Organizational Aesthetics: Caught Between Identity Regulation and Culture Jamming

Organization Science · 2011 · Volume 22 · Issue 2

Abstract

Applying insights from Lefebvre's spatial theory [Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space . Blackwell, Oxford, UK] to an analysis of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs—recently relocated to its new award-winning building—the present study seeks to offer a more comprehensive model of the role of organizational aesthetics (OA) in identity regulation and culture jamming. Our contribution is threefold. (1) At the empirical/methodological level, this study attempts to simultaneously analyze the three Lefebvrian spaces in a single organization, demonstrating negotiations and struggles over interpretations of OA. (2) We analyze aesthetic jamming as a form of intentional and unintentional efforts at collective resistance that not only reveals the aesthetic mechanisms of regulation, but actually uses them as a method of counter-regulation. (3) Whereas most studies in this emerging body of literature focus on the regulation of organization-based identities (bureaucratic and professional), we show how the translation of extraorganizational hierarchies of identities (national, ethnic, and gendered) into the organizational control system is also mediated by OA.

Keywords

organizational aesthetics, design, subjugation, identity regulation, organizational identity, power and control, resistance, culture jamming, Lefebvre

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