Abstract
‘Leaderless organizations’ are a seductive category in the field of Cultural Studies and critical organization studies. In the 1960s, arguably, Situationism made a fetish of the idea. Various authors made the case for direct, spontaneous action without the hierarchies and directive lead of conventional management structures. The Occupy protest movement revived this thinking. Following the Arab Spring (2011), it gained high media publicity for a series of occupations of prominent sites adjacent to international centres of finance capital. Global events provide a relevant parallel to this. Ever since Live Aid (1985) they have presented themselves as stateless solutions to international issues and emergencies. But are leaderless events possible in cultural management? This paper examines a neglected area in the sociology of culture: global event management and the type of social consciousness that it exploits and perpetuates. The Burning Man City annual event in Nevada is explored as a case of flat horizon strategy in cultural management.
Global events feature prominently in the field of cultural management. However, within cultural sociology and cultural studies they have not received the attention that they deserve. Single issue events provide individuals with a powerful sense of ‘making a difference’, ‘doing good’ and even ‘making culture’. However, event consciousness presents the world as a series of episodes, incidents and emergencies. As such, it neglects to address underlying structures of power and inequality.
This paper is intended as a contribution to both understanding the nature of the philosophy of ‘leaderless events’ and an elucidation of the fragmentary, episodic, disaggregated nature of event consciousness. Leaderless events refer to forms of collective mobilization and direct action that are externally constituted without a leader. They emphasize social inclusion, non-hierarchical structure and tolerance. Culturally speaking, they are stridently populist. That is, they portray action as the will of the group (and sometimes the will of the entire people) that arises irrepressibly.
In Sociology, the notion of spontaneous general social reaction as a social force of change has been developed most fully in work on so-called world historical events (WHEs) (Wallerstein 1989, Watts 2001, White 2008). WHEs are intense, disturbing social moments that momentously query the recurrence of habitual social and economic ordering. The 18th-century French revolutionary Saint-Just refers to them as ‘public moments’ in which the social contract is ‘simultaneously reviewed and reconstituted through action’ (Watts, 2001: 160).
What does it mean to ‘review’ and ‘reconstitute the social contract? To pursue the language of Habermas (1976) with respect to system reproduction, WHEs express and reinforce legitimation crises in the reproduction of social systems. To expand, democratic systems depend upon legitimate principles of executive capacity, stability control, governability and concentrated power (Judge, 2006). World historical events challenge these principles. They are in the nature of disturbing, often inchoate, episodes of dis-establishment. Inter alia, these are socially expressed in the form of protest marches, occupations, the repurposing of public space, looting and rioting. It is as if social consciousness is seized by the conviction that accustomed ways of doing things can no longer carry on. It usually carries with it a demand for a reordering of the relationship between government and society (Beetham, 1991).
WHOs carry strong Hegelian presuppositions. The events of 1848, 1905, 1968, 1989 and 2011 are analytically defined as ‘signposts’, to borrow E.J. Hobsbawm’s (1978: 130) phrase. They point to residual or emerging forces that denote a change in direction for the established system. Change is not necessarily a matter of revolution. Adaptation is a logical system response to legitimation crisis. The core of WHEs is a general sentiment in the body politic that the system is not working and that the times are out of joint (Wallerstein 1989, Watts 2001, White 2008).
The popular sentiment that the system is not working produced Robespierre, Danton and St Just in 1789; and social indignation at the famine in Ethiopia, fuelled by the media, led to the emergence of Band Aid and Bob Geldof as the architects of a stateless solution to African hunger.
On the whole, within cultural sociology, leaderless events have been regarded as improbable as spontaneous combustion is in the natural sciences. Protests, demonstrations and movements have been assumed to have a leader, or at least a strategic management team of some sort. Sociology has also produced the classic rebuttal to the hypothesis of non-hierarchical leadership combined with equal participation in the shape of Robert Michels’ (1962) famous ‘iron law of oligarchy’. Briefly stated, this holds that in all notionally democratic organizations technical and competitive forces mean that power always rises to an upper echelon.
