Organisational Performance: A View from the Arts

ABSTRACT This paper suggests that most understandings of organisational performance appears to be about developing a set of rules or prescriptions, that need to be followed if successful performance is to be achieved. It proposes that organisations are still attempting to apprehend and represent the world utilising strategies and understandings that were predominant in the early part of the 20th-century and thus exerted a massive influence during the infancy of management thinking. Influences, which despite their undoubted success in the past, may no longer be as appropriate for the current organisational environment. We then demonstrate how other fields, in particular literature and art have moved on from this position, suggesting that it may be possible to draw on their experiences and explorations in order to gain new understandings of organisational performance. ORGANISATIONAL PERFORMANCE: A VIEW FROM THE ARTS In the early part of the 20th-century a great upheaval took place in many fields of human endeavour, With qualities, values, or techniques that had been relied on in previous centuries to provide meaning, no longer retaining their efficacy. Traditional frames of reference such as perspective in painting, Euclidian geometry, tonality in music, temporal sequence in narrative, unvarying temporal and spatial reference frames in physics, were challenged and overthrown by new forms of understanding. We intend to suggest that this tidal wave of change has passed over most of our current understanding of organisational performance, leaving it in a stagnated pool of passe thinking. This paper proposes that organisations are still attempting to apprehend and represent the world utilising strategies and understandings that were predominant in the early part of the 20th-century and thus exerted a massive influence during the infancy of management thinking. Influences, which despite their undoubted success in the past, may no longer be as appropriate for the current organisational environment. It is intended to demonstrate how thinking in other fields have embraced new values and understandings, and have thus moved on from these outmoded forms of thought, in attempts to develop more apposite ways of engaging with the world. To do this we draw upon Stephen Kern's idea of 'conceptual distance', and Bakhtin's similar notion of 'ideological adequation' to demonstrate the values underpinning the thinking in some of these areas, and to show that they are quite different from those of most organisational thought. Kern (1983, p. 7) suggests that "there is greater conceptual distance between the thinking of an architect and that of a philosopher on a given subject than there is between the thinking of two philosophers, and I assume that any generalisations about the thinking of an age is the more persuasive the greater conceptual distance between the sources on which it is based". Thus considering thinking that is apparently, conceptually separated from each other, may allow us to identify underpinning values, that act as an aid to successful understanding in our current environment. To do this we intend to utilise the fields of painting and literary narrative, showing how their understandings have radically changed from those still in use in organisations. Drawing on this we then go on to suggest that organisations may be -able to exploit this body of knowledge in order to further its own understanding. STAGNATION The last forty years or so of Management literature demonstrates, a desire, or evidence of, a striving toward increasingly effective performance in organisations. Despite this attention it might be claimed that the whole notion of what is performance remains elusive, with few definitions which adequately encompass the character of performance in organisations. A closer examination of the management literature suggests that much of what is considered organisational performance, would be much better viewed as a feature of the measurement technique selected, and as such is better seen as part of a self-referential discourse that acts to define the object of study. …