Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a flurry of experimentation with processes that bring people, products and practices from the world of the arts into organizations of all kinds around the world (Darsø 2004; Berthoin Antal 2009; Laaksonen 2011; Schiuma 2011). The primary drivers behind these experiments with artistic interventions are a sense that there is an urgent need for new and innovative ways of developing organizations and that, through their ability to engage emotional and aesthetic ways of knowing, the arts can stimulate individual and collective learning and change (Schumpeter 2011; Taylor and Ladkin 2009; Strati 2010). The objective of this chapter is to explore the connections between the values and practices of organizational development ¹ (OD), and those characterizing the emerging field of artistic interventions in organizations (sometimes also called arts-based initiatives (Schiuma 2011) or workarts (Barry and Meisiek 2010)). In doing so, the chapter demonstrates that both approaches enable assumptions and values to be revealed and thus worked with in explicit ways. However, the chapter also shows that artistic interventions can run the risk of allowing vital values and assumptions to remain invisible, and thus they may not fully realize their potential power as catalysts for change in organizations.