Aesthetic Understanding of Work and Organizational Life: Approaches and Research Developments

The aesthetic dimension of work and organizational life attracted the attention of organization scholars during the 1980s and 1990s, and its study burgeoned at the turn of the new millennium. There are today four main approaches to the study of organizational aesthetics: (i) the archaeological approach which privileges the symbolic dimension of aesthetic understanding; (ii) the empathic-logical approach which seeks to grasp the pathos of organizational life; (iii) the aesthetic approach which emphasizes the negotiation of organizational aesthetics; (iv) the artistic approach which examines flow, creativity, and playfulness. They all engage in an intellectual controversy with approaches to the study of organizations which privilege the mental, cognitive, and rational dimension of social action whilst neglecting the material, sensible, and emotional dimension of work relations in organizations. This article will illustrate and discuss these approaches by paying particular attention to the topics of the emancipation of people at work and the style of work and organizational practices.     

Aesthetics and organizations without walls

This paper is based on ethnographic research into European art photography conducted at the end of the 1980s. Its conceptual framework is the aesthetic approach to organization studies. It shows that art photography is an organization without walls. This is a new concept that may prove very fruitful to the study of organizations. It analyses the kind of organizations that are invisible to the observer, while at the same time it questions the conventional reading of organizational boundaries. The thesis of the paper is that the aesthetic experience is the glue which cements together and delimits art photography as an organization without walls, and that culture and symbolism are crucial elements in organizations without walls. This thesis is illustrated through the evocative construction of organizational knowledge using the aesthetic approach.     

Tuning-In 1 to Organizational Song as Aesthetic Discourse

In this article, the author explores organizational songs, referring to songs that are created by members of an organization as an expression of organizational culture. More specifically, the author is concerned with organizational songs as an expression of organizational culture, versus the better-known occupational songs that act as an expression of occupational culture. First, the study differentiates the genre of work songs (defined by the occupation of 'laborer') to discern organizational songs (defined by the occupation of "manager"). Second, this exploration reveals a musical expression of organizations; a musical expression that also serves as a form of organizational communication or organizational discourse--specifically an aesthetic communication or aesthetic discourse. A significance for organizational studies is asserted, as the study identifies organizational songs as expressive strategies: song as a form of organizational action and an attempt at organizational intervention; song as an organization's attempt to construct its own history and autobiography; and song as a means of celebrating the identity of organizational leaders and organizational values. The approach is to provide a comprehensive literature review followed by case vignettes of organizational songs.     

Aesthetics of disaster as decolonial aesthetics: making sense of the effects of Hurricane María through Puerto Rican contemporary art

ABSTRACT

On 20 September 2017, Hurricane María made landfall on Puerto Rico causing unprecedented disaster. From that day onwards, the Puerto Rican multi-layered colonial, social and political context was further complicated by the traumatic acceleration of a human disaster via this natural disaster. This crystalized the urgency of using art as vehicle for (social) catharsis, a practice that continues to be used by individual artists, collectives, community organizations, art projects, and other art institutions on the island and abroad, through mural art, community paintings, art exhibitions, literature, music, and many other aesthetic expressions. This article examines, from a decolonial and critical cultural studies perspective, post-Hurricane María artistic expressions in contemporary art as decolonial aesthetics through the cathartic use of the frame of an aesthetics of disaster. It is argued that, an aesthetics of disaster aims to re-assert an artistic form that is able to accelerate the discursive nullification of a deeply rooted colonial, social and cultural problem by way of art as catharsis inspired by the way that Hurricane María unveiled these problems. The piece briefly contextualizes Puerto Rico, and it examines the idea of Puerto Rican contemporary art as catharsis. Then, it describes how Puerto Rican contemporary art exhibitions and associated aesthetic production are processing urgent post-hurricane issues through three illustrative pieces in exhibitions in PR and abroad in the United States (US). Lastly, decolonial aesthetics is reexamined and re-understood, informed by Édouard Glissant's view expressed in Poetics of Relation which aids to the conclusion that Puerto Rican contemporary art using the frame of an aesthetics of disaster functions as a powerful form of decolonial aesthetics.     

