Approaching a ritual design strategy: Thinking ritually to support an organisational collaboration strategy
Lewis, Marshall Steven

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Lewis, M. S. (2020). Approaching a ritual design strategy: Thinking ritually to support an organisational collaboration strategy (Thesis, Doctor of Philosophy). University of Otago. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10523/10421
Permanent link to OUR Archive version:
http://hdl.handle.net/10523/10421
Abstract:
This thesis traces the design of a method – a ritual design method – for thinking through the design of activities and things. My research goal was to evolve and apply a design method informed by ritual scholarship and based on the analysis of empirical ethnographic data. This resulted in a new way of approaching the analysis and design of interventions and of seeing, thinking and writing which I call a ritual design strategy. I developed this method during my tenure at Air New Zealand, the national airline of New Zealand, where I was a member of the Workplace Relations team. Our team’s mission included sustaining an organisational strategy that intended to build a more collaborative culture, to embed collaborative problem solving across the organisation and to strengthen the working relationship between company management and the labour unions that represented two-thirds of the approximately twelve thousand employees. This organisational strategy was called High Performance Engagement, or HPE. The mission required the design of interventions: 'activities' such as governance meetings, training sessions, collaborative problem solving workshops and informal conversations, and 'things' such as texts, graphics, digital and audio-visual materials. I evolved my ritual design strategy through my engagement with each intervention opportunity and this yielded a method that is generalisable for application across a wide range of circumstances and design-related problems. Ritual design is not specifically for designing rituals; it is a novel method that can be ritual-like itself, through which meaning is created and operationalised.
Date:
2020
Advisor:
Fitzgerald, Ruth; Wardell, Susan
Degree Name:
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Discipline:
Social Anthropology
Publisher:
University of Otago
Keywords:
ritual; ritual design; design strategy; collaboration; high performance engagement; air new zealand
Research Type:
Thesis
Languages:
English
Collections
- Anthropology and Archaeology [196]
- Thesis - Doctoral [3019]