Organizing Color

Timon Beyes is Professor of Sociology of Organisation and Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

"The immanent critique and 'tender empiricism' of this book, its eloquence and capacity to move from detailed grounding to exciting passages of speculative thought, ensures that Organizing Color escapes 'the archaic stillness of the book.' Impressively researched and written."—Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne "Inventive, brilliantly written, and very readable, Organizing Color recovers and explicates the relevance of color to social form—be that chromatic or racialized color."—Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London "Organizing is often imagined as a functional concept that belongs in business schools. In this beautifully written and illustrated book, Timon Beyes sprinkles aesthetics and politics over this black and white picture. The result is a breathtaking work that will change the way we understand how to 'see' organization."—Martin Parker, University of Bristol "[Organizing Color] delves into fascinating questions about our color experiences.... Highly recommended."—L. L. Kriner, CHOICE "The book contributes to organizational scholarship by attenuating the 'colorblind constitution of socio-organizational thought', highlighting some of the intricate and interconnected ways in which the 'primary organizational force' of color manifests. Most notably, it provides a phenomenological template for the analysis of color in the field of organizational aesthetics. It also reinforces the recent tendency to conceptualize cultural products as configurations of particular elements, examining their social construction and relational nature in historical perspective."—Stoyan V. Sgourev, Administrative Science Quarterly

• 1. Something Winged: Color as Organizational Force2. Weimar, ca. 1800: Cooking Chocolate3. New Lanark, 1816: Working the Silent Monitor4. Lower Bengal, 1859: The Coke of Empire5. Berlin, 1924: Consuming the Color Chart6. The Zone, 1945: Unleashing the Synthetic Rainbow7. Paris, 1967: The Revolution Will Be Colorized8. Houston, 1971: Two Kinds of Colorism9. Cologne, 2007: The Distribution of the Insensible10. Broken Tones: Toward a Chromatics of the Social