Storytelling in Organizations

Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies

Yiannis Gabriel author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

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Storytelling in Organizations cover

Myths, stories, and folklore are part of the fabric and life of all organizations, enabling us to understand, identify, and communicate the character of the organization - its ambitions, conflicts, and peculiarities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork of storytelling in five organizations, this book argues that stories open valuable windows into the emotional and symbolic lives of organizations. By collecting stoires in different organizations, by listening and comparing different accounts, by investigating how narratives are constructed around specific events, by examining which events in an organization's history generate stories and which ones fail to do so, researchers can gain access to deeper organizational realities, closely linked to their members' experiences. In this way, stories enable researchers to study organizational politics, culture, and change in uniquely illuminating ways, revealing how wider organizational issues are viewed, commented upon, and worked upon by their members. The book's first part develops the theory of storytelling by building on various approaches, including narrative, folkloric, ethnographic, symbolic, social constructionist, and psychoanalytic, while the second offers a set of four studies which make use of stories in exploring particular aspects of organizational life.

richness in new ideas ... deserves to be a standard reference for students of stories in organizational life * O.S. Vol.22, No.2, 2001 *
This is a good piece of discourse about organizational stories, written with elegance and drive
the book is creative and includes a number of fresh ideas for future researchers * O.S. Vol.22, No.2, 2001 *
informative, well-written, well-researched and a pleasure to read * O.S. Vol.22, No.2, 2001 *

ISBN: 9780198290957

Dimensions: 242mm x 162mm x 20mm

Weight: 547g

274 pages