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Prelims

Aesthetics and Style in Strategy

ISBN: 978-1-80043-237-6, eISBN: 978-1-80043-236-9

ISSN: 0742-3322

Publication date: 9 November 2020

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(2020), "Prelims", Cattani, G., Ferriani, S., Godart, F. and Sgourev, S.V. (Ed.) Aesthetics and Style in Strategy (Advances in Strategic Management, Vol. 42), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. i-xx. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0742-332220200000042012

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2021 Emerald Publishing Limited.

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Aesthetics and Style in Strategy

Series Title Page

Advances in Strategic Management

Series Editor: Gino Cattani

Previous Volumes:

Volume 20: Geography and Strategy
Edited by: Joel A. C. Baum and Olav Sorenson
Volume 21: Business Strategy over the Industry Lifecycle
Edited by: Joel A. C. Baum and Anita M. Mcgahan
Volume 22: Strategy Process
Edited by: Gabriel Szulanski, Joe Porac and Yves Doz
Volume 23: Ecology and Strategy
Edited by: Joel A. C. Baum, Stanislav D. Dobrey and Arien van Witteloostuijn
Volume 24: Real Options Theory
Edited by: Jeffrey J. Reuer and Tony W. Tong
Volume 25: Network Strategy
Edited by: Joel A. C. Baum and Tim J. Rowley
Volume 26: Economic Institutions of Strategy
Edited by: Jackson A. Nickerson and Brian S. Silverman
Volume 27: Globalization of Strategy Research
Edited by: Joel A. C. Baum and Joseph Lampel
Volume 28: Project-based organizing and Strategic Management
Edited by: Gino Cattani, Simone Ferriani, Lars Frederiksen and Florian Taube
Volume 29: History and Strategy
Edited by: Steven J. Kahl, Brian S. Silverman and Michael A. Cusumano
Volume 30: Collaboration and Competition in Business Ecosystems
Edited by: Ron Adner, Joanne E. Oxley and Brian S. Silverman
Volume 31: Finance and Strategy
Edited by: Belen Villalonga
Volume 32: Cognition and Strategy
Edited by: Giovanni Gavetti and William Ocasio
Volume 33: Business Models and Modelling
Edited by: Charles Baden-Fuller and Vincent Mangematin
Volume 34: Strategy Beyond Markets
Edited by: John M. Figueiredo, Michael Lenox, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Richard G. Vanden Bergh
Volume 35: Resource Redeployment and Corporate Strategy
Edited by: Timothy B. Folta, Constance E. Helfat and Samina Karim
Volume 36: Geography, Location, and Strategy
Edited by: Juan Alcacer, Bruce Kogut, Catherine Thomas, Bernard Yin Yeung
Volume 37: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Platforms
Edited by: Jeffrey Furman, Annabelle Gawer, Brian S. Silverman and Scott Stern
Volume 38: Sustainability, Stakeholder Governance & Corporate Social Responsibility
Edited by: Sinziana Dorobantu, Ruth V. Aguilera, Jiao Luo and Frances J. Milliken
Volume 39: Behavioral Strategy in Perspective
Edited by: Mie Augier, Christina Fang, Violina Rindova
Volume 40: Organization Design
Edited by: John Joseph, Oliver Baumann, Richard Burton, Kannan Srikanth
Volume 41: Employee Inter- and Intra-Firm Mobility: Taking Stock of What We Know, Identifying Novel Insights and Setting a Theoretical and Empirical Agend
Edited by: Bruno Cirillo and Daniel Tzabbar

Title Page

Advances in Strategic Management

Volume 42

Aesthetics and Style in Strategy

Edited by

Gino Cattani

Leonard N. Stern School of Business, USA

Simone Ferriani

University of Bologna, Italy

Frédéric Godart

INSEAD, France

Stoyan V. Sgourev

ESSEC Business School, France

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2021

Copyright © 2021 Emerald Publishing Limited.

1. Introduction ‘The Aesthetic Turn in Strategy: Creating Value with Style’ © Gino Cattani, Simone Ferriani, Frédéric Godart, and Stoyan V. Sgourev. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This chapter is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial & non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. 2. Chapter 6 ‘Tell Me Your Story and I Will Tell Your Sales: A Topic Model Analysis of Narrative Style and Firm Performance on Etsy’ © Donato Cutolo, Simone Ferriani, and Gino Cattani. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This chapter is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial & non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode.

