Experiencing Organizations

Told through the fresh, sharp eyes of new organizational recruits, these sometimes comic, often traumatic, but always vivid and revealing accounts of organizations have much to say to learners and old hands alike. Grouped in sections on `images′, `winning and losing′ and `survival and injuries′, the narratives encompass a wide gamut of themes and issue. These include: power and politics in organizations; organizational cultures and change; gender and discrimination; appearances and realities; leaders and followers; and emotion, motivation and stress. The authors also focus on the coldly competitive features of businesses where processes such as restructuring, rationalization and downsizing are increasingly commonplace.

Throughout, commentaries by Stephen Fineman and Yiannis Gabriel highlight particular points of analysis and learning, while each chapter concludes with questions for discussion and a selected bibliography enabling further reading.

Stephen Fineman is Professor of Organizational Behaviour, School of Management, University of Bath CONTRIBUTORS′ AFFILIATIONS OUTSIDE NORTH AMERICA: Gillian Bendelow University of Warwick Karen P Harlos University of Otago, Dunedin Avraham N Kluger The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Berry Mayall University of London Anat Rafaeli Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion, Haifa Varda Wasserman The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Yiannis Gabriel is Professor of Organizational Theory at Bath University. Yiannis has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London and a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.   Yiannis is well known for his work into organizational storytelling and narratives, leadership, management learning and the culture and politics of contemporary consumption. He has used stories as a way of studying numerous social and organizational phenomena including leader-follower relations, group dynamics and fantasies, nostalgia, insults and apologies. He has also carried out extensive research on the psychoanalysis of organizations.   Yiannis is founder and coordinator of the Organizational Storytelling Seminar series, now in its fourteenth year (See http://www.organizational-storytelling.org.uk/), the author of nine books and numerous articles. He is elected to the board of EGOS and is currently Senior Editor of Organization Studies. His enduring fascination as a researcher lies in what he describes as the unmanageable qualities of life in and out of organizations.