Institutional Pressures and Organizational Capacity: The Case of Outcome Measurement1

A central claim of new institutional theory is that organizations in a field come to exhibit shared characteristics over time. Recent literature emphasizes variation across field members, but has yet to concur on why differences occur. This study tests institutional explanations for the uneven implementation of one organizational practice—outcome measurement, an evaluative technique used to assess the impact of an organization’s programs. We analyze data from a new survey investigating the practices of nonprofit organizations (N = 379) and argue for the inclusion of the concept of organizational capacity to account for the uneven implementation of outcome measurement. As predicted by new institutional theory, organizations are more likely to adopt outcome measurement if key actors promulgate its use. However, the implementation of outcome measurement is best explained by the addition of the concept of organizational capacity alongside variables drawn from new institutionalism. Nonprofits with adequate organizational capacity, operationalized—following Weber’s concept of bureaucracy—as the presence of written rules and members with specialized knowledge, are better able to respond to isomorphic pressures to implement a new organizational practice. Our findings expand scholarship that examines the intersection of institutional dynamics and organizational traits in accounting for patterns of implementation of practices across an organizational field.     

Social forces and decision‐making by gatekeepers in arts organizations

Gatekeepers in arts organizations have an important role to play in determining which artistic works the public gets to experience. Performing arts organizations provide a good example of how these decisions made by gatekeepers necessarily delimit the art that the audiences will experience. This article catalogs the social forces that influence individual decision‐makers. Individual level forces like social background, embeddedness in social networks, and perceptions of the organization and organizational level forces like organizational structure, funding, and size all affect what they ultimately produce. This, in turn, allows us to better understand the work these companies produce form a sociological perspective.     

Deviant Acts by Complex Organizations: Deviance and Social Control at the Organizational Level of Analysis1

The study of deviance and social control can be expanded to recognize that (1) organizations, not just individuals, commit deviant acts, and (2) other organizations have responsibilities for preventing or controlling that deviance. This paper focuses on these phenomena. It defines organizational deviance, applies Blau and Scot?s cui bono taxonomy to suggest types of organizational deviance, provides a categorization of controller organizations by the types of deviance they control, and considers the social control of organizational deviance. The paper concludes by suggesting that organizational deviance should be among the theoretical, empirical, and methodological interests of an increasing number of contemporary sociologists.     

Social Sources of Community Solidarity in U.S. Congregations

Community solidarity, or a collective sense of belonging, plays a vital role in the health and survival of many organizations. Consequently, identifying the elements that contribute to a strong sense of solidarity within communities has long been a topic of inquiry for scholars. In this study, we draw upon prior theorizing to develop and test four hypotheses regarding the organizational characteristics associated with community solidarity in religious congregations. Multivariate models are estimated using national data on religious congregations from the 2001 U.S. Congregational Life Survey (n?=?357). Organizations with greater community solidarity tend to feature higher levels of social capital (operationalized with measures of friendship networks and participation in organizational activities), higher levels of official membership within the organization, and inspiring congregational leadership. Higher levels of commitment are associated with greater community solidarity, but the effect is wholly mediated by social capital. Congregations that engender higher levels of community solidarity share certain organizational features, including higher levels of social capital, higher rates of membership, and inspiring leaders.     

Keeping up appearances: aesthetic labour in the fashion modelling industries of London and New York

This paper addresses itself to literature on ‘aesthetic labour’ in order to extend understanding of embodied labour practices. Through a case study of fashion modelling in New York and London we argue for an extension of the concept to address what we see as problematic absences and limitations. Thus, we seek to extend its range, both in terms of occupations it can be applied to, not just interactive service work and organizational workers, and its conceptual scope, beyond the current concern with superficial appearances at work and within organizations. First, we attend to the ways in which these freelancers have to adapt to fluctuating aesthetic trends and different clients and commodify themselves in the absence of a corporate aesthetic. The successful models are usually the ones who take on the responsibility of managing their bodies, becoming ‘enterprising’ with respect to all aspects of their embodied self. Secondly, unlike Dean (2005 ) who similarly extends aesthetic labour to female actors, we see conceptual problems with the term that need addressing. We argue that the main proponents of aesthetic labour have a poorly conceived notion of embodiment and that current conceptualizations produce a reductive account of the aesthetic labourer as a ‘cardboard cut‐out’, and aesthetic labour as superficial work on the body's surface. In contrast, drawing on phenomenology, we examine how aesthetic labour involves the entire embodied self, or ‘body/self’, and analyse how the effort to keep up appearances, while physical, has an emotional content to it. Besides the physical and emotional effort of body maintenance, the imperative to project ‘personality’ requires many of the skills in emotional labour described by Hochschild (1983 ). Thirdly, aesthetic labour entails on‐going production of the body/self, not merely a superficial performance at work. The enduring nature of this labour is evidenced by the degree of body maintenance required to conform to the fashion model aesthetic (dieting, for example) and is heightened by the emphasis placed on social networking in freelancing labour, which demands workers who are ‘always on’. In this way, unlike corporate workers, we suggest that the freelance aesthetic labourer cannot walk away from their product, which is their entire embodied self. Thus, in these ways we see aesthetic labour adding to, or extending, rather than supplanting emotional labour, as Witz et al. (2003 ) would have it.     

