Organization and the arts: Critical conversations on expanding meanings and understandings of who matters

Abstract

In this article, I celebrate and discuss Organization’s contributions to the conversation between organization studies and works of art, such as literary fiction, poetry, film, etc. I take this critical conversation forward by highlighting several ways in which such works of art expand meanings for our research, and I then build on this to call for expanding understandings of “who matters” in our engagement with the arts and in our scholarship. In particular, I argue for the case of works of art from/of/about the Global South as an opportunity to take our critical project forward, tracing the promising but complex contours that one is likely to encounter in traversing this relatively unchartered terrain. I conclude by building on this discussion to suggest doing art and being ourselves through art as a part of our conversation with the arts in the role of academic activists and as a means of resistance to current oppressive systems.

In this article, I celebrate and discuss the unique space created by Organization in considering works of art such as literary fiction, poetry, film, etc., that are typically outside the purview of our scholarship for organizational analysis (Grey, 1996). I draw on this space to explore the “seam” of organization studies and the arts (De Cock and Land, 2006) and examine the ways in which “the literary is at the heart of organization and vice versa” (Pick, 2017: 800). First, I walk us through some of the ways in which works of art expand meanings for our research. Second, building on these possibilities I argue for expanding understandings of “who matters” by attention to art from /of /about the Global South. In this respect, I highlight the need to engage particularly with the arts that stand in opposition to oppressive systems and that center the marginalized and oppressed. Throughout, I argue how such a conversation with the arts constitutes a critical project worth developing further.

Expanding meanings

Several works in Organization have been at the forefront of highlighting and elaborating how art allows us to “turn to affects” and “depth perception” (Schmidt et al., 2015). As a punk band member who is also an organization scholar puts it, “art is political not only for its subject matter but also for its affects – when art broadens your affective capabilities, when you experience a broadening of your world, when it makes you know things emotionally and bodily, rather than cognitively” (Burø, 2021: 692–693). Similarly, Rhodes and Brown (2005) remind us of “fictional texts as valuable means by which organizations and working life might be understood and informed,” recalling the exhortation in Good Novels/Better Management (Czarniawska-Joerges and de Monthoux, 1994) that “reading fiction is a means to better understand the ‘realities’ of organizations because it incorporates subjective and emotional perspectives together with more rational and ratiocinated accounts often found in traditional academic writing” (p. 471). These arguments are in concert with those outside Organization’s pages, that certain literary works (e.g. Tolstoy’s War and Peace) can help us in “getting even closer to the sentiments and sensations of organizational experience than empirical research can” (Michaelson, 2022: 32).

Furthermore, such texts about people and their work, or “workplace literature,” could throw up surprises such as the intriguing intellectual lives of “lowly clerks” or of the “insignificant office worker” (Schoneboom, 2015: 832–833). While this study focused on intellectual writers in workplaces, another avenue here worth noting is that what people read outside workplaces matters for their work lives, and vice versa. Ethnographies in this respect, such as a recent one of novel readers in the UK and Denmark during the pandemic (Davies et al., 2022), can be a means of discovering this particular intersection between work lives and literary arts through what may be called workplace literary sociology.

The potential for rich engagement with the arts extends to film, where even cartoon series such as The Simpsons offer avenues for the exploration of professional identities (Ellis, 2008). As an intriguing example, drawing from Yojimbo, a movie by Akira Kurosawa, Sementelli (2020) compares between modern day contractors in organizations and government and ronin in Japan who are professional samurai “without a lord or master” and “for hire without the power or social status of samurai with masters” (p. 757). Through this comparison, a work of art helps understand how “something triggered” a real world contractor “[Edward] Snowden to act, to misbehave – acting against his employer” that may be seen as organizational misbehavior but also as an act of resistance (Sementelli, 2020: 763).

