Artistic Interventions in Organizations ─ Research, Theory and Practice

Artistic intervention, where the world of the arts is brought into organizations, has increasingly become a research field in itself with strong links to both creativity and innovation. Opportunities for the arts to interact with public and private organizations occur worldwide, but during the last decade, artistic interventions have received growing attention in both practice and research.

This book is the first comprehensive attempt to map the development of the field and provides an international overview of the area of artistic interventions and their impact on organizations from different perspectives, ranging from strategic management to organizational development, innovation and organizational learning. Featuring chapters from prominent and emerging scholars, including Nancy J. Adler, Barbara Czarniawska, Lotte Darso and Alexander Styhre, it places artistic interventions within an international context. The book also offers readers the opportunity to learn from experiences in a varied range of organisations, including newspapers, manufacturing, government, schools, and covers many art-forms, such as music, contemporary dance, painting, photography, and theatre.

Using extensive empirical examples, this book is vital reading for researchers and scholars of creativity and cultural industries, as well as innovation, creative entrepreneurship, organizational studies and management.

Ulla Johansson Skoldberg is the Torsten and Wanja Soderberg professor in Design Management at Business & Design Lab, a research center at University of Gothenburg. She founded the BDL and was its first director. She received her Ph.D. From Lund University, and held a position as senior lecturer/associate professor at Vaxjo University. Her interest in art, design and organizations partly comes from her early studies of architecture in the 1970s before working with housing management in1980s. In the 1990s she became a Ph.D. student and wrote a dissertation about the concept of responsibility in organizations. Her current interest in art emanates from her position as professor in design management placed in the faculty of fine and performing art. Since she regards design as applied art, she regards it as natural to investigate the logic of the source. She has published many papers and book chapters.

Jill Woodilla, Ph.D. is an affiliated researcher with the Business & Design Lab, and an honorary visiting professor at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg. Previously she was Associate Professor of Management and Associate Dean at the Welch College of Business, Sacred Heart University, Connecticut, US. She received her degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. Her current research in artistic interventions is part of her larger interest in opportunities for confluence of art, design and organization. She has published papers and book chapters on design thinking, organizational discourse and ways in which students develop intercultural competence.

Ariane Berthoin Antal is senior fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, where she leads the research stream on "Artistic Interventions in Organizations" in the Research Unit "Cultural Sources of Newness." She is Distinguished Research Professor at Audencia Nantes School of Management in France and honorary professor at the Technische Universitat Berlin. She earned her BA from Pomona College, her MA from Boston University and her Dr. phil from the Technische Universitat Berlin. Recent books include the Oxford Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge (co-edited with M. Dierkes, J. Child and I. Nonaka, Oxford University Press 2001), Learning Organizations. Extending the Field (co-edited with P. Meusburger and L. Suarsana, Springer 2014), and Moments of Valuation. Exploring Sites of Dissonance. (co-edited with M. Hutter and D. Stark, Oxford University Press forthcoming).