Abstract
Timon Beyes (Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)
Jana Costas (Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, European University Viadrina, Germany)
Günther Ortmann (Faculty of Management and Economics, Witten/Herdecke University, Germany)
The study of organization is haunted by literature, by literary scenes, characters, plots and writing styles. In particular the novel has a unique power to produce and shift the boundaries between visible and invisible, sayable and unutterable (Vogl 2002). Indeed, the development of social thought is intricately tied to the birth of modern literature (Lepenies 2002). Historically, the importance of the social body that came to fascinate social thinkers seems to have been pioneered by literary undertakings before becoming part and parcel of the social sciences. ‘Literature itself was constituted as a kind of symptomatology of society’, Rancière wrote (2004: 33), producing a mode of visibility that helped displace the ordinary world of organized life from its obviousness: ‘Marx’s commodity stems from the Balzacian shop’ (Rancière 2010: 164). As scholars, then, we are heirs to novelistic inventiveness.
The relation of the novel and organization studies is thus a rich and productive one (Phillips 1995). Broadly put, one could distinguish between two forms of organization-theoretical engagement with literary texts. On the one hand, novels are pulled into established approaches to organization and management. Here, organizational concepts are propped up with examples or excerpts from literary texts that offer more complex and nuanced descriptions of organizational life. In this sense, novels can aid or form the understanding and imagination of organizational and managerial concerns (Czarniawska-Joerges and Guillet de Monthoux 1994; Patient, Lawrence and Maitlis 2003) just as they can foster a critical sensibility of the dark side and the profane ‘underbelly’ of organization (Holt and Zundel 2014; Knights and Willmott 1999; McCabe 2014; Śliwa et al. 2013). They can also help us grasp and reshape the writing of organization as a literary genre in itself (Czarniawska 1999). On the other hand, the novel’s peculiar power is seen to reside in its ambiguity and strangeness with regard to customary ways of addressing and approaching organization (De Cock and Land 2006). Literary writing points to ‘the limits of sensemaking’ (Munro and Huber 2012), expanding the imaginary of organization studies beyond accustomed ways of analysis towards different forms of (understanding) organizing (Beyes 2009).
Yet if social thought in general and organization theory in particular is haunted by the novel, are literary texts haunted by organizational thought, too? In the Special Themed Section, we aim to reconsider the relation of the novel and organization studies along these lines. More specifically, we seek to bring to light the ways in which the works of novelists share the same subjects as organization theory yet reconfigure them; works that are contaminated by discourses of organization, and in this way allow to go beyond, irritate and inspire extant disciplinary insights. This can take the form of ‘thick descriptions’ that fit yet expand the categories of organizational thought, or of novelistic lines of flight towards different landscapes of organizing. We particularly encourage in-depth engagements with specific novels or works of literary writers in which organization and organizational thought takes place and is made strange, allowing us to see organization as well as, perhaps, the texts themselves anew and with fresh eyes.
Arguably, the pivotal figure of such an endeavor is Kafka. In his 1934 essay on Kafka, Walter Benjamin pointed out that the issue of the ‘organization of life and work in the human community’ runs through Kafka’s oeuvre and, indeed, the organization itself has taken the place of the fate in modernity (Benjamin 1999: 803). Importantly, organization is not only the subject of Kafka’s texts. Organizational discourse, which marks modernity, is structurally related to his very literary oeuvre. Whereas Max Weber envisioned a well-ordered, efficiently functioning, “soulless” bureaucracy, in Kafka, organizations become enigmatic, inscrutable and incomprehensible. Their character is one of destiny, fateful experience and mystery. The supposed foundations and “building blocks” of institutions and organizations (and thus of organization theory itself) crumble into pieces, when Kafka touches them: rules, procedures, rationality, myths and, more generally, the idea of fundamental causes and linear explanations. What kind of “organization” can we discern in theses pieces, and how might it help us to push further organizational thought?
While we believe that this reconsideration of the novel and organization studies cannot but encounter “Kafka”, of course there are other novels and writers in which and through whom organization and organizational thought is engaged with and reframed: David Foster Wallace, Elfriede Jelinek, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name but a few contemporary examples. We encourage contributions that explore literary texts and oeuvres that dwell on the ‘organization of life and work in the human community’. Papers should demonstrate the novel’s unique and uncanny power of estranging how we make sense of the organized world, reconsidering both organizational thought and the place of organization in literary texts.
The Special Themed Section is connected to a conference on ‘Whatever I touch crumbles to pieces: Organization, Law, Writing – Kafka’ that will take place at the Aby Warburg House in Hamburg, Germany, in November 2016. It will bring together cultural theorists, literary scholars, legal theorists and organization theorists. We expect that a part of the Themed Section will be based on papers presented in the conference. This way, we plan to invite a leading cultural studies and/or legal studies scholar to contribute his/her reflections on Kafka and organization to the Section (provisionally: Joseph Vogl, Humboldt University Berlin and Princeton Universty, US and/or Samuel Weber, Northwestern University, US).
The submission deadline for this special issue is
Please submit papers through the journal’s online submission system, SAGE track at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/orgstudies, create your user account (if you have not done so already), and choose the corresponding Special Themed Section“ The novel and organization studies ” under “Manuscript Type”. All papers that enter the reviewing process will be double-blind reviewed following the journal’s normal review process and criteria.
Sophia Tzagaraki, Managing Editor, Organization Studies:
For further information, please contact the Guest Editors of the Special Themed Section
Timon Beyes:
Jana Costas:
Günther Ortmann: