ABSTRACT
Organisation theory began to be appreciated in the 1960s when it became clear that neither economics nor psychology could explain the phenomena of organising purely in the language of economics, whereas these phenomena were becoming more and more central to the functioning of modern society. Enterprises and organised institutions were becoming increasingly complex and their activities could not be explained by a combination of economic laws and psychological observations. The machine metaphor that used to dominate before was now replaced by an organic metaphor that seemed complex enough to capture the complexity of the phenomenon itself. But the practices of organising outgrew even this metaphor and it became evident that we need even more complex ways to account for what organisations do. One of the propositions for how to live up to the living complexity is the language of fiction. Narrative knowledge and narrative form are good ways to an incisive insight into concrete and lived organisational experience.
Disclosure statement
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Notes
1 Chcąc wprowadzić terminy w pełni symetryczne należało by nazwać tę pierwszą wiedzą narracyjno-syntagmatyczną (Czarniawska Citation1998).