Aestho-Instrumental Coordination and the Ethic-Aesthetic Vision

Starting from a perspective of organization coordination as an essentially emergent phenomenon, anchored on common understandings and shared meanings, in this chapter it is argued that there is much in common between this perspective and our own conception of organization design-as-meaning. Also, attending to the cognitive and embodied characteristics of sensemaking, it can be assumed that common understandings and shared meanings also benefit from sensory or aesthetic knowledge, and that these provide a broader aestho-instrumental perspective to the phenomenon of coordination in organizations. This perspective is supported by authors who highlight that the rational analytical (i.e., instrumental) mode and the aesthetic mode are inseparable, insofar as they are both at work when people interact with the world. In other words, instrumental and aesthetic rationality are only distinguishable analytically, because in practice they occur simultaneously when members interact inside the organization or with the environment outside. The second part of the chapter discusses the notion of ethic-aesthetic vision as a way of materializing and presenting the organization’s purpose, the assumption being that the choices of management about what to include and how to present and implement the organization’s purpose not only reinforce or inhibit the organization’s disposition towards morality and collaboration, but also determine the probability of the organization successfully reaching its social/environmental targets.