Artfulness as a dimension of professional practice in organizations and action research: Acknowledging sensory-aware and embodied attunement in professional organizations

Introduction

In social science and humanities, it is well described how societies around the globe are in a constant state of rapid change (Rosa, 2020a), thereby becoming increasingly complex and unpredictable (Loeffler & Bovaird, 2018; Pestoff, 2014). Most recently, the climate crisis and the surge of Covid-19 have also led to unprecedented changes, adding to global societal uncertainty. In spite of a growing acknowledgement of the neo-liberal agenda’s contribution to these crises (Boje & Jørgensen, 2020; Rosa, 2020b), neo-liberal approaches to societal structures, discourses and practices seem to be so naturalized that phenomena like standardization, predictability, efficiency, measurability etc. live on, side by side with a discursive change towards sustainability, co-creation, social innovation, governance etc. (Loeffler & Bovaird, 2018).

The neo-liberal standardization logic is also one out of many ways in which finance and economy take precendence over e.g. ecological concerns and climate-related considerations on the global scale, and in organizations over humanistic values such as empathy and care (Allen et al., 2019). The standardization logic produces conformity, oppression of diversity, and subsequently inequality (Jensen, 2020), and it is questionable if standardization, focus on efficiency and speed actually improves quality or supports sustainability (Rosa, 2020a). Accordingly, research in (public) organizations acknowledge the unintended and unwanted effects of this standardized logic: that citizens feel alienated and dehumanized (Jensen, 2020), and that professionals, for example nurses, teachers, social educators and social workers, experience the standardized measures as control and de-professionalization (Brix et al., 2020). It may also have a disempowering effect on local and organizational management and leadership (Degn & Thomassen, 2017).

Background: Why talk about artfulness in professional work and organization?

As already indicated, I see the abovementioned challenges concerning disempowerment, de-professionalization and dehumanization as being related to the way we think of both knowledge, professionalism and organization of professional work. My particular focus is that the evidence and standardization discourse seem to overlook that professionals ‘bring their entire selves to the organizational work, not only the rational and logical parts of who they are, but also artistic abilities in their many forms’ (Warwick & Traeger, 2020), paraphrasing the call for the 2021 special issue of Action Research. I find that these artistic abilities are needed in action research to re-empower, re-professionalize and re-humanize relationships between human beings in public sector organizational contexts, and I base this view on artfulness as connected to embodied, sensory-aware and receptive ways of being and acting in relation to fellow human beings, in this case citizens, user groups, and colleagues.

The artfulness of teaching, nursing care, social work: Artful professional practice

Introducing the thought of artful aspects in public sector organizations may seem puzzling at a first glance. Therefore, the point of departure for this move should be explicated, since my grounding as researcher is deeply rooted in my particular professional biography, first as a classical violinist/violin teacher and then as a nurse. In my capacity as a violinist, I worked several years in symphony orchestras and music schools in Denmark. In 2000, the highly competitive, stressful, elitist music industry made me realize that I needed a change of career to a job area with a clear need for employees, and I became a nurse in 2004. In advance, I expected the transition to be more radical than it turned out to be. In fact, I experienced the most surprising similarities between practicing nursing care and playing the violin in an orchestra related to the way in which I used myself in music and nursing. I interpreted the patient as I interpreted the audience, I shaped my responses to the patient to mirror her expression as I shaped my musical expression to blend in with the violin group. Continuing with a university master’s degree in learning and change processes, a range of theories explained some of these surprising experiences as related to professional knowledge use and exercising a profession (Grimen & Molander, 2010; Martinsen, 2010). These theories regard professional practice as a fundamentally creative process, in which the professional – through judgement of unpredictable and changing situations and correspondent choice of knowledge- and experience-based action – shapes time and space in order to make interaction with user-groups possible in empathic and empowering ways (Molander et al., 2012). This is often referred to as professional judgement (Eriksson & Martinsen, 2012) or professional/epistemic discretion (Molander et al., 2012).

