Art of Management & Organization Conference 2018 University of Brighton

Food as art and organisation

Christina Schwabenland, University of Bedfordshire, [e-mail]
This paper reports on fieldwork visits to Palestinian women’s organisations based in refugee camps in Beirut and Bethlehem. Each organisation is involved in the production of food, either through the creation of small businesses that provide catering for functions and organisations within and outside the borders of the camps, and / or through producing and selling cookbooks.
While there is much research on the development of small and medium enterprises as a function of economic development and empowerment (Cornwall and Edwards 2014), there is much less that considers the kinds of activities those enterprises are engaged in in terms of their symbolic meanings. Where they do, some writers are quite critical of women’s enterprises engaged in activities (such as cooking, embroidery or childcare) seen as reproducing traditional assumptions and stereotypes of women as belonging within the domestic sphere (for example, Al-Dajani and Marlow 2010). However, this paper takes a different perspective.
Judith Butler, in her visit to the West Bank in 2010, commented that ‘if you [are] subjugated, there [are] also forms of agency available to you, and you [are] not just a victim, or you [are] not only oppressed, but oppression could become the condition of your agency. Certain kinds of unexpected results can emerge from the situation of oppression if you have the resources and if you have collective support’. This paper draws on interviews, observation and visual data, primarily photographs to identify what such resources are in this context, and how the provision of food becomes a form of agency. In so doing we will draw on developments within the area of new materialism to explore the ways in which the agentic capacities of food, and the cultural, aesthetic and physical properties it possesses, ‘reside in the affective flows within the… hybrid assemblages, territorialisations and de-territorialisations, aggregations, singularities and lines of flight that these flows produce, and the resultant capacities and constraints produced in bodies, collectivities and things’ (Fox and Alldred 2016: 405).

References

Al Dajani, H. and Marlow, S. (2010) Impact of home based enterprise on family dynamics; Evidence from Jordon, International Small Business Journal September:

DOI: 10.1177/0266242610370392

Butler, J. (2010) Interview in Haaretz: https://www.haaretz.com/news/judith-butler-as-a-jew-i-was-taught-it-was-ethically-imperative-to-speak-up-1.266243: (24/102/2010)

Cornwall, A. and Edwards, J. (eds.) (2014) Feminisms, Empowerment and Development London: Zed Books

Fox, N.J. and Alldred, P. (2015) New materialist social inquiry: Designs, methods and the research-assemblage, International Journal of Social Research Methods 18/4: 399-414

“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.