(Re)turning to body : Joseph Beuys,alternative organizing,and management education

Abstract

This article presents the work of German artist Joseph Beuys anew in organization studies by examining how his work informs alternative organizing and management education. We argue that Beuys, through the mobilization of his own body in performance artmaking, foregrounds the significance of body to alternative organizing on the one hand and to management education on the other. To alternative organizing, the relational and unfinished qualities of Beuys’ work make visible freedom – the essence of alternativity – as an affect rather than a political telos, and as immanent from collective artistic existence and maintained by never-ending self-negating inquiries. In particular, his (re)turning to his own body illustrates that prefigurative politics features upsetting institutions from within rather than decontextualized resistance, as well as an aspiration to communication, given a relational, affective conception of body. To management education, Beuys demonstrates the importance of embodiment in teaching, showing management educators that their role is not confined to lecturing but can be extensive, encompassing shamans and activists. As therapeutic, transformative shamans, they can rely on the expressivity of art to weaken education while empowering creative autonomy and intersubjective dialogue. As social activists, they can leverage their privileged power to organize bodies of their own and those of their students for prefigurative politics while bridging theory and praxis in pedagogy.