The Performative Enterprise: Ideas and Case Studies on Moving Beyond the Quality Paradigm

By Alexander Tsigkas

This book is about quality redundancy and its replacement by the “performativity” norm. Performativity is a linguistic, social, and political mechanism that produces the intended performance. The author, Alexander Tsigkas, sees this book as a natural continuation of his prior book The Lean Enterprise – From the Mass Economy to the Economy of One. He argues that performativity is the flip side of quality on a coin called identity, and in postmodernism, that is, in the age of Industry 4.0 and beyond, companies should be aiming for performativity and achieve quality as one of its many consequences. The author, therefore, encourages modern businesses to transition from quality orientation as conformance alone to a performance orientation.

The author brings forward historic, current, and philosophical perspectives in charting performativity as a new goal for modern businesses. Many examples, case studies, and conceptual constructs are used to drive in the idea of how to create a performative enterprise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030814922

Book preview

Part IThe Performative

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

A. TsigkasThe Performative EnterpriseFuture of Business and Financehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81492-2_1

1. Introduction

Alexander Tsigkas¹  

(1)

Athens, Greece

The photo of children playing on the playground originates in 1912 (Fig. 1.1). Compared to the shorter and much safer options available to children in most parks and schoolyards today, these forced children to be good climbers. One should wonder whether the society around 1900 was less sensitive to safety than today or whether safety became important. Safety became today a norm for western societies. Work-place safety, safety against contagious viruses or diseases, and risk management are examples of cases in which safety became a concern and finally a need. Eventually, societal needs become social norms that attract state attention and involvement in setting up safety and health issues. Such regulations restrict and streamline human activity, compromising human freedom in deciding for themselves.¹

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Fig. 1.1

Playground in the USA around 1912 (Imgur)

The photo (Imgur, 2018) illustrates what is at stake here, namely, the transfer of power from society to the state, which happens under the umbrella of norms and standards. Responsibility is left to the individual for disciplined conformance to the state’s regulations under the threat of punishment. Therefore, discipline and punishment are the premises under which freedom loses against conformance. Similarly happened with the recent coronavirus pandemic worldwide.

Non-conformance to norms and standards is considered a failure in controlling Quality. According to Kevin Dooley, Quality is about control and control of Quality at all levels of management. Dooley (2000) distinguishes three quality paradigms. His criterion for categorisation was the degree of expansion of control for Quality throughout the organisation resulted from a turning point of the direction of control, from the quality control to the control of the organisation through Quality. Total Quality Management is a way of submitting management to control via Quality, almost in a totalitarian manner. Control on any aspect of the organization, from the worker up to top management and the company’s strategic planning, leaving the future open for new norms. For example, this is what the ISO 9000 family of standards is all about nowadays. Non-compliance to the standards may lead to failure to receive certification with all its consequences. However, while Quality is desirable, the certification requirement for conformance to a norm or standard defined by an external organisation obliges the Enterprise to perform accordingly. To perform in this context means to reiterate procedures dictated by the norms or a set of norms and standards, i.e. to function in an expected way. Performativity is not a singular act, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or a group of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition. In this context, Enterprises perform identity without noticing it.

Moreover, performativity does not mean that the Enterprise performs in the way an actor performs a role. Instead, the collective subjectivity of the organisation performs produced by the everyday discourse. Individual subjects still have agency and responsibility, but this is not comprehensible outside the related discourse of external norms and standards. Furthermore, it is clear that identity never comes to its realisation, never comes to rest, so long Enterprises perform. That is a vicious cycle. Incrementally added norms and standards maintain a performative condition of the Enterprise that shapes identity.

Although Quality is an academic discipline, in the sense of control or regulation, Foucault (2012: 136) creates docile bodies. A docile body is a body that is subjected, used, transformed, and improved. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of the docile body, the Enterprise body is docile because it can be used, transformed, or improved, which happens iteratively, affecting its identity. Therefore, Enterprise identity is performative, i.e. the identity is executed iteratively. Consequently, it is invalid to claim that identity can be possibly designed or defined by the Enterprise alone; valid seems to be rather the opposite. Depending on the Enterprise’s environment, its identity is formed through its distinction to the environment. Especially in a disciplinary environment, such as one burdened with Quality as conformance to norms and standards, the Enterprise’s perceived identity will wrestle against that imposed from the outside, from its environment. One plausible way to observe this interaction is to look at the Enterprise as a system and use Luhmann’s theory of Social Systems as a method. Luhmann looks at a social system as distinguishing between the system and its environment (Luhmann, 1995).

