PROGRAM STUDY: LITERARY CRITICISM
From
theatrics to metatheatre: The Enron Drama
Boje,
D. M.; Hansen, Hans; & Rosile, Grace Ann. 2007. From theatrics to
metatheatre:The Enron Drama. Revue Sciences do Gestion, Management Sciences, no
58, p63-83. This journal is among the top European journals, with an editorial
board of prominent Academy of Management leaders for its English edition.
David
Boje
New
Mexico State University
Hans
Hansen
Texas
Tech University
Grace
Ann Rosile
New Mexico State
University
Abstract
In this article, we explore the
relation between theatrics and metatheatre and attempt
to demonstrate how metatheatre might act to resolve theatrics. We look at the case of Enron theatrics
and the multiple conflicting stories that came to confrontation on the Enron
stage. We synthesize several perspectives on metatheatre and suggest two ways that methatheatre mediates theatrics.
Introduction
That
life is theatrical is a given for most readers of this special issue. When this
theatrical life is well-organized and well rehearsed, it approaches a
production in full,with explicit roles, scripts and stages. Drama and theatrics
as a lense for understanding was imported into organizational studies through
Burke (1945, 1969) and Goffman (1959) and continued by Pine and Gilmour (1999)
and Oswick, Keenoy, and Grant (2001), and Clark and Mangham (2004) among many
others. Given those dramaturgical assumptions about organizations, we explore
the often explicit theatrics of the now infamous Enron. Rather than drama as a
metaphor, Enron literally employed staged theatrics to influence the world in which they
operated. So rather than all the world being a stage, inside Enron, all the
stages made up their world.
We review briefly dramatism and theatrics and
attempt to synthesize several views of metatheatre to
suggest that metatheatre has the potential to govern theatrics. Weposit
metatheatre can influence theatrics by dis-integrating dominant theatrics to
reveal differences, and provide those competing theatrics a stage for
enactment. On the other hand, metatheatre may provide a means for competing
theatrics to achieve dialectic resolution through antenarrative synthesis. We
think metatheatre serves both dialectic purposes, sometimes by engendering a
dialectic of disintegration as well as resolving competing theatrics when
metatheatre offers an antenarrative that either synthesizes theatrical dialectics
or enables them to co-exist on the same stage. These two metatheatrical
governed events occur simultaneously and continuously, continuing 4 without
closure in rhizomatic fashion. The only criteria metatheatrics must met is that
it allows theatrics to continue to find a way to move (forward, backward,
sideways, up,down, etc.), so that players, in our case, people in
organizations, can continue to coordinate ongoing action. Aligning ourselves
with dramatism and the narrative paradigm in general, we begin by reviewing
theatrics and metatheatre. We then explore Enron’s context and the related
theatrics. We demonstrate how metatheatre mediates all these theatrics and then
discuss how metatheatre operates and the implications of metatheatre for future
research on the topic of organizational theatre. We hope to offer a view of
metatheatre that can be applied widely in the analysis of
social life.
Dramaturgy, Theatrics, and Antenarrative
The
two main influences of dramaturgy in organizational studies are Kenneth Burke
and Erving Goffman. Both of them encourage us to look at social interaction through
a theatrical lens, seeing how people dramatize and mystify everything they do in everyday
life. Focusing this lens on organizational life allows us to analyze organizations
as context made up of actors playing roles on a particular stages. Dramaturgy
assumes a close relationship between language and action (Burke, 1966,1969).
Dramas are literary compositions that tell a story, often of human conflict, by
means of dialogue and action, and are performed by actors’ in front of an
audience (Turner, 1986). In organizational studies, drama is used as an
umbrella metaphor (Czarniawska,1997) encompassing a wide range of events where
meaning emerges from social interaction: story-as-performed, enacted stories,
scripts, cultural performance, plays, etc. Mangham and Overington (1987)
present a dramaturgical model for understanding organizational interactions and
the staging of organizational reality, looking at the various ways
organizational members project appearances in various organizational settings.
