Steven S. Taylor

The Aesthetics of Management Storytelling A Key to Organizational Learning

An aesthetics perspective on storytelling contributes to an understanding of how and why some stories are more effective than others. Three ideas about the nature of aesthetic experience—that it is (1) felt meaning from abductive reasoning, (2) characterized by feelings of connectedness, and (3) enjoyed for its own sake-supply criteria for identifying story quality and suggest how to make stories more effective. This idea of good and bad stories informs every aspect of management storytelling, which we illustrate by reviewing the functions of management storytelling using Mintzbergs taxonomy of the roles of the manager Furthermore, through Mintzbergs taxonomy, we show the contributions of aesthetically strong management stories to organizational learning.

Overcoming Aesthetic Muteness: Researching Organizational Members’ Aesthetic Experience

Direct questioning about the ‘felt sense’ of organizational actions or artefacts is an accepted way to explore organizational members’ aesthetic experience. However, this requires organizational members to be able to talk about their aesthetic experience, to translate that felt sense into language. I suggest this is often difficult due to aesthetic muteness, which is a significant problem, not just for research but for organizational practice in general. I use empirical data to illustrate how this aesthetic muteness is manifested in the research process as organizational members’ difficulty in approaching their experience from an aesthetic perspective, reframing from ‘feeling’ to ‘thinking’, inability to recall aesthetic experience and denial of aesthetic experience. I then speculate that aesthetic muteness might be caused by threats to harmony, efficiency and images of power and effectiveness and that the consequences of aesthetic muteness are aesthetic amnesia, a narrowed conception of organizational aesthetics and aesthetic stress.

Multiple DNA binding modes of anthracene-9-carbonyl-N1-spermine

The poly(dAdT)2 complex of anthracene-9-carbonyl-N1-spermine, a spermine derivative terminally substituted with an anthracene moiety, has been studied using fluorescence, linear dichroism, circular dichroism, normal absorption spectroscopy (as a function of temperature) and computer modelling. For comparison, some data are also provided for the same ligand with poly(dGdC)2 and calf thymus DNA. Following detailed fluorescence and CD spectroscopic studies, we propose that anthracene-9-carbonyl-N1-spermine intercalates in at least two different binding orientations with poly(dAdT)2. Based on computer simulation data, we deduce that the ligand can intercalate from both the minor groove and the major groove. In contrast, intercalation with poly(dGdC)2 probably occurs only from the major groove. At high ligand concentrations, the CD spectra suggest anthracene-anthracene interactions, whilst the LD data point towards a groove-bound anthracene. Again from computer simulations, we propose binding modes consistent with these observations. Other data from the LD spectra suggest a sequential nature to the binding of the ligand to calf thymus DNA, with GC-rich sites being occupied first. At low ligand concentrations, anthracene-9-carbonyl-N1-spermine is able to stabilize poly(dAdT)2 against thermal decomposition, but not as effectively as spermine. The reverse is found to be true with calf thymus DNA. Both the anthracene-9-carbonyl-N1-spermine and spermine complexes of poly(dAdT)2 show pre-melt transitions in their melting curves. The anthracene-9-carbonyl-N1-spermine complex with poly(dAdT)2 also shows a post-melt transition.

Making sense of revolutionary change: differences in members’ stories

Members of an organization that had undergone revolutionary, punctuated equilibrium type change were asked to tell the story of that change. Senior managers tended to make sense of the change as discontinuous, while individual contributors tended to make sense of the change as incremental. Three theories of individual sense‐making; individual agency, personal relevance, and strategic perspective are developed to suggest why individuals made sense of these changes differently.

The Politics of Performance in Organizational Theatre-Based Training and Interventions

In this article, we first ‘set the stage’, taking our focus as theatre inorganizations, in contrast to the more traditional approach within the field of organizational studies of the use of ‘theatre’ as a metaphorical means of making sense of organizational life (organizations astheatre). More specifically, we examine the phenomenon of theatrebased training and interventions. However, we move beyond the practitioner-oriented ‘how-to’ understanding of theatre-based training, instead undertaking a more critical examination of the phenomenon. We analytically look ‘behind the curtain’, exposing the ‘politics of performance’ in theatre-based training and interventions by considering who controls the script and who controls the role in a performance. Lastly, we close with an ‘offer’ to the organization studies scholar — similar to the kind of ‘offer’ found in improvisational theatre. We offer a Boalian perspective of organizational theatre. We intentionally mean to be provocative by using Boal’s language (for example, ‘theatre of the oppressor’ to describe more corporate-controlled performances and ‘liberation of the spectator’ to describe more worker-controlled performances); yet, we firmly believe that the Boalian perspective may offer an ‘other’ way of looking at organizational theatre — particularly, the politics of performance in organizational theatre.

