Abstract
Introduction
The recent surge of socio-economic ‘restructuring’ in Europe following the great recession has led to high costs for people, organizations and states, both in the short and long terms. But available facts and figures, though plentiful, appear to be unable to account for the lived reality of a complex phenomenon. Beyond closures, redundancies and offshoring—which are recorded and given substantial media coverage—the organizations and individuals who are affected undergo profound transformations that are painful for those who experience their effects, those in charge of making and implementing the decisions and even those who ‘survive’ (Beaujolin and Schmidt, 2012). Corporate restructuring processes are not linear, but produce a break where the past and the future can no longer connect. Social change plunges people into material and physical upheaval and also confronts individuals and organizations at a moment where their personal and professional identities become entwined. This urges us to break away from an often simplistic economic vision of restructuring and to try to find ways of telling about organizing which allows us to better understand its pleasures and pains (Clegg et al., 2006; Czarniawska, 1999; Datta et al., 2010; Huault and Perret, 2009).
And this is where Howard Becker comes into the picture because of his writing on art and social science methods. Some of us have been studying restructuring issues from a managerial point of view for more than a decade and have experienced continuous difficulties in accessing the field, as well as getting relevant qualitative data that could overcome the pitfalls of mainstream management research on the subject. In parallel, we have observed an increasing production of artworks: movies and documentaries—and also plays, novels, poems, songs, photographs, comics strips and so on—which have been inspired by corporate restructuring. By looking at those artworks, we were simultaneously struck by the accuracy of their representations and their unveiling power and were curious about how they could be used as a material for our research. We thus decided to follow our intuitions and start a research programme that placed artistic practices at the heart of the investigation. 1 It consisted in a series of seminars, gathering researchers, artists, managers, trade unionists and consultants to discuss works of art and artistic interventions related to restructuring processes. The idea was not only to think about some different aspects of restructuring through the arts as a method but also to explore new ‘ways of telling’ about our results, contrasting with the conventional academic format and trying to reach a broad audience. 2 Howard Becker, who spends the Autumn in Paris each year, has written one of the most influential recent books about art and was an obvious person to involve in our project. Art Worlds (Becker, 1982) argues that we cannot separate the economic, the aesthetic, the technological—these are part of a ‘world’ in which each reflects the other. Becker made us see art as a method of enquiry.
Of course art has been connected with organization studies for many years now. In management research, it has become common to take into account aesthetics and the role of emotions, bodies and senses to reach an understanding of organizations beyond one restricted by reason and measure (Barry and Meisiek, 2010; Clegg, 2005; Guillet de Monthoux, 2000, 2004; Hatch, 2002; Strati, 1992, 2000). Focusing on art and artworks is part of the ‘turn to affects’ (Clough and Halley, 2007) and allows us to see subtle and transient phenomena (Berthoin-Antal et al., 2011; Strati, 2000). It emphasizes the sensible dimension of daily experience as a key component of organizations and something that can be understood as knowledge from a phenomenological and critical standpoint (Carr and Hancock, 2003; Strati, 2007). The window opened allows ‘depth perception’ (Breuer and Roth, 2003) from and in multiple perspectives. Art and artists are thus becoming contributors to research in management and organization, and business school scholars are investigating the role of art and aesthetics (Adler, 2006; Biehl-Missal, 2013; Schein, 2001; Taylor and Ladkin, 2009). As Becker says in the interview, ‘every kind of representation is perfect for something and for somebody’.
Basing our research on art also forced us to reconsider our perspectives and methods. In a few of his more recent books, Becker (1998, 2007) has directly addressed this question of how methods shape representations. As a method of qualitative investigation, arts-based research hinges on currents of thought and representation that pertain specifically to art as an alternative way of creating meaning (Barone and Eisner, 2012; Knowles and Cole, 2008). Arts-based research does not pretend to be producing ‘truth’ about the state of the world, but rather functions as a heuristic, allowing an intricate approach to certain aspects of that world. Such a move rebounds on the researcher because the necessity of considering the subjectivity of the artist and her artworks leads to the necessity of considering the subjectivity and relativity of our own interpretations. By inviting the artists to comment on and discuss their work with us, we had the opportunity to investigate how we mutually related and experienced our tellings of art, artworks and restructuring (Begon Saint-Genis and Mairesse, 2012; Foreman and Thatchenkery, 1996; Sliwa and Cairns, 2007). Our dialogue with art and artists was like having a conversation with researchers—except in this case the subjectivity of ‘knowledge’ was kept central. In addition to unveiling detailed and complex accounts of emotional experiences, studying artworks thus helped us to build a community of researchers who continuously made interpretation present, both in their own stake in the research process and in the many interpretations—and power games—involved in restructuring situations.
