Resumo

Little attention has been paid to contradictions and tensions between economic development of creative industries (CI) activities and social inclusion. While existing levels of creative growth might appear to bring general benefits, the opportunities and rewards of such growth are not being equally or equitably shared or are not being sufficiently socialised in the ways that its proponents would like to claim. The focus of research, then, lies on how processes of organising are enacted as a way of minimize social inequalities, including the access to the cultural and creative products.

The present paper aims to explore how organizational efforts can be undertaken as attempts to minimize the social gaps by offering goods and products to people who cannot afford the creative goods and services produced by creative industries. We do this exploring the sensemaking as processes of organising of a musical theatre play in São Paulo, Brazil. We then propose the following research question: how could the processes of organising of a musical theatre play be understood as efforts to democratize the access to culture in Brazil?

The sensemaking perspective generally refers to processes by which people seek plausibly to understand ambiguous, equivocal, novel, unexpected or confusing issues or events. Departing from an idea that organising and its result (organisation) represents attempts to order the flux of actions, to give them a particular shape, through generalizing and institutionalizing particular meanings and rules, then, organisation emerges from ongoing processes in which people organise to make sense of equivocal inputs and enact that sense back into the world to make it more orderly.

This is qualitative study and the empirical research is based on an ethnographic inspired case study of organisation/production of a musical theatre play in São Paulo, SP, Brasil, which we have given the pseudonym MusiCom. The field research has involved a period of ten months of non-participant observation. In addition to field notes, data collected include interviews and documents. Data analysis were “open coded”, which mainly involved field notes being read and re-read in order to discern recurrent themes, both theoretical and empirical.

The MusiCom case illustrates the sensemaking process when a creative product must be created or organised for the first time, by a team that had never worked together before. There was no previous sensemaking to drawn on. The research describes the sensemaking phases (enactment, selection and retention) according the actions/processes that taken place. It was possible to identify the sensemaking properties and moments of prospective sensemaking were identified as well. And once the sense were produced or created, the process of sensegiving was described.

The results show that the sense created or constructed was called the “concept of the show” and it aggregates a social character since it represents a plausible story or account that organizes and guides a reality based on the idea to provide a spectacle for free, that entertains and at the same time could bring some knowledge to the audience, specially because it emphasizes the particularities of musical theatre genre, the history São Paulo, references to Brazilian culture and a visible orchestra.

Banks, M. (2018). Creative economies of tomorrow? Limits to growth and the uncertain future. Cultural Trends, 27(5), 367-380 Chia, R. From modern to postmodern organizational analysis. Organization Studies, 1995, 16, 579-604. Cristofaro, M. (2022). Organizational sensemaking: A systematic review and a co-evolutionary model. European Management Journal, 40(3), 393-405. Tsoukas, H., & Chia, R. (2002). On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13(5), 567–82. Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: sage Publications.