Narratives We Organize By [1 ed.] 9789027296610, 9789027233103

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Narratives We Organize By

Advances in Organization Studies Advances in Organization Studies includes cutting-edge work in comparative management and intercultural comparison, studies of organizational culture, communication, and aesthetics, as well as in the area of interorganizational collaboration — strategic alliances, joint ventures, networks and collaborations of all kinds, where comparative, intercultural, and communicative issues have an especial salience. Purely theoretical as well as empirically based studies are included. General Editors Stewart Clegg School of Management University of Technology Sydney Quay Street, Haymarket P.O.Box 123 Broadway, NSW 2007 Australia [email protected] Alfred Kieser University of Mannheim D 68 131 Mannheim Germany [email protected]

Volume 11 Narratives We Organize By Edited by Barbara Czarniawska and Pasquale Gagliardi

Narratives We Organize By Edited by

Barbara Czarniawska Göteborg University, Sweden

Pasquale Gagliardi Catholic University of Milan, and ISTUD, Milan-Stresa

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam
/
Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Narratives we organise by / edited by Barbara Czarniawska, Pasquale Gagliardi. p. cm. (Advances in Organization Studies, issn 1566–1075 ; v. 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Communication in management. 2. Communication in organizations. 3. Business communication. I. Title: Narratives we organize by. II. Czarniawska-Joerges, Barbara. III. Gagliardi, Pasquale, 1936- IV. Advances in organization studies ; 11. HD30.3.N37 2003 302.3’5-dc21 isbn 90 272 3310 1 (Eur.) / 1 58811 392 2 (US) (Hb; alk. paper) isbn 90 272 3311 X (Eur.) / 1 58811 393 0 (US) (Pb; alk. paper)

2003048154

© 2003 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Contents

Introduction Barbara Czarniawska and Pasquale Gagliardi

vii

Part 1. Structuralist approaches to narrative analysis

1

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process: A narrative approach to the study of an international acquisition Anne-Marie Søderberg

3

Narrative institutions we organize by: The case of municipal administration Daniel Robichaud

37

Part 2. Poststructuralist approaches to narrative

55

Re-navigating management theory: Steering by the star of Mary Follet Nanette Monin and John Monin

57

The body of the text and the ordinary narratives of organisation Heather Hop¶

75

Part 3. Genre analysis

93

How can strategy be a practice? Between discourse and narration Valérie-Inés de La Ville and Eléonore Mounoud

95

Narratives of organizational performances Hervé Corvellec

115

Part 4. Stories help to understand

135

The Schweik syndrome: The narrative power of resistance by agreement Paul M. Hirsch and Hayagreeva Rao

137

Detective stories and the narrative structure of organizing: Towards an understanding of organizations as texts Gerardo Patriotta

149

vi

Contents

Part 5. Getting help from the stories of the future

171

From Lancelot to Count Zero. Tracking knights, cyber-punks and nerds in identity narratives of freelancers in the IT-ªeld David Metz

173

Narrating the future of intelligent machines: The role of science ªction in technological anticipation Brian Bloomªeld

193

Part 6. Narrating ourselves

213

Ticking time and side cupboard: The journey of a patient Sudi Shariª

215

Fluid tales: a preservation of self in everyday life Robert Grafton Small

237

About the authors and the editors References Index

247 251 267

Introduction Barbara Czarniawska and Pasquale Gagliardi GRI, School of Economics and Commercial Law, Göteborg University Catholic University of Milan, and ISTUD, Milan-Stresa

… narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. (Roland Barthes 1966/1977: 79) What is everywhere passes unnoticed. (Tzvetan Todorov 1978/1990: 39)

It has been two decades since organization theorists noticed the ubiquity of narratives in organizational settings and in organization theory (see e.g. Martin 1982; Boje 1991; Czarniawska 1997). Narratives had previously been treated largely as if they were transparent, as if they were windows on “reality”, and therefore as deserving no more attention than the window through which someone admires the landscape. Thereafter, attention ramiªed among many diŸerent interests: in organizational stories (Gabriel 2000; Boje 2001), in the role of narrative in organizational communication (Fisher 1987; Taylor 1993), in narratology as a source of methodological inspiration (Czarniawska 1997; 1998; Cooren 2000). In this book,1 we have collected texts that explore the analogy and the parallel between organizing and narrating that Ricœur (1981) suggested so convincingly in relation to action and text. The raw material of everyday organizational life consists of disconnected fragments, physical and verbal actions that do not make sense when reported with simple chronology (for instance, in observation notes). Narrating involves organizing this raw and fragmented material with the help of such devices as plot and characters. Simultaneously, organizing makes narration possible, because it orders people, things and events in time and place. The book contains texts that explore this analogy in both directions, reporting studies that illustrate how narratives are made in situ, or apply narrative analysis (of various kinds) to stories already in existence. But it also contains texts that investigate the 1. This collection originates in Subtheme 1 of EGOS Conference, Lyon, 5–7 July 2001.

viii Barbara Czarniawska and Pasquale Gagliardi

connections among diŸerent narratives across time and space, showing the emergence of genres, their transformation or demise. Part 1, “Structuralist approaches to narrative analysis” pays tribute to the origins of narratology, especially the work of Algirdas Greimas. Although substantially inspired by Greimas’ analysis, Anne-Marie Søderberg and Daniel Robichaud steer away from its ontological assumption of “deep structures”, showing that the Greimasian vocabulary can be fruitfully — and diŸerently — put to work in exploring organizational realities. Part 2 opts for a poststructuralist treatment of texts. Nanette Monin and John Monin conduct a poststructuralist reading of the classics of management and organization theory. Heather Höp¶ glances at contemporary organization theory texts but also introduces deconstruction into the body of organization. If the analogy between action and text is taken seriously, genre analysis (Part 3) can be applied to both of them. Valérie-Inés de La Ville and Eléonore Mounoud consequently ask: What is strategy? What is tactics? And they answer, with the help of the vocabulary introduced by Michel de Certeau, that strategy is a discourse and tactics is a narrative. Constructing the former amounts to writing, constructing the latter to reading. Managerial practice acquires a diŸerent meaning in such analysis. In the same vein, Hervé Corvellec situates the popular notion of “performance” within the speciªc genre based on a contest between the main characters in a play that the ancient Greeks called agon. Corvellec’s claim is that organizational performance is a modern variation on this genre. Beginning with Part 4, the authors use stories as their equipment to conduct “visits to strange places”. Paul Hirsch and Hayagreeva Rao have (repeatedly) visited the Czech Republic since the Velvet Revolution, whereas Gerardo Patriotta has visited the shop¶oor at Fiat Auto in Italy. While Hirsch and Rao’s observation of the Czech adoption of managerialism reminded them of the pattern of behavior propagated in ªction by the Good Soldier Schweik, Patriotta resorted to the detective genre in order to interpret his observations on the automobile industry. In Part 5, Brian Bloomªeld and David Metz visit alien worlds — those of science ªction. Finally, Sudi Shariª and Robert Grafton Small take the readers to the ground ¶oor — that of everyday suŸering, in Part 6 “Narrating ourselves”. By thus introducing the texts of the contributors to our book we fulªll our duty as editors — and comply with the requirements of the genre of “research anthology”. Our authors, however, do not follow us in adopting such genre loyalty. While the chapters in Part 1 (“Structuralist approaches to narrative analysis”) and Part 4 (“Stories help to understand”) are still recognizable as belonging to the genre of a “scientiªc essay”, although they use a methodology unusual in organization theory, this is hardly the case of other chapters. The authors in Part 2 (“Poststructuralist approaches to narrative”) and Part 3 (“Genre analysis”) seem

Introduction

to be engaged in literary criticism, but it is an unusual literature they are analyzing. The contributors to Part 5 (“Getting help from the stories of the future”) read ªction, but they do so through the lenses of organization theorists. Finally, the authors in Part 6, (“Narrating ourselves”) have seemingly left the genre of theory for good, oscillating between ªction and “witness literature” (Ash 2002). We would call the reader’s attention to these “generic maneuvers”, because for us they constitute an important trait in a narrative approach to organization studies. Note that what takes place is not a “genre shift” — nobody is proposing a new, coherent genre for organization studies (nobody in this collection, that is). Neither is this a “genre transgression”, as there are no accompanying attempts to establish the boundaries of any particular genre, in order to cross them better, as is the custom. The most appropriate label is still “blurred genres”, the phenomenon whose incipiency was noted already by CliŸord Geertz in 1980. We hope that genre-blurring, facilitated by the use of narrative approach, has come to organization studies to stay. While today we smile at the nineteenth-century illusion that it is possible to describe reality dispassionately and without metaphors, and while we take it for granted that scientiªc publications are nothing but a literary genre, it is nevertheless true that the ‘literary genre’ — a recognizable, socially and conventionally deªned typology into which any discourse can be ªtted — is indispensable for the economy of communication. It signals interests, purposes, belongings, professions; it enables authors to position themselves and readers to ªnd their bearings in a world overcrowded with ever less distinguishable discourses. For genres to be ‘blurred’ it is necessary for them to exist. What matters, therefore, is the tension between distinction and cross-fertilization, between institutionalized forms of discourse and the invention of new ones, between respect for the conventions and their superseding (which usually consists of a proposal for a new convention). This anthology is born out of such tension and it is the editors’ hope that it will help to sustain it.

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Part 1 Structuralist approaches to narrative analysis

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process A narrative approach to the study of an international acquisition Anne-Marie Søderberg Department of Intercultural Communication and Management Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Electra takes over Fonodan: A British MD’s narrative I wanted to be a managing director but I wasn’t to be, so I left Electra1 after many years and went to Hong Kong to do something myself. A year later Electra decided to get into GSM technology because this area seemed to have a high proªt potential in the future years. Suddenly Richard Dutton [Electra’s owner] contacted me and said: “Danny, I’ve just bought a company for you. I promise that you can run it for ever with no interference from the head o¹ce”. Therefore I decided to take the job as managing director in Denmark. But I found a pretty desperate situation when I arrived. The ªrst task was to determine what products we wanted developed in Fonodan. Colleagues came from England in order to see what could be built from the component stocks. We created a plan and started to employ more engineers for various disciplines. Having worked for Electra I’d been used to being in a very fast-moving company. I had to get that way of making fast decisions passed on to people here in Fonodan, which I didn’t think was a problem, because they’d seen the old way of making decisions and perhaps not been given very good directions. I cannot wait for committees to make decisions, because it’s too important. So I kind of make all the decisions before the meetings — that’s a bit my key. I have a strong personality and I tend to get my way due to force and arrogance. I’ve heard many people’s opinion of me, but it doesn’t worry me. That’s just life. Fonodan’s produc1. As all other names of companies and persons, this name is ªctitious in order to protect the anonymity of the interviewees.

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tion and administration is located in one building and R&D in another. The people on this side felt that the engineers were treated with kid gloves. But that’s the way it has to be because R&D is the creative part of our business. But one of my objectives was to get people talking to each other. So I developed a management team structure, a very ¶at structure with just 13 department managers. When the meetings started nobody was saying anything except for me. They didn’t want to point the ªnger at their colleague and say: “he’s not doing his job well”. After three to ªve months, people were becoming more vociferous. There were even occasions where I had to dig a hole and hide because I felt a bit embarrassed about how the Danish managers were speaking to each other. They were so friendly, opening up, pointing out where the problems were. I thought: OK, I’ve been making all the decisions for the past year. Now I want the company to think that I’m not making all the decisions. But I still needed to know what was happening at these management meetings. Therefore I made sure that the human resource manager attended every meeting, so that she could advise me of the progress of the managers: are they good enough? I’ll still put my ªngers in the pie — get involved in activities that I consider important. Development. Production. Marketing. I’m involved in a lot of areas, and as long as I’m here as managing director, I’ll always do so. I’m not the kind of person to sit back and just relax and watch the world go by. It’s not my style. I’m used to thinking internationally, having the world as a market. I have that knowledge, and I just need people to carry it out. When I came here from Hong Kong, the center of the world in terms of business, I didn’t think in Scandinavian terms, but in worldwide terms. Strategically, Fonodan wants to be number four. I know from experience that we have the right product for the market for the next four to ªve years. We’re fortunate with me coming from the consumer electronics background — I’ve already learned from my mistakes. The key for us is to jump the customers and the big operators. We oŸer something better than just the price. We also oŸer a partnership as a strategic long-term partner for the customers. In the future, we’ll develop new products — bringing in resources from all parts of the Electra organization: fax communication, networking in computers, mobile phones, satellite receivers, multimedia. We’re actually in a very strong position now, because we have a long-term strategic partner. Such partners are the key, you know. There’s always a risk that other big companies buy out your core development engineers, and we know that they’re the key to our future. But right now the company is expanding, the engineers can see a good future, a very interesting job, lots of projects outlined for the next two to three years. This is the kind of situation where they can get paid a lot of money, so I’m conªdent that they won’t leave the company.

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

Why a narrative approach to the study of international acquisitions? What you have just read is the narrative of an international acquisition — but of course just one version among many others. The British Managing Director — a man in his ªfties — told me this story in March 1995. The human resource manager, the development engineers, and everyone else involved, all had their own accounts of what had happened — diŸerent in some ways, similar in others. But all were told in individual voices, representing events of the past as seen from various positions and points of view. Often, when one reads studies of international mergers and acquisitions, one wonders whose voices are heard in accounts about success and failure. It is probably safe to say that most of these studies have a managerial tilt, and that managers’ narratives and the public storytelling of what has happened in an organization (e.g. press releases, annual reports, web-sites) may well con¶ict with and marginalize some voices while privileging others. One of the forces of a narrative approach to organization studies is that it is well suited to give voice to a wide range of organizational actors, showing in which ways their interpretations of organizational reality may correspond and diŸer. The narrative approach enables the researcher to see the organization in an integration perspective, in a diŸerentiation perspective, and in a fragmentation perspective (Martin 1992), all at the same time. Or put diŸerently, to see that which is agreed upon by all organizational members, that which is shared only within certain groups, and that which is fragmented and ambiguous. In this essay I apply a narrative approach to the study of change processes in a telecommunications company. The Danish company Fonodan was ªrst acquired by a British corporation and then, after four years, by a German MNC. Martine C. Gertsen and I followed these developments closely, collecting a considerable number of stories about the organization and the organizational changes that took place.2 These stories were related to us in narrative interviews with numerous organizational actors at diŸerent hierarchical levels at diŸerent points in time over a period of six years. Some were told in an emotional voice, others in a highly factual way and in a distant tone, but all had plots, motives and characters. Such a longitudinal study of organizational narratives is well suited to clarify changing patterns of identiªcation, justiªcation, and causation among organizational actors. It is also useful when assessing to what extent understandings of what is going on in post-acquisition integration processes are shared, and if such understandings can be used strategically in the form of corporate storytelling. 2. An earlier and diŸerent version of this essay: “Tales of Trial and Triumph: A Narratological Perspective on International Acquisition”, written by Martine C. Gertsen and I, has been published in Cary Cooper and Alan Gregory (eds.) (2000): Advances in Mergers and Acquisitions, Volume 1. London: Elsevier.

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However, before I revert to the study of sensegiving and sensemaking processes in the company Fonodan, let me elaborate on the theoretical framing of this narrative analysis.

Theoretical perspectives Over the past 20 years, an increasing number of organizational theorists interested in understanding the social construction of organizations have shifted their attention from the study of organizational structures to the analysis of the interaction processes through which organizations are constituted and maintained over time (Weick 1995). Rather than being taken for granted as a phenomenon, the organization became the very phenomenon to be explained. A variety of perspectives have been put forward to describe the organizing processes by which organizations emerge from interaction and how they are reproduced in the course of daily routines. Among the metaphors used to describe organizing, that of a grammar suggested by Weick has been particularly in¶uential. Such a metaphor drove communication and organization scholars’ attention from the content of organizational activities to the implicit rules and schemata involved in organizing. The section below is devoted to a presentation of the theoretical concepts and models used in this essay to analyze a collection of organizational narratives. First, Weick’s concept of sensemaking is brie¶y introduced along with Gioia and Chittipeddi’s concept of sensegiving. Afterwards, I deªne a narrative as well as narratology, before ªnally introducing the main components of Greimas’ narrative grammar, which he developed into an “actantial model”.

What is sensegiving and sensemaking? Weick (1995) reminds us that storytelling is a process of making sense of actions, events and objects, or of explaining the relationships between them. Members of an organization make sense of processes or activities in the organization by ªtting them into an interpretative scheme or system of meaning that has developed through experience and socialization. When the organization is altered in some drastic way, for example by a reorganization brought on by post-acquisition integration processes, members often ªnd that their existing interpreting schemes or frames of reference no longer su¹ce to make sense of the situation. According to Weick, what they need in such a situation is a good story: (…) something that preserves plausibility and coherence, something that is reasonable and memorable, something that embodies past experience and expectations,

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

something which resonates with other people, something that can be constructed retrospectively, but also can be used prospectively; something that captures both feeling and thought, something that allows for embellishment to ªt current oddities, something that is fun to construct. In short, what is necessary in sensemaking is a good story (Weick 1995: 60–61).

When organizational members are in need of new interpretation patterns, an MD or other top managers can attempt to articulate or advocate their vision or preferred interpretive scheme, thus engaging in sensegiving processes and in¶uencing the sensemaking processes of internal and external stakeholders. As Watson states: Human beings, who join work organisations with all sorts of interests, wants, needs of their own, will not be drawn together into the sort of positive cooperative eŸort typically required in modern organisations by systems and rules alone. To contribute initiative and give commitment to a broader purpose shared with others, the work needs to be made meaningful to people (Watson 1994: 33).

Sensegiving processes take place not only between top and middle managers but also between managers and employees. Initiatives can also be taken at the organizational level to give sense to organizational change processes, through corporate storytelling that frames the actual and future situation and the common values in understandable and evocative terms. Sensegiving is diŸerent from sensemaking, in that the person trying to give sense is attempting to in¶uence other people to perceive and interpret certain actions and events in particular ways. In their study of strategic change processes, Gioia and Chittipeddi found that: … ‘sensemaking’ has to do with meaning construction and reconstruction by the involved parties as they attempted to develop a meaningful framework for understanding the nature of the intended strategic change. ‘Sensegiving’ is concerned with the process of attempting to in¶uence the sensemaking and meaning construction of others toward a preferred deªnition of organizational reality (Gioia and Chittipeddi 1991: 442).

Theoretically, at any particular time, one can thus distinguish between sensegiving and sensemaking. In practice, however, it is most often the case that people engage in sensegiving based on their sensemaking processes. In their study, Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991: 438–441) describe a change process as beginning with the envisioning phase, progressing through the signaling and re-visioning phases, only to ªnish oŸ, nice and neatly, with the energizing phase. However, it might be di¹cult to distinguish so distinctly between diŸerent phases. It must also be emphasized that in so far it is possible to give sense in organizational change processes, sensegiving is not initiated by the upper-echelon members alone. It resides rather in the interaction/negotiation between diŸerent organizational actors in which some beliefs/interpretations are exchanged and new ones adopted. As Kanter et al. state:

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Change is extraordinarily di¹cult, and the fact that it occurs successfully at all is something of a miracle. Change is furthered, however, if and when an organization can strike a delicate balance among the key players in the process. No one person or group can make change ‘happen’ alone — not the top of the organization mandating change, not the middle implementing what the top had ordained, and not the bottom ‘receiving’ the eŸorts. (…) Those who make change must also grapple with unexpected forces both inside and outside the organization. (…) No matter how carefully the leaders prepare for change, and no matter how realistic and committed they are, there will always be factors outside of their control that may have a profound impact on the success of the change process. Those external, uncontrollable, and powerful forces are not to be underestimated, and they are one reason why some researchers have questioned the manageability of change at all (Kanter et al. 1992: 370; 374).

Kanter et al. believe that it is possible to point to three organizational change agents: ªrst, change strategists, such as top managers, who create a vision and in¶uence the direction of any given change; second, change implementers who enact the vision, and ªnally, change recipients who interpret and try to make sense of the changes induced on them — or fail to adopt the change plans. In this essay I have chosen the narrative approach to gain access to diŸerent organizational actors’ sensegiving and sensemaking processes in post-acquisition processes, as they displayed these in my interviews with them. I am curious to know how top and middle managers, as change strategists, may seek to in¶uence the lower echelons in the organization through corporate storytelling. But I also want to investigate how the addressees interpret these sensegiving attempts, how they, as change implementers, integrate events and actions into a plot in order to make the organizational changes understandable for themselves in relation to their local context, and how they reinterpret and enact leaders’ visions of organizational change.

What is a narrative? Narrating is a fundamental human activity, a mode of thinking and being. We constantly tell and interpret narratives (Currie 1998). We organize our experience and our memory of what has happened mainly in the form of narrative — stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing. We tell narratives in order to understand our own as well as the lives of other people (Polkinghorne 1988). In this essay, I use the terms “narrative”, “story” and “tale” interchangeably, but in the literature the term “narrative” is usually preferred. Drawing on Bruner (1991), I focus on ªve essential characteristics in the working deªnition of a narrative. Each of these ªve attributes is a necessary but not su¹cient deªning criterion of a narrative.

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

1. Narratives are accounts of events occurring over time Any narrative has a chronological dimension; it is made up of a sequencing of events spaced and related along a line of time. Events can be deªned as “the transition from one state to another, caused or experienced by actors” (Bal 1985: 13). The basic question concerning the structure of a story is: what happens next? However, a narrative’s discourse does not have to present the story in purely chronological fashion; it may easily execute a ¶ashback and/or a ¶ash forward. A narrative can be primarily concerned with recollections of past events, or with sequences of actions and events taking place in present time, such as the narrating of ongoing actions, strategies, and reactions of other organizational actors. Eventually, a narrative may focus on the future, as with sequences of events such as threats or planning of actions (Ochs 1997). Hence, the speciªc punctuation of a course of events is a central issue. Horsdal describes the narrative’s temporal aspect in this way: We create meaning in the movement of life by experiencing it as a series of events, a narrative. We interfere with the course of time with beginnings and endings, which enclose and demarcate a sequence, so that we can ascribe meaning to it (Horsdal 1999: 27–my translation).

Narratologists often distinguish between “discourse time” — the time it takes to listen to or read a passage or a whole narrative — and “story time”, which is more like clock time and refers to the actual duration of the action episode or the whole action narrated. The relationship between “discourse time” and “story time” is important when we interpret narratives. An episode told in such a way that its “discourse time” is considerably shorter than its “story time” typically characterizes a summary or a panoramic mode of presentation in which the narrator condenses a sequence of actions into a thematically focused account. In contrast, events experienced as crucial to a given plot are typically narrated in more detail — such as a scene with a continuous stream of detailed actions instead of just a summary. Thus, “discourse time” approaches “story time” in the focal points of narratives (Chatman 1978; Genette 1980). 2. Narratives are retrospective interpretations of sequential events from a certain point of view When a narrator tells of an event, he or she relates the event to a human project and thereby integrates it into a plot structure, making it understandable from a certain point of view and in a particular context. The basic question concerning plot structure is: why does this happen? A narrative is composed of a sequence of particular events that are given meaning by a plot. This is the basic means by which a course of events is interwoven into a coherent and meaningful whole. The narrator imposes the plot on the

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events when he or she selects, prioritizes and orders the events from a certain point of view and in a particular context, determining the delineation and demarcation of the course of events. The plot involves a temporal ordering of these events, suggesting a connection between them and providing an explanation from a particular point of view. This connection may be a causal relationship, although narrative accounts cannot provide causal explanations, only interpretations of why a character acted as he or she did. 3. Narratives focus on human action — the action of the narrator and others What happens in narratives is typically explained by the imputations that constitute consciously intended doings of actors. We might say that their actions are emplotted, thereby becoming events in the narrative, through publically available resources for assembling intentionality. In the last part of this essay, where I analyze a selection of organizational narratives, the narrators (the interviewees) themselves are actors. They are simultaneously embedded in their account, displaying an awareness of their own roles in it while telling it to the interviewer. In addition to the general term “actor”, some narratologists also use the more speciªc term “character”. However, these two terms are not quite interchangeable (Bal 1985). Whereas the term “actor” normally emphasizes a structural position in the plot (what is done?; which actions are carried out?), the term “character” denotes a more complex semantic unit. The narrator creates a character (e.g. a hero; a villain), who is described by deriving a collection of more or less coherent personality traits from the narrative (what is he or she like?; how can we characterize him or her?). 4. Narrating is part of identity construction processes We use narratives to create or support identities in various manners. A narrator’s adopted identity has a central in¶uence on the narrative being told. In turn, the narrative may help the narrator construct, reinforce or change his or her identity as well as that of others. Identities are not constructed in isolation; we share our stories with others and also adjust them to their reactions. Individuals speak of their experiences by converting them into coherent accounts — stories about themselves and “the others” acting more or less purposefully in a social world. The social and personal identities that individuals create in organizational change processes are manifold and often intertwined. In some narratives a professional identity, such as an engineer, is salient; in other narratives the same narrator displays an organizational identity (e.g. we from Fonodan vs. those from Electra), a regional identity (e.g. we from Northern Jutland vs. the new manager from Copenhagen), a national identity (e.g. we Danes vs. the British) or a gender identity (e.g. we as men in the R&D department vs. the female production workers).

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

5. Narratives are co-authored by the audience Individuals are not the only authors of the narratives they tell. The telling of narratives is a social act, involving some degree of negotiation with the interlocutors about positions and meanings, which in¶uence the direction of the narrative and its form (Bakhtin 1981). Such co-authorship is also the case for the stories I have been told in Fonodan where I, as an interviewer, have taken the initiative to set up the interviews, have asked certain questions, made small comments and otherwise contributed to the narrators’ storytelling. Narrative interviews should therefore not be seen as representing the organizational actors’ reality as such, but rather as the narrators’ construction of more or less coherent narratives in their interaction with a speciªc audience. While keeping in mind that narrative interviews represent nothing other than themselves, the stories expressed by practitioners in such encounters are well rehearsed and crafted in a legitimate logic. It is therefore highly unlikely that organizational actors would construct whole new plots just for the sake of some researcher who happened to visit a company and conduct some interviews. Furthermore, we may assume that the interpretations and perceptions presented by practitioners in narrative interviews also inform their actions in the world (Czarniawska 2002a). This is one of the primary reasons why we bother to collect and analyze organizational stories in the ªrst place. Narrative interviews as accounts of organizational change processes may moreover be understood in terms of the narrators’ desire to construct themselves as heroes, survivors or undeserved victims (Gabriel 2000), to create certain impressions of rationality, brightness or moral integrity, and to present themselves so that their emotions and actions seem reasonable and worthy of the interlocutor’s empathy (Ochs 1997; Alvesson and Deetz 2000).

What is narratology? Narratology, which began as a science of narrative form and structure in literature studies, is the theory and systematic study of narrative (Currie 1998). During the twentieth century, the discipline diversiªed into several other ªelds. In the 1980s, narratology underwent a transition from the almost exclusively literary formalist and structuralist approaches into a theory complex applicable to narratives wherever they are found, not only in literature. The scope of narratology massively expanded into the newborn discipline of cultural studies, and narratologists began analyzing, for instance, ªlms, advertisements and jokes (Currie 1998). Nevertheless, narratology is most commonly associated with structuralist literary criticism. Within this approach, one of the most in¶uential is Greimas’ actantial model that I present here in detail.

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Algirdas J. Greimas developed his actantial model in Sémantique structurale (1966), on the basis of the Russian scholar Vladimir Propp’s analyses of the morphology of folktales (Propp 1928). Greimas deªnes an actant as a structural unit or a function. It is not necessarily a person (a character) that represents an actant; it may also be an abstraction (e.g. success) or an institution (e.g. the banking system; the telecommunications industry). Greimas’ narrative schema deªnes an inventory of actants, forming a basic set of relations. He posits six actants in three pairs of binary opposition, which describe fundamental patterns in narratives: – – –

subject/object: desire, search or aim power/receiver: transport, communication helper/opponent: auxiliary support or hindrance

The subject-actant is following an aim, aspiring towards a goal (e.g. a prince ªghting a dragon to win the princess; a manager working hard for his company’s survival). The object-actant is not necessarily a human being (though it may be — e.g. a princess in a fairy tale). It can also consist in reaching a certain state (e.g. wisdom; proªtability; an increase in salary). The power-actant may be a person (e.g. the king; the chairman of the board) but is often an abstraction (e.g. fate; cleverness; society). Therefore, I prefer with Bal (1985) to label this a power-actant instead of a sender-actant. The receiver-actant is often the same person as the subject-actant, and in the case of empirical narratives, frequently identical with the narrator. The helper-actant and the opponent-actant may similarly be either persons or abstractions — benevolent or malevolent in their quest for the desired object. In other words, the helper may be hard work, an innovative engineer or a fairy godmother, whereas the opponent may be laziness, a strong competitor or a vicious dragon. Greimas’ actantial model is structural; it describes the relations between diŸerent kinds of phenomena, not primarily the phenomena themselves. Its assumption is that these relations between classes of phenomena form the basis of the narrative. Below I illustrate the actantial model with a typical fairy tale of a prince who combats an evil to free a princess, after which he receives her hand in marriage from her father, the king (see Figure 1). Greimas developed the actantial model to understand the plot structures underlying literary ªction. Though the organizational narratives studied in this essay do not demonstrate the premeditated complexity or depth found in much ªction, there is no structural diŸerence between literary ªction and organizational narratives. The actantial model can elucidate how employees and managers understand organizational change processes after an acquisition, throwing light on changing interpretations of the role of various actors as well as of challenges facing the organization.

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

Power – The mighty king

→

Object – The princess

→

Subject – The prince from a ← – neighboring kingdom

→

Receiver – The prince

↑ Helper – The prince’s fairy – godmother who gives – him a magic sword

Opponent – The vicious dragon – who has captured – the princess

Figure 1.

Empirical material and methodology In 1994 my colleague, Martine Gertsen, and I contacted some Danish mobile telephone companies that had been acquired by foreign MNCs. We gained access to them by explaining that we, as management scholars, were interested in intercultural communication and management; that integration processes in acquired companies had not yet been studied very much, and that the voices of employees were seldom heard and reported on in studies of international mergers and acquisitions. Framing our research agenda in this way to gain access to the organizations helped make central organizational actors in the companies interested in contributing to our research project by storytelling about the integration processes. One way to study storytelling in organizations is to collect stories as and when they occur as part of organizational talk. It demands very time-consuming anthropological ªeldwork in the organization and in “natural” organizational settings these stories are often both fragmented and terse (Boje 1991). When we started our empirical investigations in Fonodan in 1994, we decided to conduct a series of interviews and thereby elicit stories about the acquisitions and the integration processes. Not only did we interview top managers but also a large number of employees at lower hierarchical levels, e.g. unskilled workers, shop foremen, secretaries, R&D engineers, accountants, human resource managers and sales people. We also interviewed representatives of trade unions and local trade councils as well as the director of the regional science park, to gain an impression of the company’s interaction with the local community before and after the international acquisitions. Our perspective explored mainly that of the acquired company. However, we also had the opportunity to interview expatriate managers sent to Denmark by the head o¹ce. We carried out ªeldwork every year in the period 1994–1999.3 In this way we had the chance to follow developments and shifting interpretations in the ac3. For more results on our research on international acquisitions in the Danish electronics industry, see Gertsen and Søderberg 1998a; 1998b; 1999a; 1999b; 2000; Gertsen, Søderberg and Torp 1998; Søderberg, Gertsen and Vaara 2000.

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quired Danish company over a long period of time, even though, of course, we only obtained “snapshots” of a long course of events when we visited the company for short periods. The primary method for collection of our empirical material was semi-structured interviews. Most of the interviews, however, were narrative in nature; i.e. the interviewees were deliberately encouraged to describe their work situation and their perception of critical events in relation to the foreign acquisitions and the following integration processes, and to do it in their own words with as few interruptions as possible from the interviewer. We tried to elicit stories by asking a few, very open questions and explaining the point of our research. The interviewees might have retold stories, which already circulated in the organization and gave sense to events and actions attracting attention and calling for interpretation. But the interviews themselves were at the same time a site for narrative production (Czarniawska 2002a). Therefore, the co-authorship of the collected narratives should be taken into consideration. As Gabriel puts it: (…) they are part of the dyadic research relationship rather than of organizational discourse proper. Nevertheless, in as much as certain stories become embedded in an organization’s culture or subcultures, they may be re-created for the beneªt of the researcher in a very telling manner, as though they were signiªcant artifacts or heritage ªgures, unchanged by the circumstances of their presentation (Gabriel 2000: 137).

The researcher may ask clarifying questions to further elucidate particular aspects of the story told. However, it is crucial that the storyteller feels that these questions are asked in the interest of a deeper understanding of his or her world and are driven by the interviewer’s empathy. Gabriel (2000) recommends the researcher to take on the role of a “fellow-traveller” during the narrative, showing interest and pleasure in the storytelling process. We succeeded in being “fellow-travellers” to a great extent and therefore had the opportunity to do a longitudinal study. Many of our interviewees spontaneously commented on the interviews as a welcome opportunity to re¶ect on the integration process and their experiences of it and to do so from a wide perspective that cut across the way they traditionally reported on success and failure in their positions as managers and employees. Some managers even contacted us to ask when we planned to make our next annual visit to the company to conduct a new series of interviews. While acknowledging that interviewing can never be a method for tapping abundant, objective “facts” and “information” about the organizational “reality” (Czarniawska 2002a), as sometimes seems to be implicitly assumed in management and organization studies, the use of narrative interviews enables the researcher to grasp representations of reality in their becoming, by focusing on the inherent structural foundation of the plots practitioners express orally. One of the

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

primary reasons for doing narrative interviews in this longitudinal study was to experience the ongoing and shifting construction and reproduction of organizational actors’ identiªcations and plot structures. The narrative perspective thus underpins the importance of dynamic and shifting understandings and representations, based on a common set of structural features in the narrative production. At the same time, the narrative approach encourages the embracing of a polyphonic understanding of the world. By listening to diŸerent kinds and layers of actors within the organizational hierarchy, our overall research approach and agenda was rather diŸerent from mainstream approaches in studies of international mergers and acquisitions. We encouraged diŸerent understandings and interpretations of the world rather than looked for “one truth out there”. The company Fonodan went through numerous ªnancial crises and considerable organizational change during the six-year period when the narrative interviews were conducted. Change is an integral part of daily life in organizations, but tends to be especially comprehensive, sudden, and dramatic in international acquisitions. In the collected interviews, storytelling about “us” and “them” is very prominent in situations where organizational changes may threaten the organizational actors’ way of making sense of the world. Moreover, top managers feel a special need to account for past, present and future actions. They want to justify actions to themselves and others. They feel a desire to control the actual situation (at least in their minds). And they try to plan ahead and thus make sense of what they do and what is happening to them and the organization. These accounts are often communicated in a narrative mode and can thus be seen as the top managers’ storytelling about various actions and events that are given certain meanings as part of the plots they are continually constructing and revising. Although our interview guides were gradually modiªed to take advantage of emerging themes, and although we tried hard not to impose our deªnitions of what was important or especially interesting, a common set of themes and issues for each set of interviews allowed us to analyze diŸerences in organizational members’ interpretations of certain events and actions and to see changes in their framing of them. All interviews were performed in situ, and lasted approximately one to one and a half hours. We recorded the interviews, took ªeld notes and wrote diaries about our participant observations. Afterwards, all interviews were transcribed verbatim. In what follows, I attempt to view organizing in the acquired Danish company Fonodan as narration, sensegiving and sensemaking. For practical reasons, I am not able to print the narrative interviews in their full length. However, the exemplary narrative told by the British MD at the beginning of this essay gives some idea of their content.

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The “o¹cial” story of Fonodan: A company in the global telecommunications market In Writing Management: Organization Theory as a Literary Genre (1999), Czarniawska argues that we do not distinguish social scientiªc texts such as organization studies from other literary genres such as fairy tales, detective stories or science ªction by the inherent scientiªc qualities of such texts per se, but rather through the narrative conventions they follow. In other words, the fundamental diŸerence between scientiªc and ªctitious realism lies in the textual strategy of the author. One of the most characteristic features of the social scientiªc genre known as organization studies is the use of an objectivist discourse, i.e. the strategic use of devices such as references and “theory”. Another characteristic of this literary genre is the telling of a story about the organization based on “facts”. When visiting an organization for the ªrst time, you will typically be told a particular story: the rational account of how the organization came to look as it does at the moment of your visit — as well as what expectations the organization holds for the future. The story manifests itself in a variety of other ways, e.g. on the Internet, in the press, in annual reports and in job advertisements. We might label such a story of the organization the “o¹cial” story, implicitly indicating that many other stories, understandings, and explanations of organizational reality are on oŸer. Through interviews, reading of newsletters and ªeld studies, I gained a much more complex understanding of Fonodan than what is entailed in the “o¹cial” story of the organization. Throughout the remaining part of this essay I bring these diŸerent interpretations of organizational reality in focus. For the outside observer, however, a basic introduction to the research context is an important foundation for the reading of such competing texts. I therefore invite you to a short visit at Fonodan. So let us step inside the corporate headquarters in the small community in the northwestern part of Denmark and listen to the “o¹cial” story of Fonodan as it was told to visitors in 1999. Fonodan was founded in 1980 by a small group of Danish engineers, developing and manufacturing mobile phones. Fonodan, which became known for an R&D-focused entrepreneurial spirit and a consensus-oriented decision-making style, proved highly successful, expanding from 44 employees in 1981 to 870 employees in 1990. From the very beginning, the majority of Fonodan’s products were sold on export markets. When upper-level management learned that a new pan-European telecommunication standard, the GSM system, was to be established in 1992, they decided to develop a GSM phone together with Northcom, another local producer of mobile phones. This joint development project was technologically successful but proved extremely costly.

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

In 1993, after several years with severe ªnancial di¹culties, the company had to suspend its payments. As soon as this was announced, Fonodan’s 30 R&D engineers met and discussed the fact that there were only three to four GSM R&D groups like them in Europe. This obviously made them attractive as a team. They decided to stay together for a month to investigate the possibilities to attract an acquiring company, even though most of them had already been oŸered jobs in other companies. During this month they contacted several potential purchasers. One of them was the British trading company Electra, whose owner wanted to diversify. He had already for some time been planning to enter the expanding telecommunications market. Electra almost immediately decided to buy Fonodan, sending a British managing director and a couple of other managers from their headquarters to Denmark. Marketing and sales were relatively weak points in the Danish company, and the new management team made great eŸorts to improve the company’s commercial strategy as well as enter into long-term contracts with telecommunication network operators on the European market. Electra was able to purchase components for Fonodan at lower costs, and also invested in new machines for semi-automatic production. Extensive plans were made for mass production and the building of a new factory, but it turned out to be harder than expected to make proªts, why the plans were postponed. In 1997, after almost four years under British ownership, the German multinational industrial group, Gerhard Strohm GmbH, bought Fonodan from Electra. A new production plant aimed at mass production was built. In addition, the Strohm Telecom division invested considerable amounts of money in R&D. Since 1997, the number of employees has increased from 750 to about 1,500. In a country where most companies are small by international standards, the Danish business unit of Strohm Telecom has become the biggest in the region of Northern Jutland.4 Having heard the “o¹cial” story of Fonodan as it was told in 1999, let us take a closer look at how organizational actors construct diŸerent plots and events in narrative form, starting with the narrative that set oŸ this essay — the narrative of the British MD. How did Danny Allen make sense of the course of organizational actions and events back in March 1995?

4. The events of 1997–1999 are not analyzed in this chapter because of space limits, and because they conform to the pattern described in the present analysis. The complete account is to be found in Søderberg 2003.

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Narratives of a telecommunications company in Denmark The British acquisition — The Electra era (1993–1997) The British MD’s narrative — March 1995 The British Managing Director Danny Allen, who was sent to Denmark from late 1993 to 1996, was a self-made man in his mid-ªfties with a long career in sales and management in Electra, including some international experience. When he realized that he no longer had any real career opportunities in the company, he moved to Hong Kong and started a new career path independent of Electra. A year later, Electra’s owner asked him to be Managing Director in the Danish company, promising him relative autonomy in relation to the British headquarters. As MD, Danny Allen devoted himself to a well-deªned goal: to make Fonodan number four in the global market. He was conªdent this will happen: “I know from experience that we have the right product for the market for the next four to ªve years”. He reorganized the management team, introduced strict ªnancial control and personally took action to secure orders from large network operators. Danny Allen believed in his own abilities as a businessman, manager and salesman. He was pleased with the commitment he saw among his Danish managers and employees — a commitment expressed in the production workers’ and union representatives’ wage restraint and the generally high level of cost consciousness developed after a shock produced by the company’s suspension of payments. The British MD looked upon the young human resource manager as his helper and ally, and openly admitted that he used her in a somewhat problematic role, as a “spy” among the other Danish managers: But I still needed to know what was happening at these management meetings. Therefore I made sure that the human resource manager attended every meeting, so that she could advise me of the progress of the managers: are they good enough?

He mobilized his helpers (the human resource manager) and his allies (the production workers). With these people to help him, he was convinced he could reach his goal. However, Danny Allen also saw himself as a decisive agent when things go well. He described himself as strong, experienced, dynamic, an international businessman, and he added: “I have a strong personality and I tend to get my way due to force and arrogance”. This is unlike the Danish managers. They are described as likeable, but according to the British MD, they need to be taught quick decision-making and need to develop a stronger market-orientation. Danny Allen saw the Danish middle managers’ decision-making processes and the engineers’ focus on technology, instead of market needs as obstacles that must be overcome. He interpreted these attitudes as remnants’ of the former management’s ine¹ciency. He was also somewhat

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

critical of the considerable power the Danish unions have but admits that the union representatives have been quite cooperative so far. Applying Greimas’ actantial model, the narrative structure of the British MD’s story can be systematized as in Figure 2.

The shop steward’s narrative — March 1995 The shop steward Jonna Jensen, a woman in her forties, organizes her narrative in a series of events and selects certain happenings as crises or transitions, important from her point of view. These events are described in greater detail; for example, the day when all employees were informed about the company’s suspension of payments and dismissal of all employees: In August 1993 we got a big shock. Everybody was summoned to a meeting in our canteen. There, a lawyer brie¶y told us that the company had no money left and had to send us home. Afterwards, we were sort of stunned — we didn’t know what to do. Some went home right away, but a lot of us stayed on and talked for hours. Some even cried. What happened after the suspension of payments was just terrible. Fonodan was a big company in a small community. Everybody was out of work, shops in the village closed, and so on.

At such a stage in the narrative, “discourse time” expands, and the narrative becomes more scenic. Also in other situations of threat, trial and transition, the shop steward tells more about her own and her co-workers’ feelings, thus appealing to the listener’s sympathy. Power – Electra

→

→ Object – To become number four in the global market for mobile phones

Receiver – Fonodan

↑ Helper → – (The MD’s) fast decision-making and sales experience – (The workers’) wage restraint – The human resource manager – (All employees’) costconsciousness and corporate commitment

Figure 2.

Subject – Fonodan

←

Opponent – (Middle management’s) slow decision-making – (Engineers’) narrow product focus – Potential union demands for higher wages

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The shop steward made sense of some initiatives taken by the British MD to alter the existing value and meaning systems of Fonodan. In the interview she told us that there is no longer free coŸee for the employees, and the cleaning standard is also lower than it was before. But these actions are justiªed as more or less symbolic actions to introduce a higher cost-consciousness and emphasize the need for strict ªnancial control in every aspect of work life. The shop steward spoke in such a way that she was speaking on behalf of all the female production workers, who are the subjects of her narrative. She did not draw special attention to her own actions, but tended to use the personal pronoun “we” rather than “I” (“We knew that Fonodan wasn’t going well”; “we got a big shock”, etc). She clearly identiªed with the group of female workers she represented, though this does not mean that she was in opposition to the British managers. On the contrary, in her narrative, the workers all desire the same thing: jobs and as much job security as possible. To some extent, she even included the entire local community as the subject. Fonodan’s suspension of payments was truly a traumatic event, which had a massive impact on the small community since hundreds of employees lost their jobs overnight. Therefore the object of securing jobs is not just desired by the workers but by all who depend directly or indirectly on their income. The receiver is identical with the subject, and the power providing the desired object is clearly the British acquiring company, Electra. The British MD represents this power — he is the hero and the savior in Jonna Jensen’s story. The shop steward does not seem to distinguish clearly between Danny Allen and Electra: “The way I see it, Danny saved us, didn’t he? If Electra hadn’t bought Fonodan, we’d still be out of work”. The former management of the Danish company is identiªed as the culprit: it was at least partly because of their ine¹cient leadership and lack of strict ªnancial control that the workers lost their jobs. The helpers are indicated rather vaguely, but it is worth noticing that the shop steward mentions the workers’ own voluntary wage restraint as something that might make their jobs more secure. Still, it is not emphasized as a crucial fact and could not by itself have brought about the desired object. The central agent in the narrative is obviously Electra. In the shop steward’s story, the workers are rather powerless themselves. She sees herself and the other workers as agents only to a very limited extent. They do not make things happen — things happen to them. Her world-view is moreover fatalistic; the workers are not responsible: I’ve been in production since 1990, and we’ve had our ups and downs. That’s the way it is — in electronics, anyhow. It goes very fast, sometimes up, sometimes down. We’re also paid less than before — actually, now, we get less than workers do in other companies in this area. But the pay system is better now, because everyone is paid in the same way — by the hour. Now, some girls are laid oŸ if there isn’t anything to do

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

in the production. But we’re content with that — it’s unsatisfactory to sit around, knit or do crosswords. And it was also too expensive for the company. We realize that the electronics industry is extremely competitive, and if the company does well ªnancially, we can feel more secure in our jobs.

Generally, the shop steward tends to accept the situation as it is: “Everything new is somewhat di¹cult” is her soothing remark about the smoking policy introduced by the British management, which has provoked some resistance from other workers. Obvious di¹culties such as board meetings in English and partly unsuccessful negotiations are met with comments such as: “It’s no problem, really”, “Otherwise, things go well” and “We can talk about most things”. Even though she is not only a shop steward but also a member of the regional executive committee of the Female Workers’ Union, you can hardly hear the voice one might expext of a trade union representative. Cuts in wages and beneªts are met with the attitude: “Before, we may have been a bit spoilt” and “We weren’t clever enough to get all of the beneªts back”. Here, she takes a very (self-)critical perspective on the workers and their actions. In this narrative, Bakhtin’s concepts of “polyphony” and “dialogism” can be used to illustrate how diŸerent voices are intermingled. We hear the management’s voice in her narrative (“It was also too expensive for the company”). She accepts and justiªes the wage reductions and changes in working conditions by using an egalitarian perspective (“the pay system is better now, because everyone is paid in the same way”). Finally, we hear her individual voice (“The way I see it, Danny saved us”) when she refers to her own and other workers’ experiences with unemployment in the vulnerable local community. The shop steward actually described that it was the workers’ own fault that they did not achieve a better result during the negotiations between union representatives and employers. She might instead have blamed the British employers for being unfair and unwilling to see that the workers’ demands were reasonable and in line with working conditions in other Danish companies in the region. By adding that the workers used to be “spoilt” (i.e. the former management spent too much money on them), she even — on behalf of the group — accepts part of the blame for the suspension of payments. It is also worth noticing that the shop steward tells her tale with some pathos and in an emotional voice. She describes how she and the other workers felt at various points in time: they “got a big shock”, “cried”, “felt excited”, “satisªed”, etc. She focuses more on feelings than on attempting to explain what has happened in terms of causal relationships. But this is hardly just a question of narrative style; it also indicates that certain causal relationships concerning the company’s successes and failures may not be visible at all from her point of view. Applying Greimas’ actantial model, the narrative structure of the shop steward’s story can be systematized in Figure 3.

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Power – Electra – Danny Allen (the British MD)

→

→

Receiver – The female production workers

Subject ← – The female production workers – The local community

Opponent – Remnants of the ine¹cient management of “old Fonodan”

Object – Jobs – Job security

↑ Helper → – (The female production workers’) voluntary wage restraint

Figure 3.

The human resource manager’s narrative — March 1995 Tina Berggren is a young woman in her early thirties. She tells her narrative in a very energetic and optimistic voice. She has been with the company for several years, but has only recently been promoted by the British MD from a relatively modest administrative position to her present job as human resource manager. She is enthusiastic about Fonodan, which has “always been known as a great place to work; there is a special spirit here — zest and openness”. She does not hesitate to place the responsibility for Fonodan’s suspension of payments with the former management’s lack of ªnancial control: “They were very spendthrift. Their cash box was always open, so to speak”. But she is conªdent that the new management is in the process of bringing ªnances under control, and she sees herself as an important change implementer. In her negotiations with the shop steward and in her recruiting eŸorts she wants to give sense to the company’s restrictive wages policy. She argues for a high level of cost-consciousness among the employees and appeals to individual responsibility to improve the company’s ªnancial situation in a competitive environment. These are her examples of conscious attempts to alter the current way of thinking and acting in the company. She also says that “Electra realizes that Fonodan’s relationship with its employees is crucial. Therefore, Danny [the British MD] asked me to work out a new personnel policy for our company by myself, and I’m now busy implementing it”. In fact, the successful implementation of this policy is her object. She feels that the lack of professional human resource management has been a problem and that more emphasis must be placed on the employees’ personal and professional development. In her narrative she tells about her sensegiving initiatives in relation to the employees. She tries “to make it clear to them that it’s their own responsibility to stay qualiªed, for instance by attending various types of courses during periods of unemployment”. Most employees are interested in

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

doing so, but a few seem unwilling to learn, wanting things to stay the same. Still, although there is a lot of work ahead, Tina Berggren believes that with the good company spirit and with the experienced and charismatic MD Danny Allen as helpers, she will be able to move the company in the right direction. It is evident in this narrative that the human resource manager identiªes strongly with Fonodan, with the new British owner and the British expatriate MD. She expresses admiration for the MD and appreciates the career opportunity he has given her. But she also feels that she, with a university background and longer experience in Fonodan, can be of considerable assistance to him. She emphasizes that she is theoretically up-to-date and familiar with the newest ideas in human resource management. She distances herself from the former Danish management and from employees who are not su¹ciently qualiªed or willing to learn and develop — personally as well as professionally. As she sees it, this is absolutely necessary in order to work in a professional high-tech company in a highly competitive industry. Those colleagues who do not realize this are opponents to her project. Applying Greimas’ actantial model, the narrative structure of the human resource manager’s story can be systematized in Figure 4.

The project manager’s narrative — April 1996 Let us now turn to one of the stories collected from the middle management level, one year later. The narrator, Peter Sonne, is an engineer in his early thirties, who is employed as a project manager in the R&D department. Basically, the project manager’s story is about his endeavors to establish a wellfunctioning research team, which carries out technologically-interesting projects in a successful manner. This is his object. He is conªdent that he will succeed in this

Power – Electra – Danny Allen (the British MD)

→ Object

→ Receiver

– Implementation of a new, professional human resource policy

↑

→ Subject Helper – The special Fonodan – Tina Berggren as a spirit competent human – Support from the resource manager British Figure 4.

– Fonodan

← Opponent – Remnants of the former managers’ ine¹cient management style Incompetent employees

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— helped by, among others, the British production manager, who has a good technological understanding and is an intelligent engineer. Still, the narrator does meet some obstacles along the way — often because of the British MD who, as the narrator sees it, sometimes makes the wrong decisions because his understanding of the complicated GSM technology is insu¹cient. In addition, he is unwilling to listen to the engineers’ expert advice. Furthermore, the British MD does not understand that it is necessary to invest considerable capital in R&D to reach the company’s goal: to be a global player in telecommunication. Intertwined with the main narrative are a couple of other success stories, both about the engineers’ triumphs as a group and about Peter Sonne’s individual achievements in a more personal career perspective. One narrative is about the pioneering development of the ªrst GSM phone; another is about the engineers’ initiative to contact potential acquiring companies after Fonodan had suspended its payments and dismissed its employees. In a very rationalistic voice, Peter Sonne tells about the engineers’ initiative to ªnd a new owner: In the R&D department, we were all well aware of the company’s problems, so it wasn’t unexpected when it was announced in August 1993 that Fonodan had to suspend all payments. The majority of us were immediately oŸered jobs in other electronics companies in the region. But we decided to wait one month and give our R&D team a chance to stay together. We contacted quite a few European companies who might ªnd our group of experts in GSM technology attractive. Electra wanted to get access to the expanding telecommunications industry, and Electra’s owner very quickly decided to employ us.

He emphasizes causal relationships and, in contrast to the shop steward Jonna Jensen, he does not describe his own feelings or those of others. Technology plays a decisive role in his narrative, not the concern for other groups of employees in the company: It won’t be worthwhile to move the factory to a developing country because of cheaper labor. In a couple of years, most production processes will be automated, and we’ll need very few people — and probably no unskilled workers at all.

As demonstrated above, the project manager identiªes strongly with the group of R&D engineers as a team of experts and often uses the pronoun “we” (e.g. “we were all well aware of the company’s problems”), whereas top management is perceived as “the others”. Except for top management, he does not refer to people or departments outside R&D. His world is primarily that of the engineers. At the same time, Peter Sonne is also an individual who sees his job as a choice: “It must be fun and technologically challenging”. He displays no emotional attachment to the company, knowing that as a competent engineer he has a number of alternatives in the job market. He appreciates his colleagues in the R&D depart-

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

ment (“We work well together as a team”), but what really matters is the R&D content of the projects he is assigned to. Applying Greimas’ actantial model, the narrative structure of the project manager’s story can be systematized in Figure 5.

The human resource manager’s narrative — April 1996 The human resource manager, Tina Berggren, starts her second narrative in this way: “People ask: `But isn’t your job just exciting?’ and yes it is, but most of all it’s hard work and very stressful”. It has been much more di¹cult than she expected to reach the object of implementing a new human resource policy. She feels that she has been let down by Electra and by the British MD. She has not received the necessary support, and they do not understand or appreciate her ideas. The British are now her opponents, but still the decisive power in her narrative, which makes her position di¹cult. She is proud of the Danish company and assertive when she talks about the well-educated Danish workforce. At the same time she distances herself from the less-educated British decision-makers who are unwilling to spend money on human resource management: For a self-made man like the owner of British Electra who doesn’t have much education, having a foreign high-tech company as a subsidiary was much more demanding than he’d expected. We’ve had to spend a lot of time trying to convince him of all the investments that are needed. Many of our employees are very well-educated and expect their opinions to be taken into account, whereas he’s more used to just issuing orders.

The human resource manager is now very critical of Electra in general and includes other voices of the Danish management in her statement: We had expected more professional competence from Electra. Now, I’ve developed personnel selection and training systems. But Electra and our British expatriate man-

Power – The engineers

→ Object

→ Receiver

– To establish a wellfunctioning group of engineers doing interesting work

↑

– Peter Sonne as an employee

← Opponent → Subject Helper – The intelligent British – Peter Sonne as a project – The overly conªdent production manager manager and technologically incompetent British MD Figure 5.

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agers don’t understand that considerable investment in training and development is necessary. They think that you’re born with certain personal qualiªcations — managerial, for instance — and that you don’t need any more training when you leave university as an engineer. They ªnd it hard to understand that people can learn and develop continually — personally as well as professionally.

She admits that it has been a tough year for her at the psychological level, too. She feels that no one in the company helps her and that she “cannot have a natural and relaxed relationship with colleagues anymore” — perhaps due to the role she has accepted to play as the British MD’s “spy” and ally. But though she sees herself as being in a di¹cult position, isolated in the company, outside the community of Fonodan employees, she is still ªghting for what she believes is right in terms of professional human resource management. Still, though she does not say so directly, I have the impression that sometimes she feels the price she pays is too high. At the end of the interview she expresses some identiªcation with people who have resigned from Fonodan: A few people have left the company. But I think it’s a positive thing if they’ve thought about the sort of life they want to have and have decided they want to do something else. Some of them have worked very hard ever since they graduated from university, and there’s been a lot of pressure here.

Applying Greimas’ actantial model, the narrative structure of the human resource manager’s story can be systematized as in Figure 6.

The British MD’s narrative — April 1996 The British MD was also interviewed again and now Danny Allen tells a story of trials rather than of the expected triumphs. He has not succeeded in making Fonodan number four in the global market, but he explains it by factors outside of his control. Most importantly, the market is → Power – Electra – Danny Allen (the British MD)

Object – Implementation of a new, professional human resource policy

→

Receiver – Fonodan

↑ Helper – None

Figure 6.

→

Subject – Tina Berggren as a human resource manager

←

Opponent – Electra – Danny Allen (the British MD) – Danish colleagues

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

di¹cult and the company is up against strong competitors with well-established brands: It’s not the seller’s market — things have changed. The market is becoming more and more competitive — this means that phones are sold too cheaply. Several new manufacturers have started production. Also, some brands are just too famous for us to compete with — Nokia and Ericsson especially. Fonodan cannot aŸord to promote a brand — it takes years. So the best thing for us to do is to sell to a network operator who puts his own name on the phone.

Now, Danny Allen’s object is more modest: Fonodan’s survival. He hopes he can make the company survive because of his abilities as an experienced businessman, but he does not seem very conªdent. Furthermore, he still experiences the Danish managers as too indecisive to be e¹cient and, due to the poor results, the owner of Electra has refused to invest in a new high-volume production plant, which had been planned at Fonodan for some time. The British MD’s shifting identiªcations from the ªrst to the second interview are remarkable. In the ªrst interview, he identiªes with the task of making Fonodan successful and making the Danish managers e¹cient and professional. At the same time, he dissociates himself from the former Danish management. A shared tale among the British and the Danish managers is that the former management of Fonodan was indecisive, not cost-conscious enough and too consensus-oriented. As Danny Allen sees it, this is why middle managers are still too slow in their decision-making. In the second interview, Danny Allen still identiªes with the task of making Fonodan proªtable to the investors/Electra. At the same time he dissociates himself from the present Danish top managers, whom he experiences as increasingly indecisive. He seems to be somewhat split between a certain identiªcation with the Fonodan engineers’ enthusiastic development of innovative products for the future and his old identiªcation with Electra’s short-term perspective of proªt making. In his ªrst narrative he emphasizes that the British owner had promised he would not interfere in the management of the Danish company. In the second narrative he perceives Electra’s short-term perspective of proªt making as an obstacle to his plans. Now he actually tends to support the engineers in their attempts to obtain more money for R&D from the British owner. He still sees himself as a competent international businessman. But through no fault of his own, he is now up against very tough competition in the market, with no help from anyone else in Fonodan. Applying Greimas’ actantial model, the narrative structure of the British MD’s story can be systematized as in Figure 7. Ten days after this interview, Danny Allen was asked to resign from his position and to return to Electra’s headquarters in London. Electra turned the

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Power – External circumstances – Market developments

→ Object

→

– Fonodan’s survival

↑ Helper → Subject – (The MD’s) abilities as a – Fonodan businessman and a fast decision-maker

←

Receiver – Fonodan

Opponent – Competitors’ wellestablished brands – (The Danish managers’) reluctance to make decisions – (Electra’s owner’s) unwillingness to invest in a new production plant or in new R&D projects

Figure 7.

management of Fonodan over to the Danish operations director, Erik Nielsen. At the same time, 115 workers in the manufacturing unit were laid oŸ. Once again Fonodan faced serious ªnancial problems. Even though the turnover was 910 million DKK in 1996, the net result of Electra’s investment was negative: minus 84 million DKK. However, the R&D department was still successful in technological terms, and due to new product developments, Fonodan was very attractive to investors. Three multinational electronics companies, one Japanese and two German industrial groups, went into negotiations and started a due diligence process. In April 1997 the large German industrial group Gerhard Strohm GmbH acquired Fonodan — o¹cially becoming known as Strohm Telecom DK — and another integration process began, which, strangely enough, conformed to the same narrative structure (Søderberg 2003).

The structure of events: From helper to opponent The narrative approach applied to the collection of interviews analyzed in this chapter oŸers insight into interpretations based on diŸerent perspectives on a chain of events and actions, while at the same time displaying that central actors within an acquired company may have very diŸerent goals and express diŸerent work-views and world-views. The analyses of narrative interviews also exemplify how diŸerent organizational narrators and actors construct diŸerent plots and account for causalities from

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

diŸerent points of view. The analyses demonstrate that the plots and causalities in the narratives told must be seen as a result of both individual and collective processes of selection, hierarchization and sequencing of organizational actions and events. The analyses of narrative interviews have also focused on the narrators’ diŸerent modes of storytelling: rationalistic, seemingly objective accounts on behalf of the company or a particular department, enthusiastic stories about a certain person’s visions and future plans for the company, and tales of personal triumph and managerial success. But there are also tales of trial and failure, told by both top management and people at the lower echelons in the organization, who blame others’ actions or look for cultural diŸerences at a national or an organizational level as explanations for the failure of plans and projects. The longitudinal perspective on organizational change processes as they are experienced and interpreted by diŸerent central actors has enabled me to see some patterns in the way organizational narrators’ stories change and develop over time; from the suspension of payments in 1993, to the situation in 1997 where the company was searching for another strategic partner to survive tough global competition. Although the consequent German acquisition is not reported here in detail, it followed the same structural pattern (Søderberg 2003). Notably, the acquiring company seems to move from a position as power and/ or helper to a position as opponent or a cause of problems as time passed and a new company was about to take over, or had already taken over. Both top and middle managers tend to present themselves as decisive agents when the company experiences success and to place themselves as helpers in the plots they construct. But they tend to tone down the impact of their own decisions when problems arise. Other organizational actors, such as shop stewards, production workers and secretaries, display themselves as agents to a much lesser extent than managers, regardless of whether things go well or not. Managers — like all people — are more than ready to take responsibility when things go well, but they are quick to identify obstacles in the environment, including the foreign acquiring company, when they face di¹culties in implementing their strategic objectives. In times of trial, managers typically point to contextual factors outside their control as opponents and cause of problems, such as the market, the competitors, technological developments and consumers’ changing preferences. Consequently, given the typical narrative emphases involved, managers’ accounts may distort researchers’ conclusions if such tendencies in their storytelling are not detected in studies of factors that lead to success or failure in mergers and acquisitions. Therefore, it is probably wise to always interpret the causal explanations oŸered in qualitative research interviews with a grain of salt. A narratological perspective on interviews can help us to remember that the truth

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of managers and employees’ stories may not lie in the “facts” they recount. What is interesting from a research point of view is rather the way they construct their narratives and retrospectively try to give sense to or make sense of a course of actions and critical events. When reading through the numerous narratives told by managers and other employees in the Danish acquired company, it becomes clear that the changing MDs have had demanding roles to ªll — not just in terms of workload and formal responsibility, but also at the psychological and interpersonal levels. Although the MD’s personality has a bearing on the way he or she leads the company, his or her professional identity and the functions he or she has to undertake are of course not deªned by that person alone, but also by the employees. This makes it very di¹cult or risky for the MD to deviate too much from the expectations concerning the role he or she is to play. The narrative interviews conducted in Fonodan support the impression that one of the leader’s most important functions is to provide the rest of the organization and its environment with the illusion of controllability: the MD is in charge, so the employees need not worry too much. The MD’s role is generally expected to be that of a central and preferably heroic character who assumes personal responsibility for the company’s fate: “Inherent in the idea of `managerial eŸectiveness’ are high self-conªdence, energy, initiative, belief in internal locus of control, being pragmatic and results-oriented” (Alvesson and Deetz 2000: 120). This implies that it will not be acceptable for a manager to voice too much uncertainty and indecision, not even in the face of problems obviously outside his or her control. Moreover, it should be recognized that people in leading positions tend to present themselves and the companies they are in charge of in a good light and thus “dress up for visitors” using a certain self-conscious discursive style and a kind of “logic of representation” (Czarniawska 2002a) sometimes mixed up with elements from other discourses. Although leaders are expected to uphold the illusion of overall controllability, even when an acquired company meets severe internal and external challenges, they might one day also play the role of scapegoats in the stories told (Czarniawska 1997). If a MD is not dismissed in the event of managerial failure, it is implicitly admitted that he or she is not responsible for what happens — and so everyone has to face the uncontrollability of organizational life. But if a MD is dismissed and a new MD takes over, the old one can safely be blamed, and everybody, except perhaps the new MD, can feel secure again and tell each other that someone more competent is now responsible for the development. Hopes and positive expectations are then projected onto the new MD. It is evident that former top managers, when I was told about them in retrospect, tended to play the role of scapegoats in the narratives constructed in

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

the Danish acquired company, e.g. the pre-acquisition Fonodan management team and the British MD Danny Allen. It also seems that top managers themselves are to some degree aware of the risks inherent in their role. Some of them tend to see their job in the context of a “war” or a “game”, and they are very concerned with their personal position and their performance. They seem to display their work life as dramatic and exciting, but also as dangerous, and they are much more interested in concepts of power and success/failure than other employees. All this means that it is misleading in research or business consultants’ reports on organizational change processes when managers’ success narratives are used as the basis of practical guidelines aimed at normative conclusions. From my perspective, it is a pitfall when research on organizational change processes in general, and research on mergers and acquisitions in particular, is based on interviews with managers alone — but this is very often the case.

