Publications
Publications
- 2008
- 21st Century Management: A Reference Handbook
Artistic Methods and Business Disorganization
Abstract
The idea that artists' work can usefully inform business practice has gained support in recent years. Managers have long described some business activities as "more art than science," but usually they've meant by this that they don't understand the activity and can't do it reliably themselves. In this view, artistic methods and art-like activities are personal and intuitive, even magical, not yet sufficiently analyzed, routinized, or rationalized to be trustworthy. Authors such as Adler (2006), however, note that an increasing number of companies are abandoning the notion that art practice within business signifies a problem; they've embraced artistic processes in approaches to strategic and day-to-day management, leadership, and team work. Management researchers, too, have drawn practical lessons from artistic methods in design (Bolland and Collopy, 2004), music (Hackman, 2002; Zander and Zander, 1998), theatre (Austin and Devin, 2003), and other areas. Scholars have also proposed art principles and art-based philosophies as organizing bases for business firms (Guillet de Monthoux, 2004) and as conceptual lenses through which we can more completely understand organizations (Strati, 1999). In this article, we survey, discuss, and critique this development in management research.
Keywords
Citation
Austin, Robert D., and Lee Devin. "Artistic Methods and Business Disorganization." In 21st Century Management: A Reference Handbook, edited by Charles Wankel, 490–499. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008.