INTRODUCTORY PAPER ARTS AND ORGANIZATIONS: FROM INDIVIDUALS TO STRUCTURES, THE INSEPARABLE AESTHETIC DIMENSION OF POLITICS

Abstract

We live a time of constant calls for affect, creation, innovation, imagination, intuition, play and improvisation, supposedly necessary to manage contemporary organizations in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. Despite this, it has been more than three decades since the first French international special issue on the links between art and organizations (Benghozi, 1987), and almost twenty years since the RIPCO dedicated one to the topic. We thus wanted to offer an update with this special issue calling for an aesthetic perspective that explores how and why aesthetics, art and its practices influence organizational behaviors, perceptions, representations and research. By taking an aesthetic perspective, we invited authors to deconstruct and/or rethink the links and interactions between humans and structures, subjective and concrete experiences, or individual micro, meso and macro-organizational levels – in line with the identity of the RIPCO and with recent developments in the academic literature.Belief is spreading that the value creation generated by organizations does not simply come from rational and linear processes, but is more and more linked to the lived experience of their members, to their emotions and the energy they put in their activities and the development of new ideas – things that arts would be susceptible to stimulate (Carlucci & Schiuma, 2018). For example, dance-based interventions can help the acquisition and reinforcement of innovative skills (Bozic Yams, 2018)…