Ann J Rippin

O Fortuna! Medieval conduct texts, the collapse of Enron, and a call for a revolution in management education

Abstract This article takes as its starting point the derivation of the word ‘revolution’ from the Latin word revolvere, and its original sense of ‘to revolve, roll back’.This links, etymologically, the concept of overturning the status quo with the image of a wheel. From Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, written at the end of the Roman Empire, until the early modern period, Fortune’s Wheel was the ubiquitous image of the mutability of this sublunary world. A major theme in Boethius was the need to accept failure as inevitable, to learn from it, and so to grow morally and spiritually, since at the height of Fortune’s Wheel disaster beckons. This message was passed on to the conduct literature – the Mirrors for Princes – of the Middle Ages. Machiavelli’s Prince turned this ancient tradition on its head, by claiming that the true leader could conquer Fortune and halt her wheel. The most celebrated, most spectacular fall from grace in recent business and management history is the case of Enron. By examining the popular accounts of the company’s collapse it is possible to see what moral we are supposed to draw from the case.The paper considers who learned what at Enron: the wider business community, the majority of the employees and the principals. As Enron was a prodigious employer of MBA graduates, and as the story of the collapse has become an iconic teaching case, the paper goes on to consider what management students can expect to learn in contemporary schools of business and management by looking at some of the most influential texts on management development curricula. It finds a notable absence of any pedagogy of failure and concludes that for business schools to include an account of failure in their curricula would require a second kind of revolution, one in which success is not seen as a certainty and a stable state, but as an uncertain and possibly fleeting one for which business educators have a duty to prepare their students: taking their cue from Boethius rather than Machiavelli.

Stitching up the leader: empirically based reflections on leadership and gender

– This paper seeks to use two empirical episodes to investigate gendered critiques of leadership., – The paper uses an action inquiry approach by reflecting on two pieces of work, one collaborative and one individual, to reflect on ideas about womens ways of leading, and womens leadership of groups. The work includes the making of artefacts which it uses as a stimulus for reflection and as a reflective practice in itself. The artefacts which it uses are quilts, and the feminised nature of quiltmaking is also considered., – The paper begins by reflecting on the ability of a leaderless group of women to achieve a task in a highly successful and timely manner. It uses this experience to explore theories of distributed leadership in work groups, and suggests an alternative proxy for leadership. It then uses the creation of a piece of art about Elvis Presley and the Madonna to consider gendered constructions of leadership, including heroic and post‐heroic leadership. Drawing on the work of Fletcher, it considers why feminised post‐heroic leadership is so often vaunted and so seldom seen. It posits the tension between self‐abnegation and self‐promotion and service and individual achievement as an explanation of the slow adoption of this more feminised form of leadership. The paper traces the emergent process of the work itself, and hints at the difficulty of getting the “right answers” from research participants, and reflects on the role of nostalgia as a limiting factor in organisational research., – The collaborative method of the piece synchronises with the ideas under investigation, and builds on the critique of post‐heroic leadership as an observable phenomenon in organisations.

The illustrated Post Office: a layered account of organisational sexism, brutality and escape

Purpose – Reading the works of Charles Bukowski is a male, and by extension, masculine activity, and as such it can make a female reader feel as if she is trespassing into some male preserve. Arguably, in entering many organisations, women experience similar feelings. The purpose of this paper is to offer an account of the process of reading Charles Bukowskis novel Post Office as a woman.Design/methodology/approach – In order to evoke her response to the text of Post Office and to reclaim her feminine identity in the face of Bukowskis masculinist project, the author adopts a multilayered, art‐based methodological approach using Bukowskis text as well as her own, Bukowskis biographers, texts of a number of theorists of research methodology, visual illustrations and notes.Findings – Through the original use of arts‐based methodology, the paper offers insights into the embodied, situated experience of reading Post Office, and gives an account of the authors reflections on organisational sexism, brutali...

Eliza, Anita and me: An art investigation into using portraiture as a research method in organisation studies

This article explores the use of portraiture as a research method in organisation studies using the case example of Anita Roddick and the Body Shop International. The author makes a series of portraits in order to explore what this art practice can contribute to our understanding of both the identity of the contemporary organisational leader and the practice of organisational research itself. It explores the nature and purpose of portraiture and then goes on to work with two original sets of portraits. For the purposes of the article, Anita Roddick is compared and contrasted with Elizabeth I of England in order to give a full account of the formers personality by juxtaposing it with the latter. The article argues that portraiture allows us to give a fuller and rounder and more nuanced account of identity than conventional written accounts, and that it allows for a tactful criticism of public figures which is necessary for any attempt at complete and truthful biography.

