Putting The Body Shop in its Place: A Studio-based Investigation into the New Sites and Sights of Organization as Experience

Abstract

Locating organizations is a difficult task, making it difficult to study them and difficult to represent that study. There is no single phenomenon of organization. We identify them through their buildings, brands, products, employees, customers, marketing materials, legal status and so on, but it is hard to identity a single unified entity. This research note argues that organization lies in our encounters with it, that is, our experience of organization which constitutes its existence. In order for scholars of organization to be able to say anything about these experiences we need a methodology designed to capture experience. The work of John Dewey is useful here with his insistence on art as experience. This note takes Dewey’s work on art and applies it to a particular case example – The Body Shop International – and demonstrates how organization studies can be enhanced through an arts or studio-based approach. Indeed, it argues, along with Dewey, that any civilized community of practice might be expected to produce art, and that the organization studies community should welcome an arts practice as a sign of its own maturity.