Enabling Creative Chaos

The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event

By: Katherine K. Chen

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Hardcover | 1 September 2009 | Edition Number 1

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Hardcover
272 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.35 x 1.54 x 0.2

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In the summer of 2008, nearly fifty thousand people traveled to Nevada's Black Rock Desert to participate in the countercultural arts event Burning Man. Founded on a commitment to expression and community, the annual weeklong festival presents unique challenges to its organizers. Over four years Katherine K. Chen regularly participated in organizing efforts to safely and successfully create a temporary community in the middle of the desert under the hot August sun. "Enabling Creative Chaos" tracks how a small, underfunded group of organizers transformed into an unconventional corporation with a ten-million-dollar budget and two thousand volunteers. Over the years, Burning Man's organizers have experimented with different management models; learned how to recruit, motivate, and retain volunteers; and developed strategies to handle regulatory agencies and respond to media coverage. This remarkable evolution, Chen reveals, offers important lessons for managers in any organization, particularly in uncertain times.

Industry Reviews

"Katherine Chen immersed herself in the world of Burning Man, the fascinating community that gathers annually for a week-long arts celebration in the Nevada desert. Her marvelous portrait of this unusual collective provides a rich template for considering how organizations of all varieties strike a balance between flexibility and fairness and creativity and security. This is one of the best organizational ethnographies I've seen in many years."

--Walter W. Powell, Stanford University
"Enabling Creative Chaos describes an organizational mutant which is part community, part business. It is the ultimate hybrid form, and Katherine Chen lays bare all of its qualities and contradictions. This is a rich qualitative case study of a phenomenon that many know, some have experienced, but few understand."--Joseph Galaskiewicz, University of Arizona--Joseph Galaskiewicz

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