The wonderful, magnanimous, spectacular and possible world of traveling circuses in Brazil.

AutorAguiar, Ana Rosa Camillo
CargoReport

Introduction

This paper approaches management from the perspective of the wonderful, magnanimous, spectacular and possible world of circus organizations. It aims to discuss the everyday management of traveling circuses in Brazil by looking for the practices and strategies that allow them to survive over time. These are defined herein as circuses representing complex organizations that, due to their particular nature, are built on wheels, have no fixed address, and show certain particularities in their daily management. Circuses are organizations operating in a physical structure made of canvas, with a ring for performances. Their primary purpose is to entertain a particular audience. Their origins refer back to equestrian artists, acrobats of military background, and families of jugglers, street artists, and gypsies, all united around the circus show (Silva, 2007).

In the field of management, Parker (2011) has studied circuses by analysing them as mobile and complex organizations that profit from moving people and objects around. In fact, spectators often have no idea of all the organizational structure involved in circus performances. Several institutional and economic mechanisms are necessary for magic and miracle to take place in the ring. The association of the word circus with chaos and ineffectiveness does not seem to find support in the reality of circus organizations, which are actually highly complex and organized. The spectacle is designed for playful fantasy to prevail, while concealing the managerial, organizational and economic aspects; however, these organizations aim to profit as all others. Parker argues that circuses are not reducible to a set of economic or organizational relationships, nor to the fantastic, magical or romanticized idealization of an itinerant community. Instead, the circus show is a product that comprises economic and organizational aspects.

However, the Brazilian circuses studied in this paper have shown certain peculiarities. In the national context, large physical structures with formal labour relations--such as those addressed by Parker (2011)--are seldom. In Brazil, organizational forms stemming from family businesses prevail, originating with the arrival of the first circus families in Brazil back in the eighteenth century (Duarte, 1995). The Brazilian circus, according to Silva (2006, 2007) and Bolognesi (2003), also operates based on the creation of an atmosphere of enchantment and magic aimed at attracting audiences. However, family values and nostalgia are elements that national circuses attempt to perpetuate. This decision may explain the insistence of Brazilian circuses on fostering a traditional circus lifestyle. Such tradition is expressed through customs of knowledge transmission in circus households and through a concept of how a circus performance should be carried out. In the routine of a circus, daily practices unfold in the ways subjects create to preserve the circus mobility, the familiar unity, and a certain artistic concept. In other words, subjects attempt to remain a circus, while also incorporating reinvention and reinterpretation in their daily lives.

The management of everyday life (Carrieri, Perdigao, & Aguiar, 2014; Fleming & Sturdy, 2009; Hancock & Tyler, 2009; Maravelias, 2011) is taken herein as a guideline for the study of circus organizations. This approach to management focuses on the study of ordinary individuals, that is, the everyday practices and knowledge that portray everyday life in contemporary society. This proposition aims to deconstruct the categories of management and organization studies, challenging theories that take reality as given and produce instruments to sustain a rational ordering of the world without reflecting on its true reality.

To expand this investigation, this paper examines management in relation to the theoretical category of everyday life, especially from the perspective of De Certeau (1990a, 1990b). Yet, it has to be mentioned that Lefebvre (1974) and Heller (1984) have also discussed such a category in their works. These authors perceive everyday life as the locus for the possibility of becoming. The ordinary element of everyday life represents a possibility for (extra) ordinariness to happen, through the potential it holds for reflexivity. Heller (1984) defines everyday life as a space for creation and alienation through the actions of individuals and Lefebvre (1974) defines it is a locus for praxis and a space for human experimentation. However, this paper is based on the work of De Certeau (1990a, 1990b), who defines it as creation-invention, valuing the art of doing, the resistance tactics, the power strategies, and the cultural meanings constructed by subjects.

This article is organized in the following five sections: (a) this introduction; (b) a review of the concepts of daily life and ordinariness; (c) information about the methodology used in the production of narratives about popular circuses; (d) a presentation of key topics on the management of everyday life; (e) a presentation of the main findings on extraordinary operations as observed in ordinary life.

The Possibility of (Extra) Ordinariness in Everyday Life

The proposal of working with the management of everyday life derives from the goal of redefining the very concept of management. Perceiving management as ordinary can expand the possibilities of what managing and organizing mean. On one hand, it characterizes the impossibilities and limitations of instrumental management before reality and, on the other hand, the everyday life of organizations. The management of everyday life is found in Cooper (1986); Parker (2002); Carrieri (2012); Herners and Maitlis (2010); Herners (2008); and Carrieri, Perdigao and Aguiar (2014).

The aforementioned authors start from the deconstruction of the term management and its typical uses, in order to shift it from its dominant contexts--in which they have been arranged as instruments of power. These researchers propose the study of ordinariness, focusing on ordinary individuals, their practices and the knowledge that characterize a particular set of managing practices taking place every day. This approach also addresses the everyday world, which is the very space for the unlimited production of rationalities at different periods. Due to its heterogeneity, everyday life distinguishes itself through the possibilities of becoming.

In order to situate the management of everyday life in this paper, we emphasize the review carried out by Gardiner (2000), which analysed the work of De Certeau, Lefebvre, Heller, Debord, Foucault, among other authors who approached everyday life to expose its contradictions, while unveiling its potential. From this perspective, the study of everyday life has been historically linked with life's dynamics and has been characterized as a complex, contradictory incorporator of great reflexivity. The reflexivity enables subjects to adapt to different or new situations and explains the historical and cultural variability manifested in the daily life of these subjects. This analysis shows that although everyday life can display static and non-reflective characteristics, it is also capable of moments of surprising dynamism, profound insight, and boundless creativity.

This theoretical search treats whatever is ordinary and manifested in daily life as potentially extraordinary domains. Critical theories on everyday life have questioned functional reasoning and acknowledged that human life presents various non-rational trends that cannot be captured by the reductionist explicative models favoured by positivist social sciences. In the management of everyday life, marginalized spaces and practices are privileged, as well as what is non-official and decentralized. In addition, there is interest in giving voice to those who are not heard and strong criticism against dualistic analyses of reality and the reduction of complex social practices to mere linguistic or discursive operations (Gardiner, 2000).

Everyday life is heterogeneous and permeated by hierarchical practices. Within it, actions occur without prior reflection, based on momentary judgments and guided by reflexive reproduction. Hence, the coexistence and succession of heterogeneous activities make the space of everyday life prone to alienation (Heller, 1984). Furthermore, in everyday life the production and reproduction of social relations take place, that is, the very production of human beings over the course of history. Within the historical context of modernity, human activities become fragmented, creating a gap among subjects, their subjectivities and their practices. The work that was previously imaginative and creative has been transformed into ordinary and mercantilized forms where the space is simultaneously a tool of production and control, of action and thinking (Lefebvre, 1974).

In the space of cities, work and routine, the everyday representation would lie as an empirical object and as a form of mediation between what is specific and what is universal. In modernity, everyday life in modernity is perceived under the rule of capital, dominant forms of work organization, the domain of space and time, and the voluntary and planned self-regulation of people's lives. It is in and through everyday life that capitalist social relations are produced and reproduced and, as such, it becomes a space for the production-consumption-production of practices and ideas (Goonewardena, Kipfer, Milgrom, & Schmid, 2008; Levigard & Barbosa, 2010).

Along these lines, Lefebvre (1974) had already perceived everyday life as negative, claiming that it was completely impregnated by routine, degraded and colonized by commodity and by the instrumentalized needs of States and capital. Therefore, the promise of a Total Man would be replaced by the passive and manipulated consumption of endless signals and images. The possibility of changing...

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