Book reviews

Citation

Land, C. (2010), "Book reviews", Critical Perspectives on International Business, Vol. 6 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib.2010.29006dae.001

Book reviews

Article Type: Book reviews From: critical perspectives on international business, Volume 6, Issue 4

Organizational Olympians. Heroes and Heroines of Organizational Myths,M. Kostera,Palgrave Macmillan,Basingstoke,2008a,240 pp.,ISBN: 9780230515710,£60

Organizational Epics and Sagas. Tales of Organizations,M. Kostera,Palgrave Macmillan,Basingstoke,2008b,216 pp.,ISBN: 9780230515772,£60

Mythical Inspirations for Organizational Realities,M. Kostera,Palgrave Macmillan,Basingstoke,2008c,208 pp.,ISBN: 9780230515734,£60

Keywords: Myths, Organizations, Fiction, Culture

The three volumes of “Mythologies of Organizational Everyday Life” contain 41 chapters plus the editor’s conclusion, general introduction (found at the start of each volume) and a separate introduction for each of the volumes: in total 46 distinct contributions. As the editor notes in her general introduction, however, the collection was not “assembled ex post as a result of a conference or seminar, but rather … consists of essays requested by the editor from various scholars on a specific theme: the way they see and use myth in their research of, and reflection on, organization” (Kostera, 2008a, p. 2). The number and diversity of contributors gives the trilogy an impressive range but what unites the papers is a concern with “myth” and the “mythological” albeit in a fairly broad sense, connected to the problematic of “organization”. This broad focus and diversity is the great strength of the collection.

In her general introduction Kostera focuses on the multiple ways in which myth relates to organization. In a first formulation of this relationship, myth can be set against organization. Where the former is concerned with the realm of the mystical, spiritual and sacred, the latter is concerned with the instrumental-rational and profane. Despite this apparent opposition, however, Kostera suggests that myth provides an essential frame of reference without which all action, however instrumental, would be meaningless and futile. The claim is that myth is a foundational underpinning without which organized action and management would be impossible.

Within the three volumes there are several chapters that reflect this particular conjunction of myth and organization. In their essay on “The displaced world of risk management”, in the third volume of the collection, Pelzer and Case challenge the dominant history of management and organization as a bureaucratic process of rationalisation, arguing that behind this apparently teleological “development” lies a hidden history of pre-modern mysticism and magic. Focusing on the specific example of global banking and financial risk management, they point to the continued presence of numerological superstition, magic and ritual in contemporary practices of risk management that cannot be fully apprehended within a rationalist framework. In quite a different vein, Tyler (volume three) points to the significance of Dr Seuss’s symbolically rich myth-making for the development of the collective imaginary in post-war USA, and specifically for its understanding of leadership and management. In his chapter (in volume two), Martin Parker pushes a similar, though ultimately divergent, line of analysis to explore the role of Hollywood films about pirates, cowboys and gangsters in the production of a contemporary radical and utopian organizational imaginary, and to challenge the dividing line that is conventionally drawn between “culture” and “economy”. Each of these chapters, and several others in the collection, demonstrate the culturally and symbolically loaded, mythical foundations of modern organization. As such they unsettle the relationship between the rational world of economics, work and management, and its counter-side of irrationality, superstition, magic, myth and fantasy.

A second reading of this relationship, however, figures management and managerialism themselves as myths; extremely effective and viral ones that have “monopolized the goals and informed the understandings and mindset of (late) twentieth century societies” (Campbell, 2004, cited in Kostera, 2008a, p. 4). Here the suggestion is that in our modern, secular world, work-organizations have come to replace religious cults and churches in their function of socializing people “and guiding them throughout their lives” (Kostera, 2008a, p. 1). An example of this approach is Aggestam’s chapter (in volume two), which explores “the myth of entrepreneurship”. Aggestam echoes the editor’s observations concerning the secularisation of myth when she suggests that “with the decline of traditional myths, business individuals and environments increasingly serve as role models” (p. 16). In this context she focuses on the entrepreneur as a figure of contemporary business mythology and suggests that a mythological approach can offer a more performative understanding of entrepreneurship as a co-construction of individual “entrepreneurs” in interaction with their environment and an audience of observers who attribute the quality of entrepreneurship to that individual through a process of myth making. As well as highlighting the social and political significance of the contemporary myth of entrepreneurship, such an approach therefore also offers a nuanced and processual understanding of this key organizational phenomenon.

Other managerial myths that are covered from this second approach include myths of technological salvation, the virtual organization, leadership, learning, management gurus, professionalism and the manager as creative artist, but the mythology of entrepreneurship runs through several of the contributions and clearly comes out of the collection as one of our most important contemporary managerial mythologies.

In neither of these approaches are myths treated as false and opposed to the empirical realities of organization that scientific research might proffer. In contrast to, for example, Bradley et al.’s (2000) collection Myths at Work, which is primarily concerned with debunking managerial myths such as the female takeover of work, or the myth of globalization, each of the contributions to Kostera’s trilogy maintains an appreciation of the work that myths and mythologizing do and how that work contributes to the on-going achievement of organization. To that extent, the three books are a useful addition to the literature on the cultural production of economic and social organization. What is less easy to pinpoint in this collection is the distinctive contribution that “myth” as an analytical category really contributes to this literature, as distinct from fiction, narrative, storytelling, discourse, or even culture. In her own contributions to the collection, most notably in the conclusion, Kostera (2008c) identifies a very clear and distinctive conception of the mythical, drawing on Jungian concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Although she recognises that the universalism and essentialism entailed by such a conception of mythology is highly controversial (p. 165), particularly for those who are used to a more conventional diet of cross cultural diversity and difference, this approach is at least distinctive and clearly separates the sphere of the mythical from other linguistic forms and imaginaries. For most of the contributors, however, concepts of myth and mythology are treated much more loosely so that Ancient Greek myths are found alongside fictional reworkings of the history of management education, imaginary journalists, comic book heroes, Hollywood heart-throbs and Vedic demon-slayers, with no precise or consistent delineation to distinguish “myths” from other stories and tales from the field. While this diversity of topics and approaches makes for an interesting and often entertaining read, it is hard to identify a clear contribution that the collection makes as a whole, except perhaps in its demonstration that, at least for now, there is no clear consensus within the field of organization studies over what myths are, how they should be studied, or what their ultimate organizational significance might be. And perhaps that is as it should be.

Chris LandUniversity of Essex, Colchester, UK