We are living in the midst of a wind of change about these assumptions, both in academic circles and the field of social movements. A combination of strong philosophies of social inclusion and the potential for participation afforded by new digital technologies has emboldened the spokes people for some social movements to maintain that the iron law of oligarchy is now defunct. The Arab Spring (2011) started with social protests against authoritarianism expressed by dissidents. However, what is generally held as giving the movement critical momentum was digital technology (especially the mobile phone and laptop). The Arab Spring was widely portrayed as a social reaction to power which was non-hierarchical and socially inclusive.
It is not alone. The Occupy movement (2011–12) made a virtue of so-called horizontalism, that is to say, the notion of equal power weighting for all participants, allied with free speech and majority rule. The accent was upon spontaneous, inclusive ‘people power’ designated through direct majority will. 1
The Burning Man event that occurs annually in Nevada was a pioneering contribution to the non-directive, socially inclusive event field. The first event was a spontaneous happening that gained a degree of mass momentum through word of mouth. Today the event draws nearly 50,000 participants from around the world. Of course, economies of scale have introduced the need for planning and management, notably in the areas of health and safety and establishing themes for participants. Despite this, the event portrays itself as a non-directive process based upon free expression and self-reliance.
Before coming to this case study, it is important to set the scene by going into the question of how leaderless events connect to the broader field of global event management. 2 Global event management refers to the global planning and co-ordination of special occasions or celebrations. Events fall into two main categories.
Single issue events refer to one-off celebrations designed to build consciousness and raise funds around specific issues. These typically refer to questions of global incidents and emergencies that require aid and relief or, in the case of events organized for corporate purposes, launching new product lines, smoothing out changes in the management pyramid, heralding new arrangements in seed investment or global resource allocation. Examples of humanitarian global events include the ‘Live Aid’ (1985) 3 concert to generate resources to tackle famine in Ethiopia, the ‘Concert for Hurricane Katrina’ relief (2005) and the ‘Hope for Haiti Now’ (2010) telethon to bring relief to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. These are stateless solutions to urgent international problems. A stateless solution may be defined as a committed reaction to problem-solving that arises from civil society. The state-corporate nexus may be used in a subordinate role as partners in transformation. However, the lead role is presented as being performed by ‘the people’.
Cyclical events refer to calendarized special occasions or celebrations. Examples include the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup. A significant sub-branch in this category is hallmark events, that is, cyclical events which are located in a town, city or region designed to enhance the location’s cultural profile and apply a multiplier effect on income generation by, inter alia, boosting tourist flows, infrastructural upgrades and inward investment (Chappelet, 2006; Horne, 2004; Preuss, 2007). Examples include the Edinburgh International Festival, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and Oktoberfest (the Munich Beer Festival).
A variety of organizational benefits are claimed for events. These include income generation, expanding responsible citizenship by providing constructive pedagogy (about hunger, inequality, injustice, pollution, etc.), developing social investment programmes, integrating the work force and building the client base (Getz, 2012; Bowdin et al., 2011).
The association between events and people power is well established. Doubtless it reflects the origins of events which lie in the use of drama, sport, music and oratory in Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance times to engineer a sense of pan-individualism and festivity (Callois, 1961; Bakhtin, 1968). Strauss (2009: 21) notes that the Games in Ancient Rome were associated not only with group excitement, but with the cultural attainment of the sublime. The transparent aim was to engineer a cogent sense of transcendence from day-to-day affairs to produce popular perceptions of unity and transcendence.
Like pre-industrial pagan and religious festivals and ceremonies, events involve an organized break with routine, the invocation of a higher purpose (usually expressed in secular form) and the use of drama, and even melodrama, to promote a spirit of ‘staged authenticity’ (MacCannell, 2011). 4
This is not the time or place to go into the parallels between events and traditional religious and pagan festivals with respect to the gift of grace or the sacramental functions of festive celebration. Suffice to say that the parallels are noted (and are palpable in the Burning Man organization). It is important to make this point because both events and pre-industrial carnivals and festivals carry powerful overtones of informality, emotional candour and authenticity (Pipan and Porsander, 1999: 2).
