ABSTRACT
Folklife can reveal how people in contemporary organizations deal creatively with the strain of international competition and the imperatives of learning and performing new ways of working. Throughout the world today, the problem of reconciling continuity and innovation is at the heart of business enterprise. The repertoire of folklife studies has long included patterns of persistence and change in a society or social group. By expanding its focus to include business organizations, folklife can help participants understand how human beings organize and conduct themselves in communities of practice. In organizations no less than in societies and cultures, the performance of rituals of inclusion and exclusion, the strategies for negotiating change, tradition, and conflict, and the modes of transmitting the tacit knowledge of how to work in this or that
organization all are illuminated by the study of folklife.
