Rafael Nadal is one of the world's greatest ever tennis players. He's also known for what some people regard as superstitious rituals, and there are many of them, as you'll see if you do an Internet search. One of his rituals involves two water bottles, which he brings with him to the court every time he plays. He takes a sip from one first and then from the second. He then carefully places the bottles on the ground in front of his chair, but to the left. He positions them so that they are diagonal to the court. They have to be diagonal to the court, and he repeats the exact same ritual at every change over. Now this is an individual ritual, not a collective one. And thus far, the ritual has not been copied by others. Though, of course, it could be. And if it did get copied, it would become clearly part of culture. Still, it is obvious that this and other rituals have symbolic significance for Nadal. Indeed, they are really condensation symbols that call up an affective response. Nadal himself commented on this in his book, Rafa My Story, authored together with John Carlin. He explains that some people think he's superstitious, but he says that he's not. Instead, he claims the rituals help him to focus on the match, and they might well do that as symbol. Interestingly, another tennis player named Lukas Rosol sensed the importance of this particular ritual. Rosol had beaten Nadal at the 2012 Wimbledon tennis tournament. Then in a 2014 match, Rosol was caught on video, casually, but deliberately walking by Nadal's chair, reaching out with his racket and knocking over Nadal's water bottles, trying to steal Nadal's magical power. The incident is reminiscent of the theft of the Army mules by the Naval Academy, but the ploy didn't work. Nadal went on to win the match. In fact, it could be that setting up the bottles again after the attack on his symbol actually helped him to focus. Who knows? Businesses, as teams, develop various rituals. I'll be talking more about them in the next lecture, but many of the rituals don't strike us as rituals because we're so used to seeing them as part of business. So we think of them in terms of their business functions, if there are any, rather than in terms of their symbolic functions. In some cases, however, the invented rituals are clearly just that, they're invented rituals. An often cited example is the Walmart chant or cheer. You can see numerous video examples of this on the Internet just by searching Walmart cheer. The employees of a store get together and the leader begins clapping, with everyone joining to the same rhythmical clapping. While clapping, the leader shouts, give me a W, and the participants in the ritual call out W. Then the leader says, give me an A, and the participants shout A, and so forth through the name Walmart. Now actually, the company is legally Wal, W-A-L- Mart, with a hyphen between the Wal and the Mart. But the company tried to stop using the hyphen sometime around 2008 or 2009. In the chanted version, the hyphen was called a squiggly. You can hear this in some of the videos, and actually you'll see people wiggling their bodies around doing the squiggly when they say that. In any case, after spelling out the name and while everyone is still chanting, the leader calls out questions to which the participants respond. The first question is, what's that spell? And the participants yell Walmart. The leader then shouts, whose Walmart is it? And they respond, it's my Walmart. The leader says, who's number one? And they respond, the customer, always. The ritual chanting pattern found in the Walmart cheer is known as call and response. It is a traditional pattern of ritual interaction found in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. And of course, we see it today also in the ritual form of behavior associated with cheerleaders of sports teams, and certain rituals in church and in other contexts. According to the Walmart corporate website history timeline, Sam Walton, the founder of the Walmart stores, got the idea for the chant when he visited a Korean manufacturer back in 1975. He made efforts to get his employees to do the chant, and evidently, many have done so, as you'll see in the videos. However, it's unclear just how widespread the practice is among Walmart employees, and some, evidently, did resist it. Undoubtedly for some, the ritual is enjoyable, perhaps even effective in the way that Nadal's individual rituals are effective for him. But the Walmart chant seems less integral to the success of the business enterprise as a team than some of the corporate rituals we will look at in the next lecture.