Sustainability of Nonprofit Human Service Organizations in a Neighborhood Context

Nonprofit human service organizations (NHSOs) carry both practical and symbolic implications for serving local needs. Whether neighborhood characteristics influence the existence of NHSOs is a critical inquiry, albeit with mixed results. This study examines the relationship between neighborhood characteristics and organizational sustainability based on the data of the capital district of New York State. Spatial analysis showed that the largest concentration of NHSOs remains in the inner‐city neighborhoods. Regression analysis identified small revenues of organizations and density of African American residents as significant factors that are negatively associated with the longevity of NHSOs, controlling for neighborhood income level. These findings imply that small‐budget organizations in African American neighborhoods may experience a quick turnover, which prompts a deeper understanding of how NHSOs attempt to sustain in such neighborhoods.     

Organized Environmentalists: Democracy as a Key Value?

This article, taking as its point of departure that voluntary organizations are of crucial importance in a democracy, views the transformation of the Norwegian voluntary sector through the lenses of what happens within the environmental field. Seeing changes within this field as prototypical for the transformation of the voluntary sector more generally, we start with the organizational level and contrast old versus new environmental organizations. The aim is to ascertain to what extent the newly built organizations are leaving the historically important democratic organizational model. Second, we compare attitudes toward democracy of members of the democratically and nondemocratically built organizations: attitudes both toward democracy within a voluntary organization (internal) and democracy in society (external). Furthermore, we compare these findings with what we find for the population at large. The last section analyzes demographic characteristics of organized environmentalists to see whether a new type of elite, more distanced from the population at large, is emerging in the new and nondemocratically built organizations. The study finds that new organizations are definitely breaking with the democratic organizational model. The support for democracy (internal and external) is comprehensive but not always overwhelming, and there is a tendency in the direction of congruence between organizational structure and individual attitudes. That is, members of democratically built organizations especially value internal but also to some extent external democracy more than members of nondemocratically built organizations. However, even if formal democratic structure and democracy as an absolute and generalized value seems to be under pressure, it does not follow that a new type of elitism is emerging.     

Leadership succession and the performance of nonprofit organizations: A fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis

Leadership succession is critical to the performance of nonprofit organizations. Existing research has mostly treated leadership succession as an instantaneous event, and it has examined the independent effects of certain factors on organizational performance. However, little research has focused on the combinations of causally relevant factors. This article integrated organizational life cycle, resource dependence, and institutional theories, as well as the organizational fit literature, to explain how contextual and strategic factors combine to affect postsuccession performance. A fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was used to analyze 15 succession events in Chinese environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The study identified four pathways to good NGO performance after succession. It also highlighted that it is not succession per se but the succession context (i.e. founders' control, board governance, professionalization, and political environment) and the strategic orientations of the successor that affect postsuccession performance in nonprofit organizations.     

Telling stories,reflecting, learning: hannah arendt and organization

This article is written in recognition of the need for dialogue between organization theory and other disciplines and languages. It uses some concepts coined by Hannah Arendt to develop reflection concerning organizational dynamics. Arendt's category of action, as different from both labour and work, makes possible to define, in an original way, the political dimension of organizational action. The category of thought, again, as defined by Arendt, allows us to highlight the production of meaning which takes place in organizations. With the help of those two concepts, the author develops a notion of organizational learning as a process where the political and cognitive dimensions of organizational action are strongly interrelated.     

For a sociology of committed professionals: “Art Worlds” in the United States and opposing the war in Iraq

This article analyzes American artists’ opposition to the war in Iraq, emphasizing the way it was determined by their professional situations. Regardless of the networks and political organizations involved, or the ideological dimensions of the anti-war cause, individual professional identities and relationships persisted and influenced their public practices and positioning. In a first section, we compare different artistic subfields and labor configurations, to grasp what, in the participants’ own eyes, made the combination of artistic and militant identities - and, sometimes, the production of a form of “political art” - tenable. The second section concentrates on how political commitment emerged in fields of professional activity, how the functioning of artistic milieus today – that have become more autonomous, specialized and professional – tends to discourage “mixing registers”, i.e. combining aesthetic motives and political logics.     

