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Festive Work
Scene 13
February 18, 2005
Work is scripted in an organization theatre situated in the political economy of
postmodern capitalism. 1 Postmodern capitalism is about the accumulation of spectacle,
no longer about the accumulation of production; production capitalism that Marx
envisioned has become the Society of the Spectacle that Guy Debord and the Situationist
movement documented in the late 1960s and which Best and Kellner (2001) wrote the
sequel in Postmodern Adventure.
Postmodern capitalism is show business, part of the entertainment economy
(Schmitt, Rogers & Vrotsos, 2003). It is show business beyond the cute ways of engaging
customers in experience marketing, with live shows at the malls, and evangelistic
marketing to people on the street. My critique of their book is that it does not scratch
beyond surface of the spectacle, and reduce poetics of Septet to the 3 Ps (players, plot &
place). They try to make spectacle appear festive, and leaves out all the carnivalesque
resistance to business putting on the show, becoming show business. The book is onedimensional, when organization theatre is three-dimensional: spectacle, carnival, and
festival in hybridity. Finally, the book dies not look at the ethics of theatre, only reviews
spectacle performances that make any business a show business. What they do well is to
examine examples where the spectator (customer) is invited to participate in the creation
of the show business, to become an actor and sometimes co-director of the performance.
This chapter situates festive work in a three-dimensional view of organization
theatre.
1 This chapter was first drafted in 2000, was reworked in my work with Rosile (Boje &
Rosile, 2001) and with some modification is to be published (Boje & Rosile, 2005). In
developing the version for this book, I am focused on the relationship of festival to the
spectacle of work, and how carnival of resistance can be transformative of work. What is
new is a section focused on intervention into organization theatre and interrelationship
between ethics, cognition, and aesthetics of organization theatre.
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Spectacles of
Oppression
Organization
Theatrics
Dialectic
Festivals of
Liberation
Carnivals of
Resistance
Figure 1 – Dialectic of Spectacle, Carnival, and Festival Theatrics
Figure 1 gives you an image of the dialectic of Spectacles of Oppression with Carnivals
of Resistance that can work our here and there into a synthesis of Festival. We will define
the three dimensions of organization theatre separately, but keep in mind they are
interactive. We will then look at ways to change those relationships. Finally we will turn
to Bakhtin (1990) for a view of theatre systemics of theatre, one that allows us to look at
questions of ethics and aesthetics. We turn now to some starting definitions.
Defining spectacle – spectacle is defined as the often violent and oppressive
social control that masquerades as a celebration of betterment by recycling pseudoreforms, false-desires, and selective sightings of progressive evolution, never devolution
(Debord, 1967). Here, spectacle is oppressive, a legitimating narrative for social
engineering and social control masking capitalism’s violent acts of production,
distribution and consumption (Boje, 2000b: 79) Spectacles are our own day-to-day
scripted practices of theatric-accumulation, secular worship of consumption that Marx
(1867) called fetish. The spectacle would convince us that production and consumption is
godly while nature is godless. Spectacle is uniquely commercial and corporately
controlled. It is no longer last place in importance among Aristotle’s (350 BCE) list of
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poetic elements: spectacle in Society of the Spectacle is now first place. Spectacle feeds
our brains with illusion; we plug into the matrix of the phantasm and confuse it with life.
In sum, the key features of spectacle is that is a show of consumption, work is an end to
itself, work time overtakes all other time, work is highly scripted, becoming dead time,
where they are only pseudo desires and pseudo needs, a loss of self, in colonized spaces
where we are the spectator to our own enterprise (see contrasts in Table 1).
Defining Carnival - Carnival is much tamer today than in medieval and
Renaissance times, when the term “Carnivalesque” could be applied to theatric ways of
questioning the most powerful in society. Bakhtin’s (1968) history of carnival, argues
that modernity, transformed carnival into just another show, what we are calling
spectacle, and the powerful class no longer attended (unwilling to let the powerless speak
back to them). Carnivalesque, in limited areas, is still a way to parody and satirize
authority figures, societal norms of behavior, and rigid social structure (see examples in
chapters on Disney, Las Vegas, 911, and McDonald’s). It is important to note that some
parody and satire forms of carnival are hostile and violent; other times the grotesque
humor is a way to look sideways at society, and to enact metamorphosis (Boje, & Yue,
2004). In sum, the key features of carnivalesque theatre is its resistance, where parody
becomes an end to itself, but can be part of metamorphosis of work through laughter, by
satirizing oppressive work scripts, making space for renewal time, focuses on
emancipatory needs (need to speak back to power, to be removed from its oppression),
and where that fails, it is time for mis-management, a bit of absurd anarchy that
deconstructs the events, and where one is both spectator and actor on the stage (spectactor).
Defining Festival - Festivalism is defined here as the pragmatics of long-term
sustainability in a non-violent and spiritual option to predatory capitalism, more in
balance with the whole planet. “The pre-capitalism festival ways of life were
appropriated and transformed by spectacle capitalism. Festival has been replaced by
spectacles of theatrical consumption (the mall and the stores in the mall) as well as by
spectacular organizations (producers of spectacles and themselves spectacles)” (Boje,
2000b: 80). Festivalism is idealistic on my part, a discovery of a life-oriented capitalism,
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a healthy spirituality. I search for festival that has not been wiped out, or turned into one
more spectacle. Festivalism is a search for the rhythm of Earth, a celebration of less male,
more feminine ways of knowing, and less violent ways of being a citizen of the world. In
sum, the theatrics of folk culture treats play as an end (not as a shill to spectacle, or a
means to speak back to power), play time is without work (excluding its preparation), it is
a time for play scripts that allow for improv, and it is alive time, where desires and needs
are transparent, and one can self-manage (no need for bosses), it’s a free space, and one
where one is participant and co-designer with the people who show up.
Although we separate the three theatric forms of spectacle, festival and
carnivalesque (in our definitions and the summary table below), keep in mind they are
conjoined within organizations. They share common elements. Spectacle, carnival and
