Writing Organization
(Re)presentation and control in narratives at work
Carl Rhodes examines the implicit power of writing and authorship that is at play when people and organisations are (re)presented in research. To explore this, the book reports a research project in the area of organisational storytelling that investigates how people in one organisation used stories to (re)present their own learning experiences from the implementation of a quality management program. This research is written in three principal genres: autobiography, ethnography and a fictional short story. These (re)presentational strategies are reviewed to examine how different genres effect authority in different ways. Drawing extensively on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and on writers associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism, the book offers a challenging discussion of what organisational research might be when the notion of the equivalence of reality and representation is radically questioned.
[Advances in Organization Studies, 7] 2001. xvi, 134 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 21 October 2008
Published online on 21 October 2008
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgments | p. ix
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Pre-text | pp. xi–xv
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Part 1: Writing about organizations | p. 1
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Introduction | pp. 3–19
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Storytelling and the heteroglossic organization | pp. 21–34
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Writing the heteroglossic organization | pp. 35–51
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Part 2: (Re)presentations | p. 53
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World Services | pp. 55–59
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World Services | pp. 61–73
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World Services | pp. 75–87
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World Services | pp. 89–95
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Part 3: Closing the text | p. 97
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The politics of being conclusive | pp. 99–112
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Post-text | pp. 113–118
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Name index | pp. 127–129
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Subject index | pp. 131–133
“Carl Rhodes has made a genuine contribution to the management literature through exploring the use of ‘genre’ rather than paradigms as the medium of explanation and understanding. He produces a set of extremely well crafted autobiographical, ethnographic and fictional case accounts. The fictional, short story style in particular breaks new ground as a methodological approach for organizational analysis. The book furthers our understanding of methods that allow us to make sense of organization and organizing through a multiplicity of narrative accounts.”
John Hassard, UMIST, Manchester
“This is a bold work, and long overdue, because of course organizations are narrartive productions. Carl Rhodes brilliantly shows how this is so, and in so doing, re-presents the ways in which we write about, hence tell
stories about organizations and the forms of work and social control that occur therein.”
stories about organizations and the forms of work and social control that occur therein.”
Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Rhodes does a remarkable job explaining complex topics such as heteroglossia and re-representation, fitting examples to them. The book shows how organizational researchers, for example, use concepts of narrative and story to interpret the writing of organizations and showing how stories write the research, and make sense of our collective experience.”
David M. Boje, Editor, Journal of Organizational Change Management & Tamara, Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science (New Mexico State University)
“Rhodes has provided a thoughtful and provocative example of a dialogic text that offers new alternative forms of writing for scholars.”
Steven K. May, University of North Carolina in Contemporary Psychology, APA Review of Books, Vol. 48:6 (2003)
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Subjects
Linguistics
Miscellaneous
Psychology
Main BIC Subject
CF: Linguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General