The Aesthetics of Organization

Citation

Harding, N. (2001), "The Aesthetics of Organization", Journal of Management in Medicine, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 323-329. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmm.2001.15.4.323.1

Interviewing the management team of the local NHS trust involves first traversing hospital corridors that are a hustle, bustle and hubbub of people, of doctors in stethoscopes and white coats, nurses and members of various health professions in their uniforms, patients whose pyjamas and dressing gowns signify their status as exiles from the outside world, relatives wearing casual clothes and worried frowns, and a host of others whose dress does not immediately reveal their reason for being there. Eventually, one pushes one’s way through heavy, plastic, curtain‐like doors, out of the over‐heated hospital wing and into fresh air. The management headquarters of this NHS trust is at the rear of the hospital complex, and is reached by passing through the above hospital wing, walking down a steep concrete ramp, crossing a road and walking up a rose‐strewn path (rose bushes are planted each side of this path). The headquarters are hushed. Here the visitor walks down empty corridors painted pastel blue and white, over deep carpets that absorb any sound that dares to intrude. The chief executive, after a wait just long enough to put the visitor in her lowly place but not long enough to be rude, takes off his jacket and sits on the settee in his office, separated from the researcher by a coffee table.

It is largely the verbal experiences of fieldwork that are recorded and analysed, yet I take my body with me on my field work (how could it be other?) and the sensory impressions I gather inform my analysis, in ways of which I am only sometimes conscious. However, the mass of physical and sensory experiences we absorb during our fieldwork are seemingly lost to our analyses of organisations and their management. How would understanding the above experience enrich my analysis of that organisation? Could it?

The answer to those questions should be affirmative. Cartesian dualism no longer rules, okay, and today we ponder reflexively how our embodiedness, our psyches, our emotions and the ways we use language constitute the organisations we work in, the organisations we study, the managerial practices we analyse and the prescriptions we recommend. We borrow concepts from geography to study how we use and conceive of space and territory, and geographers in turn use concepts borrowed from the wider social sciences and the humanities. Anthropology informs our studies of our local organisations; psychoanalysis our studies of the people who frequent them, and the body has appeared as a focus for study within organisations (Hassard et al., 2000). Meantime, scientific rationalism’s hegemonic sway in management and organisation studies operates in its own parallel life‐world, sometimes putting out feelers into this veritable stew of influences to see what tasty morsel it can absorb into itself for its own purposes. An understanding of the world of health management enhanced by these various perspectives would, it seems, require that I focus not only on analysing the words I have gathered in the interviews, but the sensory experiences involved in the gathering of that crop. It is thus to the study of aesthetics of organisations that I have turned for inspiration. This field of study, effectively started by Antonio Strati (1999) but heavily informed by the later work of Michel Foucault, has already produced lively streams of discussions at the biannual Critical Management Conference held in Manchester in 1999 and 2001. This book, edited by Linstead and Höpfl, with its emphatic title, The Aesthetics of Organization, appears to offer a definitive statement of how this comparatively new method of study may enhance our understanding of organisations and thus of their management. Unfortunately, the title, or at least the emphatic “The” with which it commences, is a misnomer: perhaps a more appropriate title would be “Preliminary, muddled and contradictory thoughts about the aesthetics of organizations”, which offer some rich pickings but require indulgence on the readers’ part.

The book has 12 chapters organised into six parts:

1. 1.

   (1) aesthetic theory;

2. 2.

   (2) aesthetic processes;

3. 3.

   (3) aesthetics and modes of analysis;

4. 4.

   (4) crafting an aesthetic;

5. 5.

   (5) aesthetics, ethics and identity; and

6. 6.

   (6) radical aesthetics and change.