festival share the six elements of feasting, masquerading, merriment, mirth, utopian
vision, processing. Carnival and festival share four elements: uninhibited freedom,
suspension of hierarchical rank, primordial gaiety, and street theatre. I theorize them as
the hybrid, the three-dimensions of any organization’s theatrics.
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Table One: Spectacle, Festival and Carnival Elements
Spectacle
1. Theatrics of showconsumption
2. Work is end
3. Its all work time
4. Scripted patterns of
work behavior
5. Dead time
6. Pseudo desires
7. Pseudo needs
8. Loss of Self
9. Colonized spaces
10. Spectator
Carnival
Festival
1. Theatrics of
resistance
2. Parody is the end
3. Metamorphosis of
work through
laughter
4. Satirize the work
scripts
5. Renewal time
6. Embodied desires
7. Emancipatory
Needs
8. Mis-management
9. Deconstructed
spaces
10. Spect-actor
1. Theatrics of folk
culture
2. Play is end
3. Play time without
work
4. Play scripts to improv
5. Live time
6. Transparent desires
7. Transparent needs
8. Self-Management
9. Free spaces
10. Participant/Codesigner
Organization theatre is a hybrid of spectacle opposed by carnival, and the synthesis into
festive organization is not usually forthcoming.
What is Festive Organization? Festive organization is interactive with carnival
and spectacle. One is impossible to achieve without the other. One masquerades as the
other, and we can not tell them apart without careful analysis. Since one can morph
before your eyes into the other, it is a tough assignment to look at their hybridity (how
one animates the other). We have discussed examples in previous chapters. Beneath the
Disney spectacle show business is a factory system that would make Frederick Taylor
smile. This relationship between a cast of characters being on stage interacting with the
public and what goes on under the stage, as well as what is going in terms of carnivals of
resistance all around the show stage is the dynamics of organization theatre.
Disney presents itself as a place and a time to be festive, a safe place for family
fun, for gay and straight fun, for letting out the inner child, and floating on the plastic
surface of factory-produced fantasy. Disneyfication spreads that theatre to other
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organizations, to managers who attend Disney University, and try to make their own
organization into the show, their employees into cast members, and their customers into
guests.
Each McDonald’s is a concentrated spectacle, and the corporation as a whole,
spreads in diffuse spectacles, into that global capitalism discussed under the heading of
McDonaldization. Everywhere, it seems, McDonaldization is resisted by social and
ecological movements enacting carnivalesque street theatre. In the film Supersize Me we
meet rather strange, heavy users of McDonald’s that find it a festive and restive place.
Most of us find the garish colors, the tables bolted to the floor, to robotic smile of the
crew, and the food itself to be a rather plastic experience. McDonald’s presents itself as a
festive experience by putting on the masks of ancient, pre-modern folkloric culture
(Bakhtin, 1968, 1981): the clown, rogue and fool played by Ronald, Hamburglar, and
Grimace.
By imitation globally, has its resistance carnival.
I want to step away from these glitzy examples, and bring home the point that
organization theatrics applies to every organization. I want to focus on how to change the
theatre of the everyday organization, from the small business to the less showy
corporation. We turn next to the way work is scripted, then to the scripted organzitons,
and how to rescript them.
Festive Work Scripts – Work is highly scripted. People have job descriptions, on
the job and formal training to teach them the scripts. Scripts are created by others,
directed by others, and edited by others. We are left with very little to work with, and can
improv within exceedingly narrow constraints. Trying being a building contractor and
seeing haw far you can improv with building codes, inspectors, industry tradition, and
customer expectations. Set up a print shop or a sandwich shop and you invariably imitate
or fall into scripted patterns of behavior. In more complex organizations, with hundreds
of people, divided by units and territory --- the scripts begin to overlay one another. From
one generation of executives and workers to the next, consultants and new CEOs bring in
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the latest fad and fashion. Each is an attempt to rescript work; each gets only a partial
implementation; each is abandoned in favor of the next fad.
Script can be defined as a social recipe for performance. We invite others to play
roles in our scripts. Some of the scripts turn into games of oppression, others into games
of resistance, and sometimes there are games of festive relief.
Roy’s (1959) banana time is a story of machine operators who sought relief from
boredom of their monotonous work scripts by engaging in some ritualistic behavior. They
began to make a game out of work. Ritualistic games of horseplay, joking, and pranks
marked time in ways that interrupted monotonous work rhythm. Banana time was
signaled by a lunch box banana as a collectively determined break time. There was also
peach time, window time, lunch time, pickup time, fish time, and coke time. Playing
games at work is also the subject of Eric Berne’s (1964), Games People Play. Love Me
Love My Dog, Avoid the Monkey, Ain't it Awful, Why Does This Always Happen to Me
(WAHM), and Now I got You/You Son of a Bitch (NIGYSOB). People recruit each other
into their game scripts. They are vigilant for players who can play certain roles in the
script, which allow themselves to play the character they are so desperate to bring forth.
This can range from venting rage, scolding an unsuspecting clerk, releasing stored up
frustration, all the way to declaring oneself the victim. People can recruit each other: for
example, one can play NIGYSOB while the other plays WAHM. These scripts can be
played out repeatedly over a person’s lifetime (Sterner, 1974).
There is one particular game I would like to focus upon, one that is an intersection
between worker and organization game-playing: the workaholic. Those addicted to work
play the role of the victim (addict). The recruit an oppressor (usually managers/bosses), a
rescuer (often a subordinate, or co-worker), an enabler (could be co-worker or
subordinate, and a connection to an endless supply the work (the organization).
Workaholics find unlimited access to their favorite game, workaholism, in organizations.
The workaholic plays the victim (see how overloaded I am), the rescuer and enabler help
(here is more work; let me help you work) and defend the addict from discovery (he is
taking more breaks than before). The purpose of the game depends upon the player: the
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addict gets to be victim, the others get to help. Workaholism is a self-destructive life
script. It takes away from family time, leisure time, and the person’s health and
relationships ultimately suffer.
Workaholism feeds the organization’s appetite for performativity. Performativity
is defined as working someone until death. It is extracting as many work hours as
