Special Issue on THEATRICS OF CAPITALISM
Call for Papers due April 2004
Please submit your paper and inquiries to tamara@nmsu.edu
We seek papers that integrate theatre with critical postmodern theory and global capitalism. Four thematic perspectives are suggested below but these are not intended to be all encompassing. For review of Burke vs. Goffman theatre (Oswick, Keenoy, & Grant, 2001; Boje, Luhman, & Cunliffe, 2003).
One theme is that theatre can change and control organizations and society. In Europe and North America, plays are written for specific organizational problems, and staged in front of organizational audiences with the aim to change management and employee’s work behaviors (Boje, Luhman & Cunliffe, 2003; Clark and Mangham, 2002; Schreyogg, 2001). A critical view would examine, for example, how it is usually management that orders and controls the theatre intervention to raise awareness and to change organizational structures and thinking on the part of spectators (employees and other mangers). For example, corporate-dominated news in America instructs their employees to manipulate the news (e.g. PeaceAware.com's MediaAware page; Michael Moore's remarks at Oscar ceremony). It is a form of postmodern theatre, the theatre of symbol manipulation, the substitution of simulation for the horror of war, the selling of heroism in place of the war crimes. The presentation is as stage-managed as the talking points at the Republican 2000 convention. These plays reflect in both their organization and performance the organizational hierarchy, and a chain of power that goes from state, to corporate-owned media, to our living room. The spectators attend to celebrate the heroic endeavors of management and state as they are portrayed on the virtual stage. Consequently, organizational theatre does not forsake the stage or the script, fearing that “improvisatory anarchy” will preempt the official and sanctioned ways of representing power (Derrida, 1978: 239). This kind of theatre has important links to other genres such as the masques of the Tudor and Stuart courts, which sought to celebrate the achievement of those in power. Key questions include, how is control exercised, what is the spectators experience and do these plays achieve their objectives? Can Boal’s ‘forum theatre’ resist the hegemony of state control? (Boal, 1979, 1992, 1995).
A second theme is theatre as metaphor, to look at corporations as performers on the global stage (to look at the spectacle on stage, what is back stage, and what is in the corridor of power between off and on stage). Spectacle work by Guy Debord and others may be a useful critical postmodern theatre perspective perspective. Spectacle work of Guy Debord (1967, Society of the Spectacle) has something important and critical to say about how spectacles of production and consumption relate to post-Marxist critique. Another example is Hopfl’s (2001) work on how theatricality of organizations can create and re-create metaphoric appearances that suppress critical differences, mask ambivalence, and sustain a world of make believe would equally apply. Michael Moore, for example, in accepting his oscar, said,
''We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president,'' Moore said. ''We live in a time where we have a man who's sending us to war for fictitious reasons, whether it's the fiction of duct tape or the fiction of orange alerts.'' (Moore, April 7, 2003)
Submissions could critically examine how theatre as metaphor enacts a metaphoric space within capitalism in which critical assessment is marginal or outlawed.
A third theme is complexity and theatrics. If organization and interorganizational behavior is a network of theatrical production, in distributed networks of consumption, then the question is what are the complexity and chaos dynamics? For example, in the Tamara play, a wandering audience chases a dozen actors on a dozen stages, never able to see all actions at once (Boje, 1995, 2001b). Moreover, Tamara helps explain the dynamics of performers caught in a network of stages, as they make choices of whose drama to participate in next. Global Theatre is a 'Tamara-land' of many stages, wandering audiences chasing characters from stage to stage, to trace the web of storylines. And off-stage there are characters that never seem to make it into the carefully scripted storylines. For example, if spectacle is the theatre of sanctioned power, then part of the dynamics of complexity is the carnival theatre of resistance, such as the protests against globalism and WTO in Seattle, and the succeeding encounters of spectacle and the street theatre of carnival (Boje, 2001a). Carnivalesque refers to strategies of resistance to power and hegemony that take the form of culture jamming, street theatre, and varied forms of parody and satire of state and capital forms of power.
