'Beyond the Scope of the Possible': Art, Photography and Organisational Abjection (original) (raw)
Related papers
Un/doing Gender and the Aesthetics of Organizational Performance
Gender, Work & Organization, 2007
This paper reflects on the potential value of art photography as a means of critically interrogating the relationship between organisation and abjection. Inspired by understanding of art as a non-conceptual mode of communication and concept of the abject, we consider the work of several contemporary photographic artists, who have specifically chosen the subject of work organisations in their images. We do so in an attempt to illustrate our argument that art photography shares a capacity with other art forms to reveal, in an immediate and powerful manner, that which is formally excluded from traditional modes of organisational analysis and those discourses that surround and support it.
2018, 2018
This article considers a number of issues hampering the application of arts-based 'playful' methods in organization studies once the close relationships between ethnography and aesthetic research, and the connections between art and everyday experience, are recognized. Drawing particularly from the creative ethnographies of Kathleen Stewart, Dwight Conquergood and H. L. Goodall, Jr. it suggests that the performative nature of artistic cultural texts lies in their intention to move their audience towards new sensitivities, awareness, and even learning. Critique is not oppositional to such development, being essential for fully creative movement. The article therefore suggests that what is needed are critically affective performative texts. For such texts to be socially, politically and epistemologically defensible, and thus a viable form for researchers to consider adopting, it is necessary to understand how they work to generate critical momentum, and what possible lines are available for justifying and evaluating creative approaches that challenge orthodox organizational research in being neither objective, representational nor expressive. The article outlines four 'moments' of critical leverage-aesthetic, poetic, ethical and political-that work in play with each other to create powerful artistic texts, and illustrates them by drawing on work-related literature, music, poetry and art, including workplace ethnographies. This framework enables the location of artistic and 'playful' methods epistemologically and ontologically relative to other modes of research and offers a robust justification for their further use in the field of organization studies.
Art, ordinary work and conceptuality: sculpting the social relations of the art world
Ethnography and Education, 2018
This research reveals the social relations of the art world through an investigation of visual artists’ ordinary art-making practices. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, the article attends to art and ordinary work, clarifying how visual artists’ work, is not only shaped socially and historically, but also reveals tensions about what counts as art and who counts as an artist. The article clarifies how today’s art world valorises conceptual approaches – centred on mobilising concepts and ideas, while devaluing expressivist approaches – centred on accessing intuition or inspiration. The article makes visible an increasingly conceptual, academic art world in which an expressivist practice is harder to sustain. By tracing shifting forms of work and shifting social relations, the study contributes to educational research on art, while calling attention to organisational processes that deeply shape artists’ lives. KEYWORDS: Artists, feminist ethnography, social organisation, work
International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion,
There is a long history of using researcher-generated photography to complement verbal descriptions of culture in ethnographic research. In the recent discussions, photos are no longer treated as authentic or accurate descriptions of the field, but are instead understood as particular representations of organisational life. As manufactured visual artefacts, photos reflect the conditions surrounding their production within ethnographic practice, but at the same time their ethnographicness is contingent on the shifting interpretations and uses of images in scholarly representations. The purpose of this paper is to add to the emerging body of performative visual ethnography by re-reading and narrating a set of photos of university organisation taken originally as a part of another field research project. By presenting the photos depicting the organisation from the viewpoint of a cosmopolitan academic, and complementing the images with critical narratives about some of the personal experiences of living and working under a regime of intensifying control and managerialism, a multi-modal representation of 'how it feels being there' is offered. The challenge of photographic ethnography is to retain the specific sensitivities related to the visual format while at the same time being able to spin an accompanied narrative that enables a creative dialogue between the pictures and the words.
