Business Ritual Studies: Corporate Ceremony and Sacred Space

Abstract

Business organizations are comprised of shifting and multi-layered cognitive and affective networks which may at times have areas of dispute or disparity. Analyses of business rituals, such as celebratory launches of new products, business conventions, award ceremonies, retirement parties, and openings of new plants offer potent loci for capturing how the hierarchical conventions are reiterated in different forms; how individual agents and groups of stakeholders engage with one another in public performance; and how they bring forth synergetic fusion and creative adaption, or alternatively, mutual alienation, confusion, and even hostility. The author provides a short history of ritual studies in anthropology, and then argues that business ritual can be investigated as a kind of critical event, or conversely a critical event can be analyzed as a kind of ritual. Studies of corporate ritual as condensed public drama can delve directly into the actual cognitive, emotive, and neurological processes of meaning creation by various stakeholders, and can capture multi-level enactments of organizational descent, power and hierarchical order, as well as shifting images of future possibilities. In order to strengthen this argument, the author offers a detailed ethnographic study of a retirement party of a Japanese multinational in the United States.