Aesthetics, Organization, and Humanistic Management

Monika Kostera, Cezary Wozniak, Monika Kostera, Cezary Wozniak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367550073
• eBook ISBN: 9781000209426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book is a reaction to the reductionist and exploitative ideas dominating the mainstream contemporary management discourse and practice, and an attempt to broaden the horizons of possibility for both managers and organization scholars. It brings together the scholarly fields of humanistic management and organizational aesthetics, where the former brings in the unshakeable focus on the human condition and concern for dignity, emancipation, and the common good, while the latter promotes reflection, openness, and appreciation for irreducible complexity of existence. It is a journey towards wholeness undertaken by a collective of management and organization theorists, philosophers, artists, and art curators.

Reading this book's contributions can help both academics and practitioners work towards building organizational practices aimed at (re)acquiring wholeness by developing aesthetic awareness allowing for more profound understandings of performativity, insights into the dynamics of power, appreciation of ambiguity and ambivalence, and a much needed grasp of complexity. The varied ways of engaging with art explored by the authors promote imaginative insights into and reflection on the beauty and vicissitudes of organizing, of management knowledge and collective expression.

It will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of organizational theory and practice, business and management history, human resource management, and culture management.

1 Introduction
Understanding Organizing and the Quest for Wholeness

Cezary Woźniak and Monika Kostera

Against Reductionism

Contemporary management and organization studies are often based on ideological premises: instead of pursuing an explorative study into how organizations are managed, they try to produce knowledge useful to managers, and, above all, create and disseminate the conviction that the current socio-economic system is the best, or even the only possible. Martin Parker (2018) notes that much of the current managerial knowledge is limited and presented in a seductively simple form that does no justice to complexity and diversity in the area. Organizations are reduced to one type only (business corporations), and management is presented as a strictly goal-oriented activity. The philosophical approach can be best described as dramatically simplified utilitarianism (Dierksmeier, 2011). Parker calls for research that broadens our knowledge and shows possible and actual alternatives to this narrowed down world of ideas and practices. We need more and broader knowledge relevant for complex organizations to counteract the raging reductionism that dominates in the contemporary approach to all management problems, producing serious problems such as irreversible damage to the planet and erosion of social institutions and structures. If we fail, humanity may no longer be able to cope with problems towards what is it: ecological, cultural, economic, and political. The solutions that have worked so far are no longer helpful because they applied to radically different contexts and situations. Insisting on them creates even further serious problems and damage to nature and society, as Zygmunt Bauman (2017) points out in his last book, Retrotopia.

These concerns correspond well with the relatively new but already vibrant humanistic turn in management (for an overview, see Orzechowski, 2009; Pirson, Spitzeck, Amann, Khan, & Kimakowitz, 2009; Pirson, Steinvorth, Largacha-Martinez, & Dierksmeier, 2014). The Humanistic Management Manifesto published by the Humanistic Management Network states the following:

The Humanistic Management Network defends human dignity in the face of its vulnerability. The dignity of the human being lies in her or his capacity to define, autonomously, the purpose of her or his existence. Since human autonomy realizes itself through social cooperation, economic relations and business activities can either foster or obstruct human life and well-being. Against the widespread objectification of human subjects into human resources, against the common instrumentalization of human beings into human capital and a mere means for profit, we uphold humanity as the ultimate end and key principle of all economic activity

(Humanistic Management Network, 2014)

For Aesthetics

One of the ways of looking at organization and management, without resorting to reductionism, is one that is informed by art and the philosophy of aesthetics. Antonio Strati (1999) upholds that aesthetics in organizational life is a form and a part of human knowledge and excluding it leads to epistemological blindness. If aesthetics is eliminated from organization and management studies, the latter cease to have relevance for organizational life and become sterile. It is a kind of idealization, albeit one devoid of meaning, because it implies disembodiment and thus obscures, rather than makes visible, vital aspects of the studied realities. These aspects include management of symbols, organizational ceremonies, and the physical settings of work. Strati welcomes the (re-)introduction of the aesthetic dimension into the study of organization, and calls for an increased attention to aesthetics as epistemology, practice, and feature of organization. This call concerns both theoretical and methodological issues, which may result in insights and knowledge beyond the logico-rational, narrowly defined boundaries of the field, which still (now as at the time of the writing of Strati’s book) dominate the discourses. It demands new metaphors, a new language and consciousness, enriching management studies with the contributions from philosophy and anthropology. Only then the knowledge in and of organization can truly claim completeness, touching upon and using understandings about such central issues as emotions and feelings in organizations, the importance of symbol, the dynamics of culture, and, last but not least, the embodied and emotional aspects of learning and cognition.

