Who’s afraid of the senses? Organization, management and the return of the sensorium

Organization and management are the perpetual, and perpetually fraught and resisted, ordering of sense experience. However, banning the senses into the outside of thought, and of organizational analysis, was – and to a large degree still is – the default and mostly implicit and unquestioned mode of thinking and studying organization and management. Introducing the special issue on ‘The Senses in Management Research and Education’, this essay historicizes and contextualizes the neglect of the senses, dwells upon possible reasons for keeping the sensory at bay and discusses recent attempts to remedy this situation. The contributions to the special issue are introduced into this context. In conclusion, we speculate on what might happen next.

Skills Development through Virtual Art-Based Learning: Learning Outcomes of an Advanced Training Program for Project Managers

With regard to emerging requirements of the professional field, uncertainty competence is a skill to be cultivated and integrated into project management education and training. Art-based learning seems to be a promising approach because the artistic mindset is a suitable model for coping with uncertainty. However, it is widely unclear to what extent art-based learning’s experiential nature will result in soft skills development under the restrictions of distance education. The present quantitative study explores whether—in a virtual learning environment—art-based executive training has a measurable effect on uncertainty competence. Data collection and analysis applied a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design. Participants in the experimental group completed a month-long virtual training program based on visual arts. Contrary to its objective, the program did not cause meaningful changes in uncertainty competence or perceived stress but had a significant effect on participants’ attentiveness and presence. Participants achieved a higher level of mindfulness in dealing with complexity. The results imply that—even in virtual settings—art-based approaches enhance terms of perceptive capacity and social presence but need to be long-term, related to participants’ individual work-context, and disturb participants’ routines to have an effect on uncertainty competence.

Arts-based methods in business education: A reflection on a photo-elicitation project

This article addresses research calls to explore the theory and practice of arts-based methods in business and management education to better understand the learning processes and the ways of knowing that these methods generate. By focusing on photo-elicitation as a pedagogical tool, we problematize an insufficient focus of current discourses on its arts-based origins and revisit photo-elicitation from an arts-based perspective. Based on a reflective account emerging from our teaching experience with photo-elicitation as an assessment strategy, we provide a conceptualization of photo-elicitation as an (experiential) learning and teaching tool. This conceptualization teases out under-theorized elements (i.e. doing, power, multiple framing of meaning, audience) of the method and surfaces overlapping stages of a photo-elicitation learning process. We also offer novel insights into students’ encounters with the photo-elicitation method, thus illustrating the role of the method’s arts-based elements in understanding how learning occurs in such a context. Implications are also provided contributing to an understanding of the value of arts-based methods to the theory and practice of management education.

‘Dracarys’ for all: TV series and experiential learning

Film has been widely used for management learning, mostly with a focus on the story rather than on the film experience. This study draws on arts-based learning literature, film studies and data from learning interactions, and develops a taxonomy of experiential learning with film as a specific art form and emotional medium. The taxonomy includes three elements: making a film experience, processing the experience and cultural aesthetic reflexivity. This study provides process steps and teaching strategies to help move management learners along in the process towards specific learning outcomes. It introduces a film analysis tool as a method that can be used to overcome aesthetic muteness when reflecting on the film experience. The acclaimed and contested TV series Game of Thrones serves as a point of reference, and examples feature the female leader Daenerys Targaryen. The approach is transferable across films and TV series to integrate knowing, experience and emotions and to use popular culture’s critical potential for management learning.

Working with the potential of arts-based learning: Making sense and leaving ‘business as usual’ behind in an art seminar

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the interest in arts-based learning as part of the growing literature on artistic initiatives in business contexts, by advancing the understanding of the potential of arts-based business learning that people can yet fail to benefit from. We draw on Weick’s framework for how people construct meaning in organized situations and on a qualitative study of an art seminar in business education to consider arts-based learning in the face of pitfalls that can prevent people from engaging in approaches that differ from their usual ones and from which they can learn. We show that people can benefit from the potential of arts-based business learning when collective meaning-construction processes such as sensemaking or sensegiving can unfold and work in an iterative, active and intense way, to take people towards new experiences. Our study also highlights the usefulness of taking a perspective centred on ongoing collective meaning-construction processes and of focusing on both learning activities and learning situations when studying business learning.