Global events essentially aim to achieve four objectives:
1) Escapism
Events are designed to encourage participants to experience a break from routine and think outside the box. The sense of being temporarily freed from the rubric of management control or conventional social discipline is encouraged by various strategies aimed to establish informality, emotional frankness and straight talking. By providing space for talk and emotional expression that is generally marginalized in orthodox social life and conventional workplace relations, events reinforce the banner headline of being ‘special occasions’ in the community.
2) Integration
Building the brand, creating a spirit of unity and mutual co-operation, delineating the parameters of responsible citizenship – these are all common goals of event organization. The festive, informal aspects of event planning is designed to militate against inhibition and withholding. The aim is to break down barriers between corporations and customers, the CEO, the executive team and the workforce and humanitarian figureheads, audiences and network publics. Engineering a climate of unity and mutual respect is the name of the game.
3) Publicity
Humanitarian events raise consciousness about emergencies and incidents in the world. They place questions of famine, inequality and injustice on the media agenda and, by this means, seek to influence public opinion. Corporate events play a parallel function of allowing customers to provide direct feedback to the corporation and the workforce to clear the air about work or market-related issues and let their hair down with management.
4) Transcendence
Creating a sense of bigger responsibilities, beyond individual and group interest, and acknowledging respect for marginal and peripheral agents, are at the core of event management philosophy. The accent is upon looking beyond your comfort zone and engaging with larger questions relating respectively to the corporation, the community, the nation, or – in the case of Live Aid (1985) and Live 8 (2005) – the values of Western civilization.
Smart Capitalism 5
Institutionally speaking within the Academy, the origins of event management derive from hospitality management, business studies, tourist studies and leisure studies (Bowdin et al., 2011; O’Toole, 2010). However, to dwell exclusively on this academic mix of influences misses characteristics of indispensable importance, having to do with the ethos of event management. The emphasis upon informality, candour, escapism, responsible citizenship, transcendence and the importance of comprehending the emotional core of the labour process bears the hallmarks of the permissive society and the rise of therapy culture (Furedi, 2004). Event management defines itself against management barriers, the rule of oligarchy and irresponsible accumulation. It purports to elicit rapid action, stateless solutions to incidents and emergencies. The tacit assumption is that the responses of the State and the corporation are inadequate. Event management therefore positions itself as the populist, direct action alternative. Global events have risen to prominence because large elements in civil society reject the representational connection with the State and corporate power in favour of direct people power.
Events define themselves against management barriers, the rule of oligarchy and irresponsible accumulation. They purport to elicit rapid action, stateless solutions to incidents, emergencies and general states of affairs which are deemed to be insupportable by conventional democratic procedures. Event management therefore positions itself as the populist, direct action alternative.
This idea of people taking history into their own hands and making a difference carries strong echoes with 1960s activism and counter-culture. Global events have taken over many aspects of this ethos, namely informality, the notion of spontaneous action, social inclusion and co-operation as transcendence – unity through difference. Capitalism has learned from the counter culture. But this is not news.
A good deal of interesting work of late has been done on what I call ‘smart capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; McGuigan, 2009). Much of this work takes its lead from Tom Frank’s (1997) gimlet-eyed study of how capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s raided from anti-consumerism and anti-capitalism. In brief, Frank shows how traditional corporate business strategies in the USA were forced to fundamentally redefine their business practices and presentation.
After the Second World War the traditional business model of capitalism pictured consumers as white, heterosexual and engaged in legal full-time employment. Employers were viewed as agents of corporate strategy that, despite the influence of the human relations approach, were ultimately regarded as factors of production.