This view is also supported by another of the early proponents of the aesthetic perspective in organization studies, Guillet de Monthoux (1998). He proposes to recognize management itself as a kind of art: an approach that appreciates the complexity of the organizational world. It uses philosophy, as well as aesthetic reflection and sensibility, to problematize organizational issues and to gain understanding on them beyond the simplistic utilitarian preoccupation. Management is a “journey in the aesthetic space” (Guillet de Monthoux, 1993, p. 4), the pursuit of what is possible. As such it needs a language and a sensibility to grasp and express this space.

We are not able to understand management without understanding art. It is impossible to understand economic development without an aesthetic perspective.

(ibid., p. 1)

Yet, there is often a gap between economic and humanistic knowledge. The divide is not a given and certainly not historical. Guillet de Monthoux (1993) points to the origins of modern economic thought – the writings of Adam Smith – and calls attention to the broader humanistic perspective that is already present in his way of understanding economics, as part of human and moral sciences. The market, social communication and self-management are all related to morality and aesthetics, even if many contemporary managers are unaware of this dimension. The now so dominating reductionism is not due to the lack of insight handed down by the classics, but rather due to omissions and an ideologization of management theory and education, and to the rupture with philosophy and the humanities that took place only a few decades ago.

Guillet de Monthoux proposes to return to another important classic, Immanuel Kant, for insights about the aesthetic sphere, which, according to the philosopher, is located in the space between scientific truth and the moral sphere. Art can be treated as a kind of practical moral compass that helps with ethical and moral questions, and it can also be an inspiration for managers who seek new ideas in relation to internal problems of the organization as well as to market activities. Aesthetics offers a rich epistemological framework for research and description, thanks to which it is possible to study the phenomena of an organization without the radical simplification of their complexity. Finally, art produces tools to reflect on the presence of the aesthetic dimension, which is often overlooked in the rationalistic discourse on management. Every human activity has an aesthetic dimension; thus, an important aspect of the success of an organization’s functioning is its aesthetic value (Guillet de Monthoux, 1993).

Not aiming at a complete review of relevant literature, rather trying to provide an outline of what we consider to be the most relevant markers of the area from the perspective of this book, we will now briefly present a few key advantages provided by the inclusion of an aesthetic dimension in organization studies, addressing some of the most popular topics present in the mainstream of organization studies and what they gain by aesthetic awareness.

First, such awareness brings about a profound understanding of performativity, suggests Jean-Luc Moriceau (2018), which is now considered one of the major themes of interest in organization studies. Performative arts bring many valuable understandings and tools: they produce aesthetic experiences by organizing expressions and impressions. These arts also have many political aspects, by providing poetic moments with emancipative and problematizing potential. The material they utilize is strictly social and organizational: places, roles, structures, and norms. These configurations and reconfigurations trigger affects that may help to interpret organizational phenomena.

Another important blind spot addressed by the adoption of an aesthetic perspective is the dynamics of power distribution (Moriceau, 2016). The topic of power is one of the most constant presences in organization studies; however, without a holistic perspective emphasizing the embodied and physical motion, we lack a sufficient understanding of certain power dynamics that influence, among other things, organizational learning. Movement is restricted and directed by power, thus enabling or disabling learning. Power propagates and defines itself in part by physical restriction. Learning from artistic productions, such as theatre, we are able to gain knowledge about both the unfolding of the dynamics and some of its sources.

