Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event (review)

To many outside critics, Burning Man, an annual arts event that takes place for a week around Labor Day in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, is a chaotic, countercultural festival characterized by excess of all sorts, with little in the way of structure. On the other hand, many Burning Man participants complain about rules and guidelines controlling their experience, that have grown along with the event’s population, which reached 50,000 in 2011. According to Katherine Chen, an organizational sociologist who spent a decade doing ethnographic research with Burning Man organizers, staff, and volunteers, the event’s success is largely a result of its organizers striking a balance between control and chaos.

Burning Man organizers have accomplished this, she demonstrates, by adopting some “collectivist” organizational practices, such as consensus decision making, and some “bureaucratic” practices, such as a chain of authority (154). Chen places her study in the context of a large body of research on organizations to show the ways in which Burning Man organizers navigate between “unsupportive underorganizing” that does not give members enough structure, and “repressive overorganizing” that quashes individual creativity (11). One of Burning Man’s greatest successes has been in the area of “radical inclusivity,” a topic to which a large portion of the book is devoted. Chen provides compelling anecdotes of Burning Man’s “do-ocracy,” in which organizers support grassroots initiatives and role creation by members, rather than top-down hierarchical decisions. For instance, organizers encourage creative ways of making mundane tasks, such as cleaning up camps and selling ice, fun and engaging. The event’s gift economy also offers creative possibilities for participation. Chen convincingly argues that Burning Man’s organizational strategies have clearly worked to empower members and foster innovation.

Burning Man began in 1986 as an informal gathering of artists and their friends and grew into a huge international happening attracting tens of thousands of attendees every year. The event experienced unanticipated growth during the 1990s, accompanied by tragic accidents involving participants that necessitated civilizing Burning Man’s “wild frontier” atmosphere (32). Such growth necessitated transforming a small, loosely structured collective into a more structured organization with a board of directors, paid staff, and vast army of volunteers, without losing the creative and participatory community the event was known for. In each chapter, Chen details the ways in which the organization successfully dealt with challenges such as attracting and motivating volunteers, resisting stereotypical media representations, and responding to pressures from government agencies like the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In every case, she argues that the organization made mistakes and often experienced conflicts over important decisions, but, nevertheless, successfully navigated between the extremes of “debilitating chaos and totalitarianism” (6).

For those readers who hope to get a sense of the texture and experience of Burning Man, this is not a study that immerses readers in the event. Other scholars, journalists, and photographers offer thick descriptions and visually compelling accounts of Burning Man in films and book-length treatments, such as religious studies scholar Lee Gilmore’s Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (2010)¹ and journalist Steven T. Jones’s The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert is Shaping the New American Counterculture (2011).² Chen is more interested in what is happening behind the scenes the rest of the year, and her study provides a unique account of the ways in which the organization behind the event has maintained a high level of commitment from members over the years.

She wants her book to offer a model to readers, but in the end it is difficult to tell how Burning Man’s creative chaos shapes other areas of participants’s lives or the society outside its bounds. Chen hopes her book will help us “reimagine organizations and their place in everyday life” (22); yet it remains unclear how the Burning...