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The paper draws extensively from Aristotle’s Poetics, a classical work on the aesthetics of drama. Drawing from symbolic and thematic elements from folklore and mythology, this paper aims to illustrate how the Poetics can be referenced as an allegorical device in the design of culture-building strategies and interventions.

This exploratory paper examines Aristotle’s “Poetics” and the range of creative expression this literature provides as a conceptual design framework for the development of a culture map in creating a distinctive organisational mythology. The Poetics articulates an Aristotelian perspective on theatre which infuses itself as a new language in offering structural and archetypical plot devices in the development of an organisational narrative.

Findings from this explorative study can provide a creative roadmap to culture practitioners and leaders, to be used as a determining reference point in developing culture maps and change management interventions.

Poetics has its detractors, notably Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal. Boal examines how Poetics promotes a narrative that suppresses free thinking and encourages a cult of feudal personality, therefore encouraging industrial and cultural oppression, which he rebelled against through the development of his “Theatre of the Oppressed”. This new kind of theatre discarded the Aristotelian model of thinking. Ideas proposed in the Poetics may also lend verisimilitude to the propagation of obsessive consumerism through the definitive symbolism it offers in the development of institutionalised personality cults.

The Poetics as a creatively driven reflexive study provides a forward movement in the study of culture design templates. Its definitive allegorical devices and metaphors act as action principles through which an enterprise culture and its value system can be examined and developed.

Although it is often assumed that the study of human group life as “something in the making” is a product of the more distinctive emphasis of 20th century American pragmatist scholarship, the roots of the analysis of the social construction of activity run much deeper.

Whereas poetics (i.e., fiction) represents only one arena in which earlier scholars have more explicitly addressed the matters of human knowing and acting, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch, three authors from the classical Roman era (c. 200 BCE-500 CE) contribute notably to an understanding of the ways in which people accomplish activity. While Horace and Longinus focus primarily on the production of poetic texts, Plutarch addresses the matter of reading, comprehending, and utilizing fictional materials within instructional contexts.

The texts of Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch are generally valued for the insight that they cast on the Roman and Greek life-worlds in the classical Roman era, but they also assume considerable importance as detailed reference materials for developing a more informed, comparative (i.e., transhistorical) analysis of the study of human knowing and acting in contemporary contexts.

Because of the particular subject matter they address, their extended levels of involvements in the communication process and their detailed analysis of people's roles as authors, instructors, and readers, Horace, Longinus, and Plutarch provide much valuable insight in the production and use of written texts. Moreover, given their associated attentiveness to the matters of authenticity and misrepresentation, persuasion and intrigue, and interpretation and inference, these statements should have considerable value to a wide range of scholars and educators.

Poetic inquiry is an approach that promotes alternate perspectives about what research means and speaks to more diverse audiences than traditional forms of research. Across academia, there is increasing attention to decolonising research. This reflects a shift towards research methods that recognise, acknowledge and appreciate diverse ways of knowing, being and doing. The purpose of this paper is to explore the different ways in which poetic inquiry communicates parallax to further decolonise knowledge production and dissemination and centre First Nations’ ways of knowing, being and doing.

This manuscript presents two First Nations’ perspectives on a methodological approach that is decolonial and aligns with Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing. In trying to frame this diversity through Indigenous standpoint theory (Foley, 2003), the authors present two First Nation’s women's autoethnographic perspectives through standpoint and poetics on the role of poetic inquiry and parallax in public pedagogy and decolonising research (Fredericks et al., 2019; Moreton-Robinson, 2000).

The key to understanding poetic inquiry is parallax, the shift in an object, perspective or thinking that comes with a change in the observer's position or perspective. Challenging dominant research paradigms is essential for the continued evolution of research methodologies and to challenge the legacy that researchers have left in colonised countries. The poetic is often invisible/unrecognised in the broader Indigenist research agenda; however, it is a powerful tool in decolonial research in the way it disrupts core assumptions about and within research and can effectively engage with those paradoxes that decolonising research tends to uncover.

Poetic inquiry is not readily accepted in academia; however, it is a medium that is well suited to communicating diverse ways of knowing and has a history of being embraced by First Nations peoples in Australia. Embracing poetic inquiry in qualitative research offers a unique approach to decolonising knowledge and making space for Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing.

Poetic inquiry offers a unique approach to centring First Nations voices, perspectives and experiences to reduce hegemonic assumptions in qualitative research.

Writing about poetic inquiry and decolonisation from a First Nations’ perspective using poetry is a novel and nuanced approach to discussions around First Nations ways of knowing, being and doing.

The purpose of this paper is to give an account of the methods used for the author's project-based doctoral thesis, Hatred and History. The methodology is offered not as an exemplar, but rather as a case study of an integrated approach where exegesis and creative work are conceived as intertwining explorations of the same research materials.

Hatred and History creatively explores the idea that science and intuition frame our experience of the world in distinct ways, and is expressed across an audio production and a written exegesis. The dyad of scientific and intuitive knowledge is embedded deeply within the production, from the initial choice of subject through the structuring and writing of the script to the techniques employed to write the music. This paper traces the transformation of the dyad from academic construct to creative construct, and should therefore be considered a statement of poetics.

