Designerly design, e.g. design as taught in professional design schools, is becoming a mainstay within the world’s executive suites, where it is being used to form organisational structures, strategy, change, policy and more. The speed and extent of its uptake have come as quite a surprise to the traditional, analytically driven design disciplines within business studies; as is sometimes said of earthquakes, no one saw it coming. A watershed moment was when the American Broadcasting Corporation aired its ‘Deep Dive’ documentary on IDEO in 1999. The programme’s implication that design was ideal for innovation, that it could be applied to anything and the sometimes evangelical tide of design thinking literature that followed created a tectonic pull within business practice and education. I argue that this was due in part to a ‘Candy Man’ effect, where executives longing for easy, sure-fired innovation saw ABC’s sunny depiction of design, read the popular press articles and books on design thinking and swarmed in – often with unrealistic expectations and subsequent disappointment. I further suggest that we treat design thinking’s mixed reception as a call to reconsider where and how it might be applied to strategic level concerns, perhaps thinking of it as we might high end desserts and less like fields of candy canes for mass consumption.
Organizational researchers doing narrative and discursive research have three choices in how they approach a text: an ‘endotextual’ approach where the researcher works within a text, an ‘exotextual’ approach where the researcher works outward from a text to its context(s), or a combined exo/endotextual approach which embeds a textual analysis within contextual inquiry. Although all three methods are now widely used in mainstream organizational research, the merits of combining, sequencing, or separating them have never been systematically considered. After reviewing the advantages and limitations of each perspective, we discuss an experiment in which endo and exo methods were applied to a skit co-written by management and a communications company specializing in organizational theater. The finding that using one approach creates multiple, subtle blind spots towards the other, and even more significantly affects a researcher's capacity to effectively adopt a combined method, is used to construct an alternative ‘diatextual’ framework. This is used to frame a discussion of how multi-method textual studies of organizations might be conducted in the future.
Ten years ago critical theory and postmodernism were considered new and emerging theories in Business and Management. What will be the next new important theories to shape the field? In one edited volume, David Barry and Hans Hansen have commissioned new chapters that will allow readers to stay one step ahead of the latest thinking. Contributors draw on research and practice to introduce ideas that are considered ‘fringe’ and controversial today, but may be key theoretical contributions tomorrow. Each chapter sets these ideas in their historical context, lays out the key theoretical positions taken by each new approach and makes it clear why these approaches are different to more mainstream concepts. Throughout contributors refer to existing studies that show how these developing themes will change the Business and Management arena.Researchers, teachers and advanced students who are interested in the future of Business and Management scholarship will want to read this Handbook.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Design thinking has long tried to join form, function, and aesthetic appeal. In cars, furniture, architecture, typography, clothes, or photography, good designs regularly solve problems of movement, massing, and balance in attractive and inspiring ways. The field of organization design is comparatively young in this regard, having mostly focused on questions of efficiency and expediency rather than aesthetics; nevertheless, designers are increasingly being called on to create organizations that “sing” rather than just “work.” Here, we consider how aesthetically sophisticated design thinking from the arts might be applied in organizational design. Specifically, we consider the case of Learning Lab Denmark—a research institute that has experimented extensively with aesthetically informed organizational design—in light of the mobile art of Alexander Calder and other constructivist artists who championed flexible design. We conclude that in such organizations, (1) designers must strike an ongoing, interactive balance between centric and acentric design orientations and practices, (2) aesthetic consideration is fundamentally important when it comes to crafting effective design, and (3) designing processes should be given as much attention as design solutions.
Despite the complexity of workplace creativity, laboratory or survey-based quantitative research conducted in the positivist tradition supports a trend towards prescriptive 'recipied' lists for stimulating creativity. In contrast, by recognising creativity as a complex multi-level system, we were inspired by ideas from narrative therapy to develop a new narrative inquiry methodology that uses personal storytelling to collaboratively investigate, promote intelligent reflection on, and enhance the creativity process. Our aim was to explore how taking a pragmatic constructivist approach might unfold a new way of eliciting richly descriptive realworld information that exploits local situated knowledge (what we call 'emic creativity') about the individual and group creative processes within a workplace. Using a developmental application of the methodology as a single-level case study on gaming designers in Denmark, we found that the new emic creativity methodology can contribute valuable information about creativity within a particular system.
Organizational Ambidexterity (OA)–the ability to simultaneously pursue exploration and exploitation–is increasingly being advocated as a way to gain competitive advantage. Most of the work on OA has focused on large, multi-divisional organizations, resulting in frameworks and prescriptions that have little utility for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). With this in mind, we report on the first year of an exploratory, quasi-experimental study of ambidexterity within six small-to-medium manufacturing enterprises in Sweden. The research is characterized by an emic, ‘invented here’ approach, where companies closely examine their current exploration and exploitation practices, use their findings to formulate more advanced OA approaches uniquely suited to their values and circumstances, and iteratively apply and refine these over a four year period. It appears that the construct of ‘unplanned’ and associated sub-constructs such as ‘disturbance, crashes, and interruption’ could be an important key to framing and improving OA within these SMEs and perhaps more generally.
What follows is a collectively improvised story that emerged as four authors set out to explore their experiences and thoughts concerning organizational stories. The story is a reflection of their collective, creative, improvisational sense making via the construction of a narrative. The authors were selected because of their experience in the fields of organizational storytelling, narrative theory, and improvisation. They began by asking themselves What would happen if we engaged in improvisation to collectively create a story that makes sense of organizational research? After several rounds of reviews, they added reader voices, along with their own insights gained from their experience in constructing Truth or Consequences.
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.
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.
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.
We define "entrepreneuring" as efforts to bring about new economic, social, institutional, and cultural environments through the actions of an individual or group of individuals. Thus, we view entrepreneuring as an emancipatory process with broad change potential. This view foregrounds three aspects of entrepreneuring that merit closer attention in future research-seeking autonomy, authoring, and making declarations. We highlight the novel directions for entrepreneurship research suggested by our emancipatory perspective and relate it to the special topic forum articles.