Overcoming Aesthetic Muteness: Researching Organizational Members’ Aesthetic Experience

Abstract

Direct questioning about the ‘felt sense’ of organizational actions or artefacts is an accepted way to explore organizational members’ aesthetic experience. However, this requires organizational members to be able to talk about their aesthetic experience, to translate that felt sense into language. I suggest this is often difficult due to aesthetic muteness, which is a significant problem, not just for research but for organizational practice in general. I use empirical data to illustrate how this aesthetic muteness is manifested in the research process as organizational members’ difficulty in approaching their experience from an aesthetic perspective, reframing from ‘feeling’ to ‘thinking’, inability to recall aesthetic experience and denial of aesthetic experience. I then speculate that aesthetic muteness might be caused by threats to harmony, efficiency and images of power and effectiveness and that the consequences of aesthetic muteness are aesthetic amnesia, a narrowed conception of organizational aesthetics and aesthetic stress.