Furthermore, art enables learning. Through its ambiguity and ambivalence, it could be useful in knowledge-creation processes in organizational contexts marked by dynamism and uncertainty (Berthoin Antal, 2014). Artistic intervention is a way of organizational learning that involves organizational actors and settings and allows artists to engage with them, making space for refreshing and changing the one’s experience with the re-imagination of what seems to been taken as immutable, as given. Artistic interventions invite multiple ways of knowing, in particular, embodied senses and are intercultural in a very practical sense: they provide opportunities to explore new ideas in the workplace, within the work context, in a way that is, at the same time, highly imaginative and experimentally practical.

Thanks to an aesthetic perspective, it becomes viable to link an oft-postulated complexity perspective with an experienced and experiential narrative of organizing. Hugo Letiche (2000) suggests that concepts derived from complexity theory, such as self-organization, may have a reductionist effect on organizational thinking and research, even though it aspires against anti-reductionism. This happens because of the inability to cope with the variety of consciousness and self. A broader humanistic perspective enables the emergence of a phenomenal complexity theory. A text-based consciousness, including art and music, is part of a complexity involving “a multi-dimensional ecology of world and consciousness, objects and perception, opportunities and language” (Letiche & Lissack, 2009, p. 61).

Finally, art can, argues Antonio Strati (1999), provide a language, a way of seeing, and cognitive tools derived from the humanities that allow to more accurately and directly address topics such as emotions, beauty, and disgust; teach and develop the creativity and sensitivity of the human being; and contribute to the building of interpersonal relations at work. Indeed, an aesthetic perspective can help end the body–mind divide in management practice and reflection. The corporality of human participants of organizations is, in many dominating approaches to management and to business, regarded as a mere tool that should be subjected to mental functions. Art makes it possible to bring back a balance that is a better representative of human experience of organizational reality, and thus fill the gap that arose between reductionist and narrowly rationalistic knowledge and the perception of the world and being human (Linstead & Höpfl, 2000).

The chapters of this book address all of these key issues – performativity, structure, learning, and complexity – all embedded into larger contexts and nets of ideas and practices and relying on a language that opens communication towards wholeness without descending into cacophony and chaos – art and the aesthetic.

Towards Wholeness?

This wholeness is one that we can name as phenomena coming into being, lasting, transforming themselves, and disappearing. Some of them can also somehow still live on in the human memory, even for generations, as the historical sources of our present situation. However, in what appears from the history as the wholeness, we can also pick out some ideas and senses, things and structures, different activities and processes – what creates our human world. We try to understand and to describe it; we try to understand and describe the present shape of time.

The first thinker to raise and develop those questions in the Western thought was unquestionably Heraclitus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Understanding Organizing and the Quest for Wholeness
• 2 Art and Organizing: A Brief Personal Reflection
• 3 The Incompleteness Theorem: The Importance of Reinterpretation in Management Studies
• 4 Hula Hoops and Cigars, Hiccups and Stutters: Thinking with Film about Organizational Control
• 5 Writing, Dreams, and Imagination
• 6 Conformity and the Need for Roots: Two Anarchist Utopias and a Christian Politeia
• 7 The Alchemical Life of Ernesta Thot – A Romantic Heroine of Art
• 8 Rooted in Transitory Places of Gathering: Performing Spacing in Tino Sehgal’s Performance “These Situations” at the Palais de Tokyo
• 9 Aesthetic Learning in an Artistic Intervention Project for Organizational Creativity: Accepting Feelings of Uncertainty, Anxiety, and Fun
• 10 The Art of Creating the Unthinkable: Connecting Processes of Engineering, Management, and Aesthetics
• 11 Monuments to Enterprises in Communist-era Poland: The Creation and Consolidation of an Organizational Identity through Art
• 12 The Lure of the East in the Empires of Sight: Does Changing Ownership of Colonial Art Challenge the Notion of Being “Colonized by the Gaze”?
• 13 Exercises in Sensemaking: 3,628,800 Ways of Writing Organization and Management
• 14 Is a Culture-Forming Interaction between Art and Management Possible and on What Conditions?
• 15 Prologue to Filmic Research(ing)
• Index