Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies [Paperback]

Yiannis Gabriel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0198297068 | ISBN-13: 978-0198297062

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 stories 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

`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

About the Author

Yiannis Gabriel is a lecturer at The Management School, University of Bath. He is currently engaged in a study of organizational folklore, collecting, classifying, and interpreting a large number of organizational myths and stories. He is the author of Freud and Society (Routledge, 1983), Working Lives in Catering (Routledge, 1988), and joint author of Organizing and Organizations (Sage, 1993), The Unmanageable Consumer (Sage, 1995), and Experiencing Organizations (Sage, 1996). He has also written numerous articles that bring together his research interests in psychoanalytic theory and organization studies. He is Joint Editor of Management Learning.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (June 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198297068
• ISBN-13: 978-0198297062
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,306,849 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Yiannis Gabriel is Professor of Organizational Theory at the School of Management of Bath University. Earlier, he held chairs at Imperial College and Royal Holloway, University of London. Yiannis has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London, where he also carried out post-graduate studies in industrial sociology. He has a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Yiannis is well known for his work into organizational storytelling and narratives, leadership, management learning, psychoanalytic studies of work, and the culture and politics of contemporary consumption. He has used stories as a way of studying numerous social and organizational phenomena including leader-follower relations, group dynamics and fantasies, nostalgia, insults and apologies. Yiannis is co-founder and co-ordinator of the Organizational Storytelling Seminar series, now in its eighth year (See http://www.organizational-storytelling.org.uk/). More recently, Yiannis has carried out research on leadership and patient care in the hospital sector and on the experiences of sacked leaders and senior professionals. He is the author of nine books and numerous articles on leadership, consumer culture, management education and psychoanalysis. His enduring fascination as a researcher lies in what he describes as the unmanageable qualities of life in and out of organizations.