Uncovering the Semiotic in Organizational Aesthetics

This article seeks to illustrate the utility of a semiotically grounded approach to the analysis of organizational aesthetics. Developed from a critique of the tendency to romanticize the notion of aesthetics within both organization studies and the social sciences more generally, it is argued that such a tendency tends to overlook the ways in which organizational imagery and artefacts are imbued with aesthetic meaning—which in turn can be understood to function as what Gell (1992) has described as cultural ‘technologies of enchantment’. Commencing with a brief review of increasing practitioner interest in the possibility of harnessing the aesthetic as a managerial resource, the article then considers the nature of the aesthetic as an essentially contested concept within both philosophy and organization studies. In doing so, it outlines the dominance of what it considers to be a romanticized understanding of the aesthetic amongst those who believe it to provide what Strati (1999) has described as an ‘epistemological metaphor’ for organizational studies. In contrast to this, a case is then made for the utility of a semiotic approach to studying organizational aesthetics, which is itself illustrated with reference to an analysis of a particular organizational artefact, namely a graduate recruitment document.