Introduction: Organizing aesthetics

01strati (ds)

29/5/02

10:36 am

Page 755

Human Relations [0018-7267(200207)55:7] Volume 55(7): 755–766: 024539 Copyright © 2002 The Tavistock Institute ® SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi

Introduction: Organizing aesthetics Antonio Strati and Pierre Guillet de Montoux

I lay my ten fingers on the keyboard and imagine music. My fingers copy this mental image as I press the keys, but this copy is very inexact: a feedback emerges between idea and tactile/motor execution. This feedback loop repeats itself many times, enriched by provisional sketches: a mill wheel turns between my inner ear, my fingers and the marks on the paper. The result sounds completely different from my initial conceptions: the anatomical reality of my hands and the configuration of the piano keyboard have transformed my imaginary constructs. In addition, all the details of the resulting music must fit together coherently, the gears must mesh. The criteria are only partly determined in my imagination; to some extent they also lie in the nature of the piano – I have to feel them out with my hand. For a piece to be well-suited for the piano, tactile concepts are almost as important as acoustic ones . . . Ligeti (1996: 8–9) The aesthetic dimension of organizational life has become a strand of organizational research and – albeit to a very modest extent compared to output on other organizational subjects – it is now a part of organization theory. From complaints about the exclusion of aesthetics from the study of organizations (Ackoff, 1981; Pfeffer, 1982) and the pioneering works of Franklin Becker (1981), Howard Becker (1982), Pierre-Jean Benghozi (1987), Mangham and Overington (1987) and Fred Steele (1973), there is now a substantial body of literature – see, by way of example, the works of Dean et al. (1997), Fine (1996), Gagliardi (1990), Guillén (1997), Guillet de Montoux and Strati (2002), Hancock and Tylor (2000), Hatch (1997), Jones 755

01strati (ds)

756

29/5/02

10:36 am

Page 756

Human Relations 55(7)

et al. (1988), Linstead and Höpfl (2000), Ottensmeyer (1996), Turner (1990) – which can be related to three different approaches to organizational aesthetics (Strati, 1999: 188–90). •

•

•

The ‘archaeological approach’ (Berg, 1987). The researcher assumes the guise of an archaeologist or a historian of art to investigate values and symbols which highlight key aspects of organizational cultures. S/he observes, listens to, tastes, touches or smells organizational artefacts, or fragments of them, such as the organization’s products, the spaces in which its members work, the technologies used, the social relations established and the sentiments that tie the individual to the organization. The researcher therefore activates his/her perceptive faculties and aesthetic judgement to explore the information yielded by the artefacts or fragments of artefacts about the ‘civilizations’ that created them. The ‘empathic-logical approach’ (Gagliardi, 1996). The researcher relies on both empathic knowledge-gathering and logical-analytic understanding. The research concerns both the material and impalpable aspects of organizational cultures – as in the archaeological approach – and moves through three stages. The first involves observation, during which the researcher abandons him/herself to passive intuition and interrogates him/herself on the sensations aroused by the organizational artefacts, giving names to them. In the second stage, the researcher interprets his/her findings by drawing on his/her emotions and reflections, balancing empathic knowledge with analytical detachment. In the third stage, empathic knowledge is abandoned so that the researcher can employ logical-analytical rigour, albeit in a still aesthetically sensitive and ‘eloquent’ manner. The ‘empathic-aesthetic approach’ (Strati, 1992). The researcher chooses a matter to investigate according to his/her aesthetic taste. S/he activates his/her sensory faculties and aesthetic judgement in the organizational setting, in order to merge with it and share empathically in the activities of the organizational actors. By observing and listening to the others in the organizational context, the researcher allows their experiences to emerge and relives them when writing up the materials collected, so that they become fully part of his/her research data. S/he then writes an ‘open text’ which describes and evokes the organizational dynamics and processes studied. The canons of this open text reflect the researcher’s aesthetic preferences as to the architecture of the arguments developed. These three research approaches or styles have a great deal in common,

01strati (ds)