Continuing
that work, Clark and Mangham (2004) look at dramatic events that are explicitly
scripted and produced. They examine the power corporate theatre has in suggesting
new values and challenging everyday assumptions as the authors, audience and actors collude in
turning scripts into an imaginative life made present. The difference with the
examination we present is that the audience was an unwitting one.Clark and
Mangham (2004) review a piece of corporate theatre where the audience was invited
to what they knew was a corporate show, a Hollywood-style production. In the performance
we analyze here, the audience was an unwitting one. They were not aware they
were watching scripted theatrics. And while the producers knew the show was make-believe,
the audience thought they were witnessing everyday life, and not a special show
created in a liminal space set aside for the scripted performance. Our example provides
a backstage peek at some Goffmanesque trickery and mystification.
Dramaturgy’s
bent on social construction is that social realityiscoconstructemthrough a
community of players and witnesses to the play (Barry, 1997). Dramatrugists assert
that human behavior is constituted by rhetoric; individuals use discourse to
persuade and influence the behavior of others (Brissett & Edgley, 1990).
“The synthetic nature of stories goes
beyond saying what did happen, to
imply what should happen or what can
happen. In this way, they not
only influence thought, feeling, and
will, but the construction of social
reality itself”
(Feldman, 1990, italics in original).
In addition to
discourse, dramaturgy recognizes that part of the meaning of peoples’social
interaction is to be found in the manner which they express themselves during
interaction (Brissett & Edgley, 1990). Thus, how people express themselves
to, and in conjunction with, others to create meaning is the central focus of
dramaturgy (Gardner & Avolio, 1998).
Organizational
theatrics remind us that a drama is never really complete until it is performed;
acted on some kind of a stage before an audience.
‘Even
the most trivial forms of day-to-day talk involve immense
skill
and presume a great deal of learning. Talk can become art
in
the sense that particular forms of convention or contrivance
may
be employed to secure certain expressive and
communicative
ends. Storytelling, displays of wit, rhetoric and
drama
exist in all types of society. The ‘success’ of these verbal
forms,
however, is directly involved with their performance…’
(Giddens,
1987).
Those particular
theatrics, their production and for whom and what purpose, by what means,
become organizational episodes, along with their scripts, that we can explore
using narrative and ethnographic methods. For the organization itself, organizational
theatre provides a model, in one concentrated image, of the ways in which
members can give meaning and direction to their work lives. While
organizational narratives furnish an ideal, theatrics enact particular stories,
specifying roles suited for particular actors and contexts. By engaging in
theatrics in various settings for particular audiences, actors attempt to shape
their definition of the situation Goffman (1959). But this shaping can be met
with resistance. People have their own projects and there are represented by
competing discourses and expressed by people performing those discourses in
competing theatrics (Boje, 2002a; Boje and Rosile, 2003b). They are enacting
new and alternative narratives and fighting for stage time.
Metatheatre
In
this paper, we synthesize two metatheatre perspectives. Victor Turner
(1985:181) uses the term to indicate all the communication regarding a
particular communication process, the metacommentary that spectators and actors
engage in as they reflect upon their own roles and actions on various stages.
We all engage in thismetacommentary, reflecting and talking about what we have
said and done or even what we are saying and doing. “Thus, if daily living is a
kind of theater, social drama is a kindof meta-theater, that is, a
dramaturgical language about the language of ordinary roleplaying and
status-maintenance which constitutes communication in the quotidian
socialprocess” (Turner, 1985:181). This metatheatre involves reflexivity by
everyday actors about their performances where they reveal to spectators what
they are doing. For Boje and Rosile (2003a), the term metatheatre highlights
the simultaneity of multiple theatres. For them, metatheatre indicates the
multiple and contending theatres that constitute organizations. Boje (1995)
uses the metaphor of a multi-play performance called Tamara, where the audience
follows different threads of stories, following actors from room to room. Doing
so, the audience only ever sees portions of the larger script. They get peaks
and pieces depending on the theatrics they witness. The metatheatre here is
represented by the grand written script, the meta-script, by Tamara playwright
John Krizanc (1981, 1989). For actors and audience alike, there is no ‘larger’
script. The only thing the audience can experiences in chasing actors from room
to room are fragmented, emerging, incomplete theatrics. As with a grand
narrative (Lyotard, 1979/1984), no one is ever in the position to witness
metatheatre, but only local narratives and theatrics. The same is true for all
of us, whether it be the metatheatrics of ‘capitalism’ or our organizations. We never
see all the theatre performed; it is occurring simultaneously on different
stages; some you see and perform, but other acts you hear about from colleagues,
vendors, and customers (Boje & Rosile, 2002b). We know them, and change them,
only through the theatrics that involve us. The relation between theatrics and
metatheatre might be compared to Gidden’s (1987) deep and surface structure
which entails a duality of some construct simultaneously influencing and being
influenced by, social interaction. The metatheatre provides an abstract frame
for our theatrical actions, and those actions in turn influence the frame. Our
actions also change our conception of metatheatre. We see similar dualities in
organizational studies, as with the perspective of a culture that resides
‘above’individual behavior or the simultaneous and recursive emergence between
structure and strategy.
