"The Real Affects of Change": A Review
Organizational Aesthetics Cover Issue Vol. 8(1)
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Keywords

review
mergers

How to Cite

VickeryJ. (2019). "The Real Affects of Change": A Review. Organizational Aesthetics, 8(1), 26-29. Retrieved from https://oa.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/oa/article/view/98

Abstract

The subject of this project is organizational mergers -- portrayed in terms of human experience (not the management, financial and organisational processes that we normally observe, and have endlessly explained to us, as the three categories of merger). Human experience in toto, of course, is not a stable object of inquiry, or if it is, it only becomes "stable" (open for scrutiny) through the imposition of scientific procedures of theoretical dissection and analytical methods. Yet, there remains the question  --  what about human experience as "a whole" or "as such"? What about that huge world of near-existential feeling that suddenly opens up on losing a job, having one's career buckled, or becoming the inadvertent victim of some corporate shift in priority? The realm of the "subjective" as so often dismissed as relative, endlessly variable and mutable, and not scientifically significant (unless it is made concrete in some way, through the imposition of scientific theory or method -- as it has with neuropsychology, or even confessional religion, or literary tradition and its fine conventions of diction and articulation). Rationalised theory and analysis -- like archaeology -- destroys its object in the very act of interrogation. How does experience itself become both subject and object of inquiry -- where the experience is preserved in the act of analysis?

As an artistic project, this sculptural inquiry into corporate mergers, both defines and preserves something of the human experience of mergers -- in a way that is coherent and explicitly pertaining to a set of objective conditions (the total reconfiguration of the context and thus value of one's job and labour). And as a participatory project (12 participants, all of whom experienced the individual impact of a merger), the artists (researchers) maintained a sense of the complexity and individuality of each instance as expressive of forms of human experience to which we can all relate, whether we are familiar with the organisational change of a merger or not.

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