When Arts Enter Organizational Spaces: Implications for Organizational Learning
This chapter addresses a new approach to organizational learning, namely, artistic interventions, which encompass a variety of ways that people, products, and practices from the world of the arts enter the world of organizations. Although the field has gr
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Ariane Berthoin Antal
The need for organizations to learn is undisputed: The speed of technological change, the severity of problems in societies and the natural environment, and the pressure from competitors imply that organizations cannot simply continue doing the same things in the same way and expect to flourish in a sustainable system. The challenge is not limited to the private sector; public sector and civil society organizations are experiencing similar pressures to learn, intensified by shrinking budgets. Although the need is evident, how to address it is not. Of course, numerous techniques to stimulate and sustain organizational learning already exist (Dierkes, Berthoin Antal, Child, & Nonaka, 2001), but the size and scope of problems require experimentation with fresh approaches. A new type of experimentation is “artistic interventions,” which bring people, products, and practices from the world of the arts into organizations, with a more or less clearly defined learning orientation. At first glance this entrance of the world of the arts into the world of organizations may appear either very obvious or very surprising. Different logics underpin these two possibilities, which coexist in practice. 1. The “obvious” connection is that creativity generates new ideas. The arts are associated with creativity, so bringing employees into contact with the arts should develop their creativity. This is an attractively simple solution, based on the assumption that once the creativity of employees is stimulated, it will then automatically be at the service of the organization. 2. The idea is surprising because “to multitudes art seems to be an importation into experience from a foreign country” (Dewey, 1934/2005, p. 11). The world of arts has its own codes, behaviors, and values, and these are usually1 perceived to be 1
Some scholars have noted that “new management” has absorbed many terms from the world of the arts and blurred the boundaries (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Chiapello, 1998), but overall, people still tend to see these worlds as distinct. A. Berthoin Antal (*) Research Unit “Cultural Sources of Newness,” Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), Reichpietschufer 50, 10785 Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A. Berthoin Antal et al. (eds.), Learning Organizations: Extending the Field, Knowledge and Space 6, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7220-5_11, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
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very different, even diametrically opposed to, those that operate in organizations like companies, hospitals, or municipal authorities. The logic behind the “surprising” idea of bringing the “foreign” world of the arts into organizational spaces is that the discovery of different possible ways of seeing and dealing with the world should permit the organization to learn by expanding its repertoire of potential interpretations and responses (Huber, 1991; Swidler, 1986). New knowledge can emerge from the combination of, or clash between, di
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