possible, it stretching the working day until there is no time left other than work time.
Karl Marx (1867: 242) is explicit about how organizations stretch the working day in
“small thefts” of time. Workers are expected to report early, stay late, work through their
breaks, and get paid for one shift. Snatching a few minutes here and there adds to the
surplus capital that can be extracted. In chapter 10 of Das Kapital (1867), Marx tells us
stories of factor life, the exploitation of child and female labor, and how the workplace is
a “Theatre of Terror” (p. 276). The antagonist in the Theatre of Terror is the vampirelike capitalist sucking the last drop of blood out of living labor, leading to their early
death (1867: 233, 246). Besides the theft of time, there is the theft of fresh air and
sunshine:
Mary Anne Walkley had worked without intermission for 26 ½ hours,
with 60 other girls, 30 in one room, that only afforded 1/3 of the cubic feet
of air required for them. At night, they slept in pairs in one of the stifling
holes into which the bedroom was divided by partitions of board. And this
was one of the best millinery establishments in London. Mary Anne
Walkley fell ill on the Friday, died on Sunday, without, to the
astonishment of Madame Elise [her boss], having previously completed
the work in hand. The doctor, Mr. Keys, called too late to the death-bed,
duly bore witness before the coroner’s jury that “Mary Anne Walkley had
died from long hours of work in an over-crowded workroom, and a too
small and badly-ventilated bedroom” (Marx, 1867: 254-255).
Prolonging the working day beyond the natural day, and into the night “quenches only in
a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour. To appropriate labour
during all the 24 hours of the day is, therefore, the inherent tendency of capitalist
production” (p. 256-257).
The two forces, workaholism and performativity combine to create the addictive
organization. Both usurp time for family, bodily, and spiritual health and well being. “It
steal the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight.. It reduces the sound
sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so
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many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders
essential” (Marx, p. 265).
The House of Terror attracts the workaholic and the oppressor into parasitic roles.
Schaef and Fassel (1998: 5), in The Addicted Organization say that organization are in
denial when it comes to workaholism, as well as sex, alcohol, and drug addiction. The
addicted organization operates in a society that is addicted to processes of overconsumption and over-work. “The True addicts rise quickly in the leadership hierarchy”
(Boje & Rosile, 2005: 10). The lean, mean, high performing company functions as “an
active addict” (Schaef & Fassel, 1988: 8). There is no boundary between home and work
life, between work and leisure. The working day is 24 hours and it’s a seven day work
week.
If we focus on process-addictions in the workplace, we certainly have to include
the obsession with quality and perfectionism (zero-defects) of the Total Quality
Management program (TQM). It is a system that exacerbates the perfectionist and the
workaholic scripts. Mistakes are unacceptable, only perfection will do in TQM. It sets up
a total commitment to work, to perfecting the system of work, to making oneself into the
perfect work addict. Combined with the downsizing trend, still in vogue snce the 1980s,
the addictive organization combines workaholism and perfectionism with the scarcity
model: “not enough work for everyone… so we keep working, hoping that things will get
better, that a drastic turnaround will happen” (Boje & Rosile, 2005: 11). It takes two and
even three jobs (McJobs) to survive in the great service economy. I have students who
pull a day shift at McDonald’s and a night shift at Wal-Mart. Yes, if you must know, they
sleep in class. Like Marx’s Theatre of Terror, the addicted organization contrives ways to
involve workers (and everyone else) more deeply into the passion for work. The addict
too easily rises to become the leader, while the rest of us take on the co-dependent
enabler and rescuer roles.
In the Theatre of Terror, work becomes not only an addictive script, but is
complemented by scripts of denial (creating camouflage to cover the chaos the addictive
system perpetrates), and much of what gets staged in spectacle is putting up a front to
cover it all up. We examined this situation in Enron, working faster and harder with
fewer people, and courting chaos in the energy/utility industry a model of the New
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Economy. Andrew Fastow rescued his bosses (Jeff Skilling & Ken Lay) using complex
off-the-balance sheet partnership schemes. People working in addicted organizations are
socialized to please others, to protect them from being found out, to sacrifice themselves.
Addictive organizations recruit co-dependents to play the roles necessary to keep
the show on the road. The addictive-process script allows the co-dependent and the addict
to get their ‘fix.’ Addict and co-dependents are angry, depressed, controlling, and
manipulative. We have delineated four types of addictive organizations (Boje & rosile,
2005: 12-5).
1. Organizations in which a key person is an addict. Leaders with compulsive
perfectionist and workaholic personalities thrive on process addiction. They are
dogmatic, insisting others submit to their way of doing things, self-centered
making sure everything is cleared through them, and subject to mood swings
including guilt, euphoric hyper-activity, and depression. They are tragic figures,
always fixing their organizations, by applying more work, more perfection an
control. Secrecy becomes critical to their survival. Co-dependents play to role of
putting out the fires, putting on the front, telling the necessary lies.
2. Taking your disease with your into the organization. Workaholism repeats a cycle
of behavior learned in the family setting. The disease is replicated in the work
organization. It is fatal to marriages and personal relationships. Children, who
grow up in addictive families, often choose workaholism as a career script. They
have trouble dealing with authority, but are calm, cool, and collected in a crisis
(why not they grew up in so much chaos, they handle it well). Workaholics are
unaware of the effects their obsession for work puts upon their children, spouse,
co-workers, and their own health.
3. The organization as an addictive substance. The theme of addictive organization
is the promise to fulfill our every need and gratify every desire by being our
family (e.g. Disney employees for like family members before they became cast
members in the show). Popular culture glorifies the lifestyles of the fast and
furious, making workaholic who gets ahead, the role model to emulate. It amounts
to recognition, belonging and the approval of community (at least in popular
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culture images). The corporate family offers all kinds of structure, and control that
the dysfunctional family could not.
4. The organization as addict. when organization becomes saturated with addictive
