Budget theatre : a postdramaturgical account of municipal budget making

Abstract

This thesis adopts “performance” as a metaphor and participates with the dramatic by acknowledging the messiness of social interaction and by matching this with a proposed research method capable of dealing with heterogeneity. The thesis enters several conversations that are underway in the academic literature and claims four contributions: 1. (re)assembly of Goffman’s notion of dramaturgy. In so doing, I stimulate movement toward a critical version of dramaturgy with an amodern orientation. This reassembly of Goffman’s work grows from a proposed relationship among three schools of thought: dramaturgy, Actor-network Theory, and historiography. 2. engagement with ontological politics in municipal budget making; 3. demonstration of budget history as performance, an extension of engagement with ontological politics by seeing history as performance of those politics; 4. encouragement for public administrators to understand budget making as drama rather than uncritically seeing it as a mundane administrative practice. The theoretical contributions are linked by their concern for performance. Following a dramaturgical framework, this dissertation uses as its exemplar the budget making processes of the Halifax Regional Municipality where structural legal boundaries between elected and appointed officials gives rise to more or less constant contests, and to a sense of diffused authority.

The introductory chapter proposes a new research methodology called postdramaturgy. The following three chapters rehearse the literatures of dramaturgy, actor-network theory, and historiography. Then a methodological rhizome is crafted to propose postdramaturgy. This is followed by multiple performances that use postdramaturgy to study empirical aspects of municipal budget making as well as further empirical study that considers the capacity of postdramaturgy for critique. Concluding thoughts are then provided which reflect upon postdramaturgy and its potential for application in future research work. I also attempt to take advantage of my previous experiences as a municipal manager (and budget maker) by proposing some implications of postdramaturgy for practice in the not-for-profit sector. The value of my thesis will be in theorizing a coalition of research methods and in helping to illuminate the complex dynamics of municipal budget making.