There is, however, a confused understanding of aesthetics, with the majority of authors relating it, simplistically, to art. For this reader trying to make sense of the resulting confusion, a more accurate formation of chapters would have been: chapters in which the writers indulge themselves, albeit interestingly, in analysing and critiquing art works, with minimum attempt made to show how their ideas contribute to a broader understanding of organisations (including Heather Höpfl’s chapter which critiques the work of one artist; Frank J. Barrett’s essay on jazz; Harro Höpfl’s history of the Jesuits); chapters in which the writers study organisations involved in the production of art (Hugo Letiche’s study of the Nederlands Dance Theatre; Stewart Clegg’s description of how popular music has stimulated the regeneration of a suburb in Bahia in Brazil); chapters in which the writers appear to use the concept of “aesthetics” as a cover for an opportunity to propound their own favoured world‐view (David Silverman’s chapter on conversation analysis which magisterially refuses to bow to the demands of the book’s title; Stephen Cummings’ aim (groans of despair from this reader) to turn Michel Foucault into a management consultant); and chapters in which the writers attempt to grapple seriously with definitions of aesthetics and how it may inform our attempts to understand organisations and their management. Although some of the first three categories are fun, even illuminating, it is only the last category which offers ways of using an understanding of aesthetics when studying organisations, for it is here that a definition of aesthetics which goes beyond a simple comprehension of the organisation as a work of art, or as a place where an artistic sensibility can be used when analysing organisations, is to be found. In this essay, I will focus on three chapters I have placed in this arbitrary classification.

Antonio Strati’s opening chapter, “The aesthetic approach in organization studies”, reprises and develops his earlier, foundational work. The underlying assumption of the aesthetic approach to the study of organizations, he argues (p. 13), is that organisations are social and collective constructions which are not exclusively cognitive but derived from the knowledge‐creating faculties of all the human senses. However (p. 17), an aesthetic understanding should not be confused with an artistic understanding, for the aesthetic involves all the senses and is attained without reference to theories or bodies of knowledge. Similarly, an aesthetic understanding is not related to an emotional understanding. The aesthetic understanding relates to ways of knowing through the senses, i.e. through seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting. Thus the aesthetic approach stands in antithesis to the cognitively based model of organisations, disputing the knowledge‐claims of such approaches. The focus of research should thus include an analysis of tacit knowledge, and should take into account all the senses of those being researched, giving priority to empathetic forms of understanding.

How then should we discover “all the senses” of people in organisations? The bulk of Strati’s chapter is devoted to the aesthetic categories of beauty, the sublime, the ugly, the comic, the gracious, the picturesque (game‐playing) and the agogic (grounded in movement and rhythm) categories, the tragic and the sacred. There is no space here to go into the definitions of each of these, and indeed in Strati’s analysis there is sometimes a sense that he is forcing organisational examples into each of these categories so as to ensure that each one is filled. How the researcher can turn these categories into useful methods of analysis, without imposing a drama upon the snapshots of fieldwork, is a task whose solution is left to the reader’s own ingenuity. Strati concludes that the aesthetic approach urges the scholar to develop new awareness of organisational life rather than looking for a rational explanation of organisational phenomena at any cost.

Strati thus urges us to turn away from the normal paths of empirical research, the paths that lead to the seven S’s, the functions of management, and other prescriptions for running organisations, and down the paths trodden by super‐alert anthropologists. What, I wonder, would a study of a hospital look like that was informed in this way? Certainly I can see how applying some of the above categories to the snapshot I describe above could inform a certain analysis. Ideas of the rhythm of the trust appeals – the bustling movement of bodies in the “wings” (how apt that title seems in this category) is like a frenetic ballet, while the calm of the headquarters is like a meditation. The next chapter I will discuss suggests a way of taking forward these first thoughts.

The chapter by one of the editors, Stephen Linstead, entitled “Ashes and madness: the play of negativity and the poetics of organization” was more interesting to this reader as it gave a theory of how an aesthetic understanding may work. He draws on the theories of the usual suspects in post‐structuralist analyses, particularly Lyotard and Derrida, in seeking to develop a “poetics of organisation”. As is usual in authors who draw on such works, the writing is not prized for its immediacy of comprehension.