The counter culture derailed this. It brought multi-ethnic, multi-cultural issues from the margins and made them central. Business relevance was now judged by articulating sensitivity and policy to questions of gender equality, civil rights, multi-cultural diversity (especially with respect to gay and lesbian matters) and environmental responsibility. As a result, business ethics took on much wider responsibilities, usually discharged through specialist business ethics departments, having to do with social investment and sustainability. Corporations like Virgin, Body Shop and Apple are market leaders in this regard. Their version of smart capitalism emphasizes the power of a winning brand, customer services, ethical business practice and social inclusion. Even Exxon Mobil – the world’s leading capitalist company involved in oil exploration and extraction, and by most accounts, the world-ranked number one or two corporation measured by market capitalization – has a large and vigorous ‘community and development’ department aimed at ‘corporate citizenship’. Its website lists philanthropy, fighting malaria, improving standards in the education of maths and science, gender equality and social investment as primary corporate responsibilities (www.exxonmobil.com). 6
Organizations that make virtues of informality, listening to the market, corporate responsibility and social inclusion face a well-known difficulty. The ‘iron law of oligarchy’ states that as democratic organizations grow in scale, power tends to rise to the top. Despite the formal equality of all citizens under democracy, in the medium and long terms, power will be concentrated in the hands of a salaried executive board, dealing with organizational strategy and implementation (Michels, 1962). So the difficulty facing smart capitalism and leaderless event strategies is that bureaucratization, professionalization and commercialization separate the corporation from the consumer. The result is that consumers gradually become accustomed to seeing issues of corporate ethics, informality and social inclusion as empty rhetoric.
The problem is particularly acute in the field of event management because the organizational structures that emerge generally portray themselves as direct populist responses to global incidents and emergencies. The public relations ethos is that they are expressions of people power. This is compromised when professionalization, bureaucratization and commercialization are seen as cutting people off from the business. It therefore behoves us to examine in some detail the measures used by a decentralized, event-based organization of scale, to militate against the iron law of oligarchy. For this raises the question of whether flat horizon strategies, based in the notion of equality between managers and consumers, presenters and spectators, are compatible with scale. In short, can an organization founded in strong populist sentiments avoid the divisive effects of professionalization, bureaucratization and commercialization?
Burning Man City
The Burning Man City event draws 50,000 annually to a desert playa in Nevada. It is unique in the field of major events. For one thing, it pursues a ‘no spectators’ policy, so that all trippers are defined as active participants. They engage in voluntary artistic, educational, exercise and support functions for the benefit of all. The development of a ‘them and us’ philosophy is scrupulously opposed in favour of militant social inclusion.
No advertising is permitted, and exchange is mostly organized around an ethic of gifting, not a money economy. The only commodities for sale in the desert city are ice, tea and coffee. Participants are encouraged to regard artistic, educational and exercise contributions as gifts that carry no pecuniary gain. Turner (2009: 91) defines the event as ‘a living model of commons-based peer production carried out for non-monetary purposes’. Arguably, it is the world’s largest cyclical counter-cultural event.
What actually happens in Burning Man City? Does the purported flat horizon strategy mean that hierarchy is eliminated? Let us organize the discussion of the case study around these questions.
The Burners construct and, for one week, manage the fourth biggest city in Nevada. The retro-futuristic tent city is arranged in a horseshoe shape, 12 blocks deep. End to end, the dimensions stretch for a mile and a half. The tents are positioned around a grid-like street structure along which participants run ‘theme camps’. Event planners supply the temporary city with basic services – camp placement, public information, medical care, porta-potties and refuse bins. Participants are meant to be self-sufficient, so they bring their own food and water supplies.
The temporary system is a themed event. Each year the theme, determined by event planners, is elaborated by Burners. Recent themes include Rites of Passage, Metropolis, Evolution, The American Dream, the Green Man, Hope and Fear, Psyche and The Vault of Heaven. The themes are designed to elicit a spirit of festivity in which human creativity and physical energy are set free. Burning Man aims to achieve a type of event experience that is self-directed, self-forming and personally transformative. The event seeks to reward creativity and experimentation and dispel hierarchy.
These sentiments were strongly expressed in the origins of the event. They have carried over as guarantees against ‘selling out’ and capitulating to the market norm in event management. The original Burning Man was set alight at Baker Beach, San Francisco, in 1986. The burning by artist and landscaper Larry Harvey drew a handful of spectators. It is remembered as an impromptu affair designed to commemorate the end of a failed love affair.
The first event drew 20 spectators. By 1989, the numbers attending had climbed to 300, causing the San Francisco Police and Parks departments to raise noise abatement and health and safety issues, leading to a banning order. As a result, the event switched to Black Rock City in Nevada, drawing a crowd of 800.