Helping without harming: the instructor's feedback dilemma in debriefing--a case study.

Introduction Simulation instructors often feel caught in a task-versus-relationship dilemma. They must offer clear feedback on learners’ task performance without damaging their relationship with those learners, especially in formative simulation settings. Mastering the skills to resolve this dilemma is crucial for simulation faculty development. Methods We conducted a case study of a debriefer stuck in this task-versus-relationship dilemma. Data: The “2-column case” captures debriefing dialogue and instructor’s thoughts and feelings or the “subjective experience.” Analysis: The “learning pathways grid” guides a peer group of faculty in a step-by-step, retrospective analysis of the debriefing. The method uses vivid language to highlight the debriefer’s dilemmas and how to surmount them. Results The instructor’s initial approach to managing the task-versus-relationship dilemma included (1) assuming that honest critiques will damage learners, (2) using vague descriptions of learner actions paired with guess-what-I-am-thinking questions, and (3) creating a context she worried would leave learners feeling neither safe nor clear how they could improve. This case study analysis identified things the instructor could do to be more effective including (1) making generous inferences about the learners’ qualities, (2) normalizing the challenges posed by the simulation, (3) assuming there are different understandings of what it means to be a team. Conclusions There are key assumptions and ways of interacting that help instructors resolve the task-versus-relationship dilemma. The instructor can then provide honest feedback in a rigorous yet empathic way to help sustain good or improve suboptimal performance in the future.

Presentational Form in First Person Research: Off-Line Collaborative Reflection Using Art

Rigorous reflection for the purposes of learning about and changing our own behavior as the foundation of an organizational change process (in the action science tradition) can include representing our tacit knowing with an artistic form and then applying explicit analytic techniques to the artistic form to generate actionable explicit knowing. This process is illustrated with an example of a collaborative off-line reflection process based on a presentational (or artistic) representation in which I learned in what ways and in which conditions I cooperate with and re-enforce power systems rather than speaking to or fighting the power. This process suggests: 1) the need for first person research in order to act as a third person change agent; 2) the need for second person research in order to do first person research; 3) the need to use multiple forms of representation and; 4) the advantages of presentational forms.

Leadership as art: Variations on a theme

FromMax Depree’s Leadership is an Art (1989) to Michael Jones’ Artful Leadership (2006) to Oba T’Shaka’s two volumes of The Art of Leadership (1990–1991), the rhetoric that leadership is an art is alive and well. However, with a few exceptions such as Keith Grint’s The Arts of Leadership (2001), the moniker ‘leadership as art’ is used rather indiscriminately, indicative of everything from ‘skillful practice’ to ‘trendy title for a book’. In this special issue we offer six articles that each work with the idea of leadership as art, not as a loose rhetorical turn, but as a starting point for some rigorous and interesting thinking. Our impetus for generating this issue was curiosity about the consequence of taking the notion of ‘leadership as art’ seriously. How might doing so inform what we recognize as leadership? What consequences would result for the ways in which we understand the role of followers or context in leadership’s enactment? What would it imply about the ways in which leaders might be developed? Why might conceptualizing ‘leadership as art’ be important? The six articles presented here create a surprisingly consistent argument in answer to this final question. In short, we live in a complex world, which cannot be fully understood solely by reference to scientific forms of logic and sense-making. The arts, and arts-based practices, provide different ways of both describing and relating to that complexity, thereby offering novel ways of responding to it. This possibility has been noted by a number of organizational theorists in recent years, for instance Karl Weick writes:

Theatrical Performance as Unfreezing Ties That Bind at the Academy of Management

The author conceptualizes the staging of a theatrical play within the main session of the Academy of Management as an organizational intervention intended to facilitate unfreezing as a first step in bringing about change. He suggests that the theatrical performance facilitates Scheins three requirements of unfreezing: It creates disconfirming data through second-order observation and by creating a common language, it facilitates anxiety or guilt through the social sharing of emotion, and it creates psychological safety through catharsis and communal audiencing. The author illustrates this based on cast and audience responses to a play, called Ties That Bind, that was performed at the 2002 annual meetings of the Academy of Management in Denver as an all-academy symposium.

Material Matters: Increasing Emotional Engagement in Learning.

Organizational scholars and neuroscientists suggest that when people are more emotionally engaged, they learn more effectively. Clinical art therapists suggest that the experience as well as the expression of emotions can be enabled or constrained by different materials. So then, what materials can be employed by management educators to achieve optimal levels of emotional engagement? In this essay, we begin to answer this question by discussing the ubiquitous material aspects of management learning by exploring the complex relationships involving materials, emotions, and learning, and by presenting a set of practical ideas about how management educators can become more adept at designing and facilitating learning processes that effectively engage students’ emotions through the use of materials such as clay, LEGO bricks, and paper.