Organizational Storytelling
- 1 September 1994
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Management Learning
- Vol. 25 (3) , 433-461
- https://doi.org/10.1177/135050769402500304
Abstract
All organizations are learning organizations. Some are learning sites for a more exploitive capitalist pedagogy. The purpose of this paper is to explore three historical discourses, pre-modernism, modernism and postmodernism, to reveal the pedagogy and resistances in learning organizations. Its contribution is to theorize organizations as a struggle of fragmented, polyvocal (having multiple voices), polysemous (having multiple meanings) and polydiscursive learning struggles. In organizational learning and in the modern-versus-postmodern debate, pre-modern management issues get less theoretical attention than they deserve. To this day, universities, judiciaries and corporate boardrooms sustain many pre-modern traditions of social welfare, apprenticeship and collective governance. Organizations are also sites for the struggle of modernist and postmodernist organizational learning. Tamara, a play with wandering and fragmented audiences chasing wandering storytellers, is presented as a multi-discursive metaphor to explain this theory of a distributed, multifaceted network of struggling organizational learning pedagogies.Keywords
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