The development of modern business and administrative organizations that are
formally rational and technical in their structures and operations has given rise to
the false conclusion that the aesthetic dimension does not figure at all in their
making. The present paper argues that the opposite is the case, that the
organization as a ‘rational-technical machinery’ gives rise to an aesthetic
imperative characterized by those familiar elements of modernist design: the
sharpness and simplicity of line, the suppression of color, the smoothness and
hardness of tactile values, and the preference for planar forms. By such aesthetic
means, modern organizations successfully cultivate, in their members, a presence
through which the organization is made and re-made; this presence is
characterized by the separation of head from body, of work life from private life, of
rationality from sensuous values, of production from consumption, and of
organizational function from personal expression
