Artistic Interventions in Organizations

Research, Theory and Practice

Ulla Sköldberg, Jill Woodilla, Ariane Berthoin Antal, Ulla Johansson Sköldberg, Jill Woodilla, Ariane Berthoin Antal, Ulla Sköldberg, Ulla Johansson Sköldberg, Jill Woodilla, Ariane Berthoin Antal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317589266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Business

Artistic intervention, where the world of the arts is brought into organizations, has increasingly become a research field in itself with strong links to both creativity and innovation. Opportunities for the arts to interact with public and private organizations occur worldwide, but during the last decade artistic interventions have received growing attention in both practice and research.

This book is the first comprehensive attempt to map the development of the field and provides an international overview of the area of artistic interventions and their impact on organizations from different perspectives, ranging from strategic management to organizational development, innovation and organizational learning. Featuring chapters from prominent and emerging scholars, including Nancy J. Adler, Barbara Czarniawska, Lotte Darsø and Alexander Styhre, it places artistic interventions within an international context. The book also offers readers the opportunity to learn from experiences in a varied range of organisations, including newspapers, manufacturing, government, schools, and covers many art-forms, such as music, contemporary dance, painting, photography, and theatre.

Using extensive empirical examples, this book is vital reading for researchers and scholars of creativity and cultural industries, as well as innovation, creative entrepreneurship, organizational studies and management.

Part I Framing the field

1 Artistic interventions in organizations

Introduction

Ariane Berthoin Antal, Jill Woodilla and Ulla Johansson Sköldberg

DOI: 10.4324/9781315743486-1

Imagine you are on the management board of a media group in which the circulation of a local newspaper has been falling. Someone from an intermediary that specializes in bringing artists into organizations to stimulate learning and change suggests: Why not invite an artist to work with the staff of the local newspaper for several months and see if they come up with fresh ideas about how to find new readers?

Or imagine you are a theatre director and have embarked on a project in a municipality that wants to prepare its staff to respond better to the needs of its multicultural community. After some weeks the members of the group you are working with express their scepticism about the process, and particularly about management’s intentions. You are excited: this is the kind of tension that makes things come alive in the theatre and could signal a turning point! Which of your approaches from working on stage will help the participants take their story forward?

Or put yourself in the shoes of a PhD student who wants to make a difference in the real world. Can you test whether engaging with music will affect the way people negotiate in conflictual situations?

What all three of these situations have in common is that they are what we call “artistic interventions” – when people, practices or products from the world of the arts enter organizations to make a difference (Berthoin Antal 2009, p. 4; see also Schiuma 2011, who calls them Arts-Based Initiatives, ABIs). While every situation is unique and there is no such thing as a typical artistic intervention, the number of such experiments is growing, particularly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. Why?

At first glance, the idea of artists accepting managers’ invitations to work in an organization outside the art-world for hours, days or even months appears antithetical because they have such different values, driving forces and ways of thinking and behaving, particularly when the organizations in question are in the private sector. The two worlds are often positioned as extreme opposites: art for art’s own sake (Guerard 1936) and business for economic development and profit (Friedman 2007). It is important to recognize the distinctions, but misleading to represent the artistic endeavour and the purpose of management so narrowly. The pursuit of welfare and value creation in the contexts in which organizations are embedded is also considered to be part of management’s remit in modern societies (Normann and Ramirez 1993), while social engagement and critique are also part of artists’ raison d’être (Thompson 2012).

