Abstract

This paper illustrates that emotion is integral to stakeholders ' perceptions of a key organizational artifact. Emotion-- both emotion toward the artifact and emotion toward the organization-- is shown to inhere in perceptions of three dimensions of artifacts and is thus suggested to be what connects between artifacts and their organizations. Multiple stakeholders were interviewed about an artifact of a large public transportation organization. Perceptions of the artifact, shown to be imbued with emotion, considered three conceptually distinct dimensions: 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. Our analysis illustrates these three dimensions and then demonstrates that the unsolicited emotion they entail regards both emotion toward the artifact and emotion toward the organization. In informants ' responses to open ended queries about the artifact there was no separation, but rather much spillover between emotion toward the artifact and emotion

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