Events, Performance and

Rationalisation
Dr Adam Talbot

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 Further Study
• Are you interested in doing a PhD at University of the West of Scotland with a focus on sport,
leisure, tourism?
– The Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (SGSSS) has launched its Student-led Open Competition
2023/24 for ESRC funded PhD studentships. UWS is eligible for any studentship application that takes a
social sciences approach to a topic in the fields of Sport, Leisure and Tourism. If you are interested in
developing a PhD project in this area, this is a fantastic opportunity to apply for funding.
• What do I need to do?
– Read the information on the following page: https://www.sgsss.ac.uk/studentships/open-competition/
– Contact Professor David McGillivray to discuss your project idea: David.McGillivray@uws.ac.uk
– Write an application with guidance and input from UWS academic staff
• What is SGSSSS
– The Scottish Graduate School of Social Science is the UK's largest facilitator of funding, training and support
for doctoral students in social science. By combining the expertise of sixteen universities across Scotland,
the school facilitates world-class PhD research. The school is funded jointly by the Economic and Social
Research Council and the Scottish Funding Council. For more info see: https://www.sgsss.ac.uk/

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 Session Plan
• Consider theoretical approaches to
performance of identity
• Understand different forms of labour
deployed in the events sector
• Understand the rationalisation of events in the
21st Century

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 What is identity?
• In groups, discuss:
• What do you think of as your identity?
• Consider
– Is it fixed or does it change over time? If so, how?
– How do you experience your identity?
– How do you understand others’ identities?

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 Presentation of self (Goffman 1959)
• We don’t show everything
about ourselves in all in
situations.
• We have multiple ‘selves’
that build up who we are.
• The self is a ‘performed
character’ a ‘product of a
scene that comes of, not a
cause of it’. ‘A firm self... will
appear to emanate
intrinsically from its
performer’ (Goffman, 1959:
252-3).
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 Dramaturgy as metaphor
“All the world’s a stage and all the men and
women merely players. They have their
entrances and their exits, and one man (sic) in
his time plays many parts”
As You Like It, Act II, Sc vii

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 Dramaturgy: Key terms
• Front stage: The way we present our self directed towards an
audience.
• Backstage: The parts of who we are that we try to hide from a
particular audience in order to maintain an image of ourself that we
wish to project. Parts of ourselves that might contradict the image
we are trying to project
• Audience: The groups of people or individuals that we shape our
performances of self for.
• ‘As human beings we are presumably characters of variable impulse
with moods and energies that change from one moment to the
next. As characters put on for an audience, however, we must not
be subject to ups and downs’ (Goffman, 1959:49).

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 Impression Management
• Formed through:
Individual

Information we ‘give’
Information we ‘give away’

Others

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 Strategic Interactions (Goffman 1970)
• Specific strategies used to
execute our actions:
– Assessing the others
moves
– Establishing the
operational code
– Analysing the opponents
resolve
– Discovering the others
information state
– Assessing the opponents
resources

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 Dramaturgy
• The dramaturgical model
involves 6 key features:
– Expressive equipment (i.e
clothing, gender)
– Exaggeration
– Teamwork/collaboration
– ‘Discrepant roles’
– Communication that is out
of character
– Setting (Scripts, Roles,
Props)

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 Dramaturgy at events
• Thinking about a recent • Expressive equipment
event you attended, try (i.e clothing, gender)
to think of examples of • Exaggeration
each of the six features • Teamwork/collaboration
of dramaturgy
– It could be your own
• ‘Discrepant roles’
impression • Communication that is
management, or that of out of character
others
• Setting (Scripts, Roles,
– Some are easier to think
of than others!
Props)

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 Butler and Gender performativity
• “there is no gender identity
behind expressions of
gender” (Butler 1990: 34)
• No backstage – we are who
we appear to others
because identity is a social
concept
• No objective, biological
concept of gender (as
opposed to sex) –
constantly socially
constructed and contested

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 Giddens and the reflexive self
• The self (identity) is a
reflexive project for which
the individual is
responsible
• Continuous reflexivity
– What am I doing, how can I
change?
• Conscious narrative of the
self – we write our own
auto-biographies
• We are always performing
our identity – even when
alone?
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 Labour in events
• Performative and emotional labour are both
common in the event industry
• “the rendering of work by managements and
employees alike as akin to a theatrical performance
in which the workplace is constructed as similar to a
stage” (Bryman 2004: 103)

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 Emotional Labour (Hochschild 1983)
• Displaying certain
emotions to meet the
requirements of the job
– Examples in the event
industry?
• Emotion regulation
strategies
– Cognitive, bodily,
expressive
• Service workers emotions
become commodified,
alienating them from
their own feelings

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 Performative Labour (Rojek 2013)
• Performance (a la Goffman) as
labour
– Examples in the event
industry?
• “because social impact
depends so much upon being
in the know and looking right,
according to the mores of the
peer groups to which one is
attached, performative labour
is now a perpetual, seven days
a week undertaking (Rojek
2013: 6)
• But does this alienate event
industry workers from their
own identities?
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 Consumption as performance
• We perform our identities
through our actions an
consumption choices
• Our event choices become
more important as images
of our identity rather than
for their enjoyment
themselves
• Performing what we believe
to be the socially desired
role for the benefit of social
positioning
– Showing up to be seen

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 Labour of Leisure vs the Art of Life
• Self government of
identity through leisure
(Rojek 2009)
• Identity is forever
incomplete, a work in
progress
• Shape-shifting as the art
of life
• Freeing or constraining?

