Long before there was anything anyone would call the field of arts and business, Goffman (1959) showed us how we could understand organizations as theater. Although, organization as theater has never been one of the dominant metaphors (Morgan 1997) of how we think about what an organization is, it is a well-established idea that sits beneath what is probably the most common conjunction of arts and business. The Applied Improvisation Network , which consists of practitioners who use theatrical improvisation methods to work within organizations has over 5000 members world-wide. Chicagoâs famous Second City comedy club has a commercial division dedicated to working with businesses. I suspect that while for many it may not be quite clear what painting or music has to do with managing a business, the link to theatre is much easier to see.
In my academic work I have been interested in how plays are used within organizations (e.g. Nissley et al. 2004; Taylor 2000, 2003b, 2008) as an example of a much larger movement of the use of arts-based methods within organizations (cf Taylor and Ladkin 2009). Alongside my academic work, I have written plays as a different way of thinkingâI might even say theorizing (Taylor 2000)âabout organizations. The dichotomy between art and science has always seemed rather false to me. The two have so much in common, it seems silly to set them as opposites. And yet, they are so often positioned that way. In recent times there has been movement within the world of social science scholarship to bring the two together, such as portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Hoffman-Davis 1997), art-as-research (McNiff 1998), and the host of arts-based approaches (e.g. Galvin and Prendergast 2015; Leavy 2015; Springgay et al. 2005) that have appeared in recent times. Nonetheless the appearance of this work also serves to emphasize just how dominant the dichotomous view of art and science is in the scholarly world.
For me, whether I am crafting scholarly social science or writing a play, I am doing the same thingâtrying to make sense of the world in a new and useful way. It is an effort to make the previously unseen seeable. If am I successful in either crafting new theory or writing a play, it allows others to see our world differently than they had seen it. I can think of many times where both scholarly work and art have allowed me to see my world differently. I recall first learning to see business processes as a series of actions (White and Fischer 1994; Winograd and Flores 1986), which resonated with how my theater training (Clurman 1972; Stanislavski 1936) had taught me to focus on the verbs or âwhat we do with wordsâ (Austin 1962). I recall reading the novel âCatch 22â once every year while I was on active duty in the Air Force and every time it made me see my world in a new and different way.
And yet, there are differences in how organizational theory and art allow us to see differently. In short, management theorizing has a tendency to create categories , which allow us to group things and see how they are different and similar (much of this argument comes from Taylor 2014). Categories abound in the management world, from Myers-Briggs personality types to the Boston Consulting Groupâs Growth -Share matrix. I am guilty of adding to this, for example, with my somewhat tongue-in-cheek âPlants/Acid Trip/Visit to Marsâ matrix (Taylor 2003a). All of this categorization is for good reasonâas humans we like categories. Categories are short cuts that allow us to quickly make sense of our world and not have to think a lot more about it. Our natural tendency is towards what Kahneman (2011) calls lazinessâit takes less energy to work from pre-existing categories than it does to keep engaging with the evidence of our senses.
In a very real way, social science categories are a giant leap forward from categories based on prejudice, cultural tradition, and our own narrow experience of the world. But they are nonetheless, still categories and as such they provide an easy way to not engage with the particular, the individual case. They provide a way to stop paying attention to the evidence of our senses (Springborg 2010, 2012) and they are a way of not ânot knowingâ (Berthoin Antal 2013). In short, they are antithetical to artfulness (Taylor 2013). What I am trying to point out is that most of the products of social science researchâthe mid-level theories, the social science instruments, the two-by-two matrixesâgive us a very different way of understanding our world than art does. Where art asks us to engage with the particular, to learn from the individual, to stay with the evidence of our senses and be willing to not know; social science products provide us with ways to identify the individual as a member of a class, and then work from our own mental model of that class rather than with the particularity of the individual. In keeping with this attention to the particular and the individual, I will use my first-person voice throughout this book.
