Administrative ritual and ceremony: social aesthetics, myth and language use in the rituals of everyday organizational life

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature and forms of ritual and ceremonial behaviour in the social life of organizations, in order to suggest how administration can be conceptualized systematically in ritual terms. Proposed is a cultural studies intepretive approach to organizational structure, functions and behaviour as ritual systems, derived in part from Max Weber's theory of social action. This involves examining organization through developmental and functional aspects of ritual systems as they apply to organizational reality in both constitutive and punitive form.