Creating art-based approaches in working life development: The shift from success to significance (original) (raw)

Art and well-being at work

In enhancing well-being at work and understanding quality of life (QoL), it is essential to carefully explore potentials of art at workplaces. The studies show that arts are becoming an important opportunity to support well-being at work. Therefore arts can be an important mediator in developing sustainable working environment. In doing this, arts have both aesthetical and ethical aspects. According to theories of work ability, values, attitudes and motivation have strong connections to human needs of an individual. Art experiences are connected to inner reflection of an individual. It seems that arts can have the capacity to transform old ways of acting in order to bring new, softer and more human values at work. Art activities can enhance motivation to ethical thinking at work. In this way, art is carrying in itself a lot more than just an aspect of "a tool" to improve business or company image. The aim of my study is not to present readymade answers, but to participate in this discourse by creating new viewpoints and asking new questions. This paper introduces my on-going dissertation research project which is based on theoretical material and where writing is used as a method of inquiry.

The Impact of Art-Making in the University Workplace

Beginning in the summer of 2002, a Queen's University arts education research team has met weekly for art-making sessions. This research paper describes how this long-term art-making practice has influenced the personal and professional lives of the team, based on semi-standardized interviews with six participants and one observer of the art-making group. Several key themes arose from the analysis, including the growth and deepening of relationships amongst participants, the sense of losing track of time while engaged in art-making, and the importance of art-making sessions bringing a temporary reprive from work-related demands. These themes resonate strongly with the scholarly literature and empirical work on embodied knowing, creativity, and non-formal adult learning. (Contains 1 footnote.)

Art in the Workplace : Creating and Managing Art Programs in Non Traditional Spaces

This is the first lesson for a course that is being developed by The Humanities Exchange on Art in the Workplace and Non Traditional Spaces. Some of the topics include learning how art can be used as a social connector in the workplace; how art programs can forge links with the community; how art can transform the workplace; and how art can enhance a company’s image. This professional level course focuses on what is unique about selecting, caring, and managing art in the workplace and other traditional spaces. This first modules discusses the benefits and advantages of art in the workplace. At the end of the course, students will have acquired a large body of information that is now essential as the field of corporate art collections and art programs has become more important. Course materials include interviews with experts working in the field, from important corporate collections, from university professors, independent art advisors with experience in working with in-house corporate curators, educators developing art programs, and artists working on corporate commissions. Further information about the course is available at www.corporateartbrief.com

The viewpoints on art-based work : Art-based methods in social, youth, health, and therapeutic work

2018

Art and culture has been considered to be a valuable part of well-being in social and health care. In youth work, art and cultural methods have been a traditional approach. Art-therapy in psychiatric work has a long history as well. Empowerment and communication are common in all these professional areas. Art-based methods support participants to feel empowerment at a personal level, but also as a group member and in society. Art is a strong way to make visible different feelings, conflicts in everyday situations and injustice that occurs in society. Art-based work provides a safe environment for testing different decision possibilities and to discussing them critically. The way of working is playful and, at the same time, the content to be discussed is serious. That makes working meaningful and fun. The dialogue is often quite open in art work without the control that is normal in everyday situations. Dialogue is a discussion of multiple voices and multifaceted viewpoints. That easily comes true in learning situations involving different people with different ages and different socio-cultural backgrounds in a multi-cultural context. That was the case in the intensive program Art-based methods in social, youth, health, and therapeutic work. That is also the case by the authors of this publication and in the communities that are described in many of these articles.

Meaningful work and artistic interventions in organizations: Conceptual development and empirical exploration

Journal of Business Research

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When arts enter organizational spaces: Implications for organizational learning

This chapter addresses a new approach to organizational learning, namely artistic interventions, which encompass a variety of ways that people, products, and practices from the world of the arts enter the world of organizations. Although the field has grown rapidly, little empirical research has been conducted on what actually happens inside organizations during and after artistic interventions. The chapter argues that to close gaps and correct for biases in existing work, future research will need to engage multiple stakeholders (employees, artists, managers, intermediaries, policy-makers), address multiple ways of knowing, especially the neglected bodily senses, and draw on concepts and methods from diverse disciplines.

Breaking the mould: Learning with artists at work

Although learning is usually associated with classrooms in schools, technical colleges and universities, a great deal of it actually takes place in non-educational settings, particularly the workplace--at which employees spend far more time than in the formal education system. And although training in engineering and management has

‘Painting’ as emergent knowledge: a practice-led case study of contemporary artistic labour

Journal of Visual Art Practice

Our current economic, social and environmental climate demands that we find creative responses to live and work in a sustainable manner. In this context, we need to reclaim creativity as a potential force for transformation, understanding it as a social phenomenon, without over-relying on social constructionist approaches that mistrust concepts of ‘agency’ and ignore human cognition. This article explores ways in which contemporary artistic labour might be understood as a cognitive process which is both agential and social. Through a case study of practice-led research, it investigates (1) the ways in which painting may be understood as a process of ecological cognition involving artist, audience and artefacts; and (2) what happens when you explicitly draw attention to the material, social and relational processes of making sense of the artwork. I conclude that the work of art may be experienced as a bringing-forth of emergent knowledge involving artist, audience and artefacts.

Understanding work, learning and the remaking of cultural practices

Studies in Continuing Education, 2005

This paper focuses on dualities in both the process and outcomes of participation in work. Firstly, the process of participation in work activities and interactions draws on contributions of both individuals and the social world in ways that are variably interdependent, that is, relational. The affordances of workplaces shape the array of experiences individuals are able to access and, they in turn, elect how they engage, construe and construct what is afforded them. Both the social and individual contributions are exercisable with different degrees of intensity, focus and intentionality, thereby making the process of participation in work a relational one. Secondly, and consistent with these processes, the outcomes of workplace participation also comprise dualities. These are individuals' learning or change, on one hand, and the remaking and transformation of cultural practice that comprises work, on the other. In illuminating and elaborating these concepts, this paper draws upon the initial findings of an inquiry that is mapping the working lives of groups of three workers in each of four workplaces. The aim is to understand how these relational interdependences shape the participation, learning and remaking of work practices in these workplaces. Further, the paper identifies the exercise of both affordances and engagement for each participant within their workplaces. The findings emphasise the distinctive bases by which the groups of workers engage with their work and construct meaning and remake practice as a result of that engagement.

What to Unlearn from Art Organizations

Monash University Museum of Art, 2019

While it offers a form of being and doing together that has been undervalued by the dominant capitalist logic through attribution of work according to gender, race, class, physical abilities and more, collectivity in all forms of work, both productive and reproductive, can also be mobilised and utilised to enable control by a specific group in power: state, employers or others. The double-bind could and will never be resolved, since we are living in a multiple condition full of contradictions. Yet what we can do is play the double-bind by composing different modes of governing ourselves that remain critical about what is considered ‘work’.