Abstract:
Increased awareness of the value that aesthetic knowledge can bring to everyday life in organizations has led to calls for the development of new ‘lifeful’ research methodologies – methodologies that support access to, and the capture and transfer of, tacit aesthetic knowledge and allow that knowledge to be built on in other contexts. In this study, which is sited in the midst of the everyday life of the participating organization, I explore through praxis the potential of two visual inquiry techniques. The first draws on Fine Arts’ fundamentals and involves the lacing (as in adding spice) and layering of multiple lenses. Here, ‘lenses’ refers to the ways in which the artist and the appreciator of art envision the world, and are a means to ‘see afresh’ and generate new insights. The second involves the application of a technique borrowed from the field of Visual Anthropology and adapted to specifically support work with sensory knowledge. Here, participants are empowered to ‘re-live’ their significant experiences utilizing self-produced video. Simultaneously, I capture participants’ corporeal, emotional and verbal responses to their individual works. During the course of the study I also examine, through my own project experiences, the edge where artistic and scholarly practices come together, identifying the challenges and rewards at what emerges to be a very dynamic and potential-filled interface. I suggest it is at this edge that scholars in the field of Organizational Aesthetics, which provides the foundation for this study, undertake further inquiry.