Corporate Theatrics and Carnivalesque Resistance

By

Grace Ann Rosile (Horsesense At Work)

Steven Best (University of Texas at El Paso)

David Boje (New Mexico State University)

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More Resources --- Academy of Management 2001 August symposium on Theatrics http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/conferences/theater2001.htm 

ABSTRACT

We are moving and transforming organizations from festival to spectacle modes of theatric performance.  Postmodern forms of resistance to corporate spectacle theatrics include the Carnivalisque.  Our claim is that where there is theatrics of power and spectacle, there is also resistance. When we unmask the Theatrics of Leadership, we find Machiavellian Princes pretending to be festive or spectacle hero, or just plain bureaucrats pretending to be Princes. We are looking at theatrics enacted and embedded in two ways. First, there is theatrics as protest we recognized in the anti-WTO protests of Seattle. Second is the idea of theatrics and performance, spectacles that permit practice through theatrics.  Our purpose, then is to show the interplay of corporate theater and the resistance to corporate practice.

Our theatric performances allow us to play with time and to experiment with alternative futures as well as rehistoricize and restory events from the corporate past. Organizations are storytelling theaters and storytelling spectacles, not metaphors of sameness, but actualized in the material reality of the global stage (Boje, 1991, 1995; Czarniawska, 1997; Geis, 1993; Best & Kellner, 2000; Hopfl, 2001; Schreyogg, 2001).

There are several ways in which theatricality is making itself part of consultation. First, Schreyogg (2001) reports that professional theater groups are now consulting to organizations in France and Germany, putting on researched and scripted performances of professional actors of organizational problems, followed by reflective (focus group) discussions. Second, there is the metaphorical approach, such as Saner (1999), who asserts that organizational consulting practice is like theatrics, or "Off-Off-Wall Street" performances where we can learn a lot about consultation from "Off-Off-Broadway" theater. Third, perhaps organizations just are theatrics is what Currie (1998: 103) calls the “theater of signs and discourse” and Firat and Dholakia (1998: 154-5) call the “theater of consumption,” what we call the production and consumption of spectacular ODC praxis. Hopfl (2001) also indicates that in many ways organizations are theatrical, “the theatricality of organizations is rooted in the creation and re-creation of appearances which suppress difference, mask ambivalence and sustain a world of "make believe". Here, we want to look less at the metaphorical or the commissioned theatrics, and more at the ways organizations are exhibit the theatrics of spectacle and carnival.

We see four types of theater as relevant to organizational consulting.

Four Types of Organization Theater Consulting

Metaphoric Tool - First, in Gareth Morgan style, theater can be a metaphoric lens for looking at consulting and organizing in borrowed terms like “rehearsing,” “script changing” “front” or “back stage.” Consultants for example, can draw from a toolkit of metaphors and explore questions such as, “How is this front office like a stage? Or “which customers are like different audiences?” The advantage of the metaphoric use of theater terminology is that new and creative thinking can happen. The downside of importing metaphors is organizations already have metaphoric lens embedded in their shoptalk. Disney for example, switched from Disney as a “family” to the “show” metaphors where employees are “actors” always on stage, wearing “costumes” and expected to know their “lines.” Metaphoric uses of theater can miss the ways organizations are theater.

Theatrical Inquiry into Folk-culture - Second, consulting can initiate Theatrical Inquiry, the ways they are being theatrical. Theatrical inquiry means the consultant helping to identify pockets of theater and ways to develop it. It involves mapping more folkloric occurrences of theater, such as any ongoing staged events that take place in organizations. For example, an employee cabaret at an office party, amateur talent show at a retreat, some marketer’s play to launch a new product line, or festivity to entertain shareholders or retirees at an annual meeting. This would include change programs, such as “TQM boot camps,” or “reengineering rollouts” that are certainly theatrical. Consulting can help these become better theater.

