No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Finding beauty in the banal: An exploration of service work in the artful classroom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2015
Abstract
Artists derive inspiration from daily life. According to John Dewey (1934), common experiences are transformed into works of art through a process of compression and expression. Our paper adopts Dewey's frame to demonstrate that experience in the artful classroom plays a valuable role in management education. We asked students to reflect on their work experience and then to provide an artful expression of their reflections. For this exercise we defined artfulness as a process which relies on the discursive practices of satire, and in particular irony and parody. Offering a service management class as an exemplar we demonstrate the use of these rhetorical techniques as reflective learning tools. A class of students were first prompted to consider their common experiences as both customers and service providers, and were then asked to create an ironic artefact. Our paper, which analyses a cartoon sequence produced by students in response to this assignment and in which they parody the fast-food service experience, illustrates how a business studies classroom can be transformed into an artful space.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management 2008
References
Bohman, J (1996) Public deliberation: Pluralism, complexity, and democracy, Cambridge MA, MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hochschild, AR (1983) The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling, Berkeley CA, University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hogben, LT (1949) From cave painting to comic strip: A kaleidoscope of human communication, New York, Chanticleer Press.Google Scholar
Jameson, F (1981) The political unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act, Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Korczynski, M and Ott, U (2004) When production and consumption meet: Cultural contradictions and the enchanting myth of customer sovereignty, Journal of Management Studies 41(4): 575–599.Google Scholar
Korczynski, M, Shire, K, Frenkel, S and Tam, M (2000) Service work in consumer capitalism: Customers, control and contradictions, Work, Employment and Society 14(4): 669–687.Google Scholar
Kosnoski, J (2005) Artful discussion: John Dewey's classroom as a model of deliberative association, Political Theory 33(5): 654–677.Google Scholar
Leidner, R (1993) Fast food, fast talk: Service work and the routinization of everyday life, Berkeley CA, University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mintzberg, H (2003) Managers, not MBA's: A hard look at the soft practice of managing and management development, San Francisco CA, Berrett-Koehler.Google Scholar
Parker, M (2006) The counter culture of organisation: Towards a cultural studies of representations of work, Consumption, Markets & Culture 9(1): 1–15.Google Scholar
Rehn, A (2002) Pretty ugly: Notes on the moral economy of method, Ephemera: Critical Dialogues on Organisation 2(1): 43–52.Google Scholar
Rorty, R (1989) Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rosenthal, P, Peccei, R and Hill, S (2001). Academic discourses of the customer: ‘Sovereign beings’, ‘management accomplices’ or ‘people like us’? In Sturdy, A, Grugulis, I and Willmott, H (Eds) Customer service: Empowerment and entrapment, pp18–37, Basingstoke, Palgrave.Google Scholar
Sabin, R (1996) Comics, comix & graphic novels: A history of comic art, London, Phaidon.Google Scholar
Sayers, J and Monin, N (2007) Love® A critical reading of Lovemarks, Journal of Organizational Change Management 20(5): 671–684.Google Scholar
Sheinberg, E (2000) Irony, satire, parody and the grotesque in the music of Shostakovich: A theory of musical incongruities, Aldershot, Ashgate.Google Scholar
Sturdy, A (1998) Customer care in a consumer society: Smiling and sometimes meaning it? Organization 5(1): 27–53.Google Scholar