PART II WHY ECONOMIES ARE SPECTACLE THEATRES

Chapter 2 Economic effects of Metatheatre

Metatheatre is both a social and an economic phenomenon. The social aspects of Metatheatre interpenetrate the economic ones.

Interpenetrate is a term used by Mary Parker Follett to show how two elements typically thought to be separate and oppositional, such as capital and labor or management and union – can be retheorized as interpenetrating. Follett believed, for examples, that managers and workers could reach peaceful understanding about a conflict, by doing a joint analysis of the situation. In the Metatheatre Intervention method, interpenetration of dualities such as Social and Economic, and particularly Organization and Theatre is critical to this manual. The interpenetration of Social and Economic with Theatre, we believe, affects every aspect of organization and political economic life.

2.1 Effect of competitive markets on Metatheatre

There are macroeconomic aspects to Metatheatre. Metatheatre interpenetrates an enterprise’s competitive markets. Advertising scripts, the costuming of personnel, the art of the headquarters, and the gala event at the shareholders’ meeting all contribute to public image, meeting customer and investor expectations, in what we call the Theatres of Capitalism (Boje, 2002a). The ability of an enterprise to successfully manage its Metatheatre is a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Frames, for example, are ideological viewpoints (mind sets) that become translated into advertising, speeches to shareholders, the training of leaders and workers, and inform the strategic plans (plots) of the firm. Boje (2001a) and Gardner (2002) have theorized and studied the multiplicity of frames (what they call the hybridity of frames) in complex organizations.

· Bureaucracy, for example, is a narrative and theatric frames, which scripts our character roles, dialogs, and sets up the themes, rhythms, and strategic plots we work within.

· Quests are narrative/theatrical frames, which are journeys to transform the enterprise, by recruiting helpers, and finding some holy grail that will make the old form into something healthier and more economically effective. For example, most organizations go on a series of quests (sometimes one each year) to transform their bureaucratic metatheatre into something more post-bureaucratic (network, flexible production, participative democracy, chaos organization, and even a postmodern organization). Most often the quest is never fully implemented and real-ized.

· Chaos and Complexity is a narrative/theatrical frame, which is becoming increasingly popular as an alternative to bureaucracy. There are many quests to transform bureaucracy into the flexible, self-designing, multi-skilled, team patter that can exploit the near-to-chaos patterns of work organizations that are hallmark of the 21st century enterprise.

· Postmodern Organizations comes in a variety of narrative/theatrical frames. Some are just flexible complexity networks, others seek more democratic governance of the firm, and still others are striving for sustainable organizing that is conscious of where Earth resources come from and how to distribute products and services that are less toxic to human, plant, and animal life.

We will develop each of the SEPTET elements in later chapters to show their economic consequences.

2.2 Relation of Spectacles to Capitalism

We live in what Guy Debord (1967) calls the Society of the Spectacle. Nature is now socially engineered for eco-tourism, the attraction of manicured national forests, and biotechnically altered to produce genetically altered foods. We see several thousand advertising messages as we drive, work, web-serf, watch TV, and even our movies are filled with advertisements of Coke, McDonalds, and Adidas. There are four types of spectacles:

· Concentrated Spectacles – The first six SEPTET elements (frames, themes, dialogs, characters, rhythms, & plots) are constitutive of concentrated spectacles, the Metatheatrics of the enterprise. From bureaucracy to democratic firms, there are ideological frames, themes of dominations, more or less dialog, character roles, rhythms, and plots.

· Diffuse Spectacles - As a firm establishes markets around the world, their theatrics plays on the global stage. The Metatheatre of a multinational corporation, for example, includes the public image, the faciality, and starring characters in a global drama.

· Integrated Spectacles – Integrated equals concentrated plus diffuse spectacle in synergistic combination.

· Megaspectacle – Some firms, form time to time, enact a theatric performance that collapses into Scandal, such as Enron. Over a thousand press articles described Enron as a colossal scandal.

The first three types of spectacles come from the work of Guy Debord (1967), the fourth from extensions by Best and Kellner (2001) to Debord’s work. The gulf and post-11 wars of the Bush presidents are media events, transformed into nightly infotainment events mass consumption.

The relation of the four types of spectacles to capitalism is an evolution of economics from Marx’s accumulation of products, to Debord’s accumulation of spectacles.

Spectacles can be defined as the Metatheatre of late modern and postmodern capitalisms where concentrated and diffuse corporate spectacles integrate on the global stage, but can veer into megaspectacle scandals, becoming the stuff of popular culture (e.g. all those new E-words and E-jokes after the Enron collapse turn into megascandals).

METATHEATRE INTERVENTION MANUAL page 6