Conceiving of the worlds of the arts and the world of organizations as different cultures with distinct basic assumptions, norms and languages, rather than polar opposites makes it possible to envisage learning with and from each other while still maintaining their own identity (Strauß 2009). Like other cross-cultural learning processes, it entails moving out of the comfort zone and dealing with irritations, misunderstandings and clashes along the way (Eriksson 2009). Dissonances are especially likely in this particular kind of cross-cultural interaction because one of the roles of the art-world is to critique society and to give voice to whatever lacks a voice. What do the two worlds hope to learn from engaging with one another? Managers who embark on artistic interventions have diverse objectives, including developing employees’ competences (such as creativity and leadership), improving communication and stimulating innovation processes. Artists, too, have different kinds of objectives: some are looking for new contexts in which to make art outside the art-world, others seek fresh inspiration for projects they want to present in the art-world, and some want opportunities to stimulate change in society (Berthoin Antal 2009). To what extent are members of the two worlds actually achieving their diverse objectives? Are they discovering other unexpected benefits or negative consequences from crossing the cultural divide?

The objective of this book is to illustrate what is happening and to discuss its implications for organizations and for artists. The chapters in this volume offer examples in diverse kinds of organizations across Europe and in North America, with many different art forms. The authors reflect on the desired outcomes and the different effects of these interventions. In doing so, they take various perspectives – management, employees, artists and the intermediaries that are bridging between the world of the arts and the world of organizations to produce such artistic interventions.

Before sending you, the reader, off into these interesting studies, we provide some background about the development of the field in practice and the different discourses in the growing body of literature about artistic interventions.

Historical development and geographic spread of artistic interventions in organizations

Early examples

Looking back into the past, there is evidence that managers have tried to learn from the arts. Corporate art collections can be considered the oldest and longest lasting type of artistic intervention in organizations. For example, the American magnate Albert C. Barnes wanted to edify his employees with his art collection in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Many organizations’ art collections may still just be about “personal aggrandizement, organizational prestige, and long-term investment and the decoration of the work environment”, but a number of collectors are coming to view their art collections as a possible resource for learning to see and think differently in the organization (Barry and Meisiek 2010, p. 1511). Far from simply decorating the workplace in a pleasing manner, some collections (for example, EA Generali Austria and Novo Nordisk in Denmark) are intended to provoke and irritate, thereby generating “creative unrest” and signalling to employees that unusual ideas and projects are welcome in the organization (Barry and Meisiek 2010, p. 1512; see also Jacobson 1996, 1994).

Another way that artists have entered organizations is by becoming artists-in-residence and creating work on site. Whereas most artists who chose to work in situ in the 1970s were taking flight from the “private place, an ivory tower perhaps” of the studio (Buren 1979/2010, p. 156), some were motivated by a desire to engage with people in non-arts-based organizations. First experiments with such interactive residencies are usually traced back to projects like the Artists’ Placement Group in the United Kingdom in the 1970s (Steveni 2001) and PAIR at Xerox PARC in the United States (Harris 1999).

Expansion of the field

There are various precedents to the artistic interventions in organizations that are the subject of this volume. What is new since the late 1990s is their rapid expansion, as artists of all genres and managers in diverse kinds and sizes of organizations – not just wealthy private firms – have undertaken experiments together. Various factors have fuelled the growth. The most frequently mentioned reasons for people in organizations – including the public sector – needing to learn from the arts are the pressures to be ever more innovative, competitive and responsive in their markets (“Schumpeter” 2011), and to attract employees from the “creative class” (Florida 2002). Such terms, stemming from the “dehydrated language of management” (Adler 2010), may be more effective as rhetorical devices for legitimising risky decisions to experiment with the arts than to reflect the true reasons that motivated the managers to try out a new approach. Within the academy, interest in organizational aesthetics provided an impetus for looking at organizational activity through a different lens (for example, Strati 1999; Taylor and Hansen 2005) and a platform from which to critically assess connections between art and management (Carr and Hancock 2003, 2007).

Enabling agents

Several other potent factors have played significant roles in the multiplication of artistic interventions: intermediary organizations, funding bodies, and pioneers in business schools and universities, and publications.

