Carl Rhodes has made a genuine contribution to the management literature through exploring the use of ‘genre’ rather than paradigms as the medium of explanation and understanding. He produces a set of extremely well crafted autobiographical, ethnographic and fictional case accounts. The fictional, short story style in particular breaks new ground as a methodological approach for organizational analysis. The book furthers our understanding of methods that allow us to make sense of organization and organizing through a multiplicity of narrative accounts.
- John Hassard, UMIST, Manchester,
This is a bold work, and long overdue, because of course organizations are narrartive productions. Carl Rhodes brilliantly shows how this is so, and in so doing, re-presents the ways in which we write about, hence tell<br />stories about organizations and the forms of work and social control that occur therein.
- Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Rhodes does a remarkable job explaining complex topics such as heteroglossia and re-representation, fitting examples to them. The book shows how organizational researchers, for example, use concepts of narrative and story to interpret the writing of organizations and showing how stories write the research, and make sense of our collective experience.
- David M. Boje, Editor, Journal of Organizational Change Management & Tamara, Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science (New Mexico State University),
Rhodes has provided a thoughtful and provocative example of a dialogic text that offers new alternative forms of writing for scholars.
- Steven K. May, University of North Carolina in Contemporary Psychology, APA Review of Books, Vol. 48:6 (2003),