Templates of Ideas: The charm of storytelling in academic discourse

In this text, we argue that the stereotypical, traditional way of academic writing may be disempowering and inhibit the development of new ideas and practices. We characterize the stereotypical template for academic writing, ref ecting on how expression and communication works in relationship to such templates. We illustrate our argument with students’ images of fiction versus academic writing, and an own attempt at “cross-template” translation. The discourse can be enriched, we believe, by colorful, engaging storytelling – a development which is taking place with the growing interest in narrative knowledge

The Body in the Library: An investigative celebration of deviation, hesitation, and lack of closure

The unexpected, if still clichéd, discovery of a body in the library introduces Agatha Christie’s plot starring the genius amateur detective, elderly Miss Marple. We will use the same situation as the starting point of our article and investigation, promising both the unmasking of the culprit and the departure from the currently standard form of an academic text. In a self-consciously rambling and digressive text, we will touch on various issues relevant to writing what we consider good social science, and the difficulties in doing so. Firmly reaffirming the need for writing organization studies and social science in the narrative mode, we trace what we see as the decline in quality and joyousness of contemporary management journal articles, and attempt to demonstrate, both through narrative means and by more traditional academic reasoning, how and why it is important to embrace variety in the ways knowledge in the social sciences is constructed and communicated

Sherlock Holmes and the adventure of the rational manager: Organizational reason and its discontents

Rationality has since long been one of the central been issues in the discourse of management. Among the classics voices propagating a reductionist rationalism dominated and there are still many contexts where such a view is taken for granted. On the other hand, critics since the times of classics have been arguing for a less linear approach to management and management thinking. However, little attention has been paid to some of the different dimensions of management rationality, such as imagination. This paper sets out to address this gap in knowledge through presenting a narrative study focused on a literary character well known for his rationality, Sherlock Holmes, and revealing that this, to many, very epitome of rationality is actually an example of an extended type of rationality, including imagination. Following the fictional protagonist of our study, we consider some aspects of its relevance for management thought and practice. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd

Grand plots of management bestsellers: Learning from narrative and thematic coherence

Barbara Czarniawska and Carl Rhodes have argued that managers and entrepreneurs often learn from popular culture. The dominant plots offer the accepted interpretations and guide for actions, whereas alternative plots, available but not most prominent, provide schemes for possible departures from the common wisdom. In this article, we propose that not only works of fiction serve this purpose; powerful ideas derive also from popular management books, not only in terms of explicit content but also as what we term, in homage to Lyotard, the grand plots: structures of meaning not usually seen as the overt message of this article. We present the results of our classificatory reading of popular management books, interpreting them in terms of the tacit notions of narrative development and cohesion, emplotted in the background. The contribution of this article is to show the ways in which the grand plots of popular management books are used to achieve coherence in presenting the books’ total solutions for a variety of organizational problems and contexts. What their readers learn is not so much (or not just) how to manage but how to make narrative sense of management regarded as part of wider cultural context

Textual flâneurie : writing management with Walter Benjamin

International audienceThe world's an untranslatable language without words or parts of speech. It's a language of objects Our tongues can't master, but which we are the ardent subjects of. If tree is tree in English, and albero in Italian, That's as close as we can come To divinity, the language that circles the earth and which we'll never speak. (Wright, 2010) Textual flâneurie and the Benjaminian dérive To be a flâneur means following flows and unobvious pathways, finding doors where walkways close. Textual flâneurie, for us, centres on following the poetic, dream thrust of historical texts, rather than focusing on the rational, argument-building level, while still embracing their literal, face value meaning. It is attentive yet freely wandering, as can happen in texts just as much as in physical space. Walter Benjamin (1940/1969) picked up the idea of the flâneur from Charles Baudelaire, 'the prince, who is everywhere in possession of his incognito' (Baudelaire, n.d., as quoted in Benjamin, 1940/69: 40), depicting him as a passionate spectator, moving around amongst movement, setting up house midway, following the infinite flow of the city. The flâneur is strolling freely but attentively, he is the philosopher and the chronicler of the city..