29/5/02

10:36 am

Page 757

Strati & de Montoux Introduction

but primarily they share the feature of assigning knowledge value to aesthetics. Knowledge is gathered in a particular organizational context by breathing its air and atmosphere, smelling its odours, appreciating its beauty and enjoying the stories told. It is also gathered by being repelled by ugliness, upset by tragedy, amused by the grotesque. The difference among them is the value assigned to the empathic process of knowledge-creation – which the archaeological approach lacks – and awareness that the researcher is an active part of the aesthetic process by which organizational discourse is socially constructed, which distinguishes the empathic-aesthetic approach from the other two. Finally, there are slight differences among the three approaches as regards their view of organizations as contexts in which aesthetics can be appreciated as such, and not studied solely to gain understanding of organizational life. Although the study of organizational aesthetics and the aesthetic understanding of organizational life have for some time formed a part, albeit modest, of organizational theory, one cannot take it for granted that the separation between science and art and the different theoretical status assigned to each of them have any great influence in organization studies. Organization scholars and organizational actors are generally not authorized to develop organizational discourse in aesthetic terms; and the organizations studied, like academic communities, continue to generate social cultures in which the following distinctions are more or less sharply drawn: • •

•

between the essential (survival) and the superfluous (pleasure); between the serious (employment, income, production, competition, growth) and the facetious (play in everyday work routine, good or bad relationships with colleagues, the elegance or otherwise of one’s contribution of knowledge and skill, mastery of an expertise based on tacit knowledge which cannot be logically-rationally formalized); between the scientific (cause/effect relations, their statistical measurement, their detached, systematic and methodologically rigorous description, their verification by subsequent studies) and the artistic (attention to the unusual, using one’s talent as a scholar, relying on one’s sensitive-aesthetic judgement in research, the uniqueness of the analytical experience, transgression).

A sharp distinction between science and art in organizational studies has probably lost legitimacy in the sociology of organizations, organization theory and management studies. The split between scientific discourse and aesthetic experience has faded, and today the certitudes of the social sciences – and the other sciences as well – seem less self-evident, even to those who

757

01strati (ds)

758

29/5/02

10:36 am

Page 758


rely upon them. However, the scientific community has yet to acknowledge fully that the aesthetic understanding of organizational life produces primary organizational knowledge. Steyaert and Hjorth suggest a possible way forward in their essay: organizing the aesthetics of academic work around the notion of organizational performance. Their essay is the first of the five articles that make up this Special Issue of Human Relations on the theme of ‘organizing aesthetics’. It consists of a script which confronts us with the central issue addressed by the Special Issue: the relationship between organizational discourse, on the one hand, and the social construction of aesthetic discourse in organizational settings on the other. ‘Organizing aesthetics’ highlights this relationship, and the performance throws its dynamic, practical and factual aspect into sharp relief. Their script consists of details and nuances specific to a performance in organizational settings which differ from those of the world of the arts. To this Steyaert and Hjorth devote a large part of their discussion in the prologue and post-scene of their script. Businesses and universities seem to be more aware of art as part of their activities: art, that is to say, which is not sharply distinct from production; art that is not mere entertainment or a cultural interlude in the everyday routine of hard work. The performance is translated – in the twofold meaning of the word as transferred into another language and betrayed – by the theatrical performing art to which the division of labour in the arts has accustomed us, into a conference contribution and a non-fictional publication. It is translated from the action of an artist into the action of an organizational scholar. The setting, the subject, the skill of the interpreter and the talent of the author are different from those to be found in the world of the theatre. The experience of art works can be just as dynamic as human action – according to Kant’s aesthetic philosophy as developed by Gadamer and Genette (Guillet de Montoux, 2000a: 44), and performing art is translated into performance art (Guillet de Montoux, 2000b), a process which highlights the connections between the construction of organizational discourse and the construction of aesthetic discourse in organizational practices. The core of Steyaert and Hjorth’s argument is that there is a close connection between aesthetic and politics. There ‘is no aesthetics without politics’, they repeatedly claim, and they directly and openly address organization scholars when they ask what form of public action they habitually use. With what ways to write and recount are they familiar? Of what performances do they see the academic scholar as protagonist, and inspired by what aesthetic canons? The political nature of aesthetic choices comes to the fore because aesthetics, too, are subject to political influence. Their creation and