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ISBN: 978-1-80043-237-6 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-236-9 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-238-3 (Epub)

ISSN: 0742-3322 (Series)

List of Figures and Tables

Figure 1. Different Combinations of Form and Content Dimensions of Style Configure Coherent and Incoherent Style Typologies
Figure 2. Outline of the Computer-assisted Routine Used to Manipulate Photographic Material
Figure 3. Map of Electronic Music Sub-genres, with Values Assigned to the Main Sub-genres in the Sample
Figure 4. Distribution of Relevant Measures and Style Typologies in the Sample
Figure 5. Decile-wise Ranking Distribution of Each Style Typology (Percentages Represent within-group Proportions)
Figure 1. Hypothesized Impact of Aesthetic and Technological Code Complexity on Lay and Professional Evaluation
Figure 1. US Search Rates for ‘Heels’, ‘Pumps’, ‘Slides’ and ‘Sneakers’ (2008–2018; Google shopping searches)
Figure 2. US Search Rates for ‘Heels’ and ‘Fashion Show’ (2008–2018; Google Web Searches)
Figure 3. Shoes Used (Sample), Studies 1 and 3
Figure 4. Perceived Power and Perceived Status as a Function of Shoe Style, Study 1
Figure 5. Choice Set, Study 2
Figure 6. Action Orientation Score as a Function of Shoe Style and Social Visibility, Study 3
Figure 7. Abstraction Score as a Function of Shoe Style and Social Visibility, Study 3
Figure 1. Social Network Structure of the Group
Figure 2. Semantic Content Shared with Integrator
Figure 3. Semantic Content Shared with Critic and Integrator. Link width scaled according to frequency of association;complexity of the component reduced in the mainpicture, full component displayed in the lower right
Figure 1. Topics Distribution and Narrative Conventionality: An Illustration of Two Cases
Figure 2. Narrative Conventionality – Craft Items Sold Relationship. Marginal Effects Estimated by Keeping the Other Covariates at Their Means
Figure 1. Predicted Probabilities of Consumer Evaluations for Movies During Opening Week of Release
Figure 2. Predicted Probabilities of Consumer Evaluations for Movies after Opening Week of Release
Figure 1. Imperfect Imitation in the Semi-periphery
Table 1. Overview of the Regression Models Used to Test the Hypotheses (Method, Dependent Variable and Main Regressors)
Table 2. Descriptive Statistics and Pearson Correlation Matrix (N = 100)
Table 3. Odds of Being Visually Garish
Table 4. Influence of Style Typologies on the Likelihood (Model 6 and 7) and Progressive Odds (Model 8) of Occupying a Higher Position in the Ranking
Table 5. Quantile Regression Predicting the Likelihood of Occupying a Higher Position in the Ranking
Table 1. Descriptive Statistics and Pearson Correlation Coefficients
Table 2. Multilevel Mixed-Effects Logistic Regression on Public Awards (Evaluation by Laypersons)
Table 3. Multilevel Mixed-Effects Logistic Regression on Professional Awards (Evaluation by Professionals)
Table 1. Individual Intensity of Communication
Table 2. Contribution to Semantic Content
Table 3. Properties of Semantic Content with and without Contribution by One of the Leaders
Table 4. Properties of Semantic Content with Two Leaders and without Leaders
Table 1. Two Examples of Narrative-topics Distribution
Table 2. Descriptive Statistics and Correlation Matrix
Table 3. Negative Binomial Regression Models
Table 1. Fashion Houses in Paris and Milan (Sponsoring at Least Five Catwalks from 1999 to 2007)
Table 2. Summary Statistics of Independent Variables
Table 3. Elements of the Style Genome: Continuous Variable Coding (By Garment Type)
Table 4. Elements of the Style Genome: Discrete Variable Coding (For All Garments)
Table 5. Average Style Distance as a Function of Year Span
Table 6. Logistic Regression of Review Meanrating on Designer's (or Design Team) Change (N = 525)
Table 7. Within Designer Regression of Review Meanrating on Individual Designer's Style Distance between Two Seasons
Table 8. Across Designers Regression of Other Designers' Reviews on Individual Designer's Style Distance between Two Seasons
Table 1. Movie Descriptive Statistics and Correlation Matrix for Selected Variables
Table 2. Consumer Evaluations for Movies During Opening Week of Release
Table 3. Consumer Evaluations for Movies During Opening Week of Release
Table 4. Count of Consumer Evaluations for Movies
Table 5. Consumer Evaluation for Movies During Opening Week of Release with Demand Residual
Table 6. Consumer Evaluation for Movies after Opening Week of Release with Demand Residual
Table 1. Sources and Signals of Legitimacy
Table 2. Research Participants

