Social Performance Theory Research Articles

The role of virtual influencers in environmental messaging: a case study of Noonoouri

ABSTRACT In the realm of social media, virtual influencers have become influential voices in advocating for environmental sustainability. This research investigate their communication strategies and audience responses. Through qualitative analysis, we explore how virtual influencers, exemplified by Noonoouri, convey environmental messages on Instagram and how audiences respond to these messages. Our findings reveal that virtual influencers employ a multifaceted approach, utilizing informative content and captivating visuals to engage audiences and promote sustainability. Audience responses predominantly reflect admiration, inspiration, and support for virtual influencers’ advocacy efforts, highlighting their effectiveness in driving environmental awareness and action. By applying Social Performance Theory as a theoretical framework, this study provides insights into the symbolic interactions and cultural dynamics inherent in influencer communication. The implications of our research extend to informing stakeholders interested in leveraging virtual influencers for sustainability promotion, contributing to the growing body of knowledge in environmental communication and digital marketing. This also contributes to the understanding of the role of media and technology in the social construction of environmental problems and solutions.

Corporate social performance feedback and corporate social responsibility decoupling in China: The salience of legitimacy and/or efficiency

AbstractDespite its detrimental effects, corporate social responsibility (CSR) decoupling has been underexamined in the literature. This research explores why and how companies engage in CSR decoupling from the perspective of behavioral theory of social performance. We contend that legitimacy threats drive firms with corporate social performance (CSP) below stakeholder expectations toward substantive CSR initiatives, which reduces CSR decoupling. In contrast, efficiency deficit drives firms with CSP above stakeholder expectations toward symbolic CSR initiatives, increasing CSR decoupling. Building upon literature on issue salience, these relationships are moderated by industry culpability and earnings pressure. A longitudinal analysis was conducted on Heckman two‐stage estimation using a sample of 5166 Chinese publicly listed firms from 2010 to 2019, which supports our hypotheses. Additionally, the findings remain robust after rigorous tests. This study contributes to the CSR literature by shedding light on the impact of CSP feedback on CSR decoupling and enriches the behavioral theory of social performance by incorporating the perspective on CSP feedback through issue salience.

Gliding on the edge of the iron cage: performing rationality and artistry in the sport of figure skating.

Prior studies on growing formal rationalization in evaluation systems have overwhelmingly shown that they operate as "iron cages," which redefine standards of excellence around quantifiable metrics. However, existing literature may have overestimated the extent of isomorphism in individual or organizational practices under highly rationalized systems of assessment. The judging system in figure skating both rewards quantifiable technical merit and valorizes a circumscribed notion of artistry characterized by maturity and authenticity. It constitutes a combination of formal rationalization and culturally specific productions of artistry, offering participants a distinct set of options in constructing their competition routines. Drawing on exclusively obtained interview data with 40 Olympic-level figure skaters from the U.S. and 5 other countries, and following Alexander's (Sociol Theory 22(4):527-573, 2004) social performance theory, I explore the contingent process by which figure skaters maneuver between conformity to the formally rationalized rulebook and the non-isomorphic yet culture-structured performances of artistry. In doing so, I identify three types of skaters based on their embodiment of artistry: the emerging phenoms, the athletic performers and the "authentic" artists. My article reveals that despite rationalizing tendencies of the scoring system, skaters strive for social performances of artistry based on shared cultural scripts of greatness in the sport.

Polical and cultural significance of conflicts over the orthodox symbolization of public urban space in the context of depoliticization

This article presents the results of a study of two of the most striking conflicts: the transfer of St. Isaacs Cathedral to the Russian Orthodox Church and the construction of the Church of St. Catherine in Yekaterinburg. In these clashes over attempts to change or redefine the public urban space, a hybrid of the religious and the political is quite new for a Russian researcher. So, despite the presence of Orthodox public actions, these conflicts cannot be fully called religious, while the peripheral nature of the domestic political agenda makes it difficult to call them political. In this regard, the study of these conflicts requires a special methodological setting (orientation). Thanks to the theory of social performance by J. Alexander, it becomes obvious that the conflict of meanings within these confrontations gives access to the study of display of modern political culture. Guided by his methodology and using the approach to the analysis of the discourse of D. Snow and his colleagues, in the present research, carried out by the author, there have been analyzed the discourses of the two sides of the confrontation in online media publications concerning two indicated conflicts.