Following Luhmann, the Enterprise can be observed as the distinction between the Enterprise and its environment. Distinction means that an Enterprise’s definition is not possible unless we define what is not the Enterprise, and therefore distinguish its environment. It is not a simple true or false statement since the Enterprise can have three states: true, false, true and false at the same time. Although this is a paradox in the Aristotelean logic, where statements are either true or false, the explanation is that there could be an oscillation between true and false. The instability of the Enterprise demonstrates its performative character. A social system, claims Luhmann, is an autopoietic, autonomous, intensely self-referential but not self-sufficient system. It is characterised by operational closure and structural openness. Operational closure means that the Enterprise uses its way to conform to norms and standards, with no interaction with the environment, while structural openness means that the Enterprise can observe the environment, i.e. sensing stimuli from the environment. Operational closure and structural openness characterise the performativity of the Enterprise.

Furthermore, Luhmann suggests that each system has a distinctive identity that is constantly reproduced in its communication and depends on what is considered meaningful and not. If a system fails to maintain that identity, it ceases to exist as a system and dissolves back into the environment it emerged. However, the identity of the performative Enterprise is not autopoietic as it is in the social system of Luhmann, but it evolves performatively. Therefore, since, as suggested above, the performative Enterprise’s identity never comes to its realisation, never comes to rest, it would mean that according to Luhmann, the Enterprise would cease to exist. That does not happen in reality; what happens is that the Enterprise performs and communicates the identity that the environment expects. In this way, identity becomes distinct only to the environment’s expectations and not outside of it.

The biological analogy of Luhmann’s theory of social systems helps clarify performativity from another angle. Conforming to standards and reconstructing identity affect metabolism, the maintenance of the body of the Enterprise. As in living organisms, metabolism involves a set of processes that use to maintain the body. These processes include both anabolism and catabolism, which help organise molecules by releasing and capturing energy to keep the body running strong. These phases of metabolism happen simultaneously. According to this analogy, conformance to norms and standards requires a considerable amount of energy of the organisation consuming its resources. Therefore, it is closer to catabolic processes responsible for the decline. On the other hand, the construction of identity is closer to anabolic processes responsible for growth, thus increasing energy stores. The oscillation between the two states of metabolism, the catabolic and the anabolic one, could be compared to the change between conformance and identity construction. To summarise: anabolism requires energy to grow and build, while catabolism uses energy to break down. Correspondingly identity is constructed during the anabolic phase, while it breaks down during the catabolic phase. As anabolism and catabolism work together to produce energy and repair cells, construction and deconstruction of identity cooperate similarly to perform identity.

Energy production in metabolism is similar to creating value for all stakeholders, and repair cells in metabolism are identical to rebuild operations to strengthen identity. What is essential in such an organisation is its metabolic health which addresses the Enterprise’s capability to self-grow and self-repair at any time in a continuous cycle of self-construction, without medicine, meaning an intervention from the outside. However, there is a difference between the biological aspect and the performativity aspect of identity. Metabolism includes processes that cooperate for the good of the human body. In the performativity aspect, the processes involved are antagonistic. Construction and deconstruction processes do not necessarily work together. For example conformance to externally imposed norms and standards may work antagonistically to the construction processes of identity within the organization.

Performativity implies that the Enterprise cannot operate as a perfectly biological body to the extent that it is not a perfectly closed body, free to decide on its own on how to run. It depends on externally imposed control, implemented through creating procedures developed and performed by authorised personnel. Take, for example quality control, assurance, or safety procedures. The use of procedures has its origination in the judicial system for enforcing a particular way of deciding (Luhmann, 2013). Procedures aim to reduce the environmental complexity, which results in a decision made with the binding force for its recipients. In the case of quality assurance procedures, for example the acceptance of the quality judgment is the product of a learning process, of a performative process. The participant beliefs in the procedure play absolutely no role, as the participant involvement in the process becomes a tacit acceptance of the terms of the game. That is performativity. The quality assurance norms and standards iteratively enter into the very identity of the Enterprise. Given these facts, the ratification of the quality assurance judgment is nothing more than the consequence of the refutation of a particular expectation, the expectation of acceptance of the quality judgment outcome, similarly to Luhmann’s argument for the ratification of judicial judgments.