Commissioned Modern Theater - Third, professional actors and playwrights are being commissioned to research, script, and put on a theatrical performance focused on company problems and directed at a specific organizational audience. This is a major and recent trend in France and Germany. Schreyogg (2001) reports that there were over 2000 theater performances in French firms and 200 in German ones in the past year. We view this as “modern theater,” the division of space into one for passive employee spectators and another for expert professional actors. Modern Organization Theater performances are carefully researched, scripted, and designed so spectators and performers must follow a linear storyline and view the stage performance from the viewpoint the playwright (management, and/or consultants) has determined will be seen by the spectators.  Consultants can work with poetic playwrights, helping them investigate key problems, create more believable dialog, and facilitate after-theater focus groups to reflect upon themes portrayed.

Postmodern Theater - Fourth, there is the main contribution of this chapter, which is “postmodern Organization Theater.”  Here, managers, employees, and perhaps customers and vendors are directed by consultants to explore, stage, and improv their own ongoing problems, and then rewrite their surfaced-scripts in ways that will become changes in the organization’s theater.  

Theatrics as Carnivalesque Protest – In the postmodern condition (Best & Kellner, 1993, 1997), spectacle is endemic to the exercise of corporate power. And spectacle is resisted by carnival (witness WTO in Seattle, the rise in campus protests involving Sweat Fashion Shows); these are forms of carnivalesque resistance.  Spectacle is based on the work of Guy Debord (1967, Society of the Spectacle) and refers more to the way corporate, state, and media exercise theater.  Festival, we view as a third option, but one that can be appropriated by spectacle of predatory power or the carnival of resistance.

Spectacle - involves both consumption and production: “In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life” (Debord, 1967: #6). Spectacle is oftentimes a theatric performance that legitimates, rationalizes, and camouflages violent production and consumption (Boje, 1999; Best & Kellner, 1997 &  2000). Spectacle can be total manipulation of meaning-making processes through theatrical events to serve the production of power and managerial needs to control and spin a good story in the face of bad news. Spectacle theatrics can also be a form of practice and performance; gala event with costumes, art, success stories, team awards, and celebrity appearances to launch a new product, symbolize a change initiative or to put the spot light on positive acts of corporate power.

Carnival - is a theatrics of rant and madness seeking repair to separation and alienation, a call for help from corporate power, a cry of distress and repression mixed with laughter and humorous exhibition meant to jolt power into awareness of its psychic organization.  Carnival stems from the semiotic work of  Kristeva (1980) and Bakhtin (1973). Carnival In premodern times staged theatric events that reversed and otherwise created satire of the feudal hierarchy. Contemporary carnival is a polyphonic (many voiced) expression by those without power, sometimes sanctioned by those in power as a way to blow off steam. Today we see Carnivalesque theatrics, the World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrations in Seattle this past year is a prime example. Some dressed as Sea Turtles to symbolize their cause, a few broke windows and did other violence, others did not know why they were protesting, but most of the 400,000 participants engaged in peaceful marches and demonstrations to critique transnational corporate power and express their sense of alienation. Masked or not, Foucault makes the point that the resistance accompanies power and so carnival is the resistance side show, the mirror-stage to spectacle.

Festival - In dialogic relation to both carnival and spectacle is festive theatrics. In ancient times, festival transgressed the boundary of nature and culture. In Nietzschean terms, it is the enactment of Dionysus. Festival is the self-management and self-design of our own leisure time and space, the realization of what we need to live and evolve as a species, with the most minimal harm to any other species. In festival the boundary between management and labor, customer and vendor, and other dualities is blurred in theatric moments. A festival theatrics seeks to celebrate community, including affirmation of our living participation on the planet (this would include corporate relations to animals; all three presenters are Vegan and take this more seriously than most).

In this next section we look at the relationship between the human and animal world, by linking Foucault’s approach to dressage to discipline and control in spectacle performance.

