Organizational aesthetics, both as a body of theory and a method of inquiry, is a rapidly expanding area of the organizational sciences. The Aesthetics of Organization accessibly draws key contributions delineating the emerging parameters of the field. It explains the significance of concepts devised by postmodern thinkers, through which emerge meaning and order in organizations. Methodological problems associated with investigations of the aesthetic are also highlighted so the reader can identify and understand the importance of recent ideas on vision, perspective and periphery for learning in organizations. Through the contributions of leading international theorists, organizational aesthetics is defined in greater

This book shows how aesthetic understanding of organizations can extend our knowledge and sharpen our insights into many processes that shape organizational action. Organizational life is pervaded by aesthetics, yet conventional organizational analysis has been dominated by a `scientific′, logico-rational tradition that ignores the aesthetic dimension. The book highlights the role of emotion in organizations, the importance of symbol, the subjective influence of culture and the processes of learning and cognition. These phenomena are related to the aesthetic rather than to purify rational, demanding new modes of inquiry that allow us richer insight into the dynamics of organizational life. Organization and Aesthetics provides a powerful new lens through which the daily, ever-chaning complexity of organizations can be better understood by students, researchers and mangers.

Diverse philosophies constitute the theoretical ground of the study of the aesthetic side of organization. In fact, there is not a single unique philosophy behind the organizational research of the aesthetic dimension of organizational life. Organizational Theory and Aesthetic Philosophies will illustrate and discuss this complex phenomenon, and it will be dedicated to highlight the philosophical basis of the study of aesthetics, art and design in organization. The book distinguishes three principal "philosophical sensibilities" amongst these philosophies: aesthetic, hermeneutic and performative philosophical sensibility. Each of them is described and critically assessed through the work of philosophers, art theorists, sociologists and social scientists who represent its main protagonists. In this way, the reader will be conducted through the variety of philosophies that constitute a reference for aesthetics and design in organization. The architecture of the book is articulated in two parts in order to provide student and scholars in philosophical aesthetics, in art, in design and in organization studies with an informative and agile instrument for academic research and study.

A strong point in this book is its opening extensive review of creativity in organizations and professions. . . including helpful tabulations of articles that identify the motives, expectations, emotions, means, and opportunities that lead to creative acts. . . . it can provide valuable insights and encouragement to scholars and practitioners who are concerned with developing and tapping creativity in organizations. . . . Management professors and graduate students will find the book helpful. . . . --G. David Hughes in Journal of Product Innovation Management "This book definitely will be appropriate for class use in any setting focused on creativity in organizations. Presumably, these would be specialized upper-division, MBA, or Ph.D. electives. If you are interested in the topic of creativity in organizations, this is the book you must read. It is on the frontiers, and it provides a beacon for future scholarly progress on this topic because of its emphasis on how the organizational setting affects the creative process in the world of work." --Lyman Porter, University of California, Irvine "The book is itself a creative approach to creativity. The editors have attracted a talented and well-respected group of academic contributors. The message that we should abandon the romantic but flawed notion that creativity is principally the product of extraordinary individual acts is delivered forcefully, as is the companion notion that organizational contexts are the real seedbeds of creative behavior." --John R. Kimberly, Henry Bower Professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania "This is one of the better collections of information about creativity because it is data based, and it provides a useful comparison and contrast of conceptual and practical aspects. By clearly describing the benefits and problems associated with the topics, Creative Action in Organizations obviously practices what it preaches. I would recommend that it be used as a textbook for a graduate-level business course, particularly for an MBA program. In addition, I also recommend that it be used as a text reference for industrial ′training & development′ programs targeted at teaching employees how to develop new businesses, improve existing processes, or become better leaders (viz., corporate leadership development programs)." --Tom Wojcik, Manager, Office of Innovation, Hoechst Celanese Corporation Between the trade deficit, mergers, and the recession, the topic of creativity in organizations has become one of increasing importance. How does a company retool or refine its product with foreign and, often, less costly competition? How does human resources find creative solutions to budgeting, product development, marketing, and training? With pithy and engaging chapters from leading researchers and figures in business, government, and academia, Creative Action in Organizations explores the factors that are critical to the development and promotion of creativity to develop a revised view that is grounded in experience. This volume begins with a literature review (written as a mystery to be solved), followed by essays from researchers (Part II) and practitioners (Part III). Using the chapters as "data," the editors conclude with a content-analysis that presents a look at the most significant themes and offers a framework for conceptualizing creativity in organizations. This profound and fascinating volume is essential for students, professionals, and researchers in management and organization studies, public administration, public policy, evaluation, and psychology, as well as libraries in the above areas.