The objective of the book is to examine the importance and validity of the performativity hypothesis of identity. Furthermore, conversion of metabolism is reviewed for the performative Enterprise, going beyond norms and standards. In addition, it questions the role of Quality in the existing paradigm and looks at the future. Such a paradigm can be the metabolically adapted Enterprise setting the focus on synergies for sustainably increasing profits for the Enterprise instead of on a generalised view of waste elimination and the achievement of direct efficiencies.

References

Dooley, K. (2000). The paradigms of quality: Evolution and revolution in the history of the discipline. Advances in the Management of Organizational Quality, 5, 1–28.

Foucault, M. (2012). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Imgur. (2018). Check out these amazing playgrounds in the US between 1900 and 1930 – Awesome post. Imgur. Accessed April 19, 2021, from https://​imgur.​com/​gallery/​Tyeoon9

Luhmann, N. (1995). Social systems. Stanford University Press.

Luhmann, N. (2013). Legitimation durch Verfahren (9th ed.). Frankfurt am Main.

Tsigkas, A., & Natsika, A. (2017). Lean customisation and co-creation: Supplying value in everyday life. In Springer proceedings in business and economics (pp. 313–328). Springer. Accessed June 02, 2021, from https://​ideas.​repec.​org/​h/​spr/​prbchp/​978-3-319-29058-4_​25.​html

Footnotes

1

Portions of this book are from Tsigkas and Natsika (2017, chapter 25).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

A. TsigkasThe Performative EnterpriseFuture of Business and Financehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81492-2_2

2. On Performativity

Alexander Tsigkas¹  

(1)

Athens, Greece

2.1 Introduction

The performative aspect attracts attention in business and economics as alternative thinking to scientific knowledge in recent years. Scientific knowledge is propositional knowledge, seen from a distanced perspective that addresses knowing about something. Non-scientific knowledge is active, intimate with hands-on participation and personal connection. It addresses the knowing-how and the knowing-who. While scientific knowledge is time-independent, non-scientific is transient, which fits better into businesses and organisations’ everyday lives. We identify an Enterprise as an entity that uses non-scientific knowledge to be closer to the reality of day-to-day business activity.

On the other hand, Enterprises that rely primarily on scientific knowledge have less to do with knowing-how things happen the way they happen. What they know best is to measure and calculate. However, measurements and calculations alone do not explain how things happen, the way they happen. It is even more severe than that because what they claim to measure is performance. The use of the term performance seems to fit all purposes when there is work involved. The claim made in this book is that performance needs more clarifications for its use. We hypothesise that performance follows the performative, which follows performativity. A performative Enterprise can form and be formed. It means that we, as a society, form our Enterprises, and then the Enterprises form us in an everlasting manner. Performance, in this context, is the result of the performative. The performative acts and, as a result of actions, facts are established. These facts built the conditions for the possibility of further actions back to the initiating performative and so forth. Enterprises gain their identity deeply anchored into a social happening shaping it and being shaped by it performatively. We argue that Enterprises of the twenty-first century run into the risk of being shaped by external norms and standards.

The aim is to extend knowledge and raise awareness about the increasing pressure worldwide on companies and organisations to align with the growing restrictions concerning Quality, safety, and environmental issues. These conditions have led companies to orient management towards managing for conformance instead of performance. Although norms and standards are desirable concerning the functioning of products and services, these norms and standards have transgressed the boundaries of their purpose of existence. They have moved into areas of the organisation, where more or less dictate management how to manage it. One such example is the ISO 9000 family of quality standards. Hidden behind norms and standards, it exerts power on free-acting organisations. It is maybe not visible, but interventions may deteriorate or change the company identity. Through the requested conformance to norms and standards, the identity is not under complete control of the Enterprise. Identity performs according to external factors.

Enterprises should protect themselves against loss of identity. According to Foucault, normalisation becomes one of the great power instruments of the classical age. He writes:

The marks that once showed status, privilege, and affiliation were replaced—or at least supplemented by an entire range of degrees of normality showing membership of a homogeneous social body and playing a part in classification, prioritisation and distribution of rank. (Foucault, 2012: 189)

The power of normalisation imposes homogeneity, argues Foucault. Take, for example the situation that is appearing after the pandemics of a coronavirus. Media and government officials projected the notion of the new normal. New normality is appearing backed by protocols how Enterprises and societies have to operate under the threat of punishment for non-conformance.

