A paper by Sybille Persson, Paul Shrivastava and Laszlo Zsolnai entitled “Art and Aesthetics in Sustainability Education. Insights into Beautifying Management Education with François Jullien” was published in RIPCO – Revue Internationale de Psychosociologie et de Gestion des Comportements Organisationnels (Vol. XXVII, Issue 71, pp. 75–98).
The paper questions the conceptual basis of art and aesthetics used in management education to foster sustainability education. The specific approach of the paper is opening up dialogue with the Chinese conception of aesthetics, particularly focusing on its links to life and flourishing. By looking at different conceptions of beauty in Western and Chinese thought, the authors provide a non-ethnocentric conception of beauty and offer relevant insights into how management education may be beautified.
First, the paper presents the case of ARTEM, a twenty-year experience with higher education in France. Second, it questions the Western concept of “beautiful” vis-à-vis the Chinese relational view of beauty as interpreted by philosopher and sinologist Francois Jullien. Finally, the paper analyzes the potential of beauty to sustainably “enliven” management education.