Management Lives: Power and Identity in Work Organizations

Over the last few weeks the sales representatives of the major textbook publishing companies have been paying their annual visit to my office to promote their textbooks. After confirming that one of my disciplines is organisation behaviour, they then proceed to inquire into what textbooks I currently use. This is the opportunity for me to launch into a favourite topic, namely the inade‐quacies of the standard organisation behaviour textbook as I see them. I typically complain that relatively few of these textbooks deal with the real world of organisational life. They don’t deal with demotivation and alienation, misuse of power, back‐stabbing, ambition, gender relations, jealousy, anger and other such undiscussable subjects. The sales representatives typically say that they agree and note my name to pass on to their editors who might encourage me to write such a book. Management Lives is an answer to my complaint.

The authors state, at the outset, that their intention is to facilitate an approach to teaching management which will lead to understanding management as a “lived experience”, rather than the disembodied concepts approach of standard textbooks. They aim to help readers develop their own interpretive and critical resources to reflect on their lived experience of management.

The book focuses on five themes: power, identity, insecurity, inequality and management. How these are operative in organisