Hdounderstandingbalancing Seminar
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Dr. E.M. Richmond-Garza Parlin 119, 512-232-5708 [email protected] Understanding and Balancing Motivations Focus: Ethics and Leadership 16 September 2016 Overview: Literature, especially performance, provides concrete and practical cases that help us to understand how ethical decisions are made and to see how ethics and leadership intersect. This professional seminar will use performance texts and approaches to question the nature of the ethical challenges we face in today’s diverse and dynamic workplace. We will focus on competing motivations, using methods and cases studies with practical applications. We will investigate examples, both artistic and actual, presented in a multimedia environment. These cases allow us to recognize and understand varied and competing identities and motivations. We will explore how to achieve balance so as to ensure successful management in the modern workplace. We will develop strategies for asking ourselves productive questions which lead to positive outcomes for conflicted situations in which competing ethical and personal agendas might otherwise lead to negative, or even tragic, consequences. The goal is to develop attentiveness to those patterns of motivational conflict, which might jeopardize the health and productivity of the organization and/or community in question, and to experiment with approaches for managing them. Hands-on experience with analyzing fictional conflicts will allows us to develop our own strategies for responding to real-life tensions and pressures in a self-aware and constructive manner. Exercises will involve applying Stanislavski’s system and developing ways of defining and negotiating competing motivations and ethics, while remaining aware of the subject position of each of us in the process. Further Related Reading: Relevant theorists and scholars are cited for each topic for the day. Additionally, participants may wish to consult the following works which directly apply performance techniques to management in the workplace: Whitney and Packer, Power Plays (2001), Mockler, “Using the Arts to Acquire and Enhance Management Skills,” Journal of Management Education, pp. 474-486, October 2002), Clemens and Mayer, The Classic Touch (1999), and Clemens and Wolff, Movies to Manage By (1999). Schedule for the Day 8:15 to 8:45 am: Registration and Light Breakfast 8:45 to 9:00 am: Curtain Up! Introductions and Overview of the Day § Picking a Role, Picking a Self • Culture Flower Game: Autobiographical Project Dr. E.M. Richmond-Garza Parlin 119, 512-232-5708 [email protected] 9:00 to 9:50 am: Acting the Self § Konstantin Stanislavski’s Seven Questions Activity • Anton Chekhov, Opening Scene, Uncle Vanya (1897) • Louis Malle and André Gregory, Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) 10:00 to 10:50 am: Understanding the Other [Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Mead “Symbolic Interactionism” (1934), Cooley, “Looking Glass Self” (1902)] § Social Darwinism, Profiling, and Double Lives • Sherlock Holmes and the Art of the Profile (Guy Ritchie 2009) • Sophia Coppola, Lost in Translation (2003) 11:00 to 11:50 am: Acknowledging Diversity: [Bohannan, “Shakespeare in the Bush” (1961), Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation” (1943)] § Cosmopolitanism and Belongingness § Identification: Individual vs. Collective • Neill Blomkamp, District 9 (2009) 12:00 to 12:45 pm: Lunch 12:45 to 1:40 pm: Authority, Relativism, and Respect [Appiah, Of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006)] § Futurist Play Activity: Lights! § Motivation and Resolution: A Real-World Case • Nord-Ost Theatre Bombing in Moscow (2002) 1:50 to 2:35 pm: Agreeing to Disagree [Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (2002)] § Three Case Studies • British Parliament, the Russian Duma, and U.S. Congress § Applications in Your Workplace 2:45 to 3:20 pm: Acting (Dis)honest § Relative and Absolute Lies • Parker, An Ideal Husband (1999) § Untruths, Equivocations, and Other Necessities 3:20 to 3:30 pm: Ovation for the Whole Cast.