The Art of Management and Organisation

The Sixth Art of Management and Organisation Conference, University of York, 2-6^th September 2012.

This was an emotive event for me, given my participation in organising a few of the previous international conferences, and again meeting many delegates who were there at the very first ‘Art of Man’ conference at King’s College London in 2001. Organised principally by Steve Linstead, this year’s theme was ‘Creativity and Critique’, and featured a range of events and exhibits from installation video to performance to Yorkshire sword dancing (the latter only as part of the opening night dinner, I assure you). Attendance at past conferences was generally kept below 200, so as to maintain a certain intensity of interaction, familiarity, community and network. Through the ACORN (aesthetics and creativity in organizational research) network everyone keeps in touch. Institutions like the Copenhagen Business School play a major role in flying the flag for the kinds of research represented at this conference.

The conference had as many practical and interactive seminars as academic paper-led seminars, this year strongly featuring documentary film. My own role was part of the ‘documentary as research’ experiment, which was meant to be an ‘intervention’, but ended up more of a ‘polite engagement’, if I can put it that way. The conference also featured our very own Dr Chris Bilton delivering a keynote (more of an ‘endnote’) disabusing the creativity enthusiasts among us that creativity is not what it’s usually taken to be.

What purpose does an ‘Art of Management and Organisation Conference’ serve? It brings together creative practitioners (from artists, consultants, curators) with academics and industry researchers. The mix really does work. The purpose is to find ways of reflecting on management and organisation theories and practices through creative experimentation (even if that creativity is purely discursive). This doesn’t mean there is no solid empirical research content to the conference – there is in fact quite a lot. There were papers on the creative industries, artist residencies, new incubator spaces, design, the uses of performance, creative pedagogy, prototyping and model making in management training, and on and on.

The location for the conference was the amazing Ron Cooke Hub at York’s impressive new ‘sustainable’ Heslington campus [If you don’t know about it, it’s worth taking a look at the RIBA’s case study on it: see link below]. There were notable conference highlights for me – David Hickman’s presentation on slavery with excerpts from films he made for Al Jazeera; Pierre Guillet de Monthoux on the avant-garde; Jane Gavan’s video installation Aire in the Ron Hub 360degree projection room; and Daved Barry, Henrik Schrat & Cathryn Lloyd’s interactive sessions called ‘City of Thought’, where we contemplated the relation between critical thought processes, architecture and urban community. 

Research questions I came away with: too many to mention here. On a practical note, the many sessions referencing or featuring documentary were an inspiration to continue to explore film as a research media. Documentary raises some significant possibilities for developing a non-‘art’ creative media. How do we broach the tensions between visual and linguistic in mainstream academic research, and how do we use ‘objective’ empirical content as a means of exploring experience and social engagement as well as research questions? How can film reestablish an active relationship between the body, space, place and dialogue within research? The conference has its roots in organizational aesthetics and the investigation of perception, affection, emotion and the symbolic landscapes of the corporate environment; these subjects still feature in our gatherings. However, the times have moved on, and most organizations think of themselves being creative actors, employing design agencies, spatial designers, creative management consultants. Apopos Bilton – how does the ideology of creativity actually inhibit organizational management and prevent an exploration of the essential thought-content and reflexivity of creativity?

See:
ACORN: http://www.aacorn.net/index.htm
York’s new campus:
http://www.architecture.com/Awards/RIBAAwards/Winners2011/Yorkshire/HeslingtonEastMasterplan/HeslingtonEastCampusMasterplanUniversityofYorkatnight.aspx

Jonathan Vickery : 12 Sep 2012 18:21 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem