Barbara Czarniawska, Art imitates life imitates art

Zarządzanie Kulturą, tom 6 (2013), nr 1 / Culture Management, vol. 6 (2013), no. 1

Barbara Czarniawska (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) ART IMITATES LIFE IMITATES ART

Keywords: elitist culture, pop culture, soap operas, circuits of culture, aesthetics of serialization.

Summary: In modern western societies, economy and management take central place in culture which is anthropologically understood as a set of objects, practices and symbols which characterise a given place at a given moment. They coexist with so-called mass culture represented by numerous mass media. The present article analyses relations between these two spheres of culture assuming that there is a correlation between them. Mass culture presents existent economic and management practices but also dictates new models of manners. A term “circuits of culture”, which was introduced by Richard Johnson, helps to elucidate this complex process. In the article, this model is applied to analyze Polish series Hotel 52.

If there are angels, I doubt they read our novels concerning thwarted hopes.

I'm afraid, alas, they never touch the poems that bear our grudges against the world.

The rantings and railings of our plays must drive them, I suspect, to distraction.

Off-duty, between angelic – i.e., inhuman – occupations, they watch instead our slapstick from the age of silent film.

Wiesława Szymborska, Slapstick

If even angels learn about humanity from its popular culture, are we not justified in thinking that humans learn from it, too? For good and for bad, for laughter and for tears.

In this text, I will consider a relationship between management and popular culture, which in my view is close and mutual. Before I can do so, however, I need to justify the idea that management might be connected to culture at all.

Management and culture in contemporary societies My claim is that we live in times in which a field of practice called "management" is at the center of culture – culture understood as an ensemble of artifacts, practices, and symbols existing in a given

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place at a given time. As a management scholar, I have no mandate to judge whether such a development is good or bad, but it is my duty to explore it and thus to facilitate such judgments made by others. As a result, I am constantly pursuing a question: Why do managerial practices look like they do? Why here? Why now?

This pursuit has led me, inexorably, to culture in the narrower sense of the word: as art and humanities. Naturally, I soon discovered that I was hardly the first to undertake such a journey. There is a long tradition in the social sciences in general, but also in management studies, to point out the connections between high culture and management. The connection that has usually been revealed is the character-shaping influence of high culture (especially literature). The US scholar Michael Maccoby thus described the importance of humanities for the industry leaders of the 1980s: The study of the Bible, comparative religion, ethical philosophy and psychology, and great literature leads one to explore the inner life, particularly the struggle to develop the human heart against ignorance, convention, injustice, disappointment, betrayal, and irrational passion. Such education prepares one to grapple with his fear, envy, pride, and self-deception. It raises questions about the nature of human destructiveness and the legitimate use of force. Without it, a would-be leader tends to confuse his or her own character with human nature, guts with courage, worldly success with integrity, the thrill of winning with happiness. (Maccoby, 1981: 231)

My colleagues and I have extended this thought to demonstrate that great literature not only provides ideals and discusses moral dilemmas, but also convincingly represents – that is, describes the practice of management in ways far superior to those of many research reports (CzarniawskaJoerges and Guillet de Monthoux, 1994). It combines the subjective with the objective, the fate of individuals with that of institutions, the micro events with the macro systems. Literature offers narrative knowledge – far more usable than logico-scientific knowledge (Bruner, 1986). But literature does not only tell stories, however trustworthy; it is also deeply analytical. Said Milan Kundera (1988: 32): "The novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud, the class struggle before Marx, it practiced phenomenology (...) before the phenomenologists". So, "high culture" can express the ideals, describe the practices of its era, and place them under a questioning gaze.

And so, I wish to claim, does the popular culture. Mass culture fulfills the same functions as high culture – on a larger scale. It does so not only in the sense that it reaches "the people", but also in the sense that it popularizes high culture. It renders story plots from Greek dramas, Shakespeare, and the Bible simple and familiar. It perpetuates and modernizes myths, sagas, and folktales. In doing so, popular culture might caricature or flatten high culture and mythology, or even criticize and ridicule them. What is important is that popular culture reaches more people, more quickly.