Does Board of Directors Independence Behave Opportunistically or Ethically? Study Corporation Social Responsibility and Earning Management in Indonesia

ABSTRACT
 This paper explores the opportunistic issues of EM and ethical issues of CSR where we aim to examine the relationship between CSR and EM and involve the role of BOD independence. Investigation of the relationship using corporate social performance theory where the research sample is a company that publishes sustainability reporting - GRI index for the period 2016 to 2019 in Indonesia. CSR does not affect EM, on the contrary, BOD independence has a positive and significant effect on EM. That is, BOD independence behaves opportunistically. Another finding is that BOD independence does not strengthen or weaken the relationship between CSR and EM. Therefore, despite being opportunistic, BOD independence does not use CSR as a reflection of ethical values to cover EM practices. This paper contributes to showing that BOD independence has 2 characters, namely opportunist on the one hand and ethical on the other.

Corporate Social Responsibility: A Strategy and Model for Sustainable Growth of Community

The World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 launched a Sustainable Growth program which was described into three significant concepts called economic, social and environmental sustainability. Sustainable growth works as a model under which communities can utilize resources efficiently, create new businesses to strengthen their economies, establish effective infrastructures, enhance the quality of life, and preserve the environment. Growth in terms of inadequate schools, few medical facilities, electrification and employment has been a challenge to communities. Corporate social responsibility can be used to approach the challenge. The study sought to establish the effect of socio-economic strategy on growth of community surrounding Muhoroni Sugar Company in Kisumu County, Kenya. The study was anchored on corporate social performance theory, with a target population of 13,664 residents, used descriptive research design and stratified random sampling technique to select 121 respondents. Data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics with the aid of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences. The analyzed data was presented in form of pie charts, percentage and frequency distribution tables. The study found out that socio-economic strategy affects growth of community. In conclusion, the company needs to implement socio-economic programs in order to improve schools, health facilities and facilitate creation of employment. Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility, Strategy, Growth DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/13-12-03 Publication date: June 30 th 2021

Narratives of resistance in Amakhosi Theatre Production’s Workshop Negative

This paper deploys theories of social performance as a lens to engage and examine narratives of resistance in Amakhosi Theatre Productions’ Workshop Negative. This paper locates and frames Amakhosi Theatre Productions’ Workshop Negative as a personal and community narrative inscribed with agency. Deploying the social theories of performance and the narrative of resistance approach as an analytical framework, this paper analyses and critiques Workshop Negative as a representation of everyday lived experiences and meaning-making in the community as well as undertake a nuanced reading of the Zimbabwean socio-cultural and political landscape under which this narrative (work) was created, produced and performed. This paper critiques Workshop Negative’s aesthetic playmaking methods as narrative techniques of storying its members’ lives, voices and that of the community. In essence, this paper seeks to understand how members of Amakhosi Theatre Productions aesthetically made meaning of their lives and illustrated these narratives in Workshop Negative. This paper argues that Amakhosi Theatre Productions’ situatedness in the community enabled them to aesthetically create and perform narratives located in the everyday lived experiences of the Bulawayo community. In so doing, the paper submits that Amakhosi Theatre Productions’ plays such as Workshop Negative linked personal stories with the big story narratives of Bulawayo and/ Zimbabwe.

Hiding in the Crowd: Government Dependence on Firms, Management Costs of Political Legitimacy, and Modest Imitation

Although previous studies primarily claim that government-dependent firms can actively engage in compliance activities in order to achieve political legitimacy, access government resources, and build competitive advantages, these studies largely ignore how firms react when firm-dependent governments exert coercive pressures. We thus introduce institutional theory and the behavioral theory of social performance to develop a model of modest imitation, and we propose that the more governments depend on privately owned firms, the more firms demonstrate average social performance in order to balance efficiency concerns with political legitimacy threats. Meanwhile, whether firms imitate peers’ social performance depends on the magnitude of institutional rigidity. In turn, issue salience and spatial proximity undermine modest imitation, and political connections strengthen modest imitation. We study how all listed, privately owned firms react to the Chinese government’s call for social engagement in poverty alleviation initiated in 2015. This study uses a two-stage Heckman selection model to correct for sample-selection bias, and the results provide strong support for our arguments. This research thus extends our understanding of modest imitation in response to coercive pressure from-dependent governments.