A structuralist narrative approach to organization studies5 Greimas’ structural actantial model has been criticized for being static. This critique is correct, in the sense that the speciªc ªlling in of the actantial model can be seen as freeze frames; “snapshots” of how a narrator in a given situation relates events he or she has experienced and projects he or she is currently involved in to a researcher. But in the longitudinal study that underlies the analyses of this essay, we ªnd several examples of how the same persons (e.g. the British MD, the human resource manager, the research and development manager and the shop steward) construct very diŸerent stories within a given space of time. The persons, organizations, objects or attributes that appear as helper in one narrative may appear as opponent in a later account. In this sense I have applied the model in an attempt to capture the dynamics of the organization’s and the individual employees’ sensemaking. Here, the strength of the model clearly shows itself, because it can be used to systematize marked changes in the narrators’ perception of themselves and the world. Greimas’ model has also been criticized for not being sensitive to details, because it focuses entirely on observing and ªlling in the various positions/actants and on the forces in play in the tension of the con¶ict axis between helpers and opponents. I share the assessment that Greimas’ model is not in itself a su¹cient tool for analyzing more complex narratives, which is why I have chosen to start the examination of each individual narrative with a more comprehensive analysis of

5. A special thanks to M.Sc. (Econ) SteŸen F. Mathiesen, who assisted me in editing the last version of this essay and committedly contributed to discussions about the strengths and weaknesses of the chosen narrative approach.

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the interview, from where particular concise statements are cited. This analysis also encompasses observations of the chosen narrative style, the relationship between “discourse time” and “story time”, and the narrator’s identity constructions. Not until this stage are the results of the analyses summarized. These results are relevant for the ªlling in of the actantial model, where the focus is on the subject’s (typically the interviewee’s) primary project and on the plot structures the narrator constructs. Greimas has also been criticized for developing Propp’s model of the morphology of Russian folktales into a universal model of how people make sense of the world through its narration. Greimas assumes that people’s sensemaking is founded on a need for producing accounts in which they install themselves as subjects striving to realize a project or a program. Greimas claims that, with the actantial model, he has developed a general model, founded on the assumption that semantic universes are narratively organized. He also claims that all narratives are controlled by a semio-narrative depth structure that, by condensing the narrative’s discursive surface manifestations, can be described through the six actants of the model and the relations established between them. According to him, this depth structure controls any sensemaking and furthermore determines the very organization of the discourse. In this essay I do not take a stand on Greimas’ claim of the universality of the model; I build solely on the belief that within the cultural circle where I have conducted my empirical studies, a repertoire of narrative strategies exists that the interviewees make use of in their narratives to structure the plots they are constructing in their social interaction with me as an interviewer. I only make use of Greimas’ actantial model as an analytical tool, as a method for condensing the diŸerent narrative structures that can be found in the interviews and which have been collected within a well-deªned organizational context. In this way I only use the model heuristically, not ontologically. At no time do I claim that the world, in casu the organization, its surroundings and the people that populate it, is as the interviewees claim it is. I only make use of the model to systematize the interviewees’ diŸerent ways of understanding this world, as expressed in the various narratives they construct. Throughout the analysis these narratives demonstrate very diŸerent ways of making sense of a series of critical events and actions that the interviewees more or less have in common, but to which they ascribe diŸerent weights and importance. I furthermore see possibilities in using the Greimas-inspired narrative analyses in an action research perspective, where, for instance, one enables central actors in an organizational change process to gain insight into some of the other narratives circulating in the organization that they do not necessarily know about. By enabling them to make a change of perspective, for instance by letting the MD

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

and other top managers borrow other views on the organization and to see it from the perspective of the project manager in the R&D department, or the one selling the companies’ products, or the shop steward for the production workers, they can maybe to a greater extent than otherwise, learn to make themselves acquainted with and respect the fact that some people/groups within the organization perceive the world and the actual situation the organization ªnds itself in diŸerently from themselves. At least they choose a diŸerent form of self-representation and use other explanations of the same circumstances when asked to talk about their experiences of the workings and development of the organization in an interview. Such changing perspectives could encourage the actors’ re¶ections on whether they could imagine the organization diŸerently, and if so, how and why it can be perceived diŸerently. I ªnd it essential to give voice to people in the organizational ªeld I have investigated. As a researcher I deconstruct and recontextualize the employees’ constructed reality in this account of international acquisitions. Hence, I think that as an organizational researcher I am morally obliged to listen to these individuals and show empathy towards their interpretations of the world, even though managers and employees, just like anyone in the position of a researcher, do not have a privileged access to any form of objective reality. However, as an organization researcher I can take part in creating a dialogue between diŸerent stakeholders in the ªeld and focus on the dynamics and complexity in the relation between organizational actors and their surroundings, by reconstructing the stories of managers and employees. At the same time, I am well aware that human actors also engage in a physical world with non-human actors, which in¶uence and delimit human actors’ sensemaking through narratives (Mathiesen 2002). Employees in Fonodan relate both to the physical boundaries of the company, such as the company’s buildings and the possibilities they give for social interaction, and to technologies, such as tools and machines. They furthermore relate to the local community, and the region, characterized by massive unemployment, as well as construct an identity-based community as Danes in contrast to the foreign owners, top managers and the company’s headquarters abroad, which, through its geographical distance, also in¶uences managers and employees’ possibilities for action and interpretation. Analyses based on actantial models of an organization’s diŸerent narratives can elucidate for the top management that some people in the organization strive to fulªll very diŸerent projects than the ones the top managers have and try to give sense to. Depending on the identity construction I focus on, diŸerent positions, struggles and opponents appear. The operations manager, for example, who wants to make production more e¹cient and proªtable in a market characterized by tough global competition, is potentially in opposition to the shop steward, for

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whom it is all-important to secure stable work and good pay conditions for union members and for whom the interests of the local community seem more important than the competitive global environment in which the company acts. The actantial model can be used to show that these two organizational actors, as part of their sensemaking narratives about current and future projects, choose to install very diŸerent actants as helpers, respectively opponents, in the completion of the projects they have decided to put into eŸect; perhaps so that the ones that are opponents in one narrative appear as helpers in another. This matter was also exempliªed in the analyses of the British MD, who, with his policy on wage restraint and increased cost-consciousness, was presented as a hero and a savior by the production workers, because they believed in this way he could increase their job security. But the same tight ªnancial policy was seen as a threat by the R&D engineers, because it prevented them from gaining access to the ample resources that make R&D work exciting and challenging and which give them optimal possibilities for developing and bringing new products to the market. The concept of corporate narratives and organizational storytelling (Harben 1998, Larsen 2000) is often oŸered to top management as a managerial tool to construct a coherent story about the company (who is this company? where does it come from? which values does it stand for? what does it strive for?) and thus give sense to diŸerent actions and events. However, the many diŸerent voices in the acquired company as well as their diŸering narratives about the international acquisitions and the following integration processes seem to indicate that it may be very di¹cult to implement such organizational storytelling. In some cases it may even be counterproductive to introduce corporate narratives through conscious eŸorts. However, corporate storytelling might also be used deliberately as a “ªghtback” to extant fragmenting movements within an organization (Larsen 2000). In continuation of the above reasoning, the analyses of the narrative structures in the various stories can also be used to assess the sustainability of top management’s sensegiving eŸorts through corporate storytelling. Such corporate stories deliberately simplify organizational complexity but therefore, can also be used as “guides for action”. However, one should investigate if, for instance, there is a risk that central actors will deconstruct a managerial initiative to give sense to the organization and unify it through a corporate narrative of where it is from, what values it stands for, and what visions management has for the development of the organization. However, narrative analyses can also indicate whether, among the central actors in the organization, there are important strategic alliance partners that predominantly support the sensegiving of top management and in crucial aspects share the understanding of the actual situation of the organization and the strategic goals that top management chooses to direct the organizational development.

Sensegiving and sensemaking in an integration process

To exemplify the problems with the concept of a corporate narrative as a unifying and integrating device, let me revert to the Fonodan case. During the Electra era many employees shared the negative perception of the former Danish management of Fonodan that the shop steward and the human resource manager expressed in their ªrst narratives. But a core group in the company, the R&D engineers, who beneªted from the generous investments in ambitious research projects and succeeded in developing one of the ªrst GSM phones in the world — something that made the company attractive for investors — certainly disagreed in these sensemaking eŸorts. It was not in their interest to support the British MD’s narrative when he tried to give sense to wage restraints and a more costconscious policy. In this essay, sensegiving and sensemaking in connection with organizational changes has been in focus for the study of managers’ and employees’ narratives about an international acquisition of their company and how foreign ownership in¶uenced their everyday life at the work place. This is why the narrative interviews are not just interesting texts that could be separated from their creation context and afterward made the object of a narratological analysis. On the contrary, they have been read, analyzed and thereby recontextualized, in such a way that I as a researcher have felt an obligation towards the organizational practice they refer to and which generates the stories told. This practice, therefore, should also be incorporated in the empirical investigation, analysis and interpretation in organization studies.

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Narrative institutions we organize by The case of a municipal administration* Daniel Robichaud Département de communication Université de Montréal, Canada

In this chapter, I would like to illustrate some of the results of examining organizing processes through the perspective of a narrative framework. Of course, there is actually no such thing as a narrative framework; rather, there are a number of narrative perspectives and narratologies that can shed light on organizations, as the various contributions to this book show (see also Boje 2001; Boje et al. 2001; Czarniawska 2002a for extensive reviews). The narrative framework described in this chapter is part of a noticeable trend in narrative research that has been underrepresented in organizational studies: the narratology inherited from the French structuralist enterprise of the 1960s and the 1970s, best represented by the semiotician Algirdas Julien Greimas (1983, 1987). Strongly structuralist in its ontological assumptions at the outset, the analytical toolbox that Greimas and his followers have created can still be useful to social constructionists describing the institutional forms of action and interaction that pervade organizational life and that infuse the actors with identities, capabilities and projects. Before I make this point, I will present and discuss Greimas’ narratology, especially the aspects of his theory of narrative that have not yet quite pervaded the analysis of organizational processes despite their potential value. Rather than dismissing alternative narratologies, I would like to add to the analytical toolbox of scholars who appreciate the narrative features of organizational life. The story used as an illustration throughout this chapter is that of a Canadian municipal administration engaged in a large process of consultation of its citizens regarding various city management issues. I will describe the ways in * I wish to thank Barbara Czarniawska and Hélène Giroux for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. This text is based on research supported by the Fonds pour la formation de chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche (FCAR), Québec, Canada.

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which the people from the City’s Communication Department went about the organization of the process, and in doing so, engaged the identities and programs of action of numerous actors within the community. I hope to show how a narrative analysis elucidates the constitutive processes inherent in this organizational episode.

A structural narratology Narrative as a structural pattern of organizing The already substantial literature on narrative and organizing oŸers students of organizing processes numerous ways of applying narrative analysis to their research. By far the most common object of inquiry of narrative analysis in organization are the storytelling practices of organizational members, for obvious reasons. The “storytelling organization” perspective developed by David Boje in the past decade is certainly a good example of this trend ( Boje 1991; 1995). The practical accomplishments of sensemaking (Weick 1995), along with power, domination, and hegemony, can certainly be traced back to the narration of stories in various situations by organizational members, as shown by Clair (1993), or Mumby (1987, 1993). In turn, these narratives can be examined in relation to a number of narratologies, depending on the researcher’s interests, theoretical choices, and focus (Boje 2001; Boje et al. 2001). Nonetheless, the basic methods remain the same: collecting a variety of stories in order to capture the richness of organizational life. The narrative interpretation of organizational reality presented here diŸers from the body of literature in that it avoids the “telling” part typically associated with the word story, which is the focus of most narrative analysis. While acknowledging the multiple and fundamental roles of storytelling in organizing (see Robichaud 1998; Robichaud et al. 2002) I intend to focus on narrative as a central form of the institutionalized practices and scenes we construct and reproduce in the course of interacting, coordinating, and organizing. This endeavor thus builds on the work of Czarniawska (1997, 1999) and also the “narrative paradigm” elaborated by Fisher almost 20 years ago, since both focus on the stories we live as much as the stories we tell. Fisher’s own deªnition of narration is clear on that matter: By “narration”, I refer to a theory of symbolic actions — words and/or deeds — that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create, or interpret them. The narrative perspective, therefore, has relevance to the real as well as ªctive worlds, to stories of living and to stories of the imagination (Fisher 1984: 2, my emphasis).

Narrative institutions we organize by

I will therefore treat narrative theory as the basis of a vision of organizing. The word “narrative” will refer not to written or spoken texts, but rather it will capture the general form of the organization of text, a form we can extrapolate to the enactment of organizational process. In other words, I will treat actions of organizational actors as if they were texts, as Ricoeur once suggested (Ricœur 1981). Revealing the heuristic value of such a “methodology” is precisely the objective of this chapter.

Greimas’ model of narratives The narrative reading of organizing discussed in this chapter is heavily inspired by the work of Greimas. Because of his commitment to structuralism, Greimas devoted a great deal of his eŸorts to the formal characteristics of narrative, and oŸered an abstract and very general model of what he considered to be the basic forms of narratives. His work gained much recognition in the 1970s and 1980s in the ªelds of semiotic and narrative theory, making him the most prominent ªgure of what has been called the “Paris Semiotic School” (Perron & Collins 1989; Perron & Danesi 1993). Following a structuralist mode of reasoning, Greimas argued that meaning relies at least in part on basic structures that are to be found underneath the variety of their manifestations in texts or cultural artifacts. Inspired by Propp’s study of Russian folktales (Propp 1968) and Levi-Strauss’ investigations of the structures of myths (Levi-Strauss 1958), Greimas developed a narrative grammar based on the hypothesis that narrative structures largely account for the meaning of any text. He argued that narrativity is at the core of the organization of meaning, since it deªnes a set of structural relationships between actors and objects involved in a course of action. He generalized the notion of narrativity, contending that it cannot be reduced to a property of a particular text type, such as a tale or a story. Instead, narrativity constitutes a pattern of organization of texts which can be found in any text concerned with action, be it a fairy tale such as Cinderella (Courtes 1993) or a cooking recipe (Greimas 1987). Two notions are central to Greimas’ view of the narrative structure. First, all narratives cast the subjects and objects of actions that he calls “actants” in a set of relationally and mutually deªned positions or roles. Second, a narrative always amounts to a transformation of some sort, and typically many transformations, all informing each other. Below, I explicate these two assumptions further.

Narrative as a relational system The general model of the organization of roles Greimas proposed is known as the narrative schema (Greimas 1987). The narrative schema ªrst provides an inventory of roles, or “actants”, forming a basic set of relations (Figure 1; see also previous chapter).

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Sender

Receiver

Subject

Object

Helper

Opponent

Figure 1. The roles of actants in Greimas’ narrative schema

Greimas insists on the distinction between these roles and the actants that perform them in any speciªc narrative. He deªnes actants as “[…] beings or things that participate in processes in any form whatsoever, be it only a walk-on part and in the most passive way.” (Greimas and Courtés 1982: 75). This notion is preferred by Greimas to that of “actor” because it is neutral as far as the nature or the “ontology” of the participant in the action process is concerned. An actant can thus be a human, but also an animal, an object or even an emotional state. The actants are thus deªned, from a strictly formal point of view, by their relation to each other in the network they constitute. In the example I will discuss in the second part of this chapter, a City Council mandates the Communication Department of the City administration to set up a consultation process in order to solicit the citizens’ opinions on various city management issues. From the standpoint of the actants and their relationship, we have a sender (the City Council) in a relationship with a subject (the Communication Service) such that it can have the Communication do something on behalf of the City Council. This relationship is typical, most often involving authority and delegation, as in the king, in a fairy tale, asking a prince to rescue a princess, or James Bond being assigned by M and the British government to recover a secret. In its most general expression, the sender is thus the source of action as deªned in a narrative; it is what motivates the subject to undertake a course of action. The subject is then charged with a “mission”, that is, a transformation to be performed. The subject is an actor, but mostly an agent of the sender, since he or she acts on behalf of the sender, for the beneªt of a receiver, who is the beneªciary of the performance (a position commonly held by the actor who also hold the position of a sender). Another important relationship in Greimas model is the orientation of the subject toward the object. Greimas often speaks about that relation as a relation of desire, and emphasizes the tension between these two actants. Perhaps the most signiªcant aspect of the object of a narrative is the value attributed to it, which is why it is also often called an object of value. The object is the actant that is valued in

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numerous ways throughout the narrative, often as something missing, that everyone else is trying to appropriate. In our initial example, it is the “citizens’ opinions”, an abstract object being given the highest value, for numerous reasons that I will explore in the second part of this chapter. The valorization of the object infuses the narrative with a direction and normative dimension. Furthermore, the network of actants in any narrative has a constitutively embedded polemical character, represented by the presence of an opponent. Greimas considered the manifestation of some kind of opposition in a narrative as far from epiphenomenal. Rather, he saw opposition as the basis of the identity of many other actants, especially the subject (which is why the opponent is sometimes referred to as the anti-subject).1 The opponent is in the relation of the otherness, in which one ªnds its “self” or identity. The polemical character arises from the notion that in most cases, the acquisition of the object of value by a subject implies the opponent’s privation of that same object. In Greimas’ view, any interactions between the actants can be conceived, at a more abstract level, in terms of exchange of material or symbolic objects. For example, the sender gives an order to the subject, the helper gives him tools and the subject’s mission is typically to transfer an object from an opponent to a receiver. Greimas emphasizes the notion of communication, which he extends to the transfer and circulation of objects between subjects throughout the narrative (Greimas 1987). This schema of narrative roles is the best known element of Greimas’ theory, and most typically cited by users of his model, especially in the few instances where Greimas has been applied to organization studies (e.g. Søderberg & Mathiesen 2002; Vaara 2002; Søderberg in this volume). However, his other important contribution to narrative theory is, in my view, as relevant to organization studies as the former, because of its insistence on narrativity as a dynamic and transformational process.

Narrative as a transformation scheme The second most important aspect of Greimas’ theory is his conception of narrativity as a pattern of transformations composed of the successive states that comprise a story. This notion is not entirely new. Decades before, the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp had based his own theory of the folktale on the notion that the “constitutive parts” of narratives are not the characters, but their actions, which he called narrative functions. On the basis of the corpus of over a hundred Russian folktales, he built an inventory of 31 basic functions (interdiction, transgression of the interdiction, marriage, etc.). In the early 1960s, Greimas made use of Propp’s work but also criticized it, because Propp’s list used heterogeneous 1. On the matter of agon, see Corvellec in this volume.

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criteria, among other shortcomings (Greimas 1983). On the basis of a more abstract and general deªnition of transformation as the transfer of objects between subjects, he devised a much shorter list of four basic narrative transformations that, when combined, he claimed could account for all the narrative constructions he had ever encountered. Four basic transformations were thus considered to be the building blocks of narratives: manipulation, competence, performance, and sanction. This pattern of transformation is what makes the sequence a narrative, in Greimas’ view. In a manipulation, a subject receives and accepts a duty or obligation from a sender, in the case of our Communication Department receiving the mandate to organize a consultation process to solicit the citizens’ opinions. It is the process through which a sender “manipulates” a subject to have him to do something. The process typically involves either authority (as in our example), which Greimas describes as the transfer of a “having to do”, or persuasion described as the transfer of a “willing to do.”2 This is the transformation in which the agency of the subject is literally constructed in that this is where he or she gets an intention, a direction, and where the meaning of the plots begins to arise. In order to act, a subject must also have the necessary abilities. A number of transformations enacted in narratives addresses this issue transforming the agent into an agent particularly competent to perform the transformation at the core of the plot. The power and capabilities of the agent must be built and established, creating his identity as a hero. In such a transformation, called competence, the subject receives and gives proof of his or her ability or expertise (Q gives Bond his most recently designed gadgets, the City council provides the Communication services with the proper budget, etc.). It is in this transformation that the relation between a subject and his helpers are most apparent. The typical transformations involved here are the transfer of objects (tools, weapons, knowledge or information) that will enable a subject to act. In his terminology, Greimas describes these objects as pertaining to two categories: “knowing how to do” and “being able to do”. Next is performance, a transformation where the subject transforms the undesired state by obtaining the object of his or her quest, the object of value (for example the Communication Department ªnally manages that the citizens attend the consultation meetings and express their concerns). Here again the transformation accomplished can be described in terms of the transfer of an object between two or more actants. The performance typically represents the core transforma2. These terms are taken from the English translation of the French original terminology of Greimas and Courtés’ semiotic dictionary (Greimas and Courtés, 1982), even though some of the terms may sound unusual in English. The original French terms for the modalities are vouloir-faire (wanting to do), devoir-faire (having to do), pouvoir-faire (being able to do) and savoir-faire (knowing how to do).

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tion in any narrative, the transformation for which the subject was previously prepared by being manipulated and made competent. It is where the plot of a narrative gets enacted and produces a new situation. As part of the sanction, another transformation, the subject receives an acknowledgment of his or her success or failure by virtue of a given system of values. Greimas describes this as an “interpretive moment”, a transformation where the receiver has to interpret the new state of aŸairs created by the performance and deeds of the subject and consequently decides on their truthfulness or their correspondence to the expectations established in the beginning of the narrative, speciªcally in the manipulation process. Part of the plot of the organizational narrative discussed in the next section precisely regards the success and outcomes of the process, and the issue of whether or not he process has been perceived by the public as a “true” and credible consultation exercise. Thus the more general meaning of sanction has to do with the recognition that, even at a strictly cognitive level, a transformation has occurred and that a new state has been produced. To complete my presentation of Greimas’ model, I will make a ªnal distinction between two kinds of objects. As we have seen, the four types of transformations forming a narrative involve transactions between actors structured so as to play a speciªc role in the schema of actants. Greimas maintains that these transactions can be described at a more abstract level in terms of the communication or transfer of objects between subjects. He introduces an important distinction, however, between two kinds of objects: objects of value, and modal objects, also called modalities. The object of value is the object of the performance, the object “valued” throughout the narrative and which constitutes the object of the subject’s quest. However, the other narrative transformations involve objects as well. These objects are treated by Greimas as modal objects, as they deªne the motivation and ability of the subject to enact the performance. In other words, the transformations involved in manipulation and competence concern the relation that the subject has to the performance. This is why the modalities are deªned in Greimas’ terminology as having to do, wanting to do, knowing how to do, and being able to do. The transformations by which the modalities are created and mobilized set the stage for the main narrative transformation, or the plot of the story. Behind this simple construction, Greimas would argue, there lies a fundamental organization of transformations that will be found in any description of action if it is to be meaningful. A meaningful description of action not only states a transformation (getting the citizens’ opinion), but also the sources of the will or the obligation of the subject to perform the act (called manipulation) and the ability he or she has or does not have to do so (called competence). The typically complex narrative path through which the intentionality and the competence of an agent is established is much more than a prelude to the performance that really

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matters; it represents the discursive processes by which the very identities and capacities of all are created, both as a medium and outcome of action. This aspect of Greimas’ work is a valuable tool for constructionists: it provides us with an analytical language to describe not merely the plot of a story or scene, but also the narrative construction of the identities and capacities of the actors enacting it. As Czarniawska puts it: “… actions create not only stage set but also actors, who then try to act in accordance to the stage set and what they perceive as their ‘character’, although changes and deviations are possible” (1997: 40).

The narrative character of institutions Before I present the empirical illustration, I will make a very short detour in order to extend the notion of narrative form to that of the institution that frames the practices of organizational actors in interaction. In a very dense but illuminating work, the French philosopher Vincent Descombes argued recently for “the principle of narrative intelligibility” (Descombes 1995; 1996; 2001). He argues that any symbolic action relies on a historical and institutional context to bear any meaning at all. In his view, the subjective intentions or the meaning one attributes to one’s own action (and that of others) always presupposes that what he calls “institutions of meaning” (institutions du sens) to be possible in the ªrst place. These institutions are social in nature and have a narrative form in the sense that they provide a narrative context to the act. The principle of narrative intelligibility, which he borrows from Wittgenstein, states that for an action to have any meaning attached to it, one must posit, or at least presuppose, that it has a historical context in which not only a certain past for the action, but also some pragmatic consequences, are also conceivable. As Descombes puts it: …the principle is that a psychological attribution imposes an historical context: a certain past must have occurred, a certain future must be conceivable. Otherwise, the attribution is simply not understandable. (Descombes 1995: 249, my translation).

If we are to follow Descombes’ reasoning, the enactment of organizational action would derive its meaning from a larger institutional narrative framework, simultaneously inherited from the past and re-created in situ by the actors involved, who thus reproduce it. Because these institutions are social and discursive in nature (as opposed to “mental”), and narrative in their forms, the challenge of applying a narrative approach to organizations is to show how actors, in organizing collective action, deªning their identities and stage set, contribute to the creation and recreation of narrative institutions of meaning that ªx or stabilize an “order of things”. The notion of narrative institutions of meaning reminds us that the narratives people live by persist beyond the times and places of their enactment, while

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lacking an existence other than in their instantiation in practices. As we will see below, a narrative reading of organizational reality is all the more useful when it addresses this fundamental recursivity of social and organizational reality (Czarniawska 1997; Robichaud et al. in press).

The episode under study: A short excursus into the narrative analysis of organizing The episode I would now like to turn to the case I hinted at previously to illustrate the reading of organizational reality that ensues from the narrative perspective I have laid out. The case I picked is part of a study of a Canadian mid-sized municipal administration (for the purpose of this paper, I will call it “the City”) I conducted a few years ago. At the time of the study, the political leaders in o¹ce at the City had reached the middle of their third term of o¹ce. To keep a promise to maintain open relationships with their fellow citizens, the political leaders asked the Communications Department and its chief (let us call him Jerry) to set up a public discussion process whereby the citizens could voice their concerns directly to their elected o¹cials on any municipal question. This consultation and discussion process was called “Operation Dialogue.” The core of the operation was a series of six discussion evenings between the public and their local elected o¹cials, to be held the following spring in each district. In studying this case, I initially attempted to understand how the managers of the communication service, who were responsible for the organization of the operation, dealt with a variety of potentially con¶icting interests in mobilizing the actors and resources they needed both to fulªl their mandate and to strengthen their own position within the City organization. The research included participant observation, interviews and analysis of documents, and extended over the entire time of the project (11 months), including advance preparations, and subsequent analysis of citizens’ reactions by the administration. I will now examine more closely the approach taken by the organizers in preparing the meetings between the elected o¹cials and the public. The preparation process involved four main components: the conducting of a survey, the formulation of an agenda, the creation of a slideshow and an advertising campaign. Each will be described brie¶y below. The preparation of the survey began with the formulation of a questionnaire, an activity that required the operation initiators to decide what they wanted to know. Part of the answer to this question was provided by the experience of the previous consultations and by the survey’s ªrst general objective, to wit: “to

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measure the degree of satisfaction of [members of the public]3 with regard to City services and to various aspects of its administration.”4 At the outset, it was known that the survey would include questions of the sort “What is your evaluation, for the entire city, of the quality of the following services:…” What followed was a list of the 14 main municipal services. Apart from surveys conducted in the City in 1986 and 1989, the choice and formulation of questions were informed by the text of a similar survey conducted the previous year in a neighboring city. The elaboration of the questionnaire gave rise to the selection, formulation and inscription of several kinds of hypotheses and questions during many exchanges and meetings held to determine the subjects and issues that would be presented to the sample of members of the public. The various service directors participated in discussions with the Mayor or his executive assistant and above all with Jerry, who was in charge of the entire operation. As questions were discarded or retained, Jerry wrote drafts of the questions that were subsequently reworked several times. The next process involved formulating an agenda for the discussions to be held with the citizens. Though intended to enable members of the public to interrogate elected municipal o¹cials about anything pertaining to municipal aŸairs, the Dialogue evenings still followed a general agenda established in the weeks leading up to the event. The goal of this agenda was to order the evening’s activities and to group citizens’ questions around certain anticipated themes, for example problems related to road conditions. This agenda proposed ªve discussion themes, four of which dealt with speciªc municipal services: (1) street and sidewalk conditions and parking; (2) snow removal; (3) garbage collection and the collection of material for recycling; and (4) the cleanliness of public spaces and dog control. These four themes were selected from among all municipal services because they were the ones with which members of the public were most dissatisªed, as indicated by the survey ªndings. To Jerry and his colleagues, these themes were unavoidable. The ªfth theme dealt with the tax freeze policy. The elected o¹cials wished to assess how much they could streamline municipal services after two years of tax freezes. For Jerry, who had prepared the agenda, and for most of the City administrators and councilors I interviewed, there was no doubt that these issues would be raised with or without an agenda. They constituted the “citizens’ concerns”. In the process, the identities and intentions of all the parties involved got transformed to some degree. When the operation was ªrst undertaken, each of its 3. In quoted extracts, I have systematically replaced names or adjectives permitting the identiªcation of the site of my research. 4. The City. Dialogue 1994. Rapport de sondage [Survey report] Communication Services, April 1994.

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groups of actors had its own narrative, a local narrative in which the public’s interventions were not ªrst and foremost. For example, as Jerry admitted, he was looking beyond the operation to establish the legitimacy and usefulness of his new department in the municipal apparatus. Councilor-members of the governing party hoped that the comments expressed by the public would persuade the Mayor to have the garbage collected a second time each week. Elected members of the opposition party were just as interested as their colleagues a¹liated with the Mayor in learning the main sources of discontent among the citizenry in order to set their political agenda. Several administrators in the Technical Services Department, believing the elected o¹cials to be more sensitive to the public’s grievances than to their own, hoped that the public’s comments would induce the elected o¹cials to soften cuts to services. In addition, the head of the ªnance department hoped that the operation would bolster his proposal to reform the water billing system. Even the citizenry, who had yet to become a part of the operation through the translation of their interests by the administrators, would ªnd a way into the Operation Dialogue’s narrative program to transmit their views of City aŸairs. Thus, a pretty sharply deªned identity and set of desires were attributed to the “citizens”. The organizing process of the operation, with its numerous meetings and texts, has been a formidable process of translation of the identities, interests and goals of everyone involved, who had to be quite literally “displaced” and “moved” to make the entire operation possible. When observing this organizing process in the ªeld, it was quite evident how deeply our actors were involved in the problematization of their world. In order to encourage public discussions and obtain the public’s comments, the organizers felt that the public needed to be “informed” about current matters aŸecting the City. At the time of the consultation, the most pressing problem in the minds of the elected o¹cials was the City’s budget policy. The issue was clearly laid out in the agenda, but it was also presented in a slideshow screened at the beginning of each of the discussion evenings. Once all the texts viewed as necessary to holding the Dialogue evenings had been prepared, the organizers still had to enlist an important actor in this story: the citizens. Under the slogan Let’s talk about the City, the Communication Department waged a newspaper advertising campaign for one month prior to the evenings. Large billboards were erected throughout the city with a view to soliciting the participation of the public. Moreover, each household was mailed an invitation to participate in the evenings, that speciªed the date, time, and place of the discussion evening to be held in their district. Written for the most part in the imperative, the consultation process’ “advertising” texts emphasized the theme of open discussions and relied on the presumed desire of citizens to let elected o¹cials know about what dissatisªed them.

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As a hundred or so people attended each of the Dialogue evenings, the organizers of the operation felt that their advertising campaign had worked. The interessement of the citizens had succeeded. In Jerry’s view, this participation signaled that in the eyes of its citizenry, the City was a credible interlocutor, able to listen to and to take into account their comments without which the discussion would not have been worth attending. If the City was able to get the public out of their homes to “talk about the City”, it was because the public saw in the invitation an implicit and eŸective commitment on the part of the City to listen actively to them. In the view of various actors, the invitation and its acceptance by members of the public contained a clear contractual dimension. This interpretation, which stresses the “contractual” dimension of the relationship between the citizenry and its local elected government, is part of the narrative institutions of meaning our actors mobilized in mapping and making sense of their own activities. I will now further explore the narrative dimension of organizational episode as an institutionalized narrative.

The narrative and institutional features of the consultation process The narrative analysis of this episode centres on three aspects of the process: (1) the roles and identity in which the actors are cast, (2) the capacities and scripts these roles attribute to the actors, creating a set of reciprocal expectations, and (3) the transformations or “plot” at the core of the process. I will ªrst show how the various steps of the operation display transformations that are structurally typical of narratives. Clearly, a signiªcant part of the meaning of the process arises from a larger institutional norm in which the people must have a say in the conduct of the public aŸairs, and in which a mayor acts only as the delegated agent of the citizens. This institutional background supposes a set of normative and cognitive assumptions whereby the citizens expect to have their opinions valued by their political leaders, and in which the latter are expected to listen to them and act accordingly. These expectations also arise from the prior commitments of the political leaders of the City to give a voice to the citizens throughout their mandate. From a structural point of view, these institutions display a narrative scheme: there is an object of value, the “citizens’ voice”, and a series of transformations necessary for a normal state of aŸairs to be maintained — or a breach to be avoided — “giving the citizens voice” and “getting their opinion”. From the very beginning, the organizers relied on a repertoire of institutional scripts, in which “consultation of the citizens” was already a meaningful endeavor, involving a core transformation, or “plot”: how can we get the citizens to express their opinions in a way that would be credible to all parties (mayor and other elected o¹cials, members of political

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opposition, administration o¹cers, citizens, etc)? To perform their institutional duty, and avoid a breach of their commitment, it was necessary for the organizers to build, from scratch, a speaking situation in which citizens could make their concerns known to the City’s elected o¹cials. The ªrst actantial relationship was therefore the relationship of “desire” between the subject of the action, which I will refer to the “City” and the object of value constituted by the “speech” or “voice” of the public delivering their concerns and opinions. From this structural perspective, we can consider the whole operation as a series of narrative transformations intended to transform the relationship between the City and this object, to be acquired. Obviously the “citizens’ concerns”, as an object of value, can be read as a mere step toward the acquisition of a more important object of value for our politicians, that is the citizen’s support. I will come back to this reading later. The operation’s narrative dimension is due, however, to more than the relationship between a subject and an object of value. The narrative organization of the operation was also, and more importantly, manifested in the intervention of the modalities of the discussion with the citizenry. The dialogue of the discussion evenings, considered here as a narrative transformation (which Greimas would have called a performance), was in fact heavily informed by the elements of the operation presented above, by the conclusions drawn from the survey, and by the agenda, among other factors. I contend that these elements intervened as modalities that built the identities and roles of all the parties to the dialogue as competent participants, regarding both the process and the content of the discussion.

The narrative construction of the actors’ competence The relational character of the identities and roles played by the protagonists of our story should be considered not as the starting point of a course of action (and thus the starting point of our analysis) but rather as the result of the narrative transformations through which the competence of an agent was literally built. Thus my narrative analysis, if it is to be useful, should clarify the constitution of our protagonists’ capacities to perform the transformation they are involved in and show the ‘situatedness’ and relational (as opposed to essential) character of their competence as social actors. I will examine the elected o¹cials ªrst. When asked about the reasons behind the consultation process, in the absence of any particular project or topic to address aside from the usual city management issues, the elected o¹cials invariably begin by invoking the promises made in this regard during the preceding election campaign. Some even went so far as to point to their party’s platform with its clear statement that an operation of this sort must be held midway through each term of o¹ce. The discussions with the citizenry were thus initially held in a “having to do” mode, as Greimas would call it, with obligation

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arising from a prior electoral promise. However, this ªrst modalization is not a mere adaptation of the elected o¹cials’ conduct to the text of the platform an its script. In light of the elected o¹cials concerns’, it clearly appears as a translation of both their current concerns’ and the text of the platform. The elected o¹cials did not limit the reasons for holding the discussions to election promises. They stressed their own desire to learn about the “citizens’ concerns,” to remain close to the voters, to “take the population’s pulse” so as to better understand their needs. Certain administrators went further and saw the operation as a good way for elected o¹cials to learn how to face the citizenry during the next election campaign. The relationship that the elected o¹cials had with the discussions therefore involved a “wanting to do” mode. Promises made during the previous election campaign (“having to do”) and the desire to understand the concerns of the citizenry (“wanting to do”) form the essence of semiotic manipulation, that is, the elements pushing our semiotic subject (the elected o¹cials) to undertake a course of action. In addition to the texts and past interactions that forge the “intentional” character of the elected o¹cials as agents, part of their capacities or competence to act can also be traced back to some transformations occurring in the course of the preparation of the consultation, in addition to the capacities institutionally attributed to their roles and identities. For example, the survey conducted by the City played a central role in that it gave the elected o¹cials knowledge of the public’s opinions, knowledge which would be factored into the planning of the evenings, as we saw earlier. The organization of these evenings was also strongly in¶uenced by the experience of previous consultation sessions. These evenings provided certain elected o¹cials and the head of the communication service with “know-how”, and played a signiªcant role in the planning of the evenings, especially with regard to preparing the agenda and the logistical organization of the operation. The formulation of the agenda contributed to the capacities of the actors to perform the consultation in a practical manner. The director of the communications service, for example, viewed it as a way of facilitating the interventions of all concerned. All these are typical narrative transformations in which a subject has to be made knowledgeable and capable in order to perform its mission or deed, what Greimas calls competence. What was true of the competence of the elected o¹cials was also true of that of the citizens. The preparation of the consultation also provided instances of transformations where the capacities of the citizens to fulªl their role in the story had to be literally created, so to speak. The preparation of the operation thus gave rise to the putting in place of a collection of modalities in¶uencing the citizens’ relationships with the performance expected of them, and which consisted in attending the event in order to express their concerns to their elected o¹cials. The repeated

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invitations by the Communication Service intended to encourage the citizenry to participate in the operation constituted in this respect a clear narrative manipulation eŸort. With regard to the citizenry, the City was engaged in an activity intended to get them to want to come and “talk about the City”. This manipulation activity played a crucial role in the continuation of the consultation process. Among other things, it included, as is the case for any kind of semiotic manipulation, the creation of a ªduciary contract, as Greimas calls it, linking the initiator of the performance — the City in this case — to the agent of this same performance, the citizenry, who were asked to come and let their concerns be known. When accepted by an agent, this “executory formula” entails the creation of a ªduciary contract linking the party requesting the action and the subject of the action. We saw earlier that the individuals in the Communication Service who were conducting this persuasive activity came close to examining their actions in the same way, in that their reading of the situation, and in particular the response by the citizenry, brought into play the notion of “credibility.” They attached the highest importance to this aspect of the relations with the citizenry, and urged their colleagues to deliver the goods. This crucial stage, as we shall see once again below, established a “contract” between the City and its citizens, within the framework of which the actions of the citizens would be given a meaning, even in the eyes of our devoted City administrators. Lastly, the preparation of the operation also had an in¶uence on the competence the citizens would need to mobilize in enacting the performance “Let’s talk about the City.” This competence ªrst emerged in the realization of the slideshow and its presentation at the beginning of each evening. Indeed, we saw that the main objective of the slideshow was to enable the public to make a contribution to the discussion, which would be based on their understanding of the context in which the City and its administration were operating. The preparation of the evenings thus introduced an additional modality — knowing — in the public’s relationship to the discussion, thus building its competence to intervene in the discussion.

The recursivity of the narrative framework In retrospect, the consultation process appears to be structured like any common story. Because of their prior commitment to and their political interest in being knowledgeable about the citizens’ concerns, the City’s o¹cials undertake the “mission” of getting the citizens to share their preoccupations directly with them. On their path to achieving this transformation or performance, they carry out a number of intermediary actions that shaped their competence and their capacity to succeed in this endeavor. In that respect, both the conducting of the survey and

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the formulation of the agenda can be considered as modal objects that build the elected o¹cials’ competence. The citizens are the other main subject or agent of this story since, after all, they are the ones from whom most of the action is expected. They are ªrst the object of what Greimas would have called a semiotic manipulation, where the City, here acting as a sender, engages in an advertising campaign intended to encourage the public to participate or to persuade the subject to engage in the proposed program. Then, once the citizens had agreed to participate in attending the discussion evening, they also undergo some transformations, which will make them more “competent” to intervene in the discussion. The agenda and the content of the slideshow are modal objects that build that competence. The discussions per se constitute the heart of the whole operation and can thus be easily interpreted as the primary transformation of this narrative, since the City literally obtains the object of value that is central to the whole story, i.e. the citizens’ participation, and eventually their trust. The process ends with a normative evaluation, or sanction, in which both the Communication Service and the elected o¹cials ªnd the operation successful. From a narrative perspective, the preparation of the consultation process appears both as the enactment of a number of institutional narrative frameworks pre-dating this speciªc episode, and as the recreation of these same narrative frameworks. This may be the most important contribution of a narrative reading of organizational processes: an analytical language that allows us to put a ªnger on the recursivity of organizational reality. The institution of “a city governed by a mayor and a few local elected o¹cials for the welfare of the citizens and the community” provides a narrative institutional backdrop for the whole operation to be possible and meaningful in the ªrst place. Yet the capacities grounded in the identity and deªnition of “a mayor consulting” and “the citizens expressing their concerns” is realized precisely in the constant and multiple transformations that go to make up a “mayor” and a “citizen” in multiple common plots. In a sense, this story does not have an end, because the narrative institutions on which it relies and that it creates at the same time are never completed once and for all, and do not have an “essence” other than their constant enactment, a point made more than 30 years ago by Karl Weick (Weick 1969), and restated in narrative terms more recently by Czarniawska (1997).

Conclusion In the perspective I have laid out in this chapter, “a City” is perceived as a speciªc complex of narrative institutions, “consultation” being one of the institutional narratives in its repertoire. Perhaps what makes the consultation a speciªc form of

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organizing is the unique combination and interplay between genres mobilized as the City carries out its duties and activities. As a set of narrative institutions constantly enacted by its members, a city organization looks inherently paradoxical: both strong and durable, since everyone’s identities and capabilities seem a priori ªxed, and yet fragile, since in the very moment and place of their enactment, they are put at risk of being completely problematized, questioned and reshu§ed. A signiªcant lesson of the case discussed here is that much of the story is about actors trying to obtain and/or stabilize their organizational identity, and decide about the identity and meaning of other actors, be they humans, texts or objects. What do the survey, the questionnaires, the agenda, the members of the public, the City administrators, etc, “the City”, say and want? Who are they? The answers to these questions are simultaneously the requirements and the outcomes of the process. If we can talk, in retrospect, of a sharply deªned narrative structure involved in the stabilization of the meaning of all these things, as we can hear in the accounts of the actors involved, no such thing is possible predictively. In the narrative perspective, if one looks for the origin of an action, one can always note transactions where an agent got his or her “intention” from various narrative transformations. Such a pattern can be observed in the citizens who voice their concerns after having being persuaded to do so by the City, and other senders absent from my account. Similarly, Jerry and the Communication Department solicit the public’s concerns because of the mandate they received from the City Council and the elected o¹cials in their own quest for legitimacy in the municipal administration. Moreover, the elected o¹cials themselves are motivated by other senders, including the citizens from whom they received their o¹ce. As Latour puts it: “Indeed, action cannot have a point of origin except at the price of stopping the circulation, or the series of transformations whose movement continually traces the social body” (Latour 1996: 237). This is not to say, however, that our City o¹cials and administrators organized the consultation process from scratch, far from it. They started from a universe of already institutionalized narratives of practices, inherited form the meaningful mapping of previous occasions of translations, but at the same time, in a way, they started over. The understanding of this essential duality of social life is certainly one of the most signiªcant challenges, and potential contributions, of the narrative perspective to organizing.

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Part 2 Poststructuralist approaches to narrative

Re-navigating management theory Steering by the star of Mary Follett Nanette Monin and John Monin Department of Management & International Business Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand

“Mary who?” asked Peter Drucker in 1954 (Drucker 1995: 1). Almost half a century later, with the publication of a celebratory volume of Mary Parker Follett’s writings (Graham 1995b), several competing voices have tried to explain why he had to ask the question. Most also assume that we are no longer asking it. Follett herself would probably have listened respectfully to all the talk about her “disappearance”. She would then have suggested that if we were to rethink what we are about here, we might ªnd that our conclusions represent a simple manifesto of who we, the questioners are, and have little to do with Follett and the long years of obscurity. From her gentle probing we might learn that since our questions are usually designed to ªt our tailor-made answers, we must unpick the answers we have stored away before we can draft a bespoke query. We will do that — query the presence of the reader in the proŸered interpretations of twentieth century “forgetting” of Follett — as we look at feminist, scientist and anti-positivist, historic, and culturally positioned arguments to explain her absence. And we will also suggest that the manager-as-anti-hero who emerges from our unpicking of Follett’s own fabric, her writings, throws up another kind of retelling of her story, one that has its genesis in our own reader-response to her texts. As readers we see ourselves as the teller of one more new version of the old familiar, perhaps in Follett’s case not so familiar, tale. In the ancient art of storytelling it has always been understood that the original tale grows with each retelling. In the Golden Age of Greek drama the notion that dramatists, competing for the coveted crown of ivy, should invent their own plots would have been laughed out of contention. For the audience, all the excitement of the contest was wrapped up in their anticipation of original, yet recognisably apt, interpretations of their best-loved stories, and thousands poured in to attend the Great Dionysian festival and to applaud as one dramatist after another set out a new version of a

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familiar tale. Today audiences as they, in their turn, become the tellers of new versions of old tales, still pass on what they think they have heard. Because no two listeners make quite the same narrative from the words they hear, multitudes of stories emerge, merge and re-merge anew. Our text is based on our re-telling of a short excerpt from Follett’s writings, and we would like it to be heard in the context of her other texts and existing interpretations of them; an endless anthology of as yet unwritten re-tellings of her texts; and in the dialoguing of the texts by other management theorists that we will describe as immediately talking to our chosen extract.

“Perhaps” — Competing voices If our reading of management theory is the common home from which we journey out to our separate destinations in interpretations of it, then the islands oŸering anchorage to Follett’s readers — perhaps mapped before they set sail — are theory-built. The compass of experienced issue and argument guides each voyager who “discovers” the cause of our long “forgetting” of Follett’s writings. Peter Drucker looks to the history of the twentieth century for explanations of our disregard. Business, he says, through its early decades, saw itself as an economic institution, with no role or responsibility for social issues or political governance. Because Follett attempted to “reinvent the citizen” in the historical era of the Cold War and aggressive, confrontational labour relations, her texts would have been seen as subversive (Drucker 1995). Yet the 1950s, the era of the Cold War, was the decade in which Drucker himself ªrst encountered Follett’s ideas. He writes of his delight when ªrst introduced to her work in 1955, and does not seem to be at all aware that his own, extraordinarily in¶uential, writing of that same time can be read as a major contribution to the rampant nationalism and emerging managerialism of the post-war years.1 He, and other prominent management theorists and practitioners (see for example Lawrence 1995: 291; Nohria 1995: 154; Parker 1995: 282), all “confess” to an introduction to her writings early in their careers, and to being profoundly impressed by her ideas, yet Follett continued to be largely ignored for decades after those ªrst meetings.

1. See for example Drucker 1954: 2-30. Drucker argued that in the climate of the “Cold War” “our survival” depended upon the economic advance enabled by the new leading class, managers. Austrian by birth, Drucker seemed to speak generally for the “modern West” and speciªcally for the United States when he said: “Management will be decisive both to the United States and to the free world” (p.2).

Re-navigating management theory

Kanter (1995) insists that Follett had a gender problem. Although she was accorded signiªcant academic recognition, Follett spoke “in a female voice” (p. xvi) and was not able, as were her male peers, to cultivate a coterie of student acolytes in a major college. Kanter does not explain what a “female voice” is or provide any evidence that Follett desired, attempted to build, or even had need of, “disciples” (p. xvii) who experienced her as being “very diŸerent from traditional authority ªgures”. Certainly the evidence suggests that she had a charismatic presence: her meetings on both sides of the Atlantic were hugely subscribed to, she was in high demand as a consultant, and, having been born into a privileged Bostonian family, she had easy access to the many in¶uential circles where she was a welcome guest (Graham 1995b: 12–31). Drucker says that to answer the question “why did Follett become a ‘nonperson’?” with the claim that because she was a woman she was discriminated against, is “expedient and politically correct” but wrong (Drucker 1995: 2). He reminds us that America in the 1930s was “full of female stars in every sphere of public life”, and returns us to his historical argument noted above. Camilla Stivers, trying to model her thinking on that of Follett, imagines that “the two of them [Kanter and Drucker] could, if they chose, “interweave their willings” (1996: 161). By “willings” we understand her to mean that the arguments put forward by Drucker and Kanter emerge from what they “will” to be the case, from their wishful thinking. Their “willings” interweave in that Kanter correctly assumes that women clearly do sometimes get ignored because they are women, and Drucker correctly assumes that it does not follow that every time a woman gets ignored it is because she is a woman. Stivers provides her own interpretation of the “problematic history” of Follett’s ideas in management thinking: it is Follett’s ideas that are “culturally ‘feminine’” and an ill ªt with the norms of male, but not female, behaviour (Stivers 1996: 163–165). If we assume that organisational legitimacy is premised on the need to achieve organisational goals then the inversion, the need for organisations to ªrst and ultimately prioritise the needs and goals of individuals, is inherently revolutionary and perhaps unworkable. But the notion that Follett was ignored because her ideas were “feminine” is also controversial. Stivers herself notes that many feminists have been “put oŸ” by what they read as Follett’s pro-management rhetoric (she cites [Tancred]-SheriŸ and Campbell 1992). Follett was a member of the Taylor Society and believed in “the objectivity of ‘facts’, the ‘logic of the situation’ and a ‘scientiªc method’ by which facts could be identiªed” (Quirun 1996: 260 cited in Newman & Guy 1998: 291; Graham 1995b: 27), and she upheld the values of e¹ciency and productivity (Newman & Guy 1998: 291). Then again Samuel claims that Follett was writing “against the grain” of

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“repressive and violent labor practices and scientism as exempliªed by Taylorism and the Principles of Administration” (Samuel 1996: 865); while Calás and Smircich try to convince us that after World War II the West was so taken up with positivism that there was, until very recently, no space for Follett’s anti-positivist voice (Calás & Smircich 1996: 148–149). Both factions, those who place Follett’s work in the scientist mode and those who read her as challenging it, re¶ect changing twentieth century views of what was once called “natural philosophy”, but which at the time when Follett was writing, had been reborn as “science”. Science as the positivism of the 1970s, the basis of the Calás and Smircich interpretation, emerged decades after Follett’s era at a time when it “had separated itself from the ‘humanities’ in the pursuit of true science” (Czarniawska 1999: 48). Enomoto (1995), on a diŸerent tack, looks at Follett through the lens of culture diŸerence, and ªnds two reasons for the long continuity of her popularity in Japan. He reminds us that the Japanese value their history. While reaching out for the new they also evolve the past by infusing the new back into it. Americans, he suggests, still echo Ford’s dictum “History is bunk” (p. 242). Follett was introduced into Japanese scholarship in the 1950s and has become an integral part of their teaching on management since that time. Secondly, he maintains, Follett’s understanding of the group in the individual and the individual in the group, the interdependence, interconnection and interaction of both, and ultimately the total integration of all diŸerences in all relationships, is close to the Japanese ethos (pp. 242–243) and therefore appears as “simple and basic common sense [although it is] subtle and profound” (p. 244). Enomoto does not explicitly say (he is perhaps too culturally aware and polite) that American individualism, cultural and capitalistic reverence for the autonomy, the independent self-rule and self-seeking of the American citizen is to blame for the forgetting of Follett, but it is implied in all that he does say about Japanese respect and aŸection for her. Yet underneath Enomoto’s paean of praise for her lurks a paradox that he voices, but does not address. Follett “shows the way to true democracy: how individuals who develop their potential and at the same time contribute to their group, must not passively conform to its norms” (Enomoto 1995: 244). If the Japanese have identiªed with Follett’s respect for the spirit and will of the group, why have Americans not ªxated on the respect she accords individuals in these complex writings? Tonn (1996) concludes that Follett poses a challenge to the traditional thinking of both societies. Perhaps her texts are “too hard”. Kanter “complains” and “expresses her frustration” (Snider 1998: 279) that the “nature of her analysis makes it di¹cult to use … [Follett] oŸered no speciªc techniques, no step-by-step approach, no strategies for success, no action plan” (Kanter 1995: xviii). Stewart too, argues that Follett’s writings have proved too rich a meal for a management readership more

Re-navigating management theory

used to digesting just one key idea at a time (Stewart 1996: 175). But Snider (1998) disputes this, proposing that Follett was so determined to engage with the management community, she gave up “her own more radical identity” in order to speak to “the practitioner community in its own language” (p. 274). Perhaps we are continuing to misinterpret Follett? Referencing Burrell and Morgan (1979), Snider (1998: 282) argues that Stever, when “Asserting her place in the ‘mainstream’ of American thought” (1986: 163), mistakenly interprets her as a functionalist. Snider accuses Stever of failing to recognise Follett’s radical humanist view: “he fails to recognize that Follett was really attempting to show the folly of the mainstream paradigm” (p. 282). Did Follett want to “shore up the system” or bring it down? We agree with Stivers, who points out that Follett herself would think it is the wrong question (Stivers 1996: 165). Kanter (1995) describes Follett as a “quintessential utopian and a romantic” who envisions “human goodness” for us, and claims that we should understand that we can’t fully achieve the ideal she presents. Snider, on the contrary, promotes her pragmatism. He argues that she consciously submerged the philosophical voice of her early texts, under the pragmatism of her later, better known, papers; that she was quintessentially a realist (Snider 1998: 281). Perhaps she was a vacillator, swinging from idealism to pragmatism (Stever 1986); perhaps her rhetoric is so eŸective we all hear something with which we identify, but if this is so, why do we not read her more often, why is she still (?) “forgotten”? Perhaps Follett is a “prophet” only in the sense that Stivers (1996: 165) suggests: like the female seers of old she has the power to inspire and transform the very civilisations that have almost forgotten her. Some of these commentators do not see that we have progressed at all towards the development of either a climate of welcome or an intellectual understanding of Follett’s writings (Nohria 1995; Stivers 1995; Calás & Smircich 1996; O’Connor 1996; Samuel 1996; Snider 1998), and Samuel even suggests that it is “bleakly humorous” to choose her as a prophet of our age, an age that is “devoid of what may be called her guiding precept, that ‘no human relation should serve an anticipatory purpose’” (Samuel 1996: 867), that people should not be used as a means to an end. But others (Drucker 1995; Graham 1995b; Kanter 1995; Kolb, Jensen & Shannon 1995; Mintzberg 1995; Stewart 1996; Newman & Guy 1998) assume that management is already now embracing the concepts Follett taught; some also assume that both societal norms and management theory having evolved, now support more civilised practices (Drucker 1995; Lawrence 1995; Kolb et al. 1996). If Follett was a prophet before her time, then we are now supposed to be the time: either she or we have arrived. But it is six years since the little ¶urry of attention accorded the publication of Graham’s book (see for example Calás & Smircich

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1996). There has been no rush to mainstream Follett into teaching courses or to vigorously debate her theories in our journals. We leave the last word(s) in this debate to Warren Bennis. He poses the question addressed above as: “Is the ‘climate of opinion’ today, the zeitgeist, any more congenial today than it was during her heyday, 60 or 70 years ago?” and provides his own answer: “Perhaps, perhaps.” (1995: 181)

Perhaps we try to steer too directly towards plotted destinations. If we have positioned our “answers” before we design our questions then there will be no opportunity for adventures on the voyages. If we are still asking the wrong question (Stivers 1996: 165) perhaps it is because we have allowed an assumed answer to dictate the question. Perhaps our question(s) too will pre-determine our point of arrival, but we will ask them anyway.

Management — The process or (perhaps) the protagonist For us several questions tease, but one shouts for attention. The comment outlined above, is focused on interpretations of what Follett has to say about management as process. Her ideas about the activities, skills and roles, the functions of management are what her texts are assumed to be about. There is a generalised assumption that her “prophecies” of what we should understand in terms of what we are about when we try to manage are apposite for our time. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that management scholarship or praxis is any more attuned to her voice than it ever was. Could there be (an)other reason(s) for this neglect? What, we wondered for example, do Follett’s texts say of managers? Is there an image in her texts of the kind of person that we expect a manager to be? Would a practitioner audience today identify with the re¶ected image of themselves that might be glimpsed in the subtexts of her address? In search of an answer to our question, and hoping to avoid a too ªrmly preªgured theoretical position, we decided to explore Follett’s theory as narrative. We would look for an image of managers in the subtext of her narrative, and we would compare this image with that of managers in the subtexts of other theory texts. The subject of our quest, the manager, would be pre-determined, but we did not formulate a theory as to what we might discover. We did hope that the proªles of the manager protagonists, who have been the role models of management orthodoxy from the birth of the discipline through to the present, might emerge from our analysis. We selected ªve high-proªle texts for analysis (including a text by Follett), all

Re-navigating management theory

of them written by academic management gurus — management writers who are well-known to, and highly respected by, both academic and practitioner communities (Huczynski 1993) — representative of diŸerent eras, and both genders. Our selection is as illustrated in Table 1. We began reading from the beginning of each text, and read the pages as described below.

“Vertical” narratives In conducting our analysis of these theory texts, and following Barthes (1982) and Fish (1970, 1989), we read them as narratives. Barthes, not altogether reassuringly, reminds us that narrative analysis, “faced as it is with millions of narratives” (p. 81) is “condemned” to a deductive procedure, and must therefore “devise a hypothetical model of description”. So we have worked with a “model” of narrative that we have based on Barthes’ theory of the structure of narratives. As we interpret our responses to the text we have followed Fish in that we understand textual interpretation to be a “joint venture”: we see the reader as actively participating, with the author, in making sense of what the text means. Barthes describes narrative as developing along two axes: one horizontal and the other vertical. Traditionally we have been used to reading along the horizontal axis. One sentence follows another and we look for a logic that moves us inexorably along the text to its ending. We respond to the logic of “plot” as we perceive the connections that link words to words within the sentence, sentences to sentences within the paragraph, and paragraphs to paragraphs within the whole of the text. We have been used to a dependence on the horizontal function of argument, action, description, and the chronology of time, that drives a text towards its end (Barthes 1982: 254–260). This “horizontal” reading is elsewhere described as “dominant” (Caputo 1997) and semantic (Eco 1992; Czarniawska 1999), and is the reading process with which we are all most familiar. Poststructuralist reading, by contrast, explores any number of the vertical axes of meaning that run through the text, for “In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be folTable 1. Texts selected for analysis Theorist

Text

Date 1st published

Pages

Frederick Taylor Mary Follett Peter Drucker Henry Mintzberg Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Principles of Scientiªc Management Freedom and Co-ordination The Practice of Management The Nature of Managerial Work The Change Masters

1911 1933 1955 1973 1984

5–29 30–49 1–13 1–6 17–23

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lowed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level …” (Barthes 1977: 147). The threads of meaning that the deconstructive reader follows weave patterns of meaning that criss-cross the horizontal line of meaning, whirling in many directions around it, but all in some kind of vertical angle to it. Still following Barthes, we recognise that “integrational” (vertical) levels of meaning can be discovered in any one unit of discourse within the larger system, and in our reading we pause to explore this axis before moving further along the “distributional” (horizontal) level. We pause when we sense “a little crack”, or a “nutshell” which we can prize open, delving down into the text in search of that which has been omitted, forgotten, excluded, expelled, marginalised, dismissed, ignored, scorned, slighted, taken too lightly, waved oŸ in other readings of the same text (Caputo 1997: 77–79). To embark on the reading of a text is thus to begin a process without end: the reader does not set out with the over-riding intention of reaching “the end” of the text, for “having described the ¶ower, the botanist is not to get involved in describing the bouquet” (Barthes, 1882: 255). Our vertical reading has been described as “deconstructive” (Caputo 1997) and “semiotic” (Eco 1992; Czarniawska 1999) and is generally understood as critical reading. Reading in this way (vertically) entails a second shift of perspective, from the intention of the writer to that of the interpreting reader, and emphasises the act of reading. It suggests that “an aesthetics of production” is moderated “by an aesthetics of reception” (Freund 1987: 164), and so we are comfortable with the notion that readers ultimately “write” (create) their own meanings (Fish 1970). Generally understood as reader-response criticism, this stance takes into account all of the experiences, expectations, worldview and responses of the reader as she engages with the text, and leads to the conclusion that because meaning is the “production” of the reader, there can be no one primary or right reading. There will be as many “productions”, as many interpretations, of the text as there are readers, and each reading will have its own validity. The “units” of text that we analyse are the ªrst few “¶owers” that we stumble upon that seem to have something more to say about the manager than is immediately visible in the horizontal text. We will pause, dig down vertically for the roots of meaning perhaps discoverable, and we will not worry if most of the “bouquet” remains intact. We will begin at the beginning of each of the texts listed in Table 1, and we will move on to the next text as soon as we have “vertically” read enough to provide a sample manager proªle. The thread of the narrative that we set out to explore in our reading is that of the manager as protagonist, the main “character” in the theory story. In the literature on guru theory, the story of the hero-manager has already been featured (Huczynski 1993; Clark and Salaman 1998; Jackson 2001), but Jackson claims that

Re-navigating management theory

management scholars are less than ready to critically appraise their own academic theory (p. 37). Our analysis is a response to this challenge. We searched the selected texts for traces of the genesis of the hero-manager, a sometimes romantic, aggressive, nationalistic, materialistic, hierarchical, ªgment, in academic management theory. Samples of our “horizontal” and “vertical” reading follow.