01strati (ds)

29/5/02

10:36 am

Page 759


recreation involve harmony, conflict, violence, defection, forgetfulness. In short, the negotiation of aesthetics displays and expresses the politicized organizational action of the persons involved. The script of Steyaert and Hjorth’s performance shows that it is possible to use genres other than the canonical scientific paper. It allows us to assess – aesthetically – if and to what extent it grasps us, carries us with it, yields insights for us and forces us to reflect on our academic routine with its complexity and multiple facets. The performance should be enjoyed for its own sake, therefore. It should be enjoyed in its being-in-use, to use a term from Husserlian phenomenology; or more precisely in its ‘as if’ being-in-use through imaginary participant observation (Strati, 1999). The reader becomes a participating spectator in the performance and relies on the evocative process of organizational knowledge-creation. Rather than being passive, s/he imagines taking the place of one or other of the actors in the performance described by the script. The reader may do this cognitively by merely thinking of him/herself in the actor’s place; or s/he may do it aesthetically as well, by means of an empathic process of knowledge-creation which goes beyond thought to activate the senses, so that the reader ‘sees’ him/herself acting in the performance and ‘relishes’ the pleasure of doing so. More than the mere reader of the performance script, s/he has now also become its writer. S/he ‘writes’ it on the basis of personal knowledge, impressions and intuitions which spring from his/her capacity for analogy and metaphor. S/he thus ‘writes’ a specific and particular script of his/her participation in the performance described by Steyaert and Hjorth, the text of which becomes the ‘pre-text’ of numerous others closely connected with it. These other texts are as numerous as the aesthetically participant readings stimulated by the pre-text. These readings result from interpretation of the text that is now pretext. This is a crucial process in organizational life which the theatrical background of the performance script highlights even further. Interpreting is to manifest one’s individual difference (Derrida, 1967); a différence which in the case of the performance script is not merely cognitive or mental but also involves the corporeal microcosm of each interpreter. It is the aesthetic difference of every reader/writer that determines the reading/writing of the performance ‘as if’ it were being performed. When viewed as a whole, the outcome is a multiform and multi-agent organization which can be interpreted in the light of the metaphor of organization as hypertext (Strati, 2000). This multiplicity of organizational forms and actions brings us to the topic of the second essay in this Special Issue, which was written by George Cairns. Cairns questions the assumption of convergence on a system of shared values embraced by numerous organization theories. He does so on the basis of the social construction of aesthetics in organizational contexts. His

759

01strati (ds)

760

29/5/02

10:36 am

Page 760


discussion centres on a case of workplace design which first involved him as a consultant, and then some years later as a researcher. The meanings that the actors in the design process attach to the new forms of workplace aesthetics are controversial, paradoxical and contradictory. They are also conflicting as regards authorship. In short, they do not permit unequivocal interpretation and value-sharing of the organizational aesthetics of workplace design. The conflicting values of the groups of actors involved – designers, managers, users – are understandable, Cairns writes, if we return to the various contexts of interpretation from which they sprang. Organizational aesthetics therefore prompt multi-contextual debate. From this point of view, therefore, that of the designers is not the principal context; if anything, the context that arouses the greatest interest is the one in which organizational aesthetics are elaborated and put-in-use by the users. It is this context, in fact, that enables the scholar to bring out the interconnections between freedom and empowerment on the one hand, and control and exclusion on the other, in organizational aesthetics: their links, that is to say, with power and morality in everyday organizational routine. The exclusion or underestimation of the interpretative context of the final users of the design obscures the fact that their interpretations are not mere opinions but instead give rise to the construction of workplace aesthetics through the everyday organizational practices that put them to use. But, warns Cairns, there are not only ‘presences’ in this social construction but also ‘absences’ and ‘omissions’. The scholar of organizational aesthetics should therefore investigate what is ‘lacking’ and what is ‘omitted’. And using the same precision with which s/he analyses what is recognizable, or indeed legitimated, as ‘present’, s/he should also investigate singularity and exclusion in aesthetics, on the one hand, and multiplicity and inclusion in aesthetics on the other. This reading of organizational aesthetics does not reveal sharp dichotomies which guide the creation, destruction and recreation of aesthetics through negotiation among the actors involved. Instead, it emphasizes the multi-layered organizational discourses generated by the social construction of organizational aesthetics. Some of these discourses display similarities; others major differences. Once again, aesthetics highlight difference and show their importance for the understanding of organizations as social contexts. Steven Taylor’s essay is not concerned with the differences that emerge during the creation, destruction and re-creation of organizational aesthetics, and with the fact that they are difficult to interpret using the tools of linear, binary and sequential logic (which once again gives salience to the hypertext metaphor, that is to the multi-layered realities linked by jumps and links in the organization as a whole). Instead, it calls our attention to the ways in