Popular culture propagates the ideas of its times, but also represents the practices, just as the high culture does. It is worth emphasizing that the ideas and the practices might be good or bad, in both a moral and an aesthetic sense. Popular culture shows how to be a hero, but also how to be a villain. Swedish journalists made a documentary about young mafia criminals, revealing, that one of the young gangsters knew by heart all of Al Pacino's lines from Brian De Palma's movie Scarface (Liljefors and Sundgren, 2003). Thus popular culture not only represents, in the sense of mirroring; it also invents. The practices represented may be as reported, but they may also be imaginary – and this is one of the defining distinctions between literature and science.

This leads me to an additional claim: that popular culture not only transmits ideas and furnishes descriptions, but also actively teaches practices and provides templates for interpretation of the world. In short, the mirroring and the projection, the expression and the construction, the imitation and the creation are never separated. A manager might read a detective story or watch a Hollywood movie for amusement, but might also learn from them about actual or invented practices; and might imitate them, not necessarily with explicit reflection. When unexpected events happen at a workplace, people examine their common repertoires of plots for the ways of emplotting them, and thus making sense of that which does not make sense. Some might read the Bible, Shakespeare or Euripides, but most of them will read a newspaper or watch a TV series. Was Wall Street, as we know it from the first Oliver Stone's movie (1987), like Wall Street before the

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movie was made? Apparently, Wall Street traders began wearing suspenders only after movie. Were suspenders the only things they imitated? "Representations of fictional bankers influence the behaviour and attitudes of 'real' bankers", noted Linda McDowell (1997: 39-40).

Benjamin DeMott, a professor of humanities at Baruch College in New York who was invited to deliver a series of lectures on business culture, so argued for paying more attention to the relationship between business and culture in his article in Harvard Business Review: The truth is that all of us belong to the whole of the age we inhabit, not alone to the special sector called work, production, investment; none of us can live in a world apart. (DeMott, 1989: 134)

Since DeMott's article, quite a few authors started paying attention to such connections between sectors, one of which is exactly between popular culture and management. Here is a short review.

Popular culture in organization studies It was perhaps the edited volume Organization/Representation (Hassard and Holliday, 1998) that first dealt with this issue in a systematic manner. As the title announces, its contributions focused on the ways organizations (rather than organizing practices) are represented in the popular media. Its main thesis was that popular culture presents a side of life in organizations that was hidden from the focus of conventional organization studies: sex, violence, emotions, power struggles and disorganization. A question thus arises: Was it hidden because it is unmentionable? Or was it rarely addressed because it is a marginal phenomenon? One could argue for both possibilities, as there is certainly a preference in traditional organization theory for portraying rational behavior, but there is also a preference for strongly dramatic events in popular culture. This why the genre of soap operas is noteworthy: It can be seen as complementary to the rationalist portraits of organizational life.

1 Additionally, as soap operas usually do not focus on work, organizations, or management, they an reveal taken-for-granted assumptions about many issues related to organizing that are firmly embedded and yet blackboxed in the public discourse. My colleagues and I scrutinized soap operas from three different cultural contexts, looking for such assumptions concerning women and work (Czarniawska et al., 2013).

Not only soap operas are worth attention, of course. In the edited volume mentioned above, John Hassard (1998) focused on the British cinéma vérité. All in all, although the main emphasis of the volume was on issues of representation, the editors and the contributors suggested that the representation of organizations and working life in popular media both reflects and helps to shape contemporary practices and institutions.

Can this claim apply to all or even to most genres in popular culture? Martin Parker and his colleagues (1999) edited a special issue of Organization dedicated to science fiction. Their idea was not "to add science fiction to the list of things that might be 'useful' for management, but instead to try to disturb the discipline itself" (pp. 579–80). This task may prove difficult, however, because, as the authors immediately acknowledged, there is a great deal of science fiction in management practice already. Indeed, the corroborating studies continue to accumulate: from the "eternal myth of technology" (Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2008), through "strategic planning scenarios" (Greenman, 2008) to various accounts of "cyborgization" (Parker, 1998; Czarniawska and Gustavsson, 2008); Czarniawska, 2012). The message of this special issue has been that organization theory can learn from science fiction in matters of reporting and reflecting about actual and possible practices; a theme later discussed by Rhodes and Brown (2005).

