David M. Boje

STORIES OF THE STORYTELLING ORGANIZATION: A POSTMODERN ANALYSIS OF DISNEY AS "TAMARA-LAND"

My purpose is to theorize Walt Disney enterprises as a storytelling organization in which an active-reactive interplay of premodern, modern, and postmodern discourses occurs. A postmodern analysis ...

An examination of the reliability and validity of the Aiken and Hage scales of centralization, formalization, and task routineness

March 1980, volume 25 This article examines the reliability and validity of six scales developed by Aiken, Hage, and Hall to operationalize technology, centralization, and formalization. The discussion of the definitions of these constructs suggests a need for revision in the content of the indices of job codification and job specificity. Furthermore, these two indices, designed to operationalize formalization, have serious problems of convergent and discriminant validity while the index of task routineness operationalizes a more limited part of the technology construct than originally proposed by Perrow. The indicators of centralization are found to be both reliable and valid.

Effects of Organizational Strategies and Contextual Constraints on Centrality and Attributions of Influence in Interorganizational Networks.

Comments from T. K. Das, Joseph Galaskiewicz, Bill McKelvy, Michael Moch, William Ouchi, David Rogers, and Andrew Van de Ven on an earlier draft have been very useful. This study examines the effects of organizational strategies and contextual constraints on location in interorganizational transaction networks and the effects of strategies, constraints, and network position on attributions of influence. A model of these effects is presented, and eleven propositions specific to social service organizations are examined. In client referral networks in 17 communities, it was found that centrality in referral flow, in communication exchanges, and in joint program activities was positively associated with attributions of influence. A revised model is tested using path analysis.e

The Resurrection of Taylorism: Total Quality Management’s Hidden Agenda

Looks at the historical roots of TQM. Finds that TQM, while popularly attributed to W. Edwards Deming, can be linked in Japan to 1920s industrialization and to the importation of Taylor’s philosophy. Posits that TQM’s neo‐modernism. Concludes with post‐TQM ideas for managing change.

Narrative Temporality: Implications for Organizational Research

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.

Consulting and Change in the Storytelling Organisation

A participant‐observation study of consulting in a large office supply firm of how consultants and organisational stakeholders perform stories to make sense of events and to enact change during their conversations is presented. A theory of organisation as a collective storytelling system in which precedent and future‐directed stories are shared, revised and interpreted to account for and to affect unfolding organisational changes is extended. It is illustrated how very terse stories, told in everyday conversations, require the listener silently to fill in major portions of the story line and story implications. Storytelling and story interpretation is a critical part of the consulting work done in complex organisations.

Enron Spectacles: A Critical Dramaturgical Analysis:

Enron shows us dramaturgy gone amuck. In this article, critical theory and postmodern theory are crossed to form a critical dramaturgyresulting 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.

Where’s the Power in Empowerment? Answers from Follett and Clegg

The purpose of this article is to do a critical postmodern reading of the century-and-a-half empowerment-disempowerment debate. The authors review parallels between turn-of-the-century positions of both the 19th and 20th centuries. Contemporary work on empowerment and disempowerment shows a conspicuous absence of discussion of power. The authors seek to fill this gap by drawing on the work of Mary Parker Follett and Stewart Clegg. Follett’s theory of co-power offers a key to overcoming the empowerment-disempowerment dualism that characterizes the current debates. In addition, Clegg’s circuits-of-power theory opens up the everyday machinery of power and empowerment for inspection. Follett’s understanding of managerial power, combined with Clegg’s deeper sociological understanding of systematic disempowerment and domination, yields an integrative perspective that incorporates both empowering and disempowering faces of power. This co-power perspective has important implications for organizational development and change.

Reconsidering the role of conversations in change communication

Purpose – The purpose is to inspire a more Bakhtinian perspective of conversations in change communication. Inspiration is drawn from Bakhtin and argue that change management has, for too long, focused on monologic implementation of predetermined change, i.e. how to develop the “best plot”. Change agents need to consider their anthropology are argued and ask themselves whether the people in their organizations are the objects of communication or subjects in communication. Furthermore, the argument about ones anthropology and ones espoused communication theory are intrinsically intertwined: how one communicates depends entirely on whether one views people as participating subjects in the process or as objects of the process.Design/methodology/approach – Consensus‐as‐monologue and consensus‐as‐dialogue are distinguished. Under the former, the notion of a single speaker is emphasized (expectations of response are low). But under the latter, consensus becomes saturated with the self as the other (polemic, b...

Life Imitates Art Enron's Epic and Tragic Narration

Enron is more than tragedy; it is epic theatre. Epic theatre is not one narrator on one stage; it is a multitude of simultaneous theatric performances, collectively negotiated by inquiry participants (reporters, regulators, analysts), narrating while wandering in an unstable labyrinth of networked stages. Narrators of the Enron epic (in contrast to tragic) grasp together a wider cast of characters, interlace more historical incidents, and suggest broader systemic changes to capitalism and democracy. The stages of dramatic action (rising, crisis, falling, and denouement), which we are taught to expect in narration, do not settle into one emplotment in epic as they do in tragedy. The authors contend that the tragic narrative form constrains meltdown inquiry, whereas epic expands it. The tragic version of this corporate meltdown absolves us of culpability and responsibility, as the tragic hero becomes our scapegoat.