Overcoming Aesthetic Muteness: Researching Organizational Members’ Aesthetic Experience
研究发现组织成员在谈论审美体验时存在“审美沉默”现象，表现为难以从审美角度切入、将感受转为思考、无法回忆或否认审美体验，并推测其原因与威胁和谐、效率及权力形象有关。
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.