Theatre in prison as a virtual place of knowledge creation

Purpose – Through the “Gozzini” Law, the Italian penitentiary system identifies inmates’ re-education as the main aim of personal detention; theatrical performances are included among the treatments which are intended at promoting the inmates’ social reintegration. Prison theatre allows the establishment of a performing space, which paves the way for the activation of innovative learning processes. Drawing from the knowledge creation theory, this study is aimed at examining the prison theatre phenomenon, which is eventually conceived as “Ba”, a physical, virtual, and symbolic space where the mutual interactions between different agents fosters the creation of cathartic and transformative knowledge. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing from the “double loop learning” perspective, an in-depth exploratory case-study was performed. It concerned the prison theatre initiatives launched by the Penal Institution of Naples-Secondigliano, in the South of Italy. A qualitative approach is adopted, which allowed to deal with the main issues of analysis from both a conceptual and an empirical standpoint. To improve the reliability of this study, the evidence collected were drawn from multiple sources: 1) internal archives of the Italian Ministry of Justice; 2) semi-structured interviews; and 3) external sources. The triangulation of evidence collected allowed to achieve a stronger consistency of the findings discussed. Originality/value – The relevance of this study is twofold, contributing in both conceptual (observation) and theoretical terms (abstraction) to a widely overlooked shade of knowledge creation, appropriation and sharing. To the knowledge of the authors, penal institutions are still poorly examined by scholars interested in public management, in spite of their role in enhancing both social and economic development in current societies. Practical implications – The case-study discussed provides an in-depth exploratory analysis of prison theatre, adopting the phenomenological perspective of “Ba”. The findings of the research point out the key tools to make prison theatre a physic and symbolic place, where inmates are able to build knowledge and can “reborn” through the process of knowledge sharing. This study paves the way for two important contributions: 1) it encourages a cross-fertilization between managerial science and juridical, sociological and pedagogical disciplines, which are relatively more rooted in the penitentiary environment; 2) it incites an improvement of traditional managerial and organizational practices in the penitentiary system.