01strati (ds)

29/5/02

10:36 am

Page 761


which it is possible to tackle aesthetic muteness in organizational settings. This issue – like the one raised by Cairns with regard to the study of aesthetics on the basis of dialogic knowledge and recognition of the multiplicity of interpretative contexts – problematizes organizational research by highlighting the knowledge gaps that it now takes for granted. Taylor starts from the problem of how people in organizations translate their aesthetic experience into a language that the researcher can use. Although the emphasis is on translation into words, Taylor discusses other expressive forms as well, principally drawing. This translation is important, he writes, for the understanding of aesthetic experiences from the point of view of the experiencer. Thus avoided is the excessive reliance on the researcher’s own aesthetic sensibility to be found in numerous studies on the aesthetic dimension of organizational life. In certain respects, the issue raised by Taylor is a general one which concerns the methodology of social research as a whole. At the same time it highlights that, fortunately, there is no specific – or even worse, single – methodology for the study of the aesthetic dimension in organizations. Rather, how the aesthetic in organizations should be studied is the subject of exploration and debate. Taylor also reminds us of what is happening apropos tacit knowledge in organizations. As we know, this is knowledge whereby a person knows how to do something but is unable to say how s/he does it (Polanyi, 1958, 1966), and it is closely connected with aesthetic knowledge in that they are both forms of personal knowledge which evade scientificrational formalization. Organization scholars tend to neglect this kind of knowledge because if it is tacit it cannot be investigated. Or they try to translate it into language that makes it explicit, even though, as Lex Donaldson points out (2001: 957), this means that it is no longer tacit. Other authors (Ramirez, 2000; Strati, 1999) maintain that tacit knowledge can remain such, and that the aesthetic approach – with its attention to the ‘unsaid’ and the numerous forms of organizational communication – yields understanding of tacit knowledge precisely because it does not require its translation into explicit knowledge. The theoretical frame of aesthetic knowledge, in fact, is the one that activates the perceptive-sensory faculties and aesthetic judgement in organizational practices. It does not, as Karl Weick (1979 [1969]) puts it, search for the meaning of the practices that people construct through their interactions but with a mere mental activity. By raising the issue of the translation into some or other language which enables the organization scholar to understand aesthetic experience from the point of view of the experiencer, Taylor focuses on a problem of social research which is at once general and specific to the study of organizational aesthetics. But perhaps the most important aspect of his article is that

761

01strati (ds)

