Sarah Saddler, PhD

Performing Corporate Bodies offers the first ethnographic look at corporate theatre—a global management trend that uses dramatic techniques to train, transform, and discipline employees in the name of workplace learning.

Based on a decade of ethnographic research with artists, drama schools, consultancies, and multinational firms in India and across the global South, the book explores why theatre and performance are gaining new legitimacy in corporate economies under late capitalism. Each chapter examines how theatre is mobilized to advance urgent management agendas—whether fostering innovation, building leadership, or managing cultural difference—while tracing the broader implications of this practice for artists, institutions, and laboring bodies.

The book argues that corporate theatre has become a mode of physical and psychological conditioning that encodes the cultural demands of global capitalism. At the same time, it reveals how performance in these spaces also becomes a tool for navigating power, a coping mechanism in the face of rampant precarity, and a site of critical friction for creative practitioners working within the constraints of the corporate world.

Written for scholars and practitioners alike, Performing Corporate Bodies will be of interest to readers in theatre and performance studies, anthropology, sociology, South Asian studies, and cultural economy.

Is corporate theatre a sophisticated tool for organizations to control and constrain employees or is it a site of resistance and rebellion from neoliberal capitalism? Saddler’s answer is "yes, and." It is both and more and this lovely work that explores that complexity illustrated by ethnographic data from around the world – and perhaps most intriguingly from outside of Europe and the United States. A must read for every serious consumer of theatre and organizations.

Steven S. Taylor, Founder of Organizational Aesthetics and Associate Professor of Business, Foisie School of Business, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA

Performing Corporate Bodies in an incisive and indispensable exploration of theater as one of the central mechanisms through which our social worlds become corporatized. Steeped in ethnographic detail, Sadler’s book takes the reader through the theater’s central role in the “new managerialism,” from US university campuses, to the tech hubs of India, to the post-Apartheid workplaces of South Africa, and the city-corporation of Dubai. Able to conscript the most liberatory of theatrical schemes, corporate theater has now risen to become one of the most common and powerful of global performance paradigms.

Shannon Steen, Author of The Creativity Complex and Associate Professor, Department of Theater, Dance, Performance Studies, UC Berkeley, USA

Performing Corporate Bodies is an exciting contribution to anthropology and South Asian studies. Saddler’s sensitive exploration of the uses of theatre in corporate training programmes in India provides novel insights into global business cultures and their social implications in postcolonial contexts.

Carol Upadhya, Author of Reengineering India and Associate Professor of Anthropology, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India