Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

In retrospect I interpret my involvement in the programme about identity-management
my participation as a bit of surreptitious resistance against the idea or possibility
to change the identity of organizational members by a corporate programme. In the
narrative about the performance agreements I take a more explicit position against
the possibility and desirability of these kind of agreements. Ending up in a narrative
about dissent by explicitly raising a discussion about what we are doing instead of
going on doing things.
Apart from what these narratives, the analyses and reflections clarified about my
position as an adviser - see 7.2 - it may be obvious that reflecting from a complex
responsive process-perspective while working together with many people also affected
my taken for granted assumptions. I came to experience situations as real situations
of real and interdependent people in which things evolve in a rather unpredictable
way. By that I learned that at least the people I was involved with all struggled with
what I came to label as the subject of performativity. However, a struggle not as an
explicit and rational subject on our agenda, but entwined in daily social interactions.
That performativity could become a more or less explicit subject on the agenda of
some people has amongst others to do with my presumed acting as a corporate jester.
And again, as reflected upon before, I experienced of being part of a self-organizing
social interaction in which things emerge out of control of the involved.
7.2 Corporate jestership and performativity: from a joker to
interrupting
Throughout the narratives some tenacity is striking. Partly it is my tenacity, supporting
that starting from the project about identity-management attention is growing for
what primarily is labelled as a need for openness. In due course the subject openness
evolves into discussions about dissent At least the discussions in the think-tank indicate
quite some discomfort with something what apparently is lost in the way we
organize our university.
To voice discomfort with what we were doing is part of my tenacity during the different
projects. Somehow I was the voter against. In my role as adviser I was someone
who tried to back out a bit of the contagious heat of the moment or to summon some
cognitive dissonance.
Around this backing out the theme of the joker or the corporate jester emerged. Could
I by the way I acted be qualified as the acts of a corporate jester? If so why and how?
At the end the question even came to be if the UAS is in need of a corporate jester and
how in that case a jestership could be fulfilled.
7. <strong>Rumbling</strong> on performativity: a reflexive perspective on advisory work | 179