Analysis Taylor Read horizontally, Taylor’s text (1911/1967) insists that national e¹ciency should be our over-riding concern, that competent men will achieve it, and that men will be trained to be competent under a scientiªc system of management. When we begin to read vertically we notice that Taylor reiterates several times that management is founded on principles that “are applicable to all kinds of human activities, from our simplest individual acts to the work of the great corporations” (p. 7), and that “its [management’s] principles can be applied with equal force to all social activities” (p. 8). In this sweeping generalisation of management “activities” he includes homes, farms, businesses, churches, philanthropic institutions, universities and government departments (p. 8). He not only assumes that managers, are the repository of these “principles”, in charge of all these social activities, but also later states that “Engineers and managers … are … best ªtted to lead … the whole country as to the true facts” (p. 18). Managers, as the text tells it, are “better” men, men who realise “duty” (p. 6), men who are “right”, who are “born right” (p. 6) as well as “trained right” (p. 6), who are “ªrst-class” (p. 7) and will “rise to the top” (p. 7) because they are “best” (p. 7). Those over whom the manager will have dominion are a diŸerent kind of person. They are “awkward”, “ill-directed” and “blundering” (p. 5); “ignorant” (pp. 17, 18, 21, 26); “loaªng” (p. 19) and “lazy” (iterated three times on p. 20); “greedy and selªsh” (p. 21); deceitful and “hypocritical” (p. 23); “suspicious” (p. 24), and stupid (p. 26). Taylor paints a despairing picture of the reign of “evil” (pp. 14, 18, 20) over these human creatures who are enthralled to the “devil” (p. 20). Managers, says the text, are “over” these other men (p. 26), who are “incapable of fully understanding”, who have “insu¹cient mental understanding”, without the “guidance” of managers. They must be “trained” (p. 6), “developed” (p. 7), “guided” (p. 26), and “taught” (p. 26). Whereas in the past it was assumed that “Captains of industry are born, not made” (p. 6), in the future “our leaders must be trained right as well as born right” (p. 6). In other words a class hierarchy will be on-going (“born right”) but any number of “ordinary men” (p. 7) fortunate

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enough to have been “born right” will, under Taylor’s system, aspire to become leaders (p. 6), to become ªrst-class (p. 7), to rise to the top (p. 7).

Drucker Drucker’s text (1955), if we read it horizontally, states that “management can only be one leading group among several; in its own self-interest it can never and must never be the leading group” (p. 8); but read vertically his text belies this advice. It opens into a sweeping generalisation as Drucker pronounces that “The manager is the dynamic, life-giving element in every business” (p. 1). We learn immediately that “Management will remain a basic and dominant institution perhaps as long as Western civilization itself survives” for “Management also expresses the basic beliefs of modern Western society”. We ªrst meet these managers as an “essential, a distinct, and a leading group” (p. 1), in an ambiance of awe and astonishment “Rarely, if ever … has a new leading group … Rarely in human history has a new institution proven indispensable so quickly … Management will remain a basic and dominant institution perhaps as long as Western civilization itself survives”. The text’s proclaimed message drowns out the disclaimer. Within the next two pages Drucker rounds out his description. Managers are “a leading group”, educated, emulated even by the highest echelons of government (“And when the Eisenhower Administration was formed in 1952, it was formed consciously as a “Management Administration”, p. 1); a “new institution”, “indispensable”, non- controversial, “grounded” in business basics, they are ready to “advance the human spirit”, gain “control over nature”, “win the Cold War”, and create economic prosperity around the globe (pp. 1–3). When Drucker later explains that management’s second function is “to make a productive enterprise out of human and material resources” (p. 9), that making a “whole that is greater than the sum of its parts has since Plato’s days been the deªnition of the ‘Good Society’” (p. 10) we see that managers are to be thought of as leading this development, as did Plato’s philosopher kings in The Republic (Plato 1987). But managers are not only identiªed with political power, they also seem to assume a divine right to rule. Drucker tells us that in times past resources were considered God-given and unchangeable: now “managers are speciªcally charged with making resources productive” (p. 2). “Charged” is a word that carries several layers of meaning. It is invested with the notion of “received”, or at least inherited, passed-down, authority, a divine contract to deliver. But “charge” also suggests electrical energy, the power to energise and make something happen, as well as a legal challenge, “charged with” in the sense of an accusation that a person (or group of persons, managers in this case) is responsible for a particular outcome.

Re-navigating management theory

When management, in the same paragraph, is said to “re¶ect the basic spirit of the modern age”, and is presented in biblical language, “begotten” there is a relentless build towards acceptance of the “divine right” of managers to manage. In the one word “charged”, read vertically, managers are assumed to possess power over “resources” (which include workers), that is divine, legal and physical. In a horizontal reading the image of the worker as a “human being” who requires “motivation, participation, satisfactions, incentives and rewards, leadership, status and function” (ibid) is the image that Drucker seems to portray. Yet even when he argues that mismanaging the worker in the expectation of economic gain is “illusory” (p. 13) because it is not only ultimately destructive of capital, but also because society has a vital interest in realising its aims though the functions of management, this same counterpointing subtext breaks through. In stating that the mismanagement of workers and work will create “class hatred and class warfare” Drucker assumes the notion of class in the context of management. “Class” denotes social, not organisational, hierarchy, and so as we read it the group of people who are to be led by management, “a leading group in industrial society” (p. 1) has here been classiªed into a social stratum. While Drucker writes in his text that “management’s authority and responsibility are severely limited” (p. 7) or should be, lest they “help into power a dictatorship that will deprive … all … groups in a free society of their authority and standing” (p. 8) the representation of a “lower” order of persons (lower than management persons) is often lurking in the subtext: “only superior management … can prevent our becoming smug, self-satisªed and lazy” (p. 3). Even the inclusive “we” reads like a weak subterfuge here. Though later gently admonished as to the proper limitations of the authority and responsibilities that their role confers “The scope and extent of management’s authority and responsibility are severely limited” (p. 7), managers have, by the time they reach this advice, been ¶attered with a re¶ection of themselves as being of a superior order, persons “above” the worker. They have “high visibility” and have had a “spectacular rise”, live on the fourteenth ¶oor, and are thought to be the “people at the top” (p. 4). Drucker says that these images of managers are inadequate, yet his text images them in this way and then, instead of smothering them with an alternative image, continues to build the laudatory version.

Mintzberg Although our horizontal reading of Mintzberg’s text (1973) suggests that the manager is besieged, overworked, and unsure of his ability and/or competence, read vertically, it suggests the contrary. In the subtext we ªnd that the manager is both folk hero, symbolising both the romance of America’s frontier past, and the

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anonymous grand leader with the fate of the nation in his hands. In action, and in the diverse roles that Mintzberg portrays him in, the manager symbolises all that we admire and are grateful for, all that we aspire to be, and all that we depend upon to secure our future. Mintzberg introduces the manager as “the folk hero of contemporary American society” (p. 2). So we meet him [sic] in popular territory, in the “down home” backyard of every citizen, and though “we know so little of what he does” (the mystique of the hero who is beyond the ken of local know-how) yet we believe that he is the embodiment of national pride, the “American genius”. Like the stranger, the lone ranger who rides into town, performs his hero deeds and disappears again into the sunset, we admire (he has brought us our “success”), we are grateful (“America owes”) and we remain in awe of his anonymity. In the space of three short sentences Mintzberg moves his manager from the local to the national stage. It is “America” that owes to managers “her material and organizational success”, and their welcomed leadership (“we look to the manager”) is yoked to that of the president himself, as Everyman, or at least every American citizen, is again evoked in the quoted question as put by a “popular periodical”: ‘Is the Presidency actually too much for one man?’ It is a question Mintzberg tells us that is “echoed” throughout the nation, “in the corridors of a thousand government and industrial bureaucracies”. The scale and scope of the importance of management grows exponentially within the paragraph, as we grasp the current “state of our understanding”. From “the folk” down home and the popular voice of the people, to the corridors of industrial and political power, and to the White House itself, the work of managers, a “corp” of ten or more million individuals, has come to represent all success and leadership. The manager, this entity bestriding America, enlarges his territory as he steps into the next paragraph where he immediately becomes a world citizen for he is “trained in programs throughout the world”. His territory is the nation, and he is in charge. Seer as well as the specimen, his experience is the fountain of management knowledge (for the practitioners who write to him through Fortune and Business Week); even while he is the subject of endless investigation in the academic journals (such as Administrative Science Quarterly and The Journal of Management Studies). Mintzberg’s manager is a “folk hero”, someone to trust and to admire.2

2. In the cannon of his published work Mintzberg, in his typically forthright style, vehemently denies our vertical reading. In, for example, “Managing Quietly” (Mintzberg 1999), his indictment of the hero-manager concept is scathing.

Re-navigating management theory

Kanter Kanter, read horizontally, says that “People at all levels, including ordinary people at the grass roots and middle managers at the heads of departments, can contribute … can help their organizations” (Kanter 1984: 23) and so seems to promote a democratic worldview. Her subtext says otherwise. All of these people are valued only to the extent that they further the economic prosperity and the power of corporations, American corporations, led by adventurous entrepreneurs. Before a vertical reading of this text can even begin, its title, The Change Masters, grabs attention. It suggests power. “Masters” control. They command and they dominate. The subject of this control may range from skill and theory to individual people but wherever it is found the word “master” connotes command, superiority, and even subjugation: because one cannot achieve mastery without something to be master of, the word “master” assumes domination. And yet “change” is an abstract force, domination of which would be beyond human endeavour, so in its ªrst impact this title seems to suggest that the power assumed by these masters is extraordinary. Immediately juxtaposed with this notion, that of power that is beyond the experience of ordinary mortals, is a second notion in the subtitle: “corporate entrepreneur at work”. Readers still imaging superhuman power are lead to attach this to the entrepreneur, and so it is the entrepreneur who is given extraordinary status here. Entrepreneurs are evidently in possession of the power it is assumed all readers aspire to. The title of Part 1, “The Need for an American Corporate Renaissance” immediately supports these suggestions. Not only is change needed (and the idea that this national need will be led by entrepreneurs), it should be born from (renaissance literally means rebirth) an understanding of the work of the masters of change, corporate entrepreneurs. Because the Renaissance was a time of excitement, adventure and new knowledge, all of this too is what Corporate America is in need of, is what entrepreneurs provide, and importantly, is what entrepreneurs control, is that over which they have mastery. In the yoking of the nation of America to the corporate world, a second dominant theme of the passage is introduced, for the persistent appeal to nationalism, a feature of the prefacing quotation, “the United States faces such a challenge”, weaves throughout the whole of the text and culminates in the invocation to the entrepreneurial spirit as the saviour of the American nation that “alone ensures our survival” (p. 23). In the ªrst paragraph the author claims personal knowledge of the whole of “corporate America”, in the second, knowledge of “every sector” of corporate America, and in the third, recalls recent domination of the world by American companies: “American companies seemed to control the world”. We are presented with images of the world events and powers, “OPEC and

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foreign competition and in¶ation and regulation” (p. 18), that threaten this American domination; and with a litany of the “most progressive” giants, “lead by IBM, General Electric and Xerox”, who could lead America out of the “doldrums”. Innovation should be a “national priority” (p. 19) because “where America leads, it leads because of innovation”; and “the United States is ahead even of Japan”, and thus America must “play to national strengths” (p. 20). It is within this global “environment” (paragraphs 6 and 7) that nationalist pride of corporate entrepreneurs is called upon to rescue America’s economy from the “doldrums”, a state of depression or inactivity, but literally meaning a region near the equator in which sailing ships were often becalmed to the point of desperation for lack of winds. A further use of this geographical metaphor is found in Kanter’s image of America as “disturbed”, even threatened, by other nations: “world events … threaten to overwhelm us”. In a changing world “environment”, like adventurous explorers it is American entrepreneurs who could move the nation into “uncertain realms” (p. 18). They “take the lead” (p. 19) in establishing enterprise “zones” (p. 20). If America is to “secure” its future, “American organizations” must empower people to innovate on all “fronts”, for it is these “corporate entrepreneurs” who will “help their organizations to experiment on uncharted territories and move beyond what is known into the realm of innovation” (p. 23). In this combination of a rhetorical appeal to American nationalism, combined with a geographical metaphor suggesting exploration, adventure and the discovery of new realms, Kanter has also suggested conquest and colonisation in an appeal to past greatness (“the entrepreneurial spirit responsible for American success in the past”, p. 23). Her suggestion of all the “fronts” on which people are required reminds readers that America was won by conquest. Primarily though her notions of exploration, discovery and domination are a rhetorical appeal to a romantic view of the American dream of greatness, it is the “American Entrepreneurial Spirit” (subtitle of the second section of the “Introduction”) that is called on to dominate that part of the globe popularly denoted the “new” world. It is assumed that to be a leader, to demonstrate a “willingness to take the lead” (p. 19) is the shared national goal (p. 20, paragraph 2), and that competitive values (similarly lauded) entail defeating others to ªrst place: “the United States is ahead even of Japan” (p. 19). This ethos, the need to be seen as ªrst, pre-eminent in the world of aŸairs and money-making, premised on the notion of shared assumption that competition is “good” and will result in more proªt, and that proªt is in itself an inherent “good”. The “master” of the title leads from the top “level”.

Re-navigating management theory

Follett Unlike all of the managers above, who lead from outside, beyond, or above the group, Follett’s text (1987) is built around an image of a servant manager. There is responsibility in this role but little glamour as the manager facilitates from within the group, assisting the endeavours of those who seek to understand, and progress that understanding into positive action. We searched carefully for the manager in both our ªrst, horizontal, and our second, vertical, reading of Follett’s text but found her elusive. Reading through the text horizontally we did not, as in the previous readings, ªnd dramatic statements about powerful and expert people, and in¶uential decisions or events. Follett’s arguments are muted into the tones of private, personal experience; domestic situations, and the industrial workplace of the humble and the, too often, unheard. There is no managerial class in this text, no managerial status to aspire to, or power to covet. Much of her argument is illuminated and enlivened by anecdote, but it is sourced from people in many diverse roles and from a wide variety of backgrounds. Chatty and personal, domestic and shop-¶oor based, the knowledge Follett draws on is sourced from her experience of, and thinking on, the mundane, everyday world of ordinary people, at home and at work. It seems that managers can learn from the wisdom and actions of all those with whom they work and live. Follett speaks directly to readers of confronting her own personal needs and con¶icts, as in whether or not to open a library window (p. 32), and her attempt to complete an “adjustment” to her electricity bill (p. 47), as well as of a friend who “annoys” her (p. 36), another who learns to distinguish real from imagined needs (p. 41), and yet another who provides her with the chess analogy (p. 43). Interspersed with these personal revelations is a wide sprinkling of her conversations with, and observations of, the unpretentious, those who work at humble tasks. She aŸectionately coins the terms “up-hillers and down-hillers” as she describes con¶ict over unloading cans at a creamery platform (p. 32); chats about, “Take another case”, shop-¶oor union debate (p. 33), and discloses detailed talk about the wages of working “girls” (pp. 36–37), and union negotiation (p. 47). These modest people, and the knowledge that we can glean from their engagements, are gently juxtaposed with anecdotal images of the long-drawn out and unproductive deliberations of wage board (p. 37) and trade union (p. 46), and also, ªnally, with the “the chief obstacle to integration — namely, the undue in¶uence of leaders — the manipulation of the unscrupulous on the one hand and suggestibility of the crowd on the other” (pp. 47–48). We are always in dialogue with the unassuming candour of a seeming “everyman” rather than an “expert”. Again and again Follett gently admonishes any,

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including herself, who fail to keep a balanced grip on her argument and anecdote. A sequence of paragraphs for example, begins “But I certainly ought not” (p. 32), “I have already given this illustration in print”(p. 32), “take another case” (p. 33), “A friend gave me this example” (p. 33), “By far the most interesting example” (p. 33), “It is often di¹cult to decide” (p. 34), and “Some people tell me” (p. 34). Follett does not forgo all appeal to an established authority, but her recourse is to the knowledge that resides within a tradition of academic learning rather than to the expertise or proªle of a particular person or organisation. There are times, for example, when the anecdotes which weave through the text and the snatches of conversation which weave through the anecdotes, echo Platonic dialogue on con¶ict and desire. In a passage on “The Elements in Mental Con¶ict” (Plato 1987: 206–217) Plato says: “We thought it would be easier to see justice in the individual if we looked for it ªrst in some larger ªeld which also contained it” (p. 208). Follett says “a business should be so organized … that … in any con¶ict, in any coming together of diŸerent desires, the whole ªeld of desire be … viewed” (p. 39). Plato says “when a man’s mind desires anything, don’t you … say that he has an impulse to what he desires…?” (Plato 1987: 211) and again “In that case each desire is directed simply towards its own natural object” (p. 212). Follett extrapolates: “we have to uncover our sub-articulate egoisms … see them in relation to other facts and desires, [and then] we may estimate them diŸerently” (p. 39). Their voices, Plato’s and Follett’s seem to blend as we weave them together here, into one thought process and one tone. Just as careful claim, counter-claim and qualiªcation move Plato’s theorising along, so too Follett makes a point, chats about it, qualiªes it a little and then shifts ground again. To this extent her authority is a conversation that bridges the more than 2000 years and simultaneously engages with those who humbly serve. Perhaps the manager is never quite present in this text because she is always in the process of becoming through dialogue with the wisdom of others.

Wrap-up Four of these texts, those authored by Taylor, Drucker, Mintzberg and Kanter, assume the rightful place of the manager as a member of a pre-eminent, leading class wielding social as well as economic power over other groups of people. Our vertical reading of the ªfth, Follett’s text, made in the context of the other four vertical readings of management theory texts, provides one more possible reason for the forgetting of her writings. If part of the allure of management knowledge and expertise is the assumption that access to it will bestow status, power and glamour, then a theory text that promises none of this may lack appeal.

Re-navigating management theory

Taylor’s Christian manager is “born to rule”, and is “better” than other “men” (1967: 6). Drucker’s manager assumes membership of an “essential”, “distinct and leading group” (1955: 2). He (sic) emanates power over “resources” (which include people) that is physical, legal and divine. Mintzberg’s manager is a folk hero (1973: 2) who rides into his text like the lone ranger come to save a Western out-post town, and yet claims kin with the role of the Presidency itself. Kanter’s xenophobic and paternalistic manager ensures the survival of an American nation, threatened by hostile foreigners, and leads the American people into “uncharted territories” (1984: 23). All these hero managers are adventurers, leading their “men” into new worlds. Our reading of the ªfth text, authored by Mary Follett, has discovered no hero, but ªnds instead a narrative peopled by numerous ordinary human beings, men and women, in management, in service, in politics and in intimate domesticity, speaking in their own voices of their own lives; and in their several voices the text seems to say “we are all managers, and can all learn from each other”. We conclude that our reading suggests a possible reason for the discard of Follett’s text through much of the twentieth century: it is a narrative without a hero.

Where to from here? Our approach to reading suggests that as readers we all tend to discover meaning in texts that re¶ects our own experience and concerns. We have read theories as narrative and while doing so have searched for images of the protagonists in these stories, hero-managers as described and in action. When we read theory as narrative we recreate it in every new reading. Each re-telling of our reading experience enables a little more of the inªnity of possible interpretation that texts suggest. Texts read in this way discover in every reader the teller of a “new” version of the old familiar tale. In our ending now, we recall our beginning, where we noted that in oral traditions of story-telling, from antiquity until the present, it has always been understood that the original tale would change and grow a little with each retelling: as the listener becomes the new teller, multitudes of stories emerge, merge and re-merge anew. The original tale is not lost to us, quite the reverse, for in each reconstruction it expands as more of the story is made more accessible. We suggest that if we continue to treat management theory as the familiar home from which we sometimes foray out to explore a little more new territory, but also as the safe harbour of standard interpretations to which we always return, then we will remain trapped in the managerialist thinking that Follett challenges. Perhaps if we could learn to enjoy the deep oceans of a world with ever-expanding horizons then our learning would be a more exciting adventure.

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We are not suggesting that management theory as discovered in standard interpretations is “wrong”: that we should discard it and begin again. We have argued that the horizontal, or dominant, interpretation of the text, like the refrain in the folk ballad, or the Chorus in a Classical Greek drama, reminds us of the familiar tale and keeps our steering on course, while also allowing us to safely read against the current or dive vertically beneath the surface of the text, in order to surface more of the story. Perhaps if management theory were to be more often read as narrative, Follett would be more widely remembered, read, taught, reinterpreted, and challenged. Perhaps the hero manager would become an historic curiosity?

The body of the text and the ordinary narratives of organisation Heather Höp¶ Department of Accounting, Finance and Management, University of Essex, UK

A literal dermatography A few years ago, one of my part-time doctoral students who worked for a local authority services department came to see me. “I’m afraid I’ll have to suspend my studies for a while” he said, “We are going through some changes at work at the moment and things are really bad. I’ve developed some kind of eczema. I think it is a reaction to what is happening. I was looking at myself in the mirror the other day and I thought to myself, ‘the story of what is going on at work at the moment is inscribed all over my body’”. His research, never alas completed, had involved collecting workplace stories of everyday experiences of organisational change. He had been gathering stories about a previous restructuring in his organisation when he suddenly found himself caught up in a new round of restructuring. In this second round of changes, John (not his real name) was moved from his job as a popular section leader with a staŸ of about twenty, to an operational job where he worked alone in an o¹ce dealing with external agents. At ªrst he was bewildered by the changes. He was very distressed but had no focus for his feelings. No explanation was given to him. He felt humiliated and punished and, although his salary was protected, all his former staŸ realised that he was being side-lined and, for the most part, treated him with embarrassed pity. The day that John came to see me he was a very diŸerent young man to the person I had seen not three weeks before. His coherence and the expectation of continuity had completely disappeared. “I feel terrible and I don’t know how to get myself together”, he told me. I was sympathetic and concerned, worried about him as my student, and I told him to look after himself. “You know”, he said, “with this skin disease, I feel as if I am too strong mentally to go mad — which is how I feel — I think I am the sort of person who has to take it all

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out on my body. I think if I didn’t do that I would become unhinged”. He never completed his research because the subject matter became too unbearable. I occasionally hear from John — usually at Christmas. He is still working for the same organisation but he is much more detached. After he started to make sense of his life again, he took up alternative medicine as a way of curing his skin problem. The only indication he had that he had somehow failed the organisation was from his line-manager who told him that he was “too close to his staŸ”, that he “hadn’t maintained an appropriate distance”, and that “being a manager is not about being liked”. This essay is about narratives of organisation, about continuities and discontinuities, and about madness. It is also about conditions of exile and about the power to deªne an authoritative version of a narrative. First, the chapter is concerned with the relationship between trajectory and subjection in ordinary narratives. This provides a basis for a discussion of the heterogeneous nature of the texts of organisation, the signiªcance of interpretation, and importantly, the status of diŸerent interpretations. As such, this chapter takes its inspiration from a number of diŸerent sources: certainly ªrst from John’s story but also from my own experiences and from my own research into the everyday experiences of organisational life. In a speciªc sense, however, it was the novels of John Fowles and D. M. Thomas which provided the impetus for the construction of the chapter and the hinge which holds it together.

Cruciªed beings (L. crux, crucis, cross) We live on that border, crossroads beings, cruciªed beings. Kristeva 1987: 254

This idea of the subject-in-process is familiar within postmodern accounts of complex ontology and the problem of identity. Here the intention is to examine the position of the dissident or exile in relation to the possibility of the political. According to Docherty (1996), “the postmodern narrative of characterisation … eradicates the distinction between the ethical and the political” (Docherty 1996: 66) because it draws the reader into “disposition” [sic], in other words, it puts the reader into a suitable place, it inclines the reader, or to use the Greek word for this disposition, ethos, it establishes the place of the ethical by involving the reader in the search for “the good” so, Docherty argues, re-establishing the place of the political. Thus, “to read postmodern characterisation is to reintroduce the possibility of politics, and importantly of a genuinely historical political change, into the act of reading” (Docherty 1996: 66,67).

The body of the text and the ordinary narratives of organisation

Postmodern characterisation then involves “ªrst, the confusion of the ontological status of the character with that of the reader; secondly, the decentring of the reader’s consciousness, such that she or he is, like the character, endlessly displaced and ‘diŸering’; and, thirdly, the political and ethical implications of this ‘seeming otherwise’, shifting from appearance to diŸerent appearance in the disappearance of a totalized selfhood” (Docherty 1996: 67). This has political consequence, that is, that there is “a marginalization of the reader from a centralized or totalized narrative of selfhood” which renders “the reading subject-inprocess as the ªgure of the dissident” (Docherty 1996: 67). To support this view Docherty refers to Kristeva’s identiªcation of the experimental writer and, as Docherty says, “crucially, women” [original italics] as types of dissident. So, the argument runs, what these two “share is the impetus towards marginalization and indeªnition; they are in a condition of ‘exile’ from a centred identity of meaning and its claims to a totalized Law or Truth” and, further, he adds that exile itself is a form of dissidence “since it involves the marginalization or decentring of the self from all positions of totalized or systematic Law (such as imperialist nation, patriarchal family, monotheistic language)”. Hence, Docherty puts forward the proposition that postmodern characterization , “construed as writing in and from exile, serves to construct the possibility, for perhaps the ªrst time, of elaborating the paradigmatic reader of these new novels as feminized” (Docherty 1996: 68) because “Woman … is always dispositioned towards otherness, alterity”. Hence, postmodern characterization permits the ethics of alterity and the opportunity to explore what it means “to speak from the political disposition of the Other”. After all, “What we designate as “feminine”, far from being a primeval essence, (is the) “other” without a name, (Kristeva 1982: 58). Consequently, this chapter seeks to unhinge a number of continuities, to exile the reader from the security of the continuity of the text, to establish a place from which to consider “the possibility of politics”, alterity, and ethics.

Sense and ab/sence As I didn’t understand this book, I can’t really review it. However, it came to me highly recommended by several friends. I don’t know WHY, but it did. Clever Girl from Jersey City, New Jersey, USA. (http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/177942)

Docherty is quite right in his assertion that the postmodern novel produces in the reader the conditions of exile. When I ªrst read D. M. Thomas’s book, The White Hotel, it induced in me a series of shocks. There was a preamble. It did not make sense — and it embarrassed me by its paradoxical intimacy and disconnection. I read on and was thrown from one account to another. Each account pertained to

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the same event, the same origin, and the accounts hinged on this relation. The reader cannot know that, except in its unfolding, and, therefore, I was bewildered by diŸerences, new beginnings, changes in style, standpoint and in the degree of intimacy aŸorded to the reader. Yet, the construction was clever and I savoured the unfolding and the revelation. The book both threw me forward in the text and dragged me along. I was cast into a particular relation to the text and I was exiled from it by its discontinuities. However, there is a signiªcant irony here which arises from the notion that the experience of reading the postmodern novel is in some sense liberating, and that is that the hinge is always the author’s. Consequently, whether seduced by the text or not, I could not escape its inevitable trajectory and whatever the motive of the author might be, I was always subject to it. Always caught within the unfolding and the circumscribed spaces opened up in the discontinuities — if, of course, I chose to read on. Most postmodern novels produce a similar eŸect. Recently, I read John Fowles early novel, The Ebony Tower and experienced both a delight in the construction of the piece and an irritation at being rendered subject to the whims of the author. This issue of the problem of authorship is readily addressed within literary criticism, however, my purpose here is both to parallel the construction of organisational narratives with all their discontinuities and consider the relationship between trajectory and subjection. All these issues have connotations for organisation and organisations. Like Thomas’s novel, the paper itself throws out an argument towards some conclusion or place of arrival always with the tension that the demand for exposition is at once the desire for order and the urgency of that order the instrument of the regulation of the text. Consequently, the starting point for this discussion is in the distinction which I want to make between the Ordinary and the Vernacular.

The jurisdiction of an ordering The Ordinary, in the sense in which it is used here, is the ecclesiastical and legal term for an immediate jurisdiction or authority; as, for example, in the authoritative order of the Mass; as belonging to the regular order or course; as the orderly and usual. In eŸect, the Ordinary is concerned with the authoritative interpretation of an ordering. It is easy to lose sight of this meaning in the usual understanding of the Ordinary as the commonplace. There are many ways in which the purposive force of the Ordinary might be described. Here, the Ordinary is found in the emphatic trajectory of the text, in the thrust of the paper itself. Consequently, a discontinuous text is di¹cult to produce within the ordinary narratives of organisation since it does not conform and demands explanation. Every explanation, however, is an incorporation into the body of the text. On the other hand, without explanation, the attempt becomes untenable.

The body of the text and the ordinary narratives of organisation

The m/other tongue of home-born slaves In contrast to the regulatory functions of the Ordinary, the Vernacular is concerned with native language and comes from the Latin “verna” meaning a home born slave or a slave born in the master’s house. It is interesting to note that verna has a common gender, that is, it applies to both male and female slaves despite the fact that it takes the feminine ending. The Ordinary takes precedence over the Vernacular as the regulation of the language of slaves. Take for example Cummings and Worley’s book Organization Development and Change (Cummings and Worley 1993: 144–148) where they propose how organisations might achieve organisational change via the motivation of staŸ (italics added): The ªrst activity involves motivating change and includes creating a readiness for change among organizational members and helping them to overcome resistance to change. The second activity is concerned with creating a vision for a desired future state of the organisation. The vision provides a direction for change and serves as a bench mark for assessing progress. The third activity involves developing political support for change. The fourth activity is concerned with managing the transition from the current state to the desired future state… The ªfth activity involves sustaining momentum for change so that it will be carried out to completion… (Cummings and Worley 1993: 144–145) Organizational change involves moving from the known to the unknown. … people’s readiness for change depends on creating a felt need for change. This involves making people so dissatisªed with the status quo that they are motivated to try new things and ways of behaving. Creating such dissatisfaction can be rather di¹cult… Generally, people and organizations need to experience deep levels of hurt before they will seriously undertake meaningful change. (ibid: 146) At a personal level, change can arouse considerable anxiety about letting go of the known and moving to an uncertain future. Individuals may be unsure whether their existing skills and contributions will be valued in the future. Methods for dealing with resistance to change include at least three major strategies…” (ibid: 148).

These are Ordinary narratives of organisation. Ordinary in the sense that they are commonplace and taken-for-granted accounts of the normative functions of organisation certainly, but they are Ordinary in the sense that they provide the jurisdiction of an ordering. They become the authorised versions of appropriate sequence, of proper relations. The Ordinary seeks to cast meanings, to oŸer deªnition, to construct categories, to oŸer a clear ordering and sequence. The Ordinary is the province of the Latin verb jacere which means to throw or cast. Hence the language of the Ordinary is authoritative. It is the language of phallogocentrism and hence of trajectory (L. trans\across + jacere\to throw). It is concerned with the power to indicate a movement across a space, something

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thrown from one position to another. Hence, it is the language of pro-jection, of moving forwards and of indicating a future arrival position or state, of re-jection of the throwing out of those things or people incompatible with the pro-jection, it is the language of ab-jection and the de-jection of things thrown away. So, when organisations declare speciªc objectives, outcomes, points of arrival and so forth, they throw forward an ordering into future time. This is the way in which the notion of “creating a vision for a desired future state of the organisation” (Cummings and Worley 1993: 144) functions to neutralise the moment, to cancel the present other than as “a bench mark for assessing progress” (ibid: 144). There is a directed rationality which drives the pursuit of objectives and eradicates, (pulls out by the roots), all that is Other. Embodied experience when subjected to the crushing weight of the trajectory, of purposive futurity, is rendered abject. Kristeva argues that it is either possible to submit and become the same, in other words to achieve and demonstrate mastery of the text, to become part of the project or to be other, rejected, abject. One throws in one’s lot or one is thrown out.

Direction and order So, the tra-jectory of the Ordinary is both authoritative and indicative. The Ordinary sets the order of events, the sequence of tasks to be performed the targets to be achieved, the endpoint, the desired objective. The Ordinary authorises the movement across a space and indicates a desired place of arrival. The Ordinary regulates movement and throws forward a direction. It fore-casts. The Ordinary poses a threat to the Vernacular precisely because of the regulatory functions of the Ordinary. These are the burden which is borne in the Vernacular and which ªnds expression through ways of being which are not expressible within the Ordinary. The slave who is native to a place, who is born in the house of his master is wont to dwell in a place with satisfaction, to be content in a place. The word “wont” connotes this desire to “be” in a place. It derives from the German word wohnen (to live in a place). It is a term which suggests a choice about movement: or, movement as is one’s wont. To achieve one’s wont the Vernacular must becomes intractable: rebellious, disobedient, unyielding. In regard to change — here understood as a discontinuity, as in the example from Cummings and Worley (1993) above, one might view a change as something to be carried out, to be carried through, or carried oŸ. The essential characteristic of this notion of carriage is in its implication of weight, of something borne, of burden: an imposition beyond the pervading oppression of the human condition. Change places a burden on those who must carry it out or must carrying on despite its weight. All change carries anxieties about death and mortality, the fear of disorder and decay, the fear of social disaggregation and isolation, the fear of the density of experience

The body of the text and the ordinary narratives of organisation

brought to bear on the moment. Change adds further to the burden of quotidian cares, to the weight of experience and to fears of the future. The additional pressures of change make life less bearable. In organisational terms, the response to heaviness is via theoretical and ideological structures, through ritual and codes of practice and through the paradoxical trivialisation of work activity where the meaningless is invested with heroic signiªcance. In short then, the Vernacular is the province of the home born slave and characterised by a feminine case ending. The Ordinary is rhetorical. In the manipulative and appropriative styles of the Ordinary the violence of the defence of an authoritative ordering is apparent. The authority of the Ordinary is reinforced by the appropriation and manipulation of the Vernacular and, hence, of the language of slaves, in the pursuit of an authoritative, vernacular, and rational deªnitions of purposive movement across spaces. The Vernacular exists at the margins or extremes of the Ordinary; yet it has also been recognised as central, in its appropriation, to the achievement of the goals of the Ordinary. When used to support the Ordinary, the acquisition of the Vernacular creates the illusion of completeness. In other words, the Ordinary seeks to protect itself from the transgression of the Vernacular by capture of the Vernacular and its translation into artefact. Those marginal to the quest are, hence, sacriªced to the logic of the trajectory. The purposive rationality of the organisation invites a desperate instrumentality in the pursuit of which human experience is distorted and crushed. Consequently, John’s story of the relentless pursuit of order in his organisation demonstrates very clearly the relationship between ordinary narratives and subjection. What follows, in the style of Thomas and Fowles, is a series of stories which, in one sense or other are all drawn from my research — empirical and theoretical, from my readings of various theoretical positions, and from my personal experiences. The intention in their construction is to exile the reader from the notion of a continuous text, to draw attention to heterogeneous perspectives, to give attention to the diŸerence in status between various accounts. However, there is a problem with this approach which I will return to later.

Ordinary narratives and infringements Narrative 1: Ordinary theories Infringe, in-frinj, v.t. to violate, esp law: to neglect to obey. (Lit. to break into, from L. in fringo — in and frango. In most cases of schizophrenia… the unconscious appears to prefer not the techniques of the actor, but hose of the director. It does not create a new personality, but

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instead, stages a play. The major diŸerence is that the conscious mind is permitted to remain, an audience of one sitting lonely in the theatre, watching a drama on which it cannot walk out. (O’Brien 1976: 18).

The theatrical metaphor is most appropriate to the nature of the illness. In theatre everything is possible. Illusion, fantasy, time-slips are the vehicles for the creation of a theatrical imagery. Similarly, the failure to acquire an adequate interpretative schema or the destruction of that schema creates an existential drama which is characterised by an absence of temporal connectivity. The patient experiences time as an extended and changeless “now” in which s/he is unable to in¶uence or control past or future and where future is a source of anxiety. Thought is disordered and new patterns impose themselves in an unsolicited way presenting the individual with such a range of possibilities that action is paralysed. Thoughts and images are fragmented since they have no temporal connectivity while spurious connections proliferate. It appears that there can be no standpoint from which to re¶ect or to give coherence to disordered perceptions, cognition and emotions. The self is fragmented. Kristeva argues that the notion of a uniªed subject supposes a uniªed consciousness and that, in turn, this requires an ordered mind. An orderly mind requires an ordering mechanism and this, according to Kristeva, is achieved via syntax. Poetic language can disrupt this order and ordering both of text and in social terms. The regulation of the individual is achieved by controlling the physical and psychic rhythms which are normalised by social learning from the pre-linguistic ¶ux which Kristeva terms the semiotic. This is distinct from the ordered, regulated rationality of the adult world which Kristeva refers to as the symbolic. Hence, the symbolic uses the semiotic material and gains mastery (Kristeva 1984: 153; Selden 1989: 83) over it. The symbolic relies on the semiotic for its signiªcation. The symbolic functions to locate subjects, to place them and provide the material for the construction of “identities”. Yet the sounds and rhythms of the semiotic resist subjection and seek expression through the subversion of the symbolic order. The symbolic, therefore, is equated with regulation and the semiotic with the unorganised ¶ux of the physical and the psychical. This provides a basis for an understanding of the mechanisms of control via deªnition, taxonomy and text and for an understanding of what is controlled. Consequently, ambivalence is not only a characteristic of the semiotic ¶ux but its resistance to the symbolic order and memory of regulation by it. Kristeva views the subject not as the source of meaning but as the site of meaning. The subversion of the patriarchal law is achieved by resistance to syntax and, hence, is related to the rediscovery of the mother and liberation from the authority of the patriarchal text.

The body of the text and the ordinary narratives of organisation

Narrative 2: Extraordinary experiences I am more or less certain who I am. Fractions (Fr. — L. fractio-frango, fractus, to break).

I feel death has been very close to me … well, the second death is something very close, philosophic, part of me so I sometimes feel partly dead. I think of my body as being something very central in my life. Something very important to me. Not at all a physical body that one might discard, that will be dashed at 80 but as something that is to be cared for, is to be loved, is to be respected, is to linger on in life after death, if there is to be more death for me. The future is the blossoming of my past, the fulªlment of my past and its application and translation into something of value. The future I look to explain the past and to apply spiritual forces, to apply spiritual love, to apply spiritual knowledge, to apply spiritual transcendence… I can only hope this is to be my future. If I can, I will transcend with the spirits from the past into the present and create a future of worth for myself and my studies. I need to work a change. I read a number of books at once so that I won’t get lopsided in my studies. Eating too much acts as a terrible anaesthetic. If I fall asleep during the day to no purpose, no purpose such as recharging energies, that may cause me to black out and in one sense of the term… in allegory to black out. If one doesn’t enjoy what one is doing, if one doesn’t actually read in a fulªlling manner, in some sort of true manner, then it might be that words just ¶ash by even as the days might if one was lazy. Sometimes I have met myself while walking down the street. I’ve done that several times. I might have a vision of myself when young and that has happened also. One fears change into the future. I don’t want to disintegrate and be added to my future body. That’s something very primary in my life. It’s alien to me that I should have to die into the future. It’s not something that I’m looking forward to. I take ªnnon tea. I take ªnnon salts in my tea or in water and it’s a ªne, it’s a most beautiful medicine. Finnon salts bolster the body and one’s life as only recharge can. The saddest time for me was the ascension into heaven, indeed, the absorption by the spirit even though it might be something so miraculous it was something so terribly painful and heavy it was shattering throughout my entire life. I told the Buddha that life was sorrow… the teardrops slipping into the shining sea — horrifying, lousy, lousy future. I managed to come back but I’m not sure all that many others can. When my dewdrop slipped into the shining ocean, when my body was absorbed by the spirit, and when my love was accepted by immortality, when my way was loved by eternity, I was able to come back to ponder the occurrence and to speak about it. But it was so shattering that I went mad as a result. Too broken, not knowing enough, not understanding enough. I called for help time after time but no one oŸered it. I wrote to priests but none of them replied to my letters. For a good

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many years now I’ve thought of myself as being like Jesus Christ and so, looking through my past life, I want to understand myself to an adequate extent to be able to say to another person whether, yes, I am Jesus Christ. I am snubbed by the Church, abandoned by my fellow men — in heaven, I am more or less certain who I am. While I am not respected as Christ a great harm is being done to me. If you could only please get me out of this hospital I would be very pleased.

Narrative 3: The mother’s account Grove Cottage Nutsford Cheshire Dear Marjorie, I went to see Robert yesterday. He seemed rather more talkative than on my last visit although not altogether coherent. Edward still won’t come with me. He says places like that are just too awful and, in any case, really I know that he can’t bear to see what has become of Robert. Robert was so brilliant at school — although I knew in my heart that he never really enjoyed boarding. Robert was always artistic and sensitive. Edward hoped for a son who would follow his own interests in sports. Did I ever tell you that Edward was Victor Ludorum in his ªnal year at Harwood and it was really his sporting prowess that got him into Cambridge, or so his mother always told me. Robert really hated all that competitive stuŸ but he did his best to conceal his feelings to please his father. He tried to be brave and to demonstrate his independence. I suppose the ªrst signs of the problems that were to come came when he wanted to do languages and arts. Edward threw a blue ªt. He said that he could tolerate a little recreational eŸort with music but that under no circumstances would he have a son of his opting for soppy subjects. He would hear no protests from Robert or his teachers. Robert had to concentrate on Sciences and to work hard if he ever hoped to do medicine. Robert told me that he had a great love of literature and had hoped to study English, German and History at A level. Of course, he had to buckle down and do Physics, Chemistry and Maths instead and, given Harwood boys invariably get eleven O levels and anything less than a grade B is considered a failure, he was as well qualiªed to enter the Sciences in the sixth form as the Arts. He took it well. Edward lectured him on how much his education had cost him to date and his responsibilities as a son and really that was that. He had no choice but he resigned himself well. Of course, if you remember, he did brilliantly — ªve grade As at A level — a place to study medicine at his father’s old college — Cambridge naturally.

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Edward was ecstatic and Robert enjoyed a brief period of aŸection from his father but, you know my husband, the next problems came when Edward seemed hell-bent on organising Robert’s social life for him. He’d just ring up old so and so and arrange for him to take Robert out to dinner. He’d send Robert theatre tickets for London shows. He would hector the boy mercilessly when he came home — had he joined this or that sporting club, was he on this or that committee. I never had any interest in all that undergraduate “clubbing” so I used to leave them to it. I could see that Robert was starting to change — going under in some way. Every time I saw him he seemed more into himself. He never stood up to his father or showed any resistance. He never followed his father’s instructions either. He just seemed to become more and more resigned to living his life for someone else. I never interfered. I just used to go out into the kitchen and put the kettle on. My life with Edward has not been easy and I couldn’t bear more upsets so I just let them sort it out between themselves. I tried to keep out of it all. I suppose if I am truthful with you, I wanted to escape myself. I had given in to Edward’s bossiness all my married life. I could, or perhaps should, have stood up for Robert but he didn’t seem part of me any more. I didn’t feel I had any valid point to make. I knew I couldn’t change Edward. I did nothing. I just stood by and let it happen to him. In his second year, we had a phone call. It was from the college. They said Robert had had a brain haemorrhage and would we come. Edward has never been able to tolerate illness in any form and told me to go. Robert had been taking huge quantities of LSD. They were doing tests. In my innocence I thought that they were doing tests to ªnd out the extent of the damage. The doctor called me into his o¹ce and said, “My dear Mrs Niemutter, I’m afraid I must tell you — your son is schizophrenic”…

Narrative 4: Disjuncture Robert Niemutter 22 male Admitted Sunday 19th May The patient was admitted c 03.00 — brought in by two young men from the patient’s college. Patient was in a coma. They suspected that he had been taking an hallucinogenic drug. Ramsey Hospital, Cambridge, 24th July Notes: Robert Niemutter Interview 1

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The patient explained that he had been taking LSD. He could remember nothing of the events leading to his admission. He is a medical student although I gather from his comments – a reluctant one. He feels abandoned by his mother. He speaks of his father as dead.

Narrative 5: Poetic subversion and more attempts to deªne The poetic is concerned with the very ambivalence which is concealed by masking and regulated by the text. Unlike academic writing which is rarely moving — even its lifelessness arouses no emotion — the successful literary work engages the emotions and moves the reader, albeit such emotion may range from sympathy to disgust, from joy to anger. Poetic writing is concerned with sound — alliteration, rhymes, onomatopoeia, the play of sounds which seed “an oral transgression through the semantic organization of the discourse, a transgression which displaces or cuts the articulated meanings and which renders the signiªer autonomous in relation to the signiªed” (de Certeau 1986: 53). Women threaten to reveal the poetic dimension of experience “which disrupts the tyranny of unitary meaning and logocentric discourse” (Selden 1989: 149). Women, therefore, pose a threat to the apparent symbolic unity not only in what they say but in their mere presence. Women embody the poetic. This makes women dangerous because the knowledge they embody signals The Fall of Male discourse and with it the power to regulate. Male styles are rhetorical/linear/ logical. Yet the poetic is not synonymous with poetry. Through male poetry women’s authority and selfhood is sacriªced and controlled in the pursuit of male autobiographical selfhood. Male discourse attempts to protect itself from transgression by the poetic by the capture of poetic style and its translation into artefact: poetry. The power to transgress the text is reversed by the transgression of the hymen. Docherty (1987) argues that the male imagination operates an equation between the point of death and the boundary of the male self, that is, woman — or more precisely the hymen — and says that in transgressing both these boundaries, death and the hymen, the male imagination constructs its authoritative identity of selfhood. In this construction, woman is only called into existence to permit the construction of an authorised male self. In this way, a substitution is eŸected by the male who, through his sexual desire gives woman material existence and then usurps her place as the angelic medium between god and man. She as lover rather than ideal is, thus, contaminated (Doherty 1987: 136). Docherty’s argument provides a useful device for the examination of the ways in which woman/the poetic are used in the construction of male authority: are made safe and appropriated.

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The poetic, embodies ambivalence, communicates condensed aŸect and preserves unconscious rhythms and so is a considerable challenge to the authority of the text. The poetic threatens disorder. The poetic resists regulation. The poetic subverts the mastery of the text. It is regulated, controlled, and attempts are made to master it. Ambivalence-in-being deconstructs the privileged text. Consequently, it is possible to set poetic disorder against rhetorical trajectory and poetic transgression against hymeneal transgression; to set embodiment against role, and order against ¶ux. The subversion of the patriarchal law is achieved by resistance to syntax and, hence, is related to the rediscovery of the mother and liberation from the authority of the patriarchal text.

Narrative 6: Letters to friends

To John Armitage Lancaster, Sunday 1st September 2002 Dear John, Greetings. I’m sorry I still haven’t managed to get the Body and Society paper to you. I hope to have it done before the start of term. I have to go to Berlin immediately after the BAM conference but I’m hoping to get a few days at the end of September when I can do some writing. Actually, I’m writing day and night at the moment but all my time lately has been spent on the rhetorical demands of strategy documents. Talk about facies hippocratica — well, I might if I had time — I have my pharmaka at hand for the necessary cosmetics. Hope life is treating you well. Love, Heather

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To Monika Kostera Lancaster, Wednesday 4th September, 2002 Dear Monika, How lovely it was to see you again in Barcelona for the EGOS conference. I appreciate your concern about what is happening here with the restructuring. I can’t say much about it at the moment but I’m looking forward to seeing you in Warsaw next month. I am interested in the way you describe the hidden spaces of the organisation — the signiªcance of what is there but not obvious, not fore grounded — there and yet without the power of its being “there”, seeming to have no value, the importance of its power to give meaning not recognised, its purpose not appreciated — a place to keep clear of or even somewhere to put discarded old rubbish. I think that is very much how I feel at the moment. Ah well — I suppose that’s really rather like the position of most women — and nice men. I’m oŸ to Berlin next week — I’ll be in touch. Take care of yourself, Love, Heather

The body of the text and the ordinary narratives of organisation

To a PhD student Stockton, Saturday 7th September Dear T., Thank you for sending me the draft outline of your work. It is extraordinarily brilliant. You’ll need some pretty sharp examiners to take it on though. I think the sort of thing you’ve done with male text is enough to get you burnt at the stake — and I’m not sure I mean metaphorically! You’ve textually attacked their erections and they won’t forgive you for that — well most won’t. Of course, there are lot of men who will understand precisely what your writing is about — you’ll need to ªnd some. The rest, I’m afraid will suŸer from the “anxiety of in¶uence” which Todorov speaks about every time they come to pick up a pen, a raging impotence. You alte Hexe — you’ve shown the pharmakon to be a perfume without essence/ without smell and Derrida would love it, I think — you’ll have more trouble with those who venerate him. You have mastered and negated that mastery. I loved it. See you in London at the end of the month. Love, Heather

To Barbara Czarniawska Lancaster, Saturday 7th September Dear Barbara, I just got the full text of your “Humiliation” paper oŸ the web. It rings a lot of bells with how I am feeling at the moment. I have tried to call you to let you know how things are going here but I can’t. I will tell you more when I see you. Think of me. Love, Heather

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Privilege and authority What this tortuous construction oŸers is a way in which some of the hidden voices within the text can be made audible. As such it does not present a call to analysis but rather to praxis. By ªrst giving attention to the taken-for-granted assumptions of organisational trajectories, these ideas seek to expose the organisation as ideological, as privileging objectives over individuals, and as regulatory in prescribing behaviours and values which organisation members must follow. Secondly, the approach adopted in this paper leads to particular implications which emerge from what is revealed about organisational life in general. On the one hand, it is possible to articulate a position within the radical humanist paradigm (Burrell and Morgan 1979: 32–33) from which to challenge existing social arrangements and the current modes of organising and, on the other, to follow Kristeva into deªning ethical and feminine practices which might guide the micro-politics of interpersonal behaviour. However, there is a problem here. Authority, as authorship, is not easily resigned and in producing this discontinuous text with the promise of exile and a disposition for the ethical and the political, I remain the architect of that construction. Consequently, despite my best eŸorts to fracture the text, I have succeeded in producing an allegory which leaves meaning in my hands and leaves the reader dependent on the logic of my assurance of coherence. These deªnitional characterisations of allegory have important implications for organisational analysis. In allegory, the allegorist takes an “element out of the totality of the life context, isolating it, depriving it of its function” (Bürger 1984: 69). In the promise of achieving a liberating subversion of the Ordinary narratives of the organisation, I have produced an allegory of organisational meanings. The allegorist joins the isolated reality fragments and thereby creates meaning. The constructed meaning is thus “posited meaning” (ibid) since “it does not derive from the original context of the fragments” (ibid). So whereas it might appear to throw light on diŸerent perspectives and, a sympathetic reader might agree that it does just that, there is a signiªcant caveat to follow. As allegorist, I retain the meaning that coheres in the fragments and tantalise the reader with possibilities of alternatives. “If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to ¶ow out of it and it remains behind dead but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorists, it is unconditionally in his (sic) power. That is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or signiªcance of its own; such signiªcance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist” (Benjamin 1977: 183–84; de Man 1986: 173–5; cf Cooper 1990b; italics added)). The producer and the thing produced are deªcient, exhibit loss, are melancholic. The serious point of this exercise is precisely to make this point. If one of the functions of organisations is to create allegories in order to give coherence to their purposes

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and rationalisations, so the particular conjunction of fragments are inherently melancholic and meanings are Ordinary even where they attempt to support their intentions by the use of the Vernacular. The only meanings which such fragments retain are those which are posited by the organisation itself: of course, usually by management in the production of such allegorical narratives. What the organisation deªnes as “within”, whether it be the construction of its own history, the management of its past, the attributes of member which are desired or such like, is by capture and appropriation within this scheme of reasoning, rendered melancholic since such a construction is founded on a loss, is mortiªed by capture and is subject to the construction of the allegorist. Since the allegorists themselves are “within” they too are mortiªed by the construction. Such is the role of melancholy in the production of the Ordinary narratives of the organisation. Allegory ªgures signiªcantly in the production of apparently coherent accounts of the process of organising. The point is that, while it is the case that allegory is open to multiple interpretation, it is the authorship of the allegory which gives meaning to the particular assemblage of fragments. The ability to ªnd other experiences outside of the province of the organisation is limited by the power of the allegorist to deªne the meaning of the fragments. Indeed, Owens (1980) draws on Benjamin’s conception of allegory (as a baroque construction) to make the persuasive assertion that postmodern art, although by analogy this could be applied to postmodern production of all types, thrives on “appropriation, site speciªcity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization” (Owens 1980: 75; quoted in Bertens 1995: 90). If allegory is seen as a simulacrum inhabited by “loss” and characterised by melancholy, then discursive proliferation is likewise melancholic, the relentless trajectory of posited meanings and fragmentary meanings. Consequently, there is a danger in drawing on the postmodern novel as an exemplar for deconstructing organisational narratives. The problem of authorship is a knotty one and, to my mind, the intention to subvert is not achieved. Certainly, there are lessons to be learned in the discontinuities of the narrative but most disjunctures are not to be wished for, most lessons learned with regret. The point of all this then is to return to the issue of the relationship between trajectory and subjection and to arrive at an understanding of how the inevitability of this relationship might be transgressed. Firstly, the relationship, it seems, cannot be transgressed by writing. However well intentioned the author, the reader is always at the mercy of the construction. The vernacular language is the language of experience, of the body, and of actions. So, like Thomas or Fowles, I have dragged you the reader through the various discontinuities of this paper and, if you have got this far you will perhaps feel like me feel the want of a good story. So, let me conclude with these remarks. Fowles work left me feeling that I would have enjoyed a good story better and not the

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fragments which he oŸered. Certainly, I felt that he achieved the eŸect of exiling me from the text but this is not a comfortable position. I have told two deeply personal stories in this paper. Both are accounts from real people and are of their real and painful experiences. Their stories were gifts to me as a researcher and, in a sense, I have abused them. Seriously, neither John nor Phillip (neither are their proper names) would mind that I have used their stories but my point is that I could and, to a great extent, have used their accounts to my own end. This again is the caveat. The Ordinary regulates the Vernacular. The organisation appropriates to its own end. There is a clear relationship between narrative trajectory and subjection. Narratives can help to reveal. They can also subject. Ponder.

Tidying up Hence there are two important dimensions to the ideas presented which are to do with the importance of the Vernacular and the implications of this for practice. Undoubtedly, the recognition of the role of vernacular language is important one since it implicitly challenges the rhetorical trajectory of the organisational rationality. However, there are also problems associated with this. Whenever an area of experience is identiªed as being diŸerent from or in opposition to the trajectory of the organisation, it is rapidly speciªed as a problem and the disorderliness of the experience is subjected to further regulation via the extension of the psychological contract of work. This has been the case over the past ten years or so with emotional labour: ªrst conceptualised as a problem for the individual but subsequently managed by the conceptualisation of emotional labour as a problem for the organisation. Hence, to specify is to endanger, to conceptualise to capture and to reveal to subject to regulation. Recently, during a presentation by the Vice Chancellor about the restructuring that is going on at the university where I used to work, an eminent professor from another faculty turned to the person next to him and said, “Say Nothing!”

Part 3 Genre analysis

How can strategy be a practice? Between discourse and narration

Valérie-Inés de La Ville and Eléonore Mounoud Institut d’Administration des Entreprises de l’Université de Poitiers École Centrale Paris, Laboratoire Stratégie et Technologie, France

The aim of this text is to explore the idea that strategic management research would proªt from a practice-oriented approach, where practice is deªned as everyday situated — embedded in local contexts — actions performed by organizational members in order to make strategy. Drawing on two empirical works, we study two kinds of such practice: actions (as accounted for by the actors) and narrations (as structured by the narrators). In the ªrst case, strategic discourse is contrasted to action and its tactics; in the second, strategic discourse is contrasted to narratives. Their interpretation is aided and dramatically enriched by a contrast between strategy and tactic, as introduced by Michel de Certeau. This contrast emphasizes the discursive — or paradigmatic — nature of strategy opposed to the narrative — or syntagmatic — nature of practice.

Towards a practice-oriented approach of strategy research Even if organizational studies, especially critical studies, have adopted a skeptical stance towards strategists and their role in organizational life, strategy is a key issue for organizations — especially for companies. Indeed, top executives and managers label “strategies” the narratives they continuously use in organizing. These strategies shape the lives of people and organizations in accordance to their own logic and requests. Strategy is the yardstick by which the quality of individual and organizational eŸort is assessed. The “quest for strategy” has spread to every organization, following the global managerialization of Western societies. Thus, the issue of strategy calls for re¶ection within the context of organizations for at least three reasons:

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– – –

the notion of strategy holds a commanding position in organizations, “strategic principles” (planning, budgeting, positioning, etc.) have deeply infused everyday social life, the institutionalization of “strategy” through education, training and consultancy legitimates the present logic of domination in organizations (Knights & Morgan 1991; Whittington 1993).

Since Mintzberg’s attempt to classify the schools of thought in “strategy” (Mintzberg 1991), the ªeld of “strategic management” appears to have taken a more re¶exive turn. More speciªcally, the contribution of the new institutionalism has lead to a complex interweaving of the social, political and economic dimensions in the study of strategy making. Gerry Johnson and CliŸ Bowman as well as Richard Whittington, urge researchers in strategic management to engage in a drastic change of focus (Whittington 1996; Johnson & Bowman 1999). Such shift would consist in paying more attention to day-to-day routines rather than to “grand strategy” emphasized by decision-making studies, and in including political, cultural and interactional aspects of management into the picture. This socalled micro-strategizing perspective lays emphasis on local rather than universal aspects and is concerned with activities, processes and routines as signs of strategic practice. In such view, the making of strategy is embedded in everyday organizational routines, like the permanent appeal to consultants, the ongoing process of corporate planning and budgeting, the writing of documents, the making of presentations (Whittington 1996). This essay is grounded into two recent streams of investigation that, on the one hand, explore the discursive nature of strategy making and, on the other hand, try to account for the everyday individual actions and narrations that shape organizational life. Exploring strategic discourses at the organizational level has been legitimized on the strategic management research agenda (Barry & Elmes 1997; O’Connor 2000). Strategy formation has therefore been analyzed in terms of discourse formation, discourses that will possibly generate opposition and undergo successive modiªcations within a given organizational context. For example, Carter et al. (2001) have studied how it has become necessary for an English public utility to formulate explicit strategies when entering a new competitive environment: “Strategy formulation, therefore, became a Callonesque obligatory point of passage and was constituted as being of such importance that it was now one of the core responsibilities of senior management” (Carter, Mueller & Clark 2001: 190). This strategy formulation underwent diŸerent iterations, for example by turning from diversiªcation-prone to diversiªcation-adverse when facing internal resistance. In Carter et al.’s analysis, much emphasis is put on legitimacy as both a condition and an outcome of strategy formulation.

How can strategy be a practice?

A contrasting view pleads for focusing more accurately on the activities of individuals in strategy-making (Johnson & Bowman 1999). This so-called microstrategy perspective implies conducting analysis across multiple levels: individual interactions, organizational dynamics and social contexts. Whittington narrowed this research program even further by deªning strategizing as the speciªc activity of a group of strategists (experts, consultants, top managers). Nevertheless, in our view, studying behaviours and discourses at the individual level only is risky as it leads more frequently to reinforcing the production of hagiographic accounts than to providing a comprehensive understanding of strategy-making. The promotion of neo-Schumpeterian heroes in entrepreneurial strategies can thus be seen as a demiurgic drift in research accounts of management (de La Ville 1996). This chapter is divided into three parts. In the ªrst part, we explain how researchers consider and use the notion of “strategy” in organizations through a brief overview of strategy literature. Building on Whittington’s (1996) categorization of strategic research into four perspectives — policy, planning, process and practice — we show how diŸerent perspectives conceive of strategy making. By choosing to conceptualize “strategy making” as a matter of telling, recounting and communicating which takes place in organizations, we take up his proposal to develop a practice-oriented view of strategy-making. In the second part, we suggest the need to explore the notion of practice more systematically to deªne the possible links between practice and strategy. In order to do so, we explore some concepts and approaches developed by Michel de Certeau in his work The Practice of Everyday Life (1988). Drawing on his unusual deªnitions of tactic and strategy that emphasize anti-discipline and resistance to domination, we may better account for the underlying logic of domination hidden by the discourses of ‘grand strategy’ (Whittington 1993). Moreover, Michel de Certeau constantly mirrors the relationship of writing to reading to the relationship of production to consumption. In doing so, he suggests that discourses, like goods on a market, are produced by makers and imposed on consumers, thus strongly framing their potential meaning and use. Building on this metaphor, strategy can be conceived as an ongoing creative process involving not only what strategists produce — or write — (budgets, plans, strategies) but also the ways the members of the organization consume — or read — their productions. Seen in this light, studying the practice of strategy implies giving more room to what middle managers and employees “make” or “do”, how they use and transform the grand discourse of strategy. This “poaching ability”, as de Certeau would have called it, relies on a multiplicity of intertwined ways of talking, doing and believing. Following this line of reasoning, we suggest that the change of focus from discourses of “grand strategy” to the minutiae of everyday practice necessarily leads to scrutinizing the diŸerences between discourses and narratives.

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In the last part of this article we analyze strategy making as the intertwining of strategic discourses and practice narratives, drawing on two empirical studies of strategic practices (La Ville 1996, 1999; Mounoud 1997, 2000). The ªrst study is a four-year idiographic research of a young high-tech ªrm. The narratives of several organizational members highlight the minutiae of strategy-in-the-making as well as the various tricks and poaching tactics that shape their practice. The second study illustrates the consumption of discourses produced by others (scientists, economists, politicians, ecologists) and the creation of narratives in an attempt to organize an emergent organizational ªeld and to secure domination upon it.

