There are many different kinds of rituals found in modern business enterprises around the world. Firing is just on of them. The business ritual's has often have analogues and other kinds of teams. Let's take a look at one kind first, the initiation right In businesses in the US, this is often refered to as unburgain. But as analog as been societies around the world not just businesses, every society anthropologist I've studied has some kind of initiation ritual. They're about bringing new members. Young initiates into the group as adults. In the business world, the idea of initiation is to introduce new employees to the team culture, they will need to acquire to function as part of the team. In unit one of this course, for example, we talked about how large corporations, JetBlue and McDonald's Often have their own universities. These provide practical training, but they also have their own purely symbolic elements. Some of these are captured on videos accessible through the internet. We see shots, for example, of the Jet Blue university students singing songs about their experiences at the university. In others, class valedictorians give speeches in graduation ceremonies reminiscent of colleges and universities. At McDonald's Hamburger University students actually receive a diploma, indicating that they have earned a Bachelor of Hamburgerology. I'm not kidding about that, it's true. The emotional purpose of initiation rites as condensation symbols is to get the initiates to feel that they have crossed a threshold, that they are now a different person, a new person. They have become a team member. The initiation is not just about skills and understanding. It's also about feelings. The ceremony helps to emotionally attach the initiate to the new team they had just joined. Whether that team is adult society a fraternity a sports team or a company. Another type of ritual found in companies is the awards ceremony. Individuals or teams get recognized for their performance on the job. At my university for example there are awards for outstanding staff members and even teaching awards. Actually I won a couple of teaching awards myself. As a recipient I can say that they did make me feel appreciated. They helped me to feel even more positively about my work as a teacher and about the university more generally. But I want to focus here on other members the team, not those who actually win the awards. In the previous lecture, we have observed that firing, when looked at as a ritual, is not only about the person, and being fired. That is probably not about the person being fired per se. The wave of panic spreading through the group of employees hearing about the firing is a crucial part of the ritual, in fact the crucial part. Since the effect is to motivate others through fear that if they do not perform, they too, will be fired. Similarly, in the case of the award ceremony, the effect of the award on the recipient is less important than the effect on other members of the group. The ceremony encourages others to do their jobs well. For if they do so they too may one day win a prize and receive the group's recognition. Has in the case of firing that a word ceremony is may not always improve the efficiency of team functioning. Because they can also produce envy and unhealthy form of competitiveness if they're done right. They can prove to work against cooperation and team spirit. The last type of ritual I'll mention though there are many other types it the annual holiday party. This one is most reminiscent of ceremonies and societies around the world, where the group recognizes itself as a team as a single entity. In some way as the great social theorist Emile Durkheim once proposed the group worships itself. It celebrates its own existence. Such events are related to forums of totemic rites found by anthropologists in many societies around the world. Durkheim referred to the feelings that come out during such rituals as quote, collective effervescence, unquote. Good feelings get called up and, as in the case of the dominant symbols described by Turner, transferred onto the group. Okay, so in this unit of the class, you've learned about symbols and rituals. And they are important for teams and teams' success. As a leader, you may at some point be called on to create symbols and rituals, if you haven't done so already. In this unit, we focus our attention especially on one type of symbol, the condensation symbol. Which tends to call out feelings in individuals. In the case of the dominant condensation symbols those feelings get transferred onto the group helping to create teams focused on common goals. In the final unit of this class we will turn our attention to a key property of all cultural elements, their movement through the world. Passing from person to person, group to group, across time and space, by a processies of social learning and transmission. We will be inquiring into the forces that impel that motion. As we'll see, among those forces are those arising from feelings and emotions, such as we have been discussing here. Rituals and symbols are also important for the movement of culture itself, in other words. So I'll see you again soon in the next unit.
