Remembering Barbara Czarniawska
Professor Barbara Czarniawska (1948-2024) was a first-class management and organizational scholar who contributed immeasurably to our field. Barbara was an intellectual giant. She left behind an immensely rich output of more than 120 articles and more than 50 books, written in Polish, English, Swedish and Italian. She was supervisor of more than 40 doctoral students and has been awarded honorary doctorates at six universities in four different countries. She was member of the Swedish and British Academies of Sciences and the recipient of numerous prestigious international awards for scientific excellence. She also took part in the work of many editorial boards and international academic organizations. At the beginning of her career, she worked at the University of Warsaw: she graduated from the Faculty of Psychology in 1970, received her PhD in 1976, and was employed as researcher and teacher from 1970 to 1980. From 1983 she worked at Swedish universities: in 1990 she became professor of management at Lund University, and from 1996 she worked at the University of Gothenburg. However, the most important part of Barbara's achievements, for her readers, students as well as for herself, was the content of her work. She was an indefatigable researcher, always busy with some field research, believing it to be the basis of knowledge in the social sciences. This was primarily ethnographic studies, where she continued to experiment with new approaches and methods. She pioneered ethnographies focusing on a specific social actor, seeking to understand the logics, rhythms and daily routines of work in specific positions and social contexts. But she has also promoted the study of networks of action, going beyond the individual and treating relationships as the basic building block of the organisational world. And more recently, she has been developing mobile ethnography, an approach sensitive to the increasing span of physical and virtual journeys that merge organisational worlds. Among her numerous methodological publications, the book Social Science Research: From field to desk best demonstrates her holistic approach to research, in which methods always are tools for understanding organisations in their own context. Remaining faithful to ethnographic research, she emphasised the importance of fiction and the need to study books and films in order to reveal the logic of the imaginative world dictating human desires and actions. The book Good Novels, Better Management, co-edited with Pierre Guillet de Monthoux and published in 1994, was probably the first analysis of management as presented in popular fiction carried out as part of social science. The book Management She Wrote, in turn, shows important parallels between the narrative patterns of detective novels and organisational theory. For Barbara, the patterns of action found in fictional works were not just a curiosity: they formed the basis of our own perceptions, an instruction manual for problems.