Emotion as a Connection of Physical Artifacts and Organizations

This paper documents emotion as integral to stakeholders’ sense making of a key organizational artifact, demonstrating that emotion toward artifacts blends into emotion toward the organization. Multiple stakeholders were interviewed about an artifact of a large public transportation organization. Sense making of the artifact is shown to involve emotion in interpretations that consider three dimensions of the artifact—instrumentality, aesthetics, and symbolism. Instrumentality relates to the tasks the artifact helps accomplish, aesthetics is the sensory reaction to the artifact, and symbolism regards associations the artifact elicits. The analysis demonstrates that sense making of these three dimensions includes unsolicited emotion both toward the artifact and toward the organization. Emotion that surfaces in sense making of organizational artifacts is, thus, suggested to be what links interpretation of artifacts and attitudes toward organizations. This paper lays foundations for a theory of organizational artifacts that can guide both thoughtful research and effective management of artifacts in organizations.