Work as an Aesthetically Ordered Activity: Introduction

Part II of this volume marks a shift away from the largely epistemological issues that dominated section one, and towards a consideration of work and its organization as itself an aesthetically ordered activity. In doing so, it combines both a range of theoretically informed approaches, as well as a number of different sites of research and analysis, including organizational games, songs and the bodies of organizational members themselves. What is particularly significant about these contributions we would suggest, however, is that they challenge the traditional disregard for questions of aesthetics and sensuality that disciplines such as organizational studies and industrial sociology have traditionally shown. Instead, they demonstrate to us, with great clarity, the ways in which aesthetic experience pervades a range of organizational settings and practices. While this can often be experienced as a technology of control and authority, at other times, or in other instances, it can also facilitate patterns of resistance in both thought and activity or contribute to the processes of self-identification, both at the level of the individual and the organization.