My previous experience and new theoretical understandings thus began shaping ideas of artfulness in nursing, connected to the practical-performative use of professional knowing with the aim of human flourishing, articulated by professional persons and embedded in (organizational) contexts. Still, and however well these theoretical perspectives on professional judgement and action corresponded with my experiences, I felt that some aspects were missing. After having encountered Norwegian professor emerita in nursing philosophy Kari Martinsen (2010), as well as her philosophical foundation on the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup’s (1983) phenomenological ideas of art and artfulness in professional work, my experiences of the senses’ role as a tool in the professional use of knowing in relation to others were articulated. Their work has subsequently inspired my approach to action research. Below, their perspectives are unfolded in more detail, beginning to build a conceptual framework for a sense-based understanding of artfulness in action research and organizations.

Artful professional development

K. E. Løgstrup’s (1905–1981) ideas have influenced both professional educational programs and the general understanding of relational and inter-relational aspects of practice in the public sector professions in Denmark, especially in nursing and social education studies. This is where I first met his ideas. Only selected parts of his work have been translated into English, primarily his earlier works on religious and ethical ideas (Løgstrup, 1997). In his later works however, he delivered a specific philosophy of arts, senses and aesthetic experience, which is unfinished and mainly known in a Scandinavian context. However, I find his ideas of art and aesthetic experience highly relevant for the theme of artfulness in professional work in organizations, and subsequently in action research, since they revolve around ideas about learning, enhanced imagination, and empathy, all of which are important themes for any research concerned with organizational development and relational work. In his effort to develop an ethical, aesthetic phenomenology, he investigated the correlation between arts and knowing, which has been widely accepted as part of professional development approaches in Scandinavia (Løgstrup, 1983). His exploration of this ethic-aesthetic phenomenology led to a focus on the sensuous aspects of responsiveness, attunement, and empathy within human interaction. He turned to artists and their way of working with artistic processes to develop a conceptual framework and vocabulary that are sensitive to ways of knowing that are not always unambiguous or possible to articulate in spoken language (Løgstrup, 1983). The encounter with his ideas made me realize that in relation to professional practice, the embodied, ambiguous and tacit ways of knowing often disappear in a neo-liberal knowledge discourse when it comes to legitimizing professional practice, its choices and its foundations. Down this line of thought, I argue that the action research approach embraces sense-activating and sensuous-aesthetic approaches and methodologies that are responsive to this artful dimension in the field of research in organizations.

Løgstrup and the effective daily practice

To show why I find Løgstrup’s (1983) philosophical ideas relevant to artfulness in action research and organizational development, his analysis of the way in which modern human beings relate to world that surrounds us is relevant. In daily life, we process sensory perceptions in a quick movement over interpretation to understanding of a situation. Mostly, we even sense, interpret and understand situations in one, simultaneous moment in which body and mind work together without us noticing the interaction. Think of the sirens of an ambulance: the sound immediately conveys the understanding that an ambulance is approaching. We do not actually listen to the quality of the sound or reflect on its ability to evoke a sense of alarm – we simply conclude that there is an ambulance nearby and we might even visualize what it looks like. In Løgstrup’s words: our interpretation and understanding are embedded in the sensory impression. This process allows us to act fluently and to function effectively at work and in social contexts.

When transferred to professional practice in an organization, this way of sensing, interpreting and understanding the surroundings enables the professional to act in an organizational context full of impressions, teeming with life and little situations that require instant decisions and action. The professional quickly gets over sensory impressions, interprets them and acts immediately, and proceeds efficiently to the next situation (Løgstrup, 1983; Martinsen, 2010).

The artist as inspiration for artfulness in professional organizations

However, Løgstrup has an eye for the fact that the professional not only needs to be efficient and fast, they need to have opportunities to immerse in situations, too. Immersion enables the professional to meet their ‘user group’ as fellow human beings, thereby providing them space to define the situation as they experience it from their perspective in a way that allows the co-creation of understanding (Løgstrup, 1983, see also Martinsen, 2010). To do this, professionals must create a ‘chink’ between what they sense in the professional situation, and how they interpret and understand what is sensed.

