Exploring the Aesthetic Side of Organizational Life

The Tangible Organization

Students of organizations usually conceive, describe and interpret them as (utilitarian) forms of social aggregation. We have become accustomed to associating the idea of organization with the image of people who make decisions, by acting and interacting, each performing different tasks, more or less specialized, and more or less oriented to a collective task or purpose. If you ask a manager to describe the company for which he or she works he or she will probably draw you an organization chart, that is, nothing other than a graphic and summary representation of a set of socio-professional roles and of relations between these roles.

At one time I used to view organizations in a similar corporate way. My perspective changed as a result of some field work during which I asked a workman assigned to an old lathe to describe his company to me. In reply he said:

Maybe my respondent had a poetic soul and felt things that the majority of corporate actors do not feel, though I don't believe that this was the case. I think he was merely more aware than most that our experience of the real is first and foremost sensory experience of a physical reality, while he was less concerned to supply an intellectualized version of his firm. For him it was obviously above all a place, a physical and tangible reality.

He had grasped the elementary truth that the physical setting is not a naked container for organizational action (Strati 1990), but a context that selectively solicits - and hence, so to speak, ‘cultivates’ - all our senses. This context refines some of our perceptive capacities (perhaps at the expense of others), enabling us to grasp minimal gradations in the intensity of a stimulus, and accustoms us to certain sensations until we become ‘fond’ of them, even if those same sensations may well be unpleasant in other contexts and for other people.

The physical setting can be natural (as the rectangle of sky of my informant) but in contemporary organizations - generally receptive towards any technical expedient that may improve efficiency - it is in large measure strewn with artifacts. An artifact may be defined as ‘(a) a product of human action which exists independently of its creator, (b) intentional, it aims, that is, at solving a problem or satisfying a need, (c) perceived by the senses, in that it is endowed with its own corporality or physicality’ (Gagliardi 1990a: 3).

...