Narratives We Organize By (review)
2007; Linguistic Society of America; Volume: 83; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/lan.2007.0038
ISSN1535-0665
Autores Tópico(s)Management and Organizational Studies
ResumoReviewed by: Narratives we organize by ed. by Barbara Czarniawska and Pasquale Gagliardi Marco Shappeck Narratives we organize by. Ed. by Barbara Czarniawska and Pasquale Gagliardi. (Advances in organization studies 11.) Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. 275. ISBN 1588113930. $77.95. This book, the eleventh volume in the ‘Advances in organization studies’ series, is a product of papers presented at the seventeenth EGOS conference in Lyon, France, in 2001. Organizational discourses in this volume are viewed through the lens of narratology, contributing to the body of literature that theorizes about the social sources and consequences of structure in organizations. Out of this work comes an evolved system of interpretation for organizing processes and forms. Analyzing business communication through a structuralist approach, Anne-Marie Søderberg’s contribution, ‘Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process’, looks at how top and middle managers structure narratives for their employees after an international acquisition by another company and how these sensegiving attempts are understood by the addressees in their local contexts. In ‘Narrative institutions we organize by’, Daniel Robichaud describes the inherent structure and recursivity of institutionalized narratives and the roles that were transformed during a Canadian municipal meeting between elected officials and the citizens of the city. From a poststructuralist perspective, Nanette Monin and John Monin’s chapter, ‘Re-navigating management theory’, contrasts Mary Parker Follet’s hero-less narrative paradigm from other manager-as-protagonist theories in managerial texts. In ‘The body of the text and the ordinary narratives of organization’, Heather Höpfl accentuates the interplay and distinctions between authoritative versus vernacular texts. Valérie-Inés de La Ville and Eléonore Mounoud, in ‘How can strategy be a practice?’, explore the links between practice and strategy by drawing on Michel de Certeau’s practice-oriented view of strategic management. Hervé Corvellec (‘Narratives of organizational performance’) continues with a genre analysis by examining the number of applied definitions of organizational performance and offering a particular redefinition that accounts for the socially motivated language of organizational achievement. Paul M. Hirsch and Hayagreeva Rao, in ‘The Schweik syndrome’, describe the economic outcomes of the Czech Republic in the new markets of the West since 1989. Gerardo Patriotta, in ‘Detective stories and the narrative structure of organizing’, investigates specific organizing processes of workers who, when passing blame in the factory, construct certain events in a manner that parallels detective stories. David Metz, in ‘From naked emperor to count zero’, looks at the working lives of IT-freelancers and how genres of romance, urban legend, and folklore help construct identities through narrative. In ‘Narrating the future of intelligent machines’, Brian Bloomfield analyzes the interactions with HAL 9000 from the film 2001: A space odyssey and discusses the ways in which narratives influence our perception of the relationship between humans and computers. Sudi Sharifi (‘Ticking times and side cupboards …’) writes a self-reflective, descriptive essay about her experience as a patient in a hospital. In ‘Fluid tales’, Robert Grafton Small reflects on selfhood and identity while narrating experiences he had presenting his work at an academic conference. The essays in this volume represent the state of the art in organizational theory and narratology. The insights offered by these authors will prove indispensable for future research that deals with the social dimensions of managerial discourse and organizational change. Marco Shappeck University of Illinois Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America
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