process, then you replace one addict with another, and the system is selfperpetuating. Harvey (1988) develops the idea of the organization as a Phrog
farm. A Phrog is someone who pretends they under the power of a Bull Phrog,
living in the life of the Phrog farm (i.e. addictive organization). People take on the
powerless role of the co-dependent, enabling the main bull Phrog to play out their
rageful script. They come to believe they have no options, and cannot sit down
and talk it out (drain the Phrog swamp of its muck).
How does one break out of a work addiction script? You are asking the wrong person?
I have been a workaholic most of life. I grew up in an addictive family. Two brothers are
drug addicts. I am divorced, remarried and rarely see any of my children 9I do keep in
regular touch with Ray, & someday, who knows, maybe the others); have met only one of
my three grandchildren (then that one moved back to China, & has no contact with any of
us). As bad as that all sounds, the good news is I stopped my social drinking habits about
12 years ago, turned vegetarian (now vegan), and so the only addiction I contend with is
the work. I have learned a few helpful things, but I am still addicted to work. I try to work
a normal day, but sometimes lapse into getting up at 4:30 AM and working straight
through the day, into the night, until I am so blurry-eyed and drowsy that I literally drop
from exhaustion after 16 hours or so. But, other days, I get the monster under control.
One thing I learned was to stop when I get tired, to take breaks for breakfast,
lunch, and dinner. I take time to prepare meals, and sometimes have those face-to-face sit
down meals with wife and friends. Anyone who grew up in a dysfunctional family can
tell you that the face-to-face time is something to be avoided.
One of the great lessons of my life comes from Ahimsa, the practice of nonviolence, and meditation. There are times when I fall away form it, but mostly I meditate
each morning.
I learned to get away each year and head to southern France. I think it is important
to get out of the fast, overwork culture and go some place where taking an entire month
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off from work is considered normal. People sit down for long meals with great convivial
conversation, and when the summer sun just right, head to the beach. After a few hours
on the beach, all the important pressing projects seem to fade away like the morning mist.
Finally, if there is such here-and-now as festive work, then I think it comes from
spending that time with people you trust. Festive work is a liberatory event, where the
creativity flows, and you are doing something aesthetic, something that is meaningful,
instead of meaningless. It is putting on a good show for students, finding a way to turn
classroom moments into happenings, into times where we improv instead of follow a
well-rehearsed script. Festive work is liberatory in the sense that the oppressive aspects
of the spectacle are held at bay. It is not the same kind of liberation through protest that
occurs in carnival theatrics. Festive work takes us into a more folkloric time, and a space
where we are perfecting our craft. Festive work is full of life, not an escape from the
house of terror. Festive work is liberatory in that one is able to break out of a selfdefeating script, and locate balance. Spectacle robbed us of this folkloric time and space,
reduced family to corporate relationships and corporately-valued output. Festive work is
making convivial theatre, as opposed to spectacle show, or carnivalistic theatre.
Breaking out of the work addict script requires changing the situation, changing
the organization theatre, and changing the entire political economy of postmodern
capitalism.
How to change Spectacle-dominated organization into a slightly more festive
organization?
A place to begin is to examine the interplay of spectacle, carnival, and festival in
the organization. When an organization gets out of balance and becomes too much one
over the other, then it is time to rescript. Rescripting organization theatre requires a rather
sophisticated organizational development process. It is, for me, an intervention tion the
relationship between the three forms of theatre.
We are developing an approach that integrates organizational theatre with
organization development. I teach small business consulting at my university and on
occasion contract with a larger client.
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Henri Savall and his associates (Bonnet, Zardet, et al) link economics, accounting
and a special sociotechnical systems approach to large system change. Grace Ann Rosile
and I have been working with them for the past six years to integrate theatric and
narrative work with their sociotechnical systems work. We call it, Metascript theory; it
comes from our work of Henri Savall (Boje & Rosile, 2003a); according to Savall,
“There are people who are the stars of organizational theatre. There is an off stage and an
on stage, and those who work to perfect what takes place on the stage. There is a
director, and there are people who think they can be better directors. There are people on
the sidelines who want to replace the stars, who think they can do a better job. With so
many directors and also spectators seeking to displace actors and become the new stars,
the metascript becomes increasingly chaotic.”
Metascript is defined as a network of scripts (mostly unwritten ones) and conscripts (that normalize & discipline behavior, sometimes as imprisonment) in ways that
define the field of actions into character roles, set the plots for strategies, and where
characters learn their lines and play their parts. It is what Foucault (1979) would certainly
call 'panoptic surveillance,' specifying our (con) script so tightly, that we monitor what
we say and do; being suspended in a network of scripts. A Metascript is a far-reaching
network of disciplinary scripts that render us docile (in Harvey’s Phrog Farm). Scripts
produce human bodies that are docile because we are constantly observed to make sure
we speak our lines in prescribed ways. Scripts normalize our behavior. Managers and
personnel agents write scripts. Executives write scripted plans. The organization is a
'carceral network' of scripts, little disciplinary mechanisms (Foucault, 1979: 298).
Metatheatre is defined by Boje and Rosile (2002a, b) as a multiplicity of theatres
(formal, informal, off and on stage) with starring and supporting casts of characters who
constitute the ‘concentrated,’ and ‘diffuse’ spectacles (Debord, 1967) in theatrical
performances experienced by employees, investors, customers and vendors. In Tamara
theatre, we looked at the fragmented, wandering audience, chasing actors and storylines
across a shape-shifting network of stages interconnected by the choices made on whom to
follow (Boje, 1995). In short, Metatheatre is the Tamara of multiple and contending
theatres that constitute organizations in a network of simultaneous, stage performances in
the overall spectacle-carnival-festival dimensions of organization.
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We use the term metatheatre differently than Turner (1985: 181), who invents the
term “meta-theater” for another use. for Turner, “meta-theatre” is the communication
