John T. Luhman’s research while affiliated with Eastern New Mexico University and other places

Purpose We should understand stories told in organizational settings in relation to the time, space and process of their telling. This, however, is problematic since many researchers, as a matter of habit, take organizational stories out of their context and process because they tend to collect their stories through interviews. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach In order to accept organizational stories taken out of context and process, the author looks toward archeology and its method of interpretation of artifacts as a metaphor to guide future storytelling analysis. The author argues that storytelling researchers need the analogy of archeological interpretation of artifacts to be more convincing in their quest to discover meaning. Findings If one sees stories as artifacts from past utterances that are lost to the moment in which they were uttered, which the metaphor of archeology allows one to do, then the goal is to reason out a coherent narrative out of the stories collected by describing their formal attributes, their spatial attributes and their chronological inference. After which, one might fit the collected stories within the broader cultural contexts of the organization under study. Originality/value The author offers the idea of “archeological story analysis” as a three-step method of story analysis, which allows organizational storytelling researchers to more convincingly analyze stories collected out of their context and process. The first two steps are in the interpretation of the formal attributes and spatial attributes of the stories, while the third step (chronological inference) is an attempt to analyze storytelling intent and impact on the life of the organization.

There are many people in organizations who have feelings of alienation; that is they feel they do not fit in, they get no meaning out of their work, they feel belittled or abused by their superiors or colleagues; they desire to break loose the masks they wear, or to find some sense of meaningfulness. In our paper, we demonstrate our assumption of alienation in the workplace by reviewing a collection of satirical and ironic organizational stories from police officers working at a county sheriff’s department. Our argument is that if it seems that alienation might not be resolved through organizational change efforts and interventions, or might not be resolved through radical change of the economic conditions of modern industrial life, then alienation might be changed through the aggregation of individual projects from below. We discuss the possibility of resolving alienation at the workplace by using the legend of Percival as an analogy.

Awards:RUSA Notable Business Sources 2014From agency theory to power and politics, this indispensable guide to the key concepts of organization theory is your compass as you navigate through the often complex and abstract theories about the design and functioning of organizations. Designed to complement and elucidate your textbook or reading list, as well as introduce you to concepts that some courses neglect, this historical and interdisciplinary A-Z account of the field: Helps you understand the basics of organization theory; Allows you to check your understanding of specific concepts; Fills in any gaps left by your course reading, and; Is a powerful revision toolEach entry is consistently structured, providing a definition of the concept and why it's important to theory and practice, followed by a summary of current debates and a list of further reading. This companion will provide you with the nuts and bolts of an understanding that will serve you not just in your organization studies course, but throughout your degree and beyond.Key concepts include: agency theory; business strategy; corporate governance; decision making; environmental uncertainty; globalization; industrial democracy; organizational change; stakeholder theory; storytelling and narrative research; technology and organization structure.

In previous research the author conducted a narrative examination of the literature on labor-managed firms to discover the nature of “organization democracy.” The result was a broad conceptual framework. This article builds on the framework by offering two theoretical postulations. First, it offers a substantive theoretical postulation that organization democracy is a conflation of political visions that can be represented by Mannheim’s (1936) four utopian images of anarchism, liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism. Second, it offers a formal theoretical postulation that organization democracy is an additional form of legitimate authority to add to Weber’s (1947, 1978) typology. The author proposes “rational-collective” legitimate authority as the fourth form and ends with a two-dimensional representation of the four types of legitimate authority.

Enron shows us dramaturgy gone amuck. In this article, critical theory and postmodern theory are crossed to form a critical dramaturgy resulting in two main contributions. First, critical dramaturgy is differentiated from other forms of dramaturgy, showing how 'spectacle' is accomplished through a theatrical performance that legitimates and rationalizes, and casts the public in the role of passive spectators. Second, critical dramaturgy has important connections with public relations theory. While contemporary public relations is concerned with the building of relationships, critical dramaturgy looks at how corporate theatrical image management inhibits relationships by erecting the barrier of the metaphorical proscenium. The Enron scandal is viewed as the collapse of a corporate spectacle illusion into megaspectacle fragments. These fragments include the naming of Enron, the Valhalla Rogue Traders scandal, the Gas Bank, Greenmail, Cowboy Capitalism, the Skilling-Mark rivalry, and the Masters of the Universe theme. Intertextual analysis demonstrates how these fragments contribute to the 'Greek Mega-tragedy' of the Enron megaspectacle. The article integrates several corporate theatre processes relevant to understanding four types of spectacle: concentrated, diffused, integrated, and megaspectacle. The value of the critical dramaturgy conceptual work is to lift the romantic veil of spectacle theatrics to reveal the antenarrative fragments of stories marginalized and backgrounded.

Our aim is to stimulate critical reflection on an issue that has received relatively little attention: how alternative presuppositions about time can lead to different narrative ways of researching and theorizing organizational life. Based on two amendments to Paul Ricoeur's work in Time and Narrative, we re-story narrative research in organizations as Narrative Temporality (NT). Our amendments draw upon the temporality perspective of Jean-Paul Sartre in order to reframe narrative research in organizations as a fluid, dynamic, yet rigorous process open to the interpretations (negotiated) of its many participants (polyphonic) and situated in the context and point of enactment (synchronic). We believe an approach to narrative organizational research grounded in NT can open up new ways of thinking about experience and sense-making, and help us take reflexive responsibility for our research.

Organization studies uses "theater" as a metaphor for organization life in two ways: first as organizing-is-like-theatre, a perspective adopted by those who subscribe to a Goffman approach to organization dramaturgy; and second as the more literal organizing-is-theatre, a perspective adopted by those who subscribe to a Burkean approach. Our contribution is to explore a third, more dialectic view: theatre is both life and metaphor. We develop this dialectic view by contrasting the theatrical opposition between Debord's Society of Spectacle and Bakhtin's "carnivalesque" resistance. Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed also presents a dialectic view, looking at how theatre can be used to empower spectators to be become spect-actors. Our implication is the possibility of critical consciousness and praxis transforming formal spectacle through experiments in emancipatory carnival-like theatre.