The chapter begins with a psychoanalytically‐informed description of how we learn who we are and how to be through an aesthetic understanding. We learn to understand through mimesis, or copying (a strength of this book is that terms borrowed from post‐modernist or post‐structuralist analysis are often explained). Mimesis, he writes, is “a part of the developmental process through which we learn first how to survive, then discover who we are by imitating, then bricolating and innovating with the behaviour and symbols of others” (p. 63). Here we are in the realms of objects‐relations theory, although Linstead does not draw explicitly upon it. Yet his description of how an aesthetic response of subject to object involves an opening up to the object so that it works on us, unselfconsciously, without the usual comprehensions of significance, meaning, interest or cause and effect, has been theorised by authors such as Christopher Bollas. These responses are pre‐conscious, beyond words, and thus can clash with conscious, logical apprehensions, Linstead argues. Returning to Derrida, he continues by stating that all texts, including organisations‐as‐texts:

…contain a mixture of the unsaid (unsaid either by implicit or explicit choice made on the basis of interest, which is the object of ideological critique; or by unconscious suppression, which is the object of critical analysis, and the first focus of deconstruction) and the unsayable (that which is beyond explicit expression, like something always just out of visual focus or at too low or high a frequency for audibility, yet which affects that which takes place in the expressible frame – the ultimate yet unfocusable focus of deconstruction). … This silent, implicative “double” does not necessarily negate the written words, but works alongside them (p. 71).

Thus we have a theory of how the aesthetics of organisations, or the ways in which they present themselves to us as objects, become part of the “me”.

There is a puzzle here, for how can organisations be seen to be aesthetic? This is resolved by Linstead’s argument that organisations are forms of play, made up of the prototypes of all games. Furthermore, they are forms of poetry, in the sense that poetry can reach beyond the limits given by the seemingly straightforward relationship between signifier and signified and into a realm where language can be extended beyond itself, for poetry is “a passionate engagement of self with the world” (p. 85). Poems can thus apprehend a vast complexity of meaning in a moment. It is thus implied that the aesthetics of organisations, i.e. their aspects which affect us through our senses, tell us things that are beyond language, beyond conscious knowing, and they can tell us these things in an instant.

From here Linstead offers a programme of thinking about how we may develop the ways we study organisations. We should, he says, focus on the aesthetic dimensions of the ethnographic situation, explore our own feelings and responses to the setting including how we learn about and constitute ourselves through the psychodynamics of fieldwork, to understand how we switch between the codes we use as academic writers (the interior codes of the personal and the exterior code of the analytic). Having understood ourselves we can explore how to bring our own experiences and those of organisational participants into a theorised relation. He offers no programme, only a series of possibilities.

Returning here to my own example, I suggest that Linstead offers a way of understanding how managers and professional staff can fail to understand each other, for in organisations which take up such huge spaces as do NHS trusts, and which display such different rhythms, the ways in which the organisation speaks to the participants using the messages of the aesthetics are so different that managers may have in their minds one picture of the organisation, and professional staffs yet others, and these differ so radically that when they meet they talk not about the same entity, but about very different organisations that occupy the same space.

Finally, I will describe the arguments of Carter and Jackson, in a chapter entitled “An‐aesthetics”.

They distinguish usefully between two senses of “aesthetic”: one which refers to judgements about taste, where the aesthetics are a property of some object and thus are external to the individual; and the other which refers to the emotional response experienced by an individual in relation to some externality, where the aesthetics are a property of the individual rather than the externality. The former, they write, is in the realm of science, and the latter of philosophy/psychology. The shift from the latter to the former occurred in the nineteenth century, making it part of the legacy of the enlightenment and the rise of modernism. Other writers in this book, in failing to make this distinction, fall into the trap of not quite knowing what they are trying to analyse.

