A new book has just been published on the use of story in organisations. I was interviewed for it last year. The one chapter I have seen looks at Czarniawska, Boje, Kelly and my views of the role of narrative in organisations. I am waiting for my copy to arrive and will provide a full review here when I do. However there is a special offer on at the moment and it looks to be a good popular but not trivial summary of practice in the field.
In respect of the one chapter I reviewed, all the quoted authorities are concerned with the trivialisation of story work in organisations. In particular the danger of normative approaches (use this story recipe and your employees will be motivated become innovative etc etc - you know the sort of thing). This is well summarised but the chapter avoids some of the differences which is a pity. Czarniawska & Kelly to my mind provide well grounded and self critical research. Boje less so. He is a pioneer in the field and we agree that narrative in the wild comes as fragments (Boje) or anecdotes (me). However Boje and I have profound differences over the role of deconstruction and the position of the experts. Boje seems to insist that his expertise is required to deconstruct ideological elements from stories. My view is that to do so is to impose your own ideology and that stories should be interpreted by the people who tell them. I am going to expand on that in a future post as Boje's ideological attempts to reframe the field concern me not to mention his failure to read his quoted sources, but that is for another day.
For the moment details of the book offer are below. There are various "free" offers associated with this some of which you could already get for free! Some obviously promotional but there are useful items there. CE methods are of course open source and available for free download at any time.
eMAIL I RECEIVED FROM THE EDITOR
I wanted to let you know about a special book campaign I’m running through Amazon from Monday, October 16 till midnight on Thursday, October 19. I’ve found people who will send e-mails on Monday to more than 100,000 people across the world to promote Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over: How Organizations Use Stories to Drive Results. Several bloggers are also planning to talk about the book between now and Thursday.
Why am I doing this? In today’s world, where hundreds of new books are released each week, it’s hard to capture the attention of journalists and book reviewers unless you have a best seller on Amazon (or you are a media sensation). And, I truly believe the results you’ve achieved through stories deserve to be recognized!
Here’s the offer: Buy the book on Amazon for less than $20 a copy and receive over $500 worth of f-r-e-e items that’ll help you enhance your story efforts, including a summary of business results across all 72 book examples which will not be available again until January! To activate this offer . . .
Afterwards, click here to get your f-r-e-e items.
Feel free to pass this message on to friends and colleagues who might also benefit from this great opportunity by clicking the "Forward" link at the bottom of this note.
Kind regards,
Lori
Lori Silverman
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