Videographic profanations: A companion to the videography “Pride: Alternative Entrepreneurship Enjoyed”

Abstract

This article is a companion to “Pride: Alternative Entrepreneurship Enjoyed,” a videography about the company Prezi’s engagement in the Budapest Pride parade. The aim is to advance video ethnographic methods within Organization and Management Studies (OMS) based on Agamben’s profanatory philosophical method, which puts into focus abstract “sacred” concepts and returns them to the sphere of the profane—of the everyday. A profanatory approach of use for OMS accounts for organizations, brands, and management in a way that do not reproduce their “sacredness”—entrepreneurial myths and management clichés. Instead, by opening them up to critical exposure, they can be moved from a “religious canon” of communication strategies, press releases, and policy documents, to everyday profane work. Through a methodological discussion of the videography, we show three ways in which profanation re-positions the myth of alternative entrepreneurship: by engaging in the logic of the sacred, by playing with notions of inside and outside, and by using musical soundtrack as an expressive tool. We suggest that these methodological strategies advance the analytical possibilities within video ethnography, also useful for other organizational phenomena, especially when economic interests are combined with ambitions of social change and ideals of self-realization.