After the financial collapse of 2008 and the bailing out of banks in the US and the UK, the long-term viability of the neoliberal doctrine has come under new scrutiny. The elimination of regulatory control, the financialization of the economy including the growth of increasingly complex financial innovations, and the dominance of a rentier class have all been subject to thorough criticism. Despite the unexpected meltdown of the financial system and the substantial costs for restoring the finance industry, critics contend that the same decision-makers remain in place and few...

The field of organizational storytelling research is productive, vibrant and diverse. Over three decades we have come to understand how organizations are not only full of stories but also how stories are actively making, sustaining and changing organizations. This edited collection contributes to this body of work by paying specific attention to stories that are neglected, edited out, unintentionally omitted or deliberately left silent.

Despite the fact that such stories are not voiced they have a role to play in organizational analysis. The chapters in this volume...

Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, philosopher, and anthropologist, has been widely studied and analyzed in academic circles, particularly in sociology, where his ideas about power relations in social life helped to define the contemporary field. While many other sociological theories and figures have been extensively discussed and analyzed within the contexts of organization studies and management, Bourdieu's ideas have, until recently, been largely ignored. Offering an authoritative evaluation of Bourdieu's work, this book provides readers with conceptual frameworks, empirical...

During the last few decades metaphors have increasingly been employed to aid academic understanding of both theory and society in the modern Western world. This growing interest in metaphors has been paralleled by an increased interest in professions as a social group, from university academics to doctors and social workers. Early positivist work saw the significance of creating privileged professional bodies as assurance that they use their expertise in the interests of clients and the broader public. More critical Marxist, Foucauldian and now dominant neo-Weberian analyses of...

Organizational Identity and Memory analyzes the relationship between organizational identity and organizational memory, in particular history and commemoration. The goal is to further our understanding of the role of this relationship in processes critical to today s organizations: the evolution of organizational identity, the creation of organizational memory, organizational learning and change, and employee identification with organizations.

The literature on organizational memory and organizational identity has developed independently and at times in separate disciplines. Scholars...

It is often claimed that we live in an expert society, a society where more and more individuals take expert roles in increasingly narrow fields. In contrast to more traditional experts most of these new experts lack generally accepted mechanisms for the certification and legitimation of their expertise. This book focuses on these new as well as established experts and the efforts undertaken to secure and legitimate their expertise. We view these efforts as organizing attempts and study them on four different levels the society, the market, the organization and the individual.

Robert Cooper, who died in 2013, was the leading theorist of organization working in England over the past few decades. Describing himself as a 'social philosopher, ' he was one of the first writers to introduce post-structuralist and post-modern thought into theories of organization but was always reluctant to reduce what he did to being part of 'Management.' Instead, he concentrated on thinking about organizations and organizing, working with ideas about entity and process views of organizations, and also the dualisms of organization/environment, organization/disorganization, and...

This book presents a new way of understanding organizational ethnography due to its strong emphasis on what the word organizational means in organizational ethnography. In the past five years, a new organizational studies research field has developed involving organizational ethnographies, which is when organizations are studied using ethnographical methods. This development has shed light on the methods and difficulties of organizational ethnography, and yet we argue that confusion still remains as to what organizational ethnographical approaches are.

This edited volume offers students...

Counter-Narratives and Organization brings the concept of "counter-narrative" into an organizational context, illuminating these complex elements of communication as intrinsic yet largely unexplored aspect of organizational storytelling. Departing from dialogical, emergent and processual perspectives on "organization," the individual chapters focus on the character of counter-narratives, along with their performative aspects, by addressing questions such as:

• how do some narratives gain dominance over others?
• how do narratives intersect,...

The Work of Communication: Constituting Materiality, Agency, and Organization in Contemporary Capitalism revolves around a two-part question: "What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism--and how should organization studies approach them?" Changes in the texture of capitalism, heralded by social and organizational theorists alike, increasingly focus attention on communication as both vital to the conduct of work and as imperative to organizational performance. Yet most accounts of communication in organization studies fail to understand an alternate sense of the...