about the communication process, spectators and actors reflect upon how the actors do
what they do on stage, “the ability to communicate about the communication process
itself” (p. 181). In contrasting his own dramaturgy work with Goffman’s, Turner (1985;
181) says that for him “dramaturgical analysis begins when crises arise in the daily flow
of social interaction.” Turner continues, “Thus, if daily living is a kind of theater, social
drama is a kind of meta-theater, that is, a dramaturgical language about the language of
ordinary role-playing and status-maintenance which constitutes communication in the
quotidian social process” (p. 181). Metatheatre then is for Turner, linguistic-reflexivity by
everyday actors about the communication system, where they consciously show
spectators what they are doing.
We, on the other hand, use the term, metatheatre to reflect the multiplicity of
simultaneous performance stages, and the special relationships between theatre authors,
directors, characters and beholders, and the cognitive, ethical and aesthetic dimensions
(see section below on Bakhtin’s 1990 architectonics). Corporate directors, managers and
other script-creators, for example, mobilize plot-scenarios in the course of which theatre
emerges on multiple, real corporate stages that are only partially understood (as in
Tamara, Boje, 1995). We work in fragmented scripts, that we call “metascripts”;
rescripting them into some kind of festive work script is a collective process; it is the
basis of our organization theatre consulting work. Most organizations are bad scripts,
chaotic and injurious metascripts that need a thorough rewrite. Scripts are redundant and
completely predictable affairs until they become so fragmented and so many fragments
swirl and contradict to form the chaos of metascript. Metascripting is therefore in
dynamic relationship to the physicality of performance on multiple simultaneous stages,
where wandering fragmented audiences chase storylines, in what we mean by the term
metatheatre.
We are theatre therapists to organizations. The intervention occurs in three
phases:
Phase 1: Listening and Diagnosis - Rather, the purpose of the diagnosis stage of
this intervention is to research the “metascript” of the organization, and to use qualitative
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narrative research methods (Boje, 2001b) to reproduce samples of metascript fragments
to be fed back in the “Mirror Effect.” The diagnosis takes six months to a year, and
includes detailed ethnographic field work where people are observed and interviewed,
and their scripts are collected by teams of professors and students earning their Ph.D.
Each week, the observation and interview notes are coded and put into a computer
database for further textual analysis, to develop themes in scripts, and track differences in
the scripting. At the same, time during the fieldwork the consultants (faculty & Ph.D.
students, and some graduates of the program) ask questions about the impact of the
scripts on financial performance.
Phase II: Mirror Effect - In theatrical terms, Mirror Effect explores the many
different scripts that populate an organization simultaneously, that collectively constitute
its metascript. Consultants meticulously record comments of executives and nonexecutives in individual and group interviews that we (the authors) believe constitute
fragments of the metascript. Scribing and translating the metascript is the starting point.
In terms of methodology, we scribe what we here and see of fragments of the metascript
and present a deconstruction of the script variations and incongruities in the “Mirror
Effect” intervention sessions (Boje & Rosile, 2003a, b).A co-reading of the collected
fragments of metascript is the point of the Mirror Effect event. We juxtapose the senior
executive’s script against many alternatives of workers and managers. The result is a
multiplicity of contending and fragmented scripts, sorted by key problem areas and by
types of stakeholder viewpoints (i.e. executive, workers, technicians, and customers) in
order to confront the organization with the “Mirror Effect.” For a small business this is a
one-day event, for a large organization it can take weeks to sift through the metascript
twists and turns. During Mirror Effect, the client reviews not only the script they are
performing, but the financial impact of such a script.
Phase III: Intervention - Changes to the metascript are proposed and we act
them out using improv theatre. We rehearse them with the organization members
contributing ideas for rescripting, and taking roles in the rehearsal. When the participants
find a script change that seems to improve the overall metascript, then we work on how
to implement it in day-to-day operations. The intervention phase can taek a year to
several years.
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Phase IV: Evaluation - Follow up measures of impacts of the experiment on
hidden costs and revenues; hidden in the sense that the impacts do not show up in the
current reporting system, and it takes some audits and probing to sort them out.
Determining hidden costs and hidden revenues goes hand in hand in Savall’s
methodology, as a way to sort through the impact of the discombobulated organization
theatre.
Restorying Metatheatre - Restorying comes from pioneering work of White and
Epston (1990) in narrative family therapy and has been applied more recently to
organizations (Barry, 1997; Rosile, 1998, a, b, c; Rosile & Boje, 2002). Restorying is
focused on building a new story, and uses deconstruction in order to break the grip of the
dominant oppressive story that mires the people in dysfunctional scripts in their family or
organization. The focus of Restorying is to find the pattern of relationships and scripts in
the network that are the problem, rather than find some individual or focal organization
that is the problem. This would mean working to deconstruct the forces that keep the old
story in play, but at the same time resituate those forces by finding ways to validate
attempts by the network players to institute the new story and resist the influences of the
old story. Some things to look at in doing restorying consultation work:
1. What are the storylines in place? (how are people recruited to their roles in these
stories?)
2. Who are the characters in the story? (antagonists, protagonists, victims,
perpetrators, scapegoats)
3. What is the composition of the story (What must be added, left out or rewritten to
make this story a new story?).
4. What is the dialog? (scripts).
5. Who is the author of the dominant story? (there can be many).
6. How does the plot (emplotment) unfold over time?
7. Whose voices are marginal and dominant in the story?
8. What collective assumptions are being played out?
Restorying in organization consulting is done by having spect-actors present their
old and new story to an audience that can reinforce their new script and new voices. This
has some kinship to Theatrics (see Table 2).
Table 2 - Restorying to transform Metatheatre
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Seven Steps for Restorying
1. Characterize – Describe
the organization at its
best, as if it were
functioning perfectly
and living up to all
ideals
Metatheatre & Metascript Questions
Characterize Theatric Dysfunctions:

