Strategy and Aesthetics

Éditeurs invités

• René Wiedner, Warwick Business School
• Jennifer Whyte, University of Sydney
• Saku Mantere, McGill University
• Robin Holt, University of Bristol
• Marie-Léandre Gomez, ESSEC Business School

Synthèse

There is broad recognition that organizational life cannot be fully understood or managed through rationalist frameworks. Scholars across the social sciences, including human geography and cultural theory, have long acknowledged how sensory experience, emotion, affect and embodied practice shape organization. Strategy studies are also beginning to understand how strategically significant phenomena–organizational routines, capabilities and identity, investment allocation and judgment, leadership, environmental adaptation–refuse to be confined to, and by, rational, logically structured analyses.

There is an aesthetic aspect to all strategy–it is as much vision as it reason; as much inspiration as analysis. Emotions, feelings, intuitions, desires and instincts can all have strategically significant influence. The symbolic and material dimensions of organising, alongside questions of purpose and structure across multiple human practices and fields, are all factors for which a successful strategic design must take account. The discursive, ecological and commercial forces to which organizations are adapting continually are encountered in aesthetic terms.

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Thèmes proposés

• The aesthetic qualities of strategy work: combining creative expression with analytical rigor; the coexistence of, and interplay between, poetics and reason
• Aesthetically-infused experiences such as awe in understanding how strategic organizations resist the disenchantment of strategy work through over-rationalization
• Studies of strategy confronting cultural landscapes encouraging the production and consumption of styles rather than goods, posing complex strategic identity choices across audiences with different stylistic preferences and evaluation criteria
• How the strategic organization of affective forces is often caught in a fundamental ambiguity between instrumental organization and unmanageable reorganization of experience
• Examinations of analogue and digital strategic devices and how these contribute to the performance of strategic styles, including strategy work in boardrooms and informal organizing contexts
• Investigations of the strategic appropriation of artistic activity and how organizations draw from artistic practices to reinvent themselves and maximize profitability
• Studies of organizational design and the formation of capabilities and identities that can be structured to elicit strategically significant commitments amongst stakeholders
• Inquiries of processual forming and formation in strategy, invoking vitalist and new materialist philosophy and questions about organizational forms
• Engagements with the raw material of strategy in formation, including how information and data have aesthetic forms and dimensions
• Connecting strategy and temporality through aesthetics, including how strategy forms narrative plots that elicit specific feelings of progression, symbolic and communal attachments, and identities