ABSTRACT
This review chapter engages with ethnographic conceptions of “the event” (as a public performance) held in the two disciplines of Anthropology and Organization Studies. What is it that marks events as distinct from the everyday? What do scholars hope to learn when studying trade fairs, religious rituals or management meetings? How do these occasions relate to broader social and organizational contexts? A comparative view on the question “what is an event” reveals that scholars across these disciplines divergently frame events as (1) windows into society, (2) agentic tools, (3) global forms, (4) spaces of practice, and/or (5) processes. My aims with this chapter are two-fold. First, the review carves out deeper assumptions and epistemological premises behind different ways of “seeing” events. Such reflexivity on a particular stance towards events is crucial for attending to the worldview that it carries within itself. Second, the chapter enables interdisciplinary dialogue by providing insight into interlinkages between certain historical moments in the Anthropology of Events and contemporary theorizations of events in Organization Studies, such as viewing events as representations, as reflexive spaces, or as hidden power games. The chapter thus outlines different lines of thinking about events, which renders them more open to comparison, critique and reflection.