762

29/5/02

10:36 am

Page 762


its critical reflection on research styles in studying the relationship between aesthetics and organization draws attention to a crucial problem: aesthetics have no ‘voice’ in everyday organizational life. The subject is not talked about, even though verbal performance is decisive for the art of management. Nor is value placed on the aesthetic judgement, given that there are no formal sanctions against ugliness in organizations. During Taylor’s research, moreover, his respondents were wary of talking about aesthetic experiences: they denied that they had any – ‘I didn’t have a gut sense’, a gut feeling – and preferred to talk in the rational terms of ‘I think’. Yet, Taylor points out, aesthetic experience is knowledge about organizational life that is fundamental to all experience. As Baumgarten (1750–8) observed, although aesthetic knowledge is ancillary to intellectual knowledge, all philosophers must necessarily employ it, given that it precedes the higher intellectual processes because it is based on the sensory perception and the sensitive-aesthetic judgement activated by our bodies. Denying it, neglecting it, omitting it in order to move directly to the cognitive sphere, illustrates more a socially constructed situation than a natural propensity of human beings. Hence, in analogy with the notion of moral muteness discussed by Bird and Waters (1989) with reference to managerial activity, Taylor coins the expression ‘aesthetic muteness’, applying the notion not just to organizational research but especially to everyday organizational practices. Perhaps, he writes, ‘open discussion of organizational aesthetics is avoided because it is a threat to organizational harmony’ (p. xx). But if this means the disappearance of dimensions of such importance, one can foresee serious problems for organizational life and its study, as also suggested by Peter Pelzer in his article on disgust. Disgust is an extreme, involuntary and absolute reaction. Something – or someone – is unacceptable to us. We find them obnoxious, we are repelled by them, they profoundly revolt us. Our ears are assailed by the screech of chalk on a blackboard and we cover them with our hands; our stomach turns at the sight of blood-spattered bodies at the scene of a traffic accident and we vomit, even though what we should actually feel is compassion. Disgust has nothing to do with what is right, wrong or unfair. Disgust signals that we perceive something as offensive, as something that nauseates us. Our disgust at certain events in organizations consists precisely in this: a revulsion that affects us profoundly, which arises spontaneously and unexpectedly, but which also has a political and cultural dimension. Pelzer examines a specific organizational event which provoked disgust in a bank project manager working to facilitate the introduction of the Euro as the single European currency. Pelzer does not go into the rightness or wrongness of what happened. He concentrates instead on the feeling of

01strati (ds)

29/5/02

10:36 am

Page 763


disgust, which he interprets as a means of knowledge-creation. The project manager was sickened by what had happened, and this feeling of disgust gave her and others an opportunity to take a step back and reflect on what was going on in the organization. This reflection brought out the problematic, difficult and distasteful aspects of the work done: what is usually hidden, omitted or silenced when the organizational process has finally achieved its desired outcome. The originally ‘dirty’ process was cleansed as if it had always been a perfect, seamless and placid social phenomenon. Thus the harmony discussed by Taylor was once again established. For the sake of such harmony, the organizational process with all its unpleasant but necessary blemishes and wrinkles was smoothed into a perfect body. This illustrates the paradox of an aesthetics which instead of arousing our faculties of knowledge and judgement dulls them as if it were an anaesthetic; it is the aestheticization of society that Odo Marquard criticized (1989). Studies of organizational aesthetics should therefore not consider aesthetics and art solely in regard to the beautiful things perceived and conceptualized. Aesthetic philosophy – but also everyday language in organizations – concerns itself not only with the beautiful and the sublime but also with the ugly, the grotesque and the tragic. But what Taylor hypothesizes and Pelzer discusses more amply is that art and aesthetics have imposed some sort of censorship on the phenomenological complexity of organizational processes. In this form too, the social construction of organizational discourse on art and aesthetics influences organizational discourse as a whole. The essay by Patricia Martin which closes this Special Issue examines the meaning of ‘organizing aesthetics’. It does so on the basis of Martin’s experience as an ethnographer in residential facilities for the elderly. The article is interesting because it is based on Martin’s revisitation of research materials collected in the past, and independently of study of organizational aesthetics. She finds a quantity of memos, personal comments and interview excerpts which – she ‘discovers’ – relate to the management of organizational aesthetics in the old people’s homes in question. These notes play a leading role in Martin’s discourse, as if they were a voice distinct from that of the article’s author and participate independently – from those of the staff, managers and the numerous residents – in the plurality of points of view expressed. Martin set herself, her aesthetic judgements and her bodily sensations aside when she processed her fieldwork materials, even though her annotations showed that she disliked some of the places so intensely that she had to force herself to go back to some of them to finish her research. The smells, noises and sights of rooms, kitchens, toilets and laundries merged with those of the residents and the staff. But these aesthetic experiences were excluded, despite

