Organizational Aesthetics: Artful Visual Representations of Business and Organizations

Organizational Aesthetics attempts to reconstruct artful representations of the organizational world and businesspeople. It looks at organizations and management through the eyes of artists, painters, and photographers and decodes meanings contained in artistic messages, grasping the aesthetic perceptions of the world of management and organization. Paintings and photos are analysed using qualitative methods from the social sciences as well as from the art analysis tradition. The novelty of the presented approach rests in the original method of parallel dialogues, taking place both in the institutional sphere and between co-authors. The institutional aspect covers a practical, business perspective and extends the narrow framework of a single discipline. It complements academic rigour with elements of digression and free conversation, revealing a variety of nuances for which conventional research paradigms do not always allow. Readers will receive a proposal on how to integrate diff erent approaches to organizational analysis stemming from artistic, managerial, and academic experiences.

Barbara Fryzel, PhD, dr habil. is an economist and an associate professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She has multiple years of managerial experience in international corporations. She is a laureate of the Foundation for Polish Science and was a visiting post-doc scholar at University College London. Her interests include organizational culture, corporate social responsibility and behavioural ethics.

Aleksander Marcinkowski, PhD is a sociologist and a lecturer at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. His research interests include organizational culture, sociology of organizations and social sciences research methods. He participated in multiple international research teams, including under the V Framework Programme of EU, a comparative research on entrepreneurship in collaboration with Michigan University and under Institutional Development Programs with Canadian Urban Institute, and Polish Ministry of Home Affairs. He was a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University - Bologna Center.