In the course of establishing Burning Man in the desert, the event concept was modified from a localized, festive, educational event into the vision of a fully functioning, temporary city involving managers, volunteers and round-the-year activities. By 1993, the number of participants had climbed to 1000; by 1998, 15,000; by 2003, 30,586 and by 2008, just under 50,000 (www.burningman.com.timeline).
The original 8-foot statue has been succeeded by grander scale constructions. However, the burning remains the climax of the event. The wooden statue carries pagan overtones of renewal. Burning as a symbol of closure and cleansing is well established in human mythology. In an urban-industrial context it implies both primordial, magical properties and cosmopolitan separation from metropolitan discipline. Certainly, ethnographic accounts indicate that Burners bring a huge array of new age and pagan elements to the event, ranging from temples to labyrinths, angels, demons, gods, goddesses, demons and priests. These are woven into the display of industrial and post-industrial objects and motifs, including corporate logos and new inventions. Overall, the effect is one of bricolage in which elements of the pagan and the post-industrial are combined to overturn orthodox perception and unplug conventional wisdom (Gilmore, 2010).
The desert city mantra is leave no trace. Fidelity to the ethic of environmental responsibility means that participants dismantle the city and return the land to a pristine state once the event is over. This is further embodied in the nine organizational principles that characterize the event (www.burningman.com):
Radical inclusion: the event is open to all. Although a ticketing operation has emerged in order to cover running costs, no-one is debarred from applying to be a volunteer or participating
Gifting: the event applies a gift economy. No expectation of equal return or profit is made in gift giving. The gift is an unconditional act of exchange
De-commodification: commercial sponsorship, advertising and most monetary transactions (except the purchase of ice, tea and coffee as noted above) are banished
Radical self-reliance: participants are called upon to use their inner resources and practise benevolent co-operation. Directive initiatives are restricted to health and safety issues.
Communal effort: the desert city works with the notion of non-directed, spontaneous collaboration. The city community decides what is best for city members
Civic responsibility: local, state and federal laws apply. Although Burning Man City is anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist, it does not flaunt the legal rules of the wider social order, for to ignore local, state and federal laws is recognized as prejudicing the viability of the event
Leaving no trace: environmental sustainability is respected and observed. The city is defined as a temporary mega-structure. The land of the playa is the host, whose interests must be protected in the process of construction and dismantling
Participation: there are no distinctions between followers and leaders, The precondition of participation is activism. Every citizen of the desert city is designated a creative co-worker
Immediacy: the key output is event experience. Burning Man is conceived as self-transformation and social networking. Possessions and pecuniary advantage are not the name of the game.
Not surprisingly, the crowd drawn to Burning Man City include a high percentage of the world’s leading smart capitalists located in computer-related industries. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Serge Brin, Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Brian Behlendorf, a major open source advocate, are regulars (Turner, 2009: 83). Google employees have attended company parties in costumes derived from Burning Man imagery (Cohen and Whelpley, 2007).
Why does Burning Man draw these business elements? The digital economy is creating new orientations to work and expanding the notion of ‘co-operative labour’, that is, labour partly based in the concepts of volunteering, social networking and non-pecuniary sharing. Some commentators argue that the digital economy offers new opportunities for smart capitalism to define itself against conventional corporate models (Florida, 2002; Baym and Burnett, 2009).
These arguments are probably over-exaggerated. While a philosophy of creative commons obtains at the level of production, at the point of supply and distribution the principle of engineering quasi-monopoly control applies. For example, the Forbes Business Billionaires List (2011) estimates that the founders of Google, Serge Brin and Larry Forbes, each has a personal fortune of $19.8 billion, while Jeff Bezos is listed as being worth $18.1 billion (www.forbes.com\billionaires\list). Nonetheless, the digital work setting is one in which informalization, emotional labour and principled non-conformity are encouraged. Burning Man City is the spatial equivalent of a multiplicity ‘thinking outside the box’. It therefore provides a seductive metaphor of new attitudes to work, responsible citizenship and corporate labour.
