I stress the complimentary contributions of theorists of practice (Bourdieu and Swidler) and theorists of interaction (Goffman and Strauss), building upwards from practice into interaction, symbolic power, and the negotiated order. As such, this paper reconceptualizes organizational culture as a negotiated order (Strauss 1978) that emerges through interactions between participants, an order influenced by those with the symbolic power to define the situation. However, to acquire enduring utility, the concept needs an overhaul to overcome the weaknesses of earlier approaches. With the recent wave of corporate scandals, organizational culture has regained relevance in politics and the media.
The chapter thus draws attention to parallels in lines of thinking about events and renders these philosophies more open to comparison, critique and reflection. Second, the chapter enables interdisciplinary dialogue by developing insight into interlinkages between certain historical moments in the Anthropology of Events and contemporary philosophical treatments of events in Organization Studies, such as viewing events as representations, as reflexive spaces, or as hidden power games.
Such reflexivity on a particular stance towards events is crucial for attending to the worldview that it carries within itself. First, the review carves out deeper assumptions and epistemological premises behind different ways of “seeing” events. What is it that marks events as distinct from the everyday? What do scholars hope to learn when studying trade fairs, religious rituals or management meetings? How do these occasions relate to broader social and organizational contexts? Such comparative view on the question “what is an event” reveals that scholars across these disciplines divergently frame events as (1) as windows into society, (2) as agentic tools, (3) as global forms, (4) as spaces of practice, and/or (5) as processes. This review chapter engages with ethnographic conceptions of “the event” (as a public performance) held in the two disciplines of Anthropology and Organization Studies.
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