A round of dancing and then one more: embedding intuition in the ballet of entrepreneurial decision making

The dance metaphor allows us to figuratively depict entrepreneurial decision making processes. Being conventionally conceived of as a sequence of purposeful behaviors rooted in a rational cognition process, entrepreneurial decision making can be featured as a ‘ballet’. This interpretation puts in the background the improvisational nature of decision making, which revokes ‘lindy hop’ as a dance style. The article intends to illuminate the role of intuition, highlighting its overlap with rationality in the entrepreneurial decision making dance. For this purpose, a bibliometric analysis followed by an interpretive literature review advances a comprehensive report of 66 peer-reviewed journal articles published from 1995 to 2019, constructing evidence on the nature of entrepreneurial decision making and on the interplay between intuition and rationality. Literature is categorized in five clusters, which are reciprocally intertwined. Firstly, intuition is unconsciously used as a strategy to deal with the uncertainty that inherently affects entrepreneurial ventures. Secondly, intuition is rooted in the entrepreneurs’ impulsivity, that echoes the role of emotions in decision making. Thirdly, the merge of rationality and intuition improves the entrepreneurs’ ability to keep up with the erratic rhythm of the decision making dance. Fourthly, the mix of intuition and rationality serves as a catalyst of entrepreneurs’ ability to thrive in complex and unpredictable environments. Fifthly, intuition generates drawbacks on entrepreneurs’ meta-cognitive knowledge, which should be carefully recognized. Embracing the dance metaphor, intuition turns out to be crucial to make entrepreneurs able to fill in the gap between rationality and uncertainty.

“A Fine Art in Danger”

During the 1950s and 1960s, jazz music became solidly entrenched in America’s institutions of high art patronage as the music’s most prestigious venues shifted from popular clubs and ballrooms to concert halls and upscale summer festivals, most notably the Newport Jazz Festival. While for most professional jazz dancers, this period marked a time when the work “dried up,” there were several lindy hop and rhythm tap dancers who managed to access these spaces through their relationships with jazz historian Marshall Stearns. Stearns was a key player in the adoption of jazz history as an academic subject and an advocate for the serious study of Black vernacular dance. This chapter asks why Stearns’s efforts to “legitimize” and institutionalize jazz dance largely failed, given that his similar advocacy for jazz music clearly succeeded. It argues that Stearns’s folkloric conceptualization of “vernacular jazz dance” fell short of the successful “consensus narrative” he built for jazz music in that concertized adaptations of Black vernacular dance practices by choreographers such as Katherine Dunham and Alvin Ailey were not legible to Stearns as contiguous extensions of the traditional folk and popular dance forms he problematically fetishized as dying folk art in need of preservation. The discursive barrier Stearns built between the worlds of vernacular and concert dance, while intended to safeguard from cultural appropriation so-called authentic or vernacular jazz dance forms, ultimately reinforced primitivist narratives that discursively foreclosed many possibilities for dance as a vital creative partner in jazz music’s present or future.

“Lindy Hopper’s Delight”

As jazz music became popular entertainment nationwide, many dances circulated from social venues to professional floor shows and ballroom stages and then back again to amateur social practice. As musicians built careers playing for social dancers touring with professional dance acts, they learned to structure their performances collaboratively by listening visually to dancers’ bodies. Jazz musicians, and especially drummers, learned to accentuate dancers’ movements and engage them in playful “catching” games while also providing the stable rhythmic framework that encouraged dancers to participate kinesthetically with the music. This chapter explicates the dynamics of such relationships through the career of drummer Chick Webb, whose reputation was built on the strength of his close connection with lindy hop dancers during his tenure as house bandleader at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom throughout the 1930s. Specifically, it explores his close connections with Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, a group of talented young dancers who became among the first to adapt this social partnered dance for the professional stage and, ultimately, for Hollywood films. Webb played regularly for elite lindy hop dancers in films, in touring stage shows, for amateur dance contests, and nightly at the Savoy, and his evolving relationship with them throughout the 1930s reveals the fluid boundaries between labor and play through which musicians and dancers co-creatively shaped jazz’s development.

From Local to Global: Reflections on Dance Dissemination and Migration within Polska and Lindy Hop Communities

This article discusses dissemination of dances in and out of Sweden, and the dancing communities these processes create. The examples are the African-American Lindy Hop, which originated in New York City, and the polska, a couple dance considered to be the number one Swedish folk dance. Both dances were once used in local community dancing, while today they belong to dancing communities in many places around the world.

Blackface Transformations II

This chapter draws upon iconography, film studies, and semiotics in two examples of electronically mediated masking that intentionally subvert the voyeuristic white gaze. It investigates the descriptions of Lindy Hop in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1966) and the blackface in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000), which intentionally juxtapose explicitly racist caricature and performative virtuosity, reading those passages for their cultural/political subtextual discussions. It argues that Malcolm X and Spike Lee--as cultural commentators from within the African American community--use dance as a means to problematize the paradox of black creativity’s virtuosity as it has flourished “behind the minstrel mask.”