Contrasting theoretical approaches to strategy-making In his textbook for managers provocatively entitled, What Is Strategy, and Does It Matter?, Whittington (1993) questions the basic assumptions of orthodox strategic perspectives that assume predictable environments, similar competitors and rational decision-makers. His exploration of the underlying assumptions held by diŸerent theoretical perspectives aimed at explaining how strategy develops, leads him to distinguish four basic approaches to strategy-making:

“Classical”: The planning approach This perspective conceives strategy as a rational process of deliberate calculation and analysis, designed to maximize long-term advantage. If enough eŸort is made to gather the information needed and to apply appropriate techniques, both the outside world and the organization itself can be made predictable and plastic, shaped according to the careful plans of top managers. “Evolutionary”: The e¹ciency-driven approach In this perspective, the environment is considered to be often too unpredictable to anticipate its evolutions eŸectively. The dynamic, hostile and competitive nature of markets means that long-term survival cannot be planned for. Businesses are like the species of biological evolution. Competitive processes ruthlessly select out the ªttest for survival, while the others are powerless to change themselves quickly enough to escape extinction. It is the market, not managers which makes the important choices. All managers can do is ensure that they ªt as e¹ciently as possible to the environmental demands of the day. “Processual”: The craft-like approach According to this perspective, people within organizations are too diŸerent in their interests, limited in their understandings, wandering in their attention and

How can strategy be a practice?

careless in their actions to unite around and then carry out a perfectly calculated plan. Anyway, plans tend to be forgotten as circumstances change. In practice, strategy emerges more from a pragmatic process of learning and compromise than from a rational series of grand leaps forward. The selection processes of the market are actually rather lax: as no-one is likely to know what the optimal strategy is, and no-one would stick to it anyway, failure to design and carry out the perfect strategic plan is not going to entail any fatal competitive disadvantage.

“Systemic”: The socially-embedded approach Referring to Mark Granovetter’s (1973) use of Polanyi’s (1944) notion of “social embeddedness” of economic activity, the systemic view proposes that the objectives and practices of strategy depend on the particular social system in which strategy-making takes place. Strategists often deviate from the proªt-maximizing norm quite deliberately as societies have other criteria than just ªnancial performance for supporting enterprises. Moreover, strategists might deviate from the textbook rules or rational calculation, because in the culture in which they work, such rules make little sense. These deviant strategies matter because they can be carried out eŸectively. Strategy re¶ects the traits of particular social systems in which strategists participate, deªning the interest in which they act and the rules by which they can survive. What is important to systemic theory are diŸerences between countries’ social systems and changes of such systems. The systemic studies are thus exploring the varying forms of business according to national interplay of state, familial and market structures. Table 1. Four perspectives on strategy making (Adapted from Whittington 1993: 40) Process Outcomes

Deliberate

Emergent

Proªt maximizing Pluralistic

Classical Systemic

Evolutionary Processual

Whittington devotes much re¶ection to the cultural peculiarities of the very notion of strategy. By contrasting the classical and evolutionary perspectives on market and proªtability with the current sociological appreciation of organizational environment in new institutionalist theory, Whittington exposes the ideological tone of strategic management and its role in reproducing the conditions of hierarchically organized capitalist society, in normalizing the existing structures of Western society, and in universalizing the goals of its dominant elites. Consequently, Whittington considers diŸerences in strategy as enduring, and patterns as hard to change because they are “founded on real economic, social or political conditions” (Whittington 1993: 32). He also says that the “strategy discourse” re¶ects ideological needs of the professional managerial class and that this dis-

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course entered the business world via MBA programs at a time of changes in dominance. In Whittington’s view, strategic theory mainly addresses the single audience of the practitioners themselves. He therefore favours the socially-embedded perspective as the one that could help managers to develop a sociological re¶exivity, providing them with the awareness of their social and political environments’ muniªcence. Whittington concludes by saying that strategy has to be understood as the contested and imperfect practice it really is. As he reiterates in a more recent paper, it is necessary to “take seriously the work and talk of practitioners themselves” (Whittington 1996: 732). Such a new direction in strategy thinking — which he calls “a strategizing perspective” is centred on the everyday activities of the strategists, “all the meeting, the talking, the form-ªlling and the number-crunching by which strategy actually gets formulated and implemented” (ibid). In his terms, the practice-oriented perspective is narrower than the systemic one, but for that very reason, better as a starting point. Table 2. The “4 P” of strategy making (Adapted from Whittington 1996: 732) Level of analysis Research issues

Managers

Organizations

HOW is strategy made? WHERE is strategy made?

Policy Practice

Planning Process

Whittington suggests that “the unheroic work of ordinary strategic practitioners in their day-to-day routines” should become the focus of an investigation program aimed at obtaining “systematic knowledge of what typically the various practitioners involved in strategy-making really do”, and at knowing “the diŸerent skills strategy consultants, planners and managers actually use, or how they acquire them.” (Whittington 1996: 734). He also privileges observation as the suitable methodological device: “to understand strategizing better, we will need close observation of strategists as they work their ways through their strategy-making routines” (ibid). He therefore proposes a new research agenda: We might analyze the changing discursive practices of strategy but — if not yet “enough talk” — we should also get real looking out for the changing physical technologies with which strategizing is actually done. Strategists manipulate spreadsheets, ªll in cap-ex proposals, compile presentations and do so often alone and in silence, constrained and enabled by particular technologies (typically Microsoft). (Whittington 2001: 734).

This under-socialized (“enough talk”, “real”, “physical”, “alone and in silence”) conception of practice is quite surprising coming from a theoretician previously inspired by over-socialized new institutionalist frameworks. Indeed, in the ªeld of strategic management, Whittington appears to be one of the few researchers who

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strongly advocate the need to take into account the social foundations of strategic activities. He lays special emphasis on the social embeddedness of strategic processes and he insists on the situatedness of everyday strategy-making routines. In our opinion, he is facing the paradoxical situation that Barbara Czarniawska has identiªed as the central issue in social sciences: the confrontation between social systems (as consisting of rules) and unruly practice. Whittington’s under-socialized practice perspective can be mirrored with Thurman Arnold’s conclusion that “the world of practice must conquer the world of norms” (Czarniawska 1997: 190).1 We can guess that Whittington might be as “torn between his knowledge and the demands of the professional knowledge that he represents” as Arnold was (Czarniawska 1997: 189). In an attempt to escape both over-socialized and under-socialized views of strategy-making, we shall now explore the notion of practice through the lenses used by Michel de Certeau (1988).

Restoring the narrative dimension of practice Michel de Certeau’s analysis of consumption is oriented towards the ordinary practices of the consumers, who are deªned as users of goods imposed on them by producers. Indeed, as an oŸer of products to the consumers, production entails a logic of domination towards which consumers resist by developing inventive attitudes and practices. By mirroring consumption and reading, Michel de Certeau reveals the two sides of consumption: on the one side, consuming entails a form of acceptance of an imposed oŸer of goods, while, on the other side, consumers are neither passive nor docile, they experience freedom, creativity and pleasure — as readers do. Commenting on empirical investigations of several situated social practices such as reading, talking, dwelling, cooking, wandering around, etc., Michel de Certeau explores the scientiªc literature to clarify the purpose of the theorizing enterprise he undertakes: It may be supposed that these operations — multiform and fragmentary, relative to situations and details, insinuated into and concealed … within devices whose mode of 1. Thurman Wesley Arnold (1891–1964) was in charge of reawakening the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. He has been described as contradictory, dramatic, intriguing, and ironic, and with no desire to clarify the signals. He was an expert on the conspiratorial behavior forbidden by the Sherman Act. His satirical commentaries on government and myth, Folklore of Capitalism and Symbols of Government, are famous in political science. Arnold emphasized the irrationality of the symbols of government, pointing to law, the Congress, and the Supreme Court — all symbols which most citizens treat as meaningful in political discourse.

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usage they constitute, and thus lacking their own ideologies or institutions — conform to certain rules. In other words, there must be a logic of these practices. (de Certeau 1988: xv)

Adopting this view provides a new way of looking at organizational practice because it leads to see strategic discourses as a production, as an oŸer of a (cultural) good — a text. This way, we might be able to suggest new forms of accounting for the ways people read, use and transform this particular cultural product. Linstead and Grafton-Small (1992) have already opposed the production of corporate culture to the creative consumption of organizational culture by organizational members. Using de Certeau’s theoretical lenses requires complementing the analysis of the discourse of strategy (representation) and of the time spent attending strategic meetings (behaviour) by a study of what middle managers and employees “make “ or “do “ during this time and with these discourses. Their making or doing being devious and dispersed, it remains di¹cult to reach for the researcher as it often remains hidden. In organizations, employees and managers do not espouse, adhere to or share the “strategic” vision or intent of their “charismatic leaders”. In their everyday activities, they actively interpret, criticize, learn and experiment possible attitudes and micro-decisions to implement, or to resist to the multiple implications of strategic changes imposed upon them. To better understand how to link practice to strategy, let us now move to deªnitions of strategy and tactic introduced by de Certeau: I call a “strategy” the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientiªc institution) can be isolated from an “environment”. A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, clienteles, targets or objects of research). Political, economic and scientiªc rationality has been constructed on this strategic model. (de Certeau 1988: xix)

Strategies conceal, beneath objective calculation, their connection with the institutional power that sustains them. Therefore, in this view, strategy is always linked to the concept of power, as understood by Foucault (1977) who demonstrated that “the logocentrism of ‘writing’ once translated into formal organization revolves around discipline” (Linstead & Grafton-Small 1992: 349). De Certeau’s deªnition of tactic is as follows: I call a “tactic “, on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a “proper” (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions,

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and secure independence with respect to circumstances. The “proper” is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time — it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized “on the wing”. Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into “opportunities”. (de Certeau 1988: xix).

This view diŸers drastically from the traditional deªnition of tactic as a course of action followed in order to achieve an immediate aim and also from the deªnition of tactics as the art of ªnding and implementing means to achieve immediate aims. Interestingly, tactics (as the science of manoeuvering forces in battles) comes from the military vocabulary, as does strategy. De Certeau introduces two main diŸerences, ªrstly a major change of level of analysis — from global to individual — and secondly the emphasis on the resistant nature of tactic, here meant not following the strategy! Focusing on tactic sheds light on the creativity through which groups or individuals escape the “nets of discipline “ and resist the logic imposed upon them. Tactic reveals the extent to which ordinary intelligence is inseparable from everyday struggles and the pleasure they provide. Meaningful practice is neither determined nor captured by the set of social rules in which it develops: it calls up a variety of hardly conscious, though crafty, tactics. Multiple tactics appear through a creative bricolage that consists of “the process of association, of building the ‘and, and, and’ connections between actions and events and negotiating them with the ‘readers’ (such as other organization members)” (Czarniawska 1998: 20), that is, an ongoing production of narratives. This is congruent with the more general claim — that social life is a narrative — made by McIntyre, and more precisely that “it is useful to think of an enacted narrative as the most typical form of social life” (Czarniawska 1997). We must keep in mind that “it is central to the concept of discourse that it is reproduced, can be resisted and is subject to change and ‘negotiation’” (Linstead & Grafton-Small 1992: 349). What narratives do is mainly resisting discourses. Therefore strategy in organizations can be seen as an expression of a strong program of integrative and radical change whereas narratives “can be seen as belonging to (giving expression to) the ‘weak program’, but it is abundantly clear that its existence depends on the existence of the ‘strong program’ (it needs something to diŸer from)” (Czarniawska 1997: 173). We can now summarize the contrast between the notions of strategy and tactic in Table 3. These deªnitions shed light on the diŸerent areas where organizational life has to be investigated. On the one hand, institutional arenas are necessary to legitimate, support and capitalize on an integrative discourse called strategy. On the other hand, it is necessary to bring practice back into the picture, thus accounting for the fragmentary, instantaneous and hardly conscious set of tactics upon which

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Table 3. Strategy as discourse, tactic as narrative A strategy Spatially or institutionally located Circumscribes a proper place Interacts with an exterior distinct from it Writing Reproduction Discipline Strong program A discourse

A tactic Time dependent Insinuates in the Other’s place Turns events into opportunities Reading Improvisation, bricolage Anti-discipline, resistance Weak program A narrative

practice is based. There are innumerable tactics that constitute a varied stock of potential resistances to dominant strategies. Everyday practices consist of a making without intention of capitalizing on it, unable to take control over time, but that produce perceptible eŸects such as delays, resistances, diversions, rejections or displacements (translations for one’s own purposes), etc. As a consequence, the “practice of strategy” appears to associate two contradictory concepts, thus being an oxymoron. It reveals that a direct turn to practice in strategic management research is clearly unproductive: both a theoretical and an empirical trap. A research agenda with the aim of describing the practices of strategists would lead to a purely instrumental and restrained view of strategy making that would favour univocal and far too naïve interpretations. That is why, at this point, we want to advocate the need for a mutually beneªcial dialogue between the discursive nature of strategy and interpretative approaches that deªne “organizing as narration” (Czarniawska 1997: 25). In our understanding, Czarniawska’s narrative variation of the new institutionalist perspective enables researchers to cope with the embeddedness of practices by including their symbolic reach within a given organizational context. Thus, investigating strategymaking processes actually means operating a perilous shift from discourses of “grand strategy” to the minutiae of everyday practice through a systematic focus on narratives.

Exploring strategic practice: Interpreting two empirical fragments We will present two vignettes extracted from two empirical investigations on entrepreneurial activities where we used a micro-perspective (La Ville 1996, 2002; Mounoud 1997, 2000). Using de Certeau’s theoretical lenses to reinterpret the narratives we collected, we will consider the interplay between strategic discourses and everyday narratives. These two vignettes illustrate some of the multiple ways of playing the other’s game and the pleasure of getting around a set of given rules.

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Vignette 1: Playfully resisting dominant design The ªrst vignette illustrates a phenomenon that Michel de Certeau considers as an emblematic ªgure of the tactics of ordinary practice called in French la perruque (the wig). The “perruque” refers to the worker’s own activity disguised as work for his employer. The worker who indulges in “la perruque” actually diverts time from the organization to undertake activities on his/her own that are free, creative and neither directed toward proªt, nor in accordance with strategic injunctions. The vignette is extracted from a four-year investigation in a young French ªrm called TELIX, operating in telecommunications — whose products combine various advanced technologies and have a very short life cycle — one year as an average. TELIX directly employs 70 people — among which 30 are gifted young engineers. Through successive interviews, we collected at diŸerent periods the narratives of 14 individuals who had participated in the development of the ªrm since its foundation. This investigation gathered 400 pages of accounts and resulted in an extensive monograph of 100 pages (La Ville 1996). The monograph reconstructs both the history of the ªrm since its foundation, the main orientations taken for technical development — and their correlated discussions — that took place during the time of the study. As such a short text prevents reproducing extensive parts of this monograph and situating precisely every actor, small parts of the accounts given by the actors are used here to illustrate their collective ability to set up a sort of hidden playground where improvisation could take place. In its ªrst years of existence, TELIX had routinized a set of design practices that reinforced its subcontractor position by successfully designing products for its OEM (Origin Equipment Manufacture) clients and by developing very speciªc skills concerning the regulations in European markets. A few months later, TELIX faced sharp competition that dramatically endangered the innovative character of its products developed and improved through the o¹cial design rules. Indeed, the eŸorts made to design TELIX’s own products in accordance with o¹cial design rules and to organize an international retail network were sporadic, lacked coordination and did not result in routinized practices. As the launching of TELIX’s own products was delayed several times, some important retailers refused to keep waiting and decided to favour its competitors. These decisions strengthened the tendency within TELIX to give priority to projects undertaken for industrial contractors, increasing TELIX’s long term vulnerability. Displeased with these orientations, Mathieu, an engineer employed by TELIX since 1988, points out that “the ªrm is family-owned: if more responsibilities are gradually given to the personnel, in fact important decisions remain centralized by the founders Antoine and Pierre. That’s why sometimes concerning some deci-

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sions, you know you have to stay in the background… “ He continues: Since TELIX’s foundation, within our technical department, engineers have been developing conniving rapports that go far beyond merely technical discussions. Owing to the multiple and lively talks we had within our team to prepare technical decisions, everyone learnt a lot from each other and immediately mastered a comprehensive array of technical skills. We felt that this common experience had strongly drawn us together. Our work interactions rapidly transformed into buddy-buddy relationships. Our deep complicity allows us to beneªt from a huge scope of autonomy. This autonomy we have gained enables us to cover up some problems: we have the possibility to do things secretly in order to avoid major crises and direct confrontations. We can develop marginal actions that go clearly against some decisions made by the Board. Indeed, as technical decisions are usually made in a great rush, we are led to make up for mistakes. If a bad decision has been made, what kind of collective behaviour do we have to adopt? That’s why we are sometimes led to run a diŸerent TELIX at the very heart of TELIX…

François, in charge of the technical department, makes the observation that … ambiguity within our technical department was very high at the beginning of TELIX. Today, it remains a natural way of functioning between the persons who have known this period. This evidently entails a form of conªdence and loyalty between us. It is this ambiguity that enabled us to explore ideas at the margins of the o¹cial decisions: we encourage people to follow their ideas through and if it works, it is beneªcial for the whole team; but also to feel responsible and autonomous in running the diŸerent design projects that were given to the team. But it is obvious that this mode of functioning is very di¹cult to understand for an outsider and that trying to adapt to it requires great strength of will.

This point of view is corroborated by Denis, another engineer working in the technical department: Ambiguity can bring positive results if people feel responsible for what they do. It reinforces exploration, the ability to take initiatives and to collect the necessary information. Owing to the specialization of every individual, a collective competence is able to expand in all directions, but it is the quality of our discussions and the ambiguity of our roles that do enable us to keep a global perspective on the design process. Together, we have complementary and global skills: the quality of our relationships allows us to reach and hold each other’s knowledge even if we do not have the same practice.

By cautiously engaging in a form of “illicit playing” these three engineers among the design team had progressively structured a hidden playground where they felt free to experiment with alternatives to the developmental path imposed by the rules of the o¹cial design game. Without taking the risk of opening a collective discussion about the relevance of the o¹cial design rules, these engineers applied improvised rules they found more suitable to achieve eŸective technical innovations. This concealed illicit playing lead them to develop an intensive production of inventive

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narratives that enriched both their personal interpretative repertoires and collective capacity to improvise in a diŸerent technological playground: they progressively explored diŸerent technical perspectives and found solutions to include high speed connections and radio devices into the products. Viewing the commercial di¹culties of TELIX as an opportunity, the three “free players” decided to reveal the divergent design process they had elaborated and managed to impose them on the design team. This sudden change in design rules allowed the integration of radical technical innovations to the products and the progressive restoration over six months of TELIX’s prevalent competitive position in the market. The narratives of several organizational members highlight the minutiae of strategy-in-the-making as well as the various tricks and poaching tactics that shape their design practice. This vignette underlines the agonistic character of the perruque, an activity aimed at resisting, and the concepts de Certeau associates to it: kairos (opportunities), metis (ruses) and the “strategy-tactic duality”. In spite of measures taken to repress or to conceal it, “la perruque” (or its equivalent) tends to inªltrate itself everywhere and has to be considered as an important part of strategy making. Indeed, the more an o¹cial playground is delimited through the actualization of a set of strict rules, the more illicit playgrounds are likely to emerge in order to resist and explore alternative ways of doing things. For instance, the entrepreneurial team deals with a wide range of technical possibilities and progressively restrains this scope to stabilize collective practices and routines enabling the formation of core competencies. This process leads to contextualizing the creative eŸorts to be undertaken within the ªrm and to favour some creative behaviours at the expense of other possible ones. High tech as well as entrepreneurial activities deal with the unavoidable “playing-game” duality, as some areas are delimited as games with compulsory scripts to be followed, fostering simultaneously the ongoing emergence of playful resisting practices. This is a main strategic issue at stake within entrepreneurial contexts in order to foster the progressive emergence of distinctive core competencies. Indeed, entrepreneurial activities are quite often the expression of a strong will to resist well-established or ªxed rules that govern competitive games. In that sense, all the concepts articulated by Michel de Certeau suit perfectly well the categories commonly used in the entrepreneurial literature: opportunities, tricks, poaching, wandering, roundabout means, playfulness, resistance, ruse, arrangement. All these productions are an “invention” of the memory.

Vignette 2: Consumption of discourses and production of narratives The second vignette is based on the study of an emerging industry, the organizational ªeld of the “green industry”. We have been conducting interviews with

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“green intrapreneurs” (in charge of developing new ventures in parent ªrms), about how they were shaping their strategy. The aim was to study how statements about strategy were structured and how, in turn, they were contributing to the ongoing structuring process of the ªeld (Mounoud 1997; 2000). These interviews were conducted with mixed feelings, as we were deeply aware that they were closer to an inquisition than to a mutual exchange of views, but also that “the power was on the side of the interviewee” (Czarniawska 2002a). We were also aware that collected stories were not newly built, indeed they were “well rehearsed, and crafted in a legitimate logic, [as] it is highly unlikely that the interviewee resorts to a repertoire of narrative devices unusual for his/her practice “(ibid: 746). This was an advantage, not a shortcoming, as studying strategists’ discourses requires remembering that “‘meaningful insights into subjective views’ can only be expressed by ‘familiar narrative constructs’” as Czarniawska comfortingly says. Considering Michel de Certeau’s view on practice, two levels of analysis could be put forward. On the one hand, we can consider that these texts are aiming at deªning a Strategy, they try to set a proper place, than can serve as a basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it, especially with competitors, regulatory aŸairs or parent companies. Thus they are deªning and legitimizing the speciªc competence of venturing a green business. In order to do so, they will have to show rationality. On the other hand, we can consider these texts as narratives, accounts of the social practices of their narrators in their everyday struggles, showing their various tactics and tricks, proving their poaching ability. We collected the narratives of 12 persons who were in charge of the development of the venture inside the parent company. This investigation gathered 150 pages of accounts that were interpreted as texts. As such a short text impedes reproducing extensive interviews, only the interpretation built on the interviews will be used here to illustrate their individual ability to intertwine strategic discursivity and tactical narrativity. The narratives of the “green intrapreneurs” highlight the minutiae of strategy-in-the-making as well as the various tricks and poaching tactics that shape their narrative practice. We analyzed the interviews as texts , being interested as much in the content of the answers to our questions, as in the process through which they were built during the interviews, i.e. the enunciation process). We looked at what texts say and how they say it, looking for the various textual tactics and tricks used by the interviewees. Studying interviews as texts requires one to stay as close to the texts as possible when analyzing them i.e. considering which words were used including how they were coining new expressions, what topic they were dealing with, how they related one to another through the use of “connecting words” (both causal and temporal).

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Narrative tactics Various narrative tactics have been observed:

Poaching Borrowing insights from Moscovici‘s theory of social representations, we arranged a conversation between the texts from the interviews and institutionalized discourses on environmental management and protection (from various sources: politics, economics, ecology, science and media). These discourses are supposed to be structuring, and structured by, social representations. But as Michel de Certeau underlined, the presence and circulation of a representation tell us nothing about what it is for its users. We must ªrst analyze its manipulation by users who are not its makers. Only then we can gauge the diŸerence or similarity between the representation and the secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization. Close to Ellen O’Connor’s (2000) idea of an embedded narrative, we were able to identify three larger discursive arenas in which the narrators were poaching to build their own texts. Firstly, they were poaching into managerial knowledge, producing and reproducing organizational, technical, legal, strategic and social rules of control. For example new ventures, especially in large ªrms, were deªned as following the logic of core competences. Secondly, they were poaching into the science-based discourses of “Ecology “ and “Economy”, opposing the two to resist some implications of ecology and resolving the opposition between the two when necessary, for example by deªning their action as saving pollution AND costs. Thirdly, they were playing with the “Environment” category, sometimes linking it to “Nature” that has to be protected and sometimes with “Regulation” that has to be followed. Humour One of the main competitors being Générale (now Vivendi Environment), one green intrapreneur was very proud of presenting his company as “a specialist as opposed to a generalist” (with a smile) thus denying competence to is main competitor without explicitly saying it; many anecdotes were meant for questioning the innovation capability of competitors or showing the incompetence of environment policy makers; one widespread tactic was to oppose “de-pollution” and “anti-pollution”, as two diŸerent market segments and know-how. Plotting Telling a story involves reporting a progression of events across time and uncovering the causal structure of the events. Because of the large amount of time they require from their audience, narratives must have a point. They need a plot which

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must be based on a con¶ict or tension. Here the links to various discourses are a resource: they might be invoked to highlight the diŸerences between times (past, present and future), spaces (linking the new venture, its parent company, its competitors and policy makers) or discourses themselves. Such diŸerences, or tensions, reveal not only the how (mimesis) but also the why (plot) behind organizational action. The speciªc plotting of a ªeld organizes an interpretative repertoire, linking causal and temporal dimensions such as in the example below of green intrapreneurship in the chemical industry:

BECAUSE, IN THE PAST, we used to be heavy polluters, NOW, AT PRESENT, we know a lot about pollution and how to depollute at lower costs, SO we can take advantage of our experience and our core competences IN ORDER TO we set up new businesses that generate proªts for us, cost savings for our customers and pollution savings for the whole society.

In their multiple ways of dealing with such resources and constraints, interviewees attempted to build a discourse for imposing their own meanings, interests and desires on the emerging organizational ªeld, settling a “proper place” and gaining a strategic dimension . But we must also consider that “narrativity haunts such discourses” (de Certeau 1988: 78). We account better for what texts do if, following Michel de Certeau’s view, we consider talking as a kind of consumption, or a secondary production, a creative way of using words and discourses. Local narratives are not structured by discourses but they are poaching from them, using them as resources for creating new expressions and meanings, which can rely on, or resist well-established and technocratic discourses.

Concluding remarks In this chapter, we have suggested that investigating strategic practice requires a drastic change in both conducting research and theorizing in the ªeld of strategic management. In our opinion, the development of a practice-oriented research agenda in the ªeld of strategic management can directly beneªt from Michel de Certeau’s seminal contributions. Applying the writing/reading metaphor to describe strategy making helped us conceive strategy as an ongoing creative process involving not only what strategists produce — or write — (budgets, plans, strategies), but also the ways the members

How can strategy be a practice?

of the organization consume — or read — their productions. As a consequence, studying the practice of strategy implies paying more attention to middle managers and employees’ “poaching ability”, the multiple ways through which, in their everyday activities, they understand, use and transform the strategic discourses that are imposed on them. We suggest that the change of focus from discourses of “grand strategy” to the minutiae of everyday practice necessarily leads to a theoretical articulation of strategic discourses and very ordinary narratives. Meaningful strategic practice is neither determined nor captured by the strategic discourses formulated at the top organizational level: it calls up a variety of hardly conscious, though crafty, tactics mainly aimed at resisting and transforming the logic of domination imposed by strategic discourses. We contend that developing a practice-oriented research agenda in the ªeld of strategic management would enable the pursuit of a beneªcial dialogue between several theoretical frameworks such as: – – –

the narrative embeddedness of practice which leads to treating talk as action and not merely as talk (Czarniawska 1998), the situated temporality of practice (Clark 2000), the recursive nature of social life (Rouleau 2001; Giddens 1984).

This framework constitutes therefore an invitation to enrich the concept of “routinization”. Usually, routines are seen as being merely an unconscious reproduction and acceptance of stabilized systems of rules (Jelinek 1979). Only a few authors (Nelson & Winter 1982; Giddens 1984) consider that routines include a creative part, as they imply an ongoing process of reinterpretation of rules to adapt them to — slightly or drastically — diŸerent contexts. But in their rendition, this transformative capacity of routines is limited, allowing for just some margins and evolutions within a general frame of behaviour. These micro-evolutions, however, directly nurture a global process of change by fostering intrinsic variety and thus allowing the progressive emergence of adaptive behaviours. By considering that work practices — such as organizational routines — are not only eŸortful but also emergent accomplishments, Martha Feldman reintroduces the importance of agency for routine interpretation and lays special emphasis on its performative nature (Feldman 2000). In a nutshell, a routinized behaviour always consists of a creative interpretation of given rules in relation to a speciªc context. By analyzing four situations where the outcomes achieved by a routine can be contrasted, she distinguishes three modes for routine change: repairing, expanding and striving (Feldman 2000: 621). In our opinion, Michel de Certeau — whose theoretical framework is not discussed by Martha Feldman — goes even further. Indeed, the empirical observation of very ordinary practices such as ways of cooking, wandering around, etc., proves that apparently passive behaviours, ordinarily performed

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routines or even hardly conscious practices are in fact inherently inventive: they reveal that re¶ective individuals actively try to understand to what extent — and how — they can play with — and resist — prescribed social rules within diŸerent contexts. According to Michel de Certeau, this creativity expresses itself through a narrative ability that resists the rational calculations aimed at e¹cient action that characterize strategic discourses. Another conceptual contribution of Michel de Certeau is to show that the recursive nature of very ordinary activities within organizations is founded on an ongoing process of improvisation. Improvisation is often understood as a peculiar behaviour only suited to very speciªc organizational contexts — where people do not know exactly what rules to apply, in which the level of ambiguity and newness is quite high — thus allowing a collective exploration to take place (Weick 1993, 1998; Hatch 1999). If improvisation is often depicted as occurring outside organized routines or formal plans, it is not meant to occur by accident: it results from a deliberate collective eŸort made to solve an unusual problem or to create a novel activity (Miner and al. 2001: 305). Here again, Michel de Certeau goes further by shedding light on the resisting nature of improvisation. Although organizational literature depicts mainly micro-improvisations as purely inventive practices, it seems that more attention should be paid to the resistance re¶exes collectively developed by individuals involved in improvisations within organizational contexts. While executing the improvisation, its equivocal meanings are collectively explored through an intensive narrative activity. These narrations are aimed at preserving several plausible meanings of the fragments of experience newly obtained rather than integrating all the consequences of the new behaviour adopted in a global and consistent explanation. Thus, improvisations — deªned as unre¶exive resisting practices — should not be considered only as a drawback or an impediment to achieve strategic change, but should be analyzed as a continuous and unavoidable process, contributing to an ongoing collective exploration and questioning of the sense-making principles — and their correlated rules — oŸered by strategic discourses. People, be they involved in the reproduction of routines or in improvised practices, actually develop their interpretive abilities and their social skills by enriching the perceived set of contexts, social rules and alternative behaviours available to them. The ruling order serves as a support for innumerable productive activities while at the same time blinding its proprietors to this creativity (like those bosses who simply can’t see what is being created within their own enterprises). Carried to its limit, this order would be the equivalent of the rules of meter and rhyme for poets of earlier times: a body of constraints stimulating new discoveries, a set of rules with which improvisation plays. (de Certeau 1988: xxii)

How can strategy be a practice?

Only narratives can support these tentative explorations of alternative meanings, goals or ways of doing: they give room to a local transformative capacity by expanding the realm of possibilities available to perform activities and resist the ruling order imposed on by strategic discourses. As a ªnal remark, we would like to stress that, from an epistemological standpoint, such a practice-oriented research agenda will develop within an intermediate space linking the realms of discursivity and narrativity: The narrativizing of practices is a textual way of operating, having its own procedures and tactics. … Shouldn’t we recognize its scientiªc legitimacy by assuming that instead of being a remainder that cannot be or, has not yet be, eliminated from discourse, narrativity has a necessary function in it, and that a theory of narration is indissociable from a theory of practices, as its condition as well as its production (de Certeau 1988: 78).

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Narratives of organizational performance Hervé Corvellec Kristianstad University College & Göteborg Research Institute, Göteborg University, Sweden

Few management1 notions are evoked as frequently as is the notion of performance. Managers spend considerable time planning, preparing, trying to achieve, reporting, or discussing individual and organizational performance in the hope of improving future performance. The management literature2 is likewise rife with analyses, comments, and recommendations pertaining to the ªnancial, commercial, environmental and social performance of corporate, public, or not-for-proªt organizations, in never-ending praise of strong performance and criticism of weak performance. The notion of performance enjoys a broad and sustained success in management — a success that is indeed comparable, albeit only partly related, to the founding role that the notion has had in the performing arts. This role is so central that the term “performance” actually contributes to the semantic deªnition of the ªeld. The raison d’être of this chapter is a call for re¶ection on the success of the notion of performance. I approach performance at a broad level that encompasses the various occurrences of the notion and use of the term in management practice and literature. I claim that performance has enjoyed such success in management 1. The term “management” is used in this chapter in quite a broad sense. It refers to the various ªelds of knowledge (management theory) or specialized professional activities (managerial practice) pertaining to the administration of corporations (corporate management), the public sector (public management), or even third sector organizations (not-for-proªt management). Examples of such ªelds of knowledge or professional specialties would be accounting, auditing, marketing, ªnance, human resources management, consulting, and even what is sometimes referred to as general management. In educational terms, this would correspond to what is taught for an MBA, in the French écoles de gestion, or what the Swedes call företagsekonomi. 2. Management literature refers here to the wide range of texts dealing with the running and destiny of corporate, public, or not-for-proªt organizations. The term encompasses scientiªc papers and learned books (scientiªc management writings), popular management book or articles (popular management writings), and even the consequent amount of articles in the economic press that deal with the administration of businesses and other organizations (press management writings).

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because it provides an excellent expression for the speciªc form of competition, achievement, and selection processes that typiªes management — a process that I label modern agon. My reasoning runs as follows. Whereas management theory and practice tend to adopt an objectifying perspective and regard an organization’s performance literally as what the organization achieves, I introduce a distinction between organizational life and the various accounts that are made of this life or its impacts on the organization’s environment. Reminding the reader that what is achieved within an organization is, with rare exception, accessible to our understanding only through accounts that are made of these achievements, I suggest that it would be more correct to approach an organization’s performance as accounts rather than as objectiªed acts or results. (I beg the reader to disregard situations in which the production of an account is an act in itself.) Having redeªned an organization’s performance as accounts, I then explore the structural qualities of performance accounts. I emphasize that they are narratives of achievements and that they are speciªc enough to constitute a genre. Turning thereafter toward the societal role of performance narratives as a genre, I introduce the conclusive argument of the chapter. Taken together, the millions of performance narratives that management produces and consumes daily constitute a vast narrative fresco aimed at reassuring us that late modernity actually manages to select the aristons (literally ‘the best one’) in all ªelds and therefore manages to fulªll its promises of progress. Performance narratives, far from being politically neutral, thereby keep the modernist dream a¶oat and contribute in a decisive manner to maintain the social order that is attached to it. Before I detail what identiªes performance accounts as narratives (Section 3) and what characterizes modern agon (Section 4), let me ªrst review the ways in which management deals with the notion of organizational performance, thereby identifying some theoretical shortcomings of the current approach to organizational performance (Section 1) and some remedies for improving these approaches (Section 2).

1.

Organizational performance in management

The notion of performance is in intensive use in all the professional specialties of management, which any business database search or casual reading of the economic press will conªrm. It is standard within management theory and practice to deªne organizational performance as the organization’s ability to attain goals, and the measure of this performance is attained by comparing actual levels of achievements to set objectives.3 As an author or as a manager, one can take a short cut by 3. For examples and a systematic review of the use of the performance notion in management literature, see Corvellec (1997).

Narratives of organizational performance

equating performance with proªtability. One may even refer to ªnancial performance with reference to the maximizing (long-term) shareholder value, to commercial performance through market position, or to operational performance as the capacity of the production process. It is still possible to address the responsiveness of organizations toward all stakeholders rather than limiting it to shareholders, and to include societal issues such as discrimination or contribution to the community rather than limiting one’s consideration to the performance of a speciªc function such as ªnance or marketing. Social, environmental, or ethical performance have all made their entry on the stage of organizational performance, and it is probably only a matter of time before we speak of the aesthetic performance of organizations. Organizational performance has been approached theoretically in terms as diverse as the organization’s ability to secure scarce and valued resources, as a matter of e¹ciency, and as a subset of eŸectiveness. It has been approached in terms, not only of outcomes, but also of such processes as the behavior of the organization’s participants. An organization’s performance, then, refers to the ways in which its members manage appearances and act according to the roles they are accorded in the organization — a use of the representational dimension of the notion in management writings that directly reminds us of the deªnition of performance in the performing arts (e.g., Schechner 1977/1988 and Carlson 1996). The notion of “organizational performance” points to varied referents, and it is not always easy to assess which. Not all management writings, either scientiªc or popular, are explicit as to the type of achievement to which they refer when they speak of performance; nor are they necessarily consistent in their usage. Management is richer in its recommendations for achieving performance than in its clear deªnitions of performance. It is by looking case by case at the operationalization of the notion that one can assess how performance is conceptualized in a given case.4 The notion of organizational performance often appears as a measurement construct rather than a theoretical construct. Among the most frequently used measures are ªnancial: accounting-based measures and market-based measures. Accounting-based measures include, for example, sales, revenue, operative income, residual income, proªt, cash ¶ow, sales growth, growth in net assets, return on sales, return on investment, return on assets, return on equity, and earnings per 4. One could say that managers and management writers make use, without necessarily being aware of it, of performative as opposed to ostensive deªnitions of performance. This is a distinction that Latour (1986: 271) makes and that Czarniawska-Joerges describes as follows: “Ostensive deªnitions assume that social processes are basically identical with physical objects, that they have a limited number of determined properties which can be discovered and described `from outside’, and then demonstrated to an audience. (…) Performative deªnitions, on the other hand, are creatures of language and thus always created ‘on the inside’, by people using the language” (Czarniawska-Joerges 1993: 8).

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share. Market-based measures include percentage change in stock price, marketto-book value, stock-market returns, and various other statistical ways of evaluating the ªrm’s performance on the stock market, sometimes balancing risk against return. An intensive debate places proponents of accounting-based and marketbased measures in opposition. And considerable theoretical as well as practical eŸorts are devoted to the development of accurate and reliable measures of performance (with good reason, it seems, considering the fantasy stock prices attained on the Nasdaq at the turn of this century or the criminally in¶ated performance of Enron or Worldcom). All performance measures are not ªnancial measures, however, for there also exists within management a strong interest in non-ªnancial performance indicators. This interest is emblematized by the popularity of Kaplan and Norton’s (1996) balanced scorecard, which is a simple multidimensional approach to organizational performance integrating a company’s ªnancial situation with key strategic dimensions such as innovation, quality, or customer relationships. The interest in alternatives to ªnancial measures is exempliªed by an interest in performance measures pertaining to the management of quality (e.g., defect rates, response time, and delivery commitment), customer satisfaction (e.g., customer retention rates, perceived value of goods and services), or an organization’s environmental impact (e.g., energy consumption for production and operation, carbon dioxide [CO2] emission per employee, or environmental impact per customer). Thus, in recent years, the measurement of performance has increasingly re¶ected the multidimensionality of corporate activities and their impact on the societies and environments in which and around which they evolve. I would like to emphasize the fact that many management writers approach organizational performance by applying objectifying measurement procedures to an idealized object. On the one hand, despite the fact that they frequently work with what is obviously a measurement construct (often one that follows the availability of data rather than theoretical motives) management writers tend to systematically disregard the impact of their own measuring practice on that which they claim to measure. Many management writers subscribe to a pre-quanta correspondence theory of truth and ignore the inseparability of the measure from its object. They simply deal with organizational performance as if it were constructed of objective qualities that could be indiŸerently and without consequence approached and measured in hundreds of diŸerent ways, in whole or in parts, regardless of the contexts and purposes at hand. In order to measure performance, management writers tend to objectify what they often refer to as “an organization’s performance”. They are inclined to approach performance as if it were some near-physical object that exists independently of one’s will, representations, or understanding of it — as if organizational

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performance were an object waiting for precise, rapid, and reliable measurement procedures in order to show its true nature. On the other hand, management writers treat performance as an ideal. The objectifying of performance in measurement procedures is not followed by a corresponding eŸort to provide a concrete expression for what is meant by organizational performance. Management writers seldom apply several measurement procedures to the same organizational performance, provide speciªc criteria for what constitutes a performance, or produce detailed narrative descriptions of that which they aim to measure. Although they claim to measure performance precisely and accurately, management writers tend to refer to an organization’s performance as a vaguely deªned universal abstraction, which is less precise than a Weberian ideal-type and more like a Platonic ideal. In complex simultaneous moves, that which they objectify they also abstract and idealize. The passage from objectiªcation to idealization through abstraction is at work in academic management articles aimed at reviewing a given ªeld, be it strategy or management accounting, in order to assess its advances. Authors of review articles compare previously published articles dealing with, for instance, a new strategy or managerial accounting tool to see if they can make conclusive statements about the superiority or inferiority of these strategies or tools. The rationale of review articles is to compare some corporate performance deªned in a ªrst study according to Theory A and measured with Procedure B, with some corporate performance deªned in a second study according to Theory C and measured with Procedure D, and with some corporate performance deªned in a third study according to Theory E and measured with Procedure F, and so on. Yet, to draw a conclusion from such comparisons one must assume that all the studies that are reviewed and compared, regardless of their theoretical and methodological diŸerences, actually refer to the same phenomenon when they speak of organizational performance. And this can only be done if one adopts — along with a non-critical view of measurement — a view of organizational performance as an abstract ideal that transcends every study, theory, or measurement procedure. In a move that is emblematic of management writings, review articles integrate the objectifying approaches of the performance characteristics of the various studies they incorporate into an abstract and idealizing approach of the notion. And it is on the basis of this idealization that their writers produce general statements on organizational performance at large — statements that are presented as being independent of the ways in which every management study has approached the notion of performance. Although this combining of materialism (objectifying measurement procedures) and idealism (dealing with abstract ideal) might be theoretically bewildering, it is e¹cient. Thanks to their combining an idealized view of organizational performance and a straightforward approach to measurement, management writ-

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ers have built a convenient universal yardstick with which they can assess the goodness of any management actions, tools, and ideas — even a moral norm if necessary. One must merely posit that organizational performance is a universal abstraction open to all types of measurements, then develop some adequate and convincing measurement procedure, and ªnally ignore or accept any eventual philosophical contradictions that such a position may elicit.

2.

Toward a redeªnition of organizational performance

A major weakness of management’s approach to organizational performance is to ignore the fundamental diŸerence that exists between what happens in and around an organization, organizational life in itself, and the various accounts that can be made of this life. Inversely, as I suggest in this section, considering the diŸerence between life and accounts of this life involves completely redeªning the nature of organizational performance. Even if one disregards everything that socially determines our perception of reality (from the social nature of language to the structuring of collective consciousness and unconsciousness by myths, through the existing of fashions, ideologies and doxa), one must acknowledge that we can hardly have a direct (in the sense of not being socially mediated) understanding of what happens within organizations. Organizations are far too complex to invite direct witness to all their happenings (Boje 1995). They involve too many people and operate too many hours a day in too many places simultaneously for it to be possible for anyone to physically follow more than a small slice of organizational life. Moreover, organizations comprise many private territories and areas placed under signs of conªdentiality, secrecy, and restricted access. Indeed, one cannot even be sure where the organization begins or ends, or, in fact, what constitutes an organization. With these restrictions in mind, one’s experience of an organization as a work place or a service provider is insu¹cient for understanding what happens in it, except for borderline cases of extremely simple activities taking place in transparent micro-organizations. One’s understanding of what happens within an organization is dependent upon the ªnancial, accounting or commercial accounts that one can obtain from, e.g. the company itself, customers, competitors, auditors, researchers, supervising authorities or the media. It is by organizing these accounts and our own experiences into a meaningful whole that we make sense of the organization. I simply restate here the Wittgenstein-inspired argument that reality might be out there in order for us to understand it, but that we can only understand it by entering the collective games of language that deal with it (see e.g. Gergen 1999).

Narratives of organizational performance

The argument involves a radical redeªnition of what it involves to speak of organizational performance. The mere evoking of the distance between reality and accounts, involves namely that rather than denoting, as the management literature claims, some form of organizational achievement per se, organizational performance denotes an account made of organizational action.5 More speciªcally from regarding an organizational performance as something that one has achieved within the organization, we are lead to regard it as being the naming of this achievement. The diŸerence that naming introduces here is a signiªcant one: from deªning organizational performance in terms of acting/result to deªning it in terms of account/meaning. With respect to research strategies, this means that organizational performance is suddenly open to the concepts and methodologies that the social sciences and the humanities have for centuries developed to help them study oral or written accounts: how these accounts are produced, what they say, what they mean, what is involved in reading, how they can be interpreted, how they can be translated, how to deal with older accounts, how to determine the tradition to which they belong to, and so on. This opening of organizational performance on the humanities augurs so many new possibilities that I feel like launching the following invitation:

Dear colleagues of the social sciences and humanities, Following the recent discovery of a new type of text, the organizational performance account, you are kindly invited to make the best possible use of your erudition; stringency; cunning; and, broadly speaking, talent; in order to study it in any way that you will ªnd appropriate. Transdisciplinarily yours.

While waiting for answers, I will discuss some structural and cultural aspects of organizational performance. By so doing I hope to illustrate how a redeªnition of organizational performance (one that refers to accounts of organizational achievements rather than organizational achievements per se) prompts radically new insights on organizational performance. 5. To be more precise and to consider the correspondence between texts and acts that Paul Ricoeur (1981) has shown to exist, I suggest a redeªnition of organizational performance from referring to organizational life per se to referring to the act involved by the recounting of organizational life in a text. I choose, however, not to develop this precision here, as it would considerably burden the formulation of the paper without noticeably improving its main argument. I hope the reader will show some understanding for my choice.

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3.

For a poetics of organizational performance

Looking at organizational performance as accounts of achievements opens a vast research program. I would like to inaugurate this program by introducing some elements for a poetics of performance narratives, i.e. a theory of the form and principles of these narratives (compare Gabriel 2000). Generally speaking, performance accounts recount the successful passage of an individual, a group, or an organization from State A to State B, where State B is in some way preferable to State A. It is of little importance whether this passage involves causality (ªrst A, and because of A, then B) or chance (ªrst A and then B, although no one can say why). The point is that performance accounts bind A to B in chronological order (ªrst A and later B), where B is seen as the outcome of a process initiated at A. Performance accounts are, in this regard, narratives. The standard plot of performance narratives focuses on the way in which some particular results have been attained. Linking Situation A to Situation B in a meaningful way, performance accounts describe the process of organizing results, whether it be how the latest information system has increased or decreased the organization’s ability to adapt itself to a changing environment, how core values of the organization enact or no longer enact a tradition of quality and customer satisfaction, why a certain person had to be placed in or removed from o¹ce, or how a either judicious or inappropriate strategic move led to a rise or a fall in the value of the company’s stocks. Faced with a slew of organizational events, performance narratives select and order individual events in terms of some result that is singled out. In doing so, performance narratives provide — sometimes retrospectively — individual events with an identity and attach a meaning to them in relation to some chosen outcome. Events that would otherwise be di¹cult to disentangle from overall organizational life, or events that would not even be regarded as such in their own right, acquire a speciªc meaning when they are part of a performance narrative. Daily routines are interrupted and meaning is introduced into the ¶ow of ongoing contingencies and imperatives. The narratives presented in performance accounts create contexts, formulate units of meaning, and provide action with a particular direction. In so doing, they help managers make sense of their activities — one reason why managers keep producing and consuming a steady ¶ow of performance accounts. Performance accounts follow a similar narrative pattern. The narratives they present begin with some sort of competitive challenge. This trait is particularly obvious in sport, wherein performance narratives deal with the two main questions in all competition: who will win and how. This is obvious, too, in organizational contexts, wherein performance concerns the competitive evolution of individuals among peers, the ªght for market shares, the relative values of stocks,

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and the like. Performance narratives recount battles for scarce resources, whether it be the attention of a supervisor, the tastes and desires of the consumer, or the approval of a ªnancial analyst. Such narratives provide accounts of the ªght against adversity, be it the di¹culties in developing a new product, in implementing an organizational reform, or in reversing a negative trend. There is an idea that is to be realized, but one that is threatened, either by the pugnacity of others, by one’s own shortcomings, or by the mere resistance of things. A task, a project, a call, a quest, or merely one’s survival is at risk. How far are we from folktales? The challenge presented by performance narratives is expressed in terms of comparison. One industry is compared to another (e.g., tourism with telecommunication), one group of companies with another (e.g., the US vs. the British ªnance sector), one company with another (e.g., Nokia vs. Ericsson), a company with itself but on two diŸerent dimensions (e.g., ªnancial vs. commercial results), or a company with itself on the same dimension but on two diŸerent occasions (e.g., budget years 2002 and 2001). Likewise, one compares people (think of the successand-failure-story columns of news magazines), machines (think of the numerous comparative product tests), ideas (e.g., whether Business Process Re-engineering [BPR], which is a procedure for radical redeªnition and re-organization, is preferable to Kaizen, which is a Japanese-inspired procedure for continuous improvement), or places (e.g., Paris vs. Copenhagen as a city in which to base an Australian distance teaching program). Comments clarify ªrst one side, then the other, and bind the two together. Performance accounts are comparative heuristics. Any comparisons, however, presuppose some form of homogeneity among contestants. One can only stage a comparison by adopting some criterion for commensurability. In the examples outlined in the paragraph above, one could, for instance, use as a criterion the respective economic weight of the involved industries or companies; the reliability of the control procedures; the innovative capacity of each or both of the companies, their long-term sustainability, income, potential, or technical reliability; their di¹culties in implementing things; or their symbolic and logistic qualities. The choice of a performance criterion depends on the intentions, preferences, and strategies of whoever produces the performance account. It is a choice that is largely arbitrary and dependent upon the emphasis taken by the producer of the performance account, who will undoubtedly mobilize all available resources of rhetoric and metrology. And because of this arbitrariness, one should regard the choice of a commensurability criterion as the starting point of any performance narrative. Intrinsic qualities of contestants will create an impact only insofar as the relevant criterion allows them to, any change of criteria turning the comparison into another, completely diŸerent assessment. This means that what is regarded as a performance is settled long before the performers display their skills. In fact, the outcome of any comparison is determined by the

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choice of the commensurability criterion, winners and losers being selected long in advance by the design of the comparison. One becomes a high or a low performer ªrst in the eyes of the designer of the performance assessment procedure, as soon as the terms of the comparison among contestants have been settled. Following one’s choice of a criterion for commensurability, one must then develop a measurement procedure. Commensurability is only a potential, and must therefore be activated. And this activation takes places through measurement. Measurement gives written expression to the intentions and preferences expressed in the criterion for commensurability. Correspondingly, there are as many ways of measuring performance as there are intentions and preferences of those producing performance accounts (see Section 1). The choice of a commensurability criterion is the starting point of any performance narrative, but no performance narrative can be developed without the availability of functioning measurement procedures. Measurement is that which enables the passage from an act or a situation to a sign, such as a rating or a number. By so doing, measurement gives expression, and thus meaning, to the between-agents diŸerences and similarities that commensurability assumes to exist. Measurement textualizes the competitive challenge that stages commensurability. The writing of performance accounts can begin. Using a poetic and literary vocabulary will strengthen my argument. A performance narrative recounts the story of a competitive challenge. The main characters of this story are the contestants in the competition. Once they have been introduced, a commensurability criterion is established in order to clarify the characteristics of the competition and on what basis the contestants/characters will be compared. It is, however, only through measurement that these contestants/characters can make their voices heard, demonstrate what they stand for, and meet each other. Measurement is that which actualizes the potential in commensurability, allows the competition to begin, and thus makes the occurrence of events possible. Measurement also provides the narrator with multiple occasions for comments and allows the performance narrative to take form. One does not produce performance narratives for the sake of comparison, however. Performance narratives are narratives about how processes lead to outputs. They are intended to stage a competitive challenge and to present the results and the ranking of various contestants/characters in it. Just as a fable leads to a moral, a performance narrative leads to a list of what is better and what is worse. Performance accounts present managers and whoever else might be interested with hierarchies of high and low performance, top and bottom performers, valuable and worthless outputs, better and worse managerial tools, high and low potential shares — purposely meaningful hierarchies of achievement. Provided that the meaningfulness of these hierarchies is ensured — and it is essential that the entire measurement procedure, from the choice of commensurability crite-

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rion to actual measuring, appears to be fair if the story is to be interesting — performance narratives have come to their end and fulªlled their raison d’être. In summary, the plot of performance narratives is about some type of achievement. A performance narrative begins with the staging of a competitive challenge, characteristically framed in terms of some form of comparison. A commensurability criterion needs to be chosen and a measurement procedure needs to be developed. Characters of the narrative are the contestants, whoever is required by the competition to function (e.g., referee and other supervising authorities, the media, and the audience), and anyone involved in the challenge. All sorts of events, both inside and outside the organization, can take place; although the action is related to the measures that one produces. The narrative ends when a comparative hierarchy of better and worse achievements can be presented; preferably one that respects decent conditions of fairness. To characterize performance accounts further, they ban pure invention. Performance narratives must give the impression of providing a faithful and trustworthy rendering of the organization’s activity. Even though performance accounts may involve the creative presentation of activities (creativity is, indeed, an integral part of the work of inventing new criteria for commensurability and developing innovative performance measurements), invention is not allowed to be the main vector of performance narratives. Authors of performance accounts are bound to the demands of an audience that still largely adheres to a 19th century positivist ideal of truth, and is strict in its demands for objectivity. One can invent neither characters nor achievements in performance accounts and conjuring pure ªction is a cardinal sin — as some Andersen auditors and others versed in overly creative accounting have experienced. Likewise, performance accounts must be explicit. Ideally, their public requires them to provide an immediate and integral access to what is an outcome and at least implicitly to what is not, to the context of competition, to the terms of the comparison, to background information, and to causal links. Clarity is a requirement for performance narratives, something witnessed, for example, by the impressive number of notes appended to the ªnancial statements of private companies. Performance accounts are commanded by strict narrative rules if they are to be acknowledged as meaningful by their audience. They constitute a strict genre in which it is not easy to be innovative.

4.

The grand narrative of modern agon

After having sketched some structural qualities of performance narratives and the genre of performance accounts, I now deal with what one could call, to use Paul

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Ricoeur’s terminology, the world (monde or Welt) of performance accounts (1981: 202), i.e. the world that performance accounts, taken as a whole and beyond any speciªc account of any speciªc situation, open for us and bring to our minds. Considering that millions of performance accounts are produced each year and that great importance is attached to at least some of them, analyzing the role of performance account in contemporary society should be a relevant concern not only for management scholars but also for a wide range of social scientists as well. Performance narratives are indeed remarkable. They tell us about more e¹cient processes, better information systems, superior yields, stronger visions, or strengthened market positions. In so doing they recount why State B is to be preferred over State A, the conditions for progression from A to B, or how B improves upon A. Each higher performance is conceived as adding to its predecessors and as being a sign of an increase in management e¹ciency. Each superior performance account is the mark of a managerial progression toward the better. Progression of this sort is re¶ected in a series of leading management models, remarkable departmental results, outstanding CEO personalities, model companies, and national economic miracles. And speed — speed to market or the speed of a 10n MHz processor — is, as Paul Virilio (1977) has observed, the darling of our times. At face value, performance narratives could be regarded as helping anyone interested — let say managers — make sense of organizational chaos and diŸerentiate good solutions from bad. But because many performance accounts compete for attention and new performance accounts keep replacing the old (but not always that old) ones, something else happens. Managers are provided with a universal yardstick, but one that is neither easy to read nor particularly stable. Taken together, performance accounts depict a complex, contradictory, and rapidly changing world in which it is far from unproblematic to evolve. To begin with, performance accounts are many. All sorts of organizations produce a steady ¶ow of performance accounts based on various contingencies, various purposes, or various deªnitions and operationalizations of performance. And all these sources, all these accounts, are competing for attention. A manager can, on the same morning, receive a ªnancial and a commercial performance report and two diŸerent ªnancial analyses, and ªnd several buy/sell recommendations in the economic press. These performance accounts may well be contradictory, some speaking of promising prospects and others of worrying outlooks. Our manager must, nevertheless, make sense of these accounts. How should one deal with the stress of contradictory performance accounts that, nonetheless, present themselves as true? How to choose between one criterion of commensurability and another — between market share and return on investment, for example? Should one rely upon convenience, experience, tradition, and e¹ciency, or should one ¶ip a coin ? Such

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questions touch on a key di¹culty attached to the managerial condition. Managers must, in their daily practice, solve the arduous theoretical contradictions that are contained in their approach to performance, both materialistically and idealistically. They may set aside the idea that performance accounts are objective accounts and deal with them in a practical manner by picking up the report that suits their concerns or matches their conjectures, or by presenting various audiences with diŸerent, even contradictory, reports. If they do believe in the objectivity of performance accounts, however, receiving contradictory ones can lead to stress, angst, or escapism (e.g. breaking the dead-end of contradiction by ordering new and more performance accounts). The approach to organizational performance by management theory and practice, both in its objectifying and idealizing manners (see Section 1 above), turns out to have a human cost in terms of a manager’s psyche, health, and ability to decide — demonstrating that epistemological issues indeed have a signiªcant bearing on social life. Furthermore, performance accounts depict a world that is rapidly changing. The instability of ªnancial and monetary markets is a daily reminder of the ¶uctuating character of any performance. A high performance one day can become a low performance the next, and vice-versa (think of the so-called ‘Asian crisis’ of 1997, when several high-performing countries plunged into durable economic troubles; the 2000–2001 crash of Internet stocks; or the hesitating evolution of the Euro vs. US-dollar conversion rate). Likewise, heroes can easily become villains. The French top-star manager Jean Marie Messier, CEO of Vivendi-Univeral, fell from his pedestal in less than six months (Orange 2002). Performance accounts systematically remind managers that they are working in a highly competitive environment, as well as their need for facing and accepting the challenges of modern business. The standing ¶ow of new performance accounts forces managers into an endless quest for optimal ways of doing things, turning every step and every decision into a permanently renewed life-or-death bet — even though no deªnitive result can be attained. Managers are permanently reminded by performance accounts that they are working in a competitive environment where rivalry is intense, and in which they need to face and accept modern business challenges. The ¶ow of performance accounts keeps both the imperative of surpassing oneself in endless series achievements and the elusive character of excellence present in the minds of managers. How stressful and torturous! Performance accounts align the professional lives of managers within a survive-or-perish-to-competitors pattern, requiring them to keep themselves continually informed of the position of their competitors and the criteria of success that currently apply — the keys to high performance. Good performance is the key to securing future ªnancing of their activities, which is why managers are more than keen that their ªnancing body read their performance as satisfactory. To

128 Hervé Corvellec

perform well, managers must stay in touch with the latest and most fashionable performance narratives. Best-in-test performance tool kits and lists of top performers are permanently updated. There is much discussion of parallel lists that involve competing criteria of commensurability, competing measurement procedures, parallel channels of distribution, or various audiences. One can increase almost indeªnitely the statements made about the characteristics of high or low performance in present-day terms. These temporary and multiple lists of possible approaches provide no deªnitive answers, but simply remind managers that the winning solutions on one day may be the losing solutions on the next. Performance accounts assert and re-assert the never-ending nature of the challenges that managers face. Thus the achievements described in one performance narrative always leave open the possibility of the appearance of new challenges. Because challenges abound, there are always new and diŸerent performance narratives to be told. The logic of the implied dynamics is ¶awless: every performance account contributes eŸectively to the self-sustaining dynamics of the genre. The development of performance measures and the production of performance accounts have every chance of remaining ¶ourishing activities. Competition, ªghts, rivalry, achievements, superiority, and excellence: that which performance accounts describe is a form of agon, more precisely a modern agon. To clarify what I mean by modern agon, I must brie¶y remind the reader about ancient agon. Agon, the male personiªcation of contest in Greek mythology,6 stood in ancient Greece for a speciªc form of active quest for “the best one” or ariston. Ancient agon was underpinned by three main ideas: ªrst, an intense spirit of rivalry and competition; second, an emphasis on individualism, and third, an extreme emphasis on the pursuit of fame, glory, and honor, all imbedded in the mythological, religious, and political spirit of ancient sport.7 One became an ariston by excelling over all others on the day of the competition. To gain such honor, contestants trained for, prepared themselves to, and placed at stake their self-esteem, moral character, and, at times, their very lives. The important point was to pit one’s best against one’s equals in the course of competition, beating the 6. Following the invitation made above to my colleagues from the social sciences and the humanities, I cannot overemphasize the relevance of questioning modern agon in terms of gender, and even investigating the sexual connotations of the term “performance” for some English-speaking audiences (or so I have been told). 7. Ancient agon is understood here in the sense of “a contest for a prize at the public games” (Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary 1913), “as in athletics or music” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 2000), rather than as the slightly diŸerent albeit not unrelated “debate or contest between two characters in attic comedy” (Encyclopædia Britannica, On-line) that has prompted the current use of the term to depict “the dramatic con¶ict between the chief characters in a literary work” (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, On-line).

Narratives of organizational performance 129

best of one’s peers in contests, and being the best through the acknowledgment that one is ªrst among equals. And by attaining such excellence, the ariston acquired something nearly divine (after Loy and Hesketh 1984). Modern agon of performance accounts reminds one of ancient agon, yet diŸers somewhat from its ancient ancestor. Modern agon is reminiscent of ancient agon in that both are geared toward selecting an ariston. In modern agon there is also a systematic and rational preparation to struggle, a participation in competitions, a quest for excellence, and a celebration of victory that typically reminds us of ancient agon. As in ancient times, one must ªght against oneself and win over others in order to become an ariston. But the how and why of the competition as well as the symbolic meaning attached to excellence are diŸerent, and thus ancient and modern agons are not completely comparable. The diŸerences rest on ancient agon being part of the worldview of ancient Greece, and centered in a religious mythology and a metaphysics of the body. Modern agon, on the other hand, is thoroughly imbedded in the secularized, rationalized, and controlled Weltanschauung of modernity, at least as deªned in the thinking traditions of Europe and North America.8 Modern agon requires of contestants that by themselves and without divine intervention they show their ability to achieve pre-deªned goals. Contestants entering the modern agon of performance do not actually enter competition to honor a god, but to show that they are agents who are able to make the best possible use of the resources to which their principals have entrusted them (a tenet of agency theory).9 Modern candidates to the status of ariston — conceivably any manager or organization — must be able to plan adequately, to monitor, and to control their destiny. Yet it is not enough for them to be e¹cient and eŸective. They must also be able to demonstrate it, sometimes in several distinct arenas. Modern agon achievements are not supposed to remain private matters, but should be displayed publicly. The agon of performance accounts mobilizes all the resources of accountability and publicity, and is dedicated to the visibility of its champions. Besides visibility, it is an agon dedicated to progress. The idea of achievements vaguely implies that of improvement, just as every sports record signals the striving of human race toward citius, altius, and fortius — faster, higher, and stronger. And thanks to systematic measurements can one track with precision in 8. As Brian Moeran, Copenhagen Business School, pointed out, considering how diŸerently a country like Japan approaches both modernity and what I characterize as performance (e.g., competition and hierarchies), it might be more appropriate to reduce my claims to modernity as experienced and theorized in Western Europe, North-America, and culturally corresponding countries (Personal communication, October 23, 2002). 9. I am indebted to my colleague Torbjörn Tagesson, Kristianstad University College, for this idea (Personal communication, September 9, 2002).