We
synthesize these two metatheatre approaches so we can reflect on theatrics
and their purposes and
agenda, as well as attend to Tamara-esque fragmentation, liminality and
indeterminacy of processual aspects of theatrics. Both perspectives take postmodern
turns in dramaturgy, with Turner’s focusing on reflexivity and metacommentary while
Boje and Rosile’s focus on fragmentation and multiple theatrics. As we will
see, both of these processual theatrical qualities are endemic to Enron (Boje, 2002b),
and can be reveal through Enron actors reflecting on their actions and theatrics.
At Enron, each integrating attempt by presidents, corporate leaders and boards
of directors to evoke spectacular theatre, to control the center stage, and to
enroll a cast of characters that will influence spectators, soon disintegrates
as the pull of multiple scripts, plots, and characters spin out of control.
On one hand, metatheatre reveals a
dialectic of disintegration that opposes integrative attempts by
executive players. On the other hand, metatheatre might also offer a resolution
by offering an antenarrative that allows multiple theatrics to co-exist on the
same stage (that will become a Tamaraland), or perhaps the new antenarrative
will turn out to be a good bet, bringing together or silencing the previous
narratives, carving out enough space and stage to become the new dominant
theatrics by subsuming or displacing competing theatrics. And eventually, these
evolutions and revolutions in dialectic cycles of theatric-integration and
disintegration, the networking of simultaneous.
Theatrics
at Enron: Tall Texas Tales
We
examined the theatrics and metatheatrics at Enron via various texts and
scripts.Chosen for analysis in this study were journal and news articles,
congressionaltranscripts, and key Enron memos and reports. The texts collected
were for a larger project that accumulated excerpts from 1985 to July 2002 in a
wide range of internationaland national news sources. The corpus of text
consisted of over 9,684 news articles that were published between December 2001
and March 2002. They included searching directories such as Lexus Nexus,
ProQuest, congressional transcripts, as well as webreports such as SEEN (2002),
and the Powers (2002) report. In addition to second source metacommentary about
what occurred during Enron’s theatrics, we collected semistructured interviews
from a key informant, who worked on Enron’s trading floor. Taking the stage is
infamous Enron, the world’s largest energy trader at the time of its collapse.
Enron’s storied success was based in part on elaborate theatrical productions and
performances touting their profitability and capabilities. Investors swooned.
Stock soared. Competing stories emerged. Crash. These theatrics took place from
1998 to 2000. Stock price has been pretty steady around $20 in the few years
before 1998, but began quite a climb. Enron stock was $20 in the beginning of
1998, $30 at the close of 1999, then $40 by 2000, peaking around $90 that year
before the show was canceled. Back in 1998, employees were asked to stage a corporate
performance to convince an audience of visiting analysts that a business
trading unit was fully functional (Leopold, 2002). It wasn’t. It was
make-believe, and investors were made-to-believe these dominant theatrics that
employees were directed to perform. Enron had hired choreographers and
dramatists (Banerjee, 2002) to coach executives in character roles in elaborate
corporate extravaganzas in the past. But now, Enron was ready for an off-Wall
Street performance where they set out to deceive using façade and illusion. The
theatrics took place at Enron headquarters in Houston, Texas. The producers at
Enron oversaw the construction of an elaborate theatre stage on Enron’s empty
and barren 6th floor to simulate a real trading floor. On the big day,various employees,
including secretaries and whatever cast members could be assembled, played
their rehearsed character roles, pretending to be ‘Energy Services’ traders,
doingmega deals, while Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay played their starring
roles in the Enron as on stage narrators to an audience of Wall Street
analysts, who didn’t know they were only on a setAs the curtain rises, we see
analysts being led on a tour of Enron company headquarters in Houston, Texas.
Enron executives rushed dozens of employees to an empty trading floor and told
them to act as if they were trying to sell energy contracts.