What is the impact or influence of the
relevant characters on the problem?

What is the problem’s influence on
characters?

What is the “state of affairs” at the onset,
middle, and end of the story?

How has the problem affected character’s
relations with themselves (theatre of the
mind)?
2. Externalize the problem
–What problems does
the organization
currently face? (Separate
the problem from any
individual character;
Problem becomes its
own story character)
3. Sympathize – What
benefits does the
organization derive from
the problem? What feeds
the problem?
4. Revise (Commitment to
Change) – Explain the
ways in which this
problem has had
negative effects. Would
people really like to be
rid of this problem?
Why?
Steps:

The problem is the problem

The people are not the problem; a
particular person is not the problem.

Make the problem into a character
(“overwork”) that the person, as
character, can affect.

Reduce the depressing effects of
problem-saturated accounts.

Identify the dualisms supporting the status
quo.

Explore the dominant side of each
dualism.

Explore the subordinate side of each
dualism.

Study the construction of dualisms – how
they are two sides of the same coin.

Disadvantages of the problem.

Explore the limitations of dualisms.

Deconstruct the dualisms.
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5. Strategize (Unique
Outcome) - Tell about a
time when there was a
“unique outcome,” when
this problem was not as
strong or when it was
completely eliminated.
Identify an existing
potential to overcome
the problem.

Deconstruct the problem.

Use “double descriptions: or alternative
descriptions, so the story becomes “a
story.”

Realize that multiple stores and outcomes
are possible.

Expand the alternative story – what
thoughts and feelings, what happened
before, after?
6. Re-historicize (Restory)
- Take the unique
outcome and instead of
it being the exception,
make it the rule, the
dominant story. What
evidence is there to
support this
“alternative” story?
What might a news
release say about your
organization’s new plot,
its ability to overcome
this problem?

Choose the preferred new “dominant
story.”

Choose the past “unique outcomes” that
support the new story.

Choose the future predictions/predictors
that support the new story?
7. Publicize - Who would
say they could already
see the basis for, or that
they would support, this
new organizational
approach that is
overcoming the old
problem? Enlist the
support of other
stakeholders to ensure
continuing success?

Stakeholder letters to recognize and
encourage the storytellers’ efforts.

A reauthoring process to reauthor the new
story.

