Joseph Beuys and Live Scribing: Overlaps Between Creative Practice and Managerialism

This paper explores the context of management theory and creative practice through an underlying linkage between the work of Joseph Beuys and the practice of live scribing or graphic recording. The paper traces
the origins of graphic facilitation from an intersection of management science and design in the 1970s and examines how it has evolved into a service offered today by firms such as Scriberia. Joseph Beuys in his
own way was also a ‘live scribe’. Designated under his all-encompassing concept of ‘social sculpture’, his was a performative art; constructed with the aim of healing social ills and reuniting elements of the primitive and
modern. Within this context, Beuys’ use of live drawing, metaphors, and artefacts is compared to services offered by scribing firms of today. This paper also discusses the influence of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures and drawings on Beuys’s concept of social sculpture as well as on the development of anthroposophical principles in organisation management. Finally, this paper evokes strategies of illustration in comparison to transmutative approaches to the management of data from the world of banking and the
subprime mortgage market.