Finding Form: Looking at the Field of Organizational Aesthetics docx

In this review we look at the field of organizational aesthetics in terms of content and method, suggesting four broad categories of organizational aestheticsresearch: intellectual analy

Finding Form: Looking at the Field of

Organizational Aesthetics

Steven S Taylor and Hans Hansen

Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA, USA; Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

abstract Organizational research has long focused on the instrumental sphere withits questions of efficiency and effectiveness and in recent decades there has been

interest in the moral sphere with its questions of ethics Within the last decade therehas also emerged a field that draws on the aesthetic sphere of our existence in

organizations In this review we look at the field of organizational aesthetics in terms

of content and method, suggesting four broad categories of organizational aestheticsresearch: intellectual analysis of instrumental issues, artistic form used to look at

instrumental issues, intellectual analysis of aesthetic issues, and artistic form used tolook at aesthetic issues We then suggest how organizational scholars might pursueartistic aesthetic organizational research

INTRODUCTION

The great philosophic development of the enlightenment in the eighteenth centurywas to analytically divide the world into three separate spheres of existence, instru-mental, moral, and aesthetic (Wilber, 1998) This allowed scientists to address ques-tions of how the instrumental, physical world worked separately from associatedethical and spiritual questions This freedom led to great advances in our ability

to understand and control the physical world, which in turn led to great advances

in our standards of living

Thinking about organizations has reflected this division of our reality into threeseparate spheres Historically most organizational theorizing concerns itself withthe instrumental questions of efficiency and effectiveness In the last few decades

of the twentieth century, the moral sphere started to receive some attention as thestudy of business ethics made its way into the mainstream And in the last decade

of the twentieth century, organizational theory has started to include the aesthetic0022-2380

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ ,

Address for reprints: Steven S Taylor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Department of Management,

100 Institute Rd, Worcester, MA 01609, USA (sst@wpi.edu).

sphere The degree of domination of the instrumental sphere is clear when westart to ask the question, why might we care about aesthetics, why would we care

if something is beautiful or ugly (although as we shall see, the questions of thefield are not limited to these)? It doesn’t occur to ask the same question about theinstrumental sphere (why do we care if it is efficient or effective?); the answer ispresumptive and self-evident

This essay is an attempt to review and make sense of the emerging field of nizational aesthetics We will look to the various ways that aesthetics has beendefined and used within the field to suggest an analytic structure for looking at thefield Then we apply the rough analytic dichotomies to critique where the field isand where we think there is the most promise for the future, concluding with anagenda for pursuing the artistic aesthetic

orga-CONCEPTUALIZING ‘AESTHETICS’

Broadly, aesthetics is concerned with knowledge that is created from our sensoryexperiences It also includes how our thoughts and feelings and reasoning aroundthem inform our cognitions The latest surge of aesthetics into organizationalstudies comes broadly from the search for alternate methods of knowledge build-ing, and perhaps more specifically, the ‘crisis of representation’ within organiza-tional research This ‘crisis of representation’ emerged along with the movementfrom positivist/functionalist to interpretive/critical perspectives in organizationalstudies, and along with the knowledge they generated were the associated prob-lems of representation and form Postmodernism has begun to show concern forconveying knowledge which involves problems of representation and form, or thepoetics of knowledge making (Calas and Smircich, 1999)

Various efforts to organize the field of organizational aesthetics have been made.Strati (2000a) breaks the field down into a focus on (a) images relating to organi-zational identity, (b) physical space of the organization, (c) physical artifacts, (d)ideas such as the manager as artist and the beauty of social organization, and (e)how management can learn from artistic form and content Linstead and Höpfl(2000) break their book into parts on ‘Aesthetic Theory’, ‘Aesthetic Processes’, ‘Aes-thetics and Modes of Analysis’, ‘Crafting an Aesthetic’, ‘Aesthetics, Ethics andIdentity’, and ‘Radical Aesthetics and Change’ Although these categorizations areinteresting, they seem to be based in the authors’ sorting of the existing literatureand offer little analytic insight into the overall form of the field We instead turn

to ways that aesthetics is defined and used within the existing literature to suggestkey analytic dimensions that might be useful for looking at the field

