Re-conceiving the Artful in Management Development and Education
Special Issue of Journal of Management & Organization
Volume 14 Issue 5 November 2008
ii+126 pages ISBN 978-0-9775742-6-1
Editors:
Cheryl Kerr
Centre for Learning Innovation, Faculty of Education
Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Lotte Darsø
The Creative Alliance, Learning Lab Denmark
Danish University of Education
In a recent key-note on the Fourth Art of Management and Organisation Conference, Nancy Adler spoke of this point in time and of management and organisations in particular as being ‘dehydrated’, and in her ground-breaking article (2006) claims that 21st Century business is ‘anything but business as usual’. She demonstrates an unequivocal trend, through a massive amount of convincing examples, that:
The time is right for the cross-fertilization of the arts and leadership. Companies are including artists and artistic processes in their approaches to strategic and day-to-day management and leadership.
(Adler 2006: 487-488)
The aim of this issue is to bridge the gap between academe, business and the arts by exploring new approaches for learning, suggesting new creative and artful competencies and providing examples of some of the more hopeful new developments that point toward the birth of a new paradigm.
The focus is on artful, aesthetic and artistic endeavours in management,reflecting new understandings of the science of artful management development theory and practice, including teaching, learning, work-based practice, assessment and evaluation, social responsibility, and visionary engagement in new partnerships.
In the context of this Special Issue, to be artful is to transform the self through profound learning experiences that expand human consciousness, often facilitated by artistic processes. In management education and development, this suggests a shift from instrumental management towards a paradigm of artful creation of the managerial self, in a creative economy that also creates social innovation.
This collection of papers is designed to provoke an ongoing discourse about what is relevant, what is appropriate, what is happening in the intersection of business management and other fields of intellectual and emotional endeavour and how we can enrich the field of management, and the creation of new types of knowledge, language, understanding and expression and thereby addresses the interests of management and academics world-wide.
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