Leading with Aesthetics: The Transformational Leadership of Charles M. Vest at MIT examines the role of aesthetics, design, and architecture in organizational transformation and leadership, particularly in the context of academic institutions. Leadership has been thus far predominantly examined from the perspective of function (performance) and position in the organizational structure (such as a CEO or a president). Relatively little work has been done in studying leadership of academic institutions, let alone from the perspective of aesthetics, both of which this book aims to rectify. Although aesthetic dimension is important in any organizational context, it is particularly important for academic institutions. Leading with aesthetics would empower leaders in any organizational setting. Daas examines the aesthetic dimension of transformational leadership through an eclectic blend of lenses drawn from the fields of architecture, political science, organizational aesthetics, and organizational psychoanalysis. A detailed case study of the leadership of Charles Marstiller Vest (1941–2013), who served as the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology for fourteen years between 1990 and 2004, illustrates the importance of the aesthetic dimension in leadership and organizational change.

Leaders in business and art stand to gain a great deal by listening to each other. In this book thirteen research-based cases demonstrate how software programmers and art curators, financial analysts and orchestra conductors, construction engineers and chefs, share aesthetic leadership talents that hold the key to transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Each chapter explores aesthetic leadership in a different setting and profession illuminating its universal capacity to create an economy mindful of human needs and desires. By focusing passion, playfulness, improvisation, intuitive judgement, beauty, and sensuality beyond deadlocking dualisms, this new type of leadership opens up a third aesthetic way contributing quality, meaning and value to projects and enterprises.

The question of aesthetics as a theoretical framework for thinking about modern leadership issues in educational settings is an emergent area of inquiry that is receiving considerable attention. There is a growing sense that the mechanistic approach to leadership, which has been widely encouraged over the last ten years, is sterile and that a more philosophical approach is now required. This approach is covered here, taking into account the importance of aesthetics on all aspects of the administrative and leadership world: the ways ideas and ideals are created, how their expression is conveyed, the impact they have on interpersonal relationships and the organisational environment that carries and reinforces them and the moral boundaries or limits that can be established or exceeded. While presenting a significant departure from conventional studies in the field, the international contributors reflect a continuity of thought on administrative and leadership authority, from the writings of Plato through to current theory.

The Aesthetics of Design offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics, challenging the discipline to broaden its scope to include the quotidian objects and experiences of our everyday lives and concerns. In doing so, it contributes to the growing field of Everyday Aesthetics.

Postindian Aesthetics is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on a new generation of Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary canon that is redefining the parameters of Indigenous literary aesthetics.

Presents the thinking about the processes that underlie creativity and aesthetic experience. This book discusses established theory and research and provides creative speculation on problems for inquiry and fresh approaches to conceptualising and investigating these phenomena.

Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, fourth edition, contains a selection of ninety-six readings organized by individual art forms as well as a final section of readings in philosophical aesthetics that cover multiple art forms. Sections include topics that are familiar to students such as painting, photography and movies, architecture, music, literature, and performance, as well as contemporary subjects such as mass art, popular arts, the aesthetics of the everyday, and the natural environment. Essays are drawn from both the analytic and continental traditions, and multiple others that bridge this divide between these traditions. Throughout, readings are brief, accessible for undergraduates, and conceptually focused, allowing instructors many different syllabi possibilities using only this single volume. Key Additions to the Fourth Edition The fourth edition is expanded to include a total of ninety-six essays with nineteen new essays (nine of them written exclusively for this volume), updated organization into new sections, revised introductions to each section, an increased emphasis on contemporary topics, such as stand-up comedy, the architecture of museums, interactivity and video games, the ethics of sexiness, trans/gendered beauty, the aesthetics of junkyards and street art, pornography, and the inclusion of more diverse philosophical voices. Nevertheless, this edition does not neglect classic writers in the traditional aesthetics: Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Collingwood, Bell, and writers of similar status in aesthetics. The philosophers writing new chapters exclusively for this fourth edition are: • Sondra Bacharach on street art • Aili Bresnahan on appreciating dance • Hina Jamelle on digital architecture • Jason Leddington on magic • Sheila Lintott on stand-up comedy • Yuriko Saito on everyday aesthetics • Larry Shiner on art spectacle museums in the twenty-first century • Peg Brand Weiser on how beauty matters • Edward Winters on the feeling of being at home in vernacular architecture, as in such urban places as bars.