Art to reassess the critical transformations of organisations: Challenges for management – ABRIR

Organisations today are facing critical transformations requiring approaches other than classic analytical and rationalist methods to apprehend situations and take action. One must take into account a sensible dimension – whether it be affective or political. To do so, art can be used in an active way to open up many possibilities. With the ability to reveal the complex and contradictory facets of reality or influence reality concretely, art acts as a transformative agent that remains under-explored by management sciences.
The ABRIR project aims to investigate cases of organisations facing critical transformations (restructuring, relocation, identity transformations, mergers…) using two complementary types of data: on the one hand, we will work on the basis of real case studies of artistic productions in the context of organisations facing transformations; on the other hand, we will directly analyse a series of artistic works dealing with critical transformations in organisations.
We will focus on three specific types of art forms: documentary theatre, fiction films and contemporary visual arts. This corpus of real and fictitious cases, based on various artistic approaches and types of expression, will be analysed with an innovative, collective and dialogic method of investigation – the ABCD method – fostering the comparison of interpretations and experiences.
The objective of the ABRIR project is to develop a valid art based method, which is collective and dialogical, to apprehend some implicit, diffuse and dissensual dimensions of critical transformations. This will lead to question managerial and organisational representations and practices.
This project is conducted jointly by the Most team at the DRM laboratory (Paris Dauphine University) and the Art & Flux team (Paris 1 La Sorbonne University), with the support of the M-A-I (Mutations-Anticipations-Innovations) Chair at the IAE of Paris.