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The novel and organization
Edited by Chris Land and Martyna Sliwa
Introduction
For a long time when I met people at parties or weddings or other social events, I was reluctant to tell them that I worked in a business school. I knew, or thought I knew, that they would dismiss me as someone who worked at a glorified technical college teaching the six Cs of customer care or the best way to sell a widget, and not see me as a "proper" academic like my historian husband who belonged to a "proper" academic discipline. People had switched off before I could explain my initial motivation to do academic work first in business and management and then in organisation theory, which was to try to understand why people's working lives were often so unbearable and why people felt licence to do unspeakable things to each other under a Milgram-esque cloak of corporate authority. I remember once talking to a very bright and able young man made utterly miserable by his treatment in a large bureaucracy. "If I wrote my autobiography of work," he said, "it would be called Hell ." His blank voice in telling this story still chills me 20 years later. Once I had "owned" this motivation to understand and possibly help a few people to negotiate this misery through my teaching and writing, introductions at dinner parties became easier.
Recently, I have moved away from this first motivation and have begun to study more esoteric things, but reading Charles Bukowski's Post Office and thinking about it over a number of months has made me think again about my vocation (with a very small "v").
I had never come across either Bukowski or Post Office until, in 2006, I began a long-term project undertaken for love and as a small act of resistance to the research assessment exercise. The project involved asking 12 academics at various stages of their careers to nominate a book or paper that had in some way shaped their thinking about their discipline, a text which had been an intellectual evenement after which the way in which they saw organisation studies was never the same again. The idea was that I would make them a quilt (which is...