Theatrics as Practice and Performance

We see practice and performance theatrics as being related to Foucault’s concept of dressage. Foucault defines dressage as an exercise to demonstrate control with no practical purpose.  Societies and corporations engage in what he calls “dressage,” action for the purpose of demonstrating control and discipline in spectacle performance General Motors, for example, use community service projects to train their junior managers in leadership skills.  This is theatrical performance to display control, and to train in disciplined performance.  This is a practice and rehearsal for performance in a form of Off-Broadway theatrics  (Saner, 1999).  GM can display its spectacle of organizing ability in a community service project, where they have difficulty demonstrating it in the usual course of business of producing their product (without being paid advertisement). GM has a public image of individuals with competence in organizational issues applied community issues and problems. So the corporate machine has a soul.

Thus, while dressage originally was designed for horses to learn complex and unnatural maneuvers to intimidate and defeat enemies in war, now it has become removed from that original purpose, to be just a demonstration of intricate coordination between horse and rider.  But the show horse is too valuable to be used for any utilitarian purpose, and often is not even ridden for pleasure, for fear they might become injured. 

There are additional parallels in the relationship between horse and rider, and spectacle. This demonstration of proficiency Foucault calls dressage. In dressage, for example, the spectacle is staging a highly controlled performance of horse and rider that is precisely evaluated by the judges and other spectators. But relations of horse and rider also have carnival and festive performance aspects. An example of carnival is the dollar bareback events.  Another example: "Gamblers' Choice," where each participant is allowed more individual freedom of expression. In festive riding, horse and rider stage their own performance for sheer enjoyment, such as in trail and pleasure riding. In festive riding the metrics of spectacle performance are suspended, as is the mirror-stage of carnival resistance.

Carnival and The Monitoring Industry

The street theater of the WTO protest, the sit-ins in university administration offices, and boycotts of Footlocker, NikeTown, Gap, Wal-Mart, and Disney merchandise stores are examples of carnivalesque resistance to the spectacle of postindustrial capitalism and its marriage to postmodern consumerism.   These carnivals by students, labor, environmentalists, union workers, and activists also parody truth claims produced by corporate monitors and consultants such as Fair Labor Association (FLA), PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), and Global Alliance (GA). 

University, corporate and industry codes of conduct in apparel do not operate unambiguously; the dynamics increasingly attract and seduce public administration to play the role of referee in disputes between corporate monitoring groups such as the Fair Labor Association (FLA) and student groups such as Workers Rights Consortium (WRC). University administrators and public policy makers are being asked to choose between FLA and WRC approaches to monitoring.

FLA, according to activists, has a very weak code of conduct that does not include fundamental things such as women's rights, a living wage, or independent monitoring. United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and other student organizations launched the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC).  USAS is signing up campus after campus to use WRC as an alternative to FLA; WRC prefers local monitoring by religious and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) and favors a living wage and a stronger role for independent monitoring than is the case for FLA.  USAS and scores of other groups allege that with globalization there is increased sweatshop production from Bangladesh to Brazil. The worker involved, mostly Third world women have been partnering with students and labor organizers to raise wages, improve working conditions, and promote collective bargaining.

Spectacle Control of Carnival - As networks of social movements and advocacy groups swarm to engage in annual protests, such as “Boycott Nike Day” or the recent WTO, WB, and IMF actions, corporations, industries, and the police construct “war rooms” that track and profile student and other protest groups and individuals.  For example, Nike’s war room enlists administrators on college campuses with lucrative Nike-licensing contracts to report in advance, any planned actions on a NikeTown or a speech or anti-sweat fashion show held on campus. Power is also more direct. When Nike Inc. Chief Executive Phil Knight learned that the University of Oregon had joined the anti-sweatshop Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), he stopped attending the school's athletic events and withdrew a promised $30 million gift (Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2001). 

