At the Crossroads of the Body and the Word: Interrogating Culture Through a Performance Paradigm

Orientation: The successful introduction of performance management systems to the public service requires careful measurement of readiness for change. Research purpose: This study investigated the extent to which employees were ready for change as an indication of whether their organisation was ready to introduce a performance management system (PMS).Motivation for the study: Introducing system changes in organisations depends on positive employee preconditions. There is some debate over whether organisations can facilitate these preconditions. This research investigates change readiness linked to the introduction of a PMS in a public sector organisation. The results add to the growing literature on levels of change readiness.Research design, approach and method: The researchers used a quantitative, questionnairebased design. Because the organisation was large, the researchers used stratified sampling to select a sample from each population stratum. The sample size was 460, which constituted 26% of the total population. They used a South African change readiness questionnaire to elicit employee perceptions and opinions.Main findings: The researchers found that the organisation was not ready to introduce a PMS. The study identified various challenges and key factors that were negatively affecting the introduction of a PMS.Practical/managerial implications: The intention to develop and introduce performance management systems is generally to change the attitudes, values and approaches of managers and employees to the new strategies, processes and plans to improve productivity and performance. However, pre-existing conditions and attitudes could have an effect. It is essential to ensure that organisations are ready to introduce performance management systems and to provide sound change leadership to drive the process effectively. This study contributes to the body of knowledge about the challenges and factors organisations should consider when they introduce performance management systems.Contribution/value-add: This research adds to the knowledge about aspects of change readiness, change management and introducing change initiatives.

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Nice Girls Gone Blue

10.1093/oso/9780190624194.003.0002 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Hannah Schwadron

Keyword(s):

White Women ◽

Jewish Woman ◽

The Body ◽

Jewish American ◽

Performance Ethnography ◽

At Will ◽

Jewish Mother ◽

A Performance

This chapter foregrounds a performance ethnography among New York’s Jewish neoburlesque and cabaret spoofs on the Hanukkah circuit from 2011 to 2016. By looking at what the body does to mock and modify stereotypes of the Jewish woman, it frames the ways that performers utilize physical humor to critique harmful images of the unsexy hag, Jewish mother, and Jewish American princess, while posing new identity gags. Yet in performing Otherness from positions of race privilege, Jewish neoburlesquers distance themselves from the very epochs they evoke, securing their status as white women who can presumably put on and take off Otherness at will.

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The costume of MoCap: A spatial collision of velcro, avatar and Oskar Schlemmer

Scene ◽

10.1386/scene.2.1-2.221_1 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

pp. 221-232

Author(s):

Matt Delbridge

Keyword(s):

Motion Capture ◽

The Body ◽

Human Form ◽

Mathematical Properties ◽

Victor Turner ◽

Spatial Discourse ◽

Screen Space ◽

Contemporary Practice ◽

A Performance

The rationale that governs motion of the organic in the cubical leans towards a transformation of the body in space, emphasizes its mathematical properties and highlights the potential to measure and plot movement – this is the work of a Motion Capture (MoCap) system. The translation in the MoCap studio from physical to virtual is facilitated by the MoCap suit, a device that determines the abstract cubical representation that drives first the neutral, and then the characterized avatar in screen space. The enabling nature of the suit, as apparatus, is a spatial phenomenon informed by Schlemmer’s abstract ‘native’ costume and his vision of the Tanzermensch as the most appropriate form to occupy cubical space. The MoCap suit is similarly native. It bridges the physical and virtual, provides a Victor Turner like threshold and connection between environments, enacting a spatial discourse facilitated by costume. This collision of Velcro, Avatar and Oskar Schlemmer allows a performance of space, binding historical modernity to contemporary practice. This performance of activated space is captured by a costume that endures, in Dorita Hannah’s words, despite the human form.

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Semiotics of the Protest

Membrana Journal of Photography - Augmented ◽

10.47659/m7.044.art ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 44-49

Author(s):

Maria Paschalidou

Keyword(s):

Social Change ◽

Public Space ◽

The Body ◽

The Political ◽

Street Protest ◽

A Performance

In the Semiotics of the Protest performed video, I visually examine the key significance of the body and its language for the materialization of the street protest, the vital tool by means of which people reclaim public space and activate it as a political terrain. The video is based on a performance for which I invited a volunteer dancer to “rehearse” public gestures of resistance against oppression. Challenging dominant representations of protestors as “mobs” and protestors’ bodies as irrational and uncontrollable entities, in this performed video, I visually analyse the political demonstration as choreographic tactics executed by bodies which are meaningful and purposeful and which, through their gestures, move forward to social change. Keywords: participation, performed video, Phantasmagoria, politics and aesthetics, protest as choreography

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Measuring the success of a performance measurement system in Thai firms

International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management ◽

10.1108/17410401211232966 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 61 (5) ◽

pp. 548-562 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Nopadol Rompho ◽

Sakun Boon‐itt

Keyword(s):

Performance Measurement ◽

Measurement System ◽

Measurement Model ◽

The Body ◽

Performance Measurement System ◽

Content Type ◽

Body Of Knowledge ◽

Proposed Model ◽

Confirmatory Factor ◽

A Performance

PurposeThis study aims to identify what managers involved in the design of a performance measurement system (PMS) perceive are the attributes of a successful PMS.Design/methodology/approachA total of 85 managers from Thai firms were interviewed to develop the proposed model to measure the success of a PMS. Results from 269 returned questionnaires from Thai managers were analysed by second order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).FindingsBased on the study's findings, success of PMS was categorised into two aspects: design success and implementation success. Using CFA the empirical data demonstrate a good fit with the proposed measurement model.Research limitations/implicationsThe results of this study are based on the opinions of managers and therefore their accuracy is open to question. Adding non‐managerial perspectives might demonstrate another picture.Practical implicationsThe findings could well be useful for managers in any organisation. They can assist the manager in judging whether or not the company's PMS is successful according to the discovered criteria. Use of these criteria could lead to better decision‐making in the design and implementation of a PMS framework in any organisation.Originality/valueThis study enhances the body of knowledge by defining what a successful PMS means to managers in Thai firms. The results of this study can be applied to any country, but perceptions of what is important could vary from country to country.

