Dissonant Choreographies: Performativity and Method in Socio-cultural Research

Abstract

One of the authors of this chapter (hereafter ‘I’) was once asked to assist a managerial team of a large organization in the Netherlands. The organization (PULSE), was the product of a recent merger between two competing insurance corporations. Due to increased internal conflicts following the merger, almost the entire management team had been replaced by a new one. A new mission – represented by the slogan ‘Human Value in Security’ – had been developed to engineer a more effective organizational culture. An instrumental approach to social change may be awkward for those in social and cultural studies whose intellectual heritage is to resist the idea that cultures can be re-created at will and behaviours will fall in line with a new slogan or mission statement. However, organization and business studies have been dealing with issues of organizational culture as engineered since the 1980s – in particular since the publication of Peters’ and Waterman’s (l982) bestseller In Search of Excellence. In the mainstream of management and business scholarship little has been done to counter the unrealistic idea that top-down cultural engineering is desirable and/or possible. Instead, large sums of money have been made by consultants who coin new buzzwords when old ones cease to be fashionable (Feltman 1992).