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Organizational aesthetics comprises a way of understanding organizational life based on immediate sensory reactions (i.e., sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) to the material components of organizing (e.g., artifacts, physical settings, and material practices). Despite the growing interest in the topic, however, research is fragmented across management areas. To advance scholarly knowledge in this field, we reviewed the empirical work dealing with aesthetics. Our review yields two major insights. First, we identify three perspectives on the role of aesthetics. Scholars have treated aesthetics as (1) a directed stimulus (that elicits product evaluation and work organization), (2) a knowledge tool (that is entwined with creative work and everyday tasks), or (3) an open-ended outcome (that serves as a personal experience). Second, we find that each perspective highlights emotional and cognitive mechanisms through which aesthetics is implicated in organizing. Building on these two insights, our review offers an integrative framework that provides a comprehensive picture of the state of the field, illuminating the work of aesthetics in and around organizations and providing avenues for future studies.

Scholars and practitioners acknowledge the role of design, and specifically design thinking, as a driver of innovation and change. Design thinking is gaining attention in the business community beyond the traditional product innovation realm and is increasingly promoted as an engine for the creation of novel user experiences, new businesses, strategic transformation, organizational and cultural change. Is it reasonable to assume that the same set of practices fits such a broad range of applications equally well? This study addresses how design thinking applications are differently framed when addressing diverse innovation purposes. Specifically, we compare two purposes: innovation of solutions, encompassing traditional product and service development projects, and innovation of direction, encompassing strategic and organizational renewal projects. Based on data collected from 146 design thinking projects conducted by European consulting firms we investigate the relationships between the design thinking practices adopted and the value generated by the projects. We then analyze how these relationships vary depending on the purpose of the innovation project, namely whether focused on innovating solutions or direction. The results show that different purposes indeed call for different practices. In projects aimed at innovating solutions, market value is positively related to capturing current user needs and envisioning future society. Conversely, in projects aimed at innovating direction, market value is positively related to challenging current assumptions.

A growing body of research on how organizations engage with their histories has shown that organizational members revisit history in the light of present-day concerns to inspire or legitimize futur...

Drawing on the Letter to the Male “Good Apples” recently appeared in this section, my letter has a twofold aim: to provoke all the Male “Good Apples” in academia and to offer them an olive branch. As I provide them with a few practical suggestions, I hope to illuminate their way forward to truly “getting it”. It’s time to stop talking a good game and to start playing a better game.

Academia is a world filled with bright people searching for explanations for phenomena around us, and developing and testing new theories to explain the hows and whys of our experience. It is a world defined by a drive to expand the boundaries of knowledge, and is ostensibly characterized by intellectual enlightenment and relentless progress. But is academia truly progressive? Perhaps for some of us. For others, however, it is still a world where many people struggle to be seen, to be heard, and to succeed—especially if you are in the minority (e.g., you are female, international, a person of color, or have other features that put you in a minority category). In this essay, I share some of my personal experiences as an international female academic, with the hope that my challenges—and the ways I work to overcome them—will resonate with other people in the margins of our presumably progressive field.

Author(s): Stigliani, I; Elsbach, KD | Abstract: We inductively studied the sensemaking and sensegiving processes used by industry founders in the co-formation of organizational and industry identities in the emerging industry of Service Design. Our findings illustrate how the sensemaking and sensegiving processes that revolved around the new ‘Service Design’ label allowed the two sets of industry founders to forge both distinctive organizational identities and a coherent industry identity. The new label was, thus, used as a central ‘carrier’ for both holding meanings (in terms of distinctive principles and common practices) developed through sensemaking, and for transferring these meanings respectively to organizational and industry identities through sensegiving. These insights illuminate how industry founders can address the tension between organizational distinctiveness and industry coherence in emerging industries, and have important implications for theory and future research on identity co-formation and its underlying sensemaking and sensegiving processes.

Design thinking comprises an approach to problem solving that uses tools traditionally utilized by designers of commercial products, processes, and environments (e.g., designing a new car or the layout of a new airport). While design thinking was originally introduced as an approach that would work best when infused into the culture of an organization, most early studies of design thinking focused on identifying the specific tools and methods that might be used to solve management problems. Only recently have researchers examined how the implementation of design thinking might relate to organizational-level constructs, such as organizational culture. In this review, we examine empirical research (mostly from the past decade) that relates the practice of design thinking to the development of culture in organizations. Through this review, we identify how the use of specific design thinking tools supports the development of specific organizational cultures and vice versa. In addition, we identify how using design thinking tools produces emotional experiences and physical artifacts that help users to understand why and how specific cultures support the effective use of specific tools. Together, our review findings suggest that the experiential nature of design thinking tools and cultures (i.e., that they require people to actively engage in hands-on work) allows them to support one another. On the basis of this insight, we develop a general framework for organizing design thinking research and identify a number of avenues for future research that might advance our understanding of design thinking in organizational contexts.