About the Authors

Lalin Anik is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. As an expert in the science of behavior change, she combines insights from psychology and economics to tackle big business and societal problems. Lalin has worked closely and consulted with major companies, organizations and governments to design novel social interventions that help consumers, employees and communities make better decisions and lead healthier, happier and more productive lives. As an award-winning teacher, Lalin was named as the “2019 MBA Professor of the Year” as well as one of the “2019 Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors” by Poets & Quants. She holds a doctorate of business administration degree in marketing from Harvard Business School and a B.A. degree in psychology and business from Brandeis University

Artem Antonyuk, MA, is an affiliated Researcher at the Centre for German and European Studies, St. Petersburg University. His research interests include freedom of speech, internet governance and applications of semantic network analysis in the study of knowledge creation.

Nikita Basov is both Senior Researcher in Sociology and Scientific Manager of the Centre for German and European Studies at St. Petersburg University. He investigates the fundamental principles of socio-cultural microdynamics. The main method is multidimensional – socio-semantic and socio-material – network analysis, with a particular focus on mixing ethnography with statistical modelling. His papers appeared in Social Networks, Poetics, and American Journal of Cultural Sociology. He is also the organizer of the conference series ‘Networks in the Global World’ in St. Petersburg and of ‘St Petersburg Summer School on Network Analysis’.

Gino Cattani is Professor of Strategy and Organization Theory at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He received his PhD in business administration from the Wharton School of Management, University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on creativity, innovation, and social evaluation. His work has been featured in leading academic journals such American Sociological Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Strategy Science, Research Policy and Industrial and Corporate Change. He won the 2012 Richard Nelson Award. He served as Senior Editor at Organization Science, and is currently Associate Editor at Management Science and Industrial and Corporate Change, and the Editor for Advances in Strategic Management.

Paola Cillo is an Associate Professor of Management, Vice Director of the Department of Management and Technology at Bocconi University, and Director of the Concentration in Luxury Business Management of the MBA Program at the SDA Bocconi School of Management. She is also a member of the Gucci Research Lab, funded by Gucci at Bocconi University and focused on research on innovation in creative organizations. Her research examines the dynamics of innovation in creative industries, investors’ reaction to innovation, and big data and innovation. She received a PhD in Management from Bocconi University. Her research has been published in leading international journals, such as Journal of Marketing, Research Policy, Journal of Product Innovation Management.

Kim Claes is an Assistant Professor of management at the Sungkyunkwan Graduate School of Business. He received his PhD from INSEAD. His research interests include venture capital, blockchain, and luxury industries, with a particular emphasis on the socio-structural determinants of prices and valuation in those markets.

Donato Cutolo is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bologna and a PhD candidate in Management at the University of Bologna. He has been a visiting scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research touches upon several areas at the intersection of economic sociology, entrepreneurship, and strategic management, including: (1) social evaluation processes of atypical and unconventional actors; (2) narratives and linguistic; (3) digital platforms and entrepreneurial dynamics. In his latest project, he is using a mix of quantitative analysis and topic models to investigate how atypical crafters selling their products on digital platforms can leverage different narrative strategies to elicit market attention.

