Professional blinders? The novel as an eye-opener in organizational analysis

ABSTRACT

Scholarly textbooks often follow a logic where suitable empirical cases are selected to illustrate the theoretical and analytical points that we as scholars want to make. But what would happen if we would do the opposite: build a textbook on a novel written by a novelist for such purpose and let the theories explain the actions and emotions of fictional characters? In this article, we share and reflect upon our experiences of co-authoring a textbook in organization theory together with a professional novelist. We argue that the novel can function as an eye-opener in organizational analysis, forcing us to look beyond more static and rationalistic perspectives on organizations as well as the stereotypes of such. We build and relate our experiences to the growing literature about using fiction in scholarly work and discuss the potential of such genre-bending work when we bring in flesh and blood into the analyses.

KEYWORDS:

• Fiction/novel; genre; literature; organization studies; reflexivity; writing

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank our colleague, Lars Strannegård, as well as the novelist, Oline Stig, for their reflections during the process of writing the book, and on which this article is partly based. We would also like to thank Jenny Helin, Oline Stig and Peter Svensson who participated in a panel discussion that we held on this theme in October 2017. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the valuable and encouraging comments offered by the two anonymous reviewers as well as the editors, Professor Mills and Professor Prasad, of this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Maria Grafström http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2457-6448

Anna Jonsson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4714-9449