Aesthetics of Organization

Conceptual Overview

Aesthetics of organization is concerned with the materiality of everyday life in organizations. Such materiality is made up of artifacts that possess an aesthetic form even when they are impalpable, so that they are deemed beautiful, ugly, or kitsch, according to tastes. This is a materiality due above all to the fact that organizational knowledge is not exclusively mental but rooted in the corporeality of sensible knowledge.

According to the etymology of the term aesthetics—from the Ancient Greek root aisth and the verb aisthánomai—it concerns the sensible knowledge acquired through the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. These are the perceptive faculties with which people know and, just as importantly, act in organizations. These human faculties possess the distinctive feature of being able to formulate sensitive-aesthetic judgments about the knowledge that they yield in action. People feel and judge, they feel and act, with their bodies, thereby exhibiting diversity in organizational and work practices and in their particular knowledge: a person may have “a good eye,” a “good nose,” “sharp hearing,” “taste,” or “manual skill,” while others do not possess those qualities. As a consequence, expert knowledge in organizations is constantly negotiated because it is subject to differences in individual perceiving and feeling.

Aesthetics of organization focuses on the aesthetic dimension of everyday life in organizations. It investigates how individuals and groups organizations operate by heeding their sensations, desires, tastes, talents, and emotions, negotiating them, successfully or unsuccessfully, in interactions with other individuals and groups. It shows how the negotiative processes distinctive of interaction in organizations produce the aesthetics of a product, a workplace, a showroom, a company logo, a work style, or a way of relating to others. It shows that the tastes of workers are educated as these organizational interactions unfold, so that one way of working may be defined as elegant, another as clumsy, and another as repulsive, on the basis of aesthetic judgments conditioned by diverse modes of feeling.

Thus organizations “do” aesthetics. In other words, they produce the aesthetics that convey into people's [Page 39]homes the attractiveness of an industrial design, or the grotesqueness of a reproduced work of art. Moreover, organizations develop or change the aesthetics produced by other organizations, primarily educational ones, or institutions like the family, the church, or the political system, and yet other social cultures.

Nuance, emphasis, and the unsayable distinguish the aesthetic knowledge activated in the social practices that govern organizational processes. Aesthetic knowledge is a form of knowing and acting that responds to the canons of the art of shaping an organizational process or event; the art of organizational decision making; the art of making a product; the art or doing a job; the art of managing everyday organizational interaction—and ultimately, art in itself, art without any “of.”

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