The Aesthesis Archive is a selection of articles from the six issues of the journal Aesthesis: international journal of art and aesthetics in management and organisational life. The intellectual spirit of Aesthesis lives on in Organizational Aesthetics. They are available here for free download. Readers are welcome to make as many copies of the downloads, and distribute, as they wish. They are, however, to observe all the standard copyright arrangements, with the original copyright passing from The Aesthesis Project to the producer of the original art work (including these PDF downloads) - Jonathan Vickery. If you have any queries on the use of these downloads, please email: J.P.Vickery@warwick.ac.uk

The book, Experiencing Organisations: new aesthetic perspectives (Ian King and Jonathan Vickery, eds., Libri, 2013) features some of the articles published (albeit in embryonic form) in the journal Aesthesis. The journal aimed to bring together creative practitioners, arts policy makers, researchers, managers and academics, so as to create a radical new forum for exploring the meaning, processes and spaces of management and organisations. The concept for the journal emerged in 2006 out of a consolidation of activities initiated by Ian King, Stephen Linstead and Ceri Watkins, centring around the Art of Management and Organization Conferences (London, 2002; Paris, 2004; Krakow, 2006; Banff, 2008; Istanbul 2010; and York, 2012). As a regular participant and collaborator of the conferences, I became designer and art director (and co-editor with Ian and Ceri). The Aesthesis Project was formed in 2007 to manage and fund the journal, but both the project and journal was short lived: they ran from 2007-2009, and were largely a victim of recessionary forces, for what was a very expensive operation.

The newly formed Art of Management and Organization, a non-profit company, will continue the conference (and other activities), the next being at the Copenhagen Business School in 2014. And the intellectual spirit of Aesthesis lives on in Organizational Aesthetics. The book Experiencing Organisations was originally intended to be twice the size, and two volumes. For obvious reasons, it became impossible to secure a publisher for such an expensive venture, and we settled with one volume. The contents of the volume were determined by a whole range of considerations, many being entirely out of the hands of the editors. The publishers Libri were very generous and have taken a risk with a full colour publication, further details of which can be found here.

The ‘aesthetic’ dimension of the Aesthesis journal was central to our publication strategy. Unlike standard academic publishers, the editors challenged contributors to think about the visual communication of their research as well as its ability to cut across diverse fields of thought. We hoped that the content of Aesthesis was as relevant to academics as to artists and corporate managers. With a great sadness that we could not re-publish all these articles as a two volume book project, but courtesy of Organizational Aesthetics they are now made available as free downloads.

Please note: not all the content of the journal five issues are represented here (not the editorials, reviews, features and advertisements, and not art work reproductions -- by Navid Nuur, Steve Taylor, Ben Johnson, among others -- which for practical or copyright reasons are not available). Articles from the last issue six will be made available when we obtain the original art work.

Readers are welcome to make as many copies of the downloads, and distribute, as they wish. They are, however, to observe all the standard copyright arrangements, with the original copyright passing from The Aesthesis Project to the producer of the original art work (including these PDF downloads), that is, me.

If you have any queries on the use of these downloads, the please email me: J.P.Vickery@warwick.ac.uk

Jonathan Vickery
Centre for Cultural Policy Studies
University of Warwick, UK