To explain the ‘chink’, Løgstrup turns to artists as an ‘extreme case’ of this sensitive and empathic interaction with the surroundings. The artist uses the senses professionally as a starting point for a receptive investigation of the impressions in the situation, which in turn is used as ‘raw material’ to create the artwork – in Løgstrup’s terms, the ‘expression of the impression’ (Løgstrup, 1983, p. 75). This mode of prolonged investigation of perception (the ‘chink’) allows the artist to examine and explore the attunement of the situation. Løgstrup uses the term attunement to point to the moods, sounds, atmospheres, smells, colors, and many other sensory perceived details, that altogether comprise the feeling of a situation as a whole. If the artist succeeds in being aware of, articulating, and expressing their impressions thoroughly, their attunement experience stands in the center of the artwork and may be conveyed to other people. Therefore, according to Løgstrup, the artist’s most important professional tool is their ability to investigate and explore impressions of a situation by means of the senses and to articulate these impressions through the artwork (Løgstrup, 1983). Moreover, the awareness and exploration of sensory impressions (the ‘chink’) enables the artist to discover their own pre-understandings and expectations and delay immediate interpretations that might stand in the way of perceiving the attunement of the situation. The sensory aware attunement helps the artist to let the situation speak on its own terms, which for Løgstrup contains an ethical dimension of their professionalism.

Artfulness and attunement in professional practice

The relevance for action research is that also non-artist professionals can be artful in their activity and practice if they focus on attunement as a fundamentally ethical phenomenon, embracing the colors of the contexts and acknowledging the mood and feeling of others, as well as how the other person experience the situation on their own terms. When professionals work in an artful way, sensory awareness enables them to remain in the sensory impression for as long as possible, thus preventing them from immediately understanding the situation from their own perspective and preunderstanding, risking to narrow the space for the other person’s perspectives (Martinsen, 2010). Consider the example of a teacher. A teacher’s preunderstanding is comprised of what they know about the students, their own teaching practice, and the life of the institution as an organization – all of the factors that generally contribute to shaping the teacher’s immediate interpretation and corresponding action in the situation. If the teacher works in an artful way, they mentally create a space for paying attention to what they see and hear in the situation. This enables them to postpone their own (pre-)interpretations, judgements and actions, and also to delay telling the students how to interpret the situation – that is, the teacher creates a ‘chink’ between sensing and understanding. Thus, the teacher implicitly encourage the students to define the situation themselves, they attune to the students, respecting their experiences of the situation, and how they contribute to the class with valuable colors, nuances, sounds and moods. In this phenomenological approach, Løgstrup differs from other philosophers’ view on arts and artists like e.g. Dewey’s (1984) pragmatic and experiential perspective on the relation between arts and experience, or Bourdieu’s sociological habitus-view on artists as participants in a field (Webb et al., 2002).

Returning to my own journey as a researcher, the abovementioned considerations of the artfulness of professional judgement helped me creating an understanding of the professional relationship between user and professional, in this case, teacher and students, expressed through the sensory and embodied aspects of practical life. The next step for me was to find a research approach that could capture and acknowledge the complexity and social end embodied dynamics of knowing. Action research was deeply meaningful here, which is elaborated below.

Action research and emergence: Social processes as an artful outset for experience

An important foundation for the claim that action research is needed to articulate artful aspects of professional practice in organizations is its focus on the socially creative dimension and multidimensional learning processes that human flourishing entails (Bradbury, 2015; Reason & Bradbury, 2008). Countless numbers of action research approaches exist, but in my own research, I have relied on organizational learning-oriented approaches (Jensen, 2011, 2015, 2017, 2020). The learning orientation has allowed me to combine two main inspirations: one that is aimed at human flourishing and empowerment (Bradbury, 2015; McCormack & Dewing, 2012; Reason & Bradbury, 2008; Titchen & McCormack, 2008), and another that is strongly inspired by earlier publications on artful approaches to action research (Beyes & Steyaert, 2011; Seeley, 2011; Titchen & McCormack, 2008; Tofteng & Husted, 2011).

When ‘action research is a democratic and participative orientation to knowledge creation, that ‘… brings together action and reflection, theory and practice, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern, then action research is seen as ‘… a pragmatic co-creation of knowing with, not about people’. (Bradbury, 2015, p. 56).

This definition or description of action research rely on the anticipation that knowledge is articulated and co-created in a process of collective learning aimed at creating valuable organizational change as well as development of codes of practice (Berg & Eikeland, 2008; Bradbury, 2015; Lewin, 1947). These learning processes are about shared action and mutual reflection, that is, to collectively think new thoughts about reality, which in turn are intended to lead to new, context-sensitive possibilities for action in practice, and notably new action that participants experience and value as better than before the reflection process (Bradbury, 2015). It may also be the other way around: that a group of people starts doing something new and then reflects upon what happened, and reflects on the usefulness of the new action and way of doing (McCormack & Dewing, 2012). In both cases, the focal point of change seems to be learning processes in which all participants reflect on the given change. In this contexts, it should be mentioned that when I use the word participant, I mean all actors in a given change process, including the researcher (Jensen, 2017).