Thus prepared, Carter and Jackson use “aesthetic” as “a function of perception – the emotional response to a perceived stimulus”, and they argue that “all organisation(s) produce(s) an aesthetic which is ‘designed’ to elicit positive responses from all those with whom transactions, of whatever kind, take place”. This aesthetic is, however, distinct from the creation of organisational image or of legitimation, for an important element of the creation of an aesthetic is a process of masking and denial of the experienced reality of organisation, so that there is an appearance of providing a comforting sense of security which, at the same time, defers or suppresses actions which may threaten the status quo. This, they suggest, is the function of aesthetics of organisation. They refine this definition later (p. 189) to state the propositions that:

First, that in reproducing an aesthetic what an organization does, intentionally and/or unintentionally, is to structure both form and content in such a way as to elicit a positive response from all those with whom it has any transaction. Secondly, that the way in which this is done generally involves a profound denial of the reality of organization(s).

This, they say, is the aesthetic of capitalism, one where desire for the products of the system persistently represses the recognition of other interests, so that the aesthetics of capitalism is “an attempt to evoke a positive response to experience which is, for many, profoundly negative” (p. 192). Thus we ignore, in our studies of organisations, how their practices conflict with the principles and values of liberal democracy and humanitarianism. However, as the aesthetic reinforces a constant denial of experience, the negative psychological impact of subjective experience results in our abrogating our responsibility for judgement and leaving it to others to decide on our behalf. “So the aesthetic acts to induce, sustain and reward compliance” (p. 193).

Furthermore, they suggest (p. 193) that the “dominant aesthetic in most organisations symbolises order, neatness, simplicity, function, purpose and rationality in a harmony of symmetry”. This is not, however, a visual or sensual aesthetic but a psychological one. The contrast between order and symmetry, and the chaos and disorder that is seemingly suppressed, stimulates anxiety and a further wish to escape from chaos into the orderly arms of the organisation.

Thus the production of the aesthetic serves to ensure we are “inescapably retained in the gift of the powerful”. An aesthetic works by appealing to the “shared language” of a community and the unconscious responses and intersubjective recognitions of a particular culture. To accept it without demur is to dull awareness, so “ironically, organizational aesthetics an‐aesthetize” (p. 195).

Now this adds another interesting dimension to the analysis of the trust I am using to test the utility of applying aesthetics to understand health organisations and their management. The description of the NHS trust I have given, where apparent chaos and disorder is contrasted with calm (if not symmetry) is not unusual among trusts, and indeed could be the norm. But these are not, to all intents and purposes, capitalist organisations; rather, they are highly politicised organisations where the heavy hand of politics attempts to dictate what is done. Would it therefore be possible to speculate that the aesthetics of organisations can be used to reach an understanding of how civil servants and politicians “see” the NHS as they draw up their innumerable plans for change? Paraphrasing Carter and Jackson’s intentions allows the hint that this is a plausible conjecture, for it is possible to suggest:

First, that in reproducing an aesthetic of a health service what a government does, intentionally and/or unintentionally, is to structure both form and content in such a way as to elicit a positive response from all those with whom it has any transaction, but largely from its most important constituent: the elector/patient. Secondly, that the way in which this is done generally involves a profound denial of the reality of health organisation(s).

Conclusion

If aesthetics is understood as a way of knowing that is achieved through the senses, and which constitutes our understanding of ourselves and the organisations around us, a more deeply‐informed method of research and analysis is opened to the researcher of health organisations and their management. After having taken just one snapshot of one NHS trust, and developing some highly preliminary theorising, it is possible to suggest that NHS trusts have a “reality” that is vastly different from the cool rationalism of managerialism: the poverty of our current understanding is revealed. However, it is that meagre description which informs government policy. If we are to improve health services the academy bears the responsibility of exploring how it is contributing to and maintaining such a perspective, and to offering policy makers, professional staff and managers richer and more nuanced understandings of the organisations which suffer from such continual, and misguided, tinkering.

Thus a book which at first sight betrayed its promise does perhaps hold hints of many possibilities. Applied to the study of health organisations and their management and government, aesthetics, which at first sight seems highly impractical, can perhaps help us develop the most practical of theories and their application.