Enterprise theatre is increasingly used as a managerial lever, yet it remains weakly defined and rarely measured. We report a qualitative study based on 12 ZMET interviews with opinion leaders in enterprise theatre (Zaltman, 2003). Through open and axial coding in a Grounded Theory approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), we extract a shared narrative: the tacit rules, emotional refrains, and symbolic anchors that currently define enterprise theatre in practice. We term this output a narrative prototype. We then connect the prototype to Identity Economics (Akerlof & Kranton, 2010), proposing that in firms where theatre is a central, not peripheral, practice, the intervention shifts the utility structure by converting costs of deviation into benefits of belonging: making tacit identity rules explicit, shareable, and enactable.
Operationally, the prototype enables lightweight evaluation of identity value via: (i) self-reported identity alignment; (ii) lexicon penetration (frequency of prototype terms in internal communications); (iii) ritual adoption (behavioral traces consistent with tacit rules); and (iv) refrain recurrence in short post-intervention stories.
Contribution. (1) An updated, participatory definition of enterprise theatre via a shared narrative; (2) a theoretical bridge from narrative practice to identity utility; (3) an evaluation frame that shifts emphasis from deviation costs to belonging benefits created by theatre. Status: qualitative phase completed; integration with pre-post measures is underway.