Combining the learning perspective with the considerations about the artfulness of the sensory-aware and embodied approach to professional practice leads me to suggest addressing senses and body explicitly in action research, thereby creating opportunities for participants to articulate artful aspects of individual and organizational knowing. I also suggest that drawing on arts has the potential to emphasize senses and body in research, which I elaborate below.

Action research and artful dimensions of professional practice

Involving arts in action research is not new. Within both international and Scandinavian traditions, action researchers have experimented with artistic expressions. One of the first artistic expressions used was theater (Boal, 2000; Tofteng & Husted, 2011), in which recognizability from the participants’ life-world practices is the point of departure of an aesthetic encounter with everyday problems in an effort to generate ideas for solving these problems. This approach has been accompanied by several other arts-based development approaches in action research with visual arts, music, dance, etc. (Beyes & Steyaert, 2011; Seeley, 2011; Smith, 2016; Titchen & McCormack, 2008). In these articles, artistic expressions are linked to a richer unfolding of ways in which participants may communicate and share experience (Seeley, 2011; Smith, 2016), and they are also linked to the potential of arts to make structures of power visible by means of shifts in perspective and reflection (Beyes & Steyaert, 2011). Considering Løgstrup, however, I find it necessary to emphasize the role of the sensory awareness of participants and the embodied aspects of connecting with art and art processes to empower the abovementioned arguments for involving art, and the phenomenological, sensorial focus contributes with even stronger arguments for artfulness in action research. I substantiate this argument in the article’s two empirical examples below. In the following, however, I clarify how previous action research projects has led me to regard action research’s distinctive methodological feature workshops as vital to articulate artfulness of professional and organizational practice.

Workshops as an arena for artful articulation processes

The workshop is the concrete time and place in which given participants meet, explore and exchange experiences and conceptions of practice, reflect, play with different perspectives on reality and collaborate to create a common understanding in the research process. It is also the arena in which artfulness can be thematized, acknowledged, and valued, and where participants may focus on sensory impressions and practice attuned expression of impressions. Inspired by arts-based research, this was my argument for bringing arts objects and arts processes into play as ‘evocators’ of senses and embodied experience (Cole & Knowles, 2008; Eisner, 2008; Løgstrup, 1983). When the ‘oeuvres’ and art objects are ascribed meaning beyond the conscience of the individual, thoughts and reflections occasioned by the sensuous encounter with the oeuvre (which may also be a poster or wallpaper produced by participants) are externalized, allowing participants to share thoughts and ideas (Bruner, 1999). Thus, the arts objects may create the ‘chink’ between sensing, interpreting and understanding that Løgstrup advocates above.

Below, I therefore show artworks used in a series of workshops with each of their modes of expression. After that, I turn to a discussion of the different modes of expression and their potentials for affecting our senses as active enablers of generating insight into artful aspects of professional practice in a concrete organizational context.

Art-based articulation of artful professional knowing

The motive in Figure 1 is from an action research project, in which I collaborated with teachers, who worked with developing innovative and experimental pedagogies in elementary school. The teachers participated in the project for the purpose of describing and defining their particular and collective teaching practice as an outset for creating new and more student-centered ways of teaching. For me, the research interest was to explore how the teachers worked with professional knowing in a change process and how they reflected on this in the workshop setting. The research process was designed as a course of four workshops, each of four hours duration, and the overarching theme was ‘innovative pedagogies’. Five teachers volunteered, and they were compensated for the time spent in the workshops.

Every workshop began with us observing visual arts and music by means of aesthetic principles (description, interpretation, and assessment of the picture or the piece of music). This was followed by a dialogical process, where I guided towards collective reflection on questions like ‘how does art or music resemble teaching practice?’ or ‘what can we learn professionally from our reflection on arts?’. My intent with maintaining our focus on the artworks was, inspired by Løgstrup, to create ‘a chink’ between sensing and understanding that created time and space for us to reflect on any new insights regarding teaching practice (based on previous works on artful designs for learning, Jensen, 2011). The whole process was audio-recorded and transcribed by me (Brinkmann, 2012).

