Search

In a longitudinal study, we followed 19 companies that invited artists to help their employees become more innovative. The purpose of the projects was to see if working artistically with a variety of media around organizational concerns could help employees question their habitual ways of seeing, knowing, and acting—i.e., their work epistemes. Following an artist's lead, employees created and interpreted colorful artifacts that functioned as analogs to their workplace and practices. The outcomes varied greatly. In some cases, the analogous artifacts became rich signifiers for collective sensemaking. In other cases, employees were lost in reflection. Comparing the cases, we found that there are “sweet spots” where stakeholders maintained a meaningful and dynamic balance between working artistically and business concerns. With the “sweet spot” concept, our study contributes to the literature on the role of arts-based methods for collective sensemaking, as well as the literature on epistemic objects in organizing.

Over the past decade, numerous business schools have begun experimenting with studio-based inquiry, often drawing inspiration from professional studios used within art and design schools and from business and governmental studios used for problem-solving and innovation. Business school studios vary considerably in form, ranging from temporary “pop up” studios to dedicated facilities with full-time staff, with the primary purpose of educating managers in craft, art, and design-based approaches to business problems. The jury on the studio phenomenon is out—can they deliver on their educational promise? To address this question, we pull together 25 years of studio experimentation in multiple settings, visits, and observations of studios around the world and interviews with studio makers from various disciplines. We consider the question of “what is a business studio?” in some detail, conjecture about the value that studios might have for management education, provide examples of four different business studio orientations and how these might translate into practice, and highlight what we believe to be some essentials when starting and running a business studio.

Guest editorship of special issue of Scandinavian Journal of Management, Volume 30, Issue 1

Scientific studies at the crossroads of art and management are a relatively recent phenomenon. Nevertheless, a dedicated group of scholars has created a considerable diversity in their approaches to this topic. In this paper we take stock of the works that have marked the field, review ways in which scholars have created and furthered theory across domain boundaries, and observe how scholars have addressed the difficulties of studying art and management empirically. We conclude with an outlook for the field, where we address questions of relevance and persistence.

In this paper we attempt to bring art and craft together in the enterprise of leadership, first by reframing the art of leadership in light of fine art thinking, and then joining it to notions of craft. With this, we develop an approach to leadership where artistry is closely dependent on, yet distinct from, craft. Finally, we discuss the ramifications of this perspective for leadership practice and research.

Journal article

The past years have seen a marked rise in arts-based initiatives in organizations, a field we term the workarts. In this paper, we review the workarts in light of sensemaking theory, and especially the role of mindfulness within it. We propose that the workarts foster mindfulness by directing attention away from immediate work concerns and towards analogous artifacts. We identify three distinctive workarts movements - art collection, artist-led intervention, and artistic experimentation. In each movement, we find analogous artifacts that defamiliarize organizational members' habitual ways of seeing and believing, enabling them to make new distinctions and to shift contexts: to see more and see differently. Our review raises a number of questions for the workarts in particular and research on analogical artifacts in general.

To create a generative theory that provides beautiful explanations and sublime views requires both a crafts and an art approach to scientific theorizing. The search for generativity leads scholars to perform various theorizing moves between the confines of simple, yet eloquent beauty, and the ranges of rich, yet defamiliarizing sublimity. The quality and trajectories of these moves rely on theorists' emerging appreciation of the devices, traditions, and texts of their field of inquiry.

Organizational theatre is now widely used as a platform for analogically mediated inquiry and change. Using an alternate template research strategy, we combined interview, visual, and survey methods to study the processes underlying an organizational theatre effort over a year, clarifying how theatre performances analogically affect employees' understanding of their workplace. We identified a 'looking glass' effect, where analogies create shifting reflections over time that lead to unpredictably emergent changes in the way employees perceive their organization. Our study not only informs the organizational theatre literature, but addresses broader debates on analogical thinking in organization studies, suggesting that current explanations of analogical processes may be overly restricted both in their scope and their conclusions. Specifically, we propose that compound analogues such as organizational theatre, sculpture and film will not only work differently from more abstract and singular analogues, but create very different effects as well.