The creative exploration of science and intuition encouraged me to consider the “double articulation” of theory and practice, where poetics ceases to be merely a theory of rhetorical design and is assimilated into a theory of self-knowledge.

This paper is offered in the hope that it will be of value to commencing PhD candidates in the creative arts who must navigate the waters between exegesis and creative output for themselves.

Given the dynamic structure of corporate conflict between engineering and sales, how can those two dissimilar realities be managed such that change is possible? The network of assumptions that is each of these realities is not immediately accessible to the “other”; such assumptive networks are coded through its members and located in silence. The trick in managing any organisational change effort is to interrogate those realities in ways that require its members to respond self‐reflectively with narratives rather than unreflectively with codes. Managing an organisational change effort requires that codes be transformed into narratives in ways that blur the boundaries and then redraw them along different lines.

This chapter discusses how the special qualities of poetic language can inform new principles for organizational design. Appreciative inquiry makes extensive use of poetic language – of stories, metaphors, and imagery – to facilitate the discovery of high-point experiences and the articulation of desired future states. It is commonly believed that through this narrative mode of knowing, appreciative dialogue awakens the imaginative and relational possibilities for successful transformation of organizational systems. In a critique of current practice, the chapter suggests that the unleashed generative capacity for change is not fully utilized because of appreciative inquiry's reliance on logico-scientific discourse during its design conversations. This return to modernist managerial practice is unfortunate, if we accept the need for alternative ways of knowing and talking in our efforts to create more just and sustainable forms of organizing. In an attempt to renew existing thinking, the chapter explores the question of what becomes possible when we embrace the poetics, rather than the pragmatics, of organizational design. It describes four qualities of poetic language – imaginative, ambiguous, touching, and holistic – which may inspire the design of organizations that are both more daring and caring in character.

This paper aims to explore brand rhythm in a lyrical analysis. It aims to provide insights into the appropriation of temporal meaning in material, collective and individual contexts.

The design offers a structured advance in lyrical qualitative research and the complementary third alternative to story and drama as more frequent representational forms in interpretive projects. This project presents an aesthetic performance in the sequential constructs of mimesis, poiesis and kinesis.

The inquiry confirms the paradoxical evolution of a brand’s temporal aspects and the importance of rhythm perception as a performative act of semantic bootstrapping and evolving brand meaning in general.

This project shows the importance of brand rhythm and pace in a triangulated methodological sequence of poetic perspectives as an advance of the current qualitative poetic state of play in research. It has implications for the strategic style management of brands in general.

This paper proposes the importance of brand rhythm as a differentiating attribute. The project presents a repeatable case study which depicts managers a structured poetic approach to capture the temporal essence of brands.

This project is situated in the context of an area that has become to be known as the Timeless Land. The artistic (re-)appropriation of a temporal aspect has had an impact on the development of public attitudes and policy.

This project offers new insights into the temporal aspects of brands and the construct of brand rhythm in particular. It completes Altieri’s three literary approaches in a performative inquiry. The proposition of the lyrical third way in a theoretical framework should facilitate the acceptance and increasing currency of future poetic projects in marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relevance of second‐order cybernetics for a theory of architectural design and related discourse.

First, the relation of architectural design to the concept of “poiesis” is clarified. Subsequently, selected findings of Gotthard Günther are revisited and related to an architectural poetics. The last part of the paper consists of revisiting ideas mentioned previously, however, on the level of a discourse that has incorporated the ideas and offers a poetic way of understanding them.

Gotthard Günther's conception of “You” is specifically valuable in reference to a theory of architectural design in the sense of an architectural poetics.

The research furthers the field of architecture by contributing to it a new theory in the form of an architectural poetics. It addresses questions of design with a procedural framework in which critical engagement is an intrinsic principle, and offers an alternative to existing discourses through a poetry of architectonic order that is open to the future.

The pupose of this paper is to explore the power of narrative in management and enterprise research. It is inspired by Paul Ricoeur's philosophical understanding of the relationship between life and narrative. He draws on Aristotle's Poetics and the notion of emplotment (muthos in Greek), which embodies both imaginary story (fable) and well‐constructed story (plot). This study identifies aspects of narratives of enterprise, which resonate with Aristotle's key elements of emplotment in tragedy.

This qualitative, interpretive study relies on narrative as a way of knowing and as a form of communication. The stories as told by 16 participants in in‐depth interviews, are analysed and interpreted in terms of the key elements set out in Aristotle's Poetics – reversals, recognition and suffering.

This form of literary interpretation throws into relief aspects of the founding of a family business across the generations. The dynamics of the “family” in the business, the nature and extent of the family engagement in the business is revealed.

This paper contributes to understanding the intergenerational dynamics of family and business. It illustrates, therefore, that study of the family is central to understanding family business. This calls into question the common assumption that the individual owner manager, or entrepreneur, is synonymous with the business, and therefore necessarily the most appropriate focus for research.

The narrative approach has remained, to date, under‐utilised in family business research. In adopting Aristotlean principles as a framework this study links enterprise activity with the central traditions of Western literature and provides a fresh understanding of enterprise as epic plot.