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This book deals with the℗¡organizational use of aesthetic means. Based on the idea that organizations are systems of communication, it is shown that consciously or not, organizations have always used aesthetic means to reinforce their communication.

First coined in modernity, the aesthetic is a vague, polysemic and contested concept whose complexities arise from the variety of the ways it has been defined in the history of its theorization, but also in its formative prehistory in theories of art and beauty that preceded its modern coinage. After noting key points of that prehistory, the article traces three major modern tendencies in construing the aesthetic: as a special mode of sensory perception or experience that is relevant to life in general; as a special faculty or exercise of taste focused on judgments of beauty and related qualities such as the sublime; and as a theory (or essential quality) of fine art. The idea of aesthetic disinterestedness is critically examined, and contrasts between the concept of art in Western modernity and in pre-modern and Asian culture are also considered.

"The whole of Marx's project confronts the narrow concerns of political philosophy by embedding it in social philosophy and a certain understanding of the aesthetic. From those of aesthetic production to the "poetry of the future" (as Marx writes in the Eighteenth Brumaire), from the radical modernism of bourgeois development to the very idea of association (which defined one of the main lines of tradition in the history of aesthetics), steady references to Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, and the idea that bourgeois politics is nothing but a theatrical stage: the aesthetic has a prominent place in the constellation of Marx's thought. This book offers an original and challenging study of both Marx in the aesthetic, and the aesthetic in Marx. It differs from previous discussions of Marxist aesthetic theory as it understands the works of Marx themselves as contributions to thinking the aesthetic. This is an engagement with Marx's aesthetic that takes into account Marx's broader sense of the aesthetic, as identified by Eagleton and Buck-Morss - as a question of sense perception and the body. It explores this through questions of style and substance in Marx and extends it into contemporary questions of how this legacy can be perceived or directed analytically in the present. By situating Marx in contemporary art debates this volume speaks directly to lively interest today in the function of the aesthetic in accounts of emancipatory politics and is essential reading for researchers and academics across the fields of political philosophy, art theory, and Marxist scholarship This book's concern with Marx and aesthetics is twofold; it addresses both the aesthetic implications of Marx's writings and the artistic interest in Marx. Marx's own writings not only contain various conceptions of emancipation strongly inspired by classical aesthetics, but Marx's own style shows a strong sense of awareness for the performative politics of writing. Readings of Marx that focus on these aspects echo some of the recent returns to Marx in response to the crises and contradictions of contemporary capitalism. The particularity of this renewed interest in Marx, however, also marks a significant departure from the party lines of Marxist scholarship. This book, by focusing on these trends, proposes a model of reading Marx as an author whose work circles less around political economy in a narrow sense, but rather around the aesthetic: emphasizing the sensuous, the material, the formal, ...

This accessible and exciting new text looks at the implications of aesthetic labour for work and employment by contextualizing debates and offering a critical approach. The origins of aesthetic labour are explored, as well as the relevant theories from business and management, and sociology. Coverage includes key topics such as: corporate strategy; recruitment and selection practices; and discrimination. Key features include: - a range of case studies from across different types of organizations and popular culture - the exploration of topics such as branding, 'lookism', 'dressing for success' and cosmetic surgery - suggestions for further reading.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction: Aesthetic Capitalism /Peter Murphy and Eduardo de la Fuente -- 1 From the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism to the Creative Economy: Reflections on the New Spirit of Art and Capitalism /David Roberts -- 2 The Artefacts of Capitalism and the Objecthood of Their Aesthetics /Vrasidas Karalis -- 3 The Aesthetic Spirit of Modern Capitalism /Peter Murphy -- 4 The Visual Experience Economy: What Kind of Economics? On the Topologies of Aesthetic Capitalism /Anders Michelsen -- 5 Aesthetic Capital: Hermeneutic Speculation, Economic Themes, and the Dismal Science /Ken Friedman -- 6 The Social Negotiation of Aesthetics and Organisational Democracy /Antonio Strati -- 7 Neo-Modernism: Architecture in the Age of Aesthetic Capitalism /Eduardo de la Fuente -- 8 The Aesthetics of Fiscal Consolidation /Carlo Tognato -- 9 The Innovative Role of Art in the Time of the Absence of Myth /Dominique Bouchet -- Index.

Direct questioning about the 'felt sense' of organizational actions or artefacts is an accepted way to explore organizational members' aesthetic experience. However, this requires organizational members to be able to talk about their aesthetic experience, to translate that felt sense into language. I suggest this is often difficult due to aesthetic muteness, which is a significant problem, not just for research but for organizational practice in general. I use empirical data to illustrate how this aesthetic muteness is manifested in the research process as organizational members' difficulty in approaching their experience from an aesthetic perspective, reframing from 'feeling' to 'thinking', inability to recall aesthetic experience and denial of aesthetic experience. I then speculate that aesthetic muteness might be caused by threats to harmony, efficiency and images of power and effectiveness and that the consequences of aesthetic muteness are aesthetic amnesia, a narrowed conception of organizational aesthetics and aesthetic stress.

There is an unnamed crisis of aesthetic immediacy afoot in the American criminal justice system. Defendants are seen too quickly. Or rather, they are recognized too quickly. They are recognized spatially, at the defense table, surrounded by lawyers and court marshals, playing the protagonists in the court performance. For most observers, this staging and its familiarity bring about a series of untold assumptions—assumptions that, when viewed nakedly, erode the presumption of innocence. While implicit biases and prejudices similarly short-circuit judicial proceedings—procedure and proceduralism itself—nefariously permit implicit narratives to outpace evidence. Tools to interrupt the aesthetics of transgression and its aftermath will serve judicial accuracy without substantial efficiency tradeoffs. While the bifurcation of the guilt and sentencing in American courts laudably partitions the culpability inquiry from the question of deserved punishment—the former, the question of wrongdoing, can never be truly divorced from history, neither personal nor social. Nor should it be. The Anglo-American insistence on a socially ahistorical criminal trial comes at a high cost: real and textured history—the foreground, leadup, and intimate histories of what occurred is kept out, while the more depersonalized histories that undergird daily life, narrative tropes, and mythologies of crime are permitted to play an outsized role. There is no place, as it stands, for simultaneity in truth or a multiplicity of character. This article thinks of ways to render collective transgression and the complexity of truth legally cognizable and to afford individual defendants full subject status as, I argue, the Sixth Amendment demands. It turns to a source famed for disrupting perception and the study of how and why perception is to be unsettled: Russian Formalism.