Aesthetics as Epistemology

In response to Descartes’ focus on detached intellectual thinking (e.g cogito ergo sum),

both Vico (1744, reprinted in 1948) and Baumgarten (1750, reprinted in 1936)

argue against the logico-deductive thinking that results from mind/body tion, claiming knowledge is more about feelings than cognitions Vico insisted that

separa-we separa-were active, sensing participants in creating a non-rational, felt meaning that

he called ‘poetic wisdom’ (cited in Barrett, 2000) Baumgarten suggested that logicwas the study of intellectual knowledge, while aesthetics was the study of sensoryknowledge This sensory knowledge is apprehended directly through our fivesenses, directly through our experience of being in the world Since the time ofNietzsche (Welsch, 1997), philosophic thinking has agreed that this experiential oraesthetic knowing is not only a separate way of knowing, but that other forms ofknowing such as those derived from rational thought depend on, and grow out ofaesthetic experiences (Dewey, 1958; Gagliardi, 1996) Aesthetic knowledge offersfresh insight and awareness and while it may not be possible to put into words, itenables us to see in a new way (John, 2001) In the organizational literature thisfinds its strongest voice in Polanyi’s (1958, reprinted in 1978) idea of tacit knowl-edge The embodied, tacit knowing corresponds roughly to sensory/aestheticknowing particularly as it is so often contrasted with intellectual/explicit knowing.Aesthetic knowledge, like tacit knowledge, is routinely in use in organizations buthas lacked adequate attention (Strati, 1999, 2000c)

If we look carefully at this distinction of aesthetic/sensory knowing versus lectual/propositional knowing, we find a distinction that is not just about how weknow things, but why we know things Intellectual knowing is driven by a desirefor clarity, objective truth and usually instrumental goals On the other hand, aes-thetic knowing is driven by a desire for subjective, personal truth usually for itsown sake This suggests an analytic dichotomy that we might apply to inquiry inorganizational aesthetics Is the content for instrumental purposes in the dominanttraditions of the physical and social sciences which spring from the enlightenment?

intel-Or is the content for more aesthetic purposes? We will consider more about whatthese aesthetic purposes might be later, as we look at other ways in which aesthetics is conceptualized in the literature, but first let us return to the idea ofaesthetics as epistemology

The idea of different ways of knowing is particularly well developed in the work

of Heron and Reason (Heron, 1992; Heron and Reason, 2001) They identify four different ways of knowing, experiential, presentational, propositional, andpractical

Experiential knowing is through direct face-to-face encounter with person, place

or thing; it is knowing through the immediacy of perceiving, through empathy

and resonance Presentational knowing emerges from experiential knowing, and

provides the first form of expressing meaning and significance through drawing

on expressive forms of imagery through movement, dance, sound, music,

drawing, painting, sculpture, poetry, poetry, story, drama, and so on Propositional

knowing ‘about’ something, is knowing through ideas and theories, expressed

in informative statements Practical knowing is knowing ‘how to’ do something

and is expressed in a skill, knack or competence (Heron and Reason, 2001,

p 183)

This description shows how sensory knowledge can inform our cognitions, but alsoraises the very practical issue of how these different ways of knowing are expressed.Heron’s extended epistemology follows Langer’s (1942) ideas about the role ofart Langer suggested that tacit knowledge can be represented through artistic orpresentational forms and explicit knowledge can be represented through discur-sive forms Discursive forms are characterized by a one-to-one relationshipbetween a set of signifiers and the signified, while presentational forms are char-acterized by a whole that is not divisible into its component parts The idea thatdifferent ways of knowing require different forms of representation and in par-ticular aesthetic, embodied, tacit knowledge requires presentational/artistic forms

of representation, is a direct challenge to the completeness of the dominant, lectual forms of academic knowledge (e.g journal articles like this)

intel-Looking closely at this idea of fundamentally different forms of representationalso suggests a deeper analytic dichotomy to us In inquiry, forms of representa-tion play out most directly in terms of the methods used Is the method based inintellectual/discursive forms of representation and intellectual ways of knowingthat they are based on or is the method based in artistic forms that directly represent embodied, aesthetic knowing The dichotomies of method and contentgive us two general dimensions for looking at the field of organizational aesthetics We will begin by reviewing the aesthetics literature to date Out of thevarious conceptualizations of aesthetics we derived a map of the field according

to method and content Our more general categorization of the ways aestheticshas been approached in the literature to date further allows us to discuss the implications of each approach and suggest where the field might direct futureefforts

Aesthetics as Criteria for Judgments

‘An aesthetic’ usually refers to a set of criteria for judgment such as when we mightsay, ‘he has a completely different aesthetic’ to mean that we think someone else’staste is rubbish We owe the search (that most now regard as fruitless) for some cri-teria by which to judge aesthetic value to Kant’s (1790, reprinted in 1951) treatise

on philosophical aesthetics (Crawford, 2001) Within organizations, Guillen (1997)has argued that Taylorization and Scientific Management defined a specific aes-thetic which equated beauty with efficiency, which still dominates modern orga-nizations In that sense, ‘it’s working beautifully’ (White, 1996) means that it isworking smoothly, efficiently, exactly as planned – the realization of twentiethcentury management ideals of planning and control

