Organizational Aesthetics : Artful Visual Representations of Business and Organizations

Organizational Aesthetics attempts to reconstruct artful representations of the organizational world and businesspeople. It looks at organizations and management through the eyes of artists, painters, and photographers and decodes meanings contained in artistic messages, grasping the aesthetic perceptions of the world of management and organization. Paintings and photos are analysed using qualitative methods from the social sciences as well as from the art analysis tradition. The novelty of the presented approach rests in the original method of parallel dialogues, taking place both in the institutional sphere and between co-authors. The institutional aspect covers a practical, business perspective and extends the narrow framework of a single discipline. It complements academic rigour with elements of digression and free conversation, revealing a variety of nuances for which conventional research paradigms do not always allow. Readers will receive a proposal on how to integrate diff erent approaches to organizational analysis stemming from artistic, managerial, and academic experiences.