The first arts-based reflection was on the motive displayed in Figure 1, which I presented on a projector. I had selected the motive as an expression of my pre-understanding of the teachers’ experience of the demand for developing innovative pedagogies ‘on command’ (Jensen, 2015). The teachers expressed very different interpretations of the painting. One saw a happy teacher, another saw a teacher torn between tradition and renewal, and a third was provoked by my choice of picture, because it seemed as if I perceived teachers as passive instruments for policy – like dolls rather than professionals. The difference in these experiences surprised all of us, and the teachers immediately made links to their daily teaching practice with remarks like: ‘I wonder if we see and hear the students as differently as we see a picture?’ As the process moved on, the teachers reflected on things like ‘we have to get better at regarding the students as resourceful learners,’ or ‘are we good enough at asking the students about their experience of the situation?’ or ‘are we always right about what is going on among the students?’

Afterwards, the teachers’ immediate response to my initiating picture occasioned them to want a say in the research process and each bring a picture to the following workshop that represented their individual view on ‘the professional teacher’, and, based on their pictures, continue to discuss this theme. With the impression of the teachers’ reactions to ‘my’ picture in my body, I was actually encouraged by their idea, sensing and interpreting it as a sign that they experienced the involvement of art as useful to assist reflection, the artful process as worth pursuing (cf. Bradbury, 2015).

At the following workshop, one of the teachers brought the artwork (painted by her son) presented below (Figure 2). Her intention was to communicate new thoughts about her role and professional work as a teacher, which was one of the insights that she had gained from the first workshop.

The immediate response by her colleagues was that the painting was a spot on-depiction of what teacher practice is all about, that the roaring sea was a perfect metaphor of the experience that nothing in the classroom is predictable, and that the boat was somehow still right on course because of tacit understandings of both purpose, means, objectives and action. This teacher’s conversion of her experience into a ‘work’ (Bruner, 1999; Eisner, 2008) provided an opportunity for the others to reflect upon their individual experiences as teachers and ‘put themselves in the place’ of their colleague. Without my interference, their discussion evolved around how different their own classroom-experiences must be from the experience of the students, since they often act as ‘captains on the ship’ and the students as either ‘passengers’ or ‘able seamen’. This distinction between ‘passenger’ and ‘able seamen’ was, still without my interference, followed by a discussion about the view of the student. For example, the teachers argued, if the students are regarded as ‘passengers in the boat of education’, this would entail that the students are left with no responsibility or role to play in respect of navigating or landing the boat. The students just need to sit there and let the ship’s captain do all the work in the sense that the students were ‘consumers’ of the teacher’s teaching. Taking the opposite view, regarding the students as ‘able seamen’ would ascribe the students with a different role: they would be met with expectations to contribute to navigating the vessel, meaning that they would participate in the teaching situation and be responsible for both their own learning process and the learning environment in the classroom. Finally, one of the teachers claimed that if they were to regard the students more like able seamen, they would also have to look at their own approach to their work. That is, do teachers view the students rather as a series of tasks to be done (teaching them curricula) than persons with life stories, experience and emotions that should be seen as resources and contributions to the learning environment? Like one of the teachers said: ‘we always say that our hallmark is to take a student-centered approach to teaching, but do we actually do this?’ In light of the image above and their reflections on it, the teachers agreed to pay more attention to the students in the classroom (being sensory aware), and to explore the students’ worldviews and experience.

These conversations, activated by us sensing and interpreting ‘works’ (Cole & Knowles, 2008; Løgstrup, 1983), and the following reflection made us realize that their awareness of the students and how they interpret what goes on in the classroom (sensory impressions) are a part of the embodied teacher’s professional knowing that they put into play every single day. They also agreed that they actually regarded this knowing as unwarranted, particular and personal, but that the discussion and reflections sparked by the artwork had made them acknowledge and actually ‘see’ the professional value of personal – and in Løgstrup’s sense embodied – knowing and experience. In this, something that they had hitherto regarded as ‘private’ feelings and hunches was ascribed new value as an integral part of their professionalism – in fact, more than that, as an actual foundation for making a professional judgement of a situation and taking adequate, professional action. In other words, a part of their professional competence that they had previously ‘taken for granted’ in an embodied sense had been articulated and made visible by means of the artwork, and they acknowledged this sensory-aware competence as a condition for practicing the ambition of student-centered teaching.

