Writing Organization

Book excerpt: Carl Rhodes examines the implicit power of writing and authorship that is at play when people and organisations are (re)presented in research. To explore this, the book reports a research project in the area of organisational storytelling that investigates how people in one organisation used stories to (re)present their own learning experiences from the implementation of a quality management program. This research is written in three principal genres: autobiography, ethnography and a fictional short story. These (re)presentational strategies are reviewed to examine how different genres effect authority in different ways. Drawing extensively on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and on writers associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism, the book offers a challenging discussion of what organisational research might be when the notion of the equivalence of reality and representation is radically questioned.