Abstract
When you read Steven Taylor’s “Little Beauties: Aesthetics, Craft Skill, and the Experience of Beautiful Action,” you will begin thinking about those moments when you saw something done with such grace or skill that you recognized it as something extraordinary—even beautiful. These are not moments of technical excellence, necessarily, or expert application. Rather, these are instances of craft skill experienced as beautiful.
In the classic tradition of the Nontraditional Research section of Journal of Management Inquiry, the core empiric of this piece is an analysis of a single conversation and its consequences—an analysis that would not likely be found in more mainstream journals. However, through it Taylor is able to show how a moment of virtuoso interpersonal performance becomes a pivot point for one group’s interactions as it disrupts and redirects action.
Taylor urges us to inquire into these beauties as a way to offset the tendency in organization studies to focus on the problems–the less skillful, though effective, use of algorithm-like applications. These may “work,” but are not experienced as pleasurable; they do not move or register with the observer as something special. The consequence of studying experiences of beauty, he argues, may be the starting point for theorizing about exceptional practice. For the observer, the little beauties may be moments of inspiration.