Fourth, organizations are using theatre to accomplish Disneyfication, McDonaldization, Las Vegasization, and Enronization (Boje, 2002a, b) Each is a different style of theatre. For example Disney organizes themselves explicitly as theatre, where employees are no longer employees but cast members, wearing not uniforms but costumes, and instead of working, being on stage. Disney theme parks are theatres within which people walk on the stages of Tomorrowland, Adventureland, etc. Increasingly we witness organizations and city centers becoming more themed in acts of Disneyfication. Firat and Dholakia (1998) write about the new Theatres of Consumption, the political economy being changed by theatre. McDonald’s uses a more mechanistic theatre, one where every word, gesture, and action of employee and manager is scripted. So, how is theatre inveigling itself into organizational life? How are these new forms of theatre impacting on employees? How are they being resisted and modified? What other genres are in use and emerging?
References to Theatre Papers
Boal, Augusto (1979). Theatre of the Oppressed. Translation by Charles A. & Maria-Odillia Leal McBride. Originally published in Spanish as Teatro de Oprimido in 1974. NY: Theatre Communications Group.
Boal, Augusto (1992). Games for Actors and Non-actors. Translated by Adrian Jackson. A conflation of two books, Stop C’est Magique (Paris: Hachette, 1980) and Jeuz pour acteurs et non-acteurs (Paris: La Découverte, 1989) with additions by Boal. London/NY: Routledge.
Boal, Augusto (1995). Rainbow of Desire, The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy. NY: Routledge.
Boje, D. M. (1995). Stories of the storytelling organization: A postmodern analysis of Disney as Tamara-land. Academy of Management Journal. 38 (4), 997-1035. http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/papers/DisneyTamaraland.html
Boje, D. M. (2000) "Phenomenal Complexity Theory and Change at Disney: Response to Letiche." Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 13(6): 558-566. Prepublication draft at http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/papers/Disney_phenomenal_complexity.html
Boje, D. M. (2001a). Carnivalesque Resistance to Global Spectacle: A Critical
Postmodern Theory of Public Administration. Administrative Theory & Praxis,
Vol. 23 (3): 431-458. http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/papers/carnivalesque_resistance_to_glob.htm
Boje, D. M. (2001b) "Las Vegas Spectacles: Organization Power over the
Body." M@n@gement, 4(3): 201-207. Special issue on Deconstructing Las Vegas
at http://www.dmsp.dauphine.fr/management/PapersMgmt/43Boje2.html
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://cbae.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://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/papers/enron_theatre_LJM.htm
Boje, David M.; John T. Luhman, & Ann L. Cunliffe (2003). A Dialectic Perspective
on the Organization Theatre Metaphor American Communication Journal. Volume
6, Issue 2, 2003
1. http://acjournal.org/holdings/vol6/iss2/articles/boje.htm
2. Pdf version http://acjournal.org/holdings/vol6/iss2/articles/boje.pdf
Clark, T. and Mangham, I.L. (2002) ‘From dramaturgy to theatre as technology.
The case of corporate theatre’, Journal of Management Studies, (forthcoming).
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.
Derrida, Jacque (1976). Writing and Difference. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Firat, A. Fuat & Nikhilesh Dholakia (1998) Consuming People: From political economy to theatres of consumption. London/NY: Routledge.
Hopfl, Heather (2001). Organization theatre and the site of performance. Presentation to Academy of Management Conference, Washington D.C., August.
Oswick, C., Keenoy, T. & Grant, D. (2001). Dramatizing and organizing: acting and being. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 14 (3), 218-224.
Saner, Raymond (1999). "Organizational consulting: What a gestalt approach can learn from Off-Off-Broadway Theater." Gestalt Review vol. 3 (1): 6-34.
Saner, Raymond (2000). Theatre and organizational change. Presentation to Academy of Management Conference, Toronto, August.
Schreyogg, Georg (2001). Organization Theatre and Organization Change. Presentation to Academy of Management Conference, Washington D.C., August.