Art and Aesthetics at Work: An Overview

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INTRODUCTION Over recent years the field of organization studies has exhibited an increasing interest in the aesthetic dimension of work and its organization. Whilst this interest may have been awakened, more generally, by the publication of such philosophically oriented works as Eagleton's (1990) The ideology of the aesthetic and Welsch's (1997) Undoing aesthetics, it must also be understood in relation to a series of developments within the field itself over the last three decades or so. The shift from an almost exclusively objectivist approach to the analysis of organizational practice exemplified in Weick's (1969) The social psychology of organizing and Silverman's (1970) The theory of organizations, for example, signified a significant step along the path towards an acceptance of the relevance of sensuality to understanding the rich tapestry that is organizational life. Of equal, and perhaps greater contemporary importance, has been the groundbreaking work focusing on manifestations of organizational culture and symbolism (Alvesson & Berg, 1992; Turner, 1990) with the Third international conference on organizational symbolism (1987) whose theme was `The symbolics of corporate artifacts', particularly noteworthy, resulting as it did in the publication of a selection of papers (see Gagliardi, 1990) that helped to inform and focus the field of organization studies on the presence of an aesthetic sensibility. Subsequently, a range of published contributions to the field have been forthcoming, including individual journal articles (Carr, 1997; Carr & Zanetti, 2000; Guillen, 1997; Rustead, 1999) thematic editions of journals (Organization, 1996), chapters in edited collections (Hancock & Tyler, 2000; Thompson, Warhurst & Callaghan 2000), edited books (Linstead & Hopfl., 2000) and monographs (Strati, 1999), many of which have been characterized by the work and ideas of scholars who draw significantly on a range of radical traditions within the social sciences, including critical theory, post-structuralism and postmodernism. Furthermore, in addition to such academic and critically oriented offerings, more populist management writers are also starting to contribute significantly to the diffusion of aesthetic concepts throughout the business world. For example, building on the work of writers on corporate identity and design such as Olins (1989), the likes of Dickinson and Svensen (2000) have sought in their millennium manifesto, Beautiful corporations: Corporate style in action, to argue the case for an organizational aesthetic that expresses beauty and style through everything from physical design to corporate ethics and environmental responsibility. It is to this embryonic, if albeit increasingly flourishing body of research and literature within management and business studies, which this special issue seeks to both, contribute to, and help take beyond its current stage of development. RATIONALE Art and aesthetics at work, while an ambiguous title for a single special issue of a journal is not one that was deliberately contrived to be so. Initially, it was conceived of simply as a description of the subject matter of the volume. That is, what the various contributors consider to be the role and opportunities that art and aesthetics are increasingly coming to play in the study and practice of work organizations. However, it quickly became clear that an alternative meaning, implicit within the title's semantic construction, also had great relevance for this special issue. For, what many of the papers contained within this collection are at pains to consider is not only the presence of art and aesthetics within the everyday life of the workplace, but equally, how these are increasingly put to work in the service of a range of organizational aspirations and goals or, alternatively, how they can provide a range of novel and informative insights into the structuring and maintenance of organizational activities, particularly those which rely upon the continued existence of asymmetrical relations of power and control. …