A Portrait of the Manager-Artist (after Degot)

At the close of Part I, I presented a critical reading of Degot’s 1987 article: Portrait of the Manager as an Artist. Although I argued that Degot elicited useful insights into management and organizational practice, his basic premiss of an evolutionary parallel between both art and management was, at best, dubious. However, in recognizing the value of Degot’s work as a potential contribution to the debate over management theory and its practice, I argued that it was necessary to explicate a new premiss for considering management as an artform — one that was rooted in an understanding of what the concept art might, in fact, be. Part II of this text presented a comprehensive argument for such a new premiss. It is a premiss for an art of management that is based on conceptualizing a Conjunctive Theory of Art (CTA), together with a philosophy of Socially Negotiated Alternativism (SNA). I therefore advance the idea that management art is an epistemic practice of plausible knowledge development, in which: Management Art, as a process, is the innovative conjunction of the acknowledged craftskills of management with the mimetic discovery of some aspect (real or imaginary) of the management world, and: A Management Artwork is any unique tangible realization of a thing, concept or idea resulting from the process of Management Art, and is accepted — through a process of SNA — as such within a given management context (an organizational institution or management world), also: The Manager-Artist is an innovative manager with a propensity for producing management artworks.