The Learning of Cooking in the Light of the Social Practices and the Organizational Aesthetics

Abstract

The aim of this article was to analyze the learning process of cooking in the two regional restaurants from the Brazilian northeast in the light of social practices and the organizational aesthetics. Thereby, it carried out a qualitative research drawn on an aesthetic approach. The construction of empirical data was through the mehod of zooming in and zooming out, operationalized through participant observation, informal conversations, and semi structure interviews. The analysis were carried out using aesthetics categories related to the cooking practice. The results show that the cooking learning occurs through the use of perceptive faculties along with collective aesthetic judgements constituting the social practice of cooking. Conclusions highlight that the cooking practice implies on the taste making that represents a sensible knowledge resulted from what is touchable, visible, hearing, smelled, and tasted.

Sociomateriality: Theories, methodology, and practice

“…Aesthetics in organizational studies is considered an opportunity to broaden the perception of organizational analysis by taking into account aspects of the organization's daily life that are often overlooked. This relationship between aesthetics and sociomateriality can be found in the work of Soares and Bispo (2017), in which the process of learning to cook is directly related to the ability to make aesthetic judgments based on the use of kitchen utensils in a restaurant.…”

“…Aesthetics can be understood as a branch of philosophy that studies the arts and artistic values and that is concerned especially but not exclusively with the perception of beauty. Although the ancient Greek concept of aesthetics is usually related to artistic manifestations and philosophy, aesthetics is also studied in various branches of science including art, psychology, architecture, design, and organizations (Wood Jr. & Csillag, 2001;Soares & Bispo, 2017;Strati, 2007). Strati (2007) states that the term "aesthetics" and its modern concept were developed in the eighteenth century by Alexander Baumgarten, who used it to name a field of study that employs perception and sensation as the principles for knowledge of the world arrived at through the senses.…”

Body and Senses in Organizational Research: Empathic Understandingfrom an Embodied Experience

“…In this process of consolidation of the field, certain shared understandings are established. Among them, the main one would be that organizational practice is composed of an aesthetic dimension (already mentioned in previous paragraphs), which makes the approach of organizational aesthetics a powerful theorization to understand phenomena as distinct as leadership (Azimi, Alvedari, & Nia, 2016;Bathurst & Cain, 2013;Bathurst & Kennedy, 2017;Bathurst & Williams, 2014;Hansen et al, 2007), entrepreneurship ( (Poldner, Shrivastava, & Branzei, 2017) and organizational practices (Soares & Bispo, 2017). Another shared understanding can be identified around the challenges in grasping this aesthetic dimension, which is not always evident and which makes the so-called traditional methodological approaches (i.e., the ones that use traditional tools of social research and are based on a rational-cognitive paradigm) relatively common in the 2000s (Taylor & Hansen, 2005), giving increasingly more space to alternative approaches.…”