David Dubois (PhD, Kellogg School of Management) is an Associate Professor and the Cornelius Grupp Fellow in Digital Analytics for Consumer Behaviour at INSEAD. David’s expertise bridges “big” data analytics, digital transformation and luxury and fashion brand management. A 2017 Young Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute, David is among the top 40 bestselling case authors worldwide and his cases on L'Oréal Paris’ big data and analytics strategy and the customer experience makeover at AccorHotels won the 2017 and 2018 best marketing case awards, respectively. A passionate educator, he helps professionals and organizations to leverage style and status dynamics in the marketplace to build long-term competitive advantages. He has designed, directed and delivered dozens of executive education programs for companies such as Cartier, Google, or Moët Hennessy to name a few and also teaches MBA electives on Value Creation in Luxury and Fashion and (2) Digital and Social Media Strategy. A global citizen, David grew up in France and has lived in the USA (Chicago) and Japan. He currently lives in Singapore with his wife and two kids.

Micki Eisenman is Senior Lecturer in the Organizational Behavior and Strategy groups at TheHebrew University’s Jerusalem School of Business, and was a Visiting Professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at The University of Maryland. Prior to that, she was Assistant Professor at the City University of New York’s Baruch College. She received her undergraduate degree in English and Communications from The Hebrew University, her MBA. from Tulane University, and her PhD in Management from Columbia University. Her research applies a constructivist perspective that examines how material forms shape meaning in institutions and how new meanings emerge in the context of organizations’ aesthetic innovation efforts. In other work, she examined how organizations communicate by using aesthetic design. Her work has appeared in the Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management Studies, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Long Range Planning, Human Relations, and the Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship.

Simone Ferriani is Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Bologna and Honorary Professor at Cass Business School. His research interests include entrepreneurship, creativity, and social networks. He has published his work in journal articles, books and book chapters. Recent publications have focused on processes of social evaluation, the origin of entrepreneurship and the social side of creativity. He is a lifetime member of Clare-Hall College in Cambridge.

Giovanni Formilan is Lecturer in Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh Business School, UK. His research focuses on creativity and innovation dynamics, with particular attention on the processes of development, classification and reception of creative identities. His interest in diverse analytical strategies has led him to develop research agendas that involve a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches for data analysis. He received his PhD in General Management from the University of Bologna, and has been a research fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, UK.

Frédéric Godart is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD in France. He received his PhD from Columbia University in the City of New York. He holds an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge (Trinity College) in the UK, an MSc in Management from Sciences Po Paris, and was a fellow of the ÉcoleNormaleSupérieure in France. His research explores the dynamics of the creative industries and has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal among others. He is the author of Unveiling Fashion (2012, Palgrave-MacMillan).

Iina Hellsten is an Associate Professor at the Corporate Communication program group of the Amsterdam School of Communication Research, ASCoR. Her research focuses on the dynamics of communication networks, in particular in social media settings. Previously, she has hold positions as a post-doctoral researcher at ASCoR, researcher at the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and an assistant and associate professor at the VrijeUniversiteit Amsterdam. Her work has been published in communication sciences (e.g. in Science Communication, New Media & Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication) and in information sciences (e.g. in JASIST and Internet Research).

Alexander D. Hoppe is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research covers social psychology, administration, and the economic mediations of creative work. His ethnographic dissertation analyzes organizational routines and ambidexterity across the apparel global value chain, centering on first-tier suppliers in India.

Candace Jones is the Chair of Global Creative Enterprise at the University of Edinburgh Business School. She has published in top journals on architecture, cities, film and music, using theoretical lenses of vocabularies, institutional theory, materiality and social networks. She was Chair of Organization and Management Theory division of the Academy of Management from 2012–2016. She co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries (2015). She is on two U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council grants: (1) Creative Informatics: Data Driven Innovation for the Creative Industries led by the University of Edinburgh; and (2) Policy and Evidence Center for Creative Industries led by NESTA. From 2014-2016, along with co-investigators she was awarded a grant of $797,529 to study "The Impact of Material Artifacts and Visual Representations on the Institutionalization of Innovations"bythe Danish Council for Independent Research.

Gianni Lorenzoni is Professor Emeritus of Strategic Management University of Bologna and Honorary Visiting Professor at City, University of London. His research interests include strategic networks, design driven innovation, industry emergence and genealogical theories of entrepreneurship. Prof. Lorenzoni was the founding president of Bologna Business School (2000–2014), founding president of AlmaCube (2000–2010), vice president of the Italian Academy of Management (1991–1998) and chair of the Management Department of the University of Bologna (1991–1994). He served as advisory board member of several multinational companies (1983–2006).