Exploring Social Aesthetics: Aesthetic Appreciation as a Method for Qualitative Sociology and Social Research

Social aesthetics can be regarded as an important addition to sociology and the social sciences. This article introduces the notion of aesthetic-experiential knowledge into qualitative sociology and social research. It also directs attention to the qualities of social life in their own right, paving the way for approaching the question of a good society in the aesthetic sense. In this article I make a brief exposition of social aesthetics as it has been developed in contemporary Japan. I begin with a discussion of contemporary aesthetics and its implications for social study by focusing on Yuriko Saito's everyday aesthetics. Then I offer reflections on aesthetic appreciation as an act of ajiwau (to taste, experience and appreciate). I show that the incorporation of the methodical act of ajiwau enriches our aesthetic appreciation as a qualitative method for knowing the world in general. Next I move on to the possibility of aesthetically appreciating the social world and offer a definition of social aesthetics as social inquiry through aesthetic appreciation. Based on the act of ajiwau the social, I present an aesthetic-experiential study of a micro-society as a field of human interactions. Finally, I examine the possibilities for promising dialogues between social aesthetics, on the one hand, and qualitative sociology and social research, on the other.     

Rumors and gossip as tools of social undermining and social dominance in workplace bullying and mobbing practices: A closer look at perceived perpetrator motives

The impact of ‘bully bosses’ on organizations is well studied and research has established a number of antecedents, correlates, moderators and mediators of workplace bullying and mobbing as well as the impact of the practices on the targets, bystanders, perpetrators and the employing organizations. The current study focuses on rumors and gossip as ‘tools’ used by perpetrators of workplace bullying and mobbing. This study is important because while researchers have generally agreed that rumors and gossip can contribute to a better understanding of different areas of interest to organizational behaviorists and researchers; the role played by the two social processes (i.e., rumors and gossip) have not been adequately interrogated by scholars or practitioners studying organizations. To address this gap in research, the main objective of the current study was to use collaborative and analytic autoethnography (CAAE) in exploring and presenting qualitative empirical inquiry on the dynamics of workplace bullying as perpetrated by ‘bully bosses’ and as characterized by rumors and gossip. The findings and extant literature suggests that depending on: contents, functions, and the situational and motivational contexts, perpetrators of bullying and mobbing may use rumors and gossip: 1) for maintenance of oppression and social dominance; 2) as an expression of envy and social undermining; 3) as a weapon to humiliate subordinates by corporate/organizational psychopaths; and/or 4) as a psychological attempt to close or widen the power gap.     

SOME ASPECTS OF NEGOTIATED ORDER,LOOSE COUPLING AND MESOSTRUCTURE IN MAXIMUM SECURITY PRISONS*

Even in total institutions, control is far from total. In custodial organizations, for example, staff and inmates negotiate their own interpretation of the social order, often rejecting formal rules and control techniques, and substituting alternatives that may be just as formal, although tacit, as those they replace. This creates “gaps” betwen formal organizational structure and individual behaviors which partially decouple formal rules from the behaviors intended to carry out those rules. This study integrates organizational and prison research to develop the concepts of negotiated order, loose coupling, and me-sostructure. The goal is to examine the context in which negotiations occur and the manner in which negotiated order activates the interactions and understandings through and by which organizational structure is generated and maintained.     

Exploring the association between board and organizational performance in nonprofit organizations

Note: This study investigated six dimensions of effective board performance, as suggested by Chait, Holland, and Taylor (1991), in relation to three theoretical explanations (agency theory, resource dependency theory, and group/decision process theory) of how board governance activities potentially influence organizational performance. Survey research findings revealed that strategic contributions from the board are more robust in organizations with higher financial performance. In addition, organizations that are judged to be higher performing also reported having high‐performing boards across all dimensions. In particular, the interpersonal dimension provided a unique explanation of judgments of organizational performance.     

SCHOOLS OF ACTIVITY AND INNOVATION

Explanations of artistic innovation have generally focused on political or psychological factors influencing individual socialization. This article suggests an alternative approach focusing on the organizational processes in an art world, specifically the production of concert music. Concerts are produced through the collective activity of musical specialists. Compatible collaborators identify each other by constructing "schools of activity" that group conventional concert practices and practitioners. Different schools, however, do not simply represent alternative conventions, rather they represent degrees of convention that correspond to varying aesthetic interests in innovation and virtuosity. The first part of this article examines the organization of artistic activity and the formation of schools. The second part presents data from the concert world illustrating the organization of alternative types of artistic practice.