Gambiarra as an Emergent Approach in the Entanglement of the Organizational Aesthetic and Technical Controversies: The Samba School Parade Case.
| Autor | Tureta, Cesar |
| Cargo | Research Article |
INTRODUCTION
The aesthetic dimension of organizations got researchers' attention in the 1990s (Gagliardi, 1990; Strati, 1996) and has since gained prominence as a way to understand organizational life (Stigliani & Ravasi, 2018; Strati, 2016; Weggeman, Lammers, & Akkerman, 2007). It draws attention from organizational studies to the sensuous experience/practice of art and how to research it (cf. Strati, 2009), focusing on actors' practical knowledge that emerges as they use their tastes and senses (Strati, 2008b).
Organizing aesthetics is not a smooth process and may be full of conflicts. Recently some researchers have identified an intricate relation between the material/technical and aesthetic dimensions, which may be based on tensions and disagreements regarding the way they are performed by actors (e.g., Austin, Hjorth, & Hessel, 2018; Puyou & Quattrone, 2018). In this sense, one of the promising fields of organizational aesthetics is the analysis of the role of artefacts in aesthetic production (see Puyou & Quattrone, 2018; Strati, 1996). However, although the aesthetic approach considers the materiality of organizational daily life (Gagliardi, 1990; Strati, 2007; Strati, 2010a), empirical studies tend to marginalize technical artefacts (Siciliano, 2016) considering its relations with the human in a separate way rather than symmetrically (Law, 1994). So, the entanglement of social and material elements (Scott & Orlikowski, 2014) and its potential conflicts have been underexplored in this field of study.
To overcome this limitation, we will use controversy analysis. Controversies are the disagreements between actors who question what was taken for granted (Venturini, 2010a). As highlighted by Venturini (2010a), controversy analysis can be used as a starting point to investigate the hidden aspects of a particular phenomenon, such as those that are rooted in sensible knowledge and agonistic/symbiotic relationship with cognitive knowledge (Strati, 2009, p. 243), once they show the social in its lively form. In this sense, linking up with actor-network theory (Latour, 2005; Law, 1992) and controversy analysis (Venturini, 2010a, 2010b; Hussenot, 2014), we aim to analyze the aesthetic and material/technical controversies surrounding the production of parade floats from a samba school.
The floats are huge 'cars' used to present an allegory throughout the parade. They are the most visible aesthetic dimension presented on the parade day. We study the floats' production from a samba school in the city of Sao Paulo. In recent years, the demand for high visual performance at the carnival (Duarte, 2013) and the competition between samba schools have grown rapidly, bringing greater attention to the aesthetic dimension details during the parade day (Rosa, 2013). Therefore, samba schools are constrained to enchant viewers and jurors, expending a large number of resources that are not always available at the time of producing the floats. To achieve high performance in the carnival project under time and resource constraints, creativity and inventive solutions are needed both to solve the problems and controversies that arise throughout the production of floats and to develop a charming parade.
The samba school parade is an annual project that involves typical elements of project management such as time, cost, scope, and quality objectives (Muller, Drouin, & Sankaran, 2019). Specifically, our investigation focuses on the aesthetic dimension of project life--"ordinary beauty but also ordinary ugliness; the sublime as well as the disgusting; the elegant as well as the grotesque" (Strati, 2010a, p. 80). Once these aspects related to the aesthetic dimension are evident in samba schools' context, we can obtain relevant insights into the phenomenon under analysis (Siggelkow, 2007). We identified the employment of gambiarra as an unconventional use of technical knowledge to solve emergent organizing problems. This element links the technical and aesthetic dimensions of the carnival production and helps samba school members deal with disagreements between them.