“We went down to the sixth floor, I
remember we had to take the stairs so the analysts
wouldn’t see us” (cited in Leopold,
2002).
‘We
brought some of our personal stuff, like pictures, to make it look
like
the area was lived in. There were a bunch of trading desks on the
sixth
floor, but the desks were totally empty. Some of the computers
didn’t
even work, so we worked off of our laptops. When the analysts
arrived,
we had to make believe we were on the phone buying and
selling
electricity and natural gas’ (Leopold, 2002).
Former
employee Carol Elkin explains it was all an act, and that no trades were actually
made there. The people on the phones were talking to each other. According to employees,
they knew the sixth floor of the company's downtown headquarters was a set, designed
to trick analysts into believing business was booming.
‘They actually brought in computers and
phones and they told us to
act
like we were typing or talking on the phone when the analysts were
walking
through. They told us it was very important for us to make a
good
impression and if the analysts saw that the operation was
disorganized,
they wouldn’t give the company a good rating’
(Leopold,
2002).
A
convincing performance is wise advice, Enron wanted to make sure the analysts did not
generate any alternative plot lines. They wanted them to suspend alldisbeliefand
adopt the theatrical performance as reality. Ken Lay, Enron’s chairman and
CEO, was narrating the tour personally, but this ‘harried performer’ (Goffman, 1959)
found the time to sneak back and tell the cast their performance was a success
‘I think a bunch of us asked him why we
were doing this, and he said
the analysts need to see a bunch of warm
bodies working so Enron
could get a good credit rating. He said
the trading part of Enron was
the company’s bread and butter’
(Leopold, 2002).
What
the analysts needed was buttered popcorn. They were watching the most expensive matinee in
corporate history. “The illusion must be supported, whatever the cost”
(Czarniawska, 1997), and Enron had to foresee and address any counter-claims. Witnessing
these theatrics allowed analysts to kick of their own performance as investors.
But this time, the money wasn’t a prop and these theatrics had a very real
effect on Enron’s stock.
From
theatrics to metatheatre
A
good example of Metatheatre is Lay’s October 17, 2001 performance. Already by now
Enron’s narratives were unraveling on stage, and institutions were no longer
willing to suspend disbelief for their theatrics (Goldberg, 2001b). Other
theatrics began to emerge. On Wednesday October 17 of 2001, the SEC requested
by fax more information concerning Andy Fastow and the LJM partnerships. At
that time, Lay traveled to “Boston … To try to mollify about 40 investment-fund
managers and securities analysts” (Witt & Behr, 2002: A01): Enron treated
them to an elegant lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel. Cued by a PowerPoint
presentation, Lay led the analysts through predictions of ever-rising revenue. What
the analysts wanted to know about was the $ 1.2 billion error highlighted in
that morning's paper. Instead, the Enron chairman attacked the critical press
coverage, calling it an irresponsible wild goose chase. Lay vigorously defended
Fastow and assured the audience there were no more losses coming from other
private partnerships. Gregory Phelps, who manages $ 1 billion in energy and
utility stocks at John Hancock Advisers Inc., noticed that Lay was looking
right at him.
"This
is a one-time thing," Lay said, according to Phelps. "There is
nothing
else out there."
Lay
took one or two more questions, then suddenly looked at his watch and stopped. Lay's aides
said, " 'We have to go' and just hustled out of there," Phelps said
later. The next day ( Thursday October 18, 2001), the SEC phoned Enron for
details about Fastow and two of the LJM investment partnerships (Goldberg,
2001b). The next day (Friday), Enron shares closed at $26.05. By Monday
(October 22) news about the SEC had leaked in the financial wire services.
Shares in Enron fell over 20 percent. Onthat same morning, Ken Lay was in the
middle of performing theatrics with 200 of Enron’s top-tier managers, in the
Dogwood room on the 3rd floor of Houston’s downtown Hyatt (Witt & Behr,
2002: A01):
Most hadn't yet heard about the SEC
investigation yet, and Lay didn't
mention
it. Instead, he told those assembled that Enron's board and senior
management
were united behind Fastow. Lay wanted his executives to
unite
behind Fastow, too.
As
Lay talked, some in the audience checked handheld BlackBerry
messaging
devices. News of the SEC investigation flashed. Enron's stock
price
flashed, too, the shares starting their one-day 20 percent plunge.
Sharp,
testy questions erupted about the company's vulnerable position
and
Fastow and his private partnerships.