David Metz (2003) and Brian Bloomfield (2003) have used science fiction somewhat differently, but again in tune with Hassard and Holliday’s (1998) postulates. Metz has suggested that science fiction offers identity models to the incumbents of new jobs and occupations, such as information technology freelancers and various temporary workers (William Gibson's works are 1

Those that do were analyzed by Rhodes and Westwood, 2008.

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exceptionally rich in such models) . Bloomfield saw science fiction as a template for making sense of the relationships between human beings and advanced technologies.

Czarniawska and Rhodes (2006) attempted to summarize these insights by describing the circular relationship between popular culture and practices of organizing, taking as a starting point the circuit model of culture (Johnson, 1986–87). They pointed out that popular culture transmits ideals, including identity models (Metz, 2003; Rombach and Solli, 2006). It also reflects – in the sense of representing – actual practices, sometimes more accurately than organization studies, as Hassard and Holliday (1998) have noted. It does more, however; as I suggested at the outset, it teaches practices, including those that might not have existed before. It was not only the Swedish mafiosi that needed help in learning their roles – apparently, both the Sicilian and US Mafiosi created their business discourse based on dialogues from The Godfather and Scarface (Varese, 2004). Finally, to complete the circuit, the fact that popular culture offers interpretative templates, patterns for sensemaking was exemplified both by Bloomfield (2003) and by Czarniawska and Rhodes (2006). As Traube (1992) has noted, expression becomes control, as popular culture selects and reinforces certain desires and anxieties of its audience. In turn, control provokes the further expression both of submission and of resistance.

My claim is that in studying this circuit, soap operas should be given special attention. One reason is their obvious popularity. Another is that, like in subliminal marketing (Key, 1973; McLaren, 2 2004) the attitude-forming impact of messages of secondary importance to the plot may be as strong as those of primary importance, because they are not easily submitted to critical reflection.

Watching a movie may provoke more conscious reflection and analysis; soap operas are usually watched with half an eye, while talking or eating. Furthermore, when such messages are embedded in a local context (in contrast to those of the imported TV series), they may have a stronger impact on actual practices, as the distance due to estrangement is removed. Although there is no doubt that US, UK, and Latin American soap operas are models for local productions in other countries, their local variations deserve attention.

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Soap operas: A very special genre

The origins of serials are much older than the beginning of television. First there were newspapers serials (for example, novels of Victor Hugo were first serialized), and then radio series, which were 4 popular until well after World War II, when TV replaced most of the functions of the radio . The psychological development of characters played no role in these serials: The protagonists were familiar and the audience anticipated new events rather than new insights. The TV series are also related to film serials that originated in the times of silent movies, when many people went to the cinema every week.

Umberto Eco (1990) has traced the genealogy of the series back even further to sagas – those of Old Norse origin, for example – which were narrated orally for generations. Unlike stories, sagas never finished; the heroes and heroines were as good as immortal. New things can always happen so long as someone is prepared to go on telling the tale, and anyone is interested in listening.

The sagas live on: one of the relatively recent continuations of Norse sagas can be found in Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently books (Adams, 1987, 1988). Seeing soap operas as a continuation of 2

After a heated debate about subliminal marketing that lasted for at least a half century, recent studies show that such a phenomenon does exist (Fransen, 2009), though it is not due to some quasi-magical manipulation, but to a short exposure not encouraging, or even not permitting reflection, as Zajonc (1968) postulated long time ago.

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The name of this genre comes from the US radio series sponsored in the 1930s by the soap manufacturer Proctor & Gamble.

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"Matysiakowie", the radio series that started 15 December 1956, continues.

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Norse sagas is not a common point of view, however. And although it is not often now that popular culture is pigeonholed as lowbrow, there is often a derogatory tone in cultural critiques of TV series in general and soap operas in particular (although recently the anathema has moved to reality series). A historical perspective may change that stance.

After all, as Eco (1990) pointed out, it was only modernist aesthetics that had equated artistic value with novelty and set a low value on the pleasure derived from repetition. The earlier classical theory of art lacked this differentiation. The modernists decided to distinguish the two, however, in the face of unprecedented technological development, which permitted mass replicability.