Taking this exploration further, works of art could help problematize mainstream ideas. For example, in their reading of A Wild Sheep Chase, a story of a young advertising executive working in large-corporation controlled Japanese media, Śliwa et al. (2013) discuss how the novel “actively profanes. . .the sacralizations inherent in key leadership-related concepts,” opening doors for “critical leadership scholars to also engage in the profanation of leadership studies” and thus how “fiction can contribute conceptually to the field of organization studies” (pp. 868–869). Along the same lines, in analyzing Rawhide, a TV drama set in post Civil War America but first broadcast in the Cold War era of 1950s/60s, Watson (2013) shows how the agency of a narrator creates an “illusion of leadership” because “leadership, as narrative construction, can be seen to reside in the discourse (the telling) rather than the story (the events)” (p. 931). The narrator’s version becomes “the organizational narrative” and “even [the narrator’s] ‘wrong’ judgments can be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been inspired,” precluding alternative narratives that may show how the outcomes were achieved through other organizational members, and also through chance and random events (Watson, 2013: 931).

Through a similar critical approach outside Organization’s pages, Prasad (2023) finds the nuanced details in The Chair, a Netflix series about life in US academia, helpful to showcase the tensions and conundrums faced by model minorities in workplaces, particularly in leadership positions, some aspects of which would be otherwise difficult to perceive, for example, microaggressions, pressures to use soft power, etc.

Art could thus provide an entry point to problematize existing taken-for-grantedness; but it could also help us imagine beyond (Corbett, 1995). As Pick argues, “The novel becomes more than just a work of literary fiction; it turns into a source of inspiration for new thinking” and “possibilities arise to open up new registers of thought, action and speed – for example, in the form of new metaphors, ideologies and paradigm assumptions” (Pick, 2017: 814). At one level this may be through “offering role models for moral self-cultivation” (Michaelson, 2022: 32); at other levels, new inspirations unleashed through the arts may inform new paradigms for alternative organizing, and could help us imagine desirable futures and answer the challenge “how can we study, conceptualize, and theorize what is not (yet) observable and does not (yet) exist?” (Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2022: 236–237). On the flip side, genres such as science fiction could help imagine dystopias such as the androidization of managers, wherein human empathy is replaced by machine logic (Srinivas, 1999).

These exemplars of problematizing and imagining via works of art seem remarkably prescient in our current times, and bring us to the heart of the matter. Financialized capitalism has not only taken over the economic realm, but has increasingly imposed restrictive meanings to all other aspects of life where, for example, even social relationships are not important in how they provide meaning to life but rather solely for narrow financial ends (Davis, 2009). Art often has some elements of potential opposition to such systems in-built into its form. As Dubois (2022) points out, “a poet is not seen as producing better work because she sells more in the short run—a poet will sell more on the long term because her work is recognized for its esthetic value” (p. 981). This is refracted in the organizational realm where smaller, alternative organizing around art may stand in opposition to large mainstream organizations commercializing art (Dubois, 2022), and even within the same publishing organization where editors may need to have a “dual character” that grapples with the “fundamentally antagonistic aptitudes” around “art and money, love of literature and the pursuit of profit” (Bourdieu, 2008: 138).

In this spirit, we must embrace art as a critical project in our field based on the recognition that “the anti-economic economy of pure art” is from “a sociological standpoint, as incompatible as fire and water” with mainstream commercial activity (Bourdieu, 2008: 138). Yet, arguing for expanding meanings on this basis is not necessarily to fall into the trap of leaving economic resources to the non-critical; an open question and plea remains on how more resources may be channeled to meanings not locked into current modes of being in existing oppressive systems. Furthermore, in nurturing such opposition it is crucial to remember that “it is the nature and quality of the fictional texts and the nature and quality of the reader’s engagement with them that matters” (Case, 1999: 650), because many works also feed the beast by making art subservient to all that the oppressive systems stand for (Saifer, 2023).

This potential for the arts as a critical project should also naturally gravitate us toward an intersection of the arts with activism; however, a surprisingly significant gap in this respect remains in Organization’s pages. I revisit this toward the end of this article.

