Performing Corporate Bodies: Organizational Theatre in Global India

Abstract

This dissertation examines the use of theatrical performance in the corporate workplace, with a focus on post-liberalization India. In major multinational corporations, dramatic skits and simulations drawn from theatre for social change repertories have become a popular training tool used to teach the cultural competencies, social norms, and behavioral skills now deemed essential to job success in the international work economy. This dissertation is a critical examination of this trend (“corporate theatre”) that examines how corporations deploy theatre in the service of profit, and demonstrates the transformative impacts corporate theatre is having on employees, creative economic growth, and the landscape of postcolonial arts practice in urban India. Drawing on 23 months of ethnographic research in India from 2012-2018, I analyze how theatre has become a key technology of 21st century management ideology through detailing case studies from leading sites of India’s global work ecology that provide a nuanced look at how dramatic repertoires are teaching employees to embody the entrepreneurial ethos of a globalizing Indian nation-state. Alongside detailing the ways corporate theatre functions as a technology of worker discipline which exacerbates the precarious labor conditions and gender, caste, and class dimensions of global software work, I highlight the small-scale, intimate ways individuals use the dramatic tools these trainings provide to create new ways of moving, feeling, and being together in India’s competitive work cultures. In so doing, this dissertation demonstrates how performance functions as a prime technology of human capital formation in contemporary neoliberalism, at the same time as it opens pathways for individuals to express their struggles, identities, and aspirations in the context of corporate power.