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This paper explores a meditation practice that involves forms of visualization. It is a Theravādan practice that was researched ethnographically. The analytic focus of this report concerns the practical work of meditation. Meditative visualization is placed in the context of a broader literature on visualization practices. The paper commences with a comparative consideration of 'Western' and 'Eastern' approaches to mind. Meditation practice is introduced as a means of the meditator working with mind and learning from that experience. It is a controlled, purposeful, and imaginative exploration of states of consciousness. Visualization within meditation practice comprises a means of exploring certain meditative objects. A case study of a meditation practice that employs visualization is considered, and certain conclusions are drawn. In the overall conclusion, the results of this study of visualization in meditation are placed in the context of the broader literature on visualization.

The substantive area of this article is Annual Company Reports. These comprise documents that are in the public domain. For our purposes, they are an example of what is termed in the methodological literature 'unobtrusive methods'. Company Reports are assembled from numerical, textual and visual content. This article examines certain developments within Annual Company Reports; namely, the increasing extension beyond the legal requirement for numerical financial disclosure. An extension that often includes upbeat textual descriptions of the organization, and expansion into the domain of visual representations, images and graphs. The article considers aspects of the analytical and accountable status of the visual and textual discretionary additions within Company Reports. It also addresses certain practical implications of designing Company Reports for a non-homogenous audience.

There is a growing body of literature within the humanities and social sciences that is directly critical of the documentary tradition's treatment and use of still and moving images as realistic data. The documentary tradition claims that it is possible to visually document social scenes with cameras. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, critical theory and related traditions argue that still and moving images amount to representations, their critique of realism. As instruments, cameras are open to a variety of uses ranging from the scientific to the artistic in orientation. Such uses of cameras comprise representational work. Following Garfinkel, this article suggests that the documentary method of sense making is employed in numerous practical situations. This article commences with an overview of the documentary tradition and then offers a brief case study of certain of these principles in operation within the practical work of the police and road users on public highways. Public highways and traffic flows along them are visually available social arrangements. Within police work that involves the regulation and management of traffic flows, stored images of vehicles can serve as documentary evidence of traffic violations. In this particular context and more generally on the highways, road users treat objects such as road signs and related items of roadside furniture, including cameras and road markings, as documents of some, for all practical purposes, real states of affairs. Road users make sense of the stream of visual information encountered as an ongoing practical accomplishment.

The empirical focus of the research reported in this paper is the recent rapid growth in public surveillance systems. It is now commonplace in Britain for certain "public" spaces to have video surveillance and for some stretches of public highways to have "Gatso" speed cameras located on them. The visual availability of items of material culture such as surveillance systems is introduced as an analytical organising principal for delineating the study of objects within the "seen" world. It is argued that we inhabit a palpable material environment of objects which has consequences for and impinges upon aspects of our practical decision making.

Is the economy chaotic? Dr Mike Ball of the University of Liverpool, applies the new mathematics of chaos to the economy. He concludes that the connection between cause and effect in the economy is far from certain.

In the contemporary world visual data are found in a range of forms and formats and in a variety of practical empirical contexts. Our Introduction considers the growth of visual studies in recent decades and its increasing focus upon practices of visualization and representation. Contributions to this special issue are introduced to highlight the diversity of approaches and topics used by researchers employing visual methods. The articles presented here range from developments out of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology to studies concerned to promote a focus on aspects of human dignity and community.