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Recent years have seen the beginning of new conversations between the 'natural' and 'socio-cultural' sides of the human sciences and the story of our long-term history as a species. Both sociology and the biological sciences, since the mid-twentieth century, have sought to avoid rigid models of individual or collective behaviour and to develop more flexible approaches. A concept finding favour today among very different scholars is 'sociality'. It is well established in literary English (and French), but has only recently become a technical concept. Mauss was deeply interested in long-term history and in connections with our evolutionary past as it was then understood. He envisaged social life often as a scene in movement, a potentially creative experience of living encounters. He did not use the term 'sociality', but he did make frequent reference to the image of 'drama', explicitly and implicitly through the way he re-presented ethnographic evidence. This article argues that his insights anticipated our re-thinking of the 'nature' of social life today.

Mauss comme allié au sein des débats actuels sur le « néo-darwinisme » : la « socialité » comme drame maussien Si des avancées considérables se font présentement dans le domaine des sciences de l'évolution, leurs « explications » du comportement humain demeurent partielles et controversées. À contre-courant de cette tendance dominante, les anthropologues du social qui souhaitent un dialogue avec les scientifiques peuvent s'appuyer sur la socialité humaine problématisée par Mauss en tant que théâtre. La « communauté » définie en tant que totalité productrice et reproductrice est le fruit du partage de conventions imaginées et ré-imaginées sur le temps, l'espace, la personne, le genre, ainsi que le fruit des échanges signifiants du langage, du travail et des biens si bien analysés par Mauss.

Choreography and Ceremony: The Artful Side of Action
"Actions" are normally thought of as taken by individuals. But to understand their quality, it is not enough to classify them from the perspective of individual psychology (rational vs. emotional, technical vs. artistic, etc.). We need to grasp their relation to those forms of collective life which have a historical existence independent of specific individual action (institutions, the conventions of social gathering, the organizing principles of games, architecture, music, ritual, etc.). This paper focuses on what characteristics such forms of collective life share, not what seems to separate them (eg. into sacred vs secular, technology vs creative art). The main features emphasized are their choreography, that is their enactment within commonly understood patterns of a spatial and temporal kind, as well as rules of interactive movement; and their ceremonial character, something which can be found in simple situations such as a conversation or a meal, though much more intensely in major religious ritual. A particularly resonant image for these enactments of social life is the dance. Because there is a ceremonial aspect to all social interaction, the paper argues that individual action, necessarily oriented to the social context, always has an "artful" side (however habitual or technical). The paper draws on the writings of Wittgenstein on action, and those of Collingwood on language and art, to shape the argument. Illustrations are provided of the "artful" employment of language (especially by actors on the stage), the "artful" side of material culture, and from the author's own ethnographic studies, the significance of dance among Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia.

This research explores the institutionalisation of a new performance management system, namely the Balanced Scorecard in a Government owned corporation in Australia. A single exploratory/descriptive case study with embedded multiple unit analysis was used in order to examine the adoption of a balanced scorecard as an example of the process of evolution of a new initiative. It uses the concept of isomorphism to explain the initial adoption of the Balanced Scorecard. Further, it highlights the importance of the deliberation of both rational analytical approaches and legitimacy as a fundamental accompaniment to isomorphism in the continuing development of the new performance management system.