763

01strati (ds)

764

29/5/02

10:36 am

Page 764


their intensity and despite the obviousness of issues relating to power and control over the residents’ bodies – that is to say, issues relative to body politics. As in the previous essays, once again organizational aesthetics is closely bound up with the notion of power. At issue is understanding of the aesthetic experiences and the aesthetic judgements of the residents, staff, managers and researcher in contexts which may be as familiar as a home or as impersonal as an institution. This involves the power of organizing aesthetics as regards the management of not only spaces but the human body and opportunities for sociability. ‘We have a romance going on now’, says the director of one of the facilities (p. xx), and this despite the age and health of the two residents; an ‘incontinent person is smelly and messy and it disgusts and upsets the other residents’ (p. xx), taking up the staff’s time, says the director of another. The spirit of the place changes according to the way in which power is exercised over aesthetics in residential organizations. Causing delight or otherwise, enhancing a person’s dignity and respecting his/her body or otherwise, making places pleasant to the senses of sight, smell and hearing: these are the politics of organizational aesthetics. Martin finds profoundly different ways to organize aesthetics which demonstrate the extent to which the human body is ‘a contested, political site’ that prompts aesthetic judgements, but without prefiguring specific ones. To conclude, all the essays in this Special Issue address key themes and issues in organization theory: •

•

•

•

Organizational actors and researchers possess forms of personal knowledge that are neither exclusively mental nor logical-rational, but on the contrary are sensory, tacit and influenced by the aesthetic judgement. Such knowledge can be studied using the aesthetic approaches to organizational life during both empirical fieldwork and theorization, and the presentation of research results. For this purpose a dialogic style can be adopted which allows for different interpretations without incurring the conflicts to which the theoretical dichotomies of true/false, positive/negative, success/failure, moral/immoral, sacred/profane, beautiful/ugly and others besides, have accustomed us. One may enquire as to the public action that one wishes to undertake with academic work, and on its relationship with taste, artistic creation, politics, power, ethics and the ontological definitions of organizational life.

In short, the study of organizational aesthetics and the aesthetic understanding of organizational life are indeed new areas of investigation for

01strati (ds)

29/5/02

10:36 am

Page 765


organizational analysis. But more than this, they question some of the fundamental theoretical assumptions of the most accredited organizational analyses.

