The Aesthetics of Impact: Making Impact Beautiful, Not Just Useful

This commentary introduces an aesthetic reframing of social impact, offering a conceptual and methodological shift beyond prevailing metric- and output-oriented approaches. While recent scholarship has begun to view impact as a process, such work still relies on representational logics that privilege what can be demonstrated. I advance a distinct contribution by conceptualizing impact as lived, affective, and experiential—emerging through resonance, atmosphere, rhythm, and relational renewal, often before it becomes measurable. Drawing on Deweyan aesthetics, I propose a feasible framework of aesthetic inquiry that includes structured attunement, participatory aesthetic evaluation, and compositional case-making. This aesthetic turn expands the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of impact scholarship, enabling business and society research to recognize forms of significance that standard frameworks overlook.