Scholars and practitioners are acknowledging the central role that design can play in innovation. Design is increasingly becoming a strategic source of competitive advantage, to the point that scholars investigate its managerial side and its impact in the creation of value. Design Thinking, in particular, is making the headlines, with an extremely rapid diffusion in the practice and interest of organizations. Far from being connected with the “form” of products, Design Thinking is accepted as a formal method for creative problem solving, with the intent to foster innovation. This rapid adoption of Design Thinking in practice however has not gone hand in hand with a robust development and diffusion of its theoretical underpinnings. On the practitioner side, Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, KPMG, McKinsey and PricewaterhouseCoopers rank among the most forceful players in acquiring design agencies in order to renew their offering and refresh their approach. Contemporary design thinking is booming in those industries where the digital transformation requires new competences and capabilities for developing delightful digital experiences. On the one hand Design Thinking describes significant transformations highlighting overlaps and synergies with emerging approaches such Design Sprint, Agile or Creative Confidence; on the other hand it is considered a fundamental paradigm to lead digital transformations. For this reason, the thematic track “Transformation IN and BY Design Thinking” investigates the evolution of this paradigm in relation to different theoretical lenses: Design Thinking and Innovation Theories Design Thinking and Creativity Theories Design Thinking and Leadership Theories Design Thinking and Organizational Theories

In this paper, we perform an extensive review of relatively recent empirical research that relates new information technology to biased thinking. Based on this review, we develop a framework that suggests a number of implicit associations (i.e., unconscious linkages between phenomena, such as “women are nurturing”) that relate new information technology to a variety of attitudes held by both organizational decision makers and average users of such information technology (e.g., “new information technology is superior to older information technology”). In turn, our framework proposes a set of three underlying beliefs about new information technology (i.e., new information technology is mysterious, non-human, and complex) that may underlie the implicit attitudes and biased thinking we identified. These underlying beliefs suggest that biases related to new information technology are distinct, in important ways, from most interpersonal biases studied in organizations. Given these findings, we suggest an agenda for future research that may enhance our ability to understand and mitigate biases related to new information technology in organizational settings.

In this paper, we study the way that nascent occupations constructing an occupational mandate invoke not only skills and expertise or a new technology to distinguish themselves from other occupations, but also their values. We studied service design, an emerging occupation whose practitioners aim to understand customers and help organizations develop new or improved services and customer experiences, translate those into feasible solutions, and implement them. Practitioners enacted their values in their daily work activities through a set of material practices, such as shadowing customers or front-line staff, conducting interviews in the service context, or creating “journey maps” of a service user’s experience. The role of values in the construction of an occupational mandate is particularly salient for occupations such as service design, which cannot solely rely on skills and technical expertise as sources of differentiation. We show how service designers differentiated themselves from other competing occupations by highlighting how their values make their work practices unique. Both values and work practices, what service designers call their ethos, were essential to enable service designers to define the proper conduct and modes of thinking characteristic of their occupational mandate.

The death of a central figure, like a charismatic founder, can dilute the sense of collective identity among the various stakeholders of a local community. Maintenance of collective identity can be...

In this symposium, we bring together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds and explore the experiences of a range of individuals embedded in “less traditional” organizational contexts. Suc...

Research on design and designers has emphasized the tacit nature of the aesthetic knowledge that these professionals draw upon to make decisions about formal properties of objects and spaces, but is less clear about how design teams address the difficulties associated with expressing and sharing this type of knowledge. A ten-month ethnography in a design consultancy revealed a range of multimodal and cross-modal ways in which members of a design team compensate their imperfect capacity of articulating verbally their aesthetic knowledge in order to gradually construct a common knowledge base enabling creative collaboration. In so doing, our study offers two main contributions. It illuminates the interplay between designers’ aesthetic experiences, visceral responses, and intuitive cognitive processes that enable designers to draw upon their aesthetic knowledge to support the collective accomplishment of their task, and provides an interpretation of the design process as a form of ‘creative’ intuition driven by emotional reactions to environmental stimuli and emerging formal solutions.

The entrepreneurial growth literature is extensive, but research focusing on questions such as how firms grow, why they grow according to different patterns, how the decisions about growing or not growing are made, and the contextual dimensions within which growth takes place, has been neglected. This annual review article explores such issues: it suggests that there is a greater need to understand the processes that underlie entrepreneurial growth. In particular, we need to know more about how the entrepreneur’s cognitive processes shape growth (i.e. microfoundations of growth), how they access and configure resources to achieve growth (i.e. the resource orchestration underpinning growth), whether these are influenced by a wider variety of contextual dimensions than previously recognised, and how these influence different patterns and types of growth.

This paper reviews research on product design in the broad domain of business studies. It highlights established and emerging perspectives and lines of inquiry, and organizes them around three core areas, corresponding to different stages of the design process (design activities, design choices, design results). Avenues for further research at the intersection of these bodies of research are identified and discussed, and the authors argue that management scholars possess conceptual and methodological tools suited to enriching research on design and effectively pursuing lines of investigation only partially addressed by other communities, such as the construction and deployment of design capabilities, or the organizational and institutional context of design activities.

The article discusses the supportive role of organizational artifacts in the creative process at a product-design and innovation consultancy. The discussion refers to an ethnographic study of corpo...

This symposium examines the cognitive, behavioural, affective and material mechanisms that individuals use to create meanings inside and outside organizations, and how these mechanisms facilitate t...

In this paper we examine how the formation, circulation and interpretation of a collective identity story within a local cluster of organizations contributes to make meaningful a collective supra-o...

This study investigates the activities that service designers, as members of a nascent occupation, engaged in to construct their occupational mandate. Building on the literature on occupations, the study shows what members of new occupations need to do before achieving institutional support, and, more specifically, sheds light on the practices they enact when rhetorical and political practices might not be available in this pre-institutional stage. Our findings show how members of this occupation construct their occupational mandate by enacting a specific ethos – i.e., the values informing how they perform their tasks – through a set of material practices. This ethos as embodied in material practices proves to be key in defining proper conduct in service designers’ work, and thus constructing their occupational mandate. By doing so, our study highlights the constitutive role of material practices in enacting the ethos, which in turn exists only when enacted in practice. It thus advances research on occupa...

In this paper, we examine the process of meaning construction and legitimation of a new category in a nascent field (i.e., Service Design), and the roles that different actors took on in the field....

In this paper, we examine how the selection of a new category label (i.e., a term that denotes inclusion in a new discipline or category of business) affects the identity formation of founding orga...