The paper presents two contributions. First, we contribute to the literature of organizational aesthetics by developing the concept of gambiarra as a way to solve controversies between the aesthetic and technical dimensions. Gambiarra involves the use of sensible knowledge (Gherardi, Nicolini, & Strati, 2007; Strati, 2016) arising from actors' practice to produce an original and creative solution (Amabile & Pratt, 2016) in situations where there are time and resource constraints, as well as different interests at stake. More specifically, we add the notion of gambiarra to a new stream of project management research that seeks to discuss the role of aesthetics in this field by extending the scope of the investigation beyond the rational and analytical focus (Hoorn & Whitty, 2016). Second, we show that controversies analysis is an interesting tool for studying organizational aesthetics, as through them researchers can easily identify a starting point to map the network (Venturini, 2010a) and an association (Latour, 2005) of heterogeneous actors involved in the phenomena under analysis. Aesthetics is not a smooth issue in organizations, but one that is subject to multiple controversies.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Organizational aesthetics
The organizational aesthetics approach emerged in the 1990s (Strati, 2008a). This approach is an alternative way of understanding organizational life through the feelings, desires, and tastes of individuals (Gagliardi, 2006; Strati, 2010a). Aesthetics deals with the knowledge produced by sensory experiences (Taylor & Hansen, 2005) that vary among individuals as they make judgments using their own senses (Strati, 2008b; Stigliani & Ravasi, 2018). Aesthetics can be understood as a form of organizational knowledge (Stephens & Boland, 2015; Strati, 1996); of knowing by acting, since "it requires the active (conscious or otherwise) participation of whoever is involved in managing as designing" (Strati, 2005a, p. 920). It is related to criteria used to judge (Taylor & Hansen, 2005) what is ugly or beautiful according to individuals' tastes (Strati, 2010a).
The research subjects of organizational aesthetics bring forward partial/particular representations of organizational phenomena, making "it legitimate to have conversations about how it feels to be in an organization" (Taylor, 2002, p. 838. In these terms, aesthetic experiences differ in organizations leading to a constant dynamic of judgment and negotiation around what is beautiful/grotesque, that is, "organizational aesthetics resists deterministic definitions" (Strati, 2010a, p. 82). This is the case of this particular samba school, whose knowledge-creation process cannot be described only by the dominant logic-analytic paradigms. The sensible knowledge emerges from individuals' aesthetic judgment (Gherardi, et al., 2007; Strati, 2016) concerning material elements of their organizing activities (Puyou & Quattrone, 2018). This sheds light on the organizational artefacts (Strati, 2007).
As stated by Strati (2007), "the 'materiality' of everyday life highlights quotidian social practices in organizational contexts (Strati, 2007, p. 65)" and its aesthetics can bring organizational knowledge into being (Strati, 1996). New ideas can be defined and understood through artefacts (Boxenbaum, Jones, Meyer, & Svejenova, 2018), which are products that can only become perceptible through human senses (Gagliardi, 1990). Thoughts and speeches disappear easily; on the other hand, material lasts (Gagliardi, 2006) and travels from a place to another carrying and transforming meanings and relationships (Latour, 2005). Therefore, organizational knowledge is not only mental but also material (Gherardi, et al., 2007; Strati, 2008a). It is embedded "in the relationships between it and the organizational artefacts in use" (Strati, 2010a, p. 881).
For example, Strati (1996) analyzed how the chair provides different connotations for an organization since it can indicate the level of the position in the organizational hierarchy or the type of activity that is being conducted in a given space. Puyou and Quattrone (2018) studied aesthetic codes in the history of accounting from textual, visual, and material artefacts. The authors show that these elements help practitioners establish and maintain ties between them and to acquire legitimacy in society. Stigliani and Ravasi (2018) discuss how design professionals express and share their aesthetic experiences from intuitive judgment to more deliberate elaboration of ideas embodied in artefacts, indicating experience and judgment as two distinctive elements of organizational aesthetics (Strati, 2009).
Artefacts are a bricolage and a combination of different models of various materials, remaining malleable even after its design has been finished (Weick, 2003). In this sense, they are a pathway of actions (Gagliardi, 1990): they have the power to lead and "structure sensory experience and enlarge or narrow the range of behavior that is materially possible" (Gagliardi, 2006, p. 708).
Action is the result of the association between humans and non-humans (Callon, 1986; Latour, 2005). Assuming these assumptions, we can benefit from actor-network theory and controversy analysis to bring heterogeneous relationships to the forefront of organizational aesthetics.
Actor-network theory and organizational aesthetics
Actor-network theory (ANT) allows us to analyze cases in which the separation between humans and non-humans is unclear and actors have various forms (Callon, 1999). The fundamental question for actor-network studies is not how the social is formed, but how things and people connect (Latour, 2005; Czarniawska, 2006). For ANT, organizations are the assemblage of a set of technical and social elements, which should be analyzed in the same terms (Hassard, Law, & Lee...
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