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Performatywne rozpoznania medialności polityki w myśli Judith Butler

100-lecie polskiej Policji - Studia Politologiczne ◽

10.33896/spolit.2020.55.10 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 2020 (55) ◽

pp. 212-225

Author(s):

Marcin Sanakiewicz

Keyword(s):

Public Sphere ◽

Michel Foucault ◽

Judith Butler ◽

The Body ◽

Political Activities ◽

Media Technologies ◽

And Performance ◽

Visibility Politics ◽

A Performance

Judith Butler, an American philosopher and performance theorist, sees the transformations of public sphere and democracy in the possibilities of making visible the human bodies. Butler interprets a performance as a setting boundary for belonging to a community. Public appearance requires the existence of the body and media technologies. In this way, the performative nature of political activities acquires the characteristics of biopower, according to Michel Foucault: control over the coupling of social and biological existence of man, taking into account his public visibility. Politics, by merging with what is media, obtains a performative (discursive/event) character.

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Making my bed : Tracey Emin's hysterical confessions of the abject

10.32920/ryerson.14653791 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Alicia Chantelle VanDeWeghe

Keyword(s):

Reality Television ◽

Status Quo ◽

The Body ◽

Cultural Discourse ◽

Alternative Representation ◽

Traumatic History ◽

The Status ◽

Personal Trauma ◽

A Performance

Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998) presents an alternative representation to normative notions of the body, offending hegemonic propriety so greatly that it caused a tabloid media sensation when it was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner Prize. Emin applies certain feminist notions as she continues the motif of the reclining nude, offering semiotic gestures that indicate evidence of the body rather that the body itself. My Bed is the site of trauma and disgust, with all of the abjection left intact, and above all, a self expressionist piece documenting her personal trauma. The expressionist qualities harkens back to cultural discourse of hysteria, reinforcing the legitimacy of the feminist lens. Hysteria is a performance that Emin represents through confessing her traumatic history. Like the archetypal reality television star, she confesses personal emotions and histories, but breaks the status quo by offering an alternative representation with the abjected authenticity of the bed.

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Analogy, Proportion, and Death in Donne’s Anniversaries

Light and Death ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823272778.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Judith H. Anderson

Keyword(s):

Old Testament ◽

The Body ◽

The Past ◽

Heaven And Earth ◽

The Erotic ◽

A Performance

The term proportion, a variant of analogy, occurs repeatedly in Donne’s two Anniversaries, epic commemorations of a young woman’s death. In The First Anniversarie, this word-concept extends to the loss of cosmic coherence, form, harmony, correspondence, and even comprehension. Donne’s dramatized speaker stages a performance that shows him to be stuck in the past, the Old Testament, the body, and this ruined world. In The Second Anniversarie, Donne’s speaker has a new lease on life, and he offers a dynamic renewal of vision that is fundamentally analogous. In this Anniversarie, unlike The First, the very physicality of death, captured in analogy, enables redemption. At its end, desire returns as the erotic, Christian-Neoplatonic connector between heaven and earth, between the soul’s longing for God and God’s for the soul. Desire has become the affective realization of analogical construction.

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Performing Christian Martyrdoms

10.1093/oso/9780190656485.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Gail P. Streete

Keyword(s):

The Body ◽

The Public ◽

Greco Roman ◽

The World ◽

Noble Death ◽

A Performance

Christian martyrdom is a performance that employs the body as both an instrument and an arena in which to portray a message about ideal Christian behavior in opposition to “the world,” enacting a sacrificial death imitating that of Jesus. Drawing upon Greco-Roman traditions of the hero myth and the Stoic noble death, as well as Hellenistic, Jewish narratives of death in obedience to God’s law, Christian martyrologists constructed the propaganda of martyrdom. Their rhetoric of resistance, both spoken and enacted, transformed elite concepts of Roman imperial virtue by applying them to a despised minority. The public ordeal of the martyrs shows their transformation from an identity defined by “the world” into a new identity—that of the triumphant Christ—proclaimed through the spectacle of their dying. Martyrs’ worldly bodies thus are visibly and spectacularly transformed by annihilation into vessels dedicated to the power of their God.

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The Effect of Music Therapy in Counseling

10.31234/osf.io/sw28j ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Theresia Tri Kinasih Lestari

Keyword(s):

Music Therapy ◽

General Public ◽

Body Movement ◽

The Body ◽

Body Movements ◽

Dance Movements ◽

The World ◽

The Right ◽

A Performance

In general, dance and movement is a performance that is shown in the staging event. Dance is an activitythat uses body movements where muscles throughout the body rub against each other to be able to make abeautiful body movement, and also the need for the right rhythm and beats to make movements in dancedance to be beautiful, but what if motion and dance are used in the world of counseling , through musicalaccompaniment in accordance with dance movements that can make the counselee become more relaxed,both mentally, physically, and mentally. The purpose of writing this paper is to provide newknowledge to the general public about music in counseling sessions.

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