Joseph C. Nunes is Professor of Marketing at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of business and holds the Joseph A. DeBell Endowed Professorship in Business Administration. He is widely known for his research on cultural goods including music, luxury goods and fashion, as well as his work on authenticity, loyalty programs, branding, and pricing. Prof. Nunes has published numerous papers in the top marketing journals including the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. He has also published in journals outside of marketing such as Musicae Scientiae and Psychological Science. Prof. Nunes has written for the Harvard Business Review and other publications targeted to practitioners. He currently serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Prof. Nunes received his PhD in Marketing as well as his MBA from the University of Chicago.

Virginia Postrel is an Author and Bloomberg Opinion Columnist with a particular interest in the intersection of culture and commerce. Her latest book is The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (Basic Books, 2020). She is the author of The Power of Glamour (Simon & Schuster, 2013), The Substance of Style (HarperCollins, 2003), and The Future and Its Enemies (Free Press, 1998). She lives in Los Angeles.

Emanuela Prandelli is an Associate Professor of Management at Bocconi University, and LVMH Associate Professor of Fashion and Luxury Management at Bocconi University. She is the Director of the Master in Fashion, Design, and Experience Management (MAFED). Her research focus regards fashion and luxury management, collaborative marketing, social media marketing, e-business, and the process of innovation. She published several international articles in leading international journals, such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Organization Studies, and Journal of Business Venturing. She received her PhD in Management from Bocconi University.

Davide Ravasi is Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the UCL School of Management, University College London. His research primarily examines how culture, identity, history and memory affect strategic and organizational changes, or are affected by them. He is interested more generally in cultural processes shaping entrepreneurship, design, and innovation.

Daniel B. Sands is a doctoral candidate in strategy and organization theory at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University. His primary research interests include the role of third parties in shaping market outcomes, and in particular the role of third party evaluators in the creation and capture of value. In his work, he addresses topics such as evaluation, valuation, price, competition, and innovation.

Irene Scopelliti is Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science at City, University of London. Her research examines the influence of a variety of psychological factors on human judgments and decisions. She received a PhD in Management from Bocconi University, and was previously a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research has been published in leading journals including Management Science, Psychological Science, Journal of Consumer Psychology, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and has been featured by major news organizations including Forbes, Time Magazine, BBC News, and the New York Times.

Stoyan V. Sgourev is Professor of Management at ESSEC Business School, France. He received his PhD in sociology from Stanford University and was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT Sloan. His research interests include innovation and evaluation practices in the creative industries and network dynamics in historical perspective. His work has been featured in leading organizational and sociological journals, such as American Sociological Review, Academy of Management Journal and Organization Science.

Tal Simons is a Professor of Organization Theory at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. She received her PhD from the ILR School, Cornell University. Her research interests include creative processes and dynamics, and aesthetic innovation, the motivations and implications of organizations’ use of symbols eliciting time and history, as well as questions pertaining to contestation and ideology. Tal employs qualitative and quantitative methodologies and studies varied contexts including the cultural sector (e.g., artistic dance), contested industries (e.g., tobacco industry) and organizational misconduct (e.g., corporate fraud). Her work has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, and Organization Science among others.

Antonio Strati, Senior Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Italy, and ChercheurAssocié at the Centre de RechercheenGestion (i3-CRG), CNRS, ÉcolePolytechnique, IP Paris, is both a sociologist and an art photographer. He is a founder member of the Research Unit on Communication, Organizational Learning and Aesthetics (RUCOLA) at Trento and also a founder member of the SCOS, the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism. His book Organization and Aesthetics (Sage, 1999), one of the founding texts of the field, has been translated in several languages. He is also author of Theory and Method in Organization Studies (Sage, 2000) – published also in Italian (NIS, 1996; Carocci, 2004) – and co-author (with Silvia Gherardi) of Learning and Knowing in Practice-Based Studies (Elgar, 2012). In 2018 he co-edited a special issue of Organization Studies on “Organizational creativity, play and entrepreneurship”, and has just published Organizational Theory and Aesthetic Philosophies (Routledge, 2019). His artistic research in conceptual photography, Photopoesia, has been published in books and photographic journals, and collected at museums and international collections.

