Critical Engagements with Aesthetics at Work: Introduction

In Part III of this volume, the focus shifts towards a series of self-avowed critical engagements with the role aesthetics play in the structuring of relations of power and control both within, and through, work and its organization. While sympathetic to the desire for a more aesthetically rich environment, what unites these authors is a critical distance that leads them to question the origins, and potential consequences, of the current fascination with the practice of organizational aestheticization surfacing within the field of management and organization studies. As such, underpinning all three of the following chapters is a normative commitment to the preservation of a mode of critique that places at the centre of its endeavours a concern for the preservation of the human potential for autonomy within a range of structured regimes of power and subjectification.