One concrete reason why executives from computer-related industries come to Burning Man is because the event is increasingly showcasing new inventions. Just as the Experimental Prototypical Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) is part of the Disney Theme Parks, at Burning Man the fruits of the collaborative commons, project labour and post-industrial craft-work are on display (Turner, 2009: 91). Burners exhibit their inventions without the prospect of immediate pecuniary gain. Nonetheless, in doing so they set out their stall for post-event sponsorship and product development. One increasingly significant aspect of Burning Man therefore is that it operates as a marketplace without money. This fits with the anti-corporate, anti-consumerist ethos of the event, but it raises a separate question of how far Burning Man departs from orthodox capitalism. I will come back to this issue in the conclusion.
The growth and scale of Burning Man City means that it has been impossible to entirely avoid professionalization, bureaucratization and commercialization. The planning and management organization behind the event is Black Rock City LCC (Limited Liability Company). This is a multi-million dollar organization, responsible for all Burning Man’s legal and financial obligations. It handles accounts, expenditures, sponsorship, indebtedness, contract negotiation and licensing of trademarks and copyrights. In addition, it is responsible for external relations with county, state and federal agencies and media and strategic planning.
The multi-million dollar budget is funded almost entirely by ticket sales. Although the event is concentrated in one week of activities, a web team of 2000 facilitates all the year around open source information, social networking, messaging, posting stories and a writers’ forum. The E-Playa Bulletin Board handles listings to ‘connect with Burners’. ‘Decompression’ events in the San Francisco Bay area are held after the event. They take the form of art exhibitions, performance, dance, fire parties, theme camps, lectures, circus arts, DJs and live music (www.burningman.com).
While funds are used to pay essential staff, the surplus above basic costs is reinvested into the event to improve the quality of experience. Larry Harvey receives an Executive Director salary and is President of the Black Rock City Arts Foundation. But the event eschews the cult of the individual. The accent is upon equality, unity and renewal.
No major event can exist in a vacuum. Over the years Black Rock City LLC has evolved strategies and employed staff to liaise with three key external agents: government departments, media hubs and outside business (Chen, 2009: 120–49). Yet in so far as it is logistically possible with the challenges of scale, the management team employs a strategy of self-help and autarky. When external influences threaten to intrude, the management team introduces self-correcting devices to preserve the integrity of the event. For example, attempts by government departments, especially the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), to regulate the event in compliance with legal recreational norms, pay land rental fees and provide adequate insurance cover, were met by the mobilization of volunteers, the establishment of a task force (the ‘Earth Guardians’) and the evolution of a code of standards.
Similarly, when lurid stories of drug use, alcohol consumption and nudity were trailed in Playboy and MTV, the LLC Management team closed ranks and established Media Mecca – a Black Rock City department of press and public relations. This resulted in the banning of loaded guns on site. These measures are attempts by event management to engineer relations of mutual accommodation and tolerance with external society.
In 1996 the event came close to collapsing. An event worker was accidentally killed in a motor-bike crash. The incident attracted censorious media coverage which centred on the allegation that health and safety standards were too lax. This intensified in the closing stages of the event when a drunk driver accidentally drove his vehicle into tents and seriously injured several campers. These tragedies forced the management team to introduce new safety controls and a code of conduct. While this was deemed necessary to appease the concerns of external authorities that the Black Rock City LLC had allowed the event to get out of hand, it was interpreted by many old hands among the Burners as an unwelcome turn towards more bureaucracy (Chen, 2009).
So, Burning Man City does not dispel professionalization, bureaucratization and commercialization. The economies of scale compel funds to be generated (through ticketing and other means) and necessitate a trained salaried staff to manage cost control and policing, liaise with external agencies, manage essential supplies and regulate health and safety issues. This requires the transparent written delineation of professional duties and responsibilities. For a multi-million dollar event that draws 50,000 people to participate for a week and countless others to connect through pre and post-event social networking and ‘decompression’ events, anything else would lead to utter chaos. The conclusion is inescapable. The realpolitik of efficient event management is inconsistent with flat horizon management.
