This article suggests that by regarding the semantics of storytelling, we are able to explore how dominant stories influence and may contribute to organizational inertia. Using data from two change projects in large Scandinavian companies, it is shown that in the negotiation of meaning those stories that display semantic fit with the dominant story are perceived as more convincing, while those stories that lack this attribute appear oxymoronic and fail to have an impact. As a result, the organization is only able to change in a manner congruent with the dominant story and becomes inert in other respects. We suggest that a dominant story fixes not only the meaning of events, but also the meaning of the labels available for sensemaking. By this appropriation of language, the dominant story circumscribes sensemaking and storytelling possibilities, and thereby restricts organizational flux.

This paper describes the work on board a cruise ship. The purpose is to examine the emotional demands put on workers in the so-called experience industry. A field study was conducted to study how customer experience is created through the management of space, passengers, and emotions. It is argued that the sought-after paradisiac experience is attained by acts of sanitising, and that the perceived freedom of the passengers is mirrored by increased control on the part of the service providers, synthesising Hochschild's notion of emotional labour with Ritzer's sociology of consumption to attain an understanding of the organisation of experiences.

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In the archive, the materialized traces of theatrical organization and performances remain. In this paper, we focus on the employment contract as a type of source material commonly found but rarely studied in theatre studies. Empirically, the paper is based on a study of contracts from Albert Ranft's Stockholm theatres, 1895-1926. Ranft built his commercially funded theatrical empire in Stockholm in a period when the competition from subsidized theatre was minimal, and for a time dominated the Stockholm theatres. The study demonstrates how the study of employment contracts allows us to form an understanding of the power relations between managers on the one hand, and artists and directors on the other, and also the formal and social aspects of the employment contracts. In the case of Albert Ranft, the contracts bear evidence of his dominant position in Stockholm theatre, which in turn afforded him an unusually powerful position in relation to his employees. The relationship between the formal and social contract is explored, and it is suggested that the formal contract could be seen as a photographic negative of the social contract: if there is an extensive social contract, the formal contract will be less elaborate, and vice versa. The extensive formal contracts of the studied period might therefore be seen as evidence of a relatively thin social contract, implying that industry norms were, at the time, not institutionalized enough to be taken for granted.