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performance accounts the progress made possible by modern agon. Top performers are the symbols of this quest for progress; they embody excellence and further eŸorts to improve even upon excellence. As aristons of modern agon, top performers are the characters of a modern moral tales about the politics of human success, a parable of how competition creates progress. The agon of performance accounts is contingent upon that which Jürgen Habermas (1981/1985) calls the “project of modernity” — of developing an objective science, a universal morality and law, and an autonomous art, according to a logic of its own. Thus everyday social life will be rationally organized; natural forces controlled; the world and the self understood, and moral progress, the justice of institutions, and even the happiness of human beings, promoted (ibid:8). The agon of performance accounts evokes, as well, the separation of time and space (through time measurement techniques that were no longer bound to geographical determinants), the disembedding of social systems (lifting social relations out of local contexts of interaction and restructuring them across indeªnite spans of time-space) and the re¶exive ordering and reordering of social relations in the light of continual inputs of knowledge that aŸected the actions of individuals and of groups (altering practice through knowledge and altering knowledge through practice) that according to Anthony Giddens (1990: 16), characterize modernity. Performance is part of Western modernity like fortuna is part of ancient Rome’s worldview or karma part of Hinduism. Performance accounts that are narratives of achievements at an individual level, become, at a global level, the grand narrative of modern agon. Taken together, performance accounts tell how rationally planned, organized, and controlled competition leads to the selection of the modern ariston, let it be a physical person, an organization, a management tool, or anything else that one wishes to single out. The connections between the grand narrative of modern agon and the meta-narratives of emancipation, accumulation, history, or science — all identiªed by Jean-François Lyotard (1979) as typical for modernity — are numerous, several of them having been touched upon above. And just as it possible to follow, as Lyotard claims, the constitution of the meta-narratives of modernity into many projects sustained by instrumental knowledge and by a corresponding technoscience, one can follow the constitution of the grand narrative of modern agon into numerous projects sustained by a speciªc knowledge and a corresponding technoscience — that which I would call, coining a new term, the “performance industry”. Describing in detail the projects, knowledge, and technoscience of performance agon would require many more pages than I have been allotted. In brief, however, the performance industry consists, ªrst, of the numerous projects aimed at measuring corporate, public, or nonproªt performance, or at establishing national and international standards; second, of the speciªc body of knowledge

Narratives of organizational performance

about performance measurement and reporting that management research, rating agencies, or various accounting, auditing and consulting ªrms have developed; and ªnally, of a technoscience that includes everything from legal obligations made to corporations to disclose their environmental or social performance to large data-based information systems dedicated to the measuring, computing, and reporting of organizational performance. It is, by all means, an in¶uential and rapidly growing industry.

Conclusion I believe, along with Pierre Bourdieu (1998), that the time has come to question the current domination of our imaginary by a much narrower view of economy, including management, and “ªre back”. Drawing upon the critical potential of a narrative approach to the social sciences, I present in this chapter both a critical assessment of how management currently approaches organizational performance, and a narratively informed re-conceptualization of one of management’s favorite concepts. My purpose is to open for criticism a notion that has thus far been relatively untouched by it, and to invite a critical reconsideration of management in terms of story-telling activity. I ªrst presented the ways in which management theory and practice dealt with the notion of performance, emphasizing how they simultaneously objectify and abstractly idealize what they call organizational performance. Questioning such an attitude, I suggested that one take into account the fundamental diŸerence that exists between life in itself and the various accounts that one can make of it. I also suggested that the consideration of such a diŸerence opens radically new theoretical and practical approaches to what one calls organizational performance. Looking at the poetic traits of performance accounts, I claimed that these are narratives of competitive challenges geared to the presentation of achievement hierarchies, and made possible as narratives by the use of adequate measurement procedures and the respect of decent conditions of fairness. Again adopting a socially informed standpoint, I described how the never-ending ¶ow of performance accounts in¶icts managers with stress, angst, and escapism. Finally considering performance accounts as a whole, I ended my overview of the consequences of deªning organizational performance in terms of accounts of organizational achievements rather than achievements per se, by suggesting that performance accounts not only constitute a literary genre but the grand narrative of an agon that is contingent upon modernity and that, for this reason, I label modern agon. It is on this particular point that I would like to conclude. The grand narrative of modern agon is of societal signiªcance. Performance narratives are mytholo-

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gies10 that recount in a glorifying manner how individual, organizational, national, or even transnational actors, rationally achieve their goals and progress in late modernity. At the organizational level, stories of achievements (to re-use an expression I coined before, Corvellec 1997) conªrm the organization’s well-ordered instances of production, contribute to providing a sense of purposefulness to managerial actions, and participate in the making and holding together of organizations. They abide by the heritage of positivist scientiªc knowledge and the dream of objectivity, classiªcation, and discipline. At a societal level, performance accounts elevate e¹cacy to a moral imperative and competition to a universal yardstick of value, posit measurement as an unsurpassable mode of knowledge production, and invest the idea of hierarchies with a renewed legitimacy. The success of performance accounts is an expression of modern societies’ inclination to seek e¹cacy as a means, end, and justiªcatory mode, which Jean-François Lyotard (1979) considers to be speciªc to our times. By depicting a modern agon performance accounts both present the portrait of a corresponding modern ariston (an individual, an organization, an artefact, or whatever), and a¹rm their own ability to identify the modern champions. Performance accounts are given the pretence of describing how modernity takes us to the ultimate front line of human and organizational capacity. This may all sound comforting until one remembers that modernity has failed to fulªl its promises. All performance accounts celebrating our endless technical successes notwithstanding, we are living in a world in which access to health care, education, or even drinking water, are daily challenges for far more than half the world’s population and are likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. Even as companies boast of their environmental performance, our approach to natural resources places our ecosystem under ever more encompassing long-term lethal threats. Not to mention the political (read “human-made”) troubles such as war or genocide that seem to know no end and represent triumph to no one. Performance optimists argue that it is merely a question of time and knowledge, and that the day will come when performance management will be good enough to solve these problems. The contrast remains between the self-satisªed enthusiasm underpinning the genre of performance accounts and the alarming state and perspectives of the world we inhabit. It is no mere coincidence that performance is such an immensely popular notion at a time when problems deemed di¹cult to surmount keep piling up. Performance accounts are here to remind the wealthy, healthy, and well-informed

10. In the sense given to the term by Roland Barthes (1957) of a system of signiªcation or a form of expression for a set of beliefs considered meaningful by a given population during a given period.

Narratives of organizational performance

of their capacity to achieve. The grand narrative of modern agon is here to maintain the satisfying belief of modern western society in its own superiority. Each performance account is an attempt to signal that some advances have been made somewhere and that modernity’s promise of progress will be fulªlled. Organized in endless patterns of repetitions and redundancies, performance narratives attempt to answer our need to reassure ourselves of our operative capacity to face the problems we identify as being important but to which we have no eŸective solutions. Do we consume performance accounts to relieve angst? Success stories are good at drawing our attention away from hard-to-solve problems. That which recounts our ability to achieve thrives on our conªrmed incapacity for dealing with the social or environmental consequences of, for example, our political and theoretical choices. Performance narratives endeavor to prove the capacity of contemporary societies to rationally operationalize progress and to indicate that, despite daily signs to the contrary, we are indeed moving in the direction of progress. Performance narratives are, in this regard, far from being politically neutral. They are not simply modernist narratives; they are narratives that keep a¶oat the modernist dream and the social order that is attached to it.

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Part 4 Stories help to understand

The Schweik Syndrome The narrative power of resistance by agreement Paul Hirsch and Hayagreeva Rao* Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, USA

The TVA story could be interpreted many diŸerent ways and it took me some years before I think I fully understand what this story was about. The important thing about a study of this kind is that the story hold up. The story is an empirical account of what goes on, of what went on. It’s based upon data. It has to be justiªed by the facts and by the ability of diŸerent people to see the same facts — all of the standard criteria for scientiªc inquiry. What we make of that story, the theoretical spin we give to it, that’s something which is changeable. We may decide we didn’t understand it all that well in the beginning and we want to provide a new and diŸerent interpretation to it later on, on the basis of new and more comprehensive understanding. And that certainly is what happened. I’ve sometimes thought — I should say it more strongly — that the little book I wrote and called Leadership in Administration was an attempt really to take a second run at what I was doing in that earlier (TVA) book. (Selznick 2000: 278, bold font added)

As Selznick notes, once a story’s basic elements are observed, the variability of interest will lie with its interpretation. The basic “story” elements of post-socialist east European states, and of the more general transformations of other “emerging” states and regimes, are widely agreed upon. Since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989, there has been a substantial increase in the number of capitalist market frameworks and stock exchanges adopted (Weber and Davis 2000), and a widespread deregulation or privatization of large industrial enterprises. Many of the market models adopted, and much of the funding to do so, have come from the major European countries, the United States, and the international agencies they fund, such as such the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

* The authors thank Northwestern University’s Center for International and Comparative Studies and Institute for Policy Research, the University of Michigan’s Davidson Institute, and the Halle Institute of Emory University for ªnancial support. For helpful suggestions and comments, we also thank Royston Greenwood, Andrew Wachtel and Jo Ellen Pozner.

138 Paul Hirsch and Hayagreeva Rao

In this paper, we lay out the story of how these events transpired in the Czech Republic, and explore the variety of interpretations and “spins” which both its participants and organization theory’s genres and perspectives have provided. Our ªeld’s conventional approach to the challenge of “explaining” what happened would be to reduce the ªeld of possible explanations to a manageable number (one or two), generate a “null hypothesis,” and then positivistically “test” each against the other. For this story, however (as for many others), especially for units as large as a nation state, there are too many interesting and equally plausible explanations, and no simple “test” to see which one is so clearly superior that it dominates all the others. Here, we review the Czech regime’s ironic and simultaneous success and failure in producing the socioeconomic changes approved by the West, and lay out the interpretive imageries employed by the interested parties. The Czech nationality, historically tied to Bohemia, has bordered, both physically and culturally on centuries of interaction with what became Germany, as well as with the more powerful nations of Eastern and Western Europe. As these countries’ dominance has shifted over time, the Czechs have periodically regrouped, reviving their language in the 19th century, and becoming the State of Czechoslovakia at the end of World War I. Their knowledge of being Czech and retaining a distinctive cultural identity have persevered. This contributes both facts and interpretations to our focus on their tacit unity and commitment to retain autonomy (Sayer 1999). Our account of the establishment and course of ªnancial markets in the Czech Republic is drawn from 40 extensive interviews with Czech nationals and other participants, and from published accounts and analyses by reporters and academic researchers, and Hirsch’s observations and conversations while teaching an MBA class in Prague one month a year, every year since the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Many graduates from this program became active in the markets and other activities which became the stories for which there are now a rich variety of competing interpretations. After laying out a set of equally plausible explanations, we will suggest which interpretation we favor, but cannot prove. This also suggests that some elements of nonscientiªc aesthetics and background more generally play a role in the conclusions reached for the particular story versions we all sign oŸ on as professionals. To be honest in making such judgment calls as to which of the competing narratives does best, one must also take note that when a social researcher can show her particular selection corresponds especially well to the claims of a speciªc theory, s/ he has succeeded in creating more of a scholarly work of art than a scientiªc proof (Czarniawska 1999).

The Schweik Syndrome 139

Overview of events in the Czech Republic and their interpretations To date, the most politically stable of the post-socialist east European regimes has been the Czech Republic. Its President (Havel) and, through 2001 its Prime Minister (Klaus) were elected and re-elected over a period of 12 years. Its rapid and innovative privatization program, opening of stock markets and distribution of low-priced shares to all interested citizens gained enormous support from Western governments; so much so that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank signaled their approval by selecting the Czech Republic’s capital city, Prague, as the site for their (joint) 2000 annual meetings. At the same time, the Czech economy did not take oŸ; continued ine¹ciencies and poor management of its major industries remained in place; and its unemployment rate remained lower than expected. The same government leaders who espoused their devotion to shock therapy and free market capitalism presided over a regime that failed to pass a bankruptcy law enabling banks to foreclose on poor performing clients which did not repay their loans, or establish a capital market with enough transparency and other safeguards to attract many investors. In this regard, the Economist commented, “… despite the free-market bombast which emanates from Mr. Klaus and his team of economic-advisors and economistministers, they are in practice far more paternalistic and interventionist than they would have the world believe.” (1994: 43). This combination of contradictory indicators yields easy interpretations for both organizational success (market creation and innovations), and organizational failure (markets not working, innovations poorly carried out). Organizational analysts have emphasized elements of both, as there are enough to go around so that nearly any of our wide set of theoretical genres, and the explanations or interpretations each brings to the table, can claim to ªnd support. For example, a positive narrative, associated with the neo-institutional perspective (Powell and DiMaggio 1990; Scott 1995) would emphasize how the market form has diŸused and been adopted in an increasing number of nations; it would interpret this as supporting the view that the world is becoming more and more isomorphic and that imitation of the most powerful and successful by the weaker is an eŸective strategy for the latter to employ. A second narrative tending towards a positive interpretation of the results to date, is that of the population ecologist. This theoretical genre would emphasize that while its “liability of newness” increases the likelihood of an innovation’s failing during its ªrst time out, this does not preclude organizational learning from occurring. Hence, the innovation is more likely to succeed during later trials. A New York Times assessment of a 2001 government “cleanup” of “$8.6 billion in nearly worthless loans” approximates this position:

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Very little of this stems from the Communist era. Most ¶ows from the mistakes made in the ªrst heady wave of Czech capitalism, when … state-owned banks lent freely to well-connected industrial companies, only to discover years later that about half their money had been wasted. (Andrews 2001; italics added)

Alternatively, another variant of institutional theory could provide a more negative narrative basis for the innovation’s failure, taking the same story as an excellent instance of decoupling (Meyer and Rowan 1977; Brunsson 1989) — in which the new nation’s leadership cleverly played oŸ the rewards that follow from appealing to the expectations and demands of external resource providers, against their own political self-interest in minimizing the disruptive changes that could result. In the ªrst two examples, the focus on “learning and isomorphism” rewarding the adoption of markets directs attention to the importance of exogenous, outside powers sponsoring the diŸusion of new practices, organizational forms, and deªnitions of material goods (ie. designating more “private property”). Spokespersons for these approaches would assert that after learning from their initial mistakes, these new organizations succeeded through imitating other successful versions of the same form. Even if the eŸect is delayed and some resistance is encountered, this argument would add that once an institutional innovation has been formally agreed to, it is only a matter of time before its implementation will follow. Between 1990 and 2000, this story line already sees signiªcant movement in this direction: as indicated by “a recent transition to multi-party democracy,” “IMF ‘structural adjustment’ aid,” and “regional contagion,” isomorphism is demonstrably under way. These “results indicate that globalization is usefully construed as a process analogous to institutional diŸusion at the organizational level.” (Weber and Davis 2000: 2). The diŸusion of innovations framework embodied in the above example provides a narrative framework in which innovations are positive, and those managing or possessing them earliest are brighter than those to follow. In the case of capital markets, these early adopters and creators may mentor and lead later newcomers towards the positive goal of following their example in developing investor capitalism. DiŸusion theory implicitly labels these later adopters as “in need of help to catch up to us.” Since there is seldom any doubt as to which one of these groups is superior to the other (and which is the more dependent), it seems what has been presented as a largely “descriptive” process, of events occurring naturally over time, is a far more political model. This is indicated in Table 1 sketching the alternative interpretations of the story so far.

The Schweik Syndrome

Table 1. Multiple stories and interpretations for same sets of events Theoretical Framework

Story Line

Subtext

DiŸusion of Institutional Innovations

Dependent groups will learn how …

Insight

Focus on Adopter’s Intention

Focus on Innovation’s Adoption

Inferiors will DiŸusion be made more theory is like us political

No — interest presumed (“cultural dopes”)

Yes — but with initial focus on formal agreement only

Decoupling (1) Reward common language & concepts

Ideas dominant here; action secondary

Form > content for dominant parties

Yes – “Adopter” hopes to avoid it

No – focus on “myth & ceremony”

Decoupling (2) Loud agreement buys time

Adoption more actively resisted; agreements not followed up

Cultural capital can deter compliance

Yes – “Adopter” works hard to avoid it (resists by complying superªcially

No – commitment to appeareance & to buying time (to avoid it)

Garbage Can

Less planning; muddling through. Complex

Bounded rationality deters conspiracy

Complex process not controllable

No

Yes

Cultural Path Dependence

The Good Soldier Schweik

Tacit knowledge pattern understood

History is powerful

Yes – strong cultural support systems in place

No, except to avoid doing so

Decoupling Two versions of a decoupling perspective enable a quite diŸerent interpretation of the same series of events. Each notes that a continuing or increasing ¶ow of desirable resources will follow from conforming to the relatively clear demands or expectations of the organization’s outside market or environment. In the ªrst version, close to Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) presentation in their classic treatment of (adopting) formal structure as myth and ceremony, there arises a semi mutual agreement — between the more powerful provider and less fortunate potential beneªciary of adoption — in which the receiving organization formally agrees to take on the

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characteristics of the favored (“innovative”) alteration. The emphasis here is on the announcement of agreement to do so; the outside sponsor (western economic organizations in this case) attends less seriously to whether, or how quickly the promised alteration becomes implemented. Followup here is not the point; it is the inclusion (signing on) of the dependent party, enabling its name to add further momentum to said alteration’s diŸusion. This in turn results in either a more real or illusory “density dependence” of conformity (which, for population ecologists, also deªnes greater legitimacy) to the new program. Those organizations which have signed on receive preferred treatment in relation to their formal agreement, rather than its implementation. The latter is not ruled out; it is just not a necessary condition to being able to claim that the innovation has been widely adopted. The pattern of emerging nations’ agreeing to changes proposed by the west, and being rewarded for simply agreeing (e.g., by IMF loans, or the provision of newer military weapons) is quite common and familiar to even the casual observer. We discover, some years after, that while rewards and investments followed agreements to alter economic behavior and infrastructures, the actual implementation of the agreed-upon changes was, at best, slower and weaker than the wording of the earlier celebratory statements had claimed we would see. In the weaker form of this decoupling, evaluation and audits of the agreed-uponchanges are slow and open to modiªcation; apparent eŸorts are made to meet some of the conditions, and over time, the contracts are renegotiated for both sides to achieve some of what were their apparent goals at the outset. Drift is not unusual; the process is largely reactive. Among the Eastern European nations, this description approximates the experience of Hungary since 1980. As one of the ªrst nations to embrace market capitalism, both before and after 1989, it was initially rewarded for simply signing on; since then, it has intermittently lived up to these earlier agreements. A second, and stronger form of decoupling occurs when the dependent parties are more aware of the disconnect, and re¶ective about the irony and contrast between what is agreed to and what will be delivered. While perhaps still a matter of degree, in this second form of decoupling, the beneªciary of promised changes is very schooled in knowing what the more dominant player wants to hear, and can tailor the agreements made to sound like it embodies these. In the Czech case, it is of great interest that before becoming Prime Minister, Klaus wrote his doctoral dissertation on Margaret Thatcher’s policies in Great Britain. An economist highly familiar with the phrasings of the Chicago School, Klaus achieved great favor and praise from Western leaders by, in part, asserting that Western Europe had forsaken much of capitalism’s promise and practices. Klaus’ speeches promised that his policies as Prime Minister would restrict the welfare state’s overly “generous transfer payments unconnected to achievement,” and “undermining of individual

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responsibility.” Two of the speeches reprinted in a book of Klaus’ speeches, published by the free market advocate Cato Institute, are: “Adam Smith’s Legacy and Economic Transformation” and “The University of Chicago and I.” (Klaus 1997). The cultural capital embodied in these addresses resonated deeply (see Snow et.al. 1986; Clemens 1997; Gamson 1992) with western economists, and the Czech Republic was rewarded with great praise and aŸection for espousing such free market positions. More than its “sister countries,” the Czech Republic almost completely decoupled such “front stage”statements (directed more to external listeners abroad), and “backstage” performance (permitting near full employment back home to continue, and welfare policies to remain in good standing). In fact, its very widely praised front-stage privatization policy, of issuing stock in more formerly state-owned enterprises, both faster and more widely than any other nation, had the wonderfully ironic backstage denouement of enabling nearly half of the shares issued by the state to be purchased back by its very own (state-owned) banks (Rao and Hirsch 2002). In terms of the analytical summary in Table 1, the narrative embodied in this stronger version of decoupling goes beyond simply “learning from mistakes.” It may just as easily be an instance of decoupling at its aesthetic ªnest, i.e, enabling those resisting the pace of change to: agree loudly to reform and put the desired structures into place, but not seriously implement what they represent. This has the eŸect of purchasing time to delay the onset of the agreed-upon reforms.

Garbage can The garbage can genre thrives on a very diŸerent story line — the occurrence of unintended consequences. It celebrates the complexity and confusion generated by the voices of many subªelds’ narratives, all seeking to explain the same series of events and outcomes. If invited to choose from among the preceding interpretations, it emphasizes the likelihood that all of them are present in the story. The garbage can’s narrative focuses more on events than on the motives or attitudes of the story’s players. Given a large set of possible attributions, it remains agnostic as to motives (see Table 1). For example: 1. whether late adopters of an innovation (an event) are or are not viewed by the agents and theorists of diŸusion as inferior (the attitude we ascribed to them earlier) matters not, so long as the event occurred. Or, 2. even if political leaders formally adopting free markets decoupled their implementation by reversing course (an event), one may still assume they entered into the story intending to carry out the policy (attitude) and tried to do so. While surely some of the unfulªlled agreements promised to the West repre-

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sent hypocrisies (see Brunsson 1989), it is also plausible that they honestly intended to institute more (even if not all) of the promised changes — and that their decoupling followed from having failed to realize the practical di¹culties of implementing what looks good in economics texts but not to one’s constituents. The garbage can model does not provide a plot for the process of what occurred along the way. It notes and focuses on the outcomes, noting there are many contingencies which crop up to undo the “best laid plans” of the story’s key players and participants. As they can unfold simultaneously, competing narratives may con¶ict with and block each other as they go forth. Following from March and Simon’s (1958) and Ocasio’s (1998) attention to bounded rationality, proponents of the garbage can genre’s narrative would emphasize the surprises which are bound to follow the presumption that the whole story can be planned out in advance. Here, we may discover that events for which we think we know the cause could just as easily have been accidentally or randomly generated; that the players were just “muddling through,” and could not successfully gain control over the complex myriad of events going on around them. Unlike the preceding genres, there are few causes and even fewer controlling players in the garbage can’s narrative. It comes closer to embracing Czarniawska’s (1997) depiction of a polyphonic multivocality.

The reproduction of elites This narrative is clearly less agnostic about explaining or interpreting recent developments in post-socialist eastern Europe. Like the other, preceding alternatives to the garbage can’s more easy-going perspective, the reproduction of elites narrative would concede it may not have a perfect track record, but disagrees with the garbage can view’s suggestion that power and politics do not have the wherewithal to signiªcantly in¶uence the course of events. This narrative draws extensive conceptual and empirical support from such scholars as Bourdieu, Tilly, Szelenyi, Mills, Pareto and Gramsci. While the details of each plot may change with new situations, the common theme throughout this story line is the persistence of power and in¶uence. This perspective, like the garbage can narrative, begins at the end of the story; its focus is less on the process of how the battle was won or engaged, but mainly on the fact of who or which groups came out as the victor. In examining the Czech Republic and its neighboring countries, the reproduction of elites narrative would focus attention on the following examples and possibilities, ªnding in them support for its position that elites are more likely to retain or share power than to abandon it during times of social change.

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1. Many of the top elected, appointed, and career o¹cials of the new regimes held positions of favor or in¶uence under the previous government. In the Czech Republic, both of its recent prime ministers, and many of their allies ªt this description. Further evidence that the ruling elite experience few disruptions comes from the outcome of the large-scale privatization program, which placed so much of the nation’s assets back into the hands of the elite which set up the program. A good description of what was anticipated by many, but did not happen, appears in Frydman et al. (1993). As they note, the mass IPO process was an attempt to de-institutionalize the existing order in which stateowned ªrms were controlled by state-owned banks who funneled credit to them. The underlying premise was that private ªrms would be more e¹ciently monitored and managed than government ªrms. The diŸusion of shareownership enabled privatization reforms that would lead to the emergence of completely new organizational forms in Eastern Europe: brokerage houses, stock exchanges, investment privatization funds (IPFs), and investment banks. That this program failed to generate the results anticipated by its western supporters speaks strongly for the counter-narrative that the elite of the “existing order” did indeed retain its substantial control over these economic assets — ranging from the ªrms in the industrial sector, to the State banks that provided them with substantial low-interest loans and credit. This is not to suggest there was not change, and times of uncertainty and the necessity for negotiations to occur. A great deal of cooptation, per Selznick, occurred in the economic arena, as the new investment privatization funds competed to purchase Czech citizens’ vouchers and avoid the imposition and enforcement of rules supported by some ªnancial advisors from the west (Rao and Hirsch 2002). 2. Many of the important positions throughout the new regimes have gone to members of the older generation, rather than to younger candidates or even to members of the dissident groups which helped bring down the earlier regime. This has been widely noted in the Czech and Slovac Republics. And, 3. When representatives of the dissident or previously excluded groups have attained o¹cial power, their tenure in o¹ce is shorter than those with more experience. In those nations where reform candidates were elected to o¹ce, they were generally unseated by more experienced rivals, and often party members, at the time of the next election.

Cultural path dependence The narrative of cultural path dependence takes all of the preceding story lines as indicators of a much broader, historical set of collective understandings, without

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whose presence and support none of the speciªcs of the Czechs’ version of postsocialist governance would have occurred as they did. Cultural path dependence in this instance provides the narrative of identity, or drama within which “actions create not only stage sets but also actors, who then try to act in accordance with the stage set and with what they perceive as their ‘character’ ”(Czarniawska 1997: 40). An illustrative Czech saying is “the Austro-Hungarian empire fell because it employed and relied on so many Czech clerks.” The screenplay enacted in this instance follows the path embodied by the Good Soldier Schweik, Czech culture’s satiric literary hero whose successful defense against the power and dominance of outsiders is to follow an imposed set of formal rules to the letter, taking them too literally for them to achieve the outcomes intended by their creators. The Schweik framing provides the theme for, and a tacit understanding of the behaviors adopted in the face of the market’s arrival — its treatment as just another “innovation” brought in and imposed by outsiders. With this popular four-volume novel, its author, Jaroslav Hasek, has been characterized as capturing “the soul and spirit of a people that is identiªed with them forever after… For the Slavic nations, and to some extent for all central Europeans, [this was the Czech writer, Hasek’s achievement]” (Sadlon and Joyce 1997: vi). Indeed, in Czech, the verb “to Svejk” now expresses the idea of passive resistance — saying one thing but doing the opposite, and bowing outwardly to authorities while continuing to serve one’s own interests. For a program approved by outsiders to be verbally adopted but not implemented fully is not surprising in this cultural context. Throughout central Europe the Good Soldier Schweik is read by schoolchildren. The irony and black humor it celebrates is widely shared and appreciated by all the cultures in this region. In the works of such well-respected Czech writers as Havel, Hrabal, Klima, Kundera, Jan Neruda, Skvorecky, and Topol, the examples of saying one thing and meaning or doing another, or not delivering on positions taken in an earlier discussion, are commonly portrayed and not surprising. For example, in My Merry Mornings by Ivan Klima, the main character explains why stating “I don’t know” is easier than providing a more honest and complete explanation for his actions. And, in I Served the King of England, Hrabal shows how assertion and clear opposition are losing strategies compared to Schweik’s slternative, of more quietly going along and agreeing with his superiors, while not successfully carrying out the promises made.1 1. A good illustration of Schweik’s use of this practice occurs in the following passage (p.82, 1973 translation). The good soldier has arrived at a jail, where the warden lectures him and he responds: “And God help you, you miserable shit, if when there’s an inspection you take it into your head to complain about anything. When there’s an inspection and you’re asked: ‘Have you any complaints?’ you have to stand at attention, you stinking vermin, salute

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The “taken for grantedness” of an aggressively passive resistance as an appropriate response resonates easily with this ironic and satiric narrative. It provides a sensemaking backdrop for the history of Czechs’ accommodating (and outlasting) occupations by Austrians, Germans, and Russians, among others. The most recent decoupling of o¹cially loud praise for an externally imposed innovation (a capital market), and the informal crippling of its implementation, ªt very well within this cultural and political tradition. In a broader dependency cultural framework (Scott 1990), compliance is understood to be necessary, but its faulty execution enables and facilitates retention of the very social structures which had agreed to step aside. The Czechs’ rewriting of the “foreigners’” rules and innovations occurred during earlier regimes as well. This cultural path dependence narrative, of the savvy rabbit outwitting the foreign fox, suggests that absent an institutionalized cultural tradition of sophisticated resistance in the Czech Republic, this most recent instance of eŸective decoupling would not have seemed so “natural;” and that the talent and will to carry this oŸ derives from what a constructivist deªnition of organization calls a “net of collective action undertaken in order to shape the world and human lives” (Czarniawska 1997: 41). Without the historical context and path dependent culture which this plays out, the stronger decoupling perspective — described earlier in its own right and primarily as a re¶ection of the leaders rather than the script which preceded them — would have been less likely to arise and to succeed. The path dependence narrative looks backwards to understand and explain the present and future. If nothing new occurs, just a diŸerent version of an older experience, then there is much to be learned from examining what the past can teach us (Hirsch and Gillespie 2000).

Conclusion We began with an inquiry into why, in Eastern Europe, the Czech Republic presents such an excellent case of marketplace innovations having successfully diŸused, but failing to become successfully implemented. We then discovered an alternative formulation, which conceives such a successful decoupling of the innovation and its implementation not as a failure, but as an especially talented, artistic and desirable outcome (not goal displaced). To this variety of assessments and answer: ‘Humbly report none. I’m completely satisªed.’ Now what are you going to say, you lousy oaf? Repeat what I said!” “Humbly report, none. I’m completely satisªed,” Svejk repeated with such a sweet expression on his face that the staŸ warder was misled and took it for honest zeal and decency.

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from diŸusion and institutional theory were added the garbage can’s perspective, which focuses on uncontrollable contingencies and unanticipated consequences. The reproduction of elites perspective disagrees, contending that power and in¶uence do not disappear during times of change, and can be expected to play a major part in the outcome of any social transformation. Finally, we found the “cultural path dependence” model, which asserts the importance of cultural signals and historical experience as necessary contextual factors, that must be taken into account in order for the analyst to be able to interpret correctly what s/he sees happening at any given time and place. Each of these perspectives on the same events is plausible, and can be argued well. But rather than reducing them to only one “explanation,” we ªnd them all to add a useful and important perspective, “spin,” and point of view for our understanding and interpretations of the materials in hand. Each serves an important and eŸective rhetorical purpose for its spokespeople and representative(s). In this sense, each perspective has a retinue of participants, advisors, and advocates. What is new in this context (for professors in American schools) are the ideas that each of these explanations is a narrative, which does not set itself up to be proven or disproven, but rather to be experienced, discussed with others, and re¶ected upon. It is all too seldom in our ªeld that one can so appreciate alternative explanations for events without having to select one, and to arbitrarily shut out its “competitors.” In this instance, it has been a great exercise for us to consider what works best within each of these frameworks, without having to try to choose between them. For the moment, we are most drawn to the argument of examining cultural path dependence as a set of multiple in¶uences on outcomes, whose variation is to be explored in greater detail, and then followed up and celebrated. The framing of each of these screenplay perspectives as narratives has been a most useful learning experience.

Detective stories and the narrative structure of organizing Towards an understanding of organizations as texts* Gerardo Patriotta Rotterdam School of Management, The Netherlands

This chapter develops a phenomenological perspective on organizing which is based on the analysis of narratives in the workplace. My argument is based on two related assumptions. First, an organization is treated as a text. The text metaphor, derived from semiotics and hermeneutic phenomenology, has remained relatively unexplored within the ªeld of organization studies. Admittedly, several scholars working at the boundary between ethnography and organization theory (e.g. Van Maanen 1995, Hatch 1996, Czarniawska 1999) have deployed the metaphor to characterize the work of organizational scientists as a writing endeavour. However, few of them have stretched the evocative power of the metaphor so far that it represents the way in which organization operates (for exceptions, see Cooren 2000 and Robichaud in this volume). I draw on the work of Paul Ricœur (1981) to argue that an organization functions like a text. The text metaphor connects agency problems with organizational sensemaking, both of which are central to any theory of organizing. In particular, agency concerns how an action is detached from its agent and develops consequences of its own. This issue can be equated to the problem of the dissociation of a text from its author. Organizational sensemaking focuses on the constitution and institutionalization of meaning and concerns how organizations cope with the ambiguity and equivocality of action. Here the text metaphor provides insights on how speciªc events are arranged into a meaningful whole by means of ordering and sequencing. My second assumption is that organizing can be seen as a form of narration. This conceptualization is in line with the core theme of this book. Narratives * Earlier versions of the case study on which this chapter is based have been previously published by the author (see Patriotta 2003a, b).

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constitute a well-established tradition in organizational research and the signiªcance — both theoretical and methodological — of the narrative approach has been widely recognized in the literature. My point of departure here is Czarniawska’s claim that narrating is organizing, and that organization itself can be regarded as a story, as a social construction that is interactionally relevant and constraining (Czarniawska 1997). My contention is that narratives are not just a mode of recounting organization, a way of interpreting organizational life, or the stuŸ of which organizations are made. Rather, I suggest that organizing practices unfold as a narrative and that the structure of organizing processes is similar to the construction of a narrative plot. In this regard, narrating and organizing deal with the same predicament, namely how to make sense of equivocal happenings through the construction of a ªctional order. To illustrate my argument I draw on a case study that I conducted at Fiat Auto at Miraªori, Italy (Patriotta 2003a). The setting is the stamping shop of an automotive plant. The focus of the inquiry is on how a best performing team resolves disruptive occurrences on the shop ¶oor. The analysis of narratives on the shop ¶oor highlights a distinctive mode of investigation conceptualized as a “detective story” because of its analogy with that literary genre. Dramatizing breakdowns as detective cases provides operators with a sensemaking strategy for representing equivocal action in a meaningful fashion and achieving closure. Detective stories generate a repertoire of solutions, notable experiences, and learning examples that can be stored in the organizational memory and retrieved when disruptive events occur. In this respect, they act as “templates” for the resolution of future cases. On the other hand, detective stories are deeply entrenched in the social fabric of the shop ¶oor. As a genre, the narrative structure of detective cases involves achieving closure by ªnding a culprit and attributing blame. In particular, the modus operandi of the team members at Miraªori seems to be based on a compelling system of sanctions and rewards which stresses the core value of taking responsibility for one’s mistakes. The interplay of narrative and social factors highlights problems of blame management, scapegoating, and face-saving in the day-to-day practices on the shop ¶oor. The main ªndings of the study seem to be partially consistent with the existing literature. Narratives appear to be essential diagnostic devices which enable operators to perform a coherent description of “troubled machines” (Orr 1996). Furthermore, they provide operators with “guides to conduct” (Weick 1995) or cognitive maps based on the recurrence of histories of disruption. Finally, narratives act as storage devices, providing receptacles for organizational memory. In so doing, they maintain the stability of the work setting by fostering the circulation of organizational knowledge within the community of workers. On the other hand, the text-action model and the narrative form of the detective story have novel

Detective stories and the narrative structure of organizing

implications for the study of organizing practices. In particular, the text-action model portrays organizing processes as the iteration of controversies and closures and points out the ways in which organizations progressively inscribe equivocal happenings into stable structures of signiªcation. Similarly, detective stories identify an emerging epistemological archetype similar to what Carlo Ginzburg (1990) calls the “evidential paradigm”. The essence of the paradigm lies in the formation of conjectures and the use of common sense as a primary mode of knowing and discovering reality. In this regard, detective stories provide an organizing structure or template for anticipating social action in space and time. The next section presents a phenomenological perspective on organizing which is based on Ricœur’s theory of text and action. The third section provides an overview of the Miraªori pressing plant and discusses the organizational and cognitive implications of batch production systems. The two following sections describe instances of disruptive occurrences on the shop ¶oor. The sensemaking dynamics underlying problem-solving activities are connected to a distinctive narrative-based process of investigation, conceptualized as a “detective story”. The analysis shows how sensemaking is grounded on the core values of the team and how those values aŸect collective learning processes. The next section applies the text-action model to the main ªndings of the study and reconsiders the detective method as a genre that shapes and is shaped by organizing practices. The concluding section analyses the implications of the text-action model and of detective stories for a narrative-based theory of organizing.

Organizing as the interplay between text and action The main argument of this chapter is built on the equivalence between text-action and narrating-organizing. In this section I spell out the above analogies and explain their relevance to a phenomenological theory of organizing. In contrast to structural-functionalist views of organizations (e.g. Parsons 1951, Selznick 1957, Blau 1964), which prioritize the concepts of unity and instrumental order, the argument presented in this chapter accords with the claim that organizations are characterized by intrinsic ambiguity and disorder (Weick 1979, Cooper 1990a, Patriotta 2003a). Pursuing a similar line of argument, Cooper and Law (1995) have attempted to move from a vision of organization as a fait accompli to the process of organizing in order to capture the in ªeri, emergent character of organizational phenomena. Organizing stems from the practices by which organizations make order out of disorder, and it rests upon the dynamic interactions between permanence and change, routines and breakdowns, steady states and controversies. These interactions can be described by referring to the ontological categories

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of being and becoming, which Cooper and Law allude to as ‘distal’ and ‘proximal’ modes of thinking in organizational analysis. The two modes are somewhat complementary. Distal thinking emphasizes outcomes and ready-made aspects of organizations. Proximal thinking focuses on ¶ows and processes and regards organizations as ongoing accomplishments. The shift from the proximal to the distal occurs through a process of translation whereby equivocal actions are transformed into stable structures and eŸects. This process becomes apparent when we consider the authors’ description of action: .

In its most callow sense action is a happening; before anything else — before meaning, signiªcance, before it’s ªtted into any schema — it simply happens… The happening is “nothing” — or rather no thing, no object, no form — because it doesn’t possess any meaning, it is equivocal and symmetrical; it’s not yet properly articulated, ordered, organized, not yet been converted into a product or eŸect. In other words, the happening is a heterogeneous process that has no before or after, no start or ªnish, no cause or eŸect: it always remains “unªnished”. Only when it takes its place in the network of what has already happened does it become ordered and organized, translated into an eŸect (Cooper and Law 1995: 241–242).

The distinction between proximal and distal underlines the way organizations seek to make sense of the ¶ows and processes that characterize their activity. It highlights the importance of the kind of sensemaking processes which have been most carefully scrutinized in the works of Karl Weick (1979, 1995). According to Weick, action is a continual ¶ow which shapes and is shaped by the unfolding of time. Following the philosophical ideas of phenomenologists like Alfred Schütz, Weick observes that time exists in two diŸerent forms, as pure duration (happening) and as discrete segments. Pure duration is a “coming-to-be and passing-away that has no contours, no boundaries, and no diŸerentiation” (Schütz 1967: 47). Pure duration makes sensemaking somewhat transparent, as it renders actors unaware of the activity in which they are engaged. In pure duration, action is experienced as a continuum characterized by symmetry and equivocality. In other words, action is “raw material” that needs to be put into some frame of reference in order to become meaningful. Retrospection is crucial to sensemaking. As Weick puts it, “people are always in the middle of things (projects), which become things only when those same people focus on the past from some point beyond it.” (Weick 1995: 43). This phenomenological description of action suggests that making sense of equivocal and symmetrical occurrences is closely connected to the experience of time. Anticipation and retrospection act as temporal devices whereby “happenings” are harnessed into structures of signiªcation, and action is rendered meaningful. Anticipation and retrospection can be related to the design of organizations. As Madeleine Akrich has pointed out with respect to the design of objects:

Detective stories and the narrative structure of organizing

Designers deªne actors with speciªc tastes, competencies, motives, aspirations, political prejudices, and the rest, and they assume that morality, technology, science and economy will evolve in particular ways. A large part of the work of innovators is that of inscribing this vision of (or prediction about) the world in the technical content of the new object. I will call the end product of this work a “script” or “scenario”. (Akrich 1993: 208).

Likewise, organizations are designed to anticipate action in space and time, and to direct and prescribe the behaviour of organizational actors according to a particular vision of the social reality. The script refers to a pre-understanding of reality, a pre-interpreted world that provides the background knowledge underlying organizational performance. However, this pre-understanding is grounded on retrospection, that is, on the possibility to focus on the past from some point beyond it and consequently to foresee certain outcomes: “the problem of what will come next is perhaps the fundamental problem of ordering and organizing” (Cooper and Law 1995: 242). Hence, organization can be seen as the ex-post rationalization of action, a mechanism that continuously swings between anticipation and retrospection. The latter is considered by Cooper and Law to be a real engineering of time: “without retrospection there is no anticipation, no ordering, no organization… it is a matter of constructing the future so that it looks like it’s always been there” (ibid.: 242). As stated above, anticipation and retrospection highlight the importance of the factors of time and tense and their in¶uence on the way organizations seek to make sense of their activities. More speciªcally, they point to the di¹culty, within organizations, of dealing with the unknown, of living the present as “here and now”, of perceiving action as a happening, as an equivocal and symmetrical experiencing. In order to overcome this di¹culty, a third mechanism, which provides a perspective on the present from the present, needs to be introduced. Here is where repetition comes into play. Repetition transforms novel experiences into ordinary events. Once again Cooper and Law provide a useful insight: “an obvious (but neglected) feature of organization is that it has to repeat itself in time, to renew actions every working day.” (ibid.). Repetition, in the form of routinized activities, allows organization to cope with everydayness by turning the “happening” of action into a familiar sequence of events. Routines represent the liturgy of organization, the eŸort to frame the equivocality of action through rituality. Action is thus encapsulated in stable patterns, woven into standard plots. Anticipation, retrospection and repetition make the circularity of time a permanent feature of organization. Anticipation casts a glance on the future from some point behind it; retrospection focuses on the past from some point beyond it; repetition attempts to arrange the present into some stable, recognizable pattern. In this way, organization is turned into a sort of clockwork, whose functioning depends on the

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possibility of rendering time transparent. The above activities — and the related processes of planning, ordering and sequencing — embody the strategies whereby organizations manipulate action in an attempt to make order out of disorder. Understanding the ontological bases of organizing means understanding how organizations translate the proximal into the distal, how they turn equivocal happenings and streams of experiences into agreed facts and institutionalized meanings, how they inscribe human agency into stable structures of signiªcation and durable outcomes such as technologies, routines, procedures, organizational artifacts, and so on. In order to tackle the above problem we spell out the features of organizing processes in terms of an internal dialectic between text and action (see Figure 1). According to Ricœur (1981) action may be regarded as a text; it is a meaningful entity which must be constructed as a whole. However, this construction is subject to a con¶ict among interpretations that can be resolved only by a process of argumentation and debate. Like a text, human action is an open work, the meaning of which is “in suspense”. In this regard, action generates controversies in search of a closure. Through the institutionalization of meaning, action is temporarily ªxed, it converts into a textual artefact that can be dissected by using the methodology of text-interpretation. In turn, by connecting event and meaning, the text becomes a platform for further action and further controversies, a script to be acted upon, a prompt for ad hoc performances. The text-action model highlights the connection between agency and meaning, it links a relational dimension with a semantic one. A third dimension is also implicitly comprised in the model: time. The time dimension tells us that organizing unfolds through the iteration of controversies and closures, through the temporal sedimentation of meaning. The three dimensions of action, meaning and time constitute the ontological bases of organizing. Like texts, organizations emerge through processes of distanciation and dissociation (both temporal and spatial) whereby human action is objectiªed, historicized, written down in documentary artifacts or inscribed into stable structures of signiªcation. Thanks to distanciation, human deeds become “institutions”, in the sense that their meaning no longer coincides with the logical intentions of the actors

Connecting event and meaning, fix for action. Text provides a script to be acted upon, a platform for further action

closures TEXT

ACTION controversies

Figure 1. Organizing as the interplay between text and action

In a primordial sense action is a “happening”; it is equivocal; it is an open work whose meaning is “in suspense”

Detective stories and the narrative structure of organizing

(ibid.). The “objectivity” of organizations (in the sense of autonomy, durability, materiality, and facticity) arises from the social ªxing of meaningful behaviour. Narratives are the engine behind the text-action model in that they actualize the interplay of action, meaning and time. Narratives turn action into texts and texts into action, they display the unfolding of organizational sensemaking, the movement from controversies to closures. The dialectic between text and action portrays narratives as encompassing both the structure and the content of organizational action. Through narratives, occurrences are located in space and time and translated into meaningful events by organizational actors. Emplotment is the process whereby actors impose a logical structure (a beginning, a middle and an end) upon a ¶ow of equivocal happenings through processes of ordering and sequencing. Time plays a critical role in conferring consistency on the plot and thereby promotes sensemaking. In fact, the strength of narratives as ordering devices stems precisely from their ability to link the present to the past and the future, anticipation to retrospection and repetition. On the other hand, the text metaphor reinforces the idea of narratives as inscriptions of social action. Narratives, articulated as texts, can be seen as material traces of learning and collective remembering processes, social imprints of a meaningful course of events, documents and records of human experience (ibid.). Within the framework depicted above, the task of the researcher is to describe in detail how organizational actors make sense of equivocal happenings in the work setting while attempting to identify emerging patterns and regularities of action. Moreover, the focus on narratives has important consequences as far as the relation between actors and observers is concerned. In fact, the observers are themselves involved in the construction of narrative accounts in order to make sense of certain patterns of behaviour. They too engage in the construction of plots (texts) out of equivocal events and in so doing they deal in “interpretation of interpretations” or texts about texts. In this respect the relation between actor and observer may become self-referential insofar as the distinction between the actor and observer’s accounts becomes blurred. Narratives are sensemaking devices in a twofold sense: they allow actors to articulate action through discourse; and they provide observers with access to tacit stocks of knowledge that have been externalized in text-like form. It is therefore important to distinguish between narrative as a methodological lens and the narrative voice of the observer in describing certain organizational phenomena (see Hatch 1996). The latter relates to issues of rhetoric and the representation of organizational research. Let me now relate this reasoning to my own case. I conducted my ªeldwork at the Miraªori Pressing Plant over a two-year period (1996–1997). The shop ¶oor team was the basic unit of analysis and the observational setting. Data collection combined naturalistic observation with open interviews, which were mostly con-

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ducted at diŸerent points along the production lines rather than in locations separated from the workplace. The respondents were encouraged to narrate stories about their work as well as to provide their own insights into speciªc occurrences and situations. The story reported here stemmed from direct observation of a “best performing team” in the large press unit, which had been selected jointly with the plant’s management on the basis of generic performance indicators. The ªeldwork involved shadowing the team members and asking questions only to solicit explanations for speciªc occurrences. Direct observation covered both ordinary conduct and disruptive events. Everyday activities were observed while they were deªned, enacted, and/or made problematic by people engaged in their normal routines. Particular emphasis was placed on the observation of instances of perturbations, interruptions and breakdowns, since such events trigger sensemaking activities and expose the tacit features of the organization. Direct observation required the taking of detailed and descriptive ªeldnotes. Additional notes of everything that could be remembered were made soon after I left the setting. Interviews were conducted primarily with managers, middle managers, technicians, and, to a lesser extent, line workers. All the interviews and conversations along the production lines were tape-recorded and transcribed. Additional informal conversations were not recorded. Internal documents and archival data were also analyzed. Overall, I interviewed about twenty people at the ªeld site, and visited the plant ªve times over a period of three weeks. Further interviews with three corporate managers in the area of Personnel and Communication were conducted at the company’s headquarters in Miraªori. Throughout the duration of the project I regularly visited Fiat’s training company (ISVOR) to collect documents and background information from the company library. During those visits I had several informal conversations and a few interviews with employees, managers and consultants of the company.

The Miraªori Pressing Plant: Production system and cognitive implications The Miraªori Pressing Plant is one of the largest in Europe, covering an area of 233,000 square meters with about 3,000 employees. It is housed in buildings constructed in the 1950s during extension of the Miraªori industrial district. The shop ¶oor consists of ªfteen Elementary Technical Units (UTE) distributed across two Operational Units. The production process on the shop ¶oor is organized into lots scheduled according to the customer’s requirements. The stamping shop represents the beginning of a vehicle’s journey through the production process. The primary function of Stamping is to transform coils of steel into sheet metal components and parts for the body shell (e.g. fenders, hoods, and doors). The

Detective stories and the narrative structure of organizing

process starts with steel coils of various sizes and compositions that are delivered as needed to the stamping area. Overhead cranes load the steel coils into a coil cradle. Robots then feed the coils through a series of rollers which clean and straighten the steel. The ¶attened steel is transported to a large press which cuts the steel into the primary size for the ªnal part. These parts, called blanks, are stacked and taken to a temporary storage area. Team members transfer the blanks to a press line which stamps or shapes them into parts. During this process, dies are used to shape the metal, trim excess, bend edges and pierce holes. The team members use forklifts to move the stamped parts to a temporary storage area until they are needed by the Body Shop. Once each lot has been completed, the dies are replaced and the presses can start processing a diŸerent part. The essential characteristic of batch production is that, in order to accommodate a product change, the process must be stopped and reset. Batch production is typically classiªed as an intermittent system (Hill 1991) because the product/service does not ¶ow through the system but rather undergoes a series of stops and starts. Under these circumstances, time is punctuated by the succession of production lots with changeover operations providing major points of discontinuity: a batch is not simply a production unit, it is also a temporal point of reference. For this reason die change is perceived as a major technological perturbation, with important consequences on the unfolding of organizational action and sensemaking. Signiªcantly, one manager remarked that “each lot tells a diŸerent story”. The production system in Miraªori provides a crucial entry point for observation of knowledge-making processes on the shop ¶oor. In fact, technology deªnes a set of cognitive models and sensemaking capabilities which enable its users to represent and understand events associated with it (Weick 1990). In particular, the intermittent nature of large batch production requires switching between continuous ¶ows and discrete events, absorbing interruptions and technological perturbations, coping with disconnections and discontinuities, dealing with trade oŸs and tactical choices. As such, the production system requires governance mechanisms partly embodied in the organizational structure (e.g. plans, routines, and procedures) and partly contingent upon the sensemaking activities of the organizational actors. In other words, continuity in the system’s performance critically depends on the interplay between structure and sensemaking (Weick 1993). By establishing the long-term plans, organization sets the stage on which operations can be performed. However, the way in which these plans are to be fulªlled is often subject to interpretation. Whilst production plans act as a basic organizational constraint, the frequency of unexpected events and deviations from standards allows for a certain degree of interpretive ¶exibility. Scheduling is the activity that translates organizational plans into shop ¶oor activities. It entails the conversion of actual or forecast demand for products or services into de-

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mand for time, labour and plant resources; the speciªcation of when particular products or services will be processed, and with precisely which resources, and the determination of the sequence in which batches are processed. Successful scheduling ensures the smooth ¶ow of products and services through the system. As such it depends on a number of variables/factors that are di¹cult to control. At the cognitive level, scheduling involves addressing “what-if” and “if-then” questions on an ongoing basis. Notwithstanding the paramount importance of planning activities and the high degree of repetitiveness, a batch production system seems to share some of the characteristics of stochastic events (Weick 1990), since the very distinction between predictable and unexpected is problematic. The repertoire of skills deªned by a production system of this kind are indeed those typical of a stochastic environment: “people are usually on standby, giving special attention to start-up and to anticipating faults that may lead to downtime; the distinction between operations and maintenance is blurred; skills in monitoring and diagnostics are crucial; people must be committed to do what is necessary on their own initiative and have the autonomy to do so; and people have now assumed the role of `variance absorber’, dealing with and counteracting the unexpected” (Weick 1990: 9). No scheduling system can accommodate random disruptions. Under these circumstances, organization seems to provide a relatively stable background for the local, often improvised practices of the team members.

The Panda dashboard story Conversations on the shop ¶oor highlighted the pervasive presence of machines in the daily talk of the team members. The vulnerability of machinery and its tendency to break down exposed the fragility of the work setting. Solving problems was an ongoing endeavour for the team: UTE leader: In the course of a day you are confronted with ten, twenty, thirty problems, all of them related to your production targets, all of them aŸecting the number of pieces you have to make… whenever you have a setback the line must keep producing pieces. So you try to tame the problem, to ªnd a temporary solution in order to keep the line going. Then the day after you have to go back over the problem, but in the meantime nine new problems might have cropped up.

Typically, the actions undertaken by the team were aimed at collectively making sense of disruptions, responding to or preventing the occurrence of technical breakdowns. The “presence” (real or impending) of a disruptive event emphasized the constraints typical of a batch production system. Batch production is based on

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intensive exploitation of the machinery and therefore, on completion of a production lot, the dies and machine tools are worn out. Accordingly, product quality was heavily dependent on repair and maintenance activities. When breakdowns occurred maintenance teams were allocated to the problem and their role was to respond quickly and take the decisions necessary to minimize the eŸect of the breakdown on the operations system. In many instances, temporary repairs were made so that the process could resume as soon as possible. Permanent repairs would be made at a later and more convenient time. Beyond its technical complexity, the production system raised critical cognitive challenges for the team. The need to respond to frequent breakdowns, interruptions and unexpected events was a dual challenge for sensemaking: planning (dealing with the unexpected) and diagnosis (dealing with the equivocality of action). The two activities pointed to the interconnected processes of anticipation and retrospection, which are at the core of any sensemaking endeavour (see Weick 1995). In the rest of this chapter I shall present some typical instances of breakdowns on the shop ¶oor, analyse the narratives constructed around them, and draw implications for a theory of knowing and organizing. I am with the UTE technologist. Yesterday the Miraªori assembly plant detected a hole oŸ centre on the Panda’s dashboard and reported the problem to our UTE. Although the anomaly is limited to 156 pieces, the problem is still important because it has been detected by the assembly plant, at an advanced stage of the production process, and the consequences could well have been more serious. Together with the UTE leader and the technologist we walk to the repair area where the chief repairman, the die maintenance leader and one die operator are waiting for us. We take one of the defective parts from a container where the faulty pieces are stocked. The group begins to examine the defect by touching the component at the point of anomaly.

Since the parts have been returned by the customer, there seem to be only two possible explanations for the problem, both relating to a quality control procedure and both involving a human error (although to diŸerent extents): the anomaly could be related to the completion of the lot. Anomalies towards the end of a batch are very common owing to wear and tear on the machine tools. In this scenario, the operators have completed the lot without noticing the problem (an oversight by the end-of-line workers who did not check the parts produced properly). Alternatively, it could be that team operators have taken corrective action on the dies without clearing up the faulty parts, so that the defect was passed on to the downstream process. Or they have not followed the procedure for correcting

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defects. It is therefore necessary to go backwards through the lot in order to detect the ªrst non-defective piece, and send all the faulty parts for repair. Thus, in order to perform a diagnosis, we must work backwards: the die maintainer is going to examine the die responsible for the faulty operation. He is going to open the die and check the “blue print”. If the blue print is broken, it means that the problem occurred at the end of the lot and nobody noticed it. Conversely, if the blue print is in order, that means that corrective action was taken, but without repairing the faulty parts. Before proceeding to the die area, we decide to check the position of that part on an assembled car. Taking the defective dashboard with us, we walk to another area, where a sample Panda is on display. We match the part with the car body in order to assess the deviation of the hole and decide how to perform the repair job. Now the chief repairman knows how to repair the defective parts, but we still need to understand what caused the anomaly in the ªrst place. We move to the die area, still taking the component with us. The die maintenance leader and the die operator open up the die that has produced the component in order to check its integrity. The blue print of the die looks in order. This means that it had been replaced before the target lot was completed. This seems to exclude one of the two hypotheses, but the die operator now comes up with a third one that attributes responsibility to workers at the assembly plant. Basically, it may be that the anomaly was generated in the body-welding unit before the ªnal assembly stage was reached. The group seems satisªed with this new possibility and decides to visit the assembly plant the following day. I go back to the UTE box with the technologist. While the solution is still pending, I ask him to re¶ect on the episode.

As we shall see, his language and the narration style are particularly relevant: The anomaly was reported yesterday to the chief repairman, who’d passed the information to us. The customer had returned ªve containers of defective parts, 156 in total, because they had misshapen holes. We took the faulty component from the repair team, it was about 3–3.30 p.m. Together with the UTE leader of the second shift, I had a look at the anomaly. We consulted the maintenance person who was on duty when the lot was being produced. He said he hadn’t done any work on the machines. Then we had a word with the die maintenance leader and with the line conductor of the second shift, because they had completed the lot. Basically they’d worked for three hours on Monday afternoon — because the problem occurred on

Detective stories and the narrative structure of organizing

Monday afternoon — before they changed the dies. At 6 p.m. they performed the die change. I wanted to ªnd out whether they’d noticed any problem. They insisted that they hadn’t noticed any problem nor had they performed any intervention work. This was conªrmed by a line conductor who called me about a diŸerent problem at around four o’clock. Meanwhile we had a look at the component, and the anomaly wasn’t there, it didn’t exist at four. The die change took place at six. I don’t know what happened between four and six, but the problem must have occurred within that lapse of time. Yesterday when I took the part and saw the anomaly, the ªrst thing I wanted to establish was who’d caused the fault. I wanted to establish whether it was a problem related to the end of the batch, or if an intervention had been performed without amending the faulty parts. Yesterday I was unable to solve the puzzle. I went home without having solved my problem. This morning I arrived in the o¹ce and I saw a sheet reporting the 156 defective pieces. I asked the UTE leader whether any intervention work on the machines had been done on Monday morning. He replied that there hadn’t. We decided to investigate the problem further and we did what you have just seen.

Later, a phone call informs the technologist that the puzzle has been solved, revealing yet another possibility that had not been envisaged. The defective parts returned by the assembly plant did not belong to the lot that had just been completed on Monday. Instead they belonged to the previous lot of the same component produced a few days earlier. The problem had occurred during the second shift and the die change had been brought forward because there was a broken blue print on one die. The operators had detected the defect in the components but had not performed the backward check on the containers with the anomaly: They detected the anomaly; so they brought forward the die change and started processing the next component; the next step would have been to clear up the faulty parts in the previous containers. They didn’t do this because they thought that the problem had only just occurred, without realizing that they’d already produced ªve containers of defective parts. So the anomaly concerned a previous lot and the intervention (substitution of the blue print) had been performed on the die.

Now that the problem had been ªnally resolved what remained of the above episode? Was it an event that ended in its resolution? The “moral” of the story prompts interesting considerations about the experience-related nature of learning, the professional identity of middle managers and the division of knowledge among diŸerent roles:

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A procedure is what we have in this case because such a procedure was already identiªed and written and therefore we’re conªdent on our side. In fact, this is a problem that we’ve already seen many times, it isn’t the ªrst: we have misshapen holes, damaged ones, missing ones. It’s just a matter of understanding that we already have a procedure to tackle the issue and that has been overlooked. To them (the line workers) it means that they have to gain further understanding of the method and consider it useful, because, at the end of the day, the line conductors are those who produce. We as technicians or chief of the UTE don’t need to experience this problem. For us it’s important to know that this experience is part of a method, it’s part of some occurrence we have faced, and thus if we’d acted according to some written procedure, we would have avoided the problem in the ªrst place.

The failure in applying the procedure points up the organizing practices of the team and the values underlying such practices. In this respect, adherence to a procedure becomes part of broader compliance with the team’s code of conduct.

Detective stories and the search for blame The problem solving activity depicted in the above episode seems to be linked to a distinctive sensemaking strategy whereby human and non-human “actants” (Latour 1987) are involved in a process of investigation. The problem solving procedure entails a set of moves aimed at detecting the cause of the problem, performing a diagnosis and agreeing upon corrective actions. More generally, what we see in the episode is a dramatization process characterized by the typical ingredients of a detective story. Investigation is triggered by the occurrence of a breakdown which is treated as a case of murder. Problem solving takes the form of an inquiry where the detective collects clues and seeks to reconstruct the facts. It entails locating the anomaly in space and time, formulating hypotheses and conjectures, conducting interviews. Even inanimate objects are summoned as witnesses: dies, blue prints, gauges, samples, the UTE diary. The process of investigation inherent to detective stories deªnes a distinctive sensemaking activity aimed at constructing a plot out of a disruptive event and proceeding through a series of inferences. As we saw earlier, breakdowns introduce discordance into the smooth ¶ow of action. In so doing, they trigger a sensemaking process whereby actors switch their cognitive gears from habits of mind to active thinking (Luis and Sutton 1991). Detective stories involve a process of mise-en-intrigue (emplotment) by which, as Ricœur put it, “goals, causes, and chance are brought together within the temporal unity of a whole and complete action.” (Ricœur 1984). The emplotment of an

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equivocal happening in the form of a detective story provides operators with a meaningful representation of action. “Intrigues” turn action into narratives unfolding in a chronological/sequential manner. Admittedly, the location in space and time and the presence of subject matter are the typical ingredients of a story. However, what makes a story meaningful is precisely the process of sequencing inherent in the enchainment of facts and events. This latter point is clearly stated by Karl Weick (1995), for whom stories involve building a plot for an outcome through a process of sequencing. The plot follows either the beginning-middle-end sequence or the disruption-transformation-solution sequence. But sequence is the source of sense in that it enables organizational actors to impose formal coherence on equivocal happenings. Correspondingly, sequencing is a powerful heuristic for sensemaking (Weick 1995: 128–129). Dramatic and temporal units are brought together in the narrative: time becomes human in so far as it is articulated in a narrative fashion. The process of dramatization of action also highlights the emotional quality of breakdowns. As in Greek tragedy, the emotional response of the spectator is built into the drama (Ricœur 1984) Ultimately, the narrative process and the construction of a plot around a disruptive occurrence is a strategy to absorb discordance. Catharsis, i.e. emotional release, is what turns discordance into concordance by bringing consistency back into equivocal action. In this regard, catharsis provides a form of epistemological closure in that it joins cognition, imagination and emotion. Detective stories are deeply embedded in the social fabric of the shop ¶oor and in the broader cultural system of the integrated factory, where working together becomes a sort of ethical principle. The narratives of the team members emphasize such values as commitment, dialogue, transparency, being humble and keeping a low proªle, collective responsibility, harmony, and mutual respect. These values are part of how the team represents itself, and they are re¶ected in a number of emblematic stories reported by the team members during the ªeldwork. Some examples follow: UTE leader B: Once a conductor accidentally broke a robot’s arm. He immediately came to report the incident, assuming responsibility for it. This spared us the trouble of analysing the causes of the incident and made us save a considerable amount of time. Technologist: Let me tell you about an episode that made me particularly happy. During a visit to the shop ¶oor the director of the plant noticed a container upside down and the pieces inside it scattered on the ¶oor. He called the UTE leader and the technologist to account for the episode. Meanwhile the forklift driver stopped and explained how the incident had occurred, saying that it was his fault. The director thanked us and went away.