Brute force: Medieval foundation myths and three modern organizations' quests for hegemony

Abstract Foundation myths have been at the heart of western culture since classical times. Business foundation myths lie at the heart of corporate culture. Here, the nature and purpose of foundation stories are questioned, as is their status as innocent narratives.This article takes the narrative tropes of Europe’s archetypal national foundation myth, the founding of Rome, retold in the epic Latin poem, Virgil’s Aeneid, and traces their reemergence in the foundation stories of three major modern organizations.The narrative elements are the foundation of a new empire by immigrant principals, the empire inspired by a dream or vision, and the establishment of a culture superior to that of the indigenous inhabitants.The three cases are Marks and Spencer, Nike and Starbucks.While it is impossible to state that organizations consciously have recourse to this archetypal myth, a comparison of the context in which the elements of this ancient tale are retold is a lens through which to examine organizational claims to legitimacy and autonomy, in order to pursue corporate agendas unopposed.

The Economy of Magnificence: Organisation, Excess and Legitimacy

The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries in the Musee Cluny in Paris are an early example of the use of excess as personal promotion. They were made for Jean Le Viste, a young man on the rise through the fifteenth‐century French court to demonstrate his wealth and taste and thus his fitness to aspire to high position. The paper began as an exercise in thinking about a contemporary high‐flyer might choose to portray on a similar set of art works. This was based on a reading of the Financial Times How to Spend It glossy supplement which acts as a guidebook and style manual for the rich and powerful of the contemporary world. Through this process excess is revealed as legitimating display, acting as a marker of belonging, discernment, connoisseurship and exclusivity, all of which mark the possessor out as a member of an elite. Parallels are drawn with humanist notions of magnificence and magnanimity as markers of fitness to rule, and with How to Spend It as a cultural intermediary. The paper ends by reflecting that while Jean Le Viste found room to include images about transcending wealth and care of the soul, thoughts of putting away material things would disbar the consumers of How to Spend It from the powerful elite to which their material possession give access.

A visit to the 'Great Ghaytez's palace': A Case Study in using a literary genre to explore the effects of corporate architecture

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore corporate buildings as discursive entities. They are machines designed to tell the corporate story; they embody the aspirations of a culture. This is particularly the case with headquarters buildings, which are rhetorical artefacts proclaiming a narrative of identity, designed to legitimise past, present and future decisions and strategies. Buildings such as the Vatican, Windsor Castle, the Houses of Parliament and the old Prudential Insurance Building proclaim that the organisation is old and venerable, trustworthy, a model of probity, stable, and here to stay.Design/methodology/approach – The approach employed in this paper uses literature as a way of representing organisations. This paper works with an archaic genre to present a travellers tale. This has been used to attempt to open up a third space between literary techniques used to analyse organisations and literature as a management education strategy. By opening up this possibility of a third posi...

Space, place and the colonies: re‐reading the Starbucks' story

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to re‐examine a celebrity CEO account using a variety of literary forms to uncover discourses of colonisation. Focuses on the probanza de merito and the wonder tale or travellers tale. Ideas of Non‐Place (Auge) and spatial practices (Lefebvre) conclude the analysis.Design/methodology/approach – A close reading of the account of the building of the Starbucks retail empire, given in the CEO account: Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time against the text, gives insights into the strategy and internal logic of the company founder which might otherwise be missed.Findings – The account reveals the nature of the published account of the growth of the company as analogous to many of the accounts of the colonisation of the new world. The analysis of spatial practices at the company is used to explain some of the most successful resistance to its expansion.Originality/value – Uses a wide range of theory to unpack celebrity success narrative ...

Thirteen notebooks for Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin was fascinated by notebooks which he kept compulsively throughout his life. In this methodologically experimental paper, I create a series of thirteen notebooks for Walter Benjamin as a way of engaging with Benjamins thought and also of considering the importance of notebooks as one of the tools available to organizational scholars. I will use this experimental work to draw tentative conclusions about the role of the visual in researching organizational phenomena concentrating on the work of Benjamin himself.

Editorial. Professor Heather Höpfl, 1948-2014: Eine Gedenkschrift

This is an editorial piece for a memorial special issue to commemorate the life of a colleague and friend. The authors are also the special issue editors.