Michal Frenkel

Organizational Aesthetics: Caught Between Identity Regulation and Culture Jamming

Applying insights from Lefebvres spatial theory [Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Blackwell, Oxford, UK] to an analysis of Israels Ministry of Foreign Affairs---recently relocated to its new award-winning building---the present study seeks to offer a more comprehensive model of the role of organizational aesthetics (OA) in identity regulation and culture jamming. Our contribution is threefold. (1) At the empirical/methodological level, this study attempts to simultaneously analyze the three Lefebvrian spaces in a single organization, demonstrating negotiations and struggles over interpretations of OA. (2) We analyze aesthetic jamming as a form of intentional and unintentional efforts at collective resistance that not only reveals the aesthetic mechanisms of regulation, but actually uses them as a method of counter-regulation. (3) Whereas most studies in this emerging body of literature focus on the regulation of organization-based identities (bureaucratic and professional), we show how the translation of extraorganizational hierarchies of identities (national, ethnic, and gendered) into the organizational control system is also mediated by OA.

Spatial Work in Between Glass Ceilings and Glass Walls: Gender-Class Intersectionality and Organizational Aesthetics

This study explores the relations between organizational spatiality, gender, and class. It examines the work performed by managers and architects on the one hand, and by various groups of female employees on the other, in constructing, reproducing, and challenging gender-class identities through space-related means. Three types of gender-class spatial work are identified―discursive, material, and interpretive-emotional―to highlight the role of space in constructing and reconstructing inequality regimes within organizations. Applying insights from Lefebvre’s spatial theory, we analyze the case of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ new headquarters, demonstrating how the spatial work of various actors is both gendered and gendering. We also show how space is enacted by women from different social groups in accordance with their habitus and with the aim of distinguishing themselves from others.

Situating Core-Peripheral Knowledge in Management and Organisation Studies

Since its emergence in the early 1900s, the discipline of management and organisation studies (MOS) has predominantly relied upon a Euro-American epistemology, presenting managerial and organisational forms developed in the West, or Global North, as exemplars on a path towards modernity for the rest of the world to follow (Calas & Smircich, 1999; Frenkel & Shenhav, 2006; Westwood, 2001). With few (but growing) exceptions, scholars in MOS have adopted this Euro-American outlook in both the centre and the periphery of the system of global management knowledge (Tsui, 2004). In this book, we intend to flip this outlook in order to explore what management and organisation might look like from a peripheral perspective, and how the periphery might write back to the centre of the discipline of MOS. How different would the world of management and organisational theory and practice become when studied from the periphery?

Toward a theory of effective aesthetic communication

This paper focuses on aesthetic communication-communication based on aesthetic attributes-color, size, shape, ornamentation, or texture, for example -in the context of organizational communication. We argue that aesthetic communication is potent because, when done effectively, it leads message receivers, such as the organization’s various stakeholders, employees, customers, etc., to accept an organization’s message as natural and obvious. Our paper theorizes the conditions that render aesthetic communication effective in this regard. To develop our theory, we highlight that aesthetic communication consists of three distinct modes: one linked to the associations the aesthetic attributes evoke, one linked to the habitual bodily responses the attributes form, and one linked to the linguistic communication articulating the effect of the aesthetic attributes. We suggest that aesthetic communication is more effective when there is a high degree of internal consistency among these modes. Additionally, we argue t...

Carrying Across the Line

Engaging in academic research and writing about core/centre1-periphery relations in management and organisation studies (MOS) is, almost by definition, an exercise in multilayered and multidirectional translation. At one level, there is the literal translation conducted by researchers and writers working in and between different source languages. Texts and interviews collected in the field are often written and spoken in languages other than English, the lingua franca of academic publishing in MOS (Thomas et al., 2009). Researchers, for whom English is not the native tongue, attempt to translate interview excerpts, sentiments and concepts conveyed to them in a multiplicity of different languages into ‘Global’ English. At the same time, as management experts themselves, they are often required to translate mainstream managerial texts into their own languages and cultural contexts, rendering them accessible to their students and clients in local idiom. But literal translation is just the tip of the iceberg.