Lay
tried to reassure the managers.
"Well,
we don't think we did anything wrong, but knowing what we do
now,
we would never do it again," Lay said, according to Robert J.
Hermann,
then Enron's general tax counsel.
Hermann
had everything invested in Enron: his professional pride, his
network
of golfing buddies and his retirement savings, worth more than $
10
million before Enron stock began to tumble.
Hermann
raised his hand and said: "Ken, there is a big disconnect. How
can
you say we didn't do anything wrong, but would never do it again? Is
'what
we know now' is that we got caught?"
Lay
glared at Hermann. "It was like I'd put my head on the tracks,"
Hermann
later recalled.
Vince
Kaminski, the respected and normally reserved head of research,
raised
his hand and told Lay, "I'm in the terrible position of having to
disagree
with you."
"It's
okay, anybody can," Lay said, according to one account. He invited
Kaminski,
a Polish-born mathematics whiz and expert in risk
management,
to speak.
Kaminski
strode to the podium and accepted the microphone.
Enron
should never have gotten involved in secret, high-risk deals with
Fastow's
private partnerships, he said. He had warned against that course
back
in June 1999.
"What
Andy Fastow did was not only improper, it was terminally stupid,"
Kaminski
said. "The only fighting chance we have is to come clean."
Lay
looked "sort of blank," Hermann recalled. "It was like somebody
getting
pummeled, and he just stood there and took it."
Finally,
Enron's new president, Greg Whalley, who had taken over when
Jeffrey
K. Skilling resigned in August, stepped in. "That's enough, Vince,"
he said.
Evident
now should be the multiple theatrics within Enron metatheatre. Theseemerging
theatrics are multiple, competing Tamara-esque antenarratives, fragmented stories-a-making.
These new theatrics are refusing closure, carving out space
within the metatheatre. Within this metatheatre is a multiplicity of stages and
scenes, both words here have two meaning, both temporal and physical meanings.
“Stage” means a physical space (often shaped by a proscenium arch) and it also
means a time, as in “what stage (of a process) is one at?” Scene is a special
location, as “scene of the crime,” and it also is a time “a time for a set of
related interactions among characters in a play.” We also see the metatheatre
components of reflexivity and metacommentary as actors begin to critique their
own performances. On October 26th (Friday), Be Glisan(Enron’s treasurer and
Fastow’s trusted aide), assembled his team of accountants and lawyers inside
in-house attorney Kristina Mordaunt’s office at the 14000 Smith Street headquarters
tower in Houston, Texas (Witt & Behr, 2002: A01): “Somebody tell me we didn’t
to this” he pleaded. Yet it was he who had helped Fastow design the LJM partnerships,
and had dreamed up the clever Star Wars and Jurassic names like Raptor, Jedi,
and Ob-1. With Fastow’s departure and the WSJ articles, the media began to get anonymous
tips to look in to the Chewco deal (named after Chewbacca). They sat around
reviewing the Chewco Investments L.P. file, getting ready for the next media firestorm;
the group found serious accounting errors. Chewco was a confidential partnership
Fastow’s team had concocted to keep more than $600 million in debt off Enron’s
books, keeping it hidden from analysts, average investors, and pesky
regulatorsChewco was a precursor to the LJM1 and LJM3 private partnerships run
by Fastow. Instead of seeking independent investors in Chewco, Fastow assigned
his top deputy Michael J. Kopper to own and manage it and Kopper’s domestic
partner William Dodson (a Continental Airlines
employee). Kopper and Dodson put in $125,000 of their cash, borrowed $11 million
more from Barclays Bank. Enron guaranteed those loans, further undermining
Chewco's independence from the company. Enron closed down the partnership in
early 2001, and paid Kopper and Dodson $10.5 million. “Earlier, McMahon, then
Enron's treasurer, had clashed with Fastow over the size of Kopper and Dodson's windfall, arguing that it should be
no more than $1 million. Fastow prevailed” (Witt & Behr, 2002: A01).