Recently the University of Oregon announced it would no longer participate in WRC or FLA. In Beaverton, Oregon, Nike’s war-room has become a standing operation of “virtual teams” of executives and outside consultants to respond protests such at the annual Truth Tours of NikeTown stores, shareholder meeting actions (meetings have been moved first away from Oregon, and recently out of the country to control protester access), campus sit-ins, and worldwide Boycott Nike days. For example, Vada Manager, Nike’s director of global issues, “got advance notice of the (Truth) tour through a network of paid student sales reps and friendly administrators at more than 200 universities with Nike apparel deals… The Nike team took videotape of the New York fracas and relayed it, along with bios of the RV activists  (downloaded from the Truth Tour Web site), to police all along the route”… “It’s just not in the culture here to retreat, or to keep your mouth shut,” says war-room team member Amanda Tucker (Emerson, 2001). War rooms are more usually public relations campaigns to prevent the carnivalesque tactics of protestors from obtaining media attention. For example, Washington State companies set up their war room to respond more rapidly to the accusations sure to be raised in the WTO protests in Seattle. War rooms are a way for business leaders to fight back against radical criticism. Coalitions of activists set up war rooms of their own issuing counter claims and pro-trade press releases.  Corporate monitoring of civil disorders and activist monitoring of corporate codes of conduct violations construct the playing field of postmodern war games, a new politics of conflict between spectacle and carnival.

Ø      Theatrics is a weapon to draw media spotlight

Ø      Knowledge is attained through surveillance and monitoring

Ø      Information is accumulated and disseminated at high speed across many fronts

Ø      War rooms compete to block one another’s media strategies

Ø      Sides compete for ethical high ground

Ø      High technology (even artificial intelligence) is key to sustaining competitive advantage

Results, however, have been negligible. While there has been an increase in protests, the response of more monitoring of conditions has not dramatically changed working conditions. Instead, there has been a tremendous growth in the social auditing and monitoring industry, in which accounting firms like PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) and Ernst and Young (E&Y) monitor factory conditions against corporate and industry codes of conduct.  This trend is dangerous, since it privatizes labor and human rights standards of enforcement, while letting governments and public administrators off the hook.

The Electronic Disturbance Theater initiated its first act of Electronic Civil Disobedience in April 1998 to stop the War in Mexico, in support of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico (See http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray/ecd.html for details).  The U.K. group, “Electrohippies” enrolled 452,000 web users to bombard the WTO’s web site during their virtual sit-in. There is a current Electrohippies online protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas conference in Quebec and a Zapatista Tribal Port Scan demonstration tool by Electronic Disturbance Theater distributed at their web site (Electrohippies, 2001).

In sum, we will introduce three forms of theatrics (festival, carnival and spectacle) that we see as intertwined in acts of theatrical power and resistance.  

REFERENCES FOR PRESENTATIONS and LINKS for your Exploration

Bakhtin, Mikhail M.  (1973). Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hé lè ne Iswolsky. 1st ed. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Best, Steven and Kellner, Douglas (1991) Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. NY/London: The Guilford Press. 

Best, Steven and Kellner, Douglas (1997)  The Postmodern Turn. NY/London: The Guilford Press.

Best, Steven and Kellner, Douglas (2000) “Debord, cybersituations, and the interactive spectacle.” Forthcoming in Substance.

Boje, David (1995). “Stories of the storytelling organization: A postmodern analysis of Disney as “Tamara-land.”  Academy of Management Journal. 38 (4), 997-1035.

Boje, D. M.  (1999). Spectacles and Festivals of Organization: Managing Ahimsa Production and Consumption. Book under review. To access nee (ID=aggie359  PASS=adventure).

Boje, D. M.( 2000a)  “The Theatrics of Leadership.”  Web paper.

Boje, D. M. (2000b) "Theatrics of Control:  Tamara of Spectacle, Festival, and Carnival." First draft, November 28, 2000.  This paper is about Nike Theatrics in Asia and presents an example of carnivalesque resistance.

Boje, D. M. (2000c) "Global Theatrics of Capitalism." Paper for the 2001 Academy of Management symposium on Theatrics, Washington D.C. August. 

Boje, D. M. (2000d) "Las Vegas Spectacles: Organization Power over the Body." M@n@ging Journal, special issue on Deconstructing Las Vegas.

Boje, D. M. (2000e). Festivalism at Work: Toward Ahimsa in Production and Consumption. November 2, 1999; Updated September 7, 2000. In Jerry Biberman and Mike Whitty (Eds.) The Spirit and Work Reader University of Scranton Press.