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At a subsequent meeting the director congratulated us on the atmosphere established in the factory and cited the episode of the forklift driver as emblematic. He was very glad that the forklift conductor had admitted his error. Ute leader A: Let me tell you a little story. Once I was talking to the head of the operating unit and I was telling him: you say that somebody is good because he comes to you and tells you that he has produced 30,000 pieces. The operator who has produced 28,000 pieces is less good, and the one who has produced only 26,000 is still less good. Then you discover that the one who produced 30,000 has sent everything forward: yes he has made 30,000 pieces, but 4,000 of them have gone to repair and 400 have been wasted; he has exceeded the lot size twice on two production lines, he has not performed the die change when it was required and he has placed the burden of changeover operations on the next shift. The worker making 28,000 pieces has performed the die change when it was required, he has done almost everything expected of him, but he has overlooked quality problems. The one making 26,000 has performed the die change according to the schedule; if he detected defects on the parts he stopped the line and did the repairs. In my opinion he is the one who worked best among the three. In my opinion a performance evaluation based on sheer measurement of output is not accurate. One should deduct the number of pieces sent for repair and those discarded from the total output. Time spent on changeover operations should also be included. If we accounted for those factors we would gain a better idea of who is working well and who is not.

The above narratives highlight a consistent pattern of causal attribution within the team. Speciªcally, the team seems to reward those behaviours that avert irksome investigations to discover the culprit. This is consistent with the team spirit and the new values brought by the integrated factory model (e.g. working together, harmony, being part of a family). In this regard, oversights and human errors are tolerated (and indeed are turned into emblematic stories) insofar as they reinforce existing team values. Consider the stories of the line conductor who broke a robot’s arm and that of the forklift driver who accidentally hit a container. The two stories contain the following essential ingredients: a disruptive event, a power relationship (line conductor vis-à-vis the UTE leader, forklift driver vis-à-vis the director of the plant), high emotional involvement, a happy ending and a moral. These ingredients turn the story into a noteworthy experience that can be remembered and which acquires a prescriptive value (guide to conduct). The narrative reinforces the value of taking responsibility for one’s mistakes, which is crucial when working in a collaborative environment.

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On the other hand, as the case of the Panda dashboard illustrates, when the system of spontaneous blame assumption fails, the values of the integrated factory seem to break down. Issues of trust, power play, free riding, and opportunistic behaviour come to the fore. Concealing the truth is punishable behaviour for at least two reasons: it involves the entire team in time-consuming investigations, it eludes hierarchical control mechanisms and, more generally, it violates the team’s overall code of conduct. From a narrative perspective, the closure of the story is disturbed since concealing the truth delays the process of causal attribution. The pervasive search for blame is a very simple (if not simplistic) type of detective story where it is expected that a single culprit will be found. The narratives triggered by the occurrence of technical breakdowns seemingly contain implicit questions concerning causal attribution: Who caused the problem? Who took the blame? Who concealed the truth? To be sure, when the team “solves” a problem it is only a solution in terms of the narrative structure (or a knowledge template) that they employ. They solve it by ªnding a culprit because their narrative structure for the detective story is of that form. Interestingly, however, the team members have another, parallel narrative structure of teamwork and the integrated factory which could also be used to “solve” one such problem. A teamwork version of the story would have a solution where it was a breakdown in the “team” that was the cause, not an individual. The team breakdown narrative would be a systemic solution in which the training procedures, the climate created by the management, the design of the product, or any number of other systemic factors could be identiªed as the culprit. If these people endorsed an “integrated factory mindset” they would have an integrated factory detective genre. What is interesting is that the team seems to follow a person-blame (ªnding a “bad guy”) rather than a system-blame attribution model (Guimond et al.1989). This model emphasizes human over non-human errors and the responsibility of the individual over collective actors. In sum, the detective story genre stands for a distinctive model of factory socialization in which causal attribution is the result of the team members taking on the social perspective appropriate to the team culture. Blaming a person is a matter of drawing a logical conclusion from the commonly accepted system of representations (Moscovici 1982). This model is consistent with socio-cultural explanations of causal attribution according to which the ideology of the social group exerts normative pressure on the individual’s cognitive processes (Guimond et al. 1989). As individuals undergo socialization they learn to see the world according to the beliefs and values of the social group. To the extent that cognitive processes such as causal attributions are aŸected, the socialization process can be regarded as prescribing a “code of cognitive conduct.”

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Detective stories as a template for organizing The nature of the production process in a pressing plant is such that people are continuously confronted with interruptions, breakdowns, and perturbations in the work process. Lines stop rather frequently, because of both discretionary decisions and unexpected events. Machinery requires constant maintenance work, the work force must be re-allocated whenever the line is idle, changeover operations take place almost every day, and ¶uctuations in customer demands are very likely. All these interruptions and unexpected events require a continuous activity of variance absorption. Production schedules are constantly adjusted. Production voids are envisaged in order to allow for diŸerent types of intervention. Teamwork is a fundamental absorption mechanism because it helps to keep the emotional content of breakdowns under control. Moreover, the need constantly to make decisions reinforces the group culture. Taking into account the constraints imposed by the production system, this study has attempted to draw upon the narratives reported by relevant actors on the shop ¶oor in order to investigate the sensemaking dynamics underlying the ordering of organizational action. Sensemaking on the shop ¶oor is triggered by disruptive events (breakdowns, interruptions, and technological perturbations) occurring at the interface between the “business as usual” of routine situations and conscious awareness of problem solving activities. While solutions are still “pending”, operators are confronted by the equivocality of the “happening”; time becomes a matter of concern and emotions play an important role. The situation is socially constructed through a network of conversations among the members of the team, and through the piecing together of diŸerent sources of information. Diagnosis occurs as a narrative process in which problems are dramatized and made visible. More speciªcally, it involves turning equivocal happenings into meaningful stories characterized by a distinctive plot. The enchainment of events and the representation of action, inherent in the diagnostic process, take the form of a detective story. Detective stories turn disruptive occurrences into cases, and in so doing they provide narrative resolutions to technical problems. The conceptualization of these resolutions as “emblematic stories” is the core of a learning process that promotes the internalization of such stories as part of the stock of knowledge acquired in the workplace. Emblematic stories serve as narrative maps or “guides to conduct” (Weick 1995). They are stored in the organizational memory and at the same time act as templates for the resolution of future problems. Under these circumstances, organizing processes on the shop ¶oor seem to be closely associated with memory and the activity of collective remembering (Middleton and Edwards 1990, Walsh and Ungson 1991). In fact, the detective’s strategy involves not only the solving of puzzling problems but also the remem-

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bering of key resolutions. More importantly, it involves identiªcation of common patterns among cases in order to connect present occurrences with past events (as in diagnostic activities) or to make predictions about future occurrences. The above considerations can be rephrased as follows: emplotment as a distinctive sensemaking activity carried out by shop ¶oor operators is a necessary, but not su¹cient, condition for remembering. An important issue in understanding the organizational dynamics inherent in the detective’s strategy, then, is to determine which cases will become part of the genre repertoire of the middle managers, which experiences will be retained, and which occurrences will be remembered and therefore acquire the status of templates. At Miraªori, the selection of noteworthy experiences seems to be highly contingent upon the impact of a particular story on the cosmology of the team (values, code of conduct, etc.). In particular, the processes of causal attribution and search for blame inherent in the detective stories on the shop ¶oor in¶uence the extent to which disruptive episodes are turned into myths and sagas that reinforce the core values of the team. Moreover, the degree of emotional content associated with these events is probably crucial in establishing their relevance and accordingly causing the most emblematic episodes to be memorized. The way in which operators deal with disruptive events can be reframed using the terminology of the text-action model. Equivocal happenings (controversies) triggered by disruptive occurrences are turned into meaningful plots by means of narratives (detective cases) and inscribed into organizational templates (texts) that serve as platforms for further action (the resolution of future problematic situations). Closure is achieved by ascribing action to an actor, namely by ªnding a culprit and attributing blame. Time and processes of collective remembering produce the distanciation of action from the intentions of the actors and the institutionalization of meaning. The nature of the template identiªed at Miraªori highlights some key features of organizing practices in highly institutionalized contexts. Detective stories are ways to order experience. They point to a theory of method which is at the same time a theory of knowledge. Carlo Ginzburg (1990) has conceptualized the detective’s strategy of investigation as an emergent epistemological model which he labels “evidential paradigm”. The essence of the paradigm lies in the formation of conjectures based on the collection of evidence in the form of clues. It stresses the importance of guesses, the systematic gathering of “small insights” and attention to detail in the process of knowing and discovering reality. The conjectural method stands behind what Ginzburg calls the “humane sciences”, as opposed to the “natural sciences” dominated by the “quantitative and antianthropocentric” Galilean method. The pervasiveness of the evidential paradigm is visible in the methodology for the “recognition of painting” (i.e. identi-

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fying fakes, distinguishing originals from copies) as well as in Freudian psychoanalysis or in the inductive method of investigation epitomized by Sherlock Holmes. It stands at the heart of history and Hippocratic medicine, as well as of more exotic disciplines like physiognomics and divination. Ginzburg demonstrates how this paradigm works eŸectively in understanding the tacit features of reality: “though reality may seem to be opaque, there are privileged zones — signs, clues — which allow us to penetrate it.” (ibid.:123). When related to an institutional context, the evidential paradigm points to the nature of normative structures. For example, in ancient Mesopotamia the evidential paradigm was evidenced by “an attitude oriented towards the analysis of speciªc cases which could be reconstructed only through traces, symptoms and clues. Mesopotamian legal texts themselves did not consist of collections of laws or ordinances, but of discussions of concrete examples.” (ibid.:104). The evidential paradigm resonates with Thomas H. Huxley’s notion of retrospective prophecies: that is, the ability to make predictions about something that has already happened. In his essay “On the Method of Zadig”, Huxley (1880) claims that retrospective prophecies are a function of science in that they provide a method for the systematic observation and apprehension of selected features of reality: These conclusions may be said to be of the nature of retrospective prophecies; though it is perhaps a little hazardous to employ phraseology which perilously suggests a contradiction in terms — the word “prophecy” being so constantly, in ordinary use, restricted to “foretelling.” Strictly, however, the term prophecy applies as much to outspeaking as to foretelling; and, even in the restricted sense of “divination,” it is obvious that the essence of the prophetic operation does not lie in its backward or forward relation to the course of time, but in the fact that it is the apprehension of that which lies out of the sphere of immediate knowledge; the seeing of that which, to the natural sense of the seer, is invisible. (Huxley 1880: 5–6).

Retrospective prophecies emphasize the non-linearity of time in sensemaking processes. This is in line with Weick’s contention that organizations, like humans, are puzzled by the paradox of having to live forward but can only understand themselves through retrospective accounts (Weick 1999). In this respect, the method of Zadig provides an eloquent example of the time paradox inherent in human knowing: The foreteller asserts that, at some future time, a properly situated observer will witness certain events; the clairvoyant declares that, at this present time, certain things are to be witnessed a thousand miles away; the retrospective prophet (would that there were such a word as “backteller!”) a¹rms that, so many hours or years ago, such and such things were to be seen. In all these

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cases, it is only the relation to time which alters — the process of divination beyond the limits of possible direct knowledge remains the same (Huxley 1880: 6).

In sum, detective stories and retrospective prophecies are informed by the same epistemological paradigm. They constitute strategies for achieving closures that are based on inversion in the causality of time (future perfect), an inversion between retrospective accounts and prospective quests. Interestingly, the above examples represent ways of further articulating the features of the text action model. In fact, the interplay between text and action can be seen as a dialectic between guessing and validating (Ricœur 1981). Action as a text is open to several readings and several constructions that must be enacted and validated on an ongoing basis. Guessing has to do with divination and meaning construction. Validation concerns the procedures by which conjectures are tested on an ongoing basis. In this respect guess and validation are circularly related and form a hermeneutic circle (ibid.). Throughout the process of guess and validation there is no deªnitive outcome. It is always possible reasonably to relate sentences, or actions, to each other in more than one way. The pervasiveness of detective stories in operators’ practices has several implications for the study of organizing processes. First, detective stories relate modes of knowing to modes of organizing (Patriotta 2003b). As Czarniawska (1999) has pointed out, the plot of a detective novel consists of two stories. One is the story of the crime (the murder, the breakdown), which is hidden and mysterious. The crime produces an interruption in sensemaking, a moment of puzzlement and suspense, a situation of ambiguity and disorder. The second story concerns the process of investigation leading to solutions, emotional release and catharsis. It is the story of how knowledge is mobilized in order to rea¹rm order over chaos. It is the story of how organization supports the quest for a solution by providing meaningful structures, cognitive frames and knowledge templates. The two stories in the plot — that of the crime and that of the investigation — are nested in each other and related by a mechanism of reciprocal disclosure whereby tacit knowledge is ªrst brought to the surface and then concealed again. As Czarniawska puts it, the meaning of the ªrst story is revealed through the second story, that of investigation or acquiring knowledge, which is mystifying to the reader, who does not understand the actions of the detective until the ªrst story has been uncovered, and sometimes not even then (Czarniawska 1999: 80). In this respect, the double structure of a detective story deªnes iterative processes of opening and closure, chaos and order, becoming and being, which stand at the core of any organizing endeavour. Second, detective stories embody a structure for organizing. As a genre established within a particular community, detective stories provide a grammar of action that is consensually validated (Weick 1979); they constitute an institution-

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alized template for communication, for the resolution of problematic situations and, more generally, for social action (Orlikowski and Yates 1994). Templates perform the same function as a text. Through them, human agency and knowledge are inscribed into organizational records, they become documents of human experience that can be imitated and replicated. In this regard, detective stories provide an archetypical practice underlying the operations of the team members on the shop ¶oor. They highlight speciªc modes of anchoring human action to organization, speciªc strategies for achieving replication of knowledge, and, ultimately, idiosyncratic ways of institutionalizing human conduct. In particular, detective stories point to a structural repertoire that has been developed through selective processes of remembering and forgetting. Through them, knowledge is replicated in the form of cases, sagas, and emblematic stories. This type of knowledge does not seem to reside in standard procedures or written norms; rather, it has been institutionalized as common sense. Indeed, a distinctive feature of the detective’s approach is its commonsensical nature. Finally, detective stories provide a narrative structure, a powerful script for organizational inquiry. Interestingly, the strategy of investigation based on detective stories applies both to the observer and to the observed. For the researcher, it is a method of inquiry intended to make sense of certain organizational patterns by inscribing them into meaningful structures of signiªcation (e.g. existing theories of organizing). The method implies collecting data from diŸerent sources, piecing information together, triangulating evidence, generalizing and building theoretical arguments. In this respect, the detective story constitutes a literary sub-genre underlying the craft of thinking and writing in organization studies (Czarniawska 1999). Likewise, the shop ¶oor operators deployed the same strategy of detection in the solution of disruptive occurrences. Their solutions were based on iterative schemes and templates provided by the organization — such as routines, procedures, and collective rituals. Here too, the solutions entailed placing equivocal happenings in existing frames of reference and structures of signiªcation. In sum, the detective method is somehow self-referential; it concerns the author as well as his/her characters.

Part 5 Getting help from the stories of the future

From naked emperor to count zero* Tracking knights, nerds and cyberpunks in identity narratives of freelancers in the IT-ªeld David Metz Department of Organization and Industrial Sociology, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

How do you tell a story of identity in an environment of constant change? Is it possible to maintain a sense of continuity when relations keep breaking down and new ones must be constantly built? In this essay I explore these questions by looking at the lives of IT-freelancers through the lense of narratives. I will argue that identity models found in ªction, including such disparate genres as romance, science ªction and urban legends, can serve as analytical tools in theorizing the lives of IT-freelancers. This text is one of the products of the research project Relational Identities — On Participation in Temporary and Scattered Workpractices. The aim of the project is to develop a theoretical understanding of identities and working lives of people under the conditions of late modernity, speciªcally with regards to temporality and scatteredness of relations (Metz & Westenholz 2000). The study has three foci: freelancers, migrants and (organisational) boundary spanners, but it is aiming at a wider understanding of trends in contemporary work lives. The three groups are seen as examples of work lives where these trends manifest themselves most prominently. In the present text, I will focus on the ªrst group, that is, freelancers in IT-business.

* I need to thank a lot of people for their help by commenting on drafts for this chapter. In particular one of the editors of this book, Barbara Czarniawska as well as my colleagues in the research project Relational Identities, Ann Westenholz and Torben Elgaard Jensen and also Søren Christensen, Tine Isen and Jan Molin at the Department of Organization and Industrial Sociology at Copenhagen Business School.

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The emperor’s new database One of the best known allegorical tales in western societies is Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Rendered in a contemporary vernacular, the tale tells a story of two representatives of the vanity industry — weavers, who succeed in selling a new concept, based on a technological breakthrough to the local CEO, the emperor. A fringe beneªt in implementing this new gadget is its ability to discriminate between employees’ level of competence. Only those truly competent are able to recognize the qualities of the new product, while the ignorants will disclose their poor qualiªcations by being unable to even perceive the presence of the new, focusing instead on the absence of the old. As the story unfolds, we hear of the replacement of uncertainty and ambiguity towards the new with a sense of security in the organisational life — until in the end a newcomer to the shop ¶oor, who hasn’t heard of the recent technology implementation, reverses the perspective: the old has disappeared but it has not been replaced. What is left is only absence and ridicule. As in any good parable, the possibilities for interpretation are many. The original narrator, Hans Christian Andersen, apparently identiªes with the undisciplined bystander, the child, thus buying the story of organizational illusion as a consequence of the vanity of those in power. A moral then seems to be something like “never suspend your own judgement or you might fall prey to the machinations of luring strangers”. A counter reading might take the perspective of the weavers, comparing them to modern day consultants, suŸering the ill fate of seeing their innovative management ideas being thrown away after a brief life in the organisation’s superstructure. A moral in this reading could be something along the lines of: “make sure you sell the concept to all organizational levels or risk defeat when leaving the internal diŸusion of ideas to local management, who do not possess your selling charisma”. Somewhere in between these realist readings lie the contours of Meyer and Rowan’s observations about institutional myths (Meyer & Rowan 1977/1991). In their perspective the moral of the story would be of a diŸerent, more complex nature, emphasizing the interplay of legitimating processes and technical e¹ciency. The weavers’ contribution to the court would be understood as fulªlling the need to legitimate the organization in its environment, a process that would be best kept decoupled from the rest of the organization’s internal workings. An eŸort to enforce the new regime on the shop ¶oor is doomed to failure. Thus the questions of who is right and who is wrong seem to dissolve in such a social constructivist reading. It is transformed into a question of nuances of legitimacy within diŸerent institutional orderings at play in organisational life. Achieving the status of ‘competent’ in this view is thus seen as an accomplishment relative to the organisation’s

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localization and its coupling to other localities, inside and outside, respectively. The weavers, the king, and the child are all subject to judgements of diŸerent levels of competency relative to the rules by which they are judged. The child achieves competency from an organisational-intern technical-rational point of view, whereas the king is competent from an environmental fashion-following point of view (Røvik 1996). But what about the weavers? How can they claim legitimacy as competent practitioners of their profession? In Meyer and Rowan’s world, this is not really an interesting (legitimate) question. The weavers are puppets, manipulated by forces outside themselves, cogs in the machinery of isomorphic processes — the media or channels for the spreading of ideas. Such re-deªnition is simply an eŸect of theoretical focus: Meyer and Rowan are interested in the organisation, reducing consultants for example, to “outsiders”. It is of course possible within this tradition to describe the consultants as agents involved in legitimating processes, but that would require a shift of focus to their organisation or their organizational ªeld (DiMaggio and Powell 1991), which in turn transforms the consulted organisations into outsiders. Furthermore — irrespective of focus — in both cases it would be necessary to presuppose (analytically) clear boundaries between organisations or ªelds, which seems unsatisfactory when studying an emerging practice, IT-freelancing, that explicitly challenges traditional ideas of boundary drawing (see e.g. Malone and Laubacher 1998). To understand what takes place in the interpellation1 between outsiders bringing ideas and insiders considering their adoption, it is necessary to begin in another place, where it is possible to keep an eye on the involved parties as they negotiate their identities in relations of ongoing practice. Weick’s concept of sensemaking (Weick 1995, 2001) seems helpful in this endeavour to capture how arenas for making sense are enacted, in turn enacting participants’ identities as locally recognizable displays of varying degrees of competence. To explore this perspective, a story other than the original by Hans Christian Andersen is required, as the latter contains a hegemonic perspective on actors. We know when we hear the story, whom the good guys are and who are the bad guys (no women have an active part in it) — the weavers are introduced as “swindlers”. As always with these kinds of stories, it is possible to reverse the classiªcations, as I tried above when comparing the weavers to misunderstood management consultants. But this is not enough: we need a story that opens itself to multiple readings, as in the thick descriptions of (good) ethnographies (Geertz 1993). I do not have a ready-made 1. I use the term here as an adoption of Law’s (2002) import of Althusser’s originally structuralist concept. In Law’s recollection it becomes the process whereby subject-object distinctions are produced in an instant of recognition. However (one of) the everyday-language meaning(s) of the word is the normative pressure for accountability, the “imperative questioning” of legitimacy — a connotation I readily embrace.

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one (this is why I started with Andersen), but I can present some of its elements in a story of Jack’s visit in the IT-department of Smallville Ltd.2 Jack was dressed, as usual, stylishly casual that morning as he entered the building where Smallville Ltd. had its o¹ces. He had not heard of that company until recently, when the sta¹ng agency that kept his resumé in its archives called him in for an assignment. Smallville had had problems with an IT-project concerned with establishing a new database based on a recent web-oriented technology. The project had shown little or no progress and management was concerned with keeping deadlines so they decided to call for outside help. Someone in the company had heard of the sta¹ng agency, because it had been awarded the label Gazelle-company, a label given to fast growing companies (as measured by increase in their gross turnover) by a Danish business newspaper. The newspaper also provided a portrait article on the company. Jack wasn’t aware of all this, and it didn’t really concern him how Smallville had heard of the sta¹ng company. What mattered to him now was the assignment he had been given, and the fact that the sta¹ng agency had succeeded again in ªnding one for him in time, so he could start right away upon completion of a previous assignment in another company. It wasn’t that his personal economy depended on the absence of gaps between assignments — his fees were large enough for him to build up su¹cient funds to stay above water even if he had to endure longer periods without work, but still he had to think of his wife and two children, the mortgage on the house and the plans to ªnance his own vision of a company. He pocketed the car keys and dropped his briefcase — containing a couple of books and some disks — on the ¶oor, while he greeted Eric, his coming colleague for the next couple of months. Eric was the person responsible for the project in Smallville. He had been working on it for a little more than two months, but no presentable prototype had been produced yet. He ªlled Jack in on the more technical details of the speciªcations for the database and showed him a desk with a computer, where Jack was to work. He did not say much besides that, keeping it to the facts and formalities. For the third time this year, Jack was back in business. He spent the ªrst couple of days catching up on what management’s expectations really were about, and on some of the details of the programming environment. It 2. This story is constructed from an interview with an IT-freelancer, who recollects a work experience during a part of the interview centred on “what it means to be an expert and an outsider at the same time”.

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always takes a bit of translating work to move from the expected functional requirements of future users to the functional logics of a programming environment, and it had been some time now since last he had worked in this one. He discussed some minor details with Eric, but he didn’t seem very interested in elaborating on the subjects Jack brought up. Most of the time, while Jack was drawing charts in an attempt to get a grip on what kind of data structure was needed, Eric seemed to be engulfed in his computer, although Jack had no clue what he was working on. When Jack asked him about the code and design produced so far, he was just given a folder name on the server to look at. It took Jack almost a week to realize what was going on, but then it became very clear to him. He had suŸered a little confusion and frustration in trying to grasp the nitty gritty of this project. He had had moments of doubt as to whether he was ªt for the assignment, but they were brief and he tended to explain them to himself as ridiculous. He knew this business well enough, had produced enough functional systems and subsystems to know that he should be able to cope with this one. The problems he had understanding what was going on, he now decided, were stemming from Eric’s code. He couldn’t see the logic of it. It just didn’t make sense to him. It was bad code. As it dawned on him that Eric wasn’t good at his job he began to consider his options. He could ignore it and just try to get the job done, but that would mean considerable delay, which would impede on his credibility reputation. He would risk being labelled as unreliable either in terms of his professional capabilities at programming, or task scaling, or else in terms of his work ethic, and who wants to hire a freelancer with questionable qualiªcations and a lazy attitude? The alternative would be to take it up with Eric. He didn’t know him very well though, and didn’t know how he would react. Jack’s aim would be to get Eric to talk to management, but he couldn’t be sure Eric wouldn’t try to put the blame on Jack. The safest path to take would probably be to talk to the manager himself. So that was what Jack did.3 By the end of Jack’s visit to Smallville, there was a new database and one employee less in the company. Jack doesn’t know what happened to either Eric or the new database. He has visited Smallville’s homepage once, but he doesn’t know how much of his own code has survived. He hasn’t run into Eric and probably never will. Jack is on the road again, perhaps a journeyman on his way to become his own master. Perhaps just on his way, making a short stop to talk to a quaint researcher. 3. Actually these considerations are a rationalization that didn’t take place until later during an interview, where he was asked why he went directly to management. At ªrst he just answered ‘it was the right thing to do’, but the interviewer kept on inquiring into the reasons why.

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All the trades of Jack In this story Jack moves through a series of transformations. He starts out as a person entering a building. Given his clothes, the briefcase he is carrying, and the nature and location of the building he might be a number of things: a sales representative, an employee, a management consultant or a researcher. As it turns out he becomes all these persons — and a few more, during the story’s course. Jack-the-sales-representative is the guy who that morning decided to put on the clothes he is wearing, because he knows he has to keep a certain appearance, when he enters a new company as a freelancer. He has to sell himself as a commodity that exhibits certain qualities. If he should be in doubt as to how to go about this, he could ask the sta¹ng company. They tell all prospects the importance of appearing “presentable” on their internet site, and sometimes spend time on instructing the young and inexperienced in the business world how to achieve this. After nearly ten years of freelancing Jack, however, knows this so well that he never really re¶ects on it anymore. Perhaps it is misleading to say “he knows it” or “he has made a decision” what to wear. He just does this as part of his routine selling of himself. He enacts an identity of commodity/salesperson, and because he has done it for a long time, it has left traces in his environment. His wardrobe is ªlled with appropriate work-clothes that enact this identity as do a number of other things including his briefcase, his calendar and his car. The commodity/salesperson and the wardrobe recognize each other in a moment of interpellation as Jack steps out of the shower. The next Jack the story tells about is a family-provider, although not in the old patriarchal sense. His wife is pursuing her own career, with an ample income permitting her to carry the same label of provider, but there are diŸerences. His wife is regularly employed; she has a job with a steady income and more or less foreseeable promotion opportunities. She can feel pretty sure that, unless she wishes otherwise, she will have the same job next year. Not so for Jack, he never knows where he will be next year. Based on years of experience, he feels certain that he will be working, but he cannot be sure. One of the things contributing to this practical insecurity is Jack’s wish to start his own business. He is an entrepreneur-making-plans, but the plans involve other people as well. Some of them are like Jack, freelancing, and some of them are like his wife, employees, all with their own plans and ambitions, but they seldom ªnd the time to meet and discuss their common future. So Jack may have his own ideas or visions of a future, but they rely on other people that are far away, being busy doing other things. As the story continues a Jack-the-new-employee/colleague emerges. This is a rather shallow Jack, though. The signs of environmental recognition of this Jack are few, and many are absent — there is no elaborate introduction to the other employees, no thorough presentation of his assignment or working environment.

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When he asks questions regarding his job-content, he receives short answers. The interpellation is transient. His environment is not enacting this identity clearly, perhaps because this identity is in con¶ict with some of the others. The expertconsultant is present at the same time, and obliges Jack not to ask too many “stupid questions” if his environment is to recognise him as an expert. Instead of risking his “expertness”, he employs yet another identity, that of researcher. He enters into a puzzle-solving mode, attempting to ªgure out a way to conceptualise what is going on, what the situation is about. The con¶ict between identities resolves when the researcher decides that Jack is still an expert — he is just working with an incompetent colleague. This solution is accomplished in a series of interpellations: ªrst he recognizes the programming code as “bad” or “nonsense”, then he contacts management who a¹rm this recognition by ªring the writer of the code. The end of the story pictures a hero leaving the battleªeld after a ªght well fought. This is Jack the problem-solver. But we are also told that this story is the product of a particular incident, an interview with a researcher. So perhaps the most prominent identity in the story is Jack the story-teller, who comes around because he has been asked what it is like to work as a freelancer, particularly what it means to be an outsider and an expert at the same time. The story shows another picture than that evoked by the question. He is not diŸerent things at the same time; the narrative has him oscillating between identities in a time/space series of transformations. If being a freelancer is told thematically as a series of oscillations, it means traditional ideas of identity or self-identity (such as those used by Giddens 1991, or Sennett 1998), cannot grasp it. The autobiography cannot maintain a central theme of being and doing, when it keeps shifting between diŸerent modes. Sennett (ibid.) speaks of a “corrosion of character” but there is no character to corrode except in the eye of the beholder. As outside observers we may expect a diŸerent story than the one being told, but instead of letting it disappoint us we might let it invoke a pleasant surprise and curiosity.

Deconstructing Jack 4 The obvious point to note is that the main source of the story is Jack. I have used other sources (the sta¹ng company and its homepage) to complement a few details, but the main source has been the interview. Had I interviewed Eric or the management of Smallville it would have been diŸerent on a number of points of which I will dwell on only one: “the bad code”. In Weick’s analytical framework the emphasis is on sensemaking as a cogni4. With thanks to Woody Allen for “Deconstructing Harry”, 1997.

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tive or practical ongoing accomplishment in social space/time. “Sensemaking begins with a sensemaker.” (1995: 18) The sensemaker is not alone, but a “parliament of selves”, “constituted in social interaction”, s/he is not a solipsistic “knower” but part of a social interactional reality. As such, the sensemaker extracts cues from the environment to make sense of it, to enact the environment. In return, the environment enacts the sensemaker, as exempliªed above through the concept of interpellation. The case of “bad code” is an opportunity for studying the sensemaking process, which becomes more explicit when the day-to-day routines do not su¹ce to make sense. It is the same point Garªnkel (1967/1987) made, introducing the idea of ‘breaches’ in everyday social practices, necessary to study the methods people use to produce order. The same idea has later been imported by Giddens (1991) to understand how the individual copes with the problem of ontological security through the employment of routines. The sensemaking process opens itself up to scrutiny when it is slowed or even broken down by either unexpected or absent cues. From this perspective the situation does not make sense to Jack initially. The code that he examines lacks the cues he needs to make sense of it. This is not a lack on the part of the code, but a relational statement: it is to Jack the cues are lacking, i.e. it concerns the relation between Jack and the code. The phenomenology of the experience is one of disorder, so he needs to do some work to reinstate order or preserve ontological security, i.e. to be able to go on believing in the story he tells about himself as a competent practitioner in database programming. The outcome that emerges from this negotiation is that something is wrong with the code. This is one of the outcomes that would make it possible for him to go on in every sense of the expression: he can keep up his selfidentity, and he can start coping with the practicalities of producing the database. It could have been several other outcomes as well, but that would have made it impossible or at least di¹cult to tell a story as the one told above. So we might be tempted to ask why it was this and not another outcome that emerged. The easy answer, of course, being that Jack was right — the code was bad. My suggestion here will be: never resort to easy answers. From a sensemaking perspective it is not possible to discern ‘good code’ from ‘bad code’, it has to be enacted, which then only retrospectively makes the attribution true. ‘In the beginning there was just code, Jack saw the code and saw that the code was bad’. As in Genesis the quality of the creation is not seen until after completing the creation. Jack is not (a) God, though, but he is something similar, Jack is an expert. The attribution, “bad”, can only be made by an expert in the same way that only the competent were able to see the emperor’s new clothes. So it is Jack’s expert identity that enacts the solution. But how come there is no child challeng-

From naked emperor to count zero

ing it? Several answers could be given here, including cognitive dissonance mechanisms at work in management (Festinger and Carlsmith 1959): “since we pay this guy so much, he must be an expert, ergo he must be right.” Or one could embark on an analysis of disembedding mechanisms of late modernity and the installation of trust vis-a-vis expert systems à la Giddens: “The technology involved is an abstract system, the domain of an expertise, requiring trust to bracket the limited knowledge of management. Thus management have to trust Jack’s evaluations since they are the trustworthy utterances of an expert. If they were not, management would have to give up the project or at least get a second opinion — the latter still leaving them with the problem of whom to trust.” These are of course parodical versions of the theories mentioned. I employ these versions only to make a single point: they are theories of mechanisms (systemic trust/dissonance) located either in the social world or in the workings of the individual mind.5 Such explanative devices are problematic for a series of reasons: in this context, because they act as the theoretical deus ex machina, the gods introduced by a crane to the stage of a Greek tragedy to resolve the plot, when it has reached a stage (sic) where the con¶icts can no longer reach resolution without divine intervention. Gods, especially the ones in Greek mythology, tend to mess things up with their supernatural powers. Theoretically speaking, they impose a problem of introducing a mode of ordering that can only be induced by a ‘god-trick’ (Haraway 1991) on the part of the observer. The trick is seeing things that no one else can see — an accomplishment made possible by seeing everything from nowhere, thus being able to describe what goes on in a situated practice with the aid of ordering mechanisms stemming from everywhere else and nowhere in particular. In plain words, this means operating on levels of description such as ‘micro’ or ‘macro’ that supposedly lie forever behind, beneath or above what meets the eyes of the actors described, thus privileging the observer or installing a metaphysics (see also Callon and Latour 1981; Czarniawska and Joerges 1996; Czarniawska and Sevón 1996 for other versions of this critique). I will leave the gods hanging, but take the machina, the technology, with me. Two technologies are interestingly at play here, one in the narrative, the other the narrative itself. The (interesting) technology in the narrative is still the code, before it turns bad. It starts out as an amorphous body given shape in the sensemaking process of the expert. I will consider this further in the next section, but ªrst make an excursion to investigate how the expert enters the scene as an accomplishment of the narrative. 5. In Festinger’s original conceptualisation of cognitive dissonance it is a theory of a mechanism in individual cognition. Weick (2001) seems to move beyond that, translating the concept in to the social process of sensemaking.

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The structure of the narrative, resembles that of comedy-romance (Gergen 1994) — with an ironic twist in the end. In the beginning there is a positively evaluated state of aŸairs, in the middle a disturbance and compensation work, and at the end a positive equilibrium is reinstated. Were it not for the ironic twist, the story could have potential to convince the reader that what happened was that Jack transformed himself into a hero by seeing the truth of the problem and taking action to remedy it. One of the reasons it has this potential is actually that we recognise it as this kind of narrative we know so well. This type of narrative constructs heroes. The hero of the story is the actor doing the work that reinstates a positively evaluated state. It is present in discourses on (IT-) freelancers in many places, such as sta¹ng ªrms’6 self presentations, some of the theories about labour market development — especially futurologists’, in political debates — especially from liberalism, and many freelancers’ stories of motivation to enter into freelancing.7 These narratives, which I call Free Agent Narratives, are part of a discourse emphasising opportunity that pictures freelancing as a smorgasboard, where freelancers can take what they like and customers what they need. Below the surface of the story of Jack’s visit to Smallville there are elements of another narrative, not quite as obvious, because it concerns the invisible work Jack does (Star and Strauss 1999). Whereas the Free Agent narrative mainly concerns the identities of expert, salesperson or hero, this Other narrative concerns the commodity, family provider, entrepreneur and colleague. The invisible work Jack does to maintain these identities has to do with making himself employable, ensuring a su¹cient income to contribute to his family’s economy, trying to coordinate plans for the future with others far away and ªtting in to the work environment — getting a grip on tasks. One reason that this narrative is not ¶eshed might be that it does not have a dramatic structure, and therefore is not culturally recognisable. Such stories would be stories of stability, of maintaining status quo, progression or regression, which makes them stories of Nonpersons, most obvious in the case of Jack-the-commodity. As Kunda et al. (2000) note, stories on this type of work do exist — in what the authors label the ‘employment relations perspective on contingent work’. The stories told there tend to be structured as tragedies: the situation gets increasingly worse until it hits bottom. It is symptomatic, though, that writers who use this perspective seem to only look at so-called “low-skill occupations”, rarely touching the so6. This seems to be the preferred term. A sta¹ng ªrm is a broker mediating between freelancer and customer. Sometimes they are referred to as brokers and sometimes they call themselves ‘consulting ªrms’. I use here simply the most common term. 7. Freelance-centralen.dk, Malone and Laubacher 1998; Kunda et al. 2000; Jensen 2001.

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called “highly skilled technicians”.8 This coincides nicely with the concept of invisible work originally coined to conceptualise the work of slaves, maids and housewives, in other words, work often labelled as low-skill or of no importance. Perhaps a power/gender perspective could illuminate this further.9 The point for now, though, is that these narratives construct victims or oppressed. I call them Victimisation Narratives, which are part of a larger problematising discourse present in unions, political statements, especially by Social Democrats, and traditional industrial sociology studies.10 Had I not suggested earlier never to resort to easy answers I could conclude now. I could say that the two diŸerent discourses give rise to two diŸerent kinds of narrative of freelancing. One narrative concerns/constructs the highly skilled, free agents the other the low-skilled victims, and it is important not to mix them. But this kind of puriªcation (Latour 1993) can be dangerous. I would have to erase what I have said about the victimisation narrative below the surface in the story of Jack, and perhaps even edit the elements I referred to out of the story. I could then tell the proponents of the diŸerent discourses that they were all right, as long as they kept to their respective ªelds — but marginalization is not my agenda here. I began this section stating that it would have been a diŸerent story had I interviewed Eric or Smallville’s management. From Eric I might have heard a story about a stranger coming in to disrupt the order of things in a destructive way — a tragedy perhaps. I have no idea what kind of story I might have heard from management,11 but it certainly would be diŸerent from Eric’s and Jack’s. Management would need to legitimate both the fact that they accepted the word of a stranger and the fact that they had an apparently incompetent programmer on their payroll. Whichever the solution to that dilemma, I would have a more complicated story of identities of the parties involved. If I viewed the stories as competitive I might turn to the code and other artefacts or material traces of action to try to validate which was closer to the truth, but maybe that would not really help me — after all, I’m not an expert. 8. Sennett’s essay (1998) can be seen as a counterexample, but it is not thoroughly empirically grounded on this issue. 9. I will not follow this question further, only share a related anecdotal observation: Jack’s sta¹ng ªrm consists of a manager and four employees – all female. They have a large (considering Danish conditions) number of freelancers, approximately 80 of whom are permanently on assignment – all male. In an interview with the manager, while talking about taking care of the freelancers’ needs, she mentioned casually that they had to start thinking about ‘the women’. As I inquired what she was thinking, it became apparent she was referring to the spouses of the freelancers. 10. Madsen 2000, Information 1998, Teknologisk Institut 2000. 11. Most probable a story structured as a comedy-romance with management emerging as the hero.

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A river runs through it I will turn to the code and other materialities — not to try to validate a story, but to enhance it, to decentralise it. After all, so far it has been mainly a story of humans. To the extent other entities have been put to play, they have been so through the enacting done by the human actors: “Jack enacts the code as bad, thus making it bad and himself an expert.” Before it gets enacted as bad, however, the code enters the story as something that is obscure and obscuring. I would like to put it this way: “the code enacts Jack as obscure.” What does that mean? Only that the code has an agency of its own. Or rather it has it in relation to Jack in the same way he has in relation to it, thus creating each other as an eŸect of the relation. Without Jack no code and without the code no Jack, or at least without a particular Jack not this particular code and vice versa. Please note that this is a semiotic trick the story plays on the reader. We might argue that they are both there without each other, but then we leave the story to tell another one. That’s the kind of tricks philosophers like to play, but that is not what I want to be nor have I any ambition of discussing it with one. Why play the trick, then? Because it directs attention away from the purely social or psychological world. That is to say this reading of the story does not beforehand decide to explain everything that goes on by looking for explanatory devices in a particular realm as is often the case in both sociology and psychology, where focus gets diverted towards, for instance, the creation of meaning in either social interaction or individual minds.12 By doing that it oŸers interesting or disturbing stories that may elucidate the construction of identity without having to relapse to Münchhausen-like phantasms. A psychological or social explanation would have Jack pulling himself up by the hair from incompetence to expertise — since no one else is around to help him do it as he sits with the code, he would have to do it himself. In that way I would have to install a special power in Jack, e.g. “clear vision”, a trait that permits him to see good and bad code, to make this feat possible. But which Jack would that be, and why would that Jack be there instead of one of the others? It seems a bit confusing that on the one hand Jack comes into being through an ongoing process of enacting, while on the other hand he seems to be there ahead, or outside of time/space. This is what Weick does, when he installs what he labels ”higher-order, more-abstract capabilities” into the people succeeding in pursuing a ”boundaryless career” (2001: 220). They become “special people” with a sixth sense before they enter a career. As I said earlier, Jack is not (a) God. He is however an expert. What that means in practice can now be investigated further.

12. I am aware that this claim is highly disputable. But a further discussion would reach beyond the scope of the present text.

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At ªrst, sitting in front of the code “Jack” is nothing in particular except perhaps a confused or puzzled person. He seems to be alone, but with the help from the above-mentioned semiotic trick, I can now see that other entities are present. The code is there; obscuring Jack, obscuring the expert. I am not claiming that this is the code’s ‘intention’, I am simply recounting it as an eŸect of what the code does, after having given it the status of an entity with agency, or an actant as the semiologists label it. But the code and Jack are not the only actants in the story. There also exist the functional systems and subsystems Jack has produced in the past, the charts Jack draws to describe the datastructure of the database, the books, the disks, the briefcase, and Jack’s clothes. They are all there, participating in constructing an expert. As if that wasn’t enough, there is also Jack’s résumé, the sta¹ng company, its archives, the newspaper-awarded label “Gazelle-company”, all contributing in establishing Jack-the-expert in a less direct manner. We might say that Jack-the-expert is well connected. He is hooked up to a relatively large number of actants that have powers in many localities. From this almost quantitative or structuralist description it seems obvious that the code alone will have a hard time keeping up the obscuring of such a large, widely distributed opponent. It succeeds in doing so temporarily, though, unsurprisingly perhaps, because the code itself also has a larger size and wider distribution than immediately apparent. The code is connected as well — to a larger net of entities consisting of Eric, the programmer of the code, in turn connected with Smallville Ltd. and management who hired him. Smallville is more than just the management who hired Eric; it is also the building, the computers, desks, the other employees etc. Furthermore the code is part of a programming environment and through that connected to time. The programming environment incorporates a certain kind of functional logic through the grammar of the programming language and the programming tools. In relation to Jack-the-expert, time is a hostile actant, since it has been a while since last he worked in this environment. Thus time/distance acts together with the obscurity of the code in obscuring the expert, supported by the connections to Eric and Smallville. As the narrative proceeds, the code and Eric become decoupled from the rest of the network. Eric doesn’t work further on the code in any visible way (he just seems “engulfed in his computer”), thus decoupling himself and loosening the code’s ties to the rest of Smallville. The code becomes Jack’s domain, it gets enrolled in his network. Although other actants are chipping in, especially Jack’s reputation and the threat of delay, their participation is not unilateral — they do work for both the expert and the code. Eventually the code “looses the battle” and it’s obscurity is transformed into an identity of “bad code”13 while Jack’s becomes 13. ‘Bad code’ is a common term among programmers, signifying poorly structured programming or pure garbage.

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the expert. Put in another way, after Michel Callon (1986): the negotiation between the expert and the code does not enroll the code’s network, which makes the expert the only spokesperson for the code. This elucidates “why” Jack does not talk to Eric, after he decides the code is bad. That would reopen the negotiation of who should be spokesperson for the code and might transform Jack from expert to colleague, but his identity of colleague is — as I stated above — shallow to begin with. The network connections of this identity are thin, i.e. short lived and not very well distributed — not very encompassing. It is not that Jack as a strategic agent decides not to become a colleague. That line of argument would place an abstract version of Jack outside in a god-position. It is simply that there is no interpellation of this identity taking place, not a network of connections supporting it, not any work done by other actants trying to call it into life. I hope to have shown the diŸerences between an actor-network analysis of the story and that of an institutionalist or sensemaking analysis. The important diŸerence is that, in an actor-network analysis, it is easy to incorporate the ªnding that identities are multiple and emerge locally as outcomes of negotiations between actors of both human and non-human status. Nevertheless, these are only researchers’ tales. In what follows, I will consider other ways of telling stories that might be helpful in emphasising the multiplicity and ¶uidity of identities.

Tales from the Twilight Zone I criticised The Emperors New Clothes for its hegemonic view of identities. In contrast, in the story of Jack’s visit to Smallville I have shown the presence of two diŸerent narratives, representing two dominant and competing discourses on freelancing. I have suggested that Jack’s expert identity emerges as dominating in the story as an eŸect of narrative structure and the actions of various actants. I still feel uneasy about this description, because it is part of my own identity as a researcher, working in a particular milieu. Partial drafts of this essay have been met with questions and criticisms that have disturbed me. Is this just a cognitive perspective; what is the signiªcance of using the concept of identity instead of role; are the points I try to make relevant for IT-freelancers, or could the same points be made about almost any kind of employment relationship; what status does the story of Jack’s visit to Smallville have in relation to what Jack said in the interview, etc.? All questions seem relevant, but this is just a text that tries to concern itself with narrative identity construction. It cannot encompass such a large ªeld of related questions. I try to deal with the uneasiness produced by such questions by pointing towards inspirational sources that may creatively broaden the repertoire drawn upon in researchers’ construction of identities/narratives.

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Let me begin with two points concerning identity. The ªrst is taken from Czarniawska and concerns the retrospective coherence: to have a coherent identity equals the “ability” to present a narrative that accounts for contingent changes, a “[c]onvincing explanation.” (2000: 276). This is the second meaning of interpellation — the culturally contingent expectation that we are able to explain ourselves as our coherent self. In practice we do this by applying narrative devices to account for discrepancies between “today” and “yesterday”. Czarniawska’s examples are therapy and Business Process Reengineering that can account for profound life changes — individual or organisational. According to Kunda et al. (2000), contractors use a narrative structure that recounts incidents of increase in job-insecurity or dissatisfaction with management, pay or work-environment combined with encounters with other contractors as an explanation of how they came to be contractors themselves. The other point concerns the prospective coherence: as the choice of freelancing does not exactly conform to widely held perceptions of “wise career moves”, a device to connect “today’ with “tomorrow” is needed. If today is not recognised as desirable, secure or simply stable in the long run, a contingency plan is needed. So far I have encountered one in all the interviews with IT-freelancers I have done: to start their own business. As in the story of Jack, it is typically grounded in personal networks. Being “a temp” is (narrated as) “only temporary” — it’s just a step on the ladder leading to a more recognisable future.14 So perhaps freelancers need some more inspiration to go beyond excuses for not following the “normal” career. My advice to them is to turn to literature for inspiration. To support it, I will scrutinize three stories that might be of help. The ªrst narrative I explore concerns Lancelot, the foreigner who becomes the most skilful knight at the round table of King Arthur.15 The whole story of King Arthur is actually a reversal of the comedy/romance narrative: it starts in chaos, has a middle with temporary and constantly contested order only to end again in chaos. Arthur, Camelot, Excalibur and the Round Table are the key elements signifying the attempts of instituting order in the world, still used as symbols of the ideal culture (see e.g. Schumacher 1997). Lancelot is introduced in the story as a knight who has given up his worldly possessions in search of a true king to serve. He ªnds him in Arthur, who, aided by his magic sword, Excalibur, defeats him in battle. Lancelot becomes a knight of the round table by Arthur’s side only to betray him by falling in love with Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, an aŸair that marks the 14. This is not a generalizing claim. Later studies I have done indicate much more diverse ways of talking of future careers, which is also more coherent with other studies elsewhere. 15. Sources for this story are many and often contradictory. Thus, this is an amalgam version building primarily on Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory (app. 1460), and derivatives thereof — most prominently John Boorman’s ªlm adaptation Excalibur (1981).

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turning point in the story’s narrative. Lancelot leaves Camelot and Arthur falls into despair sending his knights on a futile quest for the Holy Grail in the hope that it can help the land back to prosperity. In the end Lancelot returns to help Arthur in a ªnal battle, but in vain; Arthur dies and the land returns to chaos. During the renaissance this kind of story was used as a way of oŸering political advice to a prince. It might be tempting, thus, to interpret the story along the lines of the kind of advice Machiavelli gave to his prince regarding the unpropertied foreigners, the mercenaries: avoid them, they are dangerous since “[t]hey are disunited, ambitious, and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor ªdelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy.” (Machiavelli 1532, chap XII). Lancelot is diŸerent from Machiavelli’s mercenaries, however. He is valiant before enemies and has ªdelity to men, but he has another kind of weakness. Where Machiavelli’s mercenaries only concern themselves with the stipend they receive, Lancelot is not in it for the money, but for the honour. He ªnds in Arthur a worthy master in whose service to employ his skilfulness, but when a peaceful reign is established his attention turns to Arthur’s court, especially to Guinevere. She is not just a passive object of desire, but also a source of desire herself, ªnding in Lancelot and his skilfulness an appropriate object. So Guinevere is experiencing the classical dilemma of every romance: of being split between being true to her heart or to the law. But Lancelot is in a diŸerent situation although a similar dilemma applies to him. Lancelot is split between diŸerent hearts: the amatory feelings for Guinevere and the loyalty towards Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Lancelot is a monster in the sense that he belongs to diŸerent worlds at the same time, while refusing to choose a single one, making him marginal in them all: a knight and a rogue, a subject and an object of desire, a protagonist and a villain. Many things at the same time, but nothing in particular. Susan Leigh Star has investigated this kind of monster identity in relation to a critique of the managerialist perspectives of ‘classical’ actor-network analysis (Star 1991). Her point is, that instead of buying into standardized classiªcations, an analysis of power, i.e. of the production of subjectivities through identiªcation, might take as a good point of departure what she calls The Zero Point. It is an identity classiªcation characterized by multiple marginality, that is of not quite ªtting in to established classiªcations, not even on a continuum of polarities. By working out from this starting point, Star argues, we may illuminate the taken for granted aspects of orderings in a way that reminds us that “[i]t might have been otherwise.” (Ibid: 53). Talking about Lancelot, the point is that instead of trying to pin him down as one or the other, it might be more illuminating to keep him as a monster — illuminating that is of both the world he lives in and the invisible work he has to do

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to go on. In terms of narrative structure this implies not keeping him as the sole protagonist of the story and not erasing from the story the incidents he is taking part in — just to keep it in compliance with the culturally recognizable form. Thus he is allowed not just to be the hero of the story but as well to be the hero’s Other. In a contemporary context, one of the ways of telling stories of the Other, communicating a moral of do’s and don’ts, is the urban legend. A relevant example is the story of the naked programmer in Silicon Valley, which circulates in diŸerent versions, but always tells the story of nerds or geeks, the highly specialised IT-workers, as someone shockingly eccentric. One version, quoted by Po Bronson (1999), is about a programmer who likes to strip naked when late at work (after 10 pm). One day he happens to misread his watch with the consequence of walking naked around his workplace two hours early. Unfortunately for him he runs into a female “union worker” who calls security, and he ends up being suspended for a week. Although the union tries to apply pressure on management to have him ªred, he returns because his work is highly esteemed by the rest of his colleagues who defend him against the accusations from the union. Bronson uses this story to explain the work culture among programmers in Silicon Valley, pointing at a connection between eccentricity and the necessary creativity as well as the tradition of working long hours having an eŸect of domesticating the workplace. He contrasts this picture with the bureaucratic thinking of unions as not being ªt for that kind of work. The typical urban legend version of the story takes the perspective of the unsuspecting woman running into a naked man at work. The message conveyed seems to be a warning of the dangers lurking below the surface of the quaint image of computer programming nerds. The monsters come out at night — only a full moon or a magic potion seems to be missing to complete a traditional shapeshifter tale. What is common to both versions of the story is the monstrosity of the programmer. He is out of the ordinary, albeit in an ordinary way. It is not really surprising that he walks around naked at work, but we do not necessarily understand why, we just accept it qua his diŸerence — after all he is a computer nerd. The point I would like to make here is that the nerd/geek category is used as a residual, a name for the unnameable. The story would not be told — or at least not in the same way — had it been about an accountant or a secretary in the same ªrm. It has to be about someone working with the unfathomable — in this case it is computer programming, in other cases typically science has played that role.16 So we give a name to what we do not understand.

16. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Shelley’s Frankenstein come to mind.

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The ªnal story I wish to discuss is William Gibson’s Count Zero (1986). Count Zero is a young guy, who wants to become a console cowboy — a free agent capable of circumventing big companies’ computer security systems. He quickly ªnds himself a pawn in the hands of bigger players — in particular inscrutable network entities, artiªcial intelligences, masquerading as voodoo gods. The story makes several ironic points on representation and agency, both to do with the issue of identity. Count Zero, a.k.a. Bobby Newmark, is living in a suburb ¶at with his mother, but he is also riding the matrix with his Ono-Sendai deck under the name of a routine in a programming language. He gets hold of an ice-breaker (a piece of anti-security software), which brings him in to trouble as he puts it to use. Through a series of complex interwoven events he hardly understands, he comes to realise his own insigniªcance only to ªnd a new ground to build a new signiªcance upon. No one in the story — least of all Count/Bobby — is anyone or anything without his or her technology — without it they have no agency and no presence in the hyperreal. The technology is incorporated in bodies, fetishised, mythical and even acting on its own account. Identity work is being done by technology alongside people. It would be a joke to try to remove Count/Bobby from his technology to study him, he simply would not be anything — he would not be there. His aspirations centre on the technology, and he does not seem to have a past of any importance.

The “Thin Red Line” A plethora of points can be drawn from these stories. I will limit it to the ways identities are constructed in them — as contrasted to the story of Jack’s visit to Smallville. In Jack’s story I focused on the structure of the narrative. That way of creating “heart and spirit” is problematic because it deletes the multiplicity of daily practice and reduces protagonists to heroes or victims. To broaden this view I ªrst looked at Lancelot. He is neither hero nor victim, but something less well deªned, for which I have no label. He becomes this obscurity, among other reasons, because the narrative follows another line than for the hero or victim. He enters as a disturbance, is transformed to a vital ally, re-emerges as disturbance and ends up as a would-be ally, but too late. In a way perhaps he is an anti-hero, but I would like for the sake of argument to keep him as obscurity. Comparing him to Jack, I am reminded of management’s and Eric’s perspectives. Perhaps they could be better incorporated if the narrative structure was closer to the story of Lancelot. That means keeping both Jack and the code as obscure, retaining the possibility that the code was not bad, but simply not strong enough to enrol Jack in its regime.

From naked emperor to count zero

In the case of the Nerd, ie. the naked programmer, it is evident that Bronson’s version is paradigmatic of a modern hero-constructing narrative; the programmer overcomes the threat and returns with a de facto strengthening of his position. In the urban legend version, however, the point of identiªcation is the woman and thus the story begins and ends in a diŸerent way. Here the programmer is the disturbance, disrupting the routine order of the work place as an eŸect of his otherness. He is not multiple but simply extra-ordinary — an uncivilized whom we civilize by baptising him a nerd. This is a reminder of what happens to the code in the story of Jack. It becomes civilized when it is named “bad code”. A big diŸerence between the two stories, however, is that while the naked programmer remains what he is, the code is transformed as part of constructing Jack-theexpert. The naked programmer is left alone, while the code is brought into Jack the expert’s network, cutting oŸ other connections — among others the connection to Eric the programmer, transforming him into an incompetent person. On the surface, this is an explanation of how the expert comes into being (again), but it is unsatisfactory in its typically modern way of reifying a dichotomy. The expert construction is also part of the incompetent person construction. Why can’t Eric be left alone? After all, perhaps he was just using an unfamiliar programming grammar, perhaps he was just as eccentric as the naked programmer. In this context the obvious answer is that the story is produced from my interview with Jack,17 a sure method to call upon expectations of conforming to ideas of individual accountability, the quintessential modern interpellation allegorically retold in The Emperors New Clothes. And ªnally, to Count Zero’s “teachings”. The most important in this context is the point of not privileging the social actors, since they are made up of non-social materials. Perhaps I should have interviewed the code? Probably not — changing from social studies to technology studies doesn’t do the trick. What I should have done was investigate the interaction/networking of the involved actants more thoroughly by way of participant observation. I hope to have met the aim of inspiring the use of other models for constructing identities through narratives. The idea was to draw on sources that use narrative structuring, which diŸers from the prevalent modes in stories typically told of modern day actors. It has not been the aim to limit this perspective to special segments of people at work, but to use ‘IT-freelancers’ as exemplary of a more general point.

17. Of course I am not implying that Eric becomes incompetent only through my interview with Jack. He was ªred long before I talked to Jack, but the interview reproduces the same kind of ‘modern logic’, that can hardly produce a winner without producing at least one loser, as was probably present during Jack’s visit to Smallville.

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Narrating the future of intelligent machines The role of science ªction in technological anticipation Brian P. Bloomªeld* Centre for the Study of Technology and Organisation, Lancaster University Management School, UK

This chapter is concerned with the construction of accounts of the future of technology and in particular the narrative devices that shape understanding of the relationship between humans and “intelligent” machines. The assumed trajectory from mechanization through automation to machine intelligence is something that not only ªgures in certain areas of science and engineering but is also a strand within organization theory. This trajectory represents the increasing displacement of human skills and agency and as such is the focus of numerous utopian and dystopian visions. It is of course also an area tackled both by futurologists and writers of science ªction — with the latter now becoming an increasing topic of interest for organization theorists (see Corbett 1995; Parker & Cooper 1998; Parker et al. 1999). The chapter is not about science ªction as such, nor does it particularly focus on the representation of technology in this genre. Rather, it sets out to explore the interrelationship between science ªction and putative scientiªc accounts of intelligent machines. In particular it focuses on a now infamous character of science ªction, the HAL 90001 computer depicted in the Stanley Kubrick ªlm 2001: A Space Odyssey and subsequent novel by Arthur C. Clarke (based on their joint screenplay), and considers its ongoing role as a cultural icon * I would like to thank both the editors and other participants in the Narratives We Organize By sub-theme of the EGOS 2001 conference. 1. HAL stands for Heuristic ALgorithmic. Although for many years a story has circulated that the name was meant to be a dig at IBM — each letter in HAL being one to the left of the corresponding letter in IBM — and so in a sense HAL preceded or was one step ahead of IBM. Arthur C. Clarke has consistently denied this suggestion.

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— both in making sense of the relationship between technology and human beings and as a milestone in the appraisal of technoscientiªc2 development. Put very brie¶y and crudely, HAL is a computer onboard a spaceship (Discovery) that is on a mission to Jupiter. Depicted as the latest achievement of artiªcial intelligence, HAL controls most of the ship’s systems and is supposed to be ¶awless and incapable of error.3 However, HAL develops a fault during the mission, wrongly diagnosing an equipment problem. This, together with other signs that all is not well with the computer leads two of the crew members — Bowman and Poole — to discuss the problem this poses and the possibility of disconnecting HAL. Although the crew conduct their conversation beyond HAL’s audio sensors they remain within his visual ªeld and are therefore susceptible to his lip-reading capabilities. In response to this conspiracy HAL goes on to kill the majority of the crew (including three who are in suspended animation) before eventually being disconnected by Bowman, the sole surviving crew member. The narrative of technology going wrong or out of control was of course far from original but the story has proved to have considerable power and an enduring resonance. Put simply: HAL 9000 is the most famous computer that never was. The Guardian, January 2, 1997

Insofar as the HAL 9000 computer stands for what might be seen as the inevitable or logical endpoint of the evolution of machine intelligence it thereby serves as a primary reference point for all discussions of such artefacts. To be sure, HAL goes murderously oŸ the rails but the vision of a highly intelligent machine that can converse ¶awlessly in natural language, is conscious, and has emotions, represents, at least for some, a pinnacle of scientiªc and technological achievement. Such capacities are part of a dream that has energised the ªeld of artiªcial intelligence (AI) since its inception in 1956 as well as capturing the popular imagination. For some, of course, as suggested earlier, that dream is a nightmare; for yet others it is an unattainable fantasy. Thus, I would suggest, HAL has come to serve as a leitmotif in the understanding of intelligent machines and the dangers associated with them. Just as Frankenstein’s monster is the spectre that casts its shadow over genetic engineering and new reproductive technologies (Rollin 1995), HAL has

2. Because of the problems associated with any rigid separation between science and technology, particularly the problematic notion of technology as “merely” applied science, this chapter will (where appropriate) use the preferable term technoscience (Latour 1987). 3. Given the abilities attributed to HAL in 2001, including a male voice and consciousness, the rest of the paper will adopt the terms his and he in preference to its and it. This is in keeping with the narrative sense of the 2001 story.

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become a character that simply cannot be elided when it comes to debate about the relationship between humans and computers.4 The remainder of the chapter is organized as follows. The next section provides a brief overview of the signiªcance of narrative in organization studies and in the emplacement of technology; this is followed by a discussion of the connection between time and narrative in the context of technology and the future. Given the focus on HAL, the third section then looks at the in¶uence of culture on scientiªc knowledge — and vice versa — in order to provide a framework in which to consider the connection between scientiªc fact and science ªction narratives. To develop this aspect of the argument the chapter examines two examples of cultural material in which the relationship between ªction and fact is interrogated. The ªrst is a book — HAL’s Legacy (Stork 1997) — published to mark HAL’s birthday in 1997. The second is a BBC radio programme that likewise marked the occasion.5 In each case the ªctional computer was deployed as a sort of benchmark for an assessment of extant and future technological developments in machine intelligence. Accordingly, such cultural material is seen as signiªcant insofar as it mediates our knowledge and expectations in the area. The fourth section then considers HAL’s broader cultural role in the narration of the relationship between technology and people and the dangers perceived therein.

Narrating organization and technology Many contributions in the ªeld of organisational studies attest to the constitutive role of narrative within organizational life, this being in keeping with the linguistic and constructivist turns within social theory more generally. The focus on talk and texts paves the way for the analysis of how they are structured (in part at least) through narrative considerations and conventions. Narrative ªgures in the numerous forms of account through which organizational reality is continually constructed and re-constructed: for instance, in so-called organizational “war stories”, gossip and other informal means of communication amongst organizational members. But on the other hand, it is also a vital part of what may be seen as the more formal discursive practices of managing and organizing — including the

4. In fact Frankenstein’s monster and HAL are connected at another level because both are examples of creation, of “life” assembled at will by human intention, thereby constituting (for some) a transgression of the divine or natural order of things. 5. On a point of re¶exivity, it is worth noting that the decision to focus on material pertaining to HAL’s birthday shapes the organization of the text of this chapter, it provides an origin from which a narrative can be developed.