'The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics' has assembled 48 brand-new essays, making this a comprehensive guide available to the theory, application, history, and future of the field.

This book is a reaction to the reductionist and exploitative ideas dominating the mainstream contemporary management discourse and practice, and an attempt to broaden the horizons of possibility for both managers and organization scholars. It brings together the scholarly fields of humanistic management and organizational aesthetics, where the former brings in the unshakeable focus on the human condition and concern for dignity, emancipation, and the common good, while the latter promotes reflection, openness, and appreciation for irreducible complexity of existence. It is a journey towards wholeness undertaken by a collective of management and organization theorists, philosophers, artists, and art curators. Reading this book’s contributions can help both academics and practitioners work towards building organizational practices aimed at (re)acquiring wholeness by developing aesthetic awareness allowing for more profound understandings of performativity, insights into the dynamics of power, appreciation of ambiguity and ambivalence, and a much needed grasp of complexity. The varied ways of engaging with art explored by the authors promote imaginative insights into and reflection on the beauty and vicissitudes of organizing, of management knowledge and collective expression. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of organizational theory and practice, business and management history, human resource management, and culture management.

A historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. The Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and technological extension of the military-industrial complex, in which architecture, computers, and corporations formed a network of objects, images, and discourses that realigned social relations and transformed the postwar landscape. In-depth case studies of architect Eero Saarinen's work for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories and analyses of office buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill trace the emergence of a systems-based model of organization in architecture, in which the modular curtain wall acts as both an organizational device and a carrier of the corporate image. Such an image—of the corporation as a flexible, integrated system—is seen to correspond with a "humanization" of corporate life, as corporations decentralize both spatially and administratively. Parallel analyses follow the assimilation of cybernetics into aesthetics in the writings of artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes, as art merges with techno-science in the service of a dynamic new "pattern-seeing." Image and system thus converge in the organizational complex, while top-down power dissolves into networked, pattern-based control. Architecture, as one among many media technologies, supplies the patterns—images of organic integration designed to regulate new and unstable human-machine assemblages.

A theoretically informed investigation that relates the philosophies of aesthetics and imagination to understanding design practice. In The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design, Mads Folkmann investigates design in both material and immaterial terms. Design objects, Folkmann argues, will always be dual phenomena—material and immaterial, sensual and conceptual, actual and possible. Drawing on formal theories of aesthetics and the phenomenology of imagination, he seeks to answer fundamental questions about what design is and how it works that are often ignored in academic research. Folkmann considers three conditions in design: the possible, the aesthetic, and the imagination. Imagination is a central formative power behind the creation and the life of design objects; aesthetics describes the sensual, conceptual, and contextual codes through which design objects communicate; the concept of the possible—the enabling of new uses, conceptions, and perceptions—lies behind imagination and aesthetics. The possible, Folkmann argues, is contained as a structure of meaning within the objects of design, which act as part of our interface with the world. Taking a largely phenomenological perspective that reflects both continental and American pragmatist approaches, Folkmann also makes use of discourses that range from practice-focused accounts of design methodology to cultural studies. Throughout, he offers concrete examples to illustrate theoretical points. Folkmann's philosophically informed account shows design—in all its manifestations, from physical products to principles of organization—to be an essential medium for the articulation and transformation of culture.

Over the last decade or so, aesthetic and art theory has played an increasingly significant role in the way work and its organization has come to be understood. Bringing together the work of an international spectrum of academics, this collection contributes, in an overall more critical vein, to such emerging debates. Combining both empirical and theoretical material, each chapter re-evaluates the emerging relationship between art, aesthetics and work, exploring its potential as both a medium of critical analysis, and as a site of conflict and resistance.