The social science categorizations aim to have convergent generalizability (one answer that everyone reaches), while art works with divergent generalizability (Taylor 2004) and a multiplicity of understanding. This idea of divergent generalizabilityâthe way each of us can connect to a piece of art (Taylor et al. 2002) and take away our own lesson of what it means for us is at the heart of the difference between art and science. Hamlet may be about indecision for me, while it may be about mother-son relationships for Mel Gibson. Rational analytic understanding works well for complicated problems that can be decomposed into simpler problems. Artistic understanding works well with complex problems that cannot be decomposed. The quality of rational analytic understanding is judged in terms of validity and reliability and its ability to be predictive, while the quality of artistic understanding is judged in terms of how well it captured the essence and contains ambiguity and contradiction.
It is not just about how we interact with works of art, but also how we go about making art and in this way it contrasts with how we are trained to go about doing social science. The artist is trained to stay with their senses, to not know and to hold any conceptions they have very lightly (Hetland et al. 2007). They work with their embodied sensemaking, which is usually not articulated and is seldom cognitive. As Louis Armstrong famously said, âif you have to ask what jazz is, youâll never know.â The artist recognizes that it is the felt, embodied knowing that matters to them and translating that into cognitive, intellectually articulated knowing is not what really matters. In contrast the scientist must translate what they know into intellectual knowing, into theory, into categories in order to have legitimacy in the academic domain.
Behind or perhaps underneath the approach of the social sciences is the assumption that we can change ourselves and our world through better decision making based in a deeper, richer cognitive understanding of the world. It is a belief that owes much to a Cartesian mindâbody dualism and belief in the primacy of the mind and rational thought. The artistic approach is based in more holistic understanding of humansâwe are our bodies and the mind is part of that. We understand and act with our whole selves and often that acting is not based in any sort of cognitive or rational thinking process. The arts embrace this and teach a way of beingâstaying with your senses and not knowingâthat takes advantage of the perceptive, emotional, and sensemaking powers of the whole human being.
To illustrate this, let me tell a story about a brief conversation that I had with someone after my play, The Age of Loneliness was performed at the Art of Management and Organization conference in Bled. The person told me that they really liked the play. I asked her what she thought it was about. She answered, that it just captured what was going on in the world today. I pushed a little for a more analytic explanation of what she thought the main message of the play was, but she couldnât provide any further clarity. Which for me, says that the play worked. I think that most of the art works that have had the most impact on me have worked in a deep and direct way that I cannot verbalize. Eventually I might be able to tell some sort of story about why I liked the piece and why it affected me deeply, but if it really moved me I canât do so right away. And I donât think that when I finally manage to offer a cognitive explanation I have necessarily captured the ârealâ reason. The power of artistic forms is that they communicate to us in a non-cognitive, felt way and any attempt to translate that into cognitive, discursive sorts of understandings is at best a translation, and at worst a violent, dishonoring of the experience.
One of the implications of this is the
ambiguity of any artistic form and in particular the ambiguity of a play. That ambiguity is connected to the translation of the embodied, felt experience into analytic explanation and also the translation of the dialogue into embodied, felt experience. As we read the play, you and I are likely to connect to it differently (Taylor et al.
2002) and feel that is it about somewhat different things. Even if we agree on how to analytically name what the play is about, we probably have somewhat different, felt, embodied experiences of what that means to us. As an example, consider this classic joke.
It was the Mailmanâs last day on the job after 35 years of carrying the mail through all kinds of weather to the same neighborhood. When he arrived at the first house on his route he was greeted by the whole family there, who roundly and soundly congratulated him and sent him on his way with a tidy gift envelope. At the second house they presented him with a box of fine cigars. The folks at the third house handed him a selection of terrific fishing lures. At the fourth house he was met at the door by a beautiful woman in a revealing negligee. She took him by the hand, and silently gently led him up the stairs to the bedroom where she made passionate love to him. Afterwards they went downstairs, where she fixed him a giant breakfast: eggs, potatoes, ham, sausage, blueberry waffles, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. When he was done she poured him a cup of steaming coffee. As she was pouring, he noticed a dollar bill sticking out from under the cupâs bottom edge. âAll this was just too wonderful for words,â he said, âbut whatâs the dollar for?â âWell,â she said, âlast night, I told my husband that today would be your last day, and that we should do something special for you. I asked him what to give you. He said, âScrew him. Give him a dollar.â Breakfast was my idea.â
Is the woman dumb and she really thought that her husband meant for her to have sex with the mailman? Or did she know what her husband meant and for her own re...
