Arts and organizations: The aesthetic dimension of politics, from individuals to structures

Abstract

More than three decades after the first international special report devoted to the relationship between art and organizations, and almost twenty years after the only RIPCO issue devoted to the arts, this special report takes an aesthetic perspective on the link between the personal, interpersonal, and structural dimensions of organizational life, and the role that art can play in it. We will explore how and why art and its practices can influence organizational behaviors, perceptions, representations, and research. We live in a time when calls for affect, creation, innovation, imagination, intuition, play, and improvisation—supposedly necessary to manage contemporary organizations in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world—are becoming more widespread. Our aim is therefore to synthesize the trends in the field, make them accessible to Francophone researchers, and to place French research on these subjects in an international perspective. Our objective in taking an aesthetic perspective is to rethink the link between the human and structures, i.e., to reflect on the link between the subjective and concrete experience of members of organizations, and the abstraction of organizational concepts and political processes, from the individual micro to the meso and the macro levels. How do the pragmatist, phenomenological, interactionist, and constructivist perspectives, from which studies on organizational aesthetics are derived, help us to understand the relationships between aesthetic, strategic, and political dimensions, in parallel with or in addition to neo-institutionalist, performative, or cognitivist perspectives?