Provide tangible evidence of support and
interest.
Source: Adapted from Rosile & Boje (2002); Rosile, (1998, a, b, c)
Architectonics of Organization Theatre – Mikhail Bakhtin (1990) in essays
from 1919 and the 1920s began developing his work on architectonics. “Architectonics
can be understood as concerned with questions of building, of the way something is put
together” (Holquist, 1990: x, in his intro to Bakhtin, 1990). Architectonics is the study of
how a system, its entities fit together and relate to each other. It includes aesthetic,
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cognitive, and ethic dimensions. Aesthetic is concerned with the consummation of the
system, how parts are shaped into the wholeness of a system in the eye of a beholder; it is
less about traditional concerns about beauty, and more about the creative aspects of
aesthetic consummation. Ethical is concerned with who has answerability for the system;
who are the authors, heroes (characters), beholders, and directors of the system? And
cognitive is concerned with the mental constructs or logics conveyed in the language of
the system. Bakhtin (1990) takes system theory to a new challenge by asking about the
interanimation of the aesthetic, ethic, and cognitive dimensions. That is, a system has
extra-aesthetic dimensions, such as the ethic and cognitive areas, and vice versa (for
extra-ethic and extra-cognitive aspects). In this way a system is a struggle among the
three aspects to achieve a negotiated whole, that is only partly understandable on any one
(axiological) dimension. The three architectonic dimensions are in systems dialogic
(Bakhtin, 1981).
Festival, spectacle, and carnival can be assessed for their architectonics, for the
way they combine and socially negotiate aesthetic, ethic, and cognitive concerns of
organization theatre. The contribution of architectonics to organization theatre study is
that it allows us to ask what are the extra-aesthetic aspects of organization theatre; what
are the extra-cognitive aspects; what are the extra-ethical aspects; and how do these
spaces and temporal events interact in an organizational system? How is it, in other
words, that organization theatre is aesthetically consummated, ethically answerable for
that consummation, and cognitively registered and articulated by its participants? Bakhtin
(1990: 1) in developing the ethics of answerability, asks who has “the liability to blame”?
At any point in time, and on any simultaneous stage of an organization theatre, the
rehearsals and performances, the scripting, editing, directing and acting is about finding
relieve from organizational answerability for the system that has been consummated. In
its aesthetic activity, organization theatre, the authors of a system, glorify its heroes and
points out any villains.
System is therefore not an accomplished mechanistic-organic, open-closed entity,
but a kind of fiction accomplished in narrative and theatric expression. As a dialogic
architectonic, organization theatre is not dialogue among people; it is dialogic between its
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aesthetic, ethic, and cognitive gradients of systemicalness (i.e. of realizing and
derealizing system consummation, answerability & appreciability at any point in time).
Architectonics allows us to ask about the “systematicness” and the “lust for unity”
of the system authors and characters (Holquist, 19990: xiv, intro in Bakhtin, 1990). As a
system organization theatre achieves its lust for unity, its very systemicality in the
dialogic relationship between cognitive appreciation (of time & space), ethic
answerability, and aesthetic consummation. In organization theatre, system participants
lust for wholeness that cannot always be achieved; they grieve the death of relationships,
scripts and parts of the system that are no more, and celebrate the emergence of relations
and parts that are yet to be consummated. As the organization theatre participants interact
with community, customers, vendors, and other actors in its environment, they are
confronted with different ethic, aesthetic, and cognitive appreciations.
As an aesthetic event, theatrics is a subset of an organization system in dialogic
interactivity with ethical and cognitive areas of discourse. These points of view are
diverse and occur with simultaneity and the “dialogical paradox” (Holquist, 1990: xxvi,
in intro to Bakhtin, 1990) is that the Tamara of theatric stages in an organization is
fragmented by the wandering audiences networking as they choose which storylines to
trace and to co-create. The aesthetics of organization theatrics always a struggle among
players and authors to consummate a whole system that can be cognitively understood by
beholders, as well as ethically answerable in a diverse multiplicity of value frames.
In sum, we are concerned in organization theatre consultation with a dialogic
architectonics of ethical answerability (who answers for this system design), aesthetic
consummation (who lusts to put the parts into a whole), and cognitive appreciation (what
frames are used in the speech acts & dialogue)? And organization theatre is coanswerability, co-consummation, and co-ethical; in shirt the dialogic relations of the
architectonics of organization theatre are multi-voiced (polyphonic), multi-logical
(polylogical), and multi-meaningful (polysemous). Organization theatre achieves partial
answerability, partial consummation, and partial cognitive sense-making. As a system, it
is not ever whole, its participants and beholders lust for wholeness (or dissolution); so the
question is always how much systemicality is being achieved at any given time and place
Architectonics allows us to ask about the levels of consummation, ethical fulfillment (or
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shortfall), and the cognitive vantage points of the sensemakers (the ones doing the
talking, acting, directing, coaching, & critiquing). We get into nitty-gritty questions of
who is talking for themselves, and who is talking for others; who is consummating the
theatrics for themselves, and who is consummating for others? In short, it is about voice
in the plots, characterization, dialogue, themes, rhythm, and frames (see Septet, in Scene
7).
Architectonically, organization theatre is being realized and derealized
simultaneously along the ethic, cognitive, and aesthetic dimensions. The cognitive frames
emerge and dissolve, the ethical answerability shifts the praise and blame, and the
aesthetic shaping of the parts into a more or less coherent whole system fluctuates.
Disney, for example, is at times valued for its aesthetic synergistic achievements, in the
way it aligns movie scripts, themes in its parks, and its merchandising of those characters.
At other times, Disney is accused of being an aesthetic Chernobyl (Boje, 1995).
McDonald’s hires the most popular and fashionable animation studio to give
McDonaldland characters an aesthetic makeover (e.g. giving Hamburglar a more Rugratlook by Klasky-Csupo studios between 1998 & 2002). And at the same juncture is
accused of being an aesthetic that is makes fatty food addicts of children (& the parents
they drag along to buy the Happy Meals). Enron’s system consummation disintegrates as
they become answerable for the artificiality of their off-the-balance sheet partnerships
despite the Star wars and Jurassic Park names of those partnerships. In postmodern wars,
the media and the politicians present a staged-managed, theatre to the embedded reporters
who consummates a performance that masks the reality of lives lost (e.g. prohibiting the
filming of fallen soldiers in their caskets; staging the Top Gun-imitative president’s
landing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, digitizing members of the
audience) (Boje, 2003). People are mostly unaware of the extensive dubbing of Bush
performances, the audacious theatrical creativeness, its extensive choreography, scripting,
and stagecraft.
For example, White House aides spent several days on the carrier setting the stage
for President Bush's Top Gun-styled landing, costuming the sailors for colorcoordination, placing the banner “mission accomplished” behind the podium, getting the
carrier to circle out of sight of the California coast, for better photo opportunities, and so
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forth, timing the speech so the lighting gave the president the right hue and glow (Boje,
2003). Declaring an end to the war was theatrically consummated, to shift the
