Steve+Taylor

Steve Taylor
photograph by Daved Barry

[|Worcester Polytechnic Institute] [|Professional Page] [|Personal Page] Contact: sst@wpi.edu
 * Assistant Professor of Management**

A friend of mine once introduced me to his fiancée by saying, “Steve will do anything for a joke.” He then illustrated his point by saying, “Steve graduated from MIT with a degree in playwriting.”  For me it wasn’t a joke, it was an expression of my dual identities as a scientist and an artist. Those two identities remained largely separate when I was a young Air Force officer and later as I ran the consulting group of a small software firm by day, while working on my Master’s in performing arts at Emerson College in the evenings. The two identities finally came together in my work as a management scholar in organizational aesthetics.

My research started with my doctoral work at Boston College and then continued when I was a lecturer in organizational change at the University of Bath. I moved back to the States in 2002 and started my current position as a professor in the management department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. My research focuses on the aesthetics of organizational action. I see this as the intersection of the emerging field of organizational aesthetics and the more well established field of action science / action inquiry. In particular, I have been focusing on the intersection of aesthetic forms with traditional management topics. Examples of this are my dissertation research into leadership storytelling, and my use of theater as a presentational form within academia.