Organizational Politics of Place and Space: The Perpetual Liminoid Performance of Commercial Flight

Abstract

Strapped in a narrow, metal tube catapulting across time zones and continents, air travelers find themselves suspended between other times and spaces in their lives. A number of social practices, however, transform the “nowhere” experience of air travel into one grounded in the familiar. Blending performance and organizational theories, this work explores the politics of air travel cultural performances. It focuses on the organizational strategies designed to reproduce norms of everyday life in a non-everyday experience, as well as on resistant tactics that show that air travel is not a unified, integrated performance but a negotiated process, a struggle to maintain the appearance of a normalized routine.