Abstract
Modern organizational life is often described and criticized as an iron cage where disenchanted employees follow and reproduce rationalized work processes. This image is a prime example of how modernity in general has been critically perceived as a triumph of mechanism, pragmatism and mechanical reproduction over meaning, myth and authenticity. Dreamers and believers are, in modern times, replaced by rational men of action. We may watch drama in theatres, movies and TV, but drama has left our social life.
Not everyone agrees. A prominent name among those who challenge the above gloomy view is Jeffrey Alexander: one of the most renowned and influential social theorists of our time, whose work has curiously remained alien to organization studies. Over the past three decades, he has forcefully argued that meanings continue to be a central concern for people, and dramas are at the heart of modern social life. Alexander’s book, The Drama of Social Life, offers a contribution that furthers this idea through detailed analyses of several striking empirical illustrations from the major events in contemporary social life.
Many readers may find the introduction chapter of the book to be more confusing than illuminating. The key to overcoming the complexity of the opening remarks is to understand the place of culture in the overall project that Alexander has pursued over the years. In prior works, he has demarcated between culture as the codes, the symbols and the meanings that people live by, and the broader social structures in which they are embedded. A core idea of Alexander’s (1990, 1996) treatise is the ‘autonomy of culture’, by which he means culture is relatively independent of other social and material forces (Alexander and Smith, 1993). So it is not possible to take culture as a dependent variable and explain it based on variables other than the culture itself; just like it is not possible to predict the language of a society based on its social or economic structure. This idea has become the cornerstone of a distinct field of study that is known today as ‘cultural sociology’. In subsequent works, Alexander (2003, 2004) further developed the theoretical foundations of cultural sociology by highlighting how it is possible to study and understand culture as a relatively autonomous force in social life. To do so, he brought in several ideas from dramaturgy, drama theory and theatre criticism, and introduced the idea that cultural pragmatics can be understood as social performance. If theatre is a conscious effort to project meaning towards distant audiences so as to create dramatic effect, so too are the social performances that seek to dramatize social and economic issues crying out for action.
This book epitomizes Alexander’s theory of social performance. In chapter 1, he examines the social movements led by Mao Zedong and Martin Luther King, Jr., and analyses how their success depended upon dramatizing the situation and seizing the stage. In chapter 2, he examines the political uprisings of Egypt in 2011 that led to the ousting of Mubarak from power, and shows how the Egyptian Revolution came about after people absorbed the revolutionary script and performance. In chapter 3, he examines the re-election of Obama for presidency in 2012, and demonstrates how his unlikely victory was produced by a new narrative that he fashioned and disseminated. In chapter 4, he studies those intellectuals – such as Marx, Freud, Keynes, Sartre, Rand and Fanon – whose writings turned out to be immensely powerful and inspired mass mobilizations of people, and he shows that the source of their social power is the performative power of their texts outside of the academy. Finally, in chapter 5, he examines the theatrical avant-garde and shows that most of the innovations were to make the performance more dramatic. The key lesson across all of these diverse cases is that these events were not the automatic products of economic or social urgencies, or accurate, rational articulations of goals and ambitions. Rather, these events were construed out of dramatizations that heightened tensions and created anticipation for multitudes of people. Numerous performances were interwoven to create a spectacle that was not seen as a spectacle. The performers, audiences and scripts became so fused that it felt real to everyone.
As the above list of topics shows, Alexander’s theory of social performance can be employed for studying a wide variety of cultural phenomena that are among the interests of organization researchers, ranging from social or political movements to marketing or promotional campaigns. But the implications and applications of this theory for organization research are not limited to a list of topics of interest. At the most fundamental level, organization may be interpreted as a stage where multiple dramas are continuously unfolding at the same time, and people are playing as both performers and audience members (Mangham, 2005). In this sense, Alexander’s theory of social performance cuts to the core of organizations as arenas of cultural construction, and opens a new vista for explaining all sorts of cultural practices and dynamics. This is a book for new beginnings, new journeys and new theories.