Antonio Strati

Organization and Aesthetics

Organizational Aesthetics, Experience and Plausibility Aesthetic Knowledge of Organizational Action The Elusiveness of Organizational Aesthetics The Beautiful in Organizational Life Artefacts, Form and Aesthetic Categories Conclusions

The passion for knowing

What are we talking about when we merge knowledge, organizations and passion together? Although this may seem a somewhat eccentric question, it in fact highlights a very simple and everyday relation. We are talking about the importance of the expressive relation and attachment to the world and the limit of a purely instrumental and economic view of human activity: the idea that people do what they do for the love of what they do and not for the money. This relation requires brief historical contextualization. The oppositional and hierarchical relationship between emotion and rationality, with the latter term predominating over the former, is a relatively recent phenomenon. As noted by Elias (1994), the individual control and the public regulation of emotions are a central part of the process of modernization. The removal or deferral of emotions and passions from the public and organizational sphere can thus be fully identifi ed as one of the main features of the project of modernity. Things, however, used to be different. Many of the 17th-century writers were concerned with the passions as a source of self-knowledge, selfcontrol, and power over others; and they were moving away from the treatment of passions embedded in discussion of vice and virtue. Most of these works are not well-known today, even if they contributed to an early philosophy of mind (James, 1997). The 17th century was marked by a growing spirit of inquiry ‘that moved from experience to generalization,

MIS)UNDERSTANDING COGNITION IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES

The article assesses the contribution made by cognitivist studies to the renewal of organizational theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s and highlights a number of ambivalences in the cognitivist approach. On the one hand, the innovations wrought by the works of Simon, Cyert and March, and Weick have focused organizational analysis on organizational thought, which became a mainstay in the paradigmatic polemic against positivism and structuralism in organizational analysis. On the other hand, the criterion of scientificity, the measurement of the thoughts of organizational actors, and the importance assigned to strategic decision makers in organizations, tie this approach to the rationalist, positivist and structuralist conception that was characteristic of the dominant paradigm in organizational studies and theories until the 1970s.

Aesthetics and organizations without walls

This paper is based on ethnographic research into European art photography conducted at the end of the 1980s. Its conceptual framework is the aesthetic approach to organization studies. It shows that art photography is an organization without walls. This is a new concept that may prove very fruitful to the study of organizations. It analyses the kind of organizations that are invisible to the observer, while at the same time it questions the conventional reading of organizational boundaries. The thesis of the paper is that the aesthetic experience is the glue which cements together and delimits art photography as an organization without walls, and that culture and symbolism are crucial elements in organizations without walls. This thesis is illustrated through the evocative construction of organizational knowledge using the aesthetic approach.

Organization as hypertext: A metaphor from visual cultures

This article argues that visual cultures exert a profound influence at the level of the metaphorical conceptions of organizational life. It investigates two metaphors of the organization which have their roots in visual cultures: the metaphor of taking a photograph of the organization, and the metaphor of the organization as a hypertext. The diversity of these two metaphors in their conceptualisation of organizational life is illustrated, as well as their shared link with the aesthetic understanding of organization. It emerges that the metaphor of the photograph highlights the organizational knowledge which is incremental, objective and ‘subject-less’. On the contrary, the metaphor of the hypertext shows that organizational knowledge ‘always has a subject’, and that this subject may be conceived as internal to the organization and not as exclusively external to it.

Designing Organizational Life as 'Aesth-hypertext': Insights to Transform Business Practice

On June 2002, I attended the workshop on ‘Managing as Designing’ held at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The aim of this workshop was to transform business education by including the power of design thinking and vocabulary in order to create new ways to produce and organize, to render more desirable the places to work, and to strive towards the highest human ideals (Boland and Collopy, 2004). More than one year later, in September 2003, I attended the Conference on ‘The Role of Humanities in the Formation of New European Elites’ held at the Fondazione Cini in Venice. The aim of this conference was to bring humanities into the heart of management by challenging established educational patterns. Both meetings were very inspiring and reinforced my desire to voice the relevance of the hypertextual, the interactive and the aesthetics in organizational practices by discussing the topic of designing organizational life as aesth-hypertext. ‘Aesth-hypertexts’ is a metaphor intended to convey the complexity, the equivocality, and the ethical and political issues that influence managing as designing. What is an ‘aesth-hypertext’? It is a hybridization of the notion of ‘text’ with the notion of ‘aesthetics’ within the framework of information and communication technology (ICT). ‘Text’ usually denotes a linear and sequential flow of words which can be appreciated for its logic and/or enjoyed for its poetry. ‘Aesthetics’ reminds us of other human faculties: not only sight, hearing and thinking, but also smell, taste and touch—that is intellectual understanding and all the five senses—and the sensitive aesthetic judgement closely related to them. The forms of knowing organizational life are thus based on the wide and complex set of both mental and perceptive faculties, so that the sensible as well as intellectual knowledge of organizational actors is emphasized. Volume 12(6): 919–923 ISSN 1350–5084 Copyright

Ordinary Beauty, Ordinary Ugliness, and the Problem of Rationality

In this chapter, ordinary beauty, ordinary ugliness, and the problem of rationality in social sciences are explored and discussed in relation to the tacit dimension of knowledge, sensible knowledge, empathy, logica poetica, and the epistemological background of the aesthetic understanding of organization. As an empirical case, the discussion of the organizational culture of an Italian university department of mathematics brings to light the inner problems of the relation between mathematical logic and the aesthetics of mathematicians’ everyday work and organizational life. The aesthetic dimension of organizational action in everyday work in organizations, in management and entrepreneurship, and in the society at large, together with its problematic feature of also being responsible for an aestheticizing human action precisely through its aestheticization, highlights in fact an overt critique against the dominance of rationality in understanding human action, organizational settings, and the social world. This critique shows, on the one hand, the variety of different aspects of human action that rationality neglects, as stressed by Alfred Schutz during the Parsons -Schumpeter seminar, and, on the other hand, the status of rationality as just one feature among several others with which to comprehend meaningful social action.