The Strategic Aestheticization of Work: How Workers Read Normative Organizational Values in Workplace Imagery

Organizations strategically invest in the aesthetics of their spaces to communicate about their values, mission, and position within an industry or community. Given the growth of mass visual culture and the circulation of images online, exposure to aestheticized workspaces is pervasive. In light of this heightened awareness of workplace design, we sought to understand how workers make sense of and interpret such images. We conducted a visual study in which office workers responded to images of strategically-designed offices. We found that most participants used sensemaking strategies of interpreting affordances and other salient cues to arrive at generally favorable conclusions about the organizations portrayed; these conclusions largely reflected organizationally-preferred interpretations. However, participants’ sensemaking also revealed how they wrestled with ambiguities of meaning to arrive at their conclusions. We illustrate the power of workplace imagery for communicating normative values about work, workers, and organizations.