Characters is defined as enrolling and directing a cast of theatrical characters (including spectators). Some characters are in the middle of being enrolled, and individual characters morph their persona in schizophrenic ways, or have it morphed by a village of institutions.
Characters – (or Agent) - “agents” says Aristotle in Poetics (350 BCE), are “either good men or bad – the diversities of human character being nearly always derivative from this primary distinction, since the line between virtue and vice is one dividing the whole of mankind” (1448a: 1). Burke (1945) did not invent the term Agents. Aristotle refers to Agents (interchangeably with characters). Agents are the “personages” [that] act the story” (1448b: 30) [note Act is another term Aristotle uses, not just Burke]. Agents are the actors who “act the stories” (1449b: 31). “Character is what makes us ascribe certain moral qualities to the agents” (1450a: 5). “Character in a play is that which reveals the moral purpose of the agents, i.e. the sort of thing they seek or avoid…” (1450b: 8; also 1454a: 18).
Burke reduces characters to agents (executives, corporations, the State are all agents).
I want to redefine Characters in a more critical postmodern direction. Critical here refers to Critical Theory, and postmodern to Postmodern Theory. In the case of Enron, LJM raptor partnerships are characters, as is Enron a character, as are the executives, but so too are investors, students, and business professors (we the spectators are also characters), or what Augusto Boal calls spect-actors. Leaders and managers are often responsible for assembling a cast of characters in a complex enterprise, and for giving the corporation its dramatis persona identity (character). In LJM for example, there is a fictitious character in Beirut named ‘M. Yass” (pseudonym for My Ass), a character important to the quasi-object characterization of first partnership, one ran not by Fastow or Skilling, but by the Rogue Traders of Valhalla, the undisclosed Third Character in the merger of Houson Natural Gas and InterNorth Pipeline in the 1985 merger called HNG/InterNorth, then HNG/INC, then Enteron, and finally Enteron (See Boje, 2002a). The point is that Enron is a morphing character throughout its history. Further, each of the executives is morphing and shizophrenic; each has at least two personalities, and there is retrospective revisionism to the heroic characters since the collapse. This dramatis persona revision to character still continues.
Aristotle’s dramaturgy needs revision, it is too linear and its characters are on a single stage, with spectators remaining in their seats, following a coherent plot: “in a play” says Aristotle (350 BCE: 1459b: 5) where “one can not represent an action with a number of parts going on simultaneously; one is limited to the part on the stage and connected with the actor.” A more critical dramaturgy is like Krizanc’s (1981) play Tamara, which has simultaneous scenes occurring on multiple stages, and where spectators do not stay in their theatre seats, but walk and run to chase the actors from stage to stage in a network of plots and unfolding storylines (Tamara, 2001).
In the play TAMARA, each of the characters has morphing personalities, and unless you are in several rooms simultaneously (an impossibility) you do not see all the characters morph as the leave one theatre and enter another in another room. You can follow each character through an entire evening, but would have to return multiple times to get to see the ways all the characters morth.
Many feel con-scripted and imprisoned in their character roles; there are for on and off stage performers, and some off-stage supporting players want to take center stage; there is a mess of directors, script editors, and aspiring characters learning and refusing their scripted lines competing for time on the center stage. That is why I call it Metatheatre.
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Metascript is what Foucault (1970) would call the carceral, since even executives follow scripts, though they have a hand in writing and directing scripts for most of the cast of characters assembled in Metatheatre. Yet, metascripts unravel, decompose, and people forget why 40 versions of a form are used, or how the official script got to center stage.
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Aristotle (written 350 BCE). E.g.
(1954) translation Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics. Intro by Friedrich Solmsen;
Rhetoric translated by W. Rhys Roberts; Poetics translated by Ingram Bywater.
NY: The Modern Library (Random House). Poetics was written 350 BCE.
Boje, D. M. (2001a). Narrative
Methods for Organizational and Communication Research. London Sage.
Boje,
D. M. (2001b). Carnivalesque Resistance to Global Spectacle: A Critical
Postmodern Theory of Public Administration. Administrative Theory & Praxis.
Vol. 23 (3): 431-458.
Boje, D. M. (2001c). Global Theatrics and Capitalism. Presentation to Academy of Management Conference, Washington D.C., August.
Boje, D.
M. (2002a). Critical Dramaturgical Analysis of Enron Antenarratives and
Metatheatre. Plenary presentation to 5th International Conference on
Organizational Discourse: From Micro-Utterances to Macro-Inferences, Wednesday
24th - Friday 26th July (London).
http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/papers/ENRON_critical_dramaturgical_analysis.htm
Boje, D. M. (2002b) Enron
Metatheatre: A Critical Dramaturgy Analysis of Enron’s Quasi-Objects. Paper
presented at the Networks, Quasi-Objects, and Identity: Reintegrating Humans,
Technology, and Nature session of Denver Academy of Management Meetings. Tuesday
August 13, 2002.
http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/papers/enron_theatre_LJM.htm
Boje, D. M. (2002c) Theatres of Capitalism. Book being published by Hampton Press (San Francisco). Available until publication, on line, at http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/theatrics/index.htm (password is required).
Boje, D.M., Ann L. Cunliffe & John T. Luhman (2002). A dialectic perspective on the organizational theatre metaphor. Paper under review.
Boje, D. M. & G. A. Rosile (2002a). The Metatheatre Intervention Manual. To be published by ISEOR Research Institute of University of Lyon 2, France.
Boje, D. M. & G. A. Rosile (2002a). Theatrics of SEAM. Paper to be
published in Journal of Organiztional Change Management Special Issue on
Socio-Economic Approach to Management (SEAM), guest edited by Henri Saval.
Boje,
D. M., Grace Ann Rosile, Rita A. Durant & John T. Luhman (2002). Enron
spectacle theatrics: A critical dramaturgical analysis. Under review at
Organization Studies, for special issue on organization theatre.
Burke, K. (1945). A grammar of motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Please contact dboje@nmsu.edu to offer suggestions that will develop the SEPTET of Leadership and Theatrics.
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