Organizational Aesthetics

Editorial Theatre – A Seat for Everyone

2025-11-30T07:28:04+00:00

This time, the editors engaged themselves in an experimental conversation about collaboration, risks, composting, the Monobloc chair, turbulences, and the future of the journal, which is presented in the form of a play in three acts. The text concludes with a 'summery late’ invitation to readers to become part of the new community and submit contributions to the journal.

An Invitation to Contribute

2025-11-11T23:38:18+00:00

Cinemenology

2026-09-02T19:50:50+00:00

In this paper we share a participatory artistic method—Cinemenology—which has emerged and crystallized over a three-year period of co-inquiry into phenomenology of work, and not-knowing. We believe this method offers organizations the opportunity to gain fresh insights into workplace issues in a non-judgemental, original manner. We discuss three specific ways in which we have used the method to inquire, make sense, and show. This paper will take you on a journey of our discovery and illuminate how the method can be used and further expanded.

Selling Beauty

2025-11-12T00:10:37+00:00

Although the idea that beauty could or even should play a central role in thinking about organizations has flitted around the edges of organizational thinking for many years, it has gained little traction in mainstream organizational theory. This may be due in part to the analogical mismatch between intellectual theorizing and the aesthetic experience of beauty. "The analysis of beauty is often like the story of the six blind elephants and the man. The first blind elephant encounters a man and says, “Oh, it feels flat.” The second elephant says, “Oh yes, it feels flat to me, too.” And so on for all six elephants as they trample the man. After analytic inquiry into the nature of beauty, there is often little left but a trampled, lifeless corpse that doesn’t seem very beautiful after all." (Taylor, 2013 p. 71) So, instead I engage the topic of beauty in organizations aesthetically, with this play “Selling Beauty”.

Threads of the Self

2026-09-02T16:49:39+00:00

This hybrid poetic-reflective piece explores the affective textures of academic work and the search for meaningfulness within university life. Combining a framing text with a poem, it examines how academic work is lived through the entanglement of multiple selves that move across professional and personal domains. Rather than treating work as bounded within formal roles, outputs, or institutional metrics, the piece attends to quieter dimensions of organizational life: attentiveness, relationality, emotional labor, and the ongoing search for coherence within conditions of productivity and performance.

Drawing on conversations in organization studies around affect, sensemaking, and care, the poem does not seek to explain organizational life analytically, but to remain close to its lived textures. Poetic form is used not simply as a representation, but as a practice of attentiveness to ambiguity, multiplicity, and embodied experience. While grounded in academic labor, the concerns explored extend more broadly to questions of meaning, identity, and affect across organizational settings.

Sold on Beauty

2025-11-12T00:14:24+00:00

The Kennedy Center 2025

2025-11-11T23:56:26+00:00

No abstract

Prelude and Fugue

2025-11-29T09:44:43+00:00

In this reflective essay, composed in the likeness of a prelude and fugue, I explore how musical form can lend insight into navigating organizational complexity.