Art of Management & Organization Conference 2018 University of Brighton

Practice as aesthetic co-creation: Can theatre-mediated processes as a co-creative way of thinking and acting fill out the gap between educational settings and everyday practice?

Britta Møller, PhD fellow, Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University [e-mail]

Dealing with workplace learning over the years as a manager and recently as a researcher, I have experienced a gap when it comes to learning between the formal educational setting (e.g. courses, workshops, meetings) and everyday practice. Different studies discuss these difficulties as a question of transfer of learning from one setting to another (e.g. Wahlgren 2013; Illeris 2009; Thomas, 2007). Studies in workplace learning point out that learning occurs through engagement in work tasks in the workplace (e.g. Billet, 2007; Vaughan, 2008; Wegener, 2013) and stress that learning has to be connected with something embedded in concrete experiences (Wegener, 2014). The question is how to do that. By what means can we connect to this something in the educational setting? And what is this something all about? I wonder: can theatre-mediated processes as a way of thinking and acting fill out the gap between educational settings and everyday practice?

This contribution intends to call for this discussion on whether theatre-mediated processes can place that something at the centre of inquiry and thereby enable workplace learning. The paper sets up a pragmatic perspective on workplace learning as deeply embedded in everyday practices and the continuous creation and re-creation of these practices by the actors in and outside the organizations (Dewey, 1980, 2005, 2008; Elkjaer & Simpson, 2011; Elkjaer, 2017). This consideration involves an interaction between a passive and an active aspect in experiences, where experiences are seen both as nouns (experience) and verbs (experiencing) (Elkjaer, 2017). With this pragmatic notion, practices appear both as active performance (doings), where the actors act upon the practices, and as materiality (works of art), where the practices act upon the perceiving actors. The hypothesis of this paper is that theatre as a way of thinking, acting and creating can enable an inquiry of practice as a matter of aesthetic co-creation between actors as creators and perceivers of the material practice (Dewey, 1980). But still, how can theatre, by materializing this performative and material something, bridge the educational and the workplace setting?
This agenda is addressed as part of a PhD project in social and healthcare education in Denmark involving a social and healthcare college and a municipal eldercare facility. With a co-creative research design, the project explores designs for learning and development for trainees and professionals in the college and the eldercare facility. The intent is to create knowledge of principles for and elements in innovative sustainable pedagogical models for learning in interaction between education and practice. The question of theatre-mediated processes is addressed both in relation to the experimental research design and in the context of school-workplace learning.
The format of the participation in the stream will be a presentation where questions will be raised in order to engage the participants in a joint reflection, mutual inspiration and co-creation (Ravn & Elsborg, 2011) on how to design for workplace learning—and research—as works of art, materiality and performance with the application of theatre-mediated processes and thinking.

Looking Back on Organizational Theatre in Business Schools: Some Personal Reflections

Daved Barry, Reh School of Business, Clarkson University, New York, USA, [e-mail]
I began experimenting with theater-based methods in the late 1980’s, trying to apply them to my MBA courses in Strategy, at Syracuse University in upstate New York. I was desperate at the time. The classes were for night-time MBAs, all middle managers who were exhausted from their day jobs, and the Harvard strategy cases were putting everyone to sleep—including me. So I thought to enact, rather than analyze them. I borrowed from what I had read about applied theatre in art therapy, socio-drama, and family therapy, but given that my theatre experience consisted of playing a tree in elementary school, I was flying blind. Still, something worked. The students got into it, variously turning the cases into soap operas and exaggerated characterizations, and on one occasion, even singing some of the lines. I won teaching awards. At the same time, my colleagues and dean were suspicious. These methods were variously seen as ludicrous and heretical. One older professor, previously an Army general, even dubbed them “somehow communist.”
From there, quite a lot happened. I moved to New Zealand, saw Steve Taylor’s “Capitalist Pigs” played to rave reviews at the Academy of Management, used Steve’s plays in my classes, worked with Hans Hansen (who had done his PhD on organizational theatre) on theatre-based creativity courses, worked on developing play-based organizational simulations, moved to Denmark and worked with Stefan Meisiek on extending his organizational theater research, began researching the whole concept of play from multiple perspectives (games, modeling, theater), became acquainted with Dacapo’s cutting edge work and Piers Ibbotson’s remarkable methods, and eventually started combining enactment with video production.
In my talk, I will discuss some of my learnings from all this, and try to extend this into some suggestions for others wanting to embark on this road—particularly within business school settings and studios. Key among these is the observation that most of what I’ve done is “amateur hour” at best, and that working with professional theater people who have written, acted in, and produced theater work is really the way to go.