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processes of decision making, strategy formulation (Knights & Morgan 1990; Hardy, Palmer & Phillips 2000), innovation (Deuten & Rip 2000), and the emplacement of technology (Bloomªeld & Vurdubakis 1997a). The interest in narrative is not conªned to the illumination of the ªeld’s empirical subject matter — organizations and organizing — but also has implications for theoretical practice (Czarniawska 1999). Theories embody, indeed are founded on, narrative forms. As articulations of how the world operates they frequently revolve around causal narratives of one form or another that interlink the objects of interest. Thus, the narrative resources of genres normally considered outside the purview of social scientiªc analysis have been explored as resources through which insights might be generated within organization studies — for example, literature (Czarniawska-Joerges & Guillet de Monthoux 1994) and science ªction literature in particular (Parker et al. 1999). Placing the narration of organization under the spotlight would be incomplete without due consideration of technology. Whether one looks to the past — for example to the origins of the bureaucratic machine or the ordering of bodies, material and space according to the techniques of visibility — or one considers the future and (supposedly) new organizational forms, it is evident that technology is a central feature in such articulations. Indeed, in more general terms, the relationship between people and machines has been a longstanding concern within organization and management studies: from the birth of the factory system, Taylorism, the assembly line, the microprocessor revolution, through to the Internet, questions have been raised about the origin, role and consequences of technology. When it comes to the matter of explaining organizations and the processes of organizing, organization theorists and social scientists more generally tend to compose and narrate accounts in which the foundational dichotomies of modernity (e.g. as addressed in Latour’s 1993, notion of the parliament of things) hold full sway.6 In these accounts, technology (standing in opposition or as a conceptual counterpart to the social/non-technical) has a particular role to play. For example, most typically, technology is either granted agency in its own right, as in the notion of technology as the engine of organizational change (technological determinism); or it is seen as an instrument in the hands of management (e.g. a strategic choice) that by implication can bear the attribution of agency (Bloomªeld & Vurdubakis 1994b). Either way we have in eŸect a character — technology — constituted in an important role within diŸerent organizational narratives. But the narration of technological development is not just an abstract or theoretical activity: it is a central feature of both the emplacement of technology and resis6. Whereas a key insight from actor-network theory is the notion that technology and organization presuppose each other.

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tance to it. For example, mundane texts of various sorts or genres — reports, guides, manuals, information requirements analyses, orders for equipment etc. — are part of the process by which technology is organized (Bloomªeld & Vurdubakis 1997a). Organizing technology in and through texts is a condition for technology to be put in place. The organization of the texts themselves will often draw upon various narrative devices — for instance in a report that argues the social, economic, market or other reasons for the introduction of new technology and thus seeks to authorise it (Bloomªeld & Vurdubakis 1994a). In addition, all the talk that surrounds and is about such texts similarly involves narrative structures. In the argument presented here however, it is not the mundane narrative texts of technological emplacement that are placed under the spotlight but rather the more evocative narratives that centre on the question of the future of the humantechnology relationship.

Time, narrative and technology Texts in various forms shape our understanding of technology, what counts as technology, what it is for, how we ought to use it, and also what lies ahead in the future (e.g. I F. Clarke 1979). In fact time plays an integral role in the understanding of technology, it is a thread through which accounts (written or spoken) of technology are narrated. More speciªcally, the linguistically derived temporal modalities of past, present, and future have counterparts in the realm of the technical. The newest, latest, or most up-to-date technology indicates a modality between the present and the future while also being a product of a now past endeavour. Essentially then, when it comes to making sense of technological development we have a simple narrative structure in which the old (anachronistic), current (soon to be displaced), and latest (but almost in an instant already fading) technologies are interrelated, recognised and understood as such. Newness or novelty is of course a characteristic that has a special position in technological discourse: on the one hand it is a hallmark of the latest advances in ingenuity and control; on the other it is a means by which consumers of technology (whether individuals or organizations) can seek to establish or reinforce an identity as being up-to-date. But again, the notion of newness makes sense only in the context of a relationship to that which is out-of-date — that is, another technology that is through its obsolescence relegated to technological history. The connection between the technological past, present, and future is constantly articulated amid the plethora of new products that come to market on a seemingly never ending conveyor belt of innovation.

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Of course when it comes to the products of technology, newness or novelty are not just indexed by reference to time but also depend on the notion of progress. To speak of progress is to assume movement, from one point or state to another, with the assumption that the latter is an improvement on the former. But our agreement that progress has been made in any particular case requires a broader framework of interpretation. Progress requires more than two reference points, it requires an interpretative horizon within which those points can be constituted as references. When it comes to technoscience what matters in this connection is that it is a teleological endeavour — in short, progress is movement or advance toward something. In the history of modernity that something has often been ultimately utopian in conception, the building of a better, brighter, future world (Nowotny 1984). In the speciªc case of robotics and artiªcial intelligence the goals are perhaps self-evident if nonetheless controversial. Teleology represents a particular narrative form in which designs and purposes are enunciated. Moreover, commentators and researchers alike often speak of the search for artiªcial intelligence or the quest to build a machine that can, for example, pass the Turing Test.7 The search is not a random one but is on a path that interconnects previous machines or technologies — e.g. 18th Century automata, Jacquard’s loom, the digital computer etc. — and leads to the ultimate goal of “true” artiªcial intelligence. The notion of a quest or search thereby presupposes speciªc narrative structures that draw upon and reinforce the wider teleology. Aside from the contention that narrative has a constitutive role in rendering technoscientiªc developments thinkable and understandable, both within the scientiªc community and its enveloping culture, I propose that we go further and suggest that such storytelling is also a means by which the future is “defuturized” (Luhmann 1982). Luhmann has utilized this term to refer to the deployment of techniques such as statistics and probability, and indeed technology more generally, as a means of rendering the future less open and thereby more knowable and open to manipulation. Technology defuturizes the future by reducing its inherent complexity — due to the openness of a myriad of possible future presents — to the vision of a present future. However in considering this process I would suggest that we must not restrict our horizon just to the formal techniques of technological forecasting — what might be termed the technology of putting technology in its place — but also (as suggested earlier) pay attention to the narrative forms through which they are understood and communicated. Thus I contend that the various narratives about the future possibilities and consequences of the development of intelligent machines discussed in this chapter 7. Proposed by the mathematician Alan Turing. Put crudely, the idea behind the test is that if (under certain conditions) a human being cannot discriminate between the behaviour of a machine and another human being then the machine could be said to be intelligent.

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are also part of the process by means of which the future is defuturized. That is, whether the vision of the future turns out to be accurate or not is beside the point. Rather, what is key here is that such narratives shape our expectations of the future and in addition form part of the ideas or cultural material out of which the future is realized or constructed. Because 2001: A Space Odyssey was set in the future and had such an impact, both at the time in 1968 and ever since, its recurrence as a cultural artefact was virtually ensured given the inevitable elapse of time. Eventually the present would catch up with the chronology (year 2001), at which point it would make sense to see if that future present looked anything like that (the present future) depicted in the ªlm. In a sense then, 2001 provided a temporally suspended narrative for the future evaluation of technoscience.8 (As events turned out, that evaluation came rather sooner in 1997 when HAL’s birthday was celebrated — as will be taken up later.)

Science ªction and science fact The putative relationship between science ªction and science fact informs a particular means of orientation to the modern world.9 It forms a narrative horizon in the understanding of technoscientiªc development. In the popular imagination today’s science ªction is expected to become tomorrow’s science fact. At the same time however the scientiªc establishment often decries the representations of the technoscientiªc endeavour portrayed in ªctional (and other media) accounts of science. Indeed, at times particular instances of science ªction are denounced as being scientiªcally illiterate: expressed diŸerently, the more science one knows the more particular examples of science ªction might seem ridiculous. For instance, in certain examples within the genre it is evident that parts of the dialogue are a (scientiªcally) incoherent concatenation of technical terms. On other occasions the denunciation is more morally charged. For example, commenting on the reception of the 1994 ªlm version of the Frankenstein story — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — Lewis Wolpert, a renowned embryologist and one time chair of the Committee for the Public Understanding of Science, was at pains to point out the intellectual (and by implication moral) distance between the butchery skills and lack of accountability of the ªctional Dr Frankenstein as compared to scientists working in the ªeld of genetic engineering (Wolpert 1994). Despite such protesta-

8. There was a good deal of media coverage on January 1st 2001 that referred to 2001 and HAL. For instance: Heaven or HAL was a documentary programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. 9. No attempt is made here either to present an overview of the diŸerent approaches to the study of science ªction (e.g. in literary studies, organization theory, or science studies) much less to provide any form of synthesis of such work.

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tions the story of Frankenstein continues to form a discursive register in discussions about technoscientiªc development. Anyone wanting to question the implications of any new idea or technology can invoke the spectre of Frankenstein and the morality tale that goes with it. However much scientists might like to invoke a boundary between science ªction and science fact it remains vulnerable to narratives that blur any such distinction. A more positive10 take on the relationship between science and its enveloping culture is oŸered by Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979) who posited a two-way ¶ow in ideas and in¶uence between science and its culture, between the genesis and development of scientiªc ideas and facts and the society in which they are located. In other words science in¶uences society but is in many ways the product of that society. This being not just a matter of economics or resource allocation — for example, as regards the question of where governments or organizations chooses to invest in research and development. Rather, Fleck was writing about a more intimate relationship between the ideas that inform a scientiªc research programme and the society from whence those ideas originate. Fleck posited the notion of two related processes: on the one hand the scientiªcation of popular knowledge in which ideas in popular culture are taken up within scientiªc research programmes and eventually contribute to the establishment of scientiªc knowledge (esoteric knowledge); on the other, there is the popularization of scientiªc knowledge in which exoteric accounts of scientiªc knowledge become articulated as part of popular culture — for example, popularisations of science in text by well-known scientists or in media coverage of science and technology. Science ªction represents a genre that may at times provide both a resource for certain ideas in technoscience — one thinks of the many discussions among scientists and in the media about when the technologies depicted in the Star Trek series, such as so-called warp drives, will become reality — and at the same time a commentary on such endeavours. The signiªcance of narrative also ªgures in the social relations of the scientiªc community. The view of science oŸered by Thomas Kuhn (much in¶uenced by Fleck’s earlier work) stressed the importance of paradigms and the disciplinary matrix within which one becomes trained as a scientist. Thus the development of scientiªc knowledge relies on a particular social context: the organization of a ªeld of research and the community of scientists within it. To this one might add that science, as with any cultural enterprise, has is heroes and villains, its deªning moments such as so-called crucial discoveries or experiments that are conducted by human agencies (Harré 1990). These form part of the narrative material out of which the intellectual sense of the scientiªc community is ordered or organized. Paradigms, including theories, instruments, exemplars, and accepted knowledge, 10. Though obviously not in terms of the scientiªc community’s self-image.

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may be largely deªnitive of the work of a particular ªeld but nonetheless rely on the background accounts or stories in terms of which they are communicated (e.g. Myers 1990).11 Having suggested the importance of narrative in scientiªc work, as well as the role of ideas from its wider culture, let us now turn to consider two examples — an academic book and a radio programme — where ªction and fact (as represented by members of the scientiªc community) are deployed in an assessment of HAL.

HAL’s Legacy HAL’s birth date on January 12th 199712 presented the occasion for celebration among a group of research scientists and academics assembled to mark the launch of a book — HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality (Stork 1997). The image of a group of scientists surrounding a birthday cake for a machine that was ªctional signals more than a mere publicity stunt for the book. It is evocative of the unique status that is accorded 2001 and HAL in particular. Indeed, it is this very standing, which is not conªned to the community of research scientists, that helped to authorise the production of the book in the ªrst place. The theme of birthdays is a recurring one in 2001, birthdays by deªnition mark the beginning of something signiªcant, something special, and so it was perhaps only ªtting that HAL’s birth date was marked in this way. From the point of view of narrative, punctualisations of time through the marking of particular dates such as birthdays is a way of shaping their signiªcance. Stopping the ¶ow of time in this way, however temporarily, is suggestive of the meaning of the event that is thus marked. And of course once inaugurated the date may be revisited ad inªnitum. The scientiªc and wider cultural signiªcance of 2001 is emphasized at the outset in HAL’s Legacy: 2001 transcends the label “science ªction movie” and captures many of the central metaphors of our time, telling us much about society and its aspirations… many people have been deeply aŸected by the ªlm, among them several contributors who re¶ect here about its in¶uence on their own careers and on computer science in general. (Stork 1997: Preface)13 11. At the same time, and in order to preserve the supposed purity of science, seemingly unpalatable aspects of scientiªc work are usually written out of conventional (particularly textbook) accounts. That is, alternative narratives are suppressed. One such example being the case of Sir Isaac Newton whose dabbling in astrology is usually denied any constitutive role in the development of his scientiªc work. 12. This was the date given in the book by Arthur C. Clarke, however in the screenplay for the ªlm the date was given as 1992. 13. This and other citations from this book refer to the electronic version available at: www.mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/Hal .

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It is clear then that the book’s editor David Stork, a specialist in machine learning, regards 2001 as a signiªcant landmark in the representation of the future relationship between humankind and science and technology. Further, Roger C. Schank, contributor and leading computer scientist recalls his ªrst viewing of the ªlm: How would a computer do that? How might a computer understand language or think of sentences to say the way HAL does? By the end of the ªlm my head was spinning. (cited in The Guardian, Online Section, January 2, 1997)

Accordingly I suggest that 2001 provided a spur or challenge to the scientiªc community. The enthralling nature of its vision of the future tapped into longstanding aspirations in the world of computing and science more generally (see e.g. Cohen 1966; J. Fleck 1984) while at the same time reformulating them. This was science ªction but done in such an authoritative way that it invited the scientiªc community to make it become fact. One reason for its standing within the scientiªc community would seem to be its credibility in scientiªc terms. Indeed, Stork contends that Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick were keen that the ªlm drew upon and was in accord with scientiªc knowledge as much as possible. This being manifest in the design of the sets and the execution of particular sequences as much as in its forward-looking extrapolations. Stork’s careful enunciation of the scientiªc credentials of the ªlm constitutes a contribution to the narrative concerning its genesis. But this is no mere supplement to the story of the production of 2001. We seek to see the ªlm from an additional, fresh perspective not to diminish its art, but to appreciate it more fully. Such a scientiªc analysis also provides those of us who are not working scientists an opportunity to learn about the research going on in real laboratories and about the recent history of computer science in particular. (Stork 1997: section1, p.2)

HAL’s Legacy sets out to assess HAL’s capabilities in the light of current knowledge in computer science and other ªelds associated with artiªcial intelligence — for example, natural language recognition, speech generation, lip reading, computer vision, common sense understanding etc. — and includes contributions from ªgures who are experts in these areas. In a sense then, the representation14 of HAL provides a means of benchmarking the progress of technoscience. Stork’s book, therefore, contributes to the re-assessment of the ªlm 2001 while at the same time allowing leading edge work on computers to be appraised in comparison to HAL. In doing so it is evident that any neat separation between fact and ªction is problematic. 14. The representation of HAL on the part of the contributors rather than HAL per se.

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Taking just one of the chapters as an example we can consider Murray Campbell’s contribution in which he provides an ingenious analysis of how HAL plays chess. Campbell, a leading computer chess expert at IBM, does this by considering the sorts of skills evident in the very brief sequence when HAL is seen playing a game with the crew member Frank Poole, and then compares these to the abilities and style of play typiªed by the world’s most powerful chess computer in 1997 — the IBM computer Deep Blue. Campbell argues that HAL’s game with Poole is actually based on an obscure encounter between two chess players in 1913. He provides a brief history of chess playing machines — beginning with von Kempelen’s chess playing automaton, The Turk, through the work of Babbage, Shannon, von Neumann, Morgenstern and other leading ªgures, right up to the design of Deep Blue. Note how narrating the past in this way brings us to the present while at the same time, given the earlier remarks about teleology, also beckons a future. Each step in the story helps increase the distance from the deception of The Turk15 and indexes a progressive line of development. Though Deep Blue has been credited with the defeat of the former world chess champion Gary Kasparov, Campbell sees signiªcant diŸerences compared to HAL.16 In particular, Deep Blue is seen as “lacking in general intelligence”. In short, at least as far as chess playing is concerned, current computers do not come anywhere close to HAL’s human style of play even if they can (as in the case of Deep Blue) be said to play at the level of a grandmaster. What can be said of HAL’s chess playing skills compared to current computer technology becomes ampliªed when one considers his other abilities. However, as the various explorations of these abilities in HAL’s Legacy makes clear, this is not due to lack of progress in computing so much as the extraordinary complexity in computational/technological terms of the things that human beings do everyday without so much as thinking about it. The lesson for artiªcial intelligence research has been that esoteric problem solving (such as chess) has proved more fruitful than trying to cope with the mundane tasks of daily human existence.

“HAL’s Birthday”, Big Byte BBC Radio 5 Live (12/1/97) The content of BBC Radio 5 Live has varied over time but remains predominantly oriented toward live sports coverage. It has also carried educational programmes and a popular technology series Big Byte which aimed to cover serious issues associated with science and technology but presented in a topical way. It terms of 15. The device was in fact a trick for it concealed a small human chess player. 16. In fact Kasparov and Deep Blue were involved in two six-match tournaments. The ªrst was won by Kasparov (by 4 to 2) in 1996, but he lost the second (2.5 to 3.5)in 1997.

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format this involved what might be termed a jocular, “right-on” style of presentation tailored to its (presumed) youthful target audience. The broadcast coinciding with HAL’s birthday was no exception. It included commentary from Arthur C. Clarke, David Stork the editor of HAL’s Legacy, Doran Swain curator of computing at the Science Museum in London, Gregory Rawlins author of Moth to the Flame (1997), and Kevin Warwick, controversial cybernetician and robot builder at Reading University and author of March of the Machines (1997). In the early part of the programme, following a conversation with Arthur C. Clarke, the presenter — Quentin Cooper — then talks to David Stork about his view of the importance of 2001 as a vision of the future. This provides Stork with the opportunity to further promulgate the message of his book — namely, that HAL was (as suggested earlier) a signiªcant ªgure for many working in artiªcial intelligence and associated ªelds. Oh I saw it in 1968 when it came out and I was awe inspired. I thought it was the most remarkable ªlm ever made. It was an era before anyone had real common usage and experience with computers and it showed a vision for the future that was, ah, magniªcent, and showed how science and technology could be in the service of mankind’s highest aspirations. Not just adventure but also self-discovery and transcendence — depending on how you read the ªnal scene in the ªlm. (David Stork)

What was also interesting about the programme as regards the argument here is the way in which the ªctional HAL was (again) used as a means of gauging the achievements of science and technology since the ªlm was ªrst screened in 1968. Rather like HAL’s Legacy, the programme set out to explore how the “ªction of HAL meets fact”. In other words, it enacted an assessment of the vision of the future in 2001: A Space Odyssey and at the same time provided an appraisal of the extent of technoscientiªc progress. For example, during an interchange with the programme presenter, Warwick, having asserted that some of the predictions or aspects have “come true”, that “HAL wasn’t a bad stab in the dark 30 years out”, is asked to clarify the relationship between the predictive ªction and extant scientiªc achievement. “Where are we up on HAL, where are we lagging behind?” asks Cooper. Accepting that in terms of speech recognition HAL is more advanced,17 Warwick argues that when it comes to areas such as speech generation, size, and speed, HAL is behind its modern factual counterparts. Indeed, while HAL is represented in the form of a very large piece of hardware in 2001 it is all too evident that, generally speaking, computers have tended to become much much smaller for the same computing power. In 1968 of course the microprocessor revolution was yet to dawn. In fact, Warwick’s remarks about speech synthesis are contentious. He argues that modern speech synthesis machines are superior to HAL’s “machiney com17. In 2001 HAL’s speech recognition abilities are supplemented by the capacity to lip-read.

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puter-like voice”, by which he means the electronic sound that has come to typify robotic/computer speech both in ªction and (previously) fact. However, in the ªlm of 2001 HAL’s speech was actually spoken by a Canadian actor, Douglas Rain. For some commentators this marked a break from other, machine-like representations of computer speech and also signalled the quasi-human characteristics of HAL more generally. That is, if in previous science ªction ªlms human actors had mimicked (their interpretation of) machine speech, then this was not the case with HAL. HAL’s voice was perhaps somewhat monotone but still marked a radical departure compared to voice generation technology at the time as well as typical representations of that technology. Before HAL, an actor speaking as a computer deliberately created a stylized, mechanical, “robotic” voice. That was the viewer’s cue that a computer or robot was speaking. 2001, however, featured a kind of talking computer, a computer who spoke in a friendly, warm, and (often) emotional voice. Rather than conforming to the expectations about computer voices, 2001 presented the possibility that future computers would speak and function like human beings. (Olive 1997: Section 1, p.1). From the moment HAL utters his ªrst words, it is clear to the moviegoer that the 9000 series is a superior architecture: HAL’s voice is decidedly nonmechanical. (S. Garªnkel 1997)

It is clear then that HAL is not like either his ªctional or factual predecessors. In addition to having a computer speaking like no machine that had gone before, 2001 indexes HAL’s technical sophistication (as compared to previous machines) in another way when the astronaut Bowman is in the process of disconnecting his higher mental functions. HAL complains that he is losing his mind and asks Bowman if he would like to hear a song. Bowman a¹rms that he would like to hear the song and HAL sings his swansong “Daisy, Daisy” but as he proceeds his voice becomes slower and deeper. In eŸect it becomes less humanlike and more machine-like. More speciªcally, his voice sounds somewhat like a human voice slowed down, as when a tape recording or vinyl record plays at the wrong speed. In a sense this reminds us that HAL is after all a machine. Furthermore, the choice of song is particularly interesting here because it is in fact a historical reference to the Illiac speech synthesis computer. In the early 1960s Clarke had heard a recording of this machine singing “Daisy, Daisy” at Bell Laboratories (Arthur C. Clarke 1997). This was the “ªrst song ever sung by a computer” (Olive 1997: Section 10, p.1). One way of interpreting this (rather esoteric) narrative device is to say that at the beginning of the song HAL’s singing is indicative of the progress made since Illiac, a machine that produced a mechanical, robotic, synthesized or electronic human voice. And as a corollary, the disconnection of HAL’s memory modules that marks the dismantling of his intellect precipitates a kind of reversion to the limitations of the Illiac — that is, back to mere mechanism. Again the boundary between fact and ªction is problematic:

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2001 as the projection of some of technoscience’s central dreams is full of scientiªc reference points. But equally, at least as far as HAL is concerned, the ªction has become part of the self-understanding of the assorted scientists and engineers working on machine intelligence. HAL couldn’t be built but his ªctional presence has helped scientists to clarify why not. Returning to Warwick’s remarks, one can readily accept that whether he simply made a mistake about HAL’s voice is uncertain. In the area of speech understanding he oŸers a more equivocal view of progress: Perhaps speech understanding, they’re [i.e. computers] perhaps not yet as to HAL’s standard. But… maybe they understand other signals in a lot better way than HAL did. HAL… communicated in human signals rather than in lots and lots of other signals, whereas we know computers, machines can take in all sorts of input.

What is ambiguous about this is that for other commentators HAL’s human-like abilities are indicative of his vast superiority compared to current machines. For Warwick on the other hand, human modes of communication seem to be seen as somewhat restrictive. While it is obvious that computers can process vast amounts of digital input far beyond the capacities of human beings, to use the term understanding in this context is arguably inappropriate. What is certainly clear however is Warwick’s belief in the inevitable progress of technology: We do have this rising tide of technology… machines are improving so rapidly it’s unbelievable.

Thus the teleological narrative of progress is invoked in a move that tilts this issue ªrmly in favour of future machines. Indeed this conviction underpins his assertion that in the then forthcoming second encounter between Kasparov and Deep Blue in May 1997 the outcome might be less clear cut than it was in the ªrst. As it turned out his suggestion was correct; 1997’s Deep Blue was an improvement on its 1996 incarnation and Kasparov lost the tournament.18

HAL: Human or machine? The assessment of HAL vis-à-vis current developments in computers raises many issues. But it isn’t the technical details of areas such as computer size or speech synthesis that matter so much as the extent to which HAL represents an erosion of the boundary between humans and machines. As an instance of the servant that becomes the master, HAL symbolizes the danger associated with transgressions of the boundary between machines and humans, between logic (disembodied rea18. A discussion of the issues involved here, and in particular the narration of the games and the question of the attribution of agency, is beyond the scope of the present paper (but see Bloomªeld & Vurdubakis 1997b).

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son) and emotion. HAL is a character within a story but at the same time HAL can be seen as a way of narrating fears about the potential consequences of pushing technological development too far. In the ªlm (and the book) HAL is said to be capable of emotions, and in this sense represents a diŸerent variety of threat than, say, the cold brute logic of the Terminator android. The latter unremittingly pursues an attempt to carry out its mission, to eliminate a speciªc individual no matter what the cost. In contrast, HAL seeks to protect itself in the face of the threat of disconnection at the hands of the crewmen Bowman and Poole. Whether this is in the service of the mission objective (i.e. a higher goal) or not is a moot point for the very suggestion that HAL has some degree of consciousness raises the possibility that its actions are self-interested. I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen. (HAL)

Moreover, it might be argued that the status of HAL as a thinking, conscious, and emotional19 entity renders problematic Bowman’s actions in disconnecting HAL. During this sequence in the ªlm the expression on Bowman’s face conveys the impression of tension and worry. In the context this could be said to be ambiguous. That is, he is trying to save his own life at the expense of HAL and is thus engaged in a struggle to the death. However, at the same time he is witness to the destruction (at his own hands) of an alternative non-human consciousness with (putative) feelings. In a similar way, Bowman’s agreement to listen to HAL sing is also suggestive for the song serves as a distraction or displacement activity (for both human being and machine alike) as HAL’s consciousness ebbs away and is terminated. In a way it is possible that the audience feels more for the destruction of HAL than it does for the elimination of the crew — after all, the crew behave rather more like robots, displaying little or no emotion, while in contrast HAL is the central personality or character. Thus the erosion of the boundary between humans and machines does not just signal the danger of machines displacing humanity but may also lead humankind to question by what right it could terminate an artiªcial consciousness. This I suggest is a possible way of reading the ambivalence inherent in Bowman’s actions. Expressed diŸerently, at the very least it is possible that this sequence in the ªlm provides a narrative for those interested in the exploration of the question of rights and so-called artiªcial lifeforms.20 19. As the ªlm makes clear at one point, in a sequence containing a media news ªlm about the Discovery mission, the fact of HAL’s emotional status is regarded as undecidable. 20. For example, this was the topic of an episode of the popular series Star Trek: The Next Generation. A trial was initiated in which a proposal to dismantle Data the android o¹cer of the Enterprise — in the interests of science, to understand exactly how ‘he’ functioned — was tested against “his” rights as an artiªcial lifeform. For an example of academic discourse on this topic see, for example, Kurzweil (1999) who forsees a time when machines will be given civil rights.

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Of course the perceived threat in the erosion of the human-machine boundary depends on just how far technology is judged to have progressed. Some scientists like Warwick contend that there has been far more “progress” in this regard than many others would allow. As Rawlins makes clear in the radio programme, recognising a person wearing a mudpack is trivial for us but an immensely complicated problem for computers. Compared to the book HAL’s Legacy which on the whole regards HAL as far beyond current scientiªc achievements, the radio programme is more equivocal in its overall message about modern computers and robotic technologies. In contrast to the possible threats symbolized by HAL, Rawlins sees more danger in the simple but possibly tragic failure of everyday technological systems based around computers. In other words, the malfunction of mundane devices rather than digital malevolence. On the other hand, Swain emphasizes the fears associated with the possibility of machine intelligence: I’d say there are intensiªed and renewed grounds for fear… The fears are: is consciousness a human prerogative? And the closer a machine gets to mind-like behaviour the more intense and real that fear becomes. So I’d say that we’ve gone both ways. There are reassuring things about machines and that is that they are more familiar, and these are grounds for fearing them less, but there are increasing grounds for fearing them more.

Warwick also sees the threat to be a signiªcant one — i.e. a march of the machines. Referring to the title of his (then) imminent book, the programme presenter comments: Now that’s a very, that sounds like a rather ominous title to me. I don’t know if you’re saying no it’s all right stay calm, or you are saying panic now while stocks last.21

To which Warwick responds: I’m certainly not saying no it’s all right stay calm. Although I think we are all right for maybe another decade before we need to panic. But we can think about panicking now let’s put it that way.

Overall then, the programme reproduces the commonplace pessimistic narrative of the erosion of the human-machine boundary. Whether current computers are as capable as HAL or not remains a matter for debate but the implication that it is only a matter of time before that boundary is well and truly undermined remains unchallenged. HAL is recast as but a step in the onward march of the machine.

21. The phrase “panic now while stocks last” indicates what might be seen as the author’s ªnancial interest in talking-up any such panic. This pointed and “humorous” style of engagement being entirely in keeping with the format of the programme.

Narrating the future of intelligent machines 209

HAL as cultural icon The narratives that serve to structure a ªeld’s own self-understanding, as well as the variants circulated among its enveloping culture in¶uence both the organization of the ªeld and popular responses to it. Accepting Arthur C. Clarke’s protestations that 2001 was not predictive as such, that he and Kubrick were extrapolating from existing knowledge and technologies at the time, I suggest that in fact it has had a more intimate, constitutive relationship to the future that has “unfolded” because in eŸect 2001 has become part of the material out of which that future has been built. Frankenstein’s monster is an omen from the past while HAL, in contrast, is a threat from the future: both continue to haunt the technoscientiªc enterprise. Ideas distilled from the spirit of modernity, the monster and HAL stand as pinnacles of the technoscientiªc project but at the same time undermine it, for they themselves enact the nemesis for the very transgressions that they as creations embody. Accordingly, while they represent goals that are in many ways still striven for — the exercise of power over life — they must at the same time be repressed or overcome, rendered impotent as misplaced symbols of the scientiªc endeavour. That is, both genetic engineering (as was discussed earlier) and AI must strive to overcome the cultural narratives that otherwise serve to deªne them as forever ¶awed. Needless to say of course, such a triumph is impossible. No matter how powerful the technology the possibility of it going wrong or malfunctioning must forever remain. In part this is because the pursuit of perfection involves the active and ongoing suppression of imperfection; just as organization and ordering involve the suppression of disoganization and disorder (Cooper 1990a; Bauman 1991). But disorder, imperfection, or resistance cannot be conªned forever. As de Certeau explains, what has been repressed in order to make it forgotten tends to return: But what was excluded re-inªltrates the place of its origin — now the present’s “clean” [propre] place. (1986: 4)

Here de Certeau is speaking of psychoanalysis and the organization of historiography but the insight also has relevance to our understanding of technology. The coupling of exclusion and return is in fact a narrative trope in many works of ªction and science ªction in particular. In this regard it adds more to narrative than the commonplace plot to the eŸect that “mad scientist creates a new invention that goes wrong”. What is missing in such a plot line is attention to the discursive resources whereby the qualities of the invention, and thus by implication the signiªcance of its powers should things go wrong, are established. For instance, in

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the ªlm 2001 we are told that HAL is incapable of error, a faultless technology, and indeed the sequence marking the introduction of HAL places great emphasis on these powers. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all by any practical deªnition of the words foolproof and incapable of error. (HAL)

In other words the narrative banishes ¶awed or malfunctioning machines to the past, a move that is important in justifying the apparent trust placed in HAL by the crew and the mission controllers. The resurfacing of error begins mundanely enough (in this case the misdiagnosis of a piece of equipment) but soon gravitates into calculated murder. This narrative of the repression and return of the possibility of computer error is mirrored in wider culture where HAL has become an icon of the computer age. In 1968, long before the launch of the personal computer, most people had no experience of computers and so their knowledge was by and large limited to representations in the media and science ªction. Since then HAL has stood as a ready-made storyline or narrative device through which developments in computing or instances of computers going wrong could be related. For example, commenting on the failed materialisation of the year 2000 computer bug Time magazine opined: It was the perfect fable for our time: HAL recast as a billion tiny bugs, his omnipotent malevolence replaced by our own innocent oversight. (January 1, 2000)

In other words, the phenomenon of the millennium bug played on fears about computers going wrong — of which HAL is the best known archetype — at a time when microprocessors had become near ubiquitous components in the technological infrastructure of the modern world. Many people it would seem did not realize the extent to which computers had inªltrated so many everyday machines and systems on which the developed world depends. In a sense then, what was secreted away in the interstices of the technological fabric of modern life (representing the repressed problem of the two-digit representation of year dates) seemingly threatened to mark its return in a spectacular way. Another example of HAL’s cultural role in the narration of computer malfunctions comes from the domain of space exploration which of course provides a particularly ªtting context in this regard. Commenting on the computer problems onboard the Russian Mir space station, TIME.com ran an article entitled as follows: Mir: My Mind Is Going The space station’s mainframe does its HAL impression again… (June 1, 1998)

Narrating the future of intelligent machines

“My mind is going” is of course a recitation of HAL’s words when Bowman begins to disconnect him. And moreover, the Russian mission control spokesman was reported as saying: With luck. They’ll ªnd the glitch before it strikes up a chorus of “Daisy, Daisy”.

It is evident then that the story of HAL provides a means of anticipating the consequences of technological development, particularly in the ªeld of computing, as well as a way of making sense and narrating technological malfunctions — both for journalists and their readership, and also for those scientists and technologists involved in the technoscientiªc enterprise.

Future organizations, organization(s) of the future and technology The narration of the future is a long-standing social practice through which it is made an object of organization and action. Thus speculation about the future shape of organizations and the assorted issues thus arising (e.g. trust or identity in the context of virtual organizations and cyberspace) is no mere passive re¶ection on what is to come but rather part of the process through which the future is realised. Each narration of the future seeks to bring it to the present — a present future — and in so doing thereby assists in making it less open. The argument developed here has tried to show that narrative is also a central feature when it comes to technology and (in the case examined here) the relationship between people and “intelligent” computers. In particular the association between “ªction” and “fact” that has been addressed here has implications for our understanding of the discursive processes through which the relationship between people and technology is made thinkable and articulated through diŸerent narratives. Media accounts such as the BBC Radio programme discussed earlier in eŸect render the future as something knowable. This does not necessarily imply speciªc detailed predictions. Rather what is more interesting is the process through which that knowledge of the future is made available, in other words the framing and organization of the material that the programme contains and in particular the resonance it establishes between esoteric and exoteric knowledge. In this regard the story of HAL presents a ready-made narrative and expert commentators — representatives of technoscience — are assembled to give their judgement on how science and narrative square up or not. This meeting of “fact”and “ªction”, esoteric and exoteric, does more than just generate a popular account of technoscience for it also opens a window on the scientiªc work too — that is on the very ideas that shape its orientation and energise its endeavours. Moreover, the programme provides the opportunity for technological developments to be in-

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dexed (how far “are we up on HAL”) while (in this instance) reproducing the predominant negative narrative concerning the future consequences of developments in machine intelligence. In so doing such programmes, along with other (more esoteric) cultural material such as HAL’s Legacy, contribute to the defuturization of the future, to the shaping of our expectations. The general implication of the argument presented in this chapter is that organizational analysis and organization theory must treat technology not as a given so much as a character that is written and thus made known through a variety of tropes. These narratives do not simply re¶ect technology or allow us to talk about it in the abstract but are very much part-and-parcel of its situated development and emplacement both now, in the present, and in future presents to come.

Part 6 Narrating ourselves

Ticking times and side cupboards … The journey of a patient Sudi Shariª School of Management, University of Salford, Manchester, UK

The opening Story is a map; a map of a journey and for a journey.1

This essay is as much a story of my journey as a patient as it is a story of my journey as an academic aiming to write a sensible and coherent text. The narrative thus will envelope the conversations that I had with myself, with the other patients and their visitors, with the medical carers and with my friends, my students, and colleagues who visited me. It includes long hours of thinking, observing, questioning in order to make sense of the episodic events, one-oŸ occasions, interactions, the language, the responses and so on. Being a patient meant that access to usual means of passing time were sometimes a luxury not obtainable and at other times not desired. Thus there was ample time to think about one’s universe and the meaning of life! I started noting down my feelings, conversations, jokes and other experiences, in the form of a collection of words, a hidden story: Pain, accident, hospital, ambulance, doctors, nurses, food, medication, sideroom, monkey-hook, nylon- covered pillows, sweat, good leg, bad leg, swollen leg, bruises, frame, bandages, window, noise, crane, notice, ¶owers, visitors, buzzers, lights, chairs, physiotherapist’s doughnut, mobility.

And continued since: Writing about my experience in the ªrst instance seemed healing but was it also an escape attempt? It was healing, as it would reassure me that I was still 1. On one of the BBC Radio 4 Programmes called ‘Room for Improvement’, 10th May 2001, this statement was attributed to Jeanette Winterson. This programme discusses metaphors and modes of speech occasionally.

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the same person. I could think and write, argue for and against thoughts and practices. I did not have preconceptions or predetermined intention of having it printed in any speciªc journal. Though that seems to be the ‘usual’ reason for writing a paper. The paper would also be a self-portrait, or maybe self-indulgence? But only ‘gurus’ can self-indulge, I thought. The philosophy that I had adopted was ‘I will write when I have something to say’. Did I have something to say? A few years ago I was told by a living ‘guru’ and a proliªc writer on organizational life that ‘you need to think about who you want your audience or your readers to be.’ That meant I needed to think about my preferred forum. Writing the narrative also was like developing a contract with those who would-be readers. There would be implicit and explicit expectations about the contribution of my story to the exiting body of knowledge and what I would be getting from writing it. The paper would contain my subjective and inter-subjective empirical accounts. This partly meant that I had to have some kind of a framework to frame my experiences as a patient. But I would be making assumptions about these events, interactions, about my ‘bay-mates’ and thus my, and what I saw as their ‘in-order-to’ and ‘because’ motives (Schütz 1967). I could also let the story speak for itself.

I was in the side room number 2. I was given some water. It had passed ‘tea’ time, so no food. I had no appetite, in fact I had no feelings, no desire for food. Yet, I felt elated. It was like being ‘in seventh heaven’ as my mother’s helper used to say after his visit to his usual opium den! A lot of noise outside the room; water running, crockery, plates, people talking, I could not see anything, just an orange colour laminated notice in front of me…

We are committed to well being and safety of our patients and of our staŸ. Please treat other patients and staŸ with the courtesy and respect that you expect to receive. VERBAL ABUSE HARRASSEMENT AND PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE UNACCEPTED and will lead to prosecution. Thank you for your co-operation. Chief Executive.

Ticking times and side cupboards … 217

The room door was left open. I could hear footsteps of people passing my room and lavatories being ¶ushed. The door was left open at night too. I was worried that others could hear me snoring. The porter took me to the operating theatre to have my wounds stitched. Whilst pushing my bed down the long narrow corridor towards the elevator, he reassured me ‘you will be back in half an hour…it is quick’. A small kitchen was opposite my room. The room was near the entrance to the ward. A trolley bearing mugs, a jar of coŸee, milk cartoons and a big teapot was parked outside my room. The entrance to the ward was left open during the day and closed at night. I felt dizzy, yet, I had the urge to speak to my worried visitor, Frank. He was relieved as I remembered his name. I had no idea what had happened. No idea what time it was. My tongue would hang out and felt like corrugated iron. It was cut in parts. I was attached to a morphine drip and a blood bag was hanging on the opposite side. Antibiotics were put through needles attached to my foot. My right leg was very swollen and its skin stretched to its limit. The basics: forget plot, but remember the importance of ‘situation’ and dialogue…talk is sneaky. Stephen King, On Writing The Observer, 1 October 2000.

The food trolley passed my room and Wendy the attendant looked above my head and continued pushing it to the next room. A nurse called Caroline told me ‘You are “Nil by Mouth”’ today. I laughed and said I had not seen the ªlm. She looked puzzled. Early morning I was awakened as Wendy put a jug of water with ice and a cup on the table next to me. The buzzer dropped on the ¶oor. Anne and Elise came in. It was still early morning and they had served the breakfast: – – – –

Do you have a towel? No. Soap? No.

They took a blue bowl, which was normally placed at the bottom of the side cupboard, out and put it on the side table ªlled with water. A bar of soap was settling in: – – – –

You can have a wash now. Wash? You know, wet the ¶annel and wipe your under arm and other places…as much as you can? Ok.

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Midnight — scream, ¶ooded-corridor, dawn, jug of water, toast, porridge, swollen leg, frame, patients, washing bowl, dried blood, window, ¶owers, sadness, tears.

My wounds oozed as they said. My temperature read very high. Five pillows covered in nylon were piled up to help me sit up. They made me feel very hot. A polyester pad was put under my leg for oozing wounds. Two electric fans were brought in. I did not see Caroline any longer. Every few hours a group of nurses peered at my bed and stood outside my room with folders. They took note as a sister read some details about me: ‘This is Sudi she is …she has a broken…’. Some looked at me and some looked at their folders…with sympathetic smiles. I smiled back but felt uncomfortable and lonely. Syrup and tablets were abundant if one had not done ‘no. 2’, though they might give the sensation that one had a tumble drier inside one’s body. The forces of gravity were at work, a bedpan and a spray and a wipe were oŸered afterwards! Sister Lisa brought Hibisole to the room and said anyone visiting would have to wipe their hands with the liquid before they departed. There was an outbreak or some kind of epidemic my visitor, a former nurse, concluded. The ªrst two days seemed like a dream on the third day. The morphine seemed eŸective. I realised that I could not move my right leg. Alison, the physiotherapist, asked me to stand up: — Use the monkey hook and push with your good leg…yes bend it and push.

I tried but could not move. I crawled sideways and reached the edge of the bed, was applauded by Alison. As my left foot reached the ¶oor and then the right, we realised that something was in the way: the catheter and of course the rubber link was twisted! Alison oŸered me a pair of disposable knickers as she was leaving. They were like a pair of beige ªshnet tights with red and green stripes, cut to the shape of a pair of boxer shorts. How would I put them on, I wondered? If you think that someone who has been given a catheter for convenience’s sake, ask a doctor about it. It’s a route of entry for bacteria. Dishing the Dirt, The Guardian, 28th November 2000.

The Bug The notice on one of the side rooms used for isolated patients warned: INFECTION CONTROL Use gloves and apron. Wash your hands and wipe.

Ticking times and side cupboards … 219

There was also a picture of a ‘bug’ at the corner of it. I was moved to a bay for women, which I labelled afterwards as the ‘forbidden bay’. We were all MRSA2 patients; we were infected by the Methiciline resistant bacteria. The story of hospital acquired infections is one of shirked responsibility amongst people who are identiªable and who are never brought to task…Bacteria are clever little things. Once one of them has evolved a trick to make it resistant to antibiotic, it tells all its friends by sharing little blobs of DNA around so that the others can make copies and share the secret. There are diŸerent solutions expensive or not expensive that can be used and a ‘hand washing task force’ to force staŸ to follow the guidelines to avoid weakening patients’ immune systems. But…to survive get out as soon as you can… Dishing the Dirt, The Guardian, 28th November 2000.

There were ªve of us. Other patients were not allowed inside our bay. Some Support staŸ would come in and rush out as they realised that they had entered without precautions. Everyone had to wear gloves and aprons. We would have to wash ourselves with anti bacterial, medicated soaps and shampoos. We were tested at regular intervals to see if the ‘bug’ had been eradicated. The bay needed to be kept cleaned. The breadcrumbs and dropped used bandages often greeted us by getting caught in our frames and crutches. At the dawning of the outbreak, the support nurses did not change the sheets, arguing that we were sleeping in our own sheets and thus with the bacteria that we carried. I asked: – –

How can you control the contamination if you preserve and provide the environment that the bug thrives in? I don’t know, love… The Laundry has not brought the clean sheets up yet.

Did the bug live on living organisms only, I wondered? Plastic aprons, smelly gloves, short shifts long shifts, painkillers, hunger, toasts, trauma, emotional upheaval, patients’ solidarity, hyperactive patients, build, destroy, functional, dysfunctional, melting muscles, dermotologist, rare species, bandage, no physiotherapy.

I sat quietly looking at the concrete edge of the building appearing at the window opposite of my bed. I tried to be dissatisªed with the arrangement, but did not know why I was sad. I did not talk to anyone.

On being with others At one corner of this large square room there was a woman in her 70s, looking into the distance with a smile on her face. She was folding and rolling here skirt around 2. Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus.

220 Sudi Sharifi

her hands unfolding it and repeating the sequence again and again. As the nurses shouted her name out when they wanted her to take her tablets, I learnt that her name was Betty. At the other corner, another woman in her 50s was sitting with her eyes closed, her mouth open, every now and then whispering to herself. Every time a nurse asked for Betty she responded too. They shared the same name she explained. But ‘I am here because of a fall’ and then would pull a face directing her glance at the other Betty and say ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with her’. This account was repeated a few times at the start of my joining the Bay. On my right side, sharing the cupboard space was Catherine, in her 30s, talking on the phone, a ritual, which I could understand later. There was a wheelchair at the end of her bed. On my left, was Ginger, a 90 years old in a ªne gown, sitting on a chair with one of her legs up on a stool. Everyone’s name was written on an orange card next to the names of the consultant and nurse in charge and pinned on the wall by their headboard. Dina, the nurse in charge of me, was given sick leave after the tests were conducted. They all glanced at me, then at my bed and all the bags that I had thrown on the bed as a form of packing. I sobbed. Ginger looked and said ‘what’s wrong?’ I shook my head. Catherine said ‘we all have been through this, I came to this bay last week and I was on my own for four days’. I looked, nodded and sobbed. …There is an inner world distinct from the outer world, a world of sense impressions, of creatures of his imagination, of sensations of feelings of moods, a world of inclinations, wishes and decisions. (Frege in McGuiness 1984: 360).

Catherine introduced others and whispered why they were there. Betty 1, [the older one] looked as if she could see something through the walls behind me. Although this was the trauma ward, and the bay was for those aŸected by the ‘hospital bug’, no one knew why she was sharing the bay with us. She was immobile. Catherine said that rarely anyone came to see Betty 1. Betty 2 had broken an arm. It happened whilst she was pushing her shopping trolley around the curb near her house. The ªrst operation was not successful. The outcome of her second operation was equally negative. Catherine had fallen oŸ her bed whilst drunk! –

You know Ken and I came back after a few drinks. I was feeling really happy and singing. Then I tried to climb my bed without his help. And just lost it. The next thing I was on the ¶oor waiting for Ken. He was drunk too and could not move me! And I stayed there for a few days…sleeping and eating in bed…Ken called for the ambulance… You are lucky. I had to wait for my operation.

She was paralysed from waist down prior to the fall.

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Ginger used to be a dancer. She could not remember why she was brought in for her knee operation. She had been in this ward for 12 weeks. ‘Most dancers’ knees become dodgy, you know when they are old…’ one of her visitors explained. I thought about the British Academy of Management conference in Edinburgh. It was a sunny day, that Thursday, dust everywhere, construction and road works, railings, buses and then it would become fuzzy, the City was in the process of renewal. Then I was in hospital. I wondered if anyone would notice my absence during the conference. I would miss some of the exchanges and keynote speeches. Though it could also contain repetition of old ideas by new people. I thought as before, what made someone a keynote speaker, their circle, their price, their availability, their latest paper…? Stairs, up to heaven, down to hell, solitary, silent days, day light, community nurse, chocolates, infection, no infection, pain, Co-codamol, constipation, suppository, absent friends.

I realised that we had developed some habits. We all repeatedly described our experiences, to each other and to our visitors. It was part of the healing process, I tried to reassure myself. I felt there was a parrot in me! It was di¹cult to have to talk about what seemed to me to be ‘trivia’ at the time. The taste and colour of our lunches and dinners, the number of pills we took, our pains, our dissatisfaction with the ‘consultants’ and nurses, the noise, the presence of an injured ‘criminal’ or perhaps a ‘victim’ and his two police guards in the room next door and so on. I felt the need to talk, even sometimes to repeat the events and conversions intentionally. I was testing my bay mates. I wanted to see how diŸerent or consistent would be their responses and reactions. They seemed to be moulded in the rituals and somehow satisªed with the certainty that they generated. Occasionally there was a kind of misunderstanding: – – –

Spray carnations last long…? I said to Ginger. Who has gone, love? …!!!…

I would end the conversation by standing up and getting ready to start my aided walk. – – – –

I’m not a leg, I’m a human being. Where is my orange juice? What oranges? Are you ok Maria? Ginger called me ‘Maria’ even though that wasn’t my name. No. That’s good, keep working.

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Our dancer and show producer often reminisced: –

Have been through three raids… Have autograph of George Formby… Who’s that?

Ginger then would look at me with her pale blue eyes. There was some sadness and some mischief in them. She would shake her head whilst leaning back on her chair and turning her head to look out of the window. A friend of Ginger visited frequently and usually brought 3 bananas and some ‘cheese thins’ and some patisserie, normally cut into small pieces. –

I knew her as a child, Maria, Ginger would say to me.

–

Do you remember Joy, your little red coat with black fur around the collar? I washed it and guess what all the hair fell out… you needed to put them back one by one. She was upset. Weren’t you love?

Then before leaving Joy often asked her to eat the patisserie. And when Joy left, Ginger would call the nurse and ask her to put the patisserie pieces in the bin. –

We go a long way…you know… I know her family. They don’t have children. They [Joy and her husband] love each other. He has a brother. When he was young, he was employed by the manager of this shop. The manger had a dog. And one day the dog jumped and he fell and hit his head against an iron fence. Since then he has been in home, you know…he loves to go to Blackpool…loves biscuits…

At the end of each visit by Joy there was the usual exchange: – – –

Watch the stairs. And you. Look after yourself. We have been saying this for years. You know Joy has got bad legs too.

Blue pill, yellow pill and Margaret A narrative is ordinarily understood as a sequential account of events, usually chronological, whereby sequential indicates some kind of causality. (Czarniawska 1995: 15).

Breakfast started early as one of the auxiliaries would bring in the cutlery and a jug of water for each patient. The trolley with boxes of cereal and big pot of tea and a jar of Nescafe, and some chipped mugs was pushed around the ward. Then came the question: ‘[Ladies] What are you having for breakfast…?’ There was despondency written all over the face of the staŸ asking the question. The choice was porridge,

Ticking times and side cupboards … 223

Corn¶akes, toast with jam and a mug of hot drink. We would still be in bed. The partly lit room would allow us to get out of bed, hairs upright. They needed to repeat the choices. Some days there was a chorus, as we repeated the choices. We would shout back our choices. Ginger would ask for porridge and toast. They were put on the side tables. Ginger would try to open the little jam containers with her frail hands. Catherine would chew her dried toast and Betty 2 would try to open her Lucozade bottle. Registrars appeared in Armani suits early in the morning as we were lying in bed waiting for breakfast or to be washed. They had a ‘conference’ by the reception desk early in the morning. They would look at x-rays. The panel for it was next to the Reception desk and opposite the window, which displayed our beds, our activities, and us. Anyone passing could also watch the x-rays. They normally belonged to the new arrivals. Senior house o¹cer and house o¹cers would stand around. Then they would rush towards our beds. The Sister would be busy sorting out the white board on which the names of the teams and team leaders were written. Management Physics: As a manager, you are automatically endowed with special powers to manipulate time, matter, and space. You can suspend the relationship between cause and eŸect and make time move at any rate you choose. (Adams 1997: 1.11). Consultants, who worked even more bizarre hours in their day, will tell you that doctors need to accumulate clinical experience for their professional training and given the nature of disease this takes time. This would be all very well if I spent my time practising clinical medicine [but] I am a paper work clerk, a machine for processing forms, a St. Bernard for seeking lost x-rays and a mobster enforcer for bullying social workers into sorting out my patients. None of these will help me to get to the Royal College of Physicians in two years time. …Why on earth would a hospital, run by mangers, want to employ an extra ward clerk, or phlebotomist to take the bloods for ªve pounds an hour when a doctor will stay late and do it for free? Bedside Stories, diaries of a junior doctor, The Guardian, 7th November 2000.

Whist we were contemplating the taste of the cereal, Elise, Anne and Gill, the support nursing staŸ, would enter the bay and bring in sheets, gowns and towels. The longer one had stayed in the ward the more holes would be in the gown they brought for one and the thinner and paler would be the colour of the towel given. The questions were ‘are you having a wash today?’ then, ‘in the bowl?’ then, ‘where is your bowl?’, ‘where is your ¶annel?’, ‘where is your towel?’ and ‘do you have a clean gown?’. Betty2 would answer by nodding. Her eyes would look at the ceiling along with her eyebrows indicating her amazement at the questions ‘… you should know by now…?’. Ginger would smile and look without uttering any words stretching her frail arms forward whilst holding her jam pot hoping that

224 Sudi Sharifi

someone would open it for her. She wanted to be seen eating. Both Ginger and Catherine would have to wait to be hoisted ªrst. –

I am going to the thing…if nurse comes I am there, you know?

Betty 2 would hold her broken arm up with her good arm and drag her feet while crossing the room. I normally nodded. – –

There is a slit at the back of your gown…showing your… Catherine would warn her. Those old blokes can’t see anyway!

Her polyester but crepe-looking shirt was as long as a tunic and see-through. When she was annoyed she would sleep in this shirt and refuse anything more comfortable. Writing papers in my experience seems to be about being instrumental. It is about ªnding the journal, which would print it. In essence this requirement did not contrast my previously mentioned principle. It could make the attempt more focused. But it created an invisible boundary around what and how I could write. Sutton and Staw (1995) draw on the logic contained in Herrigel (1989) and thus argue that ‘if we avoid aiming at the target for a long while and ªrst develop more fundamental knowledge we will do a better job of hitting the bull’s-eye when we ªnally do take aim.’ (p. 378). Weick (1979) similarly encourages us to ‘ªre then aim’. This means improvisation.

‘Pills’ times would be before a shift started or after it ªnished. We tried to remember how many tablets and what colours. Sometimes needed to answer the nurses’ questions: –

Do you need your…? Have you asked for sleeping tablets?

We compared the number of tablets we took. Ginger was given nine at each hand out, most days. Betty2 had a large round tablet that she was reluctant to take in the absence of any nurse. Catherine was proud she only had to take two Paracetamols and Lactulose, a syrupy substance to act as ªbre. I was given 7 tablets each time. The morning shift had already looked at us through the glass windows and discussed our cases before hand over. Time clocks play a role here by emphasising the importance of time thus establishing habits of regularity among employees. (Le¹ngwell 1926 in Hopwood & Loft 1989: 64). If you want to see the truth, close your eyes to what appears to be true. See that the things which most real are actually least real. See that the ideas that which exercise the greatest fascination for the intellect are actually the least interesting. (Rumi in van de Weyer 1998: 39).

Ticking times and side cupboards … 225

A trolley with a big pot of tea and mugs of diŸerent sizes would be on its way during the cleaning period and often we would not be able to ask for any drinks, as the curtains would be drawn. There were noises: – – –

You do your top half yourself, Ginger and I come back for other parts? I can’t… my arm… use your good arm Betty. … it is painful. I like to have a bath today…I am going out with Ken today.

Ken was 16 years older than Catherine. –

You know he has been really good to me…my ex was very nasty…and I don’t want him to know that we are happy….

A few days later a man came to visit Catherine. He entered the room and looked around like a surveyor. He stayed for a few minutes. They spoke in Welsh. He was Gareth, her ex. Ken usually came after 2 o’clock, the start of the visiting times, but that day he was late. –

I will take a shower. Can I have a clean towel please? The challenge became looking for a frame or frames. For the past few years I have adopted aspects of ‘complex evolving systems’ as in ‘complexity theory’ to analyse and understand organizational events. Thus I have been focusing on the non-linearity of the relationships and interconnectedness of elements in and between organizations and in organizing processes. The events, the interactions as I perceived and observed them might be interpreted accordingly. This is also about ants, fruit ¶ies, termites and turtles; it is about selforganization. Ants create lanes and bumps and bounce around them. They have lots of interactions. Ways and rights of passage get cleared; there is collaboration. Fruit ¶ies do not have a central control system. They argue and tell each other not to have bristles and the outcome of their interactions is that one develops bristles. Others turn around it then.

In the evenings the pills arrived at 8 o’clock as the night hot drinks were served. Then the lights were dimmed. This signalled a quieter period. We were expected to press our buzzers less frequently and have fewer ‘unreasonable demands’. It also meant that we could read sitting on the bed relying on the light provided by the lamp ªxed on the wall by the headboard. The shift would change at 9 o’clock. Any requests would be postponed and referred to the night shift. In the afternoon we were given a sheet of paper sometimes photocopied on colour paper. It was a menu. We needed to tick it and choose our lunch and ‘tea’. If we forgot to do so we would not be given any food the next day. Ginger would ask others to help her to tick the items on the menu.

226 Sudi Sharifi

– –

– –

Ticking time again…Damn…! Where are my glasses…can you see them? Read this for me, love…hmmm what was yesterday? The same? Not much choice…ay…? They tell me drink, eat…you know there was this nurse, I called her ‘Dimple’, who said if I did not eat…they’d force it through my nose…through my nose…oh she was so cruel… Ginger said. Dimple used to work day shifts. Ok time to change your bandage, said Mary, one of the support nurses, as she walked towards my bed. You know, I am from the old school…we used to use raw egg…break one and rub it on the sore parts …like your back…it worked like a miracle….

–

Mary moved closer and whispered

–

I don’t like some of the stuŸ they use nowadays…

– –

I could smell cigarette on her breath. Ginger remained blasé until she left the bay. That was her, the nurse who wanted to force food through my nose…Dimple, I don’t like her… A lot of people in hospital are anxious or bored. The meal may be the highlight of their day. And when you are ill you don’t want all this unidentiªable beige food. Loyd Grossman, The NHS ‘food tsar’, The Observer, 13th May 2001.

– –

I love my ªsh. It was good. I am going to have some chocolate now. You have some? Ta!

Catherine had ªsh on Thursdays. The substance looked white covered with white creamy looking sauce. The chips, which accompanied were pale yellow. The visitors would arrive as some of us were having our hot drinks. The shift would change and the hand over would sometimes take place in the presence of the visitors. The same old verse was read: ‘This is…She is …old and she has had…and she…will…’, the Sister and staŸ nurse accompanied with student nurses would look at us. Some would smile some would look perplexed. Dinner or ‘tea’ was served at ªve o’clock. Visitors would hurry leaving the ward. It meant that we could have our food ‘in peace’. It seemed also a legitimate reason and time for them to leave even though they had been there only for a few minutes. The time for cleaning the bay frequently clashed with the time of changing the dressings and washing as Sue, the young auxiliary had to clean the neighbouring ward too before preparation for lunch started. She would cancel it at the dismay of the Ward Sister who would ªnd out after the auxiliary had left. We were stationed in a large square room bound together by a common ‘bug’,

Ticking times and side cupboards … 227

who became close through our observations of the reactions of the medical crew to our problems. Our interactions seemed to circle around a purpose: to leave the bay sooner rather than later. – –

I don’t know what’s with me today, sorry, I am not with it. If only I could get my hoist …I could go home. She might also say I had a good sleep.

I knew that because I could not sleep, snoring was the common background music every night. One of my visitors had anticipated that and brought me a pair of ear mu§es. Catherine often oŸered monologues though she looked at us as she spoke. I decided that I would listen only occasionally. The physical world is public, accessible to all perception. The mental world is the world of subjective experience. It too consists of objects (pain, mental images…), states (sorrow…) and events (a pain… a recollection) and processes (thinking…).To have an experience such as pain is to stand in a relation to such mental object. (Frege in McGuiness 1984: 360).

Yet as the days of departure approached Betty 2 seemed sad. Ginger wept, as she needed to stay for a further operation. Catherine discharged herself as she thought the Dutch consultant in charge of her had neglected her because of her disability. We were four lonely people in need of sympathy and encouragement. Betty1 left without saying farewell to us but she seemed unaware of her destiny on her departure day. – –

We are both piece of crock, love! I had a friend who had two cats they were called ‘Get oŸ the Mat’, ‘And You’!

Ginger often said this short story as it made us laugh. Consultants, corridors, house o¹cer, hair gel, entourage, obedience, status, students, old patients, wheel chair, smoking, ‘Thinking about Management’, conformity, order, hierarchy, pain control o¹cer.

Once I worked on a research project entitled ‘Home from Hospital’, which examined the after care provisions for the elderly patients. It involved visiting the patients at their home. Every visit seemed to meet their need to have a company, someone to share their hospital experience with. One patient played a part from Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’. She wanted me to stay longer. I, the stranger with a questionnaire, would fulªl that need momentarily. And after I left who would ªll the gap? It was the same in the Trauma ward. We were all members of the EMI group. No not the media and music one, but the Elderly and Mentally Inªrm. This was a label used by some staŸ during the hand over of the shifts.

228 Sudi Sharifi

I discussed my interest in writing my experiences with those who visited me. Some said it was a therapeutic act, and that it was normal for a patient to have the need to pour out her suŸering onto something or someone. Others said that I could adopt the ‘micro politics’ framework, which would highlight the power relationships between the medical actors and between the patients. It reminded me of ‘My American Uncle’, a French ªlm in which a psychology professor takes the viewer through the motives underlying the human behaviour and compares and contrasts them against those of animals put in similar situations in a laboratory or in the wild. The desire to dominate was the central push for the actions and responses.

The consultants walked around the ward with an entourage, including students who neither uttered any words nor asked any questions as they were shown cases and patients’ problems were described to them in technical language. Sometimes the patients remained asleep or unaware of being the subject of the study. Sometimes they smiled and listened hoping that they might catch someone’s eyes or hear something about the reasons for their admittance. This was an occasion to raise complaints or ask for favours. The ward seemed to operate as a machine. There were set routines with set duration. There were rules and structures. Considering my location actually and metaphorically, it was not obvious or observable, the extent that there was a shared understanding of these rules. But could there be? There were set rituals, such as writing reports after visiting a patient. Each patient had a form ªlled with information about their prescribed tablets and their reactions. The pharmacist checked each patient’s ªle every morning and at initial stages questioned the patients about their history. She was Kurdish and a Muslim. I have allowed my experience to surface in its own terms and in a kind of natural order as I have been writing. But, what about those who would read these lines? Would they be able to follow my path? Did I need to consider the criteria often referred to in judging papers? Would my story add to what is already known? Is it related to what is previously written?

The ward was organized on a team basis and 8-hour shifts. These were displayed on a white board at the Reception area. The arrangement of teams seemed to be on the bases of a¹liations: who wanted to work with whom and who went out after work with whom. One could see that the same group of nurses and sisters always worked together in one bay. The Ward Sister appointed the leader of each team. The arrangements seemed arbitrary sometimes, especially when and where the student nurses were concerned, but there was a pattern. The patient’s problems would deªne the assignment. Melanie, a student nurse, whilst shadowing a staŸ nurse, once said

Ticking times and side cupboards … 229

that she was interested in learning how to dress my wounds as they had a complicated angle to them! Moreover, it seemed that teams were allocated on the basis of ‘the di¹cult patients’, this meant either those in the EMI group or those who were very ‘demanding’ and would use their buzzers frequently. There was the episodic nature of activities, a kind of temporal context dictated by clock time and events. The clock dictated our eating, washing and changing hospital gowns, dressing of wounds, taking medication. It seemed the only way that the staŸ could generate some order. Though these times and set episodes were sometimes broken, or elongated by patients refusing to follow the routines or the rules which they were given by the support staŸ. – –

What is it love? Your light is on, did you press your buzzer? Asked staŸ nurse Nimoy. I need my pillows straight.

