Performativity in Public Organizations: Making the European External Action Service Explicit
This article draws on the notion of trials of explicitness (Muniesa, 2014) in order to contribute to the understanding of the performative process in public organizations. The analysis of the implementation of the European External Action Service (EEAS) shows how the organization performed two problematizations of the external affairs of the European Union (EU), the supranational and the intergovernmental approaches. This work contributes to management research in two ways. First, it examines the influence of alternative problematizations to economics, here political, in the performing of organizational reality. Second, through the notion of trials of explicitness, it provides an approach for complementing our knowledge of the process of performativity in organizations, focusing on the way in which the organizational set-ups craft a reality out of statements.