Organizing Christmas is an exploration of the organizational character of Christmas. Taking as its starting point the view that Christmas originally achieved popularity due to its potential to promote social cohesion and political stability, this book both charts, and scrutinizes, its global emergence as the preeminent economic and organizational event of the year.
The book combines historical narrative, original interviews, and social scientific research and theories. In doing so, it tells the story of not only how Christmas has come to dominate the festival landscape, but also how it emerged as an integral component of the global evolution of contemporary social and economic relations. From the pre-Christian celebrations of the turning of the calendar year, through the political power games of Elizabethan England and the wily reinvention of the season by industrious Victorians, to today’s huge economic and logistical exercise that relies on everything from global supply chains to the domestic division of labour, Christmas exemplifies the spirit and practices of industrial, and now post-industrial, modernity.
As well as celebrating this fact, however, Organizing Christmas also critically interrogates what in fact has become a vast festive-industrial complex. From low-paid factory workers in Yiwu, to Santa Claus performers in Kingston, readers are given the chance to consider what the cost of this global festival might be, and whether it is a price worth paying. Drawing on intellectual resources ranging from Adorno and Horkhiemer’s classic critique of the culture industry, to Lazzarato’s analysis of the semiotic production of contemporary subjectivity, to Bloch’s “principe of hope’, it paints a picture of Christmas as a profoundly important, if deeply contested historical, cultural and, most significantly, organizational phenomenon.
Aimed at researcher and academics in the fields of Organizational Studies, Critical Manage Studies, as well as international Business History, Organizing Christmas offers a differing perspective on a subject so familiar and yet so often overlooked.