This idea of aesthetics as criteria for judgment offers us an example of how thecontent of a piece of organizational aesthetic research can be fundamentallyinstrumental and non-aesthetic (in the epistemological sense discussed above) Thisapproach uses aesthetics as a philosophic idea and analytic tool for intellectual andinstrumental goals Indeed, one might question whether this is not a fundamentalproperty of research and thus whether our content dimension really has the secondpole of ‘aesthetic content’ We raise that question thinking that we have foundexamples of ‘aesthetic content’, although they are certainly in a minority.

Aesthetics as Connection

So what is ‘aesthetic content’? Are we left with the idea of art for art’s sake, so thusinquiry for inquiry’s sake with no instrumental goals? Although that would seem toqualify, we think that that is not all that qualifies To consider this further, let us look

at the idea of aesthetics as connection Bateson (1979) suggested that by aesthetic

he meant experience that resonated with the pattern that connects mind and nature.Ramirez (1991) developed this idea in terms of systems and suggested that aestheticswere about the ‘belonging to’ aspect of a system (as opposed to the ‘separate from’aspect of being in a system) Sandelands (1998) argues that humans are funda-mentally both part of a group and individuals and that artistic forms are howhumans express the feelings of being part of a social group Although this way ofthinking about aesthetics is not common in western thought, it is the core of manyother cultures’, such as the Cherokee, conception of aesthetics (Clair, 1998).Placing connection in a central role echoes calls from the literature on rela-tionality (e.g Bradbury and Lichtenstein, 2000) to focus on the spaces betweenpeople rather than within individuals Within the questions about what we mean

by connection we start to hit upon one of the reasons that organizational aesthetics

is important If indeed, our feeling of what it is to be part of a group is expressedthrough aesthetic forms, then aesthetics must be the foundational form of inquiryinto social action (Sandelands, 1998) The question of what is connection is essen-tially a question of what is it to be part of a social group

Although there may be instrumental purposes for studying connection, this view

of aesthetics makes clear that we are looking at aesthetic experience and aestheticforms fundamentally because they are about our feelings of what it is to be part

of more than ourselves This idea of aesthetics as central gets elaborated in a ferent way in the work of evolutionary biologist Ellen Dissanayake (2000) For her,art is rhythmic modal elaboration of co-constructed meaning and plays a centralrole in human society She starts from mother-infant mutuality and suggests that

dif-in this mutuality are the seeds for four fundamental human drives: (1) belongdif-ing

to a social group, (2) finding and making meaning, (3) gaining a sense of tence through making, and (4) elaborating meanings as a way of acknowledgingtheir importance In art, these drives all come together in the form of co-created

compe-rhythmic experiences that express our shared meaning making – which deepensthe idea of aesthetics as connection.

The view of human evolution where art plays a key role as a fundamental drivestands in contrast to evolutionary views based on selection through competition

It is not a great leap to suggest that much of mainstream business thinking is alsobased in ideas of selection through competition with the implicit logic that if that

is how nature and evolution work then business should work that way as well ThenDissanayake’s argument that the way in which art has been marginalized is a mal-adaptive variation that could have disastrous consequences may well also apply toour study of business organizations from a competitive, instrumental viewpoint

Or in other words, aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics (rather than in the service

of instrumental goals) may be hugely important in the long run

Aesthetic Categories

Another way in which aesthetics are conceptualized which leads us to a broaderunderstanding of what aesthetic content might be is in terms of aesthetic cate-gories So far, we have spoken about aesthetics in a somewhat unitary way Oftenthis results in aesthetics being confused with beauty But the beautiful is only one

of several aesthetic categories, such as the comic, the sublime, the ugly, and thegrotesque (Strati, 1992) These categories are different types of aesthetic experi-ence The idea of having more beauty in organizations is intuitively appealing, butthe aesthetic category of the grotesque may be the key to personal and organiza-tional transformation

