Poetic Materialism under Aesthetic Capitalism: Phenomenological Aesthetics of Corporate Social Responsibility: A Dufrennian Approach to Organizations

Abstract

In our contemporary economy, capitalist modes of production increasingly rely on a multitude of technology-driven processes and practices expressed by an expansion of aesthetics — that which refers to artistic production or concern for beauty. From flashy front shops and screens, wireless phones and speakers, intelligent devices and machines, companies have nowadays recourse to an unmeasurable multitude of ways to use aesthetic tools and artefacts to shape their identities and drive their internal processes. The impact of corporate aesthetic production in shaping the common collective imaginaries is unprecedented and the phenomena has grown of interest among social scientists and philosophers from the second half of the 20th century onwards. Outlining the problematics around the phenomena, here approached via the understudied perspective of "Aesthetic Corporate Social Responsibility", the thesis investigates the aesthetic practices of organizations, carried by the framework of Mikel Dufrenne, who developed a philosophy of Nature at the crossroad between aesthetics, ethics and politics. Consequently, I will apply his notion of poetic materialism to CSR studies in order to inquire into the above-cited interrelatedness in organizational practice and processes under the contemporary paradigm of aesthetic capitalism. For that, I delineate some characteristics relative to counter-aesthetics strategies by erecting the notion of Poetic CSR to later apply it throughout an illustrative empirical study. The endgoal of the research project is to contribute to the fields of business and management studies by more narrowly embracing the mission of organizational philosophy and organizational aesthetics in rehabilitating alternative and more holistic ways of understanding contemporary issues in an organizational context.