References Ackoff, R. Creating the corporate future: Plan or be planned for. New York: Wiley, 1981. Baumgarten, A.G. Aesthetica I–II. Frankfurt am Oder: Kleyb, 1750–8 (photostat: Olms: Hildesheim, 1986). Becker, F.D. Workspace: Creating environments in organizations. New York: Praeger, 1981. Becker, H.S. Art worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Benghozi, P.-J. (Ed.) Art and organization. Special Issue of Dragon, 1987, 2(4). Berg, P.O. Some notes on corporate artifacts. Scos Note-Work, 1987, 6(1), 24–8. Bird, F.B. & Waters, J.A. The moral muteness of managers. California Management Review, 1989, 32(1), 73–88. Dean, J.W. Jr, Ottensmeyer, E. & Ramirez, R. An aesthetic perspective on organizations. In C. Cooper & S. Jackson (Eds), Creating tomorrow’s organizations: A handbook for future research in organizational behavior. Chichester: Wiley, 1997, pp. 419–37. Derrida, J. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Donaldson, L. Reflections on knowledge and knowledge-intensive firms. Human Relations, 2001, 54(7), 955–63. Fine, G.A. Kitchens: The culture of restaurant work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. Gagliardi, P. (Ed.) Symbols and artifacts: Views of the corporate landscape. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990. Gagliardi, P. Exploring the aesthetic side of organizational life. In S.R. Clegg, C. Hardy & W.R. Nord (Eds), Handbook of organization studies. London: Sage, 1996, pp. 565–80. Guillén, M.F. Scientific management’s lost aesthetic: Architecture, organization, and the Taylorized beauty of the mechanical. Administrative Science Quarterly, 1997, 42, 682–715. Guillet de Montoux, P. The art management of aesthetic organizing. In S. Linstead & H. Höpfl (Eds), The aesthetic of organization. London: Sage, 2000a, pp. 35–60. Guillet de Montoux, P. Performing the absolute. Marina Abramovic organizing the unfinished business of Arthur Schopenhauer. Organization Studies, 2000b, 21, 29–51. Guillet de Montoux, P. & Strati, A. (Eds) Aesthetics in organisation. Special Issue of Consuption, Markets and Culture, 2002, 5(1&2). Hancock, P. & Tyler, M. ‘The look of love’: Gender and the organization of aesthetics. In J. Hassard, R. Holliday & H. Willmott (Eds), Body and organization. London: Sage, 2000, pp. 108–29. Hatch, M.J. Organization theory. Modern, symbolic, and postmodern perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Jones, M.O., Moore, M.D. & Snyder, R.C. (Eds) Inside organizations. Understanding the human dimension. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988. Ligeti, G. Works for piano, études, musica ricercata. CD booklet. Sony Music Entertainment, 1996. Linstead, S. & Höpfl, H. (Eds) The aesthetic of organization. London: Sage, 2000. Mangham, I.L. & Overington, M.A. Organizations as theatre. Chichester: Wiley, 1987. Marquard, O. Aesthetica und anaesthetica. Philosophische uberlegungen. Paderborn: Schoningh, 1989. Ottensmeyer, E. (Ed.) Essays on aesthetics and organization. Themed section of Organization, 1996, 3(2).

765

01strati (ds)

766

29/5/02

10:36 am

Page 766


Pfeffer, J. Organizations and organization theory. Marshfield, MA: Pitman, 1982. Polanyi, M. Personal knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958. Polanyi, M. The tacit dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966. Ramirez, R. Why is tacit knowledge tacit? An aesthetic exploration. Paper presented at the Eiasm Workshop on ‘Organising Aesthetics’, Certosa di Pontignano (Siena), May 2000. Steele, F.I. Physical settings and organization development. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1973. Strati, A. Aesthetic understanding of organizational life. Academy of Management Review, 1992, 17(3), 568–81. Strati, A. Organization and aesthetics. London: Sage, 1999. Strati, A. Theory and method in organization studies. Paradigms and choices. London: Sage, 2000. Turner, B. (Ed.) Organizational symbolism. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990. Weick, K.E. The social psychology of organizing. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979 [1969].

Antonio Strati is Associate Professor in the Department of The Sociology of Organization at the Universities of Trento and Siena, Italy. He received his action research training in organization studies at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, UK. He is a foundermember of SCOS, the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism, and his research interests focus on symbolism, aesthetics, tacit knowledge, cognitivism and the significance of hypertext in organization studies. His most recent books include Organization and aesthetics (Sage, 1999) and the textbook Theory and method in organization studies (Sage, 2000). [E-mail: [email protected]] Pierre Guillet de Monthoux is Professor of General Management at Stockholm University, Sweden, Dozent at Universität Witten-Herdecke, Germany, Åbo Akademi, Finland and Guest Professor at IAE Université Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France, Universität Innsbruck, Austria and Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.He works in such areas as philosophy of management, history of ideas in managment, curatorial organizing, aesthetics and art in business administration and managment. He heads the ECAM (European Centre for Art and Management) research group based at the School of Business of Stockholm University currently engaged in investigating contemporary links between art and management in Project Flow funded by the Swedish National Bank Tercentenary Foundation. His most recent books on art and managment are L’Ésthetique du management de Kant a Gadamer (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999) and The art firm, aesthetic management and metaphysical marketing from Wagner to Wilson (forthcoming). [E-mail: [email protected]]