She puŸed them and bounced them around. –

Here you are…ok? I now go and save some lives… is that alright?

Catherine would watch the allocation of nurses by looking through the glass window, which allowed the staŸ to keep a watch on our bay. It was a two way medium. This way we could prepare ourselves for ‘treatment’. The support nurse in charge of us would enter the bay after the morning hot drink was served and would sit there on the empty bed watching us. We resigned to these blank hours. Time is our tyrant. We are chronically aware of the moving minute hand even of the second hand…tasks to be done in speciªed periods…records to be broken in fractions of a second. (Huxley 1936 in Hopwood& Loft 1989: 4). There is also the element of ‘cosmology’… That is the assumptions that the narrator makes implicitly or explicitly about causal connections in the world in which the events take place — and thus about causal connections in the events of the narrative. (Kelly & Dickinson 1997: 267).

There was a clock above the entrance to the bay. Most days when we sat on our easy chairs we could not see it. Betty 2 was the only one who could see it but had di¹culty reading the time. Clock time was noted in relation to those parts of the day pegged by the staŸ and the hospital routines. The events, the ward rounds, the drinks times, the visitors times, the hoisting time, changing times, food times, random buzzing seemed to constitute the bases for our interactions, for our silences, for our evasion of any engagement. Time is like a piece of elastic…You make it long or short. You can make it short by laziness and indiŸerences. You can dwindle a day into a few minutes…You can stretch a day into a week. The E¹ciency Magazine, quotations from 1917–1919.

230 Sudi Sharifi

Narrative is also linked to self. It is not just a re¶exive practice. It describes an active lived process inseparable from self (Kelly & Dickinson 1997: 254). It is about lived experiences. It presents a version of the identity of the narrator and those being narrated. The account given is not an entity external to the person who is giving the account but it is the experience after the event. And, what that experience means to that person (ibid.).

Narratives also show that events and episodes are embedded in a spectrum of time; the past- the present and an anticipated future. –

In one programme we had pipers and 70 dancers. Pipers coming down the stairs plus fountains and waterfalls…then the principals… Ginger reminisced.

–

I was standing in the pit watching…three coloured women, it was odd those days… they sang a number which was Lawrence’s and in fact one night he asked me to go out with him. I did not go and as he went with others there was a bomb. I was just outside the Hippodrome when they were knocked down.

Betty2 went on hunger strike after she recovered from the third operation on her arm. She asked her friend to bring her corned beef sandwiches and Lucozade. Catherine ate crisps and cakes 3 times a day. Her washing bowl was ªlled with bags of crisps. A box of chocolate sat next to them. The good Scrabble player is not the one who uses permutations to get terriªc words on his rack, but the one who succeeds in making good placements on the board, even if the words are shorter and less impressive. (Latour 1996: 99)

There were also those times of the day which I called ‘Margaret’s times’. Margaret was a frail woman who had had a fall. Following her operation she did not have any desire to stay in her bed. Sleeping tablets did not seem to work on her. One of the nurses suggested that she was energetic. She seemed actually agitated. She would walk up and down the ward corridor and enter the side rooms greet patients and bless them. Each day and night a member of staŸ would follow her around. We knew she was awake or out of her bed as we heard people shouting: – – –

Margaret sit down, you will be tired… Margaret do you want a cup of tea… Margaret don’t go in that room…

She did not follow any of these instructions and was not interested in food. She would sit down at the reception and start tidying up the ªles. She had three sons who came to see her occasionally, we were told. Ginger told us that one night when she was in another bay, Margaret climbed onto her bed and nurses had to persuade her that that was not her bed. Ginger found it a frightening experience, as she was asleep at the time.

Ticking times and side cupboards … 231

And the suŸering detective Explanation or interpretation depends on the intentions of the narrator. (Latour 1988 in Czarniawska 1995: 19).

V. I. Warshawski had also stayed in hospital in the line of duty. She is a detective, whose emotions sometimes make her more determined in pursuing her objectives and thus unravelling the puzzles. Other times they seem to stall her. Frequently her memories of her late mother create more paradoxes for her. She owns a Chanel handbag and a couple of special suits, which are her tools in special cases, or may be a reminder of her femaleness? She is a detective with a strong sense for justice and fairness, and stamina for tough assignments and a thirst for solving white collar crime puzzles. She is the creation of Sara Paretsky. In her investigation of the murder of an immigrant woman prisoner, V. I. confronts the bosses of a security ªrm and Coolis prison in Chicago. The challenge lands her in prison… which of course fulªls her intention of being close to the scene of the crime and the culprits. May be too close, as her disguise is blown due to her curiosity and method. She is beaten up and injured… later she is in hospital and describes her sensations: I kept dozing oŸ into phantasmagonic dream, where I was eight, nine, ten, with my mother as she made me practice scale until my arms hurt…The snapping shutter roused me periodically. I could move my arm…I was in too much pain to weak …I shut my eyes again… I looked up and saw the machine that made decals ready to push into me. My arms were manacled to the bed and I couldn’t lift them… The next time I woke I realized the machine was the arm holding an IV drip…had lines running into both arms and an oxygen tube in my nose… I looked at my wrist. It was empty. I didn’t have my watch, my father’s watch that I had worn for twenty-ªve years. Lotty [an old friend] came back the next evening with another friend. The two together told me my story. ‘You were lucky Vic’, Lotty said. ‘But you also don’t have the habit of victims’. …There are no structural diŸerences between ªctive and factual narratives, and their respective powers of attraction are not ascertained by their claim to be fact or ªction. Instead these are negotiated between the storyteller and the listener, the reader and the text, the text and the author, various readers and diŸerent readings. …The narrative mode of knowing consists in organizing one’s own experience with the help of a scheme that assumes intentionality of human action. (Czarniawska 1995: 12).

232 Sudi Sharifi

– – –

You were so lucky Sudi… said Tracy one of my early visitors. Your number was not up yet…it seems said another. But you talk so normal…as if…nothing has happened… said Natalie.

I thought ‘normal’, how ordinary. Stories are said to capture the uniqueness and complexity of experiences (Phillips in Gold 1997). This is similar to the claim of ‘social constructionists’; that stories and narratives are tools by which we experience our world and deªne our realities. Reality making through language is seen as an ‘ordinary’ process, which may be found in any human organization (Peters & Rothenbuhler 1989, Gold 1997). –

You know, I am writing down words, to indicate a summary of main episodes, main things that I think are happening to me and what’s going on here….

–

That’s really a good idea…I think I will use this method for my research…when I read something… said Hina. There is a purpose for stories. They are the containers of our repertoires of individual and organizational experiences. They may be cause maps and thus include improvisations, self-fulªlling prophecies, and enactment. My narrative represents my version of events and episodes in which I had a part, either as an observer, as a patient having illusions and as a patient sharing the territory with other patients, carers, visitors, the equipment, the machines, the lights, the buzzers, the beds, the hoists, the radio in the corner, the ‘helping hand’, the ‘television woman’ and so on. My narrative also has within it the narrative of those who shared the time with me as patients. And it is their life-world and the way they made sense of their trauma and related events in times, past and present. Events are plotted into narrative by drawing on models, which are inter-subjectively shared. These models of narrative provide a temporal organization through which events are shown to have personal signiªcance (Kelly & Dickinson 1997). Whether there can be a beginning and an ending I could not be certain. Where would I start: the context of who I was, am, what I have been doing, experiencing?

–

You know after the accident I have been thinking ‘life is too short’.

This is the tape that I have been playing for most people who have been in my path to recovery. – –

Yes, it puts life into perspective. Most said. So I’ve decided to be a nicer person, you know, no back stabbing…no gossiping…I want to be more tolerant and patient…that’s what I am now anyway…!.

Ticking times and side cupboards … 233

Later on Catherine and I complained to one of the sisters about Betty 2 who moaned and groaned all day. And about the cleaning staŸ who did not clean our room. It was the ‘forbidden bay’ who could blame them really? They were reprimanded. I felt guilty, and told Catherine that perhaps we should have talked to the cleaning women ªrst. She said we had the right as patients. ‘Rights’? I thought, what rights? Then I remembered the ‘Patients Charter’. I was called Maria, because I reminded Ginger of some foreign lass. My baymates never asked who I was, or what I did. There was a long silence when I ªrst introduce myself and uttered my name. Individuals can objectify themselves in the way they imagine others perceive them to be and in the way they can objectify things in the external world. This objectiªcation does not require language it requires a particular narratable quality in the language. (Kelly & Dickinson 1997: 275).

We decided to entertain ourselves. Betty 2 suggested the ‘spy’ game. By then Betty 1 had left. Her daughter had found a place in a nursing home, which had some green gardens and better view. I started the spy game: – – – – –

I spy with my big eyes…, Nooh. I spy with my little eye… said Betty 2. Ok. I spy with my little eye , something starting with B. Bee? Betty2 was puzzled. We don’t have any Bee here?

Catherine and Betty2 started looking around the room. Ginger, smiling at us could not hear what we were saying. The evening concert was going to start soon and on Radio 3 and I was trying to listen to the announcement. Betty2 said – –

Something starting with Bee there is nothing here…? Yes, there is.

–

There was silence as their eyes were searching.

– – –

Ok do you want me to tell you what it is? Go on tell us. It wassss… Betty. They both shouted. Betty? But that starts with Beh. Oh… I see?

– –

I realised that I did not know the rules of the game. We continued. –

I spy with my little eye, something starting with ‘Shehh’ said Betty2.

Catherine and I looked around…I thought to myself something starting with S? Could it be Shirt?

234 Sudi Sharifi

–

Tell us.

Betty2 looked under her bed and said, –

My shoes…?. The thought that a human being is a composite creature consisting of body and mind is an ancient one. It is associated with common phenomena of human lives which mystify us, such as dreaming, in which we seem to inhabit a diŸerent world, unconnected with our sleeping body. (Hacker 1999: 14). We are so accustomed to communication through speech, in conversation, that it looks to us as if the whole point of communication lay in this: someone else grasps the sense in my words-which is something mental: he as it were takes it into his own mind… (Anscombe &Rhees 1958 in Hacker 1999: 33)

The fever brought about by my oozing wounds disrupted my night sleep. I was leaving a concert hall and quite a few of my friends were walking along with me. We came out it was winter and people were in long coats. We ¶agged down a taxi and then I was alone in the taxi looking through the back window seeing my friends walking away. I was feeling very warm. The lights in the corridor outside my room were dim. I could hear some people whispering. I was walking on sands. I heard a woman screaming and begging to be left alone and taken back to her house. –

Annie please be quiet. You are going to wake other patients up…

She was my temporary neighbour in Side Room 3. Side rooms were used for the initial stage of the trauma. Though later on they were used as isolation rooms. – – – – – – –

–

How are you today? asked Sally, one of the senior house o¹cers. I am ok. Rather warm. Are you in pain? Yes. I was last night. It is not easy to sleep here. Did you ask for pain killers? No. I want to feel my pain, to know where I have pain, and how long it will last, really. That’s not right. You need to sleep in order for your body to repair itself. I’m going to write for some sleeping tablets…for tonight…they should help you sleep more easily. Err…thanks Sally. The phrase ‘my pains’ does not specify what pains I have…It merely speciªes whose pains I am speaking of. (Hacker 1999: 22)

Ticking times and side cupboards … 235

– – –

How are you today, Maria? Pain? No not today… I know…

– –

How are you today? You know when you walk with your back sticking out, I know you are in pain… Thanks.

– – –

How are you now? In pain… I said pulling my face, my eyes and eyebrows. Good… she nodded turning back to her window and looking into distance. Where there is pain the cure will come; where the land is low the water will ¶ow. (Rumi in van de Weyer 1998: 26).

The long summer twilight seemed fading. I was one of the 4 patients in the waiting room. Mark, the physiotherpist, accompanied me to his consultation room. – – – –

A patient needs to be patient, I thought. Do you mind if Ian stays in the room listening to us… He is preparing for the ªnal stages of his qualiªcation? No. Ok what happened to you…?

The credits roll…. Does anyone write on a page already covered with writing? Does anyone plant a sapling in a woodland already ªlled with trees? (Rumi in van de Weyer 1998: 24).

Carpe Diem

Fluid tales A preservation of self in everyday life Robert Grafton Small Keele University, UK

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. (di Lampedusa 1989: 41) Only one thing is certain: right cannot be de facto; real society draws legitimacy not from itself but from a community which is not properly nameable, merely required. (Lyotard 1992: 61)

This began with a crisis of identity, more properly crises, there being others involved, not all of them me or mine. At a conference on odyssey and organisation, amid the plays of text, context and contrary reading, I discovered I didn’t exist. My abstract had been accepted, my money, too — I was a registered delegate, yet barely hours before my scheduled presentation, the paper itself (Grafton Small 2001) was declared a singular disappointment. In the eyes of one eminence — a previous sponsor, my writing, my completed submission, didn’t rightly re¶ect his expectations of it, or me. Too writerly, I asked myself, or not submissive enough? Either way, the subtext left no doubt: a last-minute rewrite — well presented — was my only hope. Delivered à deux, I was ¶oored by the ¶aw in my looking-glass self — a worry always but when your personal mirror is mainly for shaving? Had I become the creature from the lack, lacuna made ¶esh? Viddy horrorshow, malchicks, with worse to come. My defence, now and then, was and is Henry — not Henri, you’ll notice — de Lotbiniere, advocate and artist’s model. With seventy others of the seriously ill in two of London’s major hospitals, he volunteered to have his portrait painted (Figure 1). These pictures are a collective attempt by their subjects, and Mark Gilbert, the artist, to oŸer an exceptional account of contemporary beauty (Neustatter 2000), promoting aspects we normally ignore — render other — in our everyday aesthetics. Henry and the rest are clearly of us yet removed; their experiences make them exotic and recognisable at the same time. Patients and sitters, they are equally unsettled and unsettling, the physical changes conªrmed in each model’s determi-

238 Robert Grafton Small

nation to overcome their illness rather than become it. For them, to adapt — mutate — Susan Sontag (1990: 14–16), cancer is a disease, serious but with no meaning, no import, beyond itself — metastasis, not metaphor. And yet we commonly take the orders of a§iction, the hierarchies of suŸering and cure, to be telling disorders, making them sensible by anecdote and avoidance, familiar somehow, as the lawyer’s likeness appears at ªrst. This picture, though, is paradoxical: a public declaration of belonging — de Lotbiniere’s a professional and a model patient — and private too, an individual assertion of will, written on his body, by his body. The scars of Henry’s suŸering — ªfteen operations in twelve years — are an explicit counterpoint to the ritual structures encoded in his costume, not tribal decoration like the wig and gown but a challenge to that same orthodoxy. Handsome and cancerous, he was excluded — until his excisions; will such ugliness prove admissible, in court and in practice, now the greater is gone? Accepting the compressed chronology of portraiture, enough of a life to boast about (Manguel 2001: 127), we see the history of Henry’s decay as he watched himself — re¶ecting on his own reduction? — in a long haul of hospital mirrors. These piecemeal deaths, each growth a belittlement, also suggest clips from cinéma vérité — perhaps Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killing, the survivor’s story. However, our right of inspection, the power of our gaze, is restricted to a single, motionless picture. It may — is meant to — move us, demanding a reading, yet only we can invent these exegeses (Derrida 1998a: 5), shaping and shifting our endless narratives within the limits, the frame imposed by this form of telling. So the lawyer’s ordeal is his odyssey and his katabasis, a modern example of classical analogies (Sontag 1990: 7), derided and still deep-rooted — routed? — linking health and harmony. For their murderous march from Persia, Xenophon (1984: 143–144) marshals a whole body of the whole in body, not those with holes in their bodies like the o¹cer, a fellow Greek, left to die because his ears are pierced in the Lydian manner. Discipline and punish, in short. When de Lotbiniere is made a Cyclops by his cancers, the law is neither blind nor balanced but cut by its own sword. On a similar point, Polyphemus is a cannibal (Homer 1988: 106–107), consuming men’s ¶esh as Henry eats away at himself. Playing more to the gallery, how can portraits be this meaningful nowadays when our collective understanding makes us doubt any lasting signiªcance for ourselves (Lynton in Gibson 2000: 7)? As Warhol realised in, and through, his artworks’ artworks — the ªrehouse before the Factory — even our stars shimmer with insecurity. Andy’s multiples are also doubly mediated, images we know from the media presented in ways that mimic those same media. On his silkscreens — Marilyn (1962), say — every outline is slightly oŸ-key, ¶ickering like ªlm or a colour TV with the blur of movement and impermanence. Figures, too, are overlaid on themselves within a single frame — a frieze of slow-motion photography, each icon

Fluid tales 239

being restored before it is complete. Elvis (1963), for instance, stands shoulder to shoulder with a second, identical and surely not his dead twin…. Yet some shadow of the other is always present, evoked by the stories we tell, we inhabit, in living our daily lives. Consider, then, that Celan (Williams 2001), Deleuze and Debord (Houellebecq 2001: 297) decided independently that they could no longer, would no longer, keep up the instalments. Never conspirators — one stab at caesura left them breathless — they chose to die when we might believe they were content with, as well as contents of, their respective scripts, psyches and situations. Perhaps Paul was buried by the ruins of his past while Gilles and Guy were past becoming ruins. Gallows humour, maybe, but because ‘we escape frivolity only at the semantic risk of nonidentity’ (Derrida 1987: 128), an impression remains from their self-denial, their undoubted denial of self: we must be serious about our trivialities if we mean to go on as we are. Undermining our own standing reveals another layer in this archaeology of the shallow (Derrida 1987: 118–119). Through the demotic ªctions of mature structures and structured maturity, we all allow ourselves to forget and be forgotten, overwriting as we feel we ought — Winston Smith en masse. We also draw like Warhol, on everything we see and hear — Andy famously had no feel for the tactile, those competing accounts and cultural forms that reassure us as readily as they corrode any sign of constancy. The celebrated suicides were undone by these endless interplays of discourse and diŸerence. Feeling themselves fall from some imagined existence, our readings of what they had each achieved in public, they preferred to let go entirely. Representation, then, cannot preserve life, only expose its undoing (van Alphen 1998: 14). Henry’s could be cast as a tale of power, a minority ªnding its voice, yet the sick and the unsightly must be proscribed before they can challenge the laws of beauty and the beauty of law. The rigours of their treatments, too, may be resisted if an early death is easier than salvaging an individual identity from the wreckage of some unaccountable illness. We’d ªnd it odd, even so, if this intensely personal decision didn’t include at least one second opinion, adding another element of uncertainty to any resolution of the original problem. In a textual parallel, an editor read my paper at the conference where it was rejected and decided, in between bites of a breakfast savoury, to publish the piece unaltered. My blemish, my unsightly growth, had become a beauty spot. Symbolic inversions aside — bread was broken while I was made whole again — there is more at stake here than simply the appetites of an academic with a book to ªll (Linstead 2003). Clearly, some sense of self is being created and consumed, recreated, rather, by its consumption, but whose? Beyond my immediate judges and all the formations of privilege apparent at every conference, the host culture asserted itself with a display of hospitality, displacing us all through our own rituals of

240 Robert Grafton Small

community. At the gala dinner held in this or that three-star restaurant, its sky-blue ceiling studded with the names of now stellar chefs who’d worked there, several hundred sat down to eat. Special provision had already been made for the vegetarians to declare themselves so I was surprised to meet only meat on the menu. A waiter voiced my raw concern to the utterly unru§ed maître d’: ‘Poisson, m’sieur?’ Is that root or pulse, I wondered inwardly, for want of anything substantial. Later, over coŸee, a full professor on the same table noticed signs being put up at either end of the room, directing us to the returning coaches. Our tickets promised one in the morning; we were gone by midnight. Viscerally opposed to the Slow Food Movement (Hughes 2001), this celebration of compressed chronology illustrates the art of mass production rather than the mass production of art — multiplicity, not multiples. The one-track carte du jour, singular yet with several courses, subjects delegates to everyday orders of industrial process and the commodiªcation of individual demand. There’s more than a ¶avour here of de facto force-feeding: any colour you want ‘so long as it is black.’ On campus the morning after, an indigenous don said with some regret that she and her colleagues were certain from the advance details, the dinner would turn out as it did. Together, they sold their tickets at a discount and spent the cash — the chef got a budget and a chance to show oŸ — in a local restaurant much closer to their tastes and their hotel. I’d have been invited but they knew I was meeting other people at the gala, friendship and politics being the only good reasons for bothering. So local understandings of the structures inherent in a formal assembly, those stories from the belly of the beast, were, are, left unspoken because of social constraints (Geertz 1993: 167–170). A legitimate tale, it seems, is not always legitimately told yet when did legitimate telling ensure a legitimate tale? Once upon a time, at BSkyB’s call centre in Livingston, near Edinburgh, the Customer Services Director was Alan Dawson. Letters were sent to subscribers in his name but with a gap, a lapsus, at the bottom like he’d forgotten to sign them — omitted the subscript. Callers with complaints, or queries about their accounts, would if they insisted on speaking ‘to someone in authority’, be transferred from one customer relations representative to a second, usually male to female or vice versa and posing as Alan’s assistant, say, some member of his personal staŸ. The director, however, was always unavailable, explicitly because of his work and importance, implicitly because he didn’t exist and never had, except as a form of talk. Along with their headsets and computer screens, company trainees learnt from line managers of this bodiless corporate creation who embodied a creative corporation. An improbable investment in re¶exivity — autocracy to autocritique, Mr Murdoch? — Alan Dawson is a simulacrum among orders of symbols (Baudrillard 1993: 75). Texts and telephones encode — portray — every individual within the

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organisation yet he is reproduced — re¶ected — on an industrial scale, an icon of authority made more potent, more mysterious, by the absence of any ultimate accountability. His deferral means, in addition, any degree of care you want so long as it is lack, all enquiries being dealt with on a common level by the same representatives. Eventually, though, and inevitably (Benjamin 1992: 214–215), Alan’s ‘aura’ did melt, into the too too solid ¶esh of Jennifer Howie, a singularly tangible presence and no stranger, I’m told, to a ªsh supper. Large-scale consumption is also behind the initially puzzling move from Dawson’s clique, collective ªction in a world where Max Headroom is old hat, to Jenny, woman on the verge of digital TV. Our appetite for more than calls or correspondence — those never close enough encounters — eats away at Alan’s supposed self, that façade of what is, in practice, a team performance for two audiences (GoŸman 1976: 97): subscribers, the public, and backstage, the impresari, the call centre managers. Workers who commonly relate to customers on this basis must inhabit similar tensions individually, knowing themselves to be formally lacking in status and poorly paid for jobs which include, and exceed, acting as a director. On canvas rather than board, (van Alphen 1998: 148), Francis Bacon blurs his sitters, their bodies not framed but bleeding between inside and out, in portraits framed for others to stare at. This situation, mine and yours, our distance from the other, the other’s distance, shows we have yet to become ourselves (Derrida 1988: 88–89). Private views, diaries and interior monologues — unread and unsaid, will never be su¹cient; the detour through another, the recognition of someone else, is necessary, vital, if we are to live our desires as we desire our lives. Signally, the same urge uncovers a darkness at the heart of BSkyB in Livingston — Stanley’s original is elsewhere (Lindqvist 1998: 39,42). What we want, what we expect, from the various forms of telling — our demands on the call centre staŸ and their chorus of responses — exceeds any semblance of an executive, however well it’s managed. Only an execution of selfhood shall satisfy us, a presence with a past, opened to interpretation as Henry de Lotbiniere has been by his picture and his press (Neustatter 2000), his profession and his diagnoses. A lack, though, of some equivalent may make the Customer Services Director easier for his representatives to enact (GoŸman 1976: 75,78), the void echoing that social distance they share with most of the subscribers who endorse the further detachment already prescribed by their letters and phone calls. This, even so, is not enough to protect the front-line recipients. They must suŸer post amounting to hate mail because of their posts within the centre, and far worse, in the name of that authority they claim to embody, from callers who believe Alan’s personal staŸ are there to be shouted at — sacriªces to rung rage.

242 Robert Grafton Small

There is also a perverse intimacy about these orders of storytelling: behind the mostly spoken lies an unspoken yet tangible truth — a palp ªction — of everyday working life here in Livingston — get this wrong, or fail to convince, and you earn a living elsewhere. Still fear is not the key, despite the frights of an aesthetically challenging lawyer — might he represent you as he does himself? — and the genuinely ugly idea of sponsored insincerity (GoŸman 1976: 28–29) passing for customer care. More sociably, over a selection of rôles and her own cooking, Mary Douglas (1975: 249–250) confesses that she and her family share a home but cannot agree on what, and how much, they should be eating at suppertime, given the appetites of any culture where a meal together at the end of the day is dismissed as ‘humble and trivial’. The professor’s belowstairs story is at the foundations of both her domestic and her professional standing yet only she speaks of either. The others around the table are her raw ingredients and helped to themselves when Mary outplays Andronicus — tops Titus — in cooking her own. Lévi-Strauss aside, order — of the self and the social — is being structured here, and eaten away in the process, as Mother Douglas is grilled by her dependents (Douglas 1975: 250): ‘What a lot of plates. Why do you make such elaborate suppers?’ Proximity has its confusions then, and the commonplace excesses that consume us as we consume them (Bataille 1991: 22–23). However, in Mary’s household, the entire family takes an active part in shaping her various rôles (GoŸman 1976: 20–21), putting ¶esh on each one to ªll out their own, and becoming themselves by supporting her. At BSkyB, similar asymmetries of speech and the spoken for are used by the contact staŸ to stop subscribers rewriting the script that contains them (GoŸman 1976: 97–98), maintaining the make-up of the Customer Services Director through frames of meaning shared to inhibit the other, the other than Alan. But the abyss will not be denied; the need to tell tales of any kind is a cruel reminder of our own decay (Dekkers 2000: 245). Equally, more Freud than frayed, the ways in which we try to destroy our lives are integral to our life stories (Phillips 1999: 71) yet the living end of narrative coherence. This being so, I am indeed a creature from the lack, lacuna on legs — no self-reference can be complete — like you and everybody else. The biographies we commonly construct, of ourselves and each other, are ªctions; we are persuaded, because of their balance, by accounts which don’t add up to a whole person (Phillips 1999: 108–109). In sum — all, assemble, resemble, dissemble. This unnatural clarity is a necessary distortion, an artiªce of everyday culture that enables cultured existence. Together, others’ views of what, or whom, I ought to be, and my own disquiet at seeming someone else, represent an organisation of self as the self of an organisation is denoted by Alan Dawson and his dedicated staŸ.

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However, not being the individual I thought I was will allow, compel, me to become myself again, to redeem — reconstitute — my life around what I imagine might be our mutual future. BSkyB can only a¹rm its — their — identity by skipping from one codiªed presence to a separate, more ¶exible, second, though the transgender shapeshifting does show an unlooked-for sense of style which, ironically, cannot be broadcast if we are to understand such a coup de théâtre as we should. Critically, my own painful unmasking reveals a Janus aspect, that editor’s other view of me, lacking in the loss of face suŸered by those customer service representatives who become the support for Jennifer Howie after playing Alan’s personal staŸ to often hostile houses. This shrinking of their supposed status may be the cue for a genuine reduction in barracking but there is also a less entrancing quality to these now minor rôles — the thrill is gone. Both the challenge and the satisfaction of developing an impromptu persona disappear when the director takes a speaking part, openly on her own account and indirectly through the decisions she makes on others’ behalf, lining managers up with the rest. These compressions of self, portrayed in industrial terms time after time after time — every working day, evoke Andy Warhol’s multiples. Organised in frames or framed in an organisation, the end result is a ‘steady stream of momentum and variation that at some outer limit seems stable and motionless’ (Jameson 1994: 17). Scale has little importance here; from an average — any — body to the largest imaginable social structure, our deªnitions of order are always incomplete, made permeable by their transience and plastic by the cross-border tra¹c that creates them. So Jennifer Howie, for one, may eat much as her workforce does yet ªnd her corporate proªle eroded if their share, as they see it, of eŸort and responsibility, is less than she might want. These interplays of onus and outline also describe de Lotbiniere’s situation: his call to the bar and the barrier caused by his unspeakable scarrings. The lawyer evidently means us to see him this way though the way he means us to see him — hung meat, cut and dressed, the symbol of his life so far — is surely ambiguous, Bacon beneath that tortured skin. Henry’s ethnography of himself, and our reaction to what he has become, show ªne art and common speech feeding on one another as we do, to sustain the signs and the signature of our own being. The other is raised here, too, as others raze our traces with their readings (Derrida 1979: 127,129). A trace of raising can be read in the tinned Campbell’s that did so much to nurture Warhol (Shanes 1993: 18) and his artistry. The trademark trope — 32 Soup Cans (1961–1962) a case among many — reproduces Andy’s (Warhol 1975: 101) product-based philosophy in condensed form: ‘no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking’. Of course, none of the tins is airtight. A Tunaªsh Disaster (Warhol 1963) threatens each of us, whatever our personal tastes, because the contents are deliberately

244 Robert Grafton Small

indeterminate, made to mimic production lines and the immanent consumption of supermarket displays. My particular preference for Baxters ‘Lentil & Vegetable’ does nothing to dilute the democratic impulse, ring-pull opening or no…. Containment, then, is a communal acknowledgement of leakage, our way of dealing with everyday uncertainties (Virilio 1998: 106–107). What we can’t account for in a single telling becomes the basis and the reason for another, just as any audience is always a retelling within others’ frames of reference, other forms of talk. This, like less naive art, hasn’t much to do with appearances (Bennett 1997: 18); ordinary middle-aged men in raincoats can be agents of the sublime — Harry looks after himself. Closer to home, my own frame is often referred to — I am framed — by the duŸel draping me most winter’s days, but transcendence does not follow though I do keep taking the drugs. On the similarly mercurial margin between night and day, Haile Selassie (Kapuscinski 1984: 7–9) ran an entire empire by anecdote. As my identity is tailored from the tales of a duŸel coat rather than its contents, he dictated light and shade, the letter of the law, to re¶ect informers’ dawn exposés, the plots themselves still shrouded. Selassie, too, was overshadowed, the Dark Negus eclipsed, when the abyss that swallowed Celan ªnally gaped for him. While in each case the compression is chronic — both are penned for decades in every sense — some vital part of the poet dies in conªnement, beyond the symbolic power and life of his writing. The Emperor, poetically, is the inverse, outliving his rôle as a symbol of power to die a prisoner. Recently, I was reading a possible memoir of the displaced and the dispossessed — emigrants — when the author’s death was announced, a German undone in East Anglia (Sebald 1997: 100): ‘telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.’ This paradox is commonplace; others embody the alien, giving voice to the other within whenever they speak. Finding themselves only in translation — lives of their own in someone else’s language — they also play a part in our theatre of the everyday (Derrida 1998b: 72–73), with betrayal — the said yet misunderstood, the heard and not intended — a feature of the cultural ¶ux. My story is here as well. I’m alienated by my own body, auto-immune disorders are unspoken now, not unspeakable — a sign o’ the times, and those drugs are hardly what you might imagine. Neither is the disease. Even so, I inhabit my ‘past self, using it as a ¶esh peg on which to hang passages of analysis’ (Mars-Jones 2002). Analyses of my passage, too, ¶eshed out by mouthfuls from other talk of forms and others’ writings.

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I have never had an exaggerated interest in my own person, but unfortunately that did not imply I could stop thinking about myself at will, from one moment to the next. (Nooteboom 1996: 5)

Figure 1. The picture used here comes from one of the many thousand identical postcards given away in 2001 to promote the Saving Faces exhibition shown a year later at the National Gallery. When I rang the contact number on the card, for permission to reproduce it in print, I was told that the publishers, London Cardguide Ltd., had ceased trading. The company’s customers and phone lines have been taken over by another ªrm but not the relevant copyright which remains, presumably, with the failed concern. Since then and sadly, after seventeen operations prompted by his tumours, the model, Henry de Lotbiniere, died of pneumonia on 1st October, 2002.

About the authors and the editors

Brian Bloomªeld holds a Chair in Technology and Organisation at Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University, United Kingdom. His research interests include the sociology of technology and in particular the relationship between technology and problems of social order. He has published in the ªelds of sociology, the sociology of science, and organization studies. Recent publications include: “The Outer Limits: Monsters, Actor Networks and the Writing of Displacement”, Organization, 6(4), 1999, (with Theo Vurdubakis); “In the Right Place at the Right Time: Electronic Tagging and Problems of Social Order/Disorder”, Sociological Review, 49(2), 2001. E-mail: b.bloomª[email protected] Hervé Corvellec is Associate Professor at Kristianstad University College, Sweden. His research deals with organization theory and behavioral accounting whereas his theoretical tools are borrowed from cultural studies, narratology and rhetoric. He has published articles in English and Swedish, as well as two books: Stories of Achievement (Transaction Publishers, 1997) and På tal om tredje spåret (Talking of the Third Track at Riddarholmen; BAS, 2002). E-mail: herve.corvellec@staŸ.hkr.se Barbara Czarniawska holds a Skandia Chair in Management Studies at Gothenburg Research Institute, School of Economics and Commercial Law, Göteborg University, Sweden. Her research focuses on organizing in action nets, most recently in the ªeld of big city management. In terms of methodology, she favors the narrative approach. She has published in the area of business and public administration in Polish, her native language, as well as in Swedish, Italian and English, the recent positions being Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity (University of Chicago Press 1997), A Narrative Approach to Organization Studies (Sage 1998), Writing Management (Oxford University Press 1999) and A Tale of Three Cities (Oxford University Press 2002). A member of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2000, a member of Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences since 2001. E-mail: [email protected] Valérie-Inés de La Ville is Assistant Professor in organization studies and business policy at the Business Administration Department (I. A. E.) of the University of Poitiers (France) where she has been running a training and research unit focused on children-orientated markets since 1997. She graduated at E. M. Lyon and holds a PhD. in entrepreneurial strategies from the University Jean Moulin Lyon 3 (France). Her research interests are in the collective foundation of entrepreneurial and strategic undertakings, the dialogical processes of strategy formation, and the epistemological challenges at stake within idiographic studies. Her ªelds of interest are entrepreneurship and strategic innovations in children-orientated markets. E-mail: [email protected]

248 About the authors and the editors

Pasquale Gagliardi is Professor of Sociology of Organization at the Catholic University of Milan, and Managing Director of ISTUD-Istituto Studi Direzionali (an Italian management institute). During the 1980s he contributed to the foundation and development in Europe of SCOS, the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism. His present research focuses on the relationship between culture, aesthetic knowledge and organizational order. He has published books and articles on this topic in Italian. In English, he has edited Symbols and Artifacts: Views of the Corporate Landscape (de Gruyter 1990) and co-edited Studies of Organizations in the European Tradition, vol. 13 in the series Research in the Sociology of Organizations (JAI Press 1995). Professor Gagliardi is a consultant to many large Italian corporations, and Secretary General of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. He also serves on the Editorial Boards of Organization Studies and Organization. E-mail: [email protected] Robert Grafton Small holds a CNAA doctorate on social aspects of consumption. Prematurely retired after posts in Marketing at Strathclyde and Organisational Symbolism at St. Andrews, he has been damned with high praise and a meagre medical pension. Currently an honorary professor at Keele University’s Department of Management, he maintains an active interest in original research and still publishes regularly in several disciplines. E-mail: [email protected] Paul Hirsch is James Allen Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Organization at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He studies the important roles of discourse and the framing of issues for management and social action. Hirsch has studied the growth of and language surrounding “hostile takeovers,” “globalization,” and the “diŸusion of innovation.” He is co-executive editor of the Journal of Management Inquiry and has published articles in Organization Science, American Journal of Sociology, and Administrative Science Quarterly. E-mail: [email protected] Heather Höp¶ was until recently Professor of Organisational Psychology and Head of the School of Operations Analysis and Human Resource Management at the University of Northumbria. She resigned from this post in December 2002. She is now Professor of Management at the University of Essex, UK. Her recent works include articles in the Journal of Management Studies, Body and Society, and the Journal of Organizational Change Management. She is interested in the humanisation of management and has recently published two edited books, Interpreting the Maternal Organization with Monika Kostera, Warsaw University and Casting the Other with Barbara Czarniawska, Göteborg University. E-mail: heatherhop¶@hotmail.com David Metz is a Research Fellow at Copenhagen Business School, Department of Organizational and Industrial Sociology, Denmark. He has previously taught Master level social psychology at the University of Copenhagen and worked as a freelance consultant for a number of NGO’s and in the health sector. He is currently preparing a Ph.D. thesis on identities and work lives of freelancers working with IT. A mix of post-structuralism, actor-network theory and narrative inspirations dominates his theoretical approach. E-mail: [email protected] John Monin is Head of the Department of Management & International Business, College of Business, in the Auckland Campus of Massey University, New Zealand. In his MA degree from

About the authors and the editors 249

Canterbury University he majored in Latin, and his PhD is in information systems. He is a member of the NZ Computer Society, and of the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management. His research interests range from strategic management, and knowledge management, to the language of management. E-mail: [email protected] Nanette Monin is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management and International Business, at Massey University’s Auckland Campus, New Zealand. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Otago, an MBS in Management from Massey University, and a PhD from the University of Auckland. Her research interests include the discourse of management, approaches to text analysis, and narratology and social issues. She has published papers on metaphor theory, dramatism, and the deconstruction of management theory, and is the co-editor of Narratives of Business & Society: DiŸering New Zealand Voices. E-mail: [email protected] Eléonore Mounoud is Assistant Professor at Ecole Centrale Paris (France) in business policy and organization studies. She was educated at INA-PG in Paris where she graduated in agricultural engineering. She then worked for ªrms and research agencies as a consultant about environmental issues and technologies. She studied the management of innovation at Ecole Centrale Paris and holds a PhD in business policy from HEC Paris (France). Her research interests are in the social dimensions of managerial discourses, their role in strategy making and the study of managerial practices. Her ªelds of interest are the “green industry” and innovations in information technologies. E-mail: [email protected] Gerardo Patriotta is Associate Professor of Strategic Management at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, The Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. in Business Studies from the University of Warwick, UK. His research interests include the phenomenology of knowing and organizing, organizational sensemaking, the study of institution building in organizations, strategy and organization. He has recently published his ªrst book Organizational Knowledge in the Making: How Firms Create, Use, and Institutionalize Knowledge (Oxford University Press 2003). E-mail: [email protected] Hayagreeva Rao is the Richard L. Thomas Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at the Kellogg School of Management. He studies the social sources and consequences of organizational change. His most recent publication, co-authored with Phillipe Monin and Rodolphe Durand is “Institutional Change in Toque Ville: Nouvelle Cuisine as an Identity Movement in French Gastronomy”, American Journal of Sociology, November, 2002. E-mail: [email protected] Daniel Robichaud is Assistant Professor of organizational communication in the Department of Communication, University of Montréal, Canada. His research focuses primarily on language uses and communication in organizing. His recent work addresses the recursivity of conversation as a constitutive processes of organizing. His work has been published in The American Journal of Semiotics and Communication Theory. E-mail: [email protected]

250 About the authors and the editors

Sudi Shariª is a Senior Lecturer in Organizational Analysis at the School of Management, University of Salford, Greater Manchester, UK. Her research has focused on forms of organizing and organizational sensemaking. She has been involved in pan-European research projects such as PACE and CODESCO, which have focused on teaming and decision-making processes in New Product Design. Recently she has focused on the notion of complex evolving systems for interpretation of organizing processes and forms. She has published and co-authored papers in the areas of organizational sense making, virtual teaming and managerial work. Some of her most recent articles include: “Virtually co-located product design teams: Sharing teaming experiences after the event?” (with Kul Pawar) International Journal of Production and Operations Management, 22 (6), 2001; “Managing the product design process: Exchanging knowledge and experiences” (with Kul Pawar) International Journal of Integrated Manufacturing Systems, 13(2), 2002; and “Organizational learning and resistance to change in Estonian companies”, (with Ruth Alas), Human Resource Development International, 5(3), 2002. E-mail: S.Shariª@salford.ac.uk Anne-Marie Søderberg is Professor of Organizational Communication at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Her research interests are located at the interface between organizational theory, cultural and communication studies. She has studied international acquisitions of Danish companies within the telecommunications industry and is currently involved in a large Nordic research project on cross-border mergers in the ªnancial sector. She has published numerous articles in English, German and Danish with a discourse analytical or narrative approach to intercultural communication and cross-border management issues. She is an author and editor of several books, two of which have been published in English: Cultural Dimensions of International Mergers and Acquisitions (Walter de Gruyter 1998), and Merging Across Borders. People, Cultures, and Politics (Copenhagen Business School Press, 2003). E-mail: [email protected]

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Name index

A Adams, Scott 223, 251 Akrich, Madeleine 152–153, 251 Allen, Woody 179n Alvarez, Rossana C. 251 Alvesson, Mats 11, 30, 251 Andersen, Hans Christian 174–176, 186 Andrews, Edmund 140, 251 Aristotle 251 Ash, Timothy Garton ix, 251 B Bakhtin, Mikhail 11, 21, 251 Bal, Mieke 9, 10, 12, 251 Barley Stephen R. 258 Barry, David 96, 251 Barthes, Roland vii, 63, 64, 132n, 251 BassoŸ, Paula 260 Bataille, Georges 242, 251 Baudrillard, Jean 240, 251 Bauman, Zygmunt 209, 251 Begin, Guy 49, 257 Belenky, Mary F. 251 Benford, Robert D. 263 Benjamin, Walter 90, 91, 241, 251 Bennett, Alan 244, 251 Bennis, Warren 62, 251 Blau, Peter M. 151, 251 Bloom, Harold 251 Bloomªeld, Brian P. vi, viii, 193, 196, 197, 206n, 247, 252 Boje, David M. vii, 13, 37, 38, 120, 252 Bourdieu, Pierre 131, 144, 252 Bowman, CliŸ 96, 97, 258 Bronson, Po 189, 191, 252 Brooke-Rose, Christine 255 Bruner, Jerome 8, 252 Brunsson, Nils 140, 144, 252

C Calás, Marta B. 60, 61, 252 Callon, Michel 96, 181, 186, 252 Campbell, E. Jane 59, 263 Campbell, Murray S. 203, 252 Caputo, John D. 63, 64, 252 Carlsmith, James 181, 255 Carlson, Marvin 117, 252 Carter, Chris 96, 252 Caudwell, Christopher 252 Chatman, Seymour 9, 253 Chittipeddi, Kumar 6–7, 256 Cicourel, Aaron V. 252 Clair, Robin P. 38, 253 Clark, Peter A. 96, 111, 252, 253 Clark, Timothy 64, 253 Clarke, Arthur C. 193, 201n, 202, 204, 205, 209, 253 Clarke, I. F. 197, 253 Clemens, Elisabeth 143, 253 Clinchy, Blythe McV. 251 Cohen, John 202, 253 Collins, Frank 39, 261 Cooper, Robert 90, 151–153, 194, 209, 261 Cooren, François vii, 149, 253 Corbett, J. Martin 193, 253 Corvellec, Hervé v, viii, 41n, 115, 116n, 132, 247, 253 Courtés, Joseph 40, 42n, 253, 257 Culler, Jonathan 255 Currie, Mark 8, 11, 253 Czarniawska [-Joerges], Barbara vii, 11, 14, 16, 30, 37, 38, 44, 45, 52, 60, 63, 64, 89, 101, 103, 104, 108, 111, 117n, 138, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 169, 170, 181, 187, 196, 222, 231, 247, 253, 254, 262

268 Name index

D Danesi, Marcel 39, 261 Davis, Gerald 137, 140, 264 de Certeau, Michel viii, 86, 95, 97, 101–105, 107–113, 209, 254 de La Ville, Valérie v, viii, 95, 97, 247, 254 de Lotbiniere, Henry 237, 238, 241, 243, 245 de Man, Paul 90, 254 De Souza, Ronald 254 Deetz, Stanley 11, 30, 252 Dekkers, Midas 242, 254 Derrida, Jacques 89, 238, 239, 241, 243, 244, 252, 254, 263 Descombes, Vincent 44, 254 Deuten, J. Jasper 196, 254 di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi 237, 254 Dickinson, Hilary 229, 232, 233, 258 DiMaggio, Paul J. 139, 175, 254, 262 Docherty, Thomas 76–77, 86, 255 Douglas, Mary 242, 255 Drucker, Peter 57–59, 61, 63, 66–67, 72, 73, 255 E Earle, John S. 255 Eco, Umberto 63, 64, 255 Edwards, Derek 166, 260 Elmes, Michael 96, 252 Enomoto, Tokihiko 60, 255 Evans, James 258 F Feldman, Martha S. 111, 255 Festinger, Leon 181, 255 Fish, Stanley 63, 64, 255 Fisher, Walter R. vii, 38, 255 Fleck, James 202, 255 Fleck, Ludwik 200, 255 Follett, Mary Parker 57–74, 251, 252, 255 Frankenstein, Dr. 189n, 194, 195n, 199, 200, 209, 262 Frege, Gottlob 220, 227, 255 Freund, Elizabeth 64, 255 Frydman, Roman 145, 255 G Gabriel, Yannis vii, 11, 14, 122

Gagliardi, Pasquale v, vii, 248 Gamson, William A. 143, 255 Garªnkel, Harold 180, 255 Garªnkel, Simson 205, 255 Geertz, CliŸord ix, 175, 240, 255 Genette, Gerard 9, 256 Gergen, Kenneth J. 120, 182, 256, 262 Gertsen, Martine C. 5, 13, 256 Gibson, William 190, 256 Giddens, Anthony 111, 130, 179–181, 256, 265 Gillespie, James 147, 257 Ginzburg, Carlo 151, 167–168, 256 Gioia, Dennis A. 6–7, 256 Giroux, Hélène 262 GoŸman, Erving 241–242, 256 Gold, JeŸ 232, 256 Goldberger, Nancy R. 251 Grafton Small, Robert vi, viii, 102, 103, 237, 248, 256, 259 Graham, Pauline 57, 59, 61–62, 251, 255, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261 Granovetter, Mark 99, 257 Greimas, Algirdas J. viii, 6, 11–12, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 31–32, 37, 39–44, 49–52, 257, 261 Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre 196, 254 Guimond, Serge 165, 257 Guy, Mary E. 59, 61, 260 H Habermas, Jürgen 130, 257 Hacker, Peter M. S. 234, 257 HAL 9000 193–195, 199, 201–212, 261 Haraway, Donna 181, 257 Harben, John 34, 257 Hardy, Cynthia 196, 257 Harré, Rom 200, 257 Hasek, Jaroslav 146, 257, 262 Hatch, Mary Jo 112, 149, 155, 253, 257, 258 Helrrigel, Eugen 257 Hesketh, Graham L. 129, 259 Higgins, Matthew 261 Hill, Terry 157, 257 Hirsch, Paul viii, 137, 138, 143, 145, 147, 248, 257, 262 Hoch-Smith, Judith 257 Homer 238, 257

Name index 269

Höp¶, Heather v, viii, 75, 248, 257 Hopwood, Anthony 224, 229, 257 Horsdal, Marianne 9, 257 Houellebecq, Michel 239, 257 Hrabal, Bohumil 146, 257 Huczynski, Andrew 63, 64, 257 Hughes, Natasha 240, 257 Huxley, Thomas H. 168–169, 258

Lindqvist, Sven 241, 259 Linstead, Stephen L. 239, 252, 257, 259 Loft, Ann 224, 229, 257 Loy, John W. 129, 259 Luhmann, Niklas 198, 259 Luis, Meryl Reis 162, 259 Lynton, Norbert 238, 259 Lyotard, Jean-François 130, 132, 237, 259

I Irigaray, Luce 258

M Machiavelli, Niccolo 188, 259 Madsen, Morten 183n, 259 Malone, Thomas W. 175, 182n, 259 Manguel, Alberto 238, 259 March, James 144, 259 Mars-Jones, Adam 244, 259 Martin, Joanne vii, 5, 259 Mathiesen, SteŸen F. 33, 41, 260, 263 Mejstrik, Michal 260 Metz, David v, viii, 173, 248, 260 Meyer, John W. 140–141, 174–175, 260 Michael, Mike 260 Middleton, David 166, 260 Miner, Anne S. 112, 260 Mintzberg, Henry 61, 63, 67–68, 72–73, 96, 260 Moi, Toril 260 Monden, Yasuhiro 260 Monin, John v, viii, 57, 248–249 Monin, Nanette v, viii, 57, 249 Moorman, Christine 260 Morgan, Gareth 61, 90, 252 Morgan, Glen 96, 196, 258 Moscovici, Serge 109, 165, 260 Mounoud, Eléonore v, viii, 95, 98, 104, 108, 249, 260 Mueller, Frank 96, 252 Mumby, Dennis K. 38, 260 Myers, Greg 201, 260

J Jackson, Brad G. 64, 258 Jameson, Fredric 243, 258 Jaynes, Julian 258 Jensen, Jesper B. 182, 258 Jensen, Lisa 61, 258 Joerges, Bernward 181, 253 Johnson, Gerry 96, 97, 258 Joyce, Emmett 146, 262 K Kanter, Rosabeth Moss 7–8, 59–61, 63, 69– 70, 72–73, 258 Kaplan, Robert S. 118, 258 Kapuscinski, Ryszard 244, 258 Kelly, Michael 229, 232, 233, 258 Klaus, Vaclav 139, 142–143, 258 Klima, Ivan 146, 258 Knights, David 96, 196, 258 Knorr Cetina, Karin 252 Kolb, Deborah M. 61, 258 Kristeva, Julia 76–77, 80, 82, 90, 258, 260 Kunda, Gideon 182, 187, 258 Kurzweil, Ray 207n, 258 L Larsen, Mogens Holten 34, 253, 258 Latour, Bruno 53, 117n, 162, 181, 183, 194n, 196, 230, 231, 252, 258, 259 Laubacher, Robert J. 175, 182n, 259 Law, John 151–153, 175n, 258, 259, 263 Lawrence, Paul R. 58, 61, 259 Le¹ngwell, William 224, 259 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 242, 259 Lightfoot, GeoŸ 261

N Nash, Cristopher 257, 260 Nelson, Richard 111, 260 Neustatter, Angela 237, 241, 260 Newman, Meredith A. 59, 61, 260 Nohria, Nitin 58, 61, 260 Nooteboom, Cees 245, 261

270 Name index

Norton, David P. 118, 258 Nowotny, Helga 198, 255, 261 O O’Brien, Barbara 82, 261 O’Connor, Ellen 96, 109, 261 Ocasio, William 144, 261 Ochs, Elinor 9, 11, 261 Olive, Joseph P. 205, 261 Orange, Martine 127, 261 Orlikowski, Wanda J. 170, 261 Orr, Julian E. 150, 262 P Palmer, Douglas L. 49, 257 Palmer, Iain 196, 257 Paretsky, Sara 231, 261 Parker, Lee D. 261 Parker, Martin 194, 196, 261 Parker, Pauline 58, 261 Parsons, Talcott 151, 261 Patriotta, Gerardo v, viii, 149, 150, 151, 169, 249, 261 Perron, Paul 39, 261 Peters, John Durkham 232, 261 Phillips, Adam 232, 242, 261 Phillips, Nelson 196, 257 Plato 66, 72, 119, 261 Polanyi, Karl 99, 261 Polkinghorne, Donald E. 8, 262 Potter, Jonathan 262 Powell, Walter W. 139, 175, 254, 262 Propp, Vladimir 12, 32, 39, 41, 262 R Rao, Hayagreeva v, viii, 137, 143, 145, 249, 262 Rapaczynski, Andrzej 255 Rawlins, Gregory J. E. 204, 208, 262 Ricoeur, Paul vii, 39, 121n, 126, 149, 151, 154–155, 162–163, 169, 262 RiŸaterre, Michael 262 Rip, Arie 196, 254 Robichaud, Daniel v, viii, 37, 38, 45, 149, 249, 262 Rochford, E. Burke Jr. 263 Rollin, Bernard E. 194, 262

Rorty, Amelia O. 254 Rorty, Richard 255 Rothenbuhler Eric W. 232, 261 Rouleau, Linda 111, 262 Røvik, Kjell-Arne 175, 262 Rowan, Brian 140–141, 174–175 S Sadlon, Zdenek 146, 262 Salaman, Grahame 64, 253 Sampson, Edward E. 262 Samuel, Sajay 59–61, 262 Sarbin, Theodore R. 262 Sayer, Derek 138, 262 Schechner, Richard 117, 262 Schooling, Bruce 252 Schumacher, Terry 187, 262 Schütz, Alfred 152, 216, 262 Schweik, Soldier v, 137, 141, 146, 257 Scott, W. Richard 139, 147, 262 Sebald, W.G. 244, 263 Selden, Ramon 82, 86, 263 Selznick, Philip 138, 145, 151, 263 Sennett, Richard 179, 263 Serres, Michel 263 Sevón, Guje 181, 253, 262 Shanes, Eric 243, 263 Shannon, Vonda L. 61, 258 Shariª, Sudi vi, viii, 215, 250 Shingo, Shigeo 263 Silverman, Hugh J. 263 Simon, Herbert 144, 259 Smircich, Linda 60–61, 252 Smith, Warren 261 Snider, Keith 60–61, 263 Snow, David A. 143, 263 Søderberg, Anne-Marie v, viii, 3, 13n, 17n, 28, 29, 41, 250, 263 Sontag, Susan 238, 251, 263 Spring, Anita 257 Star, Susan Lee 182, 188, 263 Staw Barry M. 224, 263 Stever, James A. 61, 263 Stewart, Rosemary 60–61, 263 Stivers, Camilla 59–62, 263 Stork, David G. 195, 201–202, 204, 252, 253, 261, 263

Name index 271

Strauss, Anselm 182, 263 Sutton, Robert I. 162, 224, 259, 263 T [Tancred]-SheriŸ, Petra 59, 263 Tarule, Jill M. 251 Taylor, Frederick W. 59–60, 63, 65–66, 72– 73, 196, 260, 263 Taylor, James R. vii, 262, 264 Thomas, D.M. 76–78, 81, 91, 264 Todorov, Tzvetan vii, 89, 264 Tonn, Joan C. 60, 264 Torp, Jens Erik 13n, 256 U Ungson, Gerardo Rivera 166, 264 V Vaara, Eero 13n, 41, 263, 264 van Alphen, Ernst 239, 241, 264 van de Weyer, Robert 224, 235, 264 Van Maanen, John 149, 264 Virilio, Paul 126, 244, 264 Vurdubakis, Theo 196, 197, 206n, 247, 252 W Walsh, James P. 166, 264

Warhol, Andy 238–239, 243, 263, 264 Warshawski, V.I. 231, 261 Warwick, Kevin 204, 206, 208, 264 Watson, Tony J. 7, 264 Weber, Klaus 137, 140, 264 Weber, Max 119 Weick, Karl E. 6, 7, 38, 52, 112, 150, 151, 152, 157, 158, 159, 163, 166, 168, 169, 175, 179, 181n, 184, 224 Westenholz, Ann 173, 260 Westwood, Robert 252 Whittington, Richard 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 265 Williams, Hywel 239, 265 Winter, Sydney 111, 260 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 44, 120, 257 Wolpert, Lewis 199, 265 Worden, Steven K. 263 X Xenophon 238, 265 Y Yates, JoAnne 170, 261 Z Zadig 168, 258

Subject index

A abstraction 12, 119–120 accounting 115–131 accounts (see also narrative accounts, postmodern accounts) 5, 9–10, 15, 29, 32, 76, 78–79, 81, 91–92, 97, 105, 108, 116, 120–125, 133, 137–138, 148, 155, 168–169, 193, 195–197, 199, 200–201, 211, 216, 220, 222, 230, 238–240, 242, 244 achievements 116–132, 142, 146, 194, 204, 208 acquisitions 3–35 actantial model 6, 11–12, 19, 21, 23, 25–27, 31–34 actants 12, 31, 34, 39–43, 162, 185–186, 191 actor-network theory 186, 188, 196n agon 116–132 allegory 90–91 ariston 116, 128–130, 132 B breaches (also disruptions) 48–49, 180 C catharsis 163, 169 character vii-viii, 5, 10, 12, 30, 43–44, 49–50, 64, 77, 124–125, 128, 130, 146, 170, 179, 193, 195–196, 207, 212 cognitive dissonance 181 cultural path dependence 140, 145–148 correspondence theory of truth 118 cyberpunks 173–191 D deconstruction viii, 32, 34, 64, 87, 91, 179 decoupling 140–144, 147, 174, 185 deªnitions – ostensive 117n – performative 117n

desire, object of 12, 20, 40, 42, 47, 49–50, 72, 80, 86, 188, 228, 241 detective stories 16, 149–170, 231 discourse 16, 30, 32, 64, 86, 95–112, 155, 182–183, 186, 197, 207n, 239 discourse time (see also story time) 19, 32 disruptions (also breaches) 82, 86, 140, 145, 150–151, 156, 158, 162–164, 166–167, 170 distal thinking (see also proximal thinking) 152 E emplotment ( also plotting) 10, 155, 162, 167 enactment 8, 39, 42–44, 51–53, 103, 122, 146, 156, 169, 175, 178–180, 184, 204, 209, 232, 241 evidential paradigm 151, 167–169 F feminine, the 59, 77–81, 90 folktales, morphology of 12, 32, 38, 41, 122 G garbage can 140–144, 148 gender 59, 62, 79, 128n, 183, 243 genre viii-ix, 16, 53, 93, 116, 125, 128, 131– 132, 138–139, 143–144, 150–151, 165, 167, 169–170, 174, 194, 196–197, 198–200 “god-trick” 181 Greek drama viii, 57, 74, 128, 163, 181 Greek mythology 128, 181 I identity 10, 30, 32–33, 41–42, 47–48, 52–53, 61, 76–77, 86, 122, 138, 146, 161, 173, 175, 178–180, 182–188, 190–191, 197, 211, 229, 237, 239, 243–244 improvization 104–107, 112, 158, 224, 232 institutional myths 174

274 Subject index

institutionalism 96, 99, 100, 104, 139–141, 145, 147, 148, 174, 186 institutions 12, 37–53, 58, 65–66, 96, 102– 104, 109, 130, 155, 168–170 – of meaning 44,149,154,167 interpellation 175, 179–180, 186–187, 191 isomorphism 140 M mimesis 110 modal objects (also modalities, intermediaries) 43, 52 N narrative – accounts 155, 187, 195–197, 199, 222 – constructions 32, 42, 44, 49, 76–91, 154–155, 162–163, 169, 186, 191, 193 – embedded 109 – functions 41 – intelligibility 44 – interviews 5, 11, 14–15, 28–30, 35, 108 – Ordinary, the 76–92 – schema 48 – structure 19, 21, 23, 25–28, 32, 34, 39, 53, 150, 165, 170, 186–187, 189–190, 197–198 – Vernacular, the 78–92, 174 narratology vii-viii, 6, 11, 37–44 nerds 173–191 P performance – accounts 116, 122–133 – narratives 116–133 – in structuralist analysis 31, 40, 42–43, 49–51 – organizational 49, 115–133, 153, 154, 156, 157, 164 perruque, la 105–107 phenomenology 149, 151–152, 180 plot vii, 5, 8–12, 14–15, 17, 18–29, 32, 42–44, 48, 52, 58, 63, 109–110, 122, 125, 144, 150, 153, 155, 162–163, 166–167, 169, 181, 209, 217, 244 plotting (also emplotment) 62, 109–110, 232

poaching 97–98, 107–111 postmodern – accounts 76–77 – art 91 – novels 77–78, 91 poststructuralism viii, 55, 63–64 proximal thinking (see also distal thinking) 152 R reading – horizontal 63–74 – vertical 63–74 recursivity 45, 51–52, 111–112 representation 14–15, 30, 33, 67, 102, 109– 110, 117–118, 155, 163, 166, 190, 193, 199, 202, 205, 210, 239 reproduction of elites 144–145, 148 resistance 21, 79, 82, 85, 87, 96–97, 104, 107, 112, 122, 137, 140, 146–147, 209 retrospective prophecies 168–169 routines 6, 96, 100–101, 105, 107, 111–112, 122, 151, 153–154, 156, 157, 166, 170, 178, 180, 190, 191, 228–229. S science ªction 173–212 scripts (also narrative schemes) 48, 50, 107, 147, 153–154, 170, 239, 242 sensegiving 3, 6–8, 15, 22, 35 sensemaking 3, 6–8, 15, 31–35, 38, 147, 149– 152, 155–157, 159, 162–163, 166–169, 175, 179–181, 184, 186 social constructivism/constructionism 6, 11, 37, 44, 174, 195, 232 social representations 109–110, 165 storytelling 5–8, 11, 13–15, 29, 34, 38, 57, 72, 131, 198, 242 story time (see also discourse time) 19,32 strategy 95–113, 139 structuralism viii, 1, 11, 31, 37, 39, 175n, 185 T tactic 102–113 technoscience 194n, 198–211 templates 150–151, 165, 166–170

Subject index 275

text-action model vii, 150–155, 167 textual strategy (also sensemaking) 16, 150, 162 trajectory 79–92, 193 transformations viii, 39–43, 48–53, 111, 113, 137, 148, 163, 178–179 translation 47, 50, 53, 81, 83, 86, 104, 152, 177, 244

V voice 5, 13, 21–22, 24–25, 30, 33–34, 45, 48– 49, 53, 57–62, 68, 72–73, 90, 124, 143, 155, 194n, 205–206, 239, 244 W witness literature ix women 59, 73, 77, 86, 88, 175, 183n, 219

John Benjamins Publishing Company publishes Advances in Organization Studies as a reformulated continuation of the De Gruyter Studies in Organization. 1. ZEYTINOGLU, I¸sik Urla (ed.): Developments in Changing Work Relationships in Industrialized Economies. 1999. 2. HENKE, Holger and Ian BOXILL (eds.): The End of the ‘Asian Model’? 2000. 3. QUACK, Sigrid, Glenn MORGAN and Richard WHITLEY (eds.): National Capitalisms, Global Competition, and Economic Performance. 2000. 4. MAURICE, Marc and Arndt SORGE (eds.): Embedding Organizations. Societal analysis of actors, organizations and socio-economic context. 2000. 5. CHAN, Andrew: Critically Constituting Organization. 2000. 6. BOS, René ten: Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking. 2000. 7. RHODES, Carl: Writing Organization. (Re)presentation and control in narratives at work. 2001. 8. HOSKING, Dian Marie and Sheila McNAMEE (eds.): Organization Behavior. Social constructionist approach. n.y.p. 9. CLEGG, Stewart R. (ed.): Management and Organization Paradoxes. 2002. 10. ITERSON, Ad van, Willem van MASTENBROEK, Timothy NEWTON and Dennis SMITH (eds.): The Civilized Organization. Norbert Elias and the future of organization studies. 2002. 11. CZARNIAWSKA, Barbara and Pasquale GAGLIARDI (eds.): Narratives We Organize By. 2003.