Expanding understandings of who matters: The case of the Global South

While Organization has been at the forefront of engaging with the arts in general as outlined above, there is scope for more immersions into marginalized lives by expanding our understandings of “who matters.” Here, socioeconomic inequalities of all types and their intersections should guide our attention. At a time when management scholarship is increasingly engaging with societal grand challenges, the deep dives into literary works of Austen and Balzac by social scientists studying inequality (Milanovic, 2020; Piketty, 2014) should motivate us further toward such explorations. I argue that this is an opportune moment for developing this space further, particularly through the arts from/of/about the Global South.

Let me start with a poignant personal anecdote. As someone who in early stages of life could appreciate Geoff Dyer writing about the precarious yet carefree lives of 20-somethings on the margins in Brixton, UK (Dyer, 1990), I experienced a shocked awkwardness and disconnect while reading from the same author,

“Wherever you enter America, your passport is always stamped — however daunting the interrogation leading up to this moment of formal admittance — with a certain have-a-nice-day zest” (Dyer, 2004: 171).

Who is the “you” in this entry into the United States? In contrast to this author, I can count, like many others who do not have the “right” look/place of birth/name etc., numerous instances of traveling into the United States to be the complete opposite experience. The lack of reflexivity is more jarring for a writer who draws on his non-privileged background in the context of UK, is also classified as a travel writer, and has astute observations on many other aspects of his travels across the globe. Of course, most do not even have the privilege of such cross-border traveling experiences to contrast with those of mine or Dyer’s, but this should alert us to think about whose voice dominates and is normalized in such literary works. In other words, we should pay attention to the question of “who matters?” in our conversation with the arts in general, and thus also specifically consider Global South voices and standpoints in comparison to normalized Eurocentric ones.

Organization from its inception has attempted to “give voice to those who decentred OT[Organization Theory]’s Eurocentric assumptions” (Mir and Mir, 2013: 91). But significant gaps remain in this respect. Critiques of Western Capitalism, or oppressive systems in general, from beyond the Eurocentric core are generally missed or not well understood. As an example, Khan and Koshul (2011) in their reading of three poems by Iqbal show how this poet-philosopher from the Global South has a critique that “allows him to agree with some important points in the socialist critique of capitalism but (more importantly) expand that critique in new directions and offer a distinctly different narrative on capitalism” (p. 306). This is relatively unchartered terrain in organization studies where such rare pieces in Organization prod us to engage with Global South voices.

This exemplar also showcases the power of poetry as a means of critique and philosophy, wherein this poet-philosopher from the Global South uniquely draws attention to the domination by “banks,” what we would today call the system of financialized capitalism, and characterizes oppressive economic systems as “a game of dice” that lead to “death for many”—themes dear to critical scholarship but argued from a unique vantage point:

In terms of architectural grandeur, prestige, and attendance, the banks leave the churches far, far behind.

What appears as economic activity is actually a game of dice.

The interest charged by one is sudden death for many.

Iqbal (2001: 533–534) as translated by and in Khan and Koshul (2011: 308).

In this vein, we may want to heed the argument of those who “wish to invite European philosophers to read these [Global South] poets not through the exoticized lenses of Orientalism or Area Studies, but with the same attitude of critical intimacy that they approach their own philosophers” and thus join in “collapsing the binary between philosophy and poetry, to stand next to me as I show them the poetic philosophy of our [Global South] poets” (Dabashi, 2015: 24).

Works of art that serve as points of resistance and imagination from a Global South perspective are an intriguing area to pursue in this respect. The contemporary Afrofuturism movement in music, literature, film, etc. that seeks to “imagine greater justice and a freer expression of black subjectivity in the future or in alternative places, times, or realities” is one such example (English, 2017).