Why meaning-making matters: the case of the UK Government's COVID-19 response.

Through analysis of the UK government’s management of the COVID-19 outbreak, this paper offers an empirical demonstration of the principle of culture’s relative autonomy. It does so by showing how the outcome of meaning-making struggles had impacts on political legitimacy, public behaviour, and control over the spread of the virus. Ultimately, these impacts contributed to the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of UK citizens. Dividing the crisis into phases within a secular ritual passage or ‘social drama’, it shows how each phase was defined by struggles between the government and other actors to code the unfolding events in an appropriate moral way, to cast actors in their proper roles, and to plot them together in a storied fashion under a suitable narrative genre. Taken together, these processes constituted a conflictual effort to define the meaning of what was occurring. The paper also offers more specific contributions to cultural sociology by showing why social performance theory needs to consider the effects of casting non-human actors in social dramas, how metaphor forms a powerful tool of political action through simplifying and shaping complex realities, and how casting can shift responsibility and redefine the meaning of emotionally charged events such as human death.

Strong program cultural sociology and Latin America

Over the past decade, a community of strong program cultural sociologists has developed from Latin America against the background of local traditions in the study of culture that mostly have been influenced by Gramsci and Bourdieu. Here, we will provide an overview of this community—its members, sites of production, and recent publications which mark the leading edges of iconic power theory, cultural trauma theory, social performance theory, and civil sphere theory. In particular, we will try to flesh out how the members of this emerging community have gone about extending the horizon of strong program cultural sociology while seeking to maintain their tune with local intellectual sensibilities in the study of culture across the region.

A Behavioral Theory of Social Performance: Social Identity and Stakeholder Expectations

Firms use reference points to evaluate financial performance, frame gain or loss positions, and guide strategic behavior. However, there is little theoretical underpinning to explain how social per...

A Midsummer Night’s Coup: Performance and Power in Turkey’s July 15 Coup Attempt

Occurring at a time when military interventions appeared to be a matter of the past, the coup attempt of July 15, 2016 left a major mark on Turkish society and politics. This article approaches the July 15 coup attempt as a contingent and transformative event and investigates how symbolic processes helped determine its immediate outcome as well as its cultural, social, and political consequences. Linking the sociological literature on events with social performance theory, the study argues that the putschists’ ineffectiveness in projecting legitimacy and power in the critical hours of the coup attempt significantly contributed to its failure. The retrospective construction of an authoritative “Narrative of July 15” in the following weeks, on the other hand, enabled the government to implement specific institutional changes in the cultural, economic, and political domains. The study proposes a two-step analysis for the cultural construction of political events and suggests that social performance theory provides useful analytical tools for tracing the course and explaining the outcome of this process.

Seizing the Stage: Social Performances from Mao Zedong to Martin Luther King Jr., and Black Lives Matter Today

It is possible to look at radical social movements from the perspective of social performance theory; though, being wedded to nonsymbolic and realist methods, few contemporary social scientists would agree. Despite their immensely practical goals, the success of both Chinese Communists and American civil rights protesters depended on achieving performative power, all in the service of dramatically connecting with their audiences. The same can be said for the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Sociology of Social Intercourse in the Social Sciences

The paper aims to discuss the materials and outcomes of recently conducted research dealing with an analysis of the similarities and differences in current sociological theories exploring social inter-connection phenomena. The authors translate the term “obschenie”employed in Russian literature as “social intercourse”. Four basic theoretical constructions are under scrutiny, those being Anne Rawls’ interaction order theory, Randall Collins’ interaction ritual chains theory, Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of social performance, and Jonathan Turner’s theory of interpersonal behavior. The paper’s point of departure is an idea that there is a line ascending from the sociological theory of human interactions to the tradition represented in social science by Durkheim and Goffman. The discussion opens with an attempt to depict and classify the realities of “social intercourse” occurrences, followed with an assessment of its basic characteristics. Having displayed analytical and conceptual problems that the phenomenon “social intercourse” generates for sociological theory, the paper turns to a comparative analysis of the four noted theoretical interpretations of interaction in society. The outcomes of such an analysis drive authors to present and explore the research dilemmas that configure current theoretical sociological analysis of “social intercourse”. The closing part of the paper delineates the relations between the sociology of “social intercourse” with the sociology of everyday life and the sociology of emotions.

