Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Music can be heard from the street below. It is sweet music and it is played well but it never stops. The walls and windows fail to block it out; they merely reduce its volume. The person playing the music has the right to do so; it is his job. But the two women inside the building at work in the secretary’s office are also entitled not to be disturbed. The music is sweet. but the initial pleasure that it aroused has faded and the pleasant surprise felt by the two secretaries when they first heard it has now changed into obsession. They confide in me their secret wish that the music would disappear and that the player would disappear along with it. This therefore is aesthetics in organizational life: sweetness and obses- sion the feeling of pleasure and destructive desire the source of conflict the origin of problems of difficult solution even in a socially constructed reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Knorr-Cetina 1994; Sch?tz 1962 1964) like the one described here: on the one side of the wall two women working in a second-floor office; on the other side of the wall down in the street a young musician busking as he does every day for the small change given by generous passers-by. This is reality socially constructed by the intentional action (Weber 1922) of both the young busker and the two secretaries and it appropriately exemplifies Peter Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s defini- tion (1966: 13) of ‘reality’ as ‘a quality’ distinctive of those phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot “wish them away”)’; however much they may want to the two secretaries can do nothing to blot the music out. They cannot stop their ears from hearing as they can prevent their eyes from seeing by lowering their eyelids. The problem obviously is not an immediately organizational one. Instead it is an aesthetic problem in the precise sense that it concerns a human sensory faculty namely hearing and a human faculty of judgement namely the aesthetic judgement whereby what we perceive through our senses may provoke pleasure or repugnance strike us as palatable or disgusting surprise and intrigue us or obsess us and pollute our everyday working lives. It is a problem that highlights the importance of also being able to suspend rather than activate our sensory faculties and thus no longer hear the sweet melody that haunts us; anaesthetizing our senses therefore so that we are no longer aesthetically aware of the reality that surrounds us or at least mixing our sensory faculties with other sources of aesthetic knowl edge so that their sensitivity is blunted. (LL)