Unmuting Aesthetic Excellence: Rethinking How We Read, Write, and Review

Abstract

About a year ago, I received the following e-mail, which was both surprising and flattering: Dear Patricia, I hope this email finds you well. I'm writing to you because your lecture on “Good reviewing practices” at the CIM Reviewing Seminar was so interesting. I'm currently working on several reviews and would like to include an assessment of the paper's aesthetics in my evaluations. To inform this aspect of my review process, I'm looking for some key references or readings on the topic of assessing the aesthetics of a scientific paper. Would you be able to suggest any? Your expertise in this area would be invaluable. Thank you for your time and consideration. Ciao! Salvatore The answer to the email was probably a bit disappointing at first, as I, a full professor in innovation management, had to acknowledge that I did not have a ready-made list of criteria that could be used for evaluating the aesthetic dimensions of a paper. But I also included an invitation to create that list together with Salvatore, the sender of the e-mail and an already experienced researcher. What followed were months of reading about what constitutes aesthetic dimensions and perceptions in various fields of scholarship, ranging from organization to literary studies, from psychology to the arts and philosophy of science. This article should be read as an opinion piece. It reflects our personal and evolving perspective on how aesthetic dimensions shape the experience of reading, writing, and interpreting academic work. Our aim is not to prescribe rules but to open a broader conversation among authors, readers, and scholars in the field. The peer-review process serves as the backbone of evaluating scientific research, ensuring its quality and integrity. As Boer et al. (2023, 180) point out, reviewers have the unique opportunity to “polish (and sometimes even discover) the beauty of the paper”—while we often focus on methodological rigor and scientific contributions, the aesthetic qualities of academic writing deserve our attention as well. For example, Boer et al. (2023, 191) outline further that article titles “need to be concise—not too long, not too complex, attractive”, and reviewers should pay attention to the “clarity of expression and readability, such as sentence structure, jargon use and acronyms”. Thereby, the CIM excellence reviewing guidelines clearly include aesthetic criteria that reviewers should consider. While reviewers play an essential role, aesthetic qualities also matter for authors crafting research narratives and for readers engaging with scholarly arguments. Thinking about aesthetics, therefore, concerns the entire community, not only those who evaluate manuscripts. In an editorial in Technovation, another influential innovation management journal, Linton (2017, 66) characterizes the beauty of academic theory as emerging from novelty, generalizability, and impact, and claims that an academic paper must reveal such beauty. Novelty, so he argues, creates an aesthetic response by catching the readers' interest, whereas generalizability and impact do the same through enabling them to relate the content to their real-world experiences and memories. However, he does not provide any guidelines as to how the revelation of beauty in these three dimensions might be accomplished—or evaluated by a reviewer. As has been shown, aesthetic dimensions are deemed to be important for the quality of a paper in creativity and innovation management research, but we lack reading, writing, and reviewing guidelines to evaluate and reflect on them. This absence affects not only reviewers but also authors seeking to develop more compelling manuscripts and readers who must navigate increasingly dense scientific texts. However, especially for a journal in our field, it is important that reviewers have such guidelines at hand: Earlier research has found that when research on new phenomena that lack sufficient empirical support is presented, reviewers cannot judge the value of a paper based on the criterion of truthfulness, and in this case, aesthetic factors are often the only ones available for decision-making (Cellucci 2015). Likewise, Ivanova (2017, 2) outlines that “beauty is often taken to have a heuristic role in scientific activities” when choosing between competing theories with insufficient empirical evidence. At the same time, we notice an alarming silence in discussing and defining criteria for evaluating the aesthetic dimensions of scientific articles in the field. We assume here that this situation has its root causes in the general difficulty of defining aesthetic perceptions and aesthetic knowing, and in the resulting incapacity and reluctance to discuss them. With regard to the first issue, aesthetics has been defined by Strati (2003, 54) as an “intersubjective form of knowing …a sentiment which is both individual and collectively constructed in the interactive acts by individuals of experiencing, understanding and judging through sense and taste” (quoted after Stigliani and Ravasi 2018, 777). This implies that the aesthetic perception of a scientific paper by a reviewer is an embodied, tacit knowledge-based and sensory experience (Gagliardi 1996; Strati 1999). As such, it complements rational thinking (Sandelands 1997; John 2013). The tacitness of aesthetic knowing and perceiving leads to the second issue: Aesthetic experience resists articulation through formal language (Gagliardi 1996), leading to aesthetic muteness, that is, difficulty in verbalizing aesthetic experiences (Taylor 2002). While Taylor (2002, 821) identifies aesthetic muteness as the root cause for the difficulty that organization studies researchers experience when trying to communicate with their study subjects about aesthetic phenomena that they observe, Linton (2017) acknowledges that such muteness also exists in the reviewing process: He notes that authors often have difficulty in recognizing the inner beauty of their own work, and when reviewers and editors point it out, they usually fail to improve it. With this paper, we aim to unlock aesthetic muteness in reviewing by unfolding the concept of aesthetic dimensions of scientific articles. We use these insights to provide CIM reviewers with recommendations and guidance for their evaluations, which (hopefully) will result in reviews that enable authors to unlock the inner beauty of their work. As we advanced in our interdisciplinary reading, we increasingly realized that aesthetic experience plays a deeper role in scholarly communication than is usually acknowledged. This