Foreword

It is a significant coincidence and a propitious auspice that the publication of the ASTM 42 volume is devoted to the role of aesthetics and style in management. The volume marks the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus movement, born in Dessau (Germany), which had among his key representatives the likes of Klee, Kandinsky, or Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus founder. The Bauhaus was an artistic and social movement that played a crucial role in taking aesthetics and design into everyday life worldwide. When Hitler took power in Germany, a diaspora of Bauhaus pioneering thinkers (Gropius, Van der Rohe, Brauer, among others) moved to United Kingdom, United States, and Israel. The circulation of the founding fathers made the vision and practices of the school spread all over the world, attracting several acolytes. The followers were able to learn the lessons of modernity, marrying beauty with soberness, functionality with form. The influence of this movement was strong, triggering multiple and unexpected outcomes across a variety of industries and domains. The Bauhaus left a profound imprint on the labour market, shaping a generation of painters, designers and architects, and disseminating its footprints in the activities and products of scores of design-driven companies, contributing to the appreciation of style as a canon of practice across a wide variety of organizational endeavours.

Over the past decade, organizational and management scholarship has been paying increasing attention to the domain of aesthetics, related to judgements of style and beauty. Strategy scholars have exposed the central role of design choices for coupling function and aesthetic form to fuel competitive advantage, and design-driven innovation has emerged as a distinct category to evoke the combination of form and function in product market settings. This scholarship has taught us that great strategies have great style. They thrive on the dual aesthetics of the poetry of the image and the prose of numbers. They stem from long term aesthetic commitments that shape the whole organization, its vision, workforce and operations, upstream and downstream the value chain. If we asked a group of design experts to name a bunch of companies that are a good representative of this aesthetic commitment towards marrying business and beauty, they would probably mention such iconic brands as Herman Miller, Apple, Alessi, Vitra, Bang & Olufsen, Swatch and others. What do these companies have in common? I think what they share is the devotion to a stylistic canon.

By canon, I mean a combination of rules, principles and practices that inform the company's organizational routines and strategic choices. With no ambition to comprehensiveness, I wish to highlight 4 features of this canon – first, the use of repositories of styles. The careful creation of a collection of artifacts and objects, ultimately called the museum, is almost invariably a distinctive feature of aesthetically oriented companies. Corporate museums are not primarily conceived for the visitors, who usually are very few and sometimes do not even pay the ticket, but they are working spaces for absorbing, codifying and diffusing the insights springing out from the collections. The Vitra museum space, for instance, is central to encircling employees into an aesthetic atmosphere that imprints itself on the company identity. At Alessi, the ‘museum’ is a working space for the articulation of new projects and the sedimentation of old ones into the organizational memory of the company. Second, the relentless search for and cultivation of designers and other aesthetically inclined creative talents. An exemplar in this respect is ‘the tea and coffee award’ by Alessi, a competition among artists to design a tea and coffee cup, eventually produced in limited series. The goal of the contest is not the product, but the identification of talents to recruit. The care for talent is complemented by great emphasis on space, ambiance and atmosphere. Swatch deliberately deploys a small team of creatives in iconic cities such as Venice, New York, Milan renowned for their aesthetic appeal. Third, a strong aesthetic culture which is often nurtured through collective rituals that unite people in the pursuit of beauty. In these contexts, professionals often work in ‘clan-like’ organizational structures that are kept together not only by the materiality of their working life but by their passion for higher pursuits, reflecting a urge to be surrounded by the aesthetic sensations of beauty, not as a substitute for the rigors of analysis but as a property of them. Fourth, a strong focus on the ‘flagship store’, typically designed by archistars, to convey symbolic meaning and identity claims. The store encapsulates the company style and makes it easily referable to the company image. At the same time, it is a purveyor of the company aesthetic commitment that has an immediate resonance with its visitors.

Aesthetics shows rather than tells delights rather than instructs. The effects are immediate, perceptual and emotional. Building a stylistic canon requires going beyond the utilitarian rationalization of aesthetics. It requires honouring beauty not only as an instrument of utility but also as a fundamental human aspiration because, as Jim March reminded us, ‘profoundly useful ideas about management and organizations are more likely to come from the playful pursuit of artistry in ideas than from an ambition to be helpful to managers or their social overseers’ (March 2013).

Gianni Lorenzoni

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