The Political Incorporation of Anti-System Religious Parties: the Case of Turkish Political Islam (1994–2011)

When and how do anti-system religious parties become incorporated into the political system of their countries? In recent decades, social scientists have sought answers to this question within the framework of the moderation literature. While moderation theory identifies key factors that influence party leaders’ willingness to seek political incorporation, it is less successful in explaining the contingent outcome of the incorporation process. This article develops an alternative analytical framework for the study of political incorporation grounded in social performance theory. Through a case study of Islamic parties in Turkey between 1994 and 2011, the author demonstrates that political incorporation is as much a function of successful cultural performances on the public stage as the right alignment of institutional incentives and sanctions. As a result of the Justice and Development Party leaders’ successful projection of a mainstream political identity between 2002 and 2011, secularist state elites in Turkey failed to establish legitimate grounds for a political intervention, which in turn provided the party with the time and opportunity to remove the institutional barriers to its incorporation.

Beyond Justification: Habermas, Rorty and the Politics of Cultural Change

Although Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty both reject the traditional picture of cultural change in which intellectuals are supposed to have the ‘last word’ on cultural issues and envisage cultural changes as the result of ‘dialogue’ or ‘conversation’ between them and the lay public, they nevertheless end up espousing different pictures of cultural change because of their totally different conception of the role and function of language, truth and rationality in such dialogue. In the first two sections of this article, I will recount Habermas’s critique of Rorty’s neo-pragmatism and the latter’s responses to it so that they can reveal the core issues of the debate. In the third section, I will argue that, as a ‘sociologized version’ of Rorty’s philosophy, Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of social performance provides us with a sociological framework that makes possible a wide range of empirical studies of cultural change.

Firms and sustainability: Mapping the intellectual origins and structure of the corporate sustainability field

Business research has repeatedly been criticized for its lack of engagement with pressing issues such as climate change, despite a surge of publications on corporate sustainability topics in recent years. We are therefore interested in identifying the knowledge development and knowledge gaps in business scholarship on the relationship between firms, environment and society. This paper provides a systematic review of the corporate sustainability field in form of a bibliometric analysis based on citation data acquired from the Social Sciences Citation Index. The final dataset contained 3117 records published between 1953 and 2011. Our analysis shows that, over the last 50 years, the field of corporate sustainability has emerged from a few primary nodes of research and developed into four distinct conceptual genealogies: corporate social performance theory, stakeholder theory, a corporate social performance versus economic performance debate, and a greening of management debate. The results of our analysis suggest four key findings. First, the four genealogies only comprise a relatively narrowly focused research scope. Second, there is very little integration and citation of work in other disciplinary areas such as ecology or environmental science. Third, the existing literature has a strong focus on empirically examining the relationship between a firm's environmental and/or social performance and its financial performance. Finally, there is little consideration of managerial implications and consequences of climate change in the corporate sustainability literature to date. We suggest that while this may be a reflection of an insular field, it may also be a role played by the management literature turning away from problem based issues in favor of empirical results, theory building, and the identification of variables that influence firm profitability and can be subjected to direct managerial control. We conclude by outlining pathways for future research.

Make-believe and make-belief in Second Life role-playing communities

This feature article applies the concepts of ‘make-believe’ and ‘make-belief’ formulated by performance theorist, Richard Schechner, in a study of two role-play communities, Midian City and Gor in the online 3D environment Second Life. With make-believe fantasy role-play at their core, members of the two communities negotiate the social and political norms, the goals of the community and as well as the boundaries of the virtual role-play. The article explores the innovative forms of interaction at play in these negotiation processes, using (cyber)ethnographic methods and the analysis of various textual sources, Goffman’s theories of social performance as well as various types of performance discussed by Schechner and Auslander. The innovative forms of interaction are analysed in the light of the new technology and as performances and make-belief strategies directed towards realizing performative utopias, towards influencing the direction in which leaders and residents of this digital context want the role-play to develop, and towards shaping the emergent social and cultural rules and the political framework of the role-play.

All the World Wide Web’s a stage: The performance of identity in online social networks

This paper discusses how ideas of performance can be used to conceptualize the play of identity formation on social networking sites (SNS). Linking Goffman's theories of social performance with Granovetter's notion of the social tie, this paper will argue that identities on SNS are deliberately constructed performances that straddle the frontstage and the backstage, the public and the private, and in doing so both support and rely upon webs of social connections which engage with fluid or playful identity constructions.