Most research on performativity has recently focused on performativity in economics that deals with whether economists make the markets they analyse, writes Mackenzie (2007). It is the first book dedicated to the controversial question of whether economics is performative—of whether, sometimes, economists produce the phenomena they analyse. He acknowledges Michel Callon (Anon, 1998) as the first to introduce the concept of performativity into economics. However, he was not the first scholar to develop an interest in performativity to address the issue beyond pure language processes. Austin (1962) outlined the philosophical proposition that speech does not just state facts but, in certain appropriate conditions, acts, or performs certain realities. Performativity has engaged theorists within the political and social sciences, philosophy and gender theory, including Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 2019), Jacques Derrida (1988), and Judith Butler (1993, 2006). Following Austin, Callon, and Butler, the argument in this book is whether conformance with norms and standards acts or performs certain realities within the organisations and that these realities affect their capability negatively to promote actual change.

More norms and standards widen their influence within the organisation, and they do not let organisations differentiate themselves from their competition, thus, leading to homogeneity. Homogeneity in the Market may severely impact competition. Markets cannot exist in an economic environment with no differentiation. Foucault explains how norms may introduce individuality. In Discipline and Punish, he writes that normalisation individualises by making it possible to measure gaps, determine levels, fix specialities, and make the differences useful by fitting them to one another. It is easy, claims Foucault, to understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of formal equality. Within homogeneity, the standard introduces a useful imperative and, because of measurement, all the shading of individual differences.

However, individuality cannot be and is not a result of measurement, as Foucault suggests, because the measure is a reductionistic way of dealing with conformance with the norms. If the measure reflects the degree to which the Enterprise follows the norm, individuality cannot depend on this compliance. The only distinguishing mark among Enterprises would reach various conformance degrees to the standards and not any real distinction from other competitors concerning a free economic market. It is possible to show the difference between managing for conformance and managing performance in such an Enterprise. Managing conformance is the prevailing art for a conforming identity while managing performance is the dominant art for a performing identity. A conforming identity follows external rules. Therefore, it is formed eventually by them as a passive form of individuality following the masses while performing identity; it is an identity that acts upon itself in a recursive matter, and it is an active form of individualism. A performative Enterprise chose to respect norms and standards and to develop a performative way to deal with them, confronting them if needed. The question is how and with which means.

We discuss in detail these concepts in the section on performance and performativity. It contains an etymological and theoretical exploration. Under repetition and difference, we qualify performativity as the critical driver of shaping an active identity through a cycle of repetitive difference. Conformance to the power system follows, where the emphasis is on how conformance affects the Enterprise identity by subordinating to the ruling power system. In the next section, we present the meaning of identity, why companies perform as they perform, and conclude with the performative identity’s importance. Next section, the discipline of Quality is the focal point of the discourse because of its connection to the power system. We use the Foucault method of the genealogy of History to explore how Quality shapes identity.

2.2 Performance and Performativity

It contains an etymological and theoretical exploration. Under repetition and difference, we qualify performativity as the critical driver of shaping an active identity through a cycle of repetition and distinction; conformance to the power system follows. The emphasis is on how conformance affects the Enterprise identity subordinating to the ruling power system.

2.2.1 Etymological and Theoretical Approach

It is beyond doubt that the term performance is a trendy and hence overused term. For example in James R. Evans and William M. Lindsay Managing for Quality and Performance Excellence (2016), the term performance appears 1315 times in 415 pages out of the total 756 pages of the book. The issue is that performance appears in many different meanings. For instance, it is customary to refer to high or low performance concerning a human being or a machine. What is the importance of high or low performance, and is it a measurable quantity? As this question is mostly rhetoric, what could be measured or qualified happens when performance occurs, not the performance itself. The performance itself is not accessible to measurement. Measurement is a reductionistic way to account for a commission posterior of the happening. What is the result of this or other activity, this or other art of performance? Before taking our thoughts further, we will examine the etymology of the word.

The word performance appeared in the late fifteenth-century as the meaning of accomplishment or completion of something. The phrase carried out, or a thing performed, is from the 1590s; performing a play is from the 1610s; that of public entertainment is from 1709. The earlier noun in Middle English was performing in the late fourteenth century state of completion, accomplishing an act. Performance art is in use since 1971 (Anon, 2021a). Church Latin had a compound performo, meaning to form thoroughly (Anon, 2021b). Performance, therefore, denotes an action towards starting something and completing this action with the ultimate form of this something. The final form distinguishes this something from anything else. This form is the form of a distinction that allows something to gain its identity. Therefore, to perform means to distinguish, and performance means difference. The ability to make something distinct is called performability. Performativity is the acknowledgement that to be performable, an Enterprise must be performative. It means free to perform. Free to perform in business means to act to allow for sustainability in profit-making, beyond and above conformance requirements. What characterises identity is an act of performance; hence identity is performative. A good example is social norms and expectations that exist at any point in time, constructing identities.