The anthropology of empty spaces

We would like to tell an anthropologic story about how we see reality and how we feel about it, with no intention to generalize our reflections. Our version of anthropology is intentionally self-reflexive and self-reflective. This text is a narrative study of the feelings of anthropologists out in the field. The anthropologic frame of mind is a certain openness of the mind of the researcher/observer of social reality (Czarniawska-Joerges 1992). On the one hand, it means the openness to new realities and meanings, and on the other, a constant need to problematize, a refusal to take anything for granted, to treat things as obvious and familiar. The researcher makes use of her or his curiosity, the ability to be surprised by what she or he observes, even if it is "just" the everyday world. Our explorations concern an experience of space. It aims at investigating the space not belonging to anyone. While "anthropologically" moving around different organizations, we suddenly realized that we were part of stories of the space we were moving in. Areas of poetic emptiness can be experienced, often in the physical sense, on the boundaries and inside of organizations. © 1999 Human Sciences Press, Inc

Nomadism and movement as epistemologies of the contemporary world (El nomadismo y el movimiento como epistemologías del mundo contemporáneo)

In the same way that movement and nomadism as a lifestyles opposite to sedentism involve not only the abandonment of the idea of a permanent home, but also an active challenge or furtive avoidance of the state's sedentary authority, movement and nomadism as epistemologies confront the generally fixed order of languages, discourses and perspectives with which science tries to explain our social world. New ways of thinking about movement, subjectivities, groups and institutions emerge, in a world that is not only global, but real and virtual at the same time. In this special issue we have gathered the contributions that experiment and questioning static thinking

Creativity out of chaos

Creativity is said to be highly desired in post-modern and post-industrial organizations Creativity and anarchy on the one hand, and managerialism, on the other, can be seen as different forms of knowledge, two opposed ideals. In many organizational as well as societal reforms we currently observe it is the managerialist ideal that wins over the anarchic. In this paper, we wonder if people fear anarchy? We reflect on the possible reasons for the fear, and we also try to explain why we believe that anarchic organizing should not be avoided or feared

More than a method? Organisational ethnography as a way of imagining the social

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The authors–two anthropologists and an organisational theorist, all organisational ethnographers–discuss their understanding and practices of organisational ethnography (OE) as a way of imagining and reflect on how similar this understanding may be for young organisational researchers and students in particular. The discussion leads to the conclusion that OE may be regarded as a methodology but that it has a much greater potential when it is reclaiming its roots: to become a mode of doing social science on the meso-level. The discussion is based on an analysis of both historical material and the contemporary learning experiences of teaching OE as more than a method to our students

Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging measures as biomarkers of disease progression in boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy: a phase 2 trial of domagrozumab

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a progressive, neuromuscular disorder caused by mutations in the DMD gene that results in a lack of functional dystrophin protein. Herein, we report the use of quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures as biomarkers in the context of a multicenter phase 2, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial evaluating the myostatin inhibitor domagrozumab in ambulatory boys with DMD (n = 120 aged 6 to < 16 years). MRI scans of the thigh to measure muscle volume, muscle volume index (MVI), fat fraction, and T2 relaxation time were obtained at baseline and at weeks 17, 33, 49, and 97 as per protocol. These quantitative MRI measurements appeared to be sensitive and objective biomarkers for evaluating disease progression, with significant changes observed in muscle volume, MVI, and T2 mapping measures over time. To further explore the utility of quantitative MRI measures as biomarkers to inform longer term functional changes in this cohort, a regression analysis was performed and demonstrated that muscle volume, MVI, T2 mapping measures, and fat fraction assessment were significantly correlated with longer term changes in four-stair climb times and North Star Ambulatory Assessment functional scores. Finally, less favorable baseline measures of MVI, fat fraction of the muscle bundle, and fat fraction of lean muscle were significant risk factors for loss of ambulation over a 2-year monitoring period. These analyses suggest that MRI can be a valuable tool for use in clinical trials and may help inform future functional changes in DMD.Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier, NCT02310763; registered December 2014