Art of Management & Organization Conference 2018 University of Brighton

“Sketching as a practice for organisational knowledge conversion”

Dr Adam Dzidowski, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, [e-mail]

The growing interest in organisational studies performed from the artistic and aesthetic perspective clearly means that organisations are no longer considered as aesthetically neutral and that aesthetics could be used to conceptualise an organisation as a form of creative expression. As it turns out, the principles derived from the theory of art, architecture or design can be translated into the strategies, structures and functions of organisations. Consequently, aesthetics could help us to understand that developments in organisational knowledge are often the effects of changes in the employees’ vision of organisational reality. That perspective could be especially relevant, when we take into account that the processes of perception, interpretation, reception and reaction are the essence of tacit-explicit knowledge conversion, known from Nonaka's SECI model. At the same time, these ambiguous transitions between the concealed and the conceptualised are the very reasons why Nonaka's ideas are so rarely implemented, especially in Western organisations, despite the fact that knowledge conversion model is widely recognised in managerial theory. The challenge for organisational aesthetics is to provide the tools that can be used to bridge the tacit and explicit aspects of managerial knowledge expression.

From the aesthetical point of view, the concepts that are especially valuable for the knowledge conversion processes are typically related to visual communication. That is why, many visual tools are already used in organisational practice, like graphs, plots, maps or diagrams. However, despite the fact that these tools are usually richer in conveying the meaning than pure verbalisation, their use rarely addresses the very tension between tacit and explicit knowledge. It seems that in order to relieve the tension between what is embodied and what could be expressed, less rigid and more spontaneous methods of visualisation should be used. Many cognitive researchers point out the unique properties of sketching and doodling for learning and sensemaking. Improvised visualisation could be especially useful when dealing with new, ill-defined and uncertain problems or ideas. The free graphical representation of organisational structure, culture or strategy could improve internal (tacit to tacit) and external (tacit to explicit) dialogues performed within knowledge conversion processes. However, while the relevant examples are already present, the problem is that the more abstract ideas are to be presented the less readable they are to others. That again opens the gap between tacit and explicit communication, because sketching is by definition a highly individual practice, often using hermetic, self-originated visual language.

In order to overcome these limitations and make organisational sketching a valid knowledge conversion tool we need a common visual language, which is not as vague as doodles and scribbles, but at the same time not as precise as widely accepted graphical symbols and notations, in order to maintain its unrestricted mental capacity. The basis for that kind of collective, yet highly individual communication could be found in theory of art, but also in methods derived from architecture, like “mental mapping” or “mood lines” which could be easily related to organisational theory, since both architecture and management deal with the design of social systems.

How not to disappear completely

Simon Willems
Emerging from my practice-based research at the University of Reading, my proposal for the AoMO conference is for a small mixed media installation comprised of a single painting and sculpture. Featuring a fountain of corporate lanyards draped over a metal bowl on a plinth, with the inscription ‘How Not to Disappear Completely’ written and repeated in a child’s handwriting, I imagine its placement as a standalone feature, in situ with the (attached) painting Motivational Pull (After Carlo Bonavia) suspended above it; preferably installed in a thoroughfare such as a corridor or foyer. Motivational Pull is an appropriation of Bonavia’s A Praying Hermit in a landscape, who was an 18^th century Italian Rococo painter. This installation forms part of an ongoing series of artworks that explores the enactment of corporate team-building activities within the context of hermit landscapes taken from art history. Reflecting the core themes of my research, I consider how the ascetic hermit and corporate team building participant both revolve around a problematic of anonymity and the question of the soul’s empowerment. In identifying their ironic contrast from each other, I focus on how the dichotomy that both motifs present satirises the question of agency, as it relates to a Post-Fordist economy of immaterial labour. I ask how and to what extent does a culture of ‘structured fun’ and aesthetic enticement in the workplace therefore come to reflect a broader crisis of de-politicised subjectivity. Considering the work of Post-Autonomist thinkers, Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato and Franco Berardi, I examine how corporate team building activities provide – beyond their unsavoury image– an appropriate microcosm and satirical space, through which to reflect upon the question of subjectivity and its subsumption within late capitalism. Taking the manipulation of affective and emotional labour as a primary category within this discourse, I consider the image of the corporate lanyard as a pertinent symbol of the new economy, that wishes to domesticate the subjectivity of personality and affects. It is within this capacity of working to identify the individual and the collective simultaneously, that the lanyard has become the ubiquitous work-time accessory par excellence.

The impact of technology on the work of grassroots creative workers: A view from underground electronic dance music DJs and producers.

Prof. Samantha Warren and Ms. Carmen Broome, Cardiff University, UK [e-mail]

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities facing ‘grassroots’ creative workers in a digital age. It does so through a qualitative, multi-method study of DJs and electronic music producers (DJP’s) in the UK’s underground techno, house and trance scenes. The creative sector is widely touted as the UK’s route to economic salvation, being worth 8.2% of the UK economy in 2014 at £133.3 billion (DCMS 2016: 5) and showing a growth rate of 25% since 2011 (ibid: 6). Yet this success relies in large part on precarious – often freelance – workers (Easton and Cauldwell-French 2017) and is particularly so in the music industry where almost half of all individuals are self-employed (ibid.) These workers often give significant amounts of labour for little or no return, and struggle to make ends meet solely from revenues from their creative product. The underground electronic music industry is an apposite case through which to explore these issues, given that it is characterised by high precarity of work, and has undergone radical technological change in the past 10-15 years (as have music industries more broadly), impacting on just about every dimension of the industry. Drawing on around 51 hours of interview discussion (n=34) with DJPs, the paper discusses how these workers perceive their skills have changed, the effect on their role definition and sense of identity, shifts in the nature of their ‘creative product’, decreasing revenue streams, how boundaries between ‘fake’ and ‘authentic’ have been blurred by music technologies, and the central role of social media in establishing and maintaining reputation (Gandini 2016)