Where does performance collide?

In the philosophy of language, a performative is an utterance that does not describe the world but performs an action in the very saying of it. J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words drew a contrast between constative utterances, which report and can be true or false, and performatives such as 'I promise', 'I name this ship', or 'I do' at a wedding, which enact rather than state. To speak the words, in the right setting and with the right conventions, is to carry out the act itself, so the utterance can succeed or fail rather than be true or false. Austin later folded this into a broader account of speech acts, the many things people do in and by speaking. Here performance names a property of language, the capacity of an utterance to constitute the deed it names, and not a rated work output, a staged show, or the running speed of a machine.[1]

Unit

Whether an utterance enacts the act it names, judged by success or failure rather than truth

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Judged by whether the act comes off (its felicity), given the right words, persons, and conventions, not by any scale

In gender and culture theory, performativity is the idea that gender is produced through repeated, stylized acts rather than expressing a fixed inner essence. In Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, Judith Butler argued that gender is not something a person simply is but something enacted over time, a series of gestures, movements, and styles that congeal into the appearance of a stable self. Butler drew the term from Austin's meaning, an utterance that acts, and extended it from single speech acts to the ongoing, socially regulated repetition through which gendered identity is sustained, a line of thought she developed at length in Gender Trouble. On this account the performance does not follow from a prior gender; the repeated performance is what creates the impression of one. This is a description of how the theory works, offered here as an academic position rather than an endorsement, but in every version the shared word is performance.[2][3]

Unit

Gender read as an ongoing enactment sustained by repetition, not an inner trait

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Not scored on a scale; described through close reading of acts, gestures, and their social regulation

In organizational behavior, job performance is the measurable output of an employee: the behaviors and results that contribute to the goals of the organization. Motowidlo and Van Scotter's Evidence that task performance should be distinguished from contextual performance separated task performance, the core duties tied to a specific role, from contextual performance, the broader helping and effort that support the wider work environment. This second component overlaps with what the field elsewhere calls organizational citizenship behavior, the discretionary acts that lie outside formal job requirements. Job performance in this usage is rated by supervisors, scored against role expectations, and used in appraisal and selection. Here performance is a quantity attached to a worker, counted and compared, and it has nothing in common with an utterance that acts, a theory of gender, or a play on a stage beyond the label.[4]

Unit

An employee's rated output, in appraisal scores against role expectations

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Rated by supervisors or trained observers and scored on task and contextual performance scales in appraisal

In theatre and performance studies, a performance is a live enactment carried out before an audience, a bounded event of doing that is meant to be watched. Richard Schechner's Performance Studies: An Introduction treats performance broadly as restored, or twice-behaved, behavior, running from staged plays and rituals to sports and everyday display, all understood as actions framed to be shown. Erving Goffman's dramaturgical view, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, extended the stage metaphor to ordinary social life, casting people as actors who manage the impressions they give off before others. In both, performance is something enacted in real time and received by onlookers, defined by the live relation between performer and audience. This meaning is close in spirit to the philosopher's performative and to Butler's repeated acts, but it names an event on a stage or in a social scene, not a rated work output or a machine's speed.[5][6]

Unit

A staged or social enactment, framed as an event to be watched

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Not scaled; analyzed through the live event, its framing, and the performer and audience relation

In computing, system performance is how fast and efficiently a machine or program does its work, usually captured as speed, throughput, or response time on a defined task. Fleming and Wallace's How not to lie with statistics: The correct way to summarize benchmark results examined how benchmark numbers are combined, showing that the arithmetic mean of normalized ratios can mislead and that the geometric mean is the consistent way to summarize relative performance. Performance here is reported through benchmarks, standard workloads run so that different systems can be compared on a common scale. It is an engineering quantity, timed and counted, expressed in units such as operations per second or elapsed time. It shares the word with an utterance that acts, a theory of gender, a work rating, and a live show, but the referent is the measured speed of a system and nothing more.[7]

Unit

A system's speed or throughput on a workload, in operations per second or elapsed time

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Measured by benchmarks and profiling as throughput, latency, or elapsed time, then summarized (for example, by a geometric mean)

In folklore, performance refers to verbal art understood as a mode of communication in which a speaker takes responsibility to an audience for a display of skill. This meaning comes from Bauman (1975) in American Anthropologist.[8]

Unit

Recovery means

Measured by