If the above empirical insights are seen through the lenses of theories of artfulness, the teachers and I interacted with the artwork (Cole & Knowles, 2008) or the oeuvre (Bruner, 1999). This made it possible for the teachers to express themselves in a symbolic as well as concrete way about their embodied experiences with professional practice in a process of externalization (Bruner, 1999), and for me to relate to their experiences through sensing ‘their’ artworks. This symbolic processing of experience visualized a number of ‘givens’ and tacit understandings for us, which made them possible objects of a collective negotiation of meaning, learning and insight (cf. Bruner, 1999).

In this process, Dewey’s (1994) pragmatic perspective on art as experience may shed light on the artworks and the aesthetic representation of thoughts by means of artworks, since he operated with an assumption that art and artworks help individuals wonder, imagine alternative realities, shape social and cultural changes and create new opportunities for experience by experimenting with different realities. In this, an emancipatory dimension is added to the artful practice in the workshop, which is especially seen in the teachers’ new insight: their personal experience of teacher practice is not private, but deeply professional, and their metaphorically articulated experience contributes to the development of teacher knowledge in the context. In this way, the same emancipatory processes are in play in the micro-context of the particular workshop (cf. also Bruner, 1999).

In addition, the metaphors enable the individual, sensory experience to refer to a wider, cultural context (Dewey, 1994), thus creating opportunities for collective and mutual understanding. This aspect is seen in the ‘works’ at play in the workshops described above, for instance the sailboat that referred to teaching as a collaborative effort (steering the boat). The reflections then constitute individual understandings of the concept of ‘the professional teacher’, collected in the metaphor of the sea, with an abundance of symbolic and metaphorical meaning for the teachers (Seeley, 2011). In an aesthetic sense, the important function of the ‘works’ is that they frame processes of externalization of embodied and sensory-aware experience and reflection. The ‘works’ then contain the experience, meanings and interpretations of reality of the individual teachers, while at the same time enabling everybody present to empathize to each other’s experience by means of the senses (seeing the same ‘work’, hearing each other’s words)(cf. Løgstrup, 1983).

To sum up, in the workshops described above, the teachers and I expressed ourselves aesthetically, visually and tactilely about our sensory impressions and understandings of the teachers’ practice and contexts for practice. When drawing on artful expression, these new understandings of knowledge and knowing in professional practice then suddenly function as aesthetic expressions of a process of development: the improvement of practice (Bradbury, 2015) wished for by the teachers, in this case a more student oriented way of teaching.

This brings up the question of my role as a participating researcher, which I elaborate below.

The researcher as a learner

When I actively introduced artistic works like music and paintings in the process with the intention of facilitating the teachers in re artful aspects of professional knowing, this has had significant implications for the way in which my own learning has evolved in the process. The introduction of the painting in the first workshop indicated that we not only draw on the spoken word and cognitive means of communication and learning, we also draw on our senses (eyes are used to see paintings/figures and ears are used to hear each other’s narratives and interpretations of these narratives) (Eisner, 2008; Løgstrup, 1983). This sensuous encounter with the world is a way of understanding aesthetics that links to learning, and, when participating in the learning process, my own learning process became important to address.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Russian doll. Digital image. Art by Lo.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Teacher at sea. Author's photo of painting brought to workshop.

According to Eisner (2008), the link between artfulness and learning consists of the fact that the senses are a path to ‘evoking’ the aspects of our knowing that are embodied, tacit and attached to long-forgotten experiences, and to making this embodied knowing available to conscious awareness, to thinking and to collective reflection. In the example above, this was the case for all involved, including me. In the process, the artful and symbolic work forms affected and evoked the senses of the participants, and in the pursuit of externalization of given artful and embodied aspects of the teachers’ experiences in professional teaching practice, I was affected, and my senses were evoked as well. This was especially apparent when the artworks facilitated the teachers in ‘taking power’ over the process by insisting on finding artworks themselves to reflect on. In that instant, and in the following workshop, I was positioned in the role of a learning participant along with the other teachers, which in turn meant that I was confronted with my senses and my own sensory encounter with the artworks chosen by the teachers. These moments enabled the co-creation of individual and collective understandings of professional bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing, and in a way, the artwork facilitated the encounter between human beings, in which the roles of ‘teacher’ and ‘researcher’ became irrelevant.

