The Jazz Metaphor for Organizing: Historical and Performative Aspects

Until recently, organizations have had a staid quality about them. Even today, the concept, for many, promotes images of stability rather than change. Yet in today's fast-paced, complex, globalizing world, stability seems inappropriate, even passé. This paper argues that we might update our concept of organization if we were to approach organizing in historical and performative terms, like jazz musicians do. This paper explains how jazz musicians use improvising to perform jazz tunes and how their practices organize jazz as both a dynamic musical conversation and as a narrative with a history. These ideas are then extended metaphorically to rethink organizing and management for the 21st Century.