We might also note aesthetics’ ability to transform the very categories we use toorganize our experiences Aesthetic forms of expression are like experiments thatallow us to reconsider and challenge dominant categories and classifications Inno-vative forms resist existing classifications altogether, compelling the creation of newcategories, allowing new things to belong in new places (John, 2001) and makingpossible the juxtaposition of concepts that had been incommensurable So aestheticexperiences not only transform organizations, but the lenses we use to view them.Perhaps the clearest implication of aesthetic categories is the way in which theypoint us to the distinctive questions of inquiry about aesthetic content Just asinstrumental inquiry asks about efficiency and effectiveness and an ethical inquiryasks about right and wrong, an aesthetic inquiry asks about aesthetic categories.Aesthetic inquiry asks, how can we make organizations more beautiful, moresublime, more comic, or more grotesque – not because we think that might lead

to greater efficiency or effectiveness, not because that is the right thing to do, butbecause we desire to live in world that is more beautiful, more sublime, morecomic, or more grotesque That is, aesthetic categories remind us that we careabout aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics But beyond these specific contributions,

it is important to draw a picture of the field as a whole for the sake of

compari-son of underlying assumptions and agendas of various approaches to aesthetics.

We now turn to our own categorization of the field with hopes of pushing thefield towards fertile ground

REVIEWING THE FIELD

So in order to discuss the field of organizational aesthetics, we offer two continuathat we will combine to create that classic of management theorizing, a two bytwo (see Figure 1) These analytic distinctions emerged as we began to make sense

Content Instrumental Aesthetic

• Artistic forms as metaphors for

of aesthetic approaches in organizational studies, and we found them to be useful

in mapping and critiquing the field We labelled the two continua method andcontent The methods used in aesthetic research range from intellectual methodsthat are the classic tools of social science research to artistic methods that draw

on the use of art practices Of course, in many cases, the methods draw on bothartistic practices and traditional intellectual approaches, but one method usuallypredominated On the content continuum, at one end is instrumental content thatconsiders mainstream organizational research questions of efficiency and effec-tiveness, impact on the bottom line, and power inequities Other content involvesaesthetic issues that address the day-to-day feel of the organization, questions ofbeauty and ugliness, or in short aesthetic content that has not been part of much

of mainstream organizational research

Of course, there is a great deal of variation within each of our categorizations,which will be evident as we review the organizational aesthetics literature for eachquadrant in our matrix Our aim is to show the breadth of the field and what hasalready been accomplished and to point to promising avenues not yet pursued Wehave included what we feel is a representative sampling of the work in the field;however, we do recognize that there may be work that we have missed as the field tends to publish in a wide variety of journals and disciplines and we recog-nize that our own bias as to which authors and works have influenced us is clearlyevident

Intellectual Analysis of Instrumental Issues

If we acknowledge that intellectual methods are the dominant methods for socialscience research and that instrumental content dominates organizational studies,

it then comes as no surprise that intellectual analysis of instrumental issues includesthe majority of work done in organizational aesthetics It is also not surprising thatthere is a great deal of variety of approaches within this area

Let us start by looking at the long tradition of using artistic forms as a metaphorfor organizations and/or activity within organizations If indeed management is

‘a matter of art rather than science’ (Barnard, 1938, p 325), it is only reasonable

to ask, what form of art is it like? Perhaps the most well known work is the idea

of organization as theatre, which goes back to Goffman (1959), is taken the thest by Mangham and Overington (1987) and continues to be referenced in works

far-such as Vaill’s (1989) Managing as a Performing Art (see also Clark and Mangham,

2004) Another major metaphor for organizations and organizational activity isstorytelling, which finds its strongest voice in the works of Boje (1991a, 1991b,

1994, 1995; see also Hopkinson, 2003) and narrative (e.g Coupland and Brown,2004; Czarniawska, 1998) Here organizations are conceptualized as a collection

of stories and organizational action is understood as enacting or relating stories(Gardner, 1995) There is an extensive literature on storytelling in organizations

that covers all aspects of management (see Taylor et al., 2002 for a fuller review).More recently there has been an interest in the metaphor of jazz and improvisa-tion (e.g DePree, 1992; Hatch, 1998; Mirvis, 1998; Montuori, 2003; Weick, 1998)

as a way of reconceptualizing our thinking about management Perhaps the purestexpression are pieces that take seriously the idea of the manager as an artist such

as Goodsell’s (1992) consideration of the public administrator as an artist,Richards’ (1995) how-to book on being an artist at work, or the extension of

Cameron’s popular Artist’s Way book into the work environment (Bryan et al.,

1998)

