Selling Beauty: A playful inquiry into beauty in organizations

Abstract

Although the idea that beauty could or even should play a central role in thinking about organizations has flitted around the edges of organizational thinking for many years, it has gained little traction in mainstream organizational theory. This may be due in part to the analogical mismatch between intellectual theorizing and the aesthetic experience of beauty. "The analysis of beauty is often like the story of the six blind elephants and the man. The first blind elephant encounters a man and says, “Oh, it feels flat.” The second elephant says, “Oh yes, it feels flat to me, too.” And so on for all six elephants as they trample the man. After analytic inquiry into the nature of beauty, there is often little left but a trampled, lifeless corpse that doesn’t seem very beautiful after all." (Taylor, 2013 p. 71) So, instead I engage the topic of beauty in organizations aesthetically, with this play “Selling Beauty”.