More Theatrics Sites:

Academy of Management 2001 August symposium on Theatrics http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/conferences/theater2001.htm (A symposium accepted by the Research Methods, Organizational Development & Change, and Organization, & Management Theory Divisions of the Academy of Management for presentation August, 2002 in Washington D.C.)

MORE LINKS to THEATRICS:

• Theater of the Absurd
• Theater of the Oppressed
• Existential Theatrics of Leadership
• Leader model of Prince, Hero, Superman/ woman & Bureaucrat
• Global Theatrics of Leadership
• Theatrics of Leadership

•  http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/teaching/338/global_theatrics_and_capitalism.htm

Boje, D. M. (2001a). Spectacle and Inter-Spectacle in The Matrix and Organization Theory.  October 29, 1999; Revise September 5, 2000. Chapter 7  in Parker, Martin, Geoff Lightfoot, Matthew Higgins and Warren Smith (2001) Science Fiction and Organization, London: Routledge. pp. 101-122.

Boje, D. M. (2001b) Book on line  Spectacles and Festivals of Organization. In process, CA: Hampton Press. To access nee (ID=aggie359  PASS=adventure).

Boje, D. M. ,G. A. Rosile, and Simon Malbogat (2000) "Festival, Spectacle and Carnival: Theatrics of Organizational Development and Change." Presentation to ODC division of Academy of Management, Toronto, August, 2000. 

Boje, D. M. & Grace Ann Rosile (2001). Festival, Spectacle, and Carnival: Theatrics of Organization Development and Change. Session and workshop at Academy of Management Meetings, August, 2000 in Toronto.

Boje, D. M. & Grace Ann Rosile (2001) Organizations as Theater. A symposium accepted by the Research Methods, Organizational Development & Change, and Organization & Management Theory Divisions of the Academy of Management for presentation August, 2002 in Washington D.C.

Currie, Mark (1998). Postmodern Narrative Thoery. NY: St. martin’s Press.

Czarniawska, Barbara (1997). Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Debord Guy (1967). Society of the Spectacle. La Société du Spectacle was first published in 1967 by Editions, Buchet-Chastel (Paris); it was reprinted in 1971 by Champ Libre (Paris). The full text is available in English at http://www.nothingness.org/SI/debord/index.html It is customary to refer to paragraph numbers in citing this work. Society of the Spectacle http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4

Elctrohippies web site (2001) http://www.gn.apc.org/pmhp/ehippies/high-index.html

Firat, Fuat A. and Nikhilesh Dholakia (1998). Consuming People: from Political economy to Theaters of Consumption. London/NY: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline And Punish. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Geis, Deborah R. (1993). Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Hopfl,  Heather (2001) Organizational Theatre and the Site of Performance --- A symposium accepted by the Research Methods, Organizational Development & Change, and Organization & Management Theory Divisions of the Academy of Management for presentation August, 2002 in Washington D.C. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/conferences/theater2001.htm#hopfl_site_perf

Kristeva, Julia. (1980). "Word, Dialogue, and Novel." Desire and Language. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora et al. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. 64-91.

Rosile, Grace Ann (1999a). "Managing with Ahimsa and Horse Sense" Mar 16, 1999 In Spirit At Work Journal. See http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/wtwo/ahimsaweb399.html

(1999b). "Management: Common Sense or Horse Sense?" Spirit at Work Journal. March. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/wtwo/commonsense399.html

(1999b). "Discourse from the Horse's Mouth." Transcript of Presentation at the Language and Organizational Change Conference May 15, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/wtwo/horsediscourse599.html

Saner, Raymond (1999). "Organizational consulting: What a gestalt approach can learn from Off-Off-Broadway Theater." Gestalt Review vol. 3 (1): 6-34.

Schreyogg, Georg (2001) Organizational Theatre and Organizational Change  ---  A symposium accepted by the Research Methods, Organizational Development & Change, and Organization & Management Theory Divisions of the Academy of Management for presentation August, 2002 in Washington D.C. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/conferences/theater2001.htm#schreyogg_otoc