Following the idea that management is an art, a variety of scholars have askedwhat lessons management might learn from the arts This has primarily taken theform of lessons from literature, such as Puffer’s (1991) text for teaching organiza-tional behavior and Czarniawska-Joerges’ (1994) work More recently there hasbeen a particular focus in the popular management press on lessons from man-agement to be found in the works of Shakespeare (Augustine and Adelman, 1999;Burnham et al., 2001; Corrigan, 1999; Shafritz, 1999; Whitney and Packer, 2000).This is evolving in the direction of taking lessons for businesses and managers fromartists and arts organizations (e.g Darso and Dawids, 2002; Dunham andFreeman, 2000) and using arts based practices in business organizations (e.g Austinand Devin, 2003; Ferris, 2002) and management education (e.g Shim, 2003).Much of the early work in organizational aesthetics primarily draws on the epis-temological conceptualization of aesthetics to make an argument for the impor-tance and reasonableness of an aesthetic approach to organizations We do notclaim to have found all such work, but we think we have found most or at least agood sampling In roughly chronological order we start with Sandelands andBuckner’s (1989) call for research into work feelings generated by aesthetic expe-rience Strati (1992) explicitly made an epistemological argument that aestheticswas the way to get at the feel of an organization Then in 1996, there was a special

issue of Organization in which Strati (1996) argued that aesthetics was an

impor-tant form of organizational knowledge; White (1996) argued that an aestheticapproach to organizations is apposite, and provided insight into beauty which is aconstitutive element of organizations; Ramirez (1996) suggested that futureresearch in organizational aesthetics should address the aesthetic experience ofeveryday organizational life, organizational design and issues of form, and inter-vention and research strategies; and Ottensmeyer (1996) argued that we alreadyrefer to organizations in terms of beauty and art, but we have not approached

them that way academically In the same year Gagliardi (1996) argued in the

Hand-book of Organization Studies that organizations are filled with artifacts which are

per-ceived by the senses and that means organizations are filled with sensory oraesthetic knowledge The next year Dean et al (1997) argued that an aestheticperspective addresses questions and issues that are not fundamentally instrumen-tal or ethical and that people’s aesthetic experience of organizations matter

because people are attracted to things they see as beautiful and are repulsed bythe ugly In 1999 two books came out, Strati’s (1999) seminal monograph on thefield and one in which Dobson (1999) argued that not only were aesthetics impor-tant, they were becoming the most important aspect of organizations and wereessential for understanding organizations and organizational activity in the 21stcentury Although the arguments may not have been won, they had been madeand by the turn of the century there was a recognizable (albeit small) field of orga-nizational aesthetics.

There has also been a stream of works that show how an aesthetic perspectivecan add to and deepen our understanding of various organizational and man-agement topics Duke (1986) applies an aesthetic perspective to argue that lead-ership is about bringing meaning to relationships between individuals andorganizations/communities/nations Brady (1986) suggests that an aesthetic per-spective extends ethics from ‘knowing that’ to ‘knowing how’ and gets past theproblems of ethics as rules (also an issue for Dobson, 1999) because of the epis-temological stance of aesthetics as being practice based Chua and Degeling (1993)add aesthetics as another lens for critically assessing managerial actions Strati(1995) extends organization theory by suggesting an aesthetic approach provides

a new way to define what an organization is Guillet de Monthoux (1996) suggestshow art theory can add to our understanding of strategy Schmitt and Simonson(1997) discuss how to use skills at manipulating aesthetics in marketing We notethat this work stands out in that it uses aesthetics to further the managerialistproject, while the politics of the rest of the field (where it is evident) is generallycritical and often interested in the emancipatory potential of aesthetics Feldman(2000) extends organizational politics to include domination through aestheticforms Denzin (2000) talks about how the aesthetics of writing articles matters if

we want to change the world Taylor et al (2002) offer an explanation for how theaesthetic aspects of management storytelling are central to learning, and Witz et

al (2003) expand the concept of emotional labour with a conceptualization of thetic labour

aes-These basic themes continue to occur in recent collections of organizationalaesthetics research Looking at both Linstead and Höpfl’s (2000) and Carr and

Hancock’s (2003) (some of which also appeared in a 2002 special issue of Tamara

on art and aesthetics at work) edited volumes and the July 2002 special issue of

Human Relations on organizing aesthetics, the work within this quadrant broadens

and deepens these directions There are introductions and some articles (e.g Strati,2000a; Taylor, 2002) that reflect on and make arguments for the importance ofthe field The metaphor of organizations as jazz improvisation continues (Barrett,2000), and the lessons from the arts turn to what the field of organizational studiescan learn from the arts (Carr, 2003; Watkins and King, 2002) Many contributionsdraw on aesthetics to continue the critical project in management studies (Cairns, 2002; Dale and Burrell, 2002; Hancock, 2002) and new subjects such as