Spectacles and Festivals of Organization

Managing Ahimsa Production and Consumption

September, 1999

Book under review

David M. Boje

Sample quotes Chapter 1

There is a new business paradigm, a new way of being a business that is socially and ecologically responsible.

It is a fledgling paradigm; dwarfed by the dominant spectacle of production and consumption that functions as common sense all around us.

 

BOOKS:

  1. Willis Harman and John Hormann’s (1993) book Creative Work: The Constructive Role of Business in a Transforming Society,
  2. Anita Roddick’s Body and Soul (1992),
  3. Tom Chappell’s The Soul of a Business (1993),
  4. W. Edward and Jean Garner Stead’s book Management for a Small Planet (1996),
  5. Ronnie Lessem and Sudhanshu Palsule’s (1997) Managing in Four Worlds: From Competition to Co-Creation, and
  6. my own book with Bob Dennehy (1993) Managing in the Postmodern World have something in common.

 

Define spectacle? Here, the spectacle is above all a legitimating narrative for social engineering and social control masking the violent acts of production and consumption.

 

Spectacle, says Debord, is an opium, that allows us to sleep walk, as if drugged, stumbling blindfolded through a devolving landscape of ecological and human horror; while cocooned in artificiality and illusion; mind-numbed by cyber media into passive stupefied spectators.

 

This is why it is not easy for people socialized in spectacles and consumption images of the good life through consumption to step outside of its mechanisms of persuasion, and see its impact on nature, social systems, and the manipulation of our own desires. Our life is just too "saturated with spectacles" and we are too pacified in their "permanent opium war" (Debord, 1967: #44).

 

 

Festival is what I mean by non-violent patterns of production and consumption.

Festival - defined as the pragmatics of long term sustainability in a non-violent culture, in balance with the whole planet.

 

It is, I believe, an third kind of political economy, an alternative to both state communism and predatory capitalism.

 

The Ahimsa business paradigm would transform spectacles of production and consumption:

  1. Engage in business practices that are non-violent to other species.

    2.  

  2. Limit economic growth to what is ecologically sustainable.

    3.  

  3. Develop ecological awareness through reduce, recycle, and reuse practices.

    4.  

  4. Cultivate personal Self-development through servant leadership, introspection time, and community service.

 

Postmodern is about reality, and the illusion of reality, and the interplay between real and fantasy in spectacle. Finally, spectacle is the phantasm of invention, the seduction of advertising, and the mirage of our daily life. It is equating material accumulation with happiness.