insight guided our attempt to outline dimensions that matter across reading, writing, and evaluating academic work. Specifically, we identified three forms of aesthetic judgment that are particularly relevant to academic writing: cognitive, emotional, and craft. This typology guides our exploration of how aesthetic dimensions shape the reception and evaluation of academic texts. We began our investigation from the organizational science literature on aesthetics. We built on the comprehensive review by Baldessarelli et al. (2022), which outlines how material artifacts such as physical spaces, objects, and designs elicit immediate sensory reactions such as sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, which in turn stimulate mechanisms that ultimately shape behaviors and evaluations within organizational contexts. For our case, we, in analogy to this framework, considered the academic paper as an artifact that, in the organizational context of the review process, has the capacity to evoke sensory responses in reviewers. Baldessarelli et al. (2022) identifies two primary types of mechanisms through which aesthetics exerts its influence: cognitive and emotional. Cognitive mechanisms comprise two concepts: cognitive interpretations and association. Cognitive interpretation refers to interpretive judgments, such as evaluations of originality, ethics, authenticity, usefulness, and rigor, that shape how individuals assess an artifact. Association, on the other hand, involves the activation of symbolic meanings, categorizations, and memories triggered by aesthetic elements. Emotional mechanisms are likewise divided into two categories: visceral reactions and affective responses. Visceral reactions are immediate, bodily responses such as attraction, repulsion, or comfort, while affective responses denote more elaborate emotional states like joy, awe, emotional attachment, moral shock, or love. Although developed within the context of organizational aesthetics, we find this framework particularly helpful for understanding how academic texts are aesthetically received and evaluated. Academic writing, we argue, can similarly stimulate both perceptual and emotional engagement, influencing how readers judge a work's intellectual merit, novelty, and relevance. We soon recognized that it was difficult to identify aesthetic dimensions of academic articles solely based on organization studies literature. The concept by Baldessarelli et al. (2022) provided a useful analogy and a good starting point for exploring the aesthetic dimensions of academic texts as artifacts in the review process. However, aesthetic muteness, that is, the absence of any discussion about the evaluation of beauty as a criterion for academic text, was also evident in this field of scholarly literature, except for the occasional mention of its importance (Linton 2017; Boer et al. 2023). Therefore, we additionally turned to literature from other fields that offer richer and more nuanced conceptualizations of aesthetics and draw here on insights from psychology, literature, the arts, and philosophy. At the most general level, we found support for our analogy that academic texts are artifacts that evoke aesthetic perceptions in John's (2013) philosophical reflection on the cognitive value of art. She argues that artworks offer “good perceptual and intellectual exercise”, training our capacities for attention, pattern recognition, and conceptual flexibility. In her view, aesthetic experiences are not simply ornamental; they actively support epistemic engagement, even in abstract or theoretical domains such as academic writing. Building on interdisciplinary scholarly work to explore the aesthetic dimensions of texts, we followed a narrative literature review approach (Hammersley 2001). This implied that our goal was to “draw out the contributions of a range of studies towards a cumulative understanding” (Taylor and Spicer 2007, 326) rather than seek evidence in an additive way. The cognitive dimension concerns the ways in which aesthetic perception contributes to meaning making when readers engage with an academic text. It includes two complementary components—cognitive interpretations and associations—which together shape how readers evaluate novelty, coherence, authenticity, usefulness, and the broader epistemic implications of scholarly work. Cognitive interpretations refer to aesthetic perceptions that emerge in the form of evaluative judgments—such as perceived novelty, ethical grounding, authenticity, status, usefulness, rigor, and broader implications—triggered by the academic text as material artifact. Rather than viewing these judgments as discrete criteria proposed by different authors, they can be understood as elements of a unified cognitive process activated when readers attempt to make sense of a scholarly argument. For instance, Linton (2017) emphasizes that novelty, generalizability, and implication shape the “inner beauty” of a research paper. These features are not only evaluative markers but also cues that stimulate readers to recognize how a contribution transforms existing knowledge. When a text presents an unexpected connection or reframes an established problem, readers experience a sense of cognitive stimulation that aligns with Linton's idea of beauty emerging from conceptual advancement. John (2013, 387) similarly situates aesthetic judgment within the reader's cognitive activity, noting that imagined scenarios elicit perceptions of usefulness and novelty more effectively than standard propositional arguments because they mobilize tacit knowledge. When an author asks the reader to consider a hypothetical case, such as how a theory would operate under ideal or counterfactual conditions, the reader's judgment incorporates prior experience, making the evaluation itself an aesthetic act. The relevance of cognitive structure also appears in the work of Ivanova (2017, 4–6), who highlights simplicity and unity as indicators of beauty in scientific theories. These features operate aesthetically because they help readers extend insights across contexts—for example, by showing how separate arguments fit together within a coherent explanatory frame. A theory that consolidates disparate empirical findings into a single pattern invites a cognitive interpretation that perceives it as interesting, elegant or compelling (Carton 2025). Stylistic strategies further reinforce these interpretive processes. Sword (2012, 7–10) argues that clarity, coherence, and the presence of a compelling narrative enhance the reader's ability to form such judgments. 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