The music of organising: Exploring aesthetic ethnography
Department of Management and International Business Research …
Through a discussion of Ingarden's phenomenology, this paper proposes an aesthetic ethnographic methodology. Aesthetic ethnography enables the researcher to view organisations as if they are works of art. This involves observing the continual oscillation between order and chaos, a quality Schiller terms as the play impulse. The shifts in focus from naïve outsider (Emotional Attachment) to critical insider (Cognitive Detachment) and then to informed outsider (Integrated Synthesis) are explored, followed by a case study of a symphony orchestra undergoing governance change. 'In business you have politics but in arts companies you have blood on the floor!' This blunt statement came at the end of an interview I was conducting as part of research for my doctoral studies. It gave me much pause for thought, because it succinctly described some of the things I was observing while conducting research into my selected organisation: a symphony orchestra. I had become baffled by the incongruities I was experiencing. Here was an organisation engaged in the sublime mission of recreating music from the vast canon of orchestral works, verging on self destruction through an internal struggle for control. As a budding management theorist and organisational scholar, I was confronted with the challenge of making sense of paradoxes and incongruities within the organisation. My quest for clarity and understanding mirrors theoretical developments in organisational studies over recent decades that explore the ambiguous and uncertain environments within which enterprises exist. One research trajectory has been to see organisations as processes rather than static forms. In this regard, Karl Weick notes that to understand the dynamic environment within which managers work, researchers need to be alert to an organisation's 'generative settings' (Weick, 2004, p. 664, emphasis added); an existential perspective of organisational life. He considers elements such as evolution, ambivalence, and complexity to be necessary prerequisites for appreciating process (Weick, 2004). In order to locate exemplars that illustrate this orientation, Weick and his colleagues propose that sport is an apt forum. For them, sport 'thrives on verbs and images'; and questions like, '"what are people doing?" and "what is going on?"' (Wolfe et al., 2005, p. 205), tease out this vibrancy. Another alternative has been to focus on the symbolic. Henry Mintzberg, in his reflections on organisational strategy, follows an art-making route, deploying the craft of pottery (Mintzberg, 1987) as a preferred metaphor. Several years prior to these metaphoric musings, in 1985, Mintzberg and Westley wrote a short but paper entitled 'Spinning on symbolism: Imagining strategy' where they advocate a symbolic view of a field that has traditionally relied on quantifiable data. Here they take the notion of strategy beyond its scientific roots and postulate an aesthetic perspective-strategy as an experience. Profundity, they suggest, is not found in the rigorous application of concepts and principles, but rather through the imagination. In making this claim they ask: 'Can we say that organizations rich in tangible imagery are more inclined to pursue more
The riddle and the chair: aesthetics, art and design in organizational life
Studi di estetica, anno XLVII, IV serie, 3/2019, 2019
In this essay on aesthetics, art and design in organizational life, I will focus on the emergence of the aesthetic study of organization in the sociology of organization , organizational theories and management studies. This area of organization studies formed in the 1980s contributed, together with other new approaches to the study of organization, to the renewal of organizational studies with a European theoretical and methodological perspective. Four approaches articulate this new organizational perspective: the archaeological approach, the empathic-logical approach, the aesthetic approach, and the artistic approach. These approaches are crossed by the hermeneutic, aesthetic and per-formative philosophical sensibilities. They problematize the rational interpretations of organizations in order to bring into light features of organizational life that are comprehensible through aesthetics, such as the materiality of organization that, in this article, the riddle and the chair highlight thanks also to the visual interlude constituted by the photopoem Homage to Giò Pont".
A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and Organization Through the Artistic Gaze
Handbooks in Philosophy, 2019
This chapter suggests that Jacques Rancière's aesthetics of politics can be applied as a method for questioning our understanding of management. We explain the method through demonstration. More precisely, we contrast organization shown in the work of the video artist Francis Alÿs with Gareth Morgan's seminal palette of images of organization. We argue that Morgan's metaphors convey a distribution of sensitivities and sensibilities with regard to organization that partition and tie people to particular places and functions in organizations. The work of Alÿs involves a dissensus of that partitioning and hence a rupture of business ethics based on images of self-serving organizations. We assert that this dissensus opens the possibility for a business ethics scholarship that decenters the organization and fundamentally changes how we can ethically speak of organizations, i.e. how we can do business ethics.
2015
This paper connects research that explores arts-based organisational initiatives (Meisiek, 2002; Clark and Mangham, 2004; Ladkin and Taylor, 2009; Barry and Meisiek, 2010 ; Schiuma, 2011) with the theory and practice of change management. Change management scholars such Clampitt et al. (2000) consistently place employee engagement and commitment at the heart of successful and effective change programmes. At the same time concept of grief as first articulated by Kubler Ross (1969) underpins the change process along with the concept of saying goodbye to the old organisation and its culture before embracing the new. This research explores how Orbit Housing with the help of Couravel Consulting integrated the concept of workarts in the change process in order to facilitate the creation of a new group vision. The concept of workarts is a term first explored by Barry and Meisiek (2010) to emphasise the work that art does in workplaces as opposed to artwork. In many respects such an approac...