Consequently, all variations on a known model could be judged as pleasurable but not artistic.

Moreover, repetition and the desire to please combined with a lack of innovation were seen as commercial tricks, in contrast with provocative proposals for a new world vision. "The products of mass media were equated with the products of industry, insofar as they were produced in series, and the 'serial' production was considered alien to artistic invention" (Eco, 1990: 84).

Eco criticized this artistic Puritanism, hoping that it would vanish in times characterized by iteration, repetition and mass production. After all, the mass media constantly offer new things, which are liked and accepted—even though or maybe because—the audience recognizes them. Eco spoke of a "new esthetic of seriality", in which TV serials might replace Greek tragedies in western culture.

"But why do people like TV series?" is the question asked by practically every author analyzing the impact of soap operas. The question can be asked from two standpoints: by the critics of "lowbrow culture", or else by art critics, who point out that soaps lack dramatic effect. Eco responded to this question by suggesting that TV series reward their viewers by confirming their skills of prediction (see also Geraghty, 1991). Developments proceed through various complications that produce a feeling of suspense but are resolved just as expected. The unsophisticated consumer and the smart consumer of popular culture, whom Eco called the naive and the critical reader, share this pleasure – the naive one merely enjoying the events in the series and the critical one enjoying the seriality of the serials, "not so much for the return of the same thing (which the naive reader believed was different) but for the strategy of the variations" (Eco, 1990: 92). Eco compared Balzac’s Human Comedy and Dallas, to conclude that each of Balzac’s novels told the reader something new about French society, whereas each installment of Dallas told the audience the same thing about US society but "both use the same narrative scheme" (Eco, 1990: 93).

"Lowbrow culture" is only one of the derogative terms used to describe soap operas. It has been claimed that serials present a feminine narrative form in contrast with the masculine tradition that emphasizes goal orientation, pre-established conflict and a climactic resolution (see Alexander, 1991; Geraghty, 1991; Modleski, 1979 for a summary of this argument). Indeed, action serials, as Fiske (1987) noted, attempt to reconstruct masculinity by breaking the rules of the soap operas. Soap operas in their turn broke the rules of classical drama by introducing a rhythm that is typical of everyday life, replacing dramatic resolutions with small problems that arise while others are being solved; by introducing several possible identifications and open-structured events, and by blurring the genre. Whichever was their actual origin, there is no doubt that soap operas are strongly connected to the melodramatic tradition from the second half of the 18th century (Brooks, 1976). As Modleski (1979) shrewdly observed, soap operas can never end because there is no way to disentangle the contradiction between the demands of a melodrama (the good must be rewarded and the bad punished) with the latent message of the soaps: Not everyone can be happy at the same time.

Johnson’s (1986–87) circuit of culture suggests reciprocal loans between texts and lived cultures, which can be translated here as loans from organizational reality to the series and the other way around. This circuit is even more evident in the case of soap operas because TV series are a common topic of everyday conversations, including workplace conversations (Geraghty, 1991; Hobson, 2003). As Hobson put it:

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The incidents in the series pass easily into conversation about people the audience know, and the interweaving of reality and fiction reveals not a confusion about the status of the characters in the drama, but evidence of the validity of their interpretation and their place in the consciousness of the audience. (2003, p. 5)

The amount of attention dedicated to the analysis of the impact of soap operas on the rest of popular culture and on lived cultures demonstrates their importance.

Soap operas in Poland Contrary to what the scholars in other countries believe, Poland has been familiar with TV soap operas for a long time now: Dallas has been shown in the 1980s. The contemporary Polish soap operas borrow heavily from USA, UK soap operas and especially from Latin American telenovelas, but add to it a completely unique blend of the artistic traditions. The remembered (or invented) esthetic sensibility from the period between the wars mixes with that of the period of socialism and the present trends of the newly capitalist society.

The format of this paper does not permit a complete analysis, but let me just mention one soap opera, Hotel 52. The way it portrays management and business practices reflects common ideas about how contemporary hotel should be run. Yet one of the most interesting and unique aspects concerns the role of the women. They are both equal to men (in professionalism and intelligence) and emotionally subordinated to them (be they fathers, lovers, husbands or boyfriends). In our study of three soap operas, we observed that the Italian series assumed that work and career are but of marginal significance in a woman’s life; the Swedish series suggested that women are unable to combine work and career with family duties, and the South African series suggested that women’s success in work and career is built on sexual manipulation (Czarniawska et al., 2013). Hotel 52 contains all these messages at once.