Going deeper into the researcher-as-learner reflection, the review process of this article is worth mentioning. Being brought up as a researcher in a cross field between humanities and social science, I am disciplined into a communication style in which my own voice should be ‘tacit’, and that every word should be justified with theory. The review process has opened my eyes for the fundamental problems that may be the consequence of this way of communicating, which a. o. are that I as a researcher can ‘hide’ behind others, and even worse, avoid taking responsibility for my own research. In addition, the artfulness and creative processes of research itself is at risk of being hidden in the efforts to justify each step with theory and methodological considerations, and the researcher as a creative co-producer with other co-producers gets invisible, which at the end of the day may pose a research ethical problem.

Concluding remarks

By means of the discussions of the empirical material above, I see four more general insights emerging, which I thematize below as 1) the implications of a sensuous encounter with artworks, 2) oeuvres as emerging analytical objects and theory generation, 3) artfulness as a contribution to sustainable human organizations, and 4) organizational sensitivity and artfulness. These are elaborated on in the following.

The implications of a sensuous encounter with artworks

The first insight is that the artful practices in the workshops had implications for the knowledge produced. The art works enabled the articulation and formulation of artful, sensory-aware and embodied dimensions of the teachers’ professional practice and of being professional. In other contexts, the artful workshop practice potentially may contribute to reflecting on and processing knowledge that not only consolidates given cultural understandings of professional practice and adjusts to existing mindsets. With artful practices, other participants, like the teachers and I, may be facilitated to reflect on the professional contexts in which they normally practice, using a critical-wondering, sensory explorative and imaginative approach. In our workshops, this was done by asking sensuous, open-ended and imaginative questions related to the art works such as: ‘Why do we look at our students as passengers in a boat rather than able seamen?’or ‘what do we do to attune to our students in teaching?’

Oeuvres as emerging analytical objects and theory generation

The second insight is that, apart from sparking learning, change, and context-specific insights for the teachers concerning artful aspects of professional practice, the oeuvres functioned in an empirical sense as emerging analytical objects. By this, I mean that the very objects selected by the teachers identified and singled out conditions, perspectives and characteristics that they regarded as professionally important. In turn, this identification process held the potential to generate new theory or bear witness of particular effects of a generated theory in practice – as in the described instances of the teachers’ preoccupation with student centeredness in teaching. That is, the oeuvres in play within the action research framework contributed to generate empirical material in the process, which in turn holds a theory-generating potential.

Artfulness as a contribution to sustainable human organizations

Following this line of thought, the most significant insight from the above focus on sensuous aspects of artfulness in action-research is the way in which the teachers and I deliberated on the deeply professional knowing embodied in our individual ‘subjective’ feelings and hunches. Referring to the initial problematization of the neo-liberal approaches to professional practice as disempowering, dehumanizing, etc., the insights above imply the seeds of a scalable alternative, since artfulness insists on a sensuous presence that will not be subordinated to predefined or unambiguous standards. Based on the above empirical, theoretical and philosophical reflections, art in action research has the potential to reinforce this insistence on the senses as a channel to articulate professional knowing otherwise marginalized and silenced in the standardized neo-liberal approach to public sector professions.

Organizational sensitivity and artfulness

The fourth insight is implied in the three first: Acknowledging artfulness may assist the professionals in developing the ability to drive change, to widen the space of (organizational) opportunity, and to renew existing bodies of thought and culture by means of sensory awareness, imagination and social fantasy. If recognized in the daily life of the organization, artfulness enables professionals and users to co-create ideas and imagine things that are not (yet) there, or play with the thought ‘what if …?’ (Bruner, 1999). When members of the organization help each other maintain a focus on what they see and hear in their daily practices, modes of discovery pave the way for new ideas and thoughts, thereby developing everyday creativity.

However, it is worth remembering that everything, as Løgstrup and Martinsen would put it, starts with the senses and a responsive and receptive mindset.

These four insights of artfulness in action research deserve further investigation in future research.