Our ‘Art & Restructuring’ research project eventually led to various outputs. The first one was methodological, with the formalization of our Art-Based, Collective and Dialogical (ABCD) method (Art-Based Research in Restructuring (ABRIR), 2012). 3 The ABCD method is a collective method allowing the production of knowledge through the sharing of experience by actors, both from and outside the field, and by researching how artworks and research itself are perceived. The second output was pedagogical: a multimedia training tool was created, based on the exchanges and reflections developed during the different seminars. The tool is designed to be used in corporate, union and academic training programmes and is made up of a plethora of media such as photographs, extracts of films, books, plays, interviews, academic articles and songs, among others.
A final event took place in Paris in March 2012, which was opened to a large public, and deliberately stood between art and research. In order to open the reflection, we gathered contributions from scholars and artists across Europe. We also invited keynote speakers to give a critical view on our project, its approach and outcomes. Howard Becker naturally appeared as the most legitimate and knowledgeable researcher to give us advice and feedback about our approach. As he could not attend the event, and taking advantage of his Autumn stay in Paris in 2011—and of his geographical proximity to our location—he agreed to perform a filmed interview 4 that was screened as part of our final event.
In his writings, Howard was a key counsellor all through the project. Actually, three different ‘Howies’ guided us, more or less directly, in the making of the project. The first one is Art Worlds Howie (Becker, 1982), the one who investigates how artworks, within a specific ‘world’, are collectively created, evaluated and then distributed. In this book, he shows how the form and content of the works are strongly influenced by the conventions of the world in which this cooperative process takes place. For Becker, considering artworks for the ideas they suggest aesthetically should always go with an understanding of their institutional origins. This was a suggestion that we kept in mind especially when we analysed artistic interventions during a restructuring process. The second Howie who was present during our seminars was Tricks of the Trade Howie (Becker, 1998). Facing an artwork is actually like facing a huge amount of mysterious qualitative data from which we have to extract new and challenging hypotheses and ideas. Several of his tricks helped us to perform this uneasy task. Advice such as ‘everything is possible’ (considering stories as ‘unusual events’ and trying to imagine why such things do not happen more often) or ‘let the case define the concept’ (defining new conceptualizations out of films, novels or plays rather than reading the work through existing concepts) helped us to overcome the reality–fiction tension during the analysis. But the third Howie, the Telling about Society Howie (Becker, 2007), was the most decisive inspiration for our group. In fact, what we were doing was very close to what was described and analysed in his book. We were studying artistic ‘representations’ of work and restructuring, conceived as a legitimate way of telling about such a social phenomenon.
Aware that all representations of society—be they artistic, academic or journalistic, or whatever—are necessarily biased and selective (‘pay attention to where the photographer is standing’, Howie warns us in the interview), we also agree with Becker when he suggests that these representations are all ‘perfect’ for some users and some uses. What Becker means is that the way a specific representation is made within a world fits what its users are generally looking for—when they use it the way it is supposed to be used. Following him, our task was then to question the singular productivity of artworks and the academic purpose which these objects could be ‘perfect’ for. In doing so, we realized we had to fight against our tendency to try and find, within artworks, a mere confirmation or illustration of our pre-existing conceptual frameworks. The power of artists first and foremost lies in their ability to ‘reframe’ society in their own aesthetic terms, which makes art perfect to produce new frames and categories, challenge taken-for-granted representations and ‘lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers’ (Baldwin, cited by Sullivan, 2000). But, let’s allow Howie to tell you himself.