An ethnographic study of organizational performances in business services: Space, staging and materiality
基于对一家财富500强战略研究公司14个月的民族志观察，揭示了组织如何通过主题化、风格化和顺序化三种舞台化实践，将物理空间转变为表演舞台，并指出服务与知识组织中的表演具有即兴性而非完全预设。
It is said that all the world is a stage. But how do organizations physically stage performances such as sales pitches and research presentations? Drawing on a 14-month-long ethnographic study at a Fortune 500 strategic research company, this article explains how. Emphasizing the active role of human and non-human actors, it uncovers three staging practices that organizations use to transform spaces into stages. Organizations theme stages by populating them with certain objects. They produce a style of performance by arranging relationships between performers and audiences. Finally, they order movements from one stage to others so that plots emerge. Theorizing these staging practices through a materialist dramaturgy, the article challenges existing organizational theory that tends to focus on the ways organizations control and script performances. The article shows that organizational performances in service and knowledge organizations can be improvisational. They are not preordained but they are organized.