Spectacles and Organzation

• In Event: B.E.S.T.: Materiality and the Communicative Constitution of Organizations

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to revisit Guy Debord’s critical theory of the spectacle as formulated 50 years ago in the “Society of the Spectacle” in light of the contemporary organizational production of spectacles. Spectacles are at the heart of a range of organizational communication processes, including the production of identity, culture, relations, responsibility, and power. Organizations become present and knowable to us by “displaying the actual, the artificial, and the fantastic” (Shapiro, 2003), and these processes of visualization and their importance in studies of organization are what we seek to articulate. By focusing explicitly on the relationship between spectacles and organizations, our paper seeks to sketch a fertile research agenda in this area by unpacking three possible perspectives on spectacles – as fetishism, as hyper-reality and as performativity. These invite us to rethink the spectacle-organization nexus in communication and organization studies.

Authors

• Mikkel Flyverbom, Copenhagen Business School

• Juliane Reinecke, U of Warwick