Management learning and the unsettled humanities: Introduction to the special issue

This special issue engages with the unsettling of the humanities to further explore its relevance for management learning and education. It explores how themes traditionally belonging to the humanities have spurred critical inquiry and raised theoretical issues within other disciplines, following the crisis of the classical humanist ideal as ‘the measure of all things’. It focuses on how the tensions resulting from this crisis can be constructively thematized in the field of management and organization studies, and how the unsettling of the humanities’ privileged access to studying the ‘especially human’ can be taken into the classroom. In this manner, the special issue engages with questions related to the Anthropocene, posthumanism and transhumanism, and raises issues concerning the human possibilities for knowing, learning and living in entangled ways. Additionally, it helps us understand the critical role of the humanities in making sense of the reciprocities between imagination, information and the human crafting of meaningful knowledge.

Art, culture and paradox pedagogy in management learning: The case of Portuguese fado

We propose a reawakening of interest in the role of artistic knowing for managerial education, presenting a pedagogy that is sensitive to cultural context and aimed at enabling the phronetic management of paradox. Inspired by fado, the iconic Portuguese popular music, especially the ways in which it embodies the stresses of society, we develop strategies for management learning based on engagement with art that fosters sensitivity to paradox. We contribute to management learning by inviting practitioners to be sensitive to the complexity of competing tensions in the cultures and language in and through which everyday lives are lived by bringing attention to the potential of artistic knowing for highlighting and navigating management paradoxes, to develop phronesis.

Unsettling bodies of knowledge: Walking as a pedagogy of affect

In this article, we connect with recent attempts to rethink management learning as an embodied and affective process and we propose walking as a significant learning practice of a pedagogy of affect. Walking enables a postdualist view on learning and education. Based on course work focused on urban ethnography, we discuss walking as affect-pedagogical practice through the intertwined activities of straying, drifting and witnessing, and we reflect upon the implications for a pedagogy of affect. In conclusion, we speculate about the potential of a pedagogy of affect for future understandings and practices of management learning.

Learning atmospheres: Re-imagining management education through the dérive

This article responds to the recent calls for rethinking management education, particularly to those that emphasize space, affect and atmosphere, and makes the case for the practice of dérive as a way of infusing management education with experiential, experimental and reflexive learning processes. The authors draw on ideas and practices of the art movement Situationist International who proposed the dérive, informed by the concept of psychogeography as a way of exploring and reimagining the atmospheres of everyday life. The paper is illustrated by the authors’ teaching experiences in this area (or space as one might say). The authors argue that the dérive in management education may foster future managers’ imaginative skills and inspire an imaginative self-reflection of the business school and its spatial organization. The paper concludes that in re-enacting their experience of educational space, participants may learn about, reflect on, and develop their affective capacities for becoming part of organizational processes, both as students of the business school and as future managers.

Conceptualising curricular space in busyness education: An aesthetic approximation

This article outlines a conceptual framework for conceptualising students' experiences of curricular space from an aesthetic perspective. The curriculum is conceived as a three-dimensional, aesthetic artefact that elicits sensory responses and judgements about meaning that can impact learning. Space is conceived in terms of three dimensions that may either be produced or foreclosed by curricular structures and content: autonomy space, reflective space and cognitive space. Together, these spaces enable imaginative space, which is important for innovative and creative thinking. The Japanese concept of ma is proposed as a fruitful way of thinking about space in curricula not as a wasteful, inefficient or mere void to be filled but as the element that enables learning to result from exposing students to structures and content.