organization, such as a factory, where behavior at the work place is
highly structured. There can also be ideas of intermediate complex-
ity, such as a theme (including both a direction of movement and a
minimum set of roles to be enacted) to guide an instance of
elementary collective behavior in an acting crowd, or a plot (with a
detailed scenario, defined roles, and an indication of the stages a
group must go through to reach a goal) to guide the activities in a
social movement.

Once the idea has been put forward, an action area is needed. This
may involve building or finding an action area and making
provision for an audience, if there is to be one. As Burke has noted
in his use of the concept scene/act ratio ( 1968), all aspects of the stage
or scene suggest limits for the action that will be appropriate in that
setting. The stage set suggests the time, both clock time and
historical time, and the mood of the play.

The next phase of the performance involves the recruitment of
the actors who must learn their roles. This is followed by the
enactment of one or more themes and, finally, after the last curtain
call, a period of appraisal of the effect of the action on the definition
of the situation, both for the actors and for the audience.

A similar set of basic concepts has been provided by persons who
have been working with a dramaturgical perspective. For example,
Burke ( 1968:446) suggests that for any act (performance) there must
be an agent (actor) and a scene (stage) in which the agent acts. To act
in a scene, the agent must employ some means, or agency. Burke
goes on to suggest that an act must have a purpose. To these five
concepts, which he first introduced in 1945, he later added a sixth
concept of attitude, as an ambiguous term for incipient action. For
the present analysis, Burke's concepts of agency, purpose, and
attitude are all aspects of the idea that becomes the focus of action
(see Overington, 1977, for a discussion of Burke's concepts).

For Harré and Secord ( 1972:149-53, 176-204) dramatic perfor-
mances are analyzed in terms of the episode as the natural unit of
social activity. During a single episode the participants follow a
plan or carry out the actions necessary to complete a task. The
beginning and end of an episode is often marked by a ceremony.

-4-