The anthropologist Victor Turner (Loxley, 2007: 152) sees human life as necessarily performative, as a set of active processes, as an ongoing work of action. Here again, the specific property of performativity is at work. It is not the ongoing work of story that makes human life performative, but that human life is distinct from other forms of life at any point in time. It is interesting to note that Victor Turner (Loxley, 2007: 154) coined the term Homo performans, with the interpretation that the human being draws distinctions to create universes. Jon McKenzie (Loxley, 2007: 152) sees performance also as an organising model. In McKenzie’s view (Loxley, 2007: 152), speaking of daily life processes or actions as a kind of performance means invoking much more than the dramatic theatrical paradigm. What everyday life processes gather here compared to the theatrical paradigm is the distinction between being an actor that plays a role within a particular play with a beginning and an end and the actor outside of his role as organising a person within society. Brisset (2017) discusses the possibility of using performativity as a method of investigation.

Interestingly, McKenzie (Loxley, 2007: 152) draws attention to how we live our lives by understanding performance, the efficiency of a particular institutional system or one of its compared elements, like a business or an economy. There is also the notion of technological performance, the effectiveness of machines or instruments at performing particular functions. Again, understanding performance as efficiency in various social subsystems initiates the distinction between these subsystems’ identities. Each one of these subsystems has a distinct identity from the others. Similarly, the effectiveness of machines means drawing distinctions among tasks. Performance is drawing differences creating various universes with distinct identities. Therefore, what is the performative Enterprise, if not an undertaking that can draw distinctions that distinguish itself from others by forming its identity against all others? If performance is not measurable, how can we make such an action measurable? Efforts to measure performance used ways of showing subordination to norms; performance loses meaning and reduces itself to an administrative rule. The results of this distinction appear on a measuring scale.

To perform means to draw a distinction. It is a primordial act and a final one, after which the world is not the same as it was beforehand. The articulation of a managerial decision is such a performative action. The decision is not enough for this decision to be effective unless it acts on something. The active communication of the decision, where appropriate, is the act that draws a distinction, and it is therefore performative. This act is part of the ongoing formation process of the Enterprise identity. It is a performance forming a series of signs connected to the everyday life of an Enterprise. This view of performance may offer a new perspective in rethinking the concept. A consequence may be that the Enterprise is in its everyday life nothing else than a sequence of performative acts. These acts make the Enterprise a communicative enterprise, where communication utterances exhibit a performative force.

Performative forces do not originate from single acts easily recognisable as performative. They derive from ordinary discourses that conform to the convention that has been built up over time by repetition and sedimentation of a layer upon layer of speech. Ordinary discourse means that employees built a metalanguage over time constituent of the Enterprise’s identity, seen from the communication perspective of everyday life. For Dwight Conquergood, the attention that the study of performance has brought to bear on the bodily, practical, and processual nature of human existence presents an ongoing challenge to any attempts to marginalise it as the knowledge of a particular province of human activity. He sees in such attention raising to academic visibility of a whole way of living and knowing human life repressed by the standard Western accounts of what knowledge is: performance is a way of living that we have somehow hidden or forgotten (Loxley, 2007: 152).

The dominant way of knowing in academic scholarship is an empirical observation and critical analysis from a distanced perspective: knowing that and knowing about. It is a view from above the object of inquiry. The knowledge is anchored in a paradigm and secured in print. This propositional knowledge stays in the shadow of another way of knowing, grounded in active, intimate, hands-on participation and personal connection: knowing-how and knowing-who. It is a view from ground level, in the thick of things. It is the knowledge that anchors in practice and circulated within a performance community but is transient.