Learning health/social care management critically through “Cultural Animation” community intervention and empowerment workshops

Susan MOFFAT, NewVic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, UK, [e-mail]

Takaya KAWAMURA Osaka City University, JAPAN, [e-mail]
There has been a growing concern for “management” among health/social care professionals and managers in Japan in the face of increasing and complicating health/social care needs of a rapidly-ageing population of 130 million, about 25% of which are now over 65 years old, and of pressing governmental requirements for the cost containment, quality improvement, and risk reduction. Especially, they are urgently expected to provide a massive amount of finely-customized, reliable, and low-cost residential care for the elderly with complicating multiple chronic diseases/disabilities including rapidly increasing dementia.
As Alvesson and Willmott (2012) argue, modern theories and practices of “management” can be the technologies of alienation, control, domination, oppression, exploitation, and deprivation as advanced forms of the “instrumental rationality” (Habermas, 1984; 1987). Because very few want to introduce such technologies into health/social care, health/social care professionals and managers in Japan need to be very mindful in applying extant theories and practices of “management” to not-for-profit health/social care organizations so as to avoid excessive “instrumentalization” (Habermas, 1984; 1987) of health/social care caused by the combination of “scientism” (Hayek, 1952; Popper, 1959), “managerialism” (Parker, 2002; Alvesson and Willmott, 2003), and “professionalism” (Freidson, 1970; Larson, 1977). They also need to recognize the immense loss, which is mostly invisible and long-term, due to accelerating “compartmentalization”, “routinization”, and “poor coordination” of health/social care labour/knowledge (Chambliss, 1996).
Furthermore, as health/social care professionals and managers in Japan are expected to care more elderly patients/users with more complex, chronic deceases and disabilities, they also need to understand and practice “management” not only as the “empirical-analytic” sciences driven by the technical interest for prediction and control, but also as the “historical-hermeneutic” sciences, which are driven by the interest of understanding and communicating with each other for mutual understanding, and the “critical” sciences, which are driven by the emancipatory interest for critical reflection and reconstruction (Habermas, 1972). They are required to well understand the critical importance of complex/emergent “human caring” seeking for “communicative rationality” (Habermas, 1984; 1987) in health/social care (Kleinman, 1988; Good, 1994; Groopman, 2007; Letiche, 2008). In other words, they are expected to reconstruct health/social care as a reflexive and communal technology, which is a part of communicative reason, and to develop effective ways to manage the complex/emergent system of caring organization so as to replace ineffective instrumentalization.
In order to meet these management challenges, health/social care professionals and managers in Japan need to learn “management” critically so as to recognize the decisive importance of communicative effectiveness, sustainability, and legitimacy of health/social care as well as the technical rationality/efficiency. They are required to facilitate reflective co-inquiries into the complexity, emergence, and meaningfulness of “good” care against reductionistic and solipsistic determination and provision of scientifically “correct” treatment/cure. They are also expected to expand the domain of health/social care from solely removing/easing human pain/suffering through rational problem-solving to helping clients constructing meaningful lives full of fun/enjoyment through “problem-posing” (Freire, 1970). To help health/social care professionals and managers in Japan learn “management” critically, the health/social care executive MBA program at Osaka City University has been experimenting intensive workshops with the mediation of diverse modes of “arts” such as theatrical play, music, poem, “collage”, and LEGO bricks in collaboration with international management scholars and educators including the authors.
The authors will present the outline and results of some “Cultural Animation” community intervention and empowerment workshops for the health/social care executive MBA, which aim at helping students to create a "safe environment" for and to build trustful relations with the residents of a neighborhood community as well as to work together with them in order to solve contradictions, conflicts, and differences of power, information, and knowledge, and supporting the community empowerment.