Corruption and organized crime enter the picture, as they entered the Polish reality. Also, Hotel 52 is a family business, which opens a way of introducing all possible complications, to the degree that makes Dallas family seem simple and unproblematic. In general, the spectator (this spectator) has a feeling that images of (proper) management are taken directly from US consultants' manuals, descriptions of love and family relations from Hollywood templates, and Polish traditions – old and new – are added like spices to the main dish. As the series enters now in its 7th season, it is truly worth a more detailed analysis.

To summarize: Soap operas exist not only to entertain. They are meant to educate and to convey information (apparently, especially in times of crises; Anger, 1999), but they also teach and model actual behavior in unintended ways. Such unintended messages need to be carefully documented and analyzed. Popular culture has enormous relevance for practices of organizing and managing in workplaces. It could be that people, especially young people, learn more about organizing and managing from television programs than they learn from business school curricula.

Mapping the total variety of ways in which popular culture exerts an impact on these activities therefore becomes an urgent task for organization scholars.

The scholars analyzing the impact of soap operas tend to assume that everybody watches the same (Anglo-Saxon and Latin American) series; this assumption is both correct and incorrect.

Some series are watched practically around the globe; some exist in local variations; yet others exist only locally. Their mutual influences are also of importance in understanding local practices. It is an important task for management and organization scholars to study such issues in detail.

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Barbara Czarniawska holds an MA in Psychology (Warsaw Uniwesity, 1970) and Ph.D. in Economic Sciences (SGPiS, 1976), currently she is a professor of organisation and management at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She was given a title of Doctor honoris causa by Stockholm School of Economics, Copenhagen Business School and Helsinki School of Economics. She researches organizing and managing from constructivist and feminist perspective, recently she shows interest in the relationship between management practice and mass culture. As a methodologist she works on field work techniques and application of narratology in social studies. She writes in English, Swedish, Italian and Polish.

Życie imituje sztukę, a sztuka imituje życie Słowa kluczowe: kultura elitarna, kultura popularna, opery mydlane, okręg kultury, estetyka serializacji.

Streszczenie: We współczesnych społeczeństwach zachodnich ekonomia i zarządzanie zajmują centralne miejsce w kulturze rozumianej antropologicznie jako zestaw przedmiotów, praktyk i symboli cechujących dane miejsce w danym czasie. Sąsiadują tam z tzw. kulturą masową, reprezentowaną przez rozliczne środki masowego przekazu. Niniejszy artykuł analizuje powiązania między tymi dwoma sferami kultury, postulując ich wzajemne oddziaływania. Kultura masowa portretuje istniejące praktyki gospodarcze i zarządcze, ale też dyktuje nowe wzory zachowań. Pojęcie „okręgu kultury”, wprowadzone przez Richarda Johnsona, pomaga naświetlić ten złożony proces.

W artykule model ten zastosowany jest do analizy polskiego serialu Hotel 52.

Barbara Czarniawska jest magistrem psychologii (Uniwersytet Warszawski, 1970) i doktorem nauk ekonomicznych (SGPiS, 1976), a obecnie profesorem organizacji i zarządzania na Uniwersytecie w Goteborgu, Szwecja. Stockholm School of Economics, Copenhagen Business School i Helsinki School of Economics nadały jej tytuł doktora honoris causa. Bada organizowanie i zarządzanie z perspektywy konstruktywistycznej i feministycznej; ostatnio w centrum jej zainteresowań jest związek między praktyką zarządzania i kulturą masową. Jako metodolog zajmuje się technikami

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badań terenowych i zastosowaniem narratologii w naukach społecznych. Pisze w języku angielskim, szwedzkim, włoskim i polskim. Jej ostatnia książka po polsku to Trochę inna teoria organizacji (Poltex 2010); w przygotowaniu: Zmiana kadru: Jak zarządzano Warszawą w okresie przemian (Sedno 2014).

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