Overview
Myths, stories, and folklore are part of the fabric and life of all organizations, enabling us to understand, identify, and communicate the character of the organization - its ambitions, conflicts, and peculiarities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork of storytelling in five organizations, this book argues that stories open valuable windows into the emotional and symbolic lives of organizations. By collecting stoires in different organizations, by listening and comparing different accounts, by investigating how narratives are constructed around specific events, by examining which events in an organization's history generate stories and which ones fail to do so, researchers can gain access to deeper organizational realities, closely linked to their members' experiences. In this way, stories enable researchers to study organizational politics, culture, and change in uniquely illuminating ways, revealing how wider organizational issues are viewed, commented upon, and worked upon by their members. The book's first part develops the theory of storytelling by building on various approaches, including narrative, folkloric, ethnographic, symbolic, social constructionist, and psychoanalytic, while the second offers a set of four studies which make use of stories in exploring particular aspects of organizational life.
Full Product Details
Author: Yiannis Gabriel (Lecturer at The Management School, Lecturer at The Management School, University of Bath)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 1.50cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.452kg
ISBN: 9780198297062
ISBN 10: 0198297068
Pages: 276
Publication Date: 23 March 2000
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
richness in new ideas ... deserves to be a standard reference for students of stories in organizational life O.S. Vol.22, No.2, 2001 This is a good piece of discourse about organizational stories, written with elegance and drive the book is creative and includes a number of fresh ideas for future researchers O.S. Vol.22, No.2, 2001 informative, well-written, well-researched and a pleasure to read O.S. Vol.22, No.2, 2001
Author Information
Yiannis Gabriel is a lecturer at The Management School, University of Bath. He is currently engaged in a study of organizational folklore, collecting, classifying, and interpreting a large number of organizational myths and stories. He is the author of Freud and Society (Routledge, 1983), Working Lives in Catering (Routledge, 1988), and joint author of Organizing and Organizations (Sage, 1993), The Unmanageable Consumer (Sage, 1995), and Experiencing Organizations (Sage, 1996). He has also written numerous articles that bring together his research interests in psychoanalytic theory and organization studies. He is Joint Editor of Management Learning.
