Confidential Gossip and Organization Studies

This essay sets out the case for regarding confidential gossip as a significant concept in the study of organizations. It develops the more general concept of gossip by combining it with concepts of organizational secrecy in order to propose confidential gossip as a distinctive communicative practice. As a communicative practice, it is to be understood as playing a particular role within the communicative constitution of organizations. That particularity arises from the special nature of any communication regarded as secret, which includes the fact that such communication is liable to be regarded as containing the ‘real truth’ or ‘insider knowledge’. Thus it may be regarded as more than ‘just gossip’ and also as more significant than formal communication. This role is explored, as well as the methodological and ethical challenges of studying confidential gossip empirically

The politics of gossip and denial in inter-organizational relations

Organizational gossip has largely been discussed in terms of effects at the individual level. In this article we turn our attention to the organization level. The article makes a research contribution that addresses gossip that spreads fact-based rumours about organizations in terms of their shifting role in circuits of power. The research question asks what happens when organizations officially formulate themselves as doing one thing while other organizational actors that are influential in significant organizational arenas (in which these formulations circulate) counter that these formulations are patently false. Theoretically, we draw on the literature on organizational gossip and rumour as well as on the politics of non-decision-making. Our argument is advanced by reference to a case study of the Australian Wheat Board and UN Resolution 661. Basically, organizational gossip plays a key role in the production of interorganizational power dynamics, an insight previously neglected. Copyright © 2008 The Tavistock Institute® SAGE Publications

Experiment in Prose: Authority and Experience in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was known as an innovator during her lifetime. Voltaire singles her out as ‘one of the most intelligent women in England, and with a powerful intellect into the bargain’ (Voltaire 1980, 55), citing her preparedness to disregard religious superstition to trial smallpox inoculation on her young son while in Turkey, and subsequently to promote the practice in England (by introducing it to the Princess of Wales who then championed the practice). Voltaire identifes Montagu as a supporter of new knowledge and innovation, well positioned in society to ensure that her endorsement had impact beyond her own circle