At the same time, there are concerns to navigate in going down some such roads because not every view or work from the Global South is automatically emancipatory. In this sense, it is helpful to think of an emancipatory Global South episteme, which would embrace the postcolonial, decolonial and anti-imperial perspectives but importantly also eschew and oppose oppressive systems in and of the Global South. This point is essential because, similar to other places, art in the Global South may also serve to legitimize oppressive systems such as rising autocratic populism. Here the reminder from Michaelson (2005) is apt that while art “can contribute to moral understanding and improvement, it might also contribute to moral confusion and decline” (p. 368). In Khan and Koshul’s (2011: 311) reading, Iqbal (2001) exhorts against moral decline in his context from his standpoint (pp. 536–537):

. . .obliterate every vestige of inherited hierarchy.

. . .Throw the priests out of the temples dedicated to Me.

Thus while Iqbal’s view of emancipation is guided by insights from his religious interpretations and standpoint, he also argues to push back against religion-based regimes that become “an oppressive and reactionary force in history” (Khan and Koshul, 2011: 312).

The problem is described well by Vijay (2023), arguing that scholarship in the postcolonies “predominantly import[s] canonical Western theories or retreat[s] into indigenous enclaves” (p. 427). These enclaves risk becoming “inversions of Eurocentrism” by creating national discourses that “feed into right-wing nationalist agendas” (Vijay, 2023: 427). Thus, such militant readings of religion and culture in the Global South feed a “power/knowledge symbiosis [which] is identical to that of Orientalism” (Dabashi, 2015: 25). In other words, while projecting a position as one of opposition to Eurocentrism and Western hegemony, such standpoints simply replace these patronizing views and oppressive systems with national supremacist and autocratic positions that also seek to construct others to patronize and oppress. Art in the Global South that serves such positions thus does not align with emancipatory change.

To direct critical attention to these concerns in the area of the arts, we need to ask: Whose voices and stories are we immersing into? Are they those that center the marginalized and oppressed or ones that echo oppressive views that feed into traditional and new forms of dominance in the Global South. The issue is complicated by the fact that among those from the Global South who immigrate to the West are some who help maintain imperialism (Dabashi, 2011) or support oppressive systems in the places they left behind (de Souza, 2022). The context of the arts is more challenging and yet more important to discern in this respect because such effects are often subtle. The same power that such works of art have to generate new worldviews and imagination for emancipation can also turn minds to the opposite ends (e.g. Khatun, 2018). The unique emancipatory space of Organization, “that resists the mimetic and coercive pull of orientalism, but simultaneously eschews nativism in the quest for a more organic inclusivity” (Mir and Mir, 2013: 92), can develop much needed conversations in this area. As one example, Organization’s space for “Media and Artefacts Reviews” that covers art, poetry, music, movies, etc. can chart out new terrain in this respect, in particular by including Global South voices. Furthermore, in doing this with attention to the intersection of the arts and activism, we could also bring some new perspectives to address the arts-activism gap that I identified in the first section above.

Doing art and being through art

Attention to the arts-activism gap in our scholarly work would be a first step, but I argue that it is also important to go beyond writing about the arts toward doing the arts—which is an important space open to critical scholars, to be what we are and for our activism against oppressive systems. Even as we study grand challenges, we would also do well to follow this insight from the pages of this journal: “The premise was to write songs that could express a state of crisis. We did not want to write statement songs about crisis, we wanted to write from the point of view of crisis: how does it feel to live in a failing socio-economic and ecological system” (Burø, 2021: 689). This doing art is tied to being through art, in that “we do not go on stage to perform as such; we go on stage to try to live that moment to its fullest degree of saturation” (Burø, 2021: 691). In this vein, recognizing that activism often requires artistic expression of various types, I argue we should interpret the call for more activist academic lives (Gray, 2023) as also a call for doing art and being ourselves through art.

While Bourdieu (2008) encourages us to “organize a more effective resistance” for “defending art’s freedom from money” (p. 152), the reverse—enhancing our conversation and engagement with the arts—could also rescue us and defend our freedom from the encroachment of current oppressive systems on our selves and our worldviews.