Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-04-20
Source: The Conversation – France (in French)– By Pierre-Jean Benghozi, Professor of Economics and Management, École Polytechnique
A company is said to be performing, profitable… and sometimes that it is toxic or dangerous. But it is rarer to make an aesthetic judgment. And yet, some companies are “more beautiful” than others.
This article is published as part of a partnership withFrench Management Review,who celebrated his 50th birthday in 2025.
How not to be struck by the seduction and the feeling of “formal beauty” exerted today—on analysts, economists, managers, and observers—by new technologies, unprecedented business models of platforms, the extended organizational forms of certain NGOs or mission-driven companies, rapidly growing companies or those able to reinvent themselves, and Open Innovation ecosystems built with stakeholders and by mobilizing consumers’ own production?
Recalling that these organizations are seen from an aesthetic perspective captures a dimension usually poorly taken into account by management studies. This is because the rise of rationalization starting from the industrial revolutions has created a decoupling that now seems natural between beauty on one side, and performance and rationality on the other.
The divide is not self-evident, however. This is proven in one of the sciences that appears to be the coldest and most logical: mathematics. No one is surprised that the quality of a proof is judged not only by its correctness, but also by its simplicity, brilliance, and “elegance.”
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An aesthetic question
For nearly half a century, the aesthetics of organizations has thus been a rapidly expanding field of research, which has been the subject, worldwide, of numerous articles and several special issues of major management journals. This work quickly went beyond merely highlighting a neglected aspect – the perceived beauty and/or ugliness of a company – by broadening and enriching the way organizations are accounted for.
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Beyond their mere performance, these constitute complex and formal structures, which must be analyzed as a set of elements (resources, actors, skills, etc.) connected by multiple relationships (management procedures, hierarchy, evaluation, financial dependence, commercial exchanges, technical dependence…) between different groups of actors.
In this perspective, the same objective leads everywhere to infinitely varied production structures: from large bureaucratic organizations to small structures formed in a mannerad hocfor the realization of a project. In this context, the organizational forms that appear in companies as well as in markets can be very different, both in their efficiency and performance, of course, but also in the vision, understanding — or even the appeal — through which they spontaneously present themselves.
A stylistic evolution
Beyond the characterization of this or that organization, the aesthetic approach also encourages questioning the succession of their forms. Reading a stylistic evolution highlights their different hidden dimensions. For organizations, like works of art, articulate with all the sociopolitical and cultural registers of social reality: emotion and the sensitive character of the reception of productions and engagement in work (as in the visual arts), simplicity and impact of shaping a creation in cooperation (as in architecture and cinema), importance of expressiveness in interpersonal interactions (as shown by theater and live performance).
At a time of fascination with artificial intelligence, the detour through aesthetics allows, beyond that, to question the interaction between technology and modes of production, by comparing the formal appeal of technical solutions with their structural and economic impacts.
While creativity and innovation now have an omnipresent place and role in organizational strategies (they were, moreover, the subject of the latest Nobel Prize in Economics), the detour through aesthetic theories allows for a better understanding of the tensions they generate: on the one hand, a vision of creativity involving the questioning of existing solutions, and on the other hand, the necessity, in order to impose itself and be recognized, to largely conform to the standards, norms, or practices in place.
A double movement
There is thus a double movement: the pioneering companies in the adoption of new management methods (think of the Gafam, Airbnb, and companieslow costsuch as EasyJet or Ryanair) rely on existing markets and frameworks, but then themselves become managerial models influencing emerging forms of organizations or ecosystems, just as avant-garde artists inspire currents or artistic schools.
Such movements are impossible to explain with a purely descriptive and classificatory approach. In artistic matters, the capacity for renewing aesthetic forms is decisive: the beautiful and the modern explicitly arise from this novelty. In terms of management, thinking about the evolution of managerial styles also involves considering how certain fundamentals, such as performance or optimization ofprocess, regularly redefine themselves in new forms of organization or action that appeal under the influence of entrepreneurs, researchers, or consultants.
No form can be given as beautiful outside the exercise of each individual’s subjectivity… just as judgments of performance, profitability, and cost evaluation do not exist in absolute terms, but are always linked to the position and objectives of the actors who carry them. The judgment of beauty lies both in the eyes of the artists who produce and in the eyes of the spectators or consumers who receive it.
The question of aesthetics thus makes it possible to reconsider, in the approach to organizations, an alternative between contingent subjectivity and intrinsic objectivity that crosses the issues of management but goes back to the origins of aesthetic philosophies, and which Kant himself had encountered.
The authors do not work for, do not advise, do not hold shares in, do not receive funds from an organization that could benefit from this article, and have declared no affiliations other than their research institution.
–ref. Talking about the beauty of companies? Not so absurd after all! –https://theconversation.com/talking-about-the-beauty-of-businesses-not-so-absurd-after-all-280177