Social actors of the artistic-cultural organization in the market of experience. Ethnography of the organizational role in the circus (Aktorzy spoleczni w organizacji na rynku doznan. Etnografia rol organizacyjnych w cyrku)

The subject of the article is the relations between chief social actors that occur in the organizational frames of roles performed by the actors in the artistic-cultural organization existing in the experience economy. The object of studies carried out by a group of students of the University of Warsaw is the Polish Circus Organization. The circus can be seen as a marginal phenomenon, going beyond the mainstream of management studies. Throughout centuries, often in extremely difficult conditions of the functioning of circus organizations, the members of the organisations developed extraordinary abilities of adaptation to inconvenient environment, and these are supposed to compose the area of research on the organizations. A very popular approach to the customer these days, called experience economy, has been for ages a characteristic modus vivendi of this kind of organization. In the organization being studied, we have observed three groups of social actors whose members exert a fundamental influence on the functioning of the circus. Animals are a special kind of actors in the circus, and relations between them and circus workers mark a specific space in the social structure. The influence of animals on the organization and environment is analyzed in three basic areas: their meaning for the functioning of the organization as a whole, their emotional influence on the circus audience, especially children, and their conditioning the work and life of the other actors in the organization.