Bridging popular culture. Managing and infrastructuring TV formats

Basing on Organization Studies and Science & Technology Studies literature, the current paper aims to account for an encounter among fiction, work, management, production and consumption practices as organized and bridged through the narratives of popular culture. It will propose an approach based on two symmetrical key processes that allow a deeper understanding of these phenomena: enrollment and appropriation. The study introduces a peculiar, pervasive as well as invisible feature of popular culture that represents a promising object of research in this sense: the TV format. So conceived, the paper wants to account for specific mutual engagements between modes of enrollment and appropriation of popular culture within show business on one hand, and management strategies and organizational processes in global corporations on the other. In other words, the study will thus compare managerial and organizational knowledge performed through TV formats with management strategies and business models of corporations, so as analyzing the action of popular culture and the implications of the construction of 'bricoleurs' as creative workforce.