Death and the Penguin: modularity, alienation and organising

ABSTRACT

The originality of this paper lies in the ways in which it explores how the depiction of organised crime within Andrey Kurkov’s novel Death and the Penguin can inform our understanding of organisational modularity. This non-orthodox approach might open up new avenues of thought in the study of organisational modularity while further illustrating how novelistic worlds can inform accounts of organisational realities. Two main research questions underlie the paper. How can Andrey Kurkov’s novel further our understanding of the complexity of organisational worlds and realities by focusing our attention on different landscapes of organising? How does Kurkov’s novel help us grasp the concept of modularity by drawing attention to new forms of modular organisation? Drawing from our reading of Kurkov’s novel, we primarily explore organisational modularity through Kurkov’s depiction of organised crime and consider the themes of alienation and isolation in the context of modular organising.

KEYWORDS:

• Organised crime
• modularity
• fiction
• alienation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For the use of this term, see (Varese 2011, 6).

2 Occasionally the causality is reversed: for instance, in Sept. 6, 1871, The New York Times ran Karl Marx’s obituary. There was just one problem: the original Marxist was still very much alive and remained so for a further 11 years.

3 While, even the anxious readers of the popular press, such as the Daily Mail, might find the idea of a minefield around a country house unusual they might not find the presence of the penguin surprising (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4042674/The-true-story-eccentric-British-teacher-penguin-best-pals-bird-rescued-oil-slick.html).

4 The text in inverted commas refers, respectively, to two remarkable examples of industrial sociological analyses of bureaucratic organisations: Goldthorpe et al. (1969) and Cohen and Taylor (1992).