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The paper draws extensively from Aristotle’s Poetics, a classical work on the aesthetics of drama. Drawing from symbolic and thematic elements from folklore and mythology, this paper aims to illustrate how the Poetics can be referenced as an allegorical device in the design of culture-building strategies and interventions.

This exploratory paper examines Aristotle’s “Poetics” and the range of creative expression this literature provides as a conceptual design framework for the development of a culture map in creating a distinctive organisational mythology. The Poetics articulates an Aristotelian perspective on theatre which infuses itself as a new language in offering structural and archetypical plot devices in the development of an organisational narrative.

Findings from this explorative study can provide a creative roadmap to culture practitioners and leaders, to be used as a determining reference point in developing culture maps and change management interventions.

Poetics has its detractors, notably Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal. Boal examines how Poetics promotes a narrative that suppresses free thinking and encourages a cult of feudal personality, therefore encouraging industrial and cultural oppression, which he rebelled against through the development of his “Theatre of the Oppressed”. This new kind of theatre discarded the Aristotelian model of thinking. Ideas proposed in the Poetics may also lend verisimilitude to the propagation of obsessive consumerism through the definitive symbolism it offers in the development of institutionalised personality cults.

The Poetics as a creatively driven reflexive study provides a forward movement in the study of culture design templates. Its definitive allegorical devices and metaphors act as action principles through which an enterprise culture and its value system can be examined and developed.

This study explores the trajectory and challenges faced by a doctoral researcher in her successive attempts to gain access for conducting an ethnography within the production or organisation of a musical theatre performance. Contemplating the four unsuccessful access attempts and the final, triumphant one, we ponder the reasons and impediments for conducting research within this particular context. We operate under the premise that research access possesses a relational characteristic, contingent upon the relationships established between the researcher, the researched, potential informants and the dynamics of the field as a whole.

This is an exploratory and qualitative study, and the empirical research is based on an ethnographic-inspired case study of the organisation/production of a musical theatre play in São Paulo, SP, Brazil, which we have given the pseudonym MusiCom.

The study contributes by allowing us to affirm that access is intertwined with at least two aspects: the peculiarities of the organisation itself and the characteristics or context in which it exists or is constructed, and the identity of the researcher, developed during the formal access negotiations through the relationships formed between her and the subjects during the dynamics of the field.

Our contribution reinforces the numerous challenges posed to researchers when conducting ethnographies and illustrates how access relies not solely on the skills, aptitudes and learning of the researchers.