The
tragic flaw noticed by Glisan’s team was that according to the accounting
rules, percent of Chewco funding had to
come from outside investors in order for the partnership to meet the definition
of independent. “Through an apparentoversight back in 1997, Kopper and Dodson's
stake in Chewco had fallen just short of the percent outside equity stake
required to make the deal conform to accounting rules” (Witt & Behr, 2002:
A01). Lay still hoped to turn the drama around and head off the SEC
investigation. In metatheatre terms, new cast members (new stars) can be added,
and a tamer spectacle theatre enacted, one that finds a different scapegoat, to
appease the spectators, media, and regulators. The scapegoat was, of course,
Andrew Fastow; all Enron’s sins would be heaped onto his back. On October 28th
(Sunday), Lay added Williams C. Powers Jr., dean of the University of Texas
School of Law, to Enron's board. Powers was to head aninquiry aided by more new
cast members, as Lay also hired former SEC enforcement chief William R. McLucas
and his partners at the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering to conduct
this spectacle. The outside squad of inquisitors (lawyers & accountants) began
to do their interviews, asking tough questions about Fastow and LJM. Kristina Mordaunt
(Enron’s in-house attorney), in whose office the Ben Glisan gang had met to review
the Chewco and LJM fallout, got nervous and disclosed to general counsel Derrick
that she was one of the investors in an LJM partnership. “I didn't want Lay to be blindsided,” she said. Derrick advised her
to talk to the attorneys assembled by Powers and McLukas, who had taken over
most of Enron’s fourth floor. Lays’ theatrics were a flop and began to further
unwind (Fusaro & Miller, 2002). Enron narratives dissolved into mere
antenarratives and had to share the metatheatre stage with competing
antenarratives (Boje and Rosile, 2002a), some of which were gaining coherence
and an audience with their theatrics.
Conclusion
In
‘antenarrative’ (Boje, 2001) terms, Lay’s initial idea is no more than a bet, a weakling pre-story that
Latour (1996: 119) calls a “whirlwind” since it “moves only if it interests one
group or another” in nonlinear processes of antenarrative-translation and
reconstitution, according to the interests of political groups. Whirlwind is
for Latour (1996) an alternative to more linear-diffusion models of narrative.
Only in retrospect and revisionism, is Lay’s founding strategy a linear,
journey tale. The LJM partnerships let events gain control; the whirlwind
exposed partners that preferred to remain off stage. As long as Enron stock
prices were up, the risk of exposure was small, but as stock prices fall, the
scheme had to be underwritten with more and more secret partnerships, until it imploded.
The theatrical performances by Lay, Skilling, and a supporting cast ofthousands
(including regulators, analysts, journalists, & auditors), delayed the
collapse.
As
we know, recent metatheatre has put some of these theatrics to rest. Still others continue, and
new ones are still emerging. Latour’s (1996: 119) term “whirlwind” suggests the
more non-linear models of narrative that we use to describe the fragmented, rhizomatic
(go anywhere), and emerging aspects of theatrics. Metatheatre tries to resolve this
whirlwind of theatrics. It does so by reflexivity and metacommentary as well as
fragmentation. It might integrate or disintegrate. We saw iterative versions of
metatheatre in our case analysis. In this case, metatheatre resolved Enron
theatrics by silencing them, and for many of the theatrics, they have
disintegrated. In emerging theatrics serving to integrate, thecourts have
handed down guilty verdicts for Ken Lay and Andy Fastow. Just over a month
later, but before the sentence was determined (most likely life in jail), Key
Lay passed away (at the time we were writing this paper). His death will no
doubt be the subject of further theatrics, most likely multiple and competing,
that play out on metatheatrical stages. You might be wondering does any good
ever come from theatrics? Certainly. The opportunities for positive change through
theatrics are more frequent than may seem. People everywhere transform their
lives and their experience into stories with practicedease (Mangham &
Overington, 1987). Every theatrical event may be a moment where “the past is momentarily negated,
suspended, or abrogated, and the future has not yet
begun, an instant of
pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance”
(Turner, 1982: 44). Fantasies can become everyday reality. The result is a much
more diverse, representative, and pluralistic organizational reality. If we are
accomplished performers, we might even enact our way into more diverse and
brighter futures. This is possible because theatrics help narratives to become
illocutionary, such that saying it so makes it so. The story leaps from the
story-as-performed to the story aslived. The fate of any organization depends
on the capacity to navigate within the multiple and ever-changing sea of
realities (Gergen, 1999), to restory itself. And more broadly, we share
Turner’s (1986: 122) idea that any society “which hopes to be imperishable must
whittle out for itself a piece of space and a while of time, in which it can
honestly look at itself.”
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