Exploring culture with The Radio Ballads: using aesthetics to facilitate change

Abstract

Purpose

To demonstrate that aesthetic approaches, including poetry and music, can be used to help managers to explore issues of culture and its relation to decision making and strategic change.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, these possibilities are explored through the use of an award‐winning and hugely influential series of BBC Radio programmes, The Radio Ballads, produced between 1958‐1964, using music, song and the words of informants only, without the intervention of any narrative voice, to convey a range of issues but importantly including that of the dynamics of industrial and occupational subcultures.

Findings

Whilst attention has been drawn to the importance of cultural issues in organizations in the past, these have often been addressed rationalistically, with over‐emphasis on functional issues and exchange value. Poetry and music enable the symbolic and emotional values underpinning culture to be accessed, developing a greater sensitivity in managers to a wider range of relevant issues within and without the organisation, and may themselves become a stimulus for change.

Research limitations/implications

The material used is exemplary, but responses to potential criticisms of the methodology are offered in the paper.

Practical implications

Suggestions are made for use of the material in strategic and cultural change initiatives, to improve communication, and to increase emotional awareness.

Originality/value

This paper uniquely makes available a set of already important historical resources that have only recently been re‐released, and offers the first analysis of their potential for organisations.

Citation

Linstead, S. (2006), "Exploring culture with The Radio Ballads: using aesthetics to facilitate change", Management Decision, Vol. 44 No. 4, pp. 474-485. https://doi.org/10.1108/00251740610663018