According to Conquergood, performance is a way of living concerning the bodily, practical, and processual nature of human existence. From the perspective of an enterprise, following Conquergood, it is a way of doing business, as usual, a particular way of living. We cannot measure performance as a way of living, and we cannot put it under the gauge of measurement; it makes no sense to even ask about it. The manager who decides on a day-to-day basis and communicates these decisions for execution does not know it but is part of her decision; she is involved in the results. Being a part of the happening the manager directs, it is impossible to keep the necessary academic distance from what she observes and what is critically analysed. It happens because any knowledge gained that and about the happening is a result of her own decision. In other words, she is part of what she is observing. The objective knowledge that the measurement is supposed to guarantee is a myth, especially in a business environment. Therefore, measuring performance is not only impossible, but it is also a Sisyphus task. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the king of Ephyra, known as Corinth. The Gods punished him for promoting himself as being powerful and deceitful by forcing him to roll an immense boulder up a hill only to roll down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity (Anon, 2020). Managers think they measure performance, but what they perform, in reality, is to follow what others do, conform with the mainstream knowledge on how to measure performance without questioning the measurement object.

The German economist Erich Gutenberg (Dirk Baecker, 2014: 14) has conceived this knowledge. Baecker argues that Erich Gutenberg’s ingenious foundation of the German Betriebswirtschaftslehre (business administration), which called for economic efficiency and technological efficacy to rule an organisation, turned the organisation into a Betrieb by bracketing, i.e. suspending its complexity. He started with the assumption that management is not about the organisation or about organising. Gutenberg maintained that management begins by leaving an organisation’s subject because of its complexity to other sciences better prepared to deal with it, such as philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Performance as a way of life within enterprises does not belong to managerial tasks. As a first move, he bracketed the organisation dislodging performance as an organisational happening and thus achieved to turn the organisation into an object to analyse with academic distance. The second move, which made bracketing possible, was to re-enter what found on the market into the organisation having to do with performance. According to Baecker, Gutenberg considers two sources of problems that the Betriebswirtschaftslehre would have to deal with: technological issues of efficacy and economic matters of efficiency. Efficacy is about technical means and ends; efficiency is about costs and returns. Economic efficiency and technological efficacies are the input and output, respectively, of a system in which performance is present but neutral to normalised measurements. However, the issue is that economic efficiency has tied links to organisational performance, and organisational performance has to do with human activity. Gutenberg’s idea was to measure economic efficiency, bracketing the presence of the disturbing human factor with all its deficiencies based on the body and the brain. On the other hand, measuring efficacy is more or less a dehumanised task because it had to do with technology, and this technology has its effect on the organisation output.

On the other hand, normalised measurements neglect human agency, although they do not deny it. They overlook the fact that they influence the identity of persons and the Enterprise identity. Performance can be measured but is meaningless because there is no way to normalise it. Because there is no way to normalise it using a standard measurement method, so-called experts devised external standards to dictate how enterprises should perform. Often these standards are not developed from scratch, but existing norms and measures were taken and extended to fit the new control requirements. In this way, they played the role of a Trojan Horse. Take, for example the Quality standard of ISO 9000. It was initially devised in 1979 to help companies create their assurance product quality procedures and became operative in 1987. Nowadays, its current version, ISO 9000—2015, dictates organisations how they should manage their activities, thus impacting from the outside the organisational performance in any sense.

The starting point of the analysis was the etymology of the word performance. We will proceed with the exploration of performativity from a theoretical perspective. According to Loxley (2007: 1), the history of performativity embodies its first formulation by the English philosopher J. L. Austin in the 1950s through its significance for contemporary theories of culture, language, and Law, identity, and performance. Since Austin, it has been both wandering and adventurous. The concept of performativity is often invoked in superficial or incompatible ways in recent decades. Austin shows how our utterances can be performative: words do something in the world, something that is not just a matter of generating consequences, like persuading or amusing or alarming an audience. These words are actions in themselves, actions of a distinctively linguistic kind, in this case. They perform other actions or take place, like otherworldly events, and thus make a difference in the world; we could say they produce a different world, even if only for a single speaker and a single recipient. One might say they draw distinctions once uttered. Austin argued that words are not purely reflective, that linguistic acts do not reflect a world, but that speech has the power to make a world (Loxley, 2007: 2) to draw a distinction and by doing so to create a world different from the one before this act took place. Austin broadened his view of the performative into a theory of speech acts.

The performativity of requests, orders, and declarations characterised all the utterances we issue as speakers. More radical thinkers such as Stanley Fish, Shoshana Felman, and Jacques Derrida took hold of the speech act theory. They decisively undid or deconstructed the attempt to mark a precise boundary between real and fictional utterances. Feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick took up the deconstructive lesson. They applied this retooled concept of performativity to dominant or common sense claims about the identity categories of sex, gender, and sexuality, thus using the theoretical