Intermediaries

Intermediary organizations that specialize in matching artists with organizations and supporting them during their interaction are largely responsible for creating the market for artistic interventions (Berthoin Antal 2012; Grzelec and Prata 2013; in this volume see Johansson Sköldberg and Woodilla). They are able to bridge between the worlds of arts and organizations often because their staff comes from those contexts; and they tend to be savvy about finding and combining sources of funding for such ventures. Among the earliest and most active intermediaries are TILLT in Sweden (www.tillt.se), Conexiones Improbables in Spain (www.conexionesimprobables.es), Artists in Labs in Switzerland (https://www.zhdk.ch/index.php?id=ics_artistsinlabs) and Arts & Business in the UK (http://artsandbusiness.bitc.org.uk/). These intermediaries have stimulated learning processes between organizations by facilitating meetings for sharing experiences among their participants, and, since 2008, by initiating cross-border learning processes through conducting multi-country projects with European funding (such as Creative Clash http://www.creativeclash.eu). The events and publications of those European projects encouraged others to develop intermediary activities in their contexts, such as ARCOM in South Korea and Unternehmen! KulturWirtschaft in northern Germany (http://www.nordkolleg.de/fachbereiche/kulturwirtschaft/unternehmen-kulturwirtschaft-2012–2015.html).

Public sources of funding for artistic interventions

Public sources of funding to bring artists into organizational contexts outside the art-world have also contributed to the development of artistic interventions. In addition to funding bodies with a cultural remit, which have sought to expand the range of activities and outlets for artists as well as to bring art to people in different contexts, regional and economic development agencies have created programmes to support projects destined to stimulate employment and innovation (for an early study in the UK see Stephens 2001; for a recent European overview see Vondracek 2013). Funding from the European Union has started to support artistic intervention projects in central and eastern European countries as well.

Pioneers in business schools and universities

A third source of impetus for artistic interventions is pioneers in business schools and universities. They have played a role in the growth over the past 5 to 10 years by adding arts-based modules to their programmes for students of business (sometimes also in engineering and medicine, see for example Osburn and Stock 2005). These initiatives were founded on the belief that engaging with the arts can stimulate the students’ innovative thinking, and expand and deepen their understanding of human beings and their interactions, thereby also enhancing their capacity for leadership (Adler 2011; Nissley 2002; Springborg 2012). The pioneers who spearheaded these activities were in Canada (Nancy Adler at McGill University), Denmark (Lotte Darsø at the Learning Lab), France (Anne Valérie Delval at HEC Paris), Portugal (Daved Barry and Stefan Meisiek at the Nova School of Business and Economics in Lisbon), Slovenia (Danica Purg at IEDC Bled School of Management), the United Kingdom (Gay Haskins at the London Business School, and Howell Schroeder at Ashridge Management College), and the United States (Steven Taylor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts). The Banff Centre in Canada has catalysed thinking in the field over the years through its residency programs and special events.

New academic hubs for research on artistic interventions and innovative educational programmes relating the arts and design with management emerged towards the end of the first decade of this century: Copenhagen Business School (where scholars such as Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Daved Barry, Stefan Meisiek experimented with the Studio), University of Gothenburg (where Ulla Johansson Sköldberg and colleagues at the Business & Design Lab, and Gothenburg Research Institute conducted research and developed doctoral students), the research unit on Cultural Sources of Newness at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center (where Ariane Berthoin Antal launched a large international research program), and most recently, the Innovation Insights Hub at University of the Arts in London (that Giovanni Schiuma is building up). Now in 2015 business schools in many countries boast having some form of art in their program. Although such programs are focused on individual development, they encourage experimentation in organizations when former participants draw on the experience to bring such an approach into their workplace (Sutherland 2013).

Another way that scholars have stimulated the expansion of artistic interventions in organizations is by writing about the field. Publications have drawn attention to the phenomenon and have contributed to raising expectations about its benefits. Scholars are not the only producers of articles and books about artistic interventions in organizations, and even among scholars there are quite different discourses. It is t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front Other
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Part I Framing the field
• Part II Assessment and evidence
• Part III Learning from success and failure
• Part IV Experiences with different art forms
• Part V Responsibility for making it happen
• Part VI Reflections
• Index