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The Organizational Image

In: Aesthetic Communication

Author

Listed:
  • Ole Thyssen

    (Copenhagen Business School)

Abstract

In the Renaissance, in Machiavelli and Shakespeare, the problem of the orchestrated surface moved to the centre. Machiavelli recommends that the prince learn how to orchestrate illusions, and Shakespeare plays with the metaphor of the world as a theatre — a mirror that shows reality but only ‘as in a glass darkly’ and thus as a riddle. In the Renaissance, a huge disruption begins in which Europe shakes itself loose from its feudal bonds and begins the road toward the world society in which everything fixed is dissolved into the market’s impersonal and fateful relationship between people. In the interaction of strangers, the surface is not just something that is but something that is diligently arranged. Organizations also know the strength of a beautiful appearance when they orchestrate an image and thus conjure up an ideal from a claim that, if everyone acts as if a picture is real, then it is — or becomes — real. If aesthetics has to do with constructions connecting sensation and meaning, the attempt to orchestrate an image has a foot in the camp of aesthetics.

Suggested Citation

  • Ole Thyssen, 2011. "The Organizational Image," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Aesthetic Communication, chapter 2, pages 63-101, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-30401-7_2
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230304017_2
    as

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