Notwithstanding this, one of the features, among many noteworthy features, of Burning Man City, is the principle of creative chaos to which it sincerely subscribes, that is, a balance between the straitjacket of over-organization and the free-for-all of under-organization (Chen, 2009). Now, while this is not exactly new in organization studies, the strong ethic of informality and experimentalism in Black Rock City LLC means that the public opinion of the organization stands or falls on the principle of defending creative chaos. The commitment to guaranteeing that Burning Man City maximizes opportunities for anti-corporatist, anti-consumerist, stateless, personal transformation, self-expression and creative linkage is pivotal. Optimal event experience requires an organizational bedrock constructed around environmental stability and efficient service delivery, combined with an event super-structure that maximizes access, involvement and enriching experimentation.
Conclusion
Leaderless event strategies are one of the most cogent expressions of smart capitalism. Outwardly, they affirm that it is not only listening to the people but directly empowering them. This winning message is heightened by the calculated use by the public relations-media hub of emotion-building media exercises and buttonholing event concepts. Black Rock City is one expression of this, with its commitment to free thought, edgy diversity and a no-money economy. Needless to say, it is far from being alone.
Global music concerts, tele-cast live, in which superstars appear to join hands with ordinary people to bring relief to the famine stricken, or ease the suffering of Mother Earth herself from unscrupulous, profiteering polluters, rally under the cause of ‘Feed the World’ or ‘Make Poverty History’. The event concept seeks to infuse all with a ‘can do’ attitude and the belief that anyone can ‘make a difference’. From Black Rock City, where Jeff Bezos and Serge Brin rub shoulders with people of low income and negligible influence, to Live 8 (2005), where Sir Bob Geldof and Bono bend the ears of star-struck G8 leaders to bring debt relief and salvation to the impoverished of the world, global event management imparts a message of civic responsibility and goodwill that would warm the cockles of any heart.
What this disguises is that global event management is the wrong answer to the right question. It is a media-fuelled, episode-driven approach to problem-solving that reflects and reinforces a form of social consciousness that sees the world as a series of episodes, incidents and emergencies. Instead of seriously addressing the structural causes of poverty, global inequality, disempowerment and injustice, it seizes upon symptoms. It is unable to rise above palliative care as a reform strategy. This has wider implications for the question of organizational transformation.
Becoming resident in an alternative city for a week or pledging donations during an international concert for disaster relief postpones creative solutions to the reproduction of crises and emergencies. Strictly speaking, disasters are not ‘natural’ but manmade. The disruption caused by Hurricane Katrina (2005) or the Japanese tsunami (2011), and the after-effects thereof, could have been contained by adequate investment in disaster relief resources (Aldrich and Crook, 2008; Trotter and Fernandez, 2009; Freudenberg et al., 2009). Similarly, the condition of the one billion who currently live on less than $1 a day could be substantially relieved by fiscal reform in the affluent society and regulated social and economic investment (Easterly, 2007; Moyo, 2010; Sachs, 2011).
Global events breed event consciousness that is fragmentary, episodic and produces disaggregated responses to social and economic problems. Event consciousness is compatible with a high level of self-gratification, since it carries the credit-worthy association of doing something, doing anything, to alleviate flagrant problems arising from social domination, control, inequality and injustice. But organizationally speaking this is the modern equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns. It also raises the unsettling implication that the real motivation behind events is to provide populations in the affluent societies with therapeutic emotions of effective compassion and meaningful action in a world in which habitual experience consists of helplessness, powerlessness and competitive individualism. In other words, global events, at bottom, may not be an attempt to help ‘them’ but a cry for help from ‘us’.
To pursue this point poses complex matters of invisible government, moral regulation and social ordering that require another paper. Perhaps enough has been said here to establish the principle that flat horizon strategies of management are championed by smart capitalism but are incompatible with the economies of scale in global event management. Global events espouse inclusive, spontaneous people power but exclude audiences and network publics from decision-making and post-event evaluation (Flyvberg et al., 2003: 5). Of course, accountability and involvement may be increased through regulatory measures of various kinds. However, global events, and smart capitalism in general, confirm the continued validity of the managerial thesis that hierarchy follows management. The sober conclusion is that leaderless events remain the holy grail of cultural management.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.