answerability to questions such as ‘what weapons of mass destruction’ ‘what is that
connection to 911’ “did he dessert during Vietnam’ etc. to the margins, while the media
could report how fashionable Bush looked in his Top gun outfit. Postmodern war is
theatre, “well-financed stagecraft, an enactment of power with aides preparing scripts,
choreographing the scenes, setting up special lighting, predetermining camera views,
picking audience composition, and even dramatically costuming not only the Prescient,
but the spectators” (Boje, 2003). Audiences are digitized to reflect focus group
assessments about diversity mixes that have the most appeal; aides pass out the right kind
of costumes to an audience that is pre-selected, rather than spontaneous. A lack of
understanding of the public of the consummation of such theatre makes answerability for
the theatrics difficult to assess; there is no privileged point of view to assess the
confutation of aesthetic, ethical, and cognitive dimensions of its architectonic registry.
The festive event to declare the end of the war is marred by some important statistics: as
of Feb 19 2005, 1339 U.S. soldiers are dead since May 1st 2003 when Top Gun declared
the war was over (a total 1496 dead & 10,968 wounded U.S. soldiers, & 18,305 Iraqi
dead). The festive event turns out to be more spectacle than festival, and around the
world, the carnivalesque street protesters call for answerability, while the majority of
citizens are satisfied to sit back and enjoy the show.
In all these examples, the festive aspects that have axiological validity (defined as
the axes of cognitive, ethical, & aesthetic perspective in the whole architectonic) boils
down to what we see and know about what takes place back stage to create the effects on
stage. In corporate settings, the authors of performance take possession of the heroic
characters. There are consummated and unconsummated features, lines said and unsaid
by the heroic characters, audiences choreographed or not, digital and lighting effects that
could be done or are done to effect an understanding on the part of the beholders.
Bakhtin (1990: 73-76) gives us a straightforward way to analyze the relationship
between festive, spectacle, and carnival theatre. It comes from looking at what I have
come to call the A-B-C-D model of organization theatre.
o A – Authors – scripting and editing the lines
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o B – Beholders – the actively contemplating spectators
o C – Characters – actors on the stage performing scripts
o D – Directors – prepare expressive gestures of characters
“There is no spectator [beholder] but neither is there an author as an independent and
effective participant in the event… nor is there a stage director; the director did no more
than prepare the ‘expressive’ form of the actors, thus making it easier for spectator
[beholder] to get inside them” (Bakhtin, 1990: 73, bracketed addition, mine). A-B-C-D
do not co-experience the theatric moment in the same way. Authors write words for
character; directors manage the dialog and gestures of characters; authors, characters, and
directors consummate organization theatre to construct a world view and cognitive
appreciation to be absorbed by beholders. As these elements interact, the character no
longer embodies the performance, but instead mouths the words of the authors, and does
is choreographed by the directors. The beholder does not see all the authoring and
directing, from their viewing horizon. A character is “aesthetically creative only when he
is an author” and able to contemplate the situation of consummation and answerability
outside their role (Bakhtin, 1990: 76). Author, character and director begin to internalize
the perspective of the beholder, to answer the beholder’s imagined concerns in the theatre
performed. Each tries to co-experience themselves, and to co-experience what they
imagined the spectator will behold. The character tries to co-experience what the director,
author, and beholder demands of their role. But, of course, co-experience is an
impossibility, since only when you step into the life of the other and experience directly
all the joy and oppression do you achieve co-experience; all else is empathetic
imagination. “Sympathetic understanding recreates the whole inner person in
aesthetically loving categories for a new existence in a new dimension of the world”
(Bakhtin, 1990.: 103). 2
2 In terms of organization theatre the relevance is to that there is an exterior to what A, B, C or D
experiences. Bakhtin (1990: 81-88), for example, distinguishes between a sympathetic co-experiencing
where you have lived the oppression of the other, and an empathetic co-experiencing where you can only
imagine it. In empathetic co-experience we are interjecting our empathizing into another’s life experience.
Therefore, sympathy, for Bakhtin (1990: 82) is a “pre-condition of co-experiencing.” The point has
relevance to organization theatre since there is no one vantage point or logic to consummate a system, and
in classic system theory, the system theorist assumes a unitary, proprietary logic consummates system,
where for Bakhtin (1981, 1990), it is polylogical, a product of heteroglossic forces that are centripetal
(unifying) and simultaneously centrifugal (disunifying). In sympathetic co-experiencing, the
author/beholder/director maintains an loving intention outside the character (Bakhtin, 1990: 84). Systems
23
It is the lack of sympathetic co-experience, and the lust for system wholeness that
set up the systemic dynamics between aesthetic, cognitive and ethical. Directors and
authors consummate characters aesthetically, while characters struggle through the
scripting to present themselves authentically. “One contests the author’s right to be
situated outside lived life and to consummate it” (Bakhtin, 1990; 203); Even the
beholders outside role as spectator consummating the system is refused.
Spectacle characters have a plastically consummated theatric, while festival and
carnival are more embodied characters. Festive organization, as we have theorized, is in
hybrid relation with spectacle and carnival. What is festively consummated is only that
which is spontaneous play to the characters; the authoring and directing by others is part
of spectacle; the parodic, satiric, and grotesque humor is part of the carnival. As directors
and authors project their intent into the characters, into what is scripted, there is a loss of
control of the character over their expression and story. Aesthetically, organization
theatre shapes the scattered and chaotic fragments of festival, spectacle, and carnival into
a partially consummated whole. Characters act on the boundary, as it were, between
consummating their own character, and having it scripted by directors and authors. We
rarely get to author and direct our own festive performance in a liberated arena of playful
creativity. Total freedom of character is the ultimate system fantasy. We are not the sole
authors of our story or our theatre.
The plastic-image world of stage-managed spectacle stands in strange relationship
to the folkloric communal festival of play and the always questioning and deconstructive
theatre of carnival. In this architectonic look at theatre, the fantasy expressedness of all
three dimensions of organization theatre interact, negotiating their relative positions to
affect the beholders. The beholder becomes answerable for the performance, not as
bystander but as spect-actor crossing the imaginary boundary of proscenium arch to be
what is on stage, and for answering all those focus group questions that dictate how
handlers create spectacle.
In this chapter I have presented the case for making authors, directors, characters,
and beholders answerable for organization theatre that is consummated. We have
are not consummated by any “single consciousness” and the lust for wholeness never succeeds into “there
merging of all into one” (Bakhtin, 1990: 86, 88).
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examined ways in which our scripts become imprisoning and ways to restory. We have
examined a consulting method to intervene in organization theatre, and hold up the
metascript for the characters, directors, authors, and beholders to review. We have looked
to Bakhtin for a methodology (architectonics) that allows us to trace the interanimation of
ethic, cognitive, and aesthetic dimensions of organziaiton theatre. In the next chapter we
look at McTheatre, at ways to we can restory and rescript it using work by Augusto Boal.
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