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 Co-creation of experience
• Creating an experience
environment in which
consumers can have active
dialogue and co-construct
personalised experiences
(Prahalad and Ramaswamy
2004)
• Dramaturgy of an event help
construct shared values and
foster interactions (Ziakas and
Costa 2012)
• But what are we co-creating?
– Our performance of acceptable
discourses reinforces messages
about authority and labour

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 Co-creation or co-subjugation?
(Frew and McGillivray 2008)
• “a normalising gaze is
produced whereby
individuals are made visible,
differentiated and judged”
• “Fan park is embodied, an
authorised performance is
encourage, assimilated and
enacted”
• “The ‘fan’ becomes his/her
own producer locked by a
desire to be seen, noticed,
accepted and valued so as
to assume the performative
position”

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 Performing the fan

An embodied, authorised performance?

Or a carnivalesque celebration?
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 Rationalisation
• Enlightenment ideas
emphasised the
organisation of society
based on reason
– as opposed to
religion/monarchy
• Age of Enlightenment 17th
& 18th Century, associated
with thinkers such as
Kant, Hume, Smith, Locke,
Wollstonecraft, Mill
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 Bureaucracy
• Rational system based on
efficiency
• Activities divided
systematically
• Staff selected and
promoted based on
competence
• Governed by written rules
and policies
• Particularly useful for
large organisations

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 The “Iron Cage” (Weber)
• Bureaucracy is often slow
and inflexible
• Max Weber critiqued its
dehumanising effects
– Treating humans as
numbers not as individuals
• Need for more flexible
systems of organisation –
but how to manage this
across huge
organisations?

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 McDonaldisation (Ritzer 1998; 2003)
• “The process by which the
principles of the global fast-
food restaurant McDonalds
are progressively dominating
more aspects of American
society, as well as the rest of
the world (Ritzer 1998: 1)
• Builds on Max Weber’s work –
but with a flexible rationality
instead of a rigid bureaucracy
• 5 dimensions: efficiency,
calculability, predictability,
control, irrationality of
rationality

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 Efficiency
• Efficiency refers to the
effort to discover the best
possible means to whatever
end is desired.
• A McDonaldizing society is a
speeded up, time conscious
and consumption based
society and consumers
expect to be served
promptly and efficiently.
• Customers and staff 'lose
their face' and are only
valued as a number
(Bauman, 2000)

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 Calculability
• This emphasises quantity –
perhaps best personified in
the ‘Big Mac’ burger - which
is often accompanied with
the loss of quality.
• Time is of the essence here.
Staff must work fast and
customers must eat, and
leave as quickly as possible.
• Eating becomes like a
‘Mediterranean cruise'
(2011:27)

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 Predictability
• Applies to both the food
and the experience.
• Ritzer (2004) likens the
predictability found in
McDonalds restaurants to
what Marc Augé (1995) calls
non-places- globally
conceived and controlled
and lacking the distinctive
substance – conversation,
flexibility, localism,
humanity - that make
experiences, products and
services real

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 Control
• Rationalization and
technology gives
greater control over its
employees and its
customers
• Enhanced by
technology
• Allows people to deal
with the uncertainty of
postmodern living

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 Irrationality of rationality
• In the process of rationally
organizing its business
McDonalds ends up removing
all the things that make work
rewarding and eating a
pleasurable experience.
• Rationality becomes a means
to an end rather than a means
in itself
• The upshot of this is
‘dehumanization’ (Ritzer 2003:
141)
– Tendency to treat humans as
mechanistic

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 McDonaldisation of mega-events
• Efficiency – power of media to deliver event to
audiences
• Calculability – ever-increasingly offering, but at the
expense of quality (world cup teams, number of sports)
• Predictability – events look the same and follow the
same structure everywhere they’re hosted
• Control – events governed by detailed legal contracts
and securitised through new technologies
• Irrationality of rationality – all of this takes audiences
further away from actually experiencing sport for its
own sake, supposedly the main objective of the
Olympic Games

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 McDonaldisation of events
• Think about other events and how they have changed
over time
• What elements of McDonaldisation can you identity?
– Efficiency
– Calculability
– Predictability
– Control
– Irrationality of rationality
• Remember these are ideal types – your examples don’t
have to fit all 5 elements

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 Why McDonaldisation matters
• McDonaldization is not just another cunning business
model. As Bauman (2000: 234) points out, ‘there must
have been a fertile soil for the seed, once sown, to
grow so quickly resonance (indeed, a degree of mutual
adequacy) between the changes in the existential
conditions of …individuals and the escape-from-
uncertainty-through-designed-standards which
McDonaldization is all about’.
• Second, McDonaldization shows us that the difference
between consuming and leisure is getting more blurred
and for many practical purposes has perhaps been
already obliterated.

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 Limitations of McDonaldisation
• Ignores appropriation
and resistance (Turner,
2010)
• Little empirical evidence
• Assumes that
modernity is bereft of
enchantment
• Very simplistic view of
consumption

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 Reading (all available on Aula)
• Essential
– Rojek, C. (2013) Event Power: How Global Events Manage and
Manipulate (Chapter 1: What is Event Management). London: Sage, 1-
12.
• Recommended
– Frew, M. and McGillivray, D. (2008) Exploring Hyper-experiences:
Performing the Fan at Germany 2006. Journal of Sport & Tourism, 13
(3), 181-198.
– The Walmartization of music festivals – TEDx talk by Kevin Lyman
– Ziakas, V. and Costa, C. A. (2012) ‘The show must go on’: event
dramaturgy as consolidation of community. Journal of Policy Research
in Tourism, Leisure and Events, 4 (1), 28-47.

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