Aesthetics, Organization, and Humanistic Management

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.

Monika Kostera is Professor Ordinaria and Chair in Management at the Jagiellonian University, Poland and Professor in Management and Organization at Södertörn University, Sweden. Cezary Wozniak is a philosopher and Professor at Institute of Culture at Management and Social Communication Department at Jagiellonian University, Poland.

1. Introduction: Understanding organizing and the quest for wholeness Cezary Wozniak and Monika Kostera. 2. Art & Organizing - A brief personal reflection Antonio Strati. 3. The incompleteness theorem: The importance of reinterpretation in management studies Jerzy Kociatkiewicz. 4. Hula-Hoops and cigars, hiccups and stutters: Thinking with film about organisational control Luc Peters and Anke Strauß. 5. Writing, dreams and imagination Matilda Dahl, Pierre Guillet de Monthoux and Jenny Helin. 6. Conformity and the Need for Roots. Two anarchist utopias and a Christian politea Piotr Graczyk. 7. The Alchemical Life of Ernesta Thot - a romantic heroine of art Marta Kudelska. 8. Rooted in transitory places of gathering: Performing Spacing in Tino Sehgal's performance "These Situations" at the Palais de Tokyo Jean-Luc Moriceau, Philippe Mairesse and Yannick Fronda. 9. Aesthetic learning in an artistic intervention project for organizational creativity - accepting feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and fun Marja Soila-Wadman. 10. The Art of Creating the Unthinkable: Connecting Processes of Engineering, Management and Aesthetics Allesandra Di Pisa and Robert Stasinski. 11. Monuments to Enterprises in Communist-era Poland: The creation and consolidation of an organisational identity through Art Marcin Laberschek. 12. The Lure of The East in The Empires of Sight: does changing ownership of colonial art challenge the notion of being 'colonised by the gaze' Elizabeth Carnegie. 13. Exercises in sensemaking: 3,628,800 ways of writing organization and management Daniel Ericsson. 14. Is a culture-forming interaction between art and management possible and on what conditions? Mateusz Falkowski. 15. Prologue to filmic research(ing) Hugo Letiche.