Flesh and Blood and Action: Organisations, Learning and Aesthetics

Abstract

This paper uses a modified version of Gregory Bateson’s levels of learning (Bateson, 2000) to review data from a case study of an arts organisation, in order to contemplate a multimodal understanding of organisational learning; one that sees emotions, aesthetics and learning as complex, interactive and interdependent. Tosey and Mathison (2008) argue that this requires a framework such as Bateson’s, which differentiates between logical types, and (in its modified form) between embodied, analytic and aesthetic modes of knowing. Such a proposition starts to explode the myth of rationality in organisations and approaches which ‘propound an objective and universal interpretative key to organisational life’ (Strati, 2000: 14). `Bateson… distinguishes between process and description of process, because “our description will be in words or figures or pictures but that what we describe is going to be in flesh and blood and action”.’ (Roach & Bednar, 1997).

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