Advances in Organization Studies (vols. 1–12, 1999–2004)

This book is a collection of texts that explore the analogy between organizing and narrating, between 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. Narrating is 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 collection, written by organization researchers from many different countries, explores this analogy in both directions, reporting studies that show how narratives are made in situ, and applying narrative analysis (structuralist and poststructuralist) to stories already in existence.

Barbara Czarniawska is Skandia Professor of Management Studies at GRI, School of Economics and Commercial Law, Göteborg University, Sweden.



Pasquale Gagliardi is Professor of Sociology of Organization at the Catholic University of Milan, and Managing Director of ISTUD- Istituto Studi Direzionali, Milan-Stresa, Italy.

Paradox — the simultaneous existence of two inconsistent states — has become orthodox. The orthodox is now the paradox. The orthodox world of ordering, controlling and organizing is increasingly opposed to a normalizing world of disordering, disrupting and disorganizing. And organization studies cannot avoid changing its conceptions of reality as that reality changes. In the future, organization studies will be the study of paradox, how to understand it, how to use it.

In this book of original contributions addressed to management and organization paradoxes the authors address the new state of the field in terms of representations — representing paradoxes — and materialisations — materialising paradoxes. The themes — although varied, ranging from dialectics to internal tensions; from collaborations to ethics and value conflicts; from resistant labourers and wharfies to cartoon characters such as The Simpsons; from the irrationalities of finance to the psychoanalytic rationalities of auditing, and from issues of governance in Asian and international business to the composition of the new knowledge work force in the business professions — cohere around core aspects of paradoxicality.

Overall, the contributions to Management and Organization Paradoxes are diverse and challenging. Each contribution takes a different angle on the central theme. All of the chapters illuminate diverse aspects of contemporary paradoxes in management and organization theory. The book provides, in each of its chapters, a challenge to the still overwhelmingly rationalist views of theory and practice that dominate the field and provides new directions for understanding organizations and management.The contributors are drawn from leading European, Australian and Latin American contributors.

In the past, contingency and neo-Marxist theorists of culture reduced culture to an effect of something other than itself and, as they made culture metaphorical, they constituted its object of inquiry — a somewhat impossible pretension. This book extends the debate considerably. It does so through considering the work of Foucault in the context of the analysis of culture. While Foucault has had a considerable impact on organization studies, up to the present no text has systematically addressed what happens to organization culture when it encounter a Foucauldian gaze. Read this book and you will find out.Stewart Clegg, UTS, Sydney

Why are some firms successful on global markets whilst others are not? In this collection of papers, a group of distinguished international researchers examine the inter-relationship between national context, firm performance and global competitiveness. In a series of empirical studies covering major industries (such as banking, telecommunications, construction, automobiles, and airlines) in a number of European countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Finland, Slovenia), the studies show how distinctive patterns of firm competences and capabilities arise from national contexts. These influence the way in which firms perform in response to changing technologies and competitive pressures. Thus the impact of the globalisation of economic activity may be to reinforce existing national differences in firm performance rather than producing a homogenisation and standardisation.

This book will be of interest to researchers in business and management, sociology, economics and political science for its comparative organizational approach to problems of economic performance.

The widely discussed ‘globalization’ of economic activities has given rise to a renewed interest in the relations between such tendencies, the nature and demarcation of societies, and the nature and strategies of various actors and organizations within and cross-cutting societies. One approach to capture and express these themes has been Societal Analysis, initially developed above all to confront the internationally comparative study of work, organization, education and training, industrial relations, business and industrial structures.

After twenty-five years of practising and developing Societal Analysis, this book serves to systematize and redefine the approach, and to react to criticism and newly arising issues. It brings together proponents, sympathizers and critics of Societal Analysis. It enters new fields, and contributions are clustered around the enterprise, the economy, theoretical and methodological aspects, public policy and gender issues. The message stressed and demonstrated by the editors and various authors, is that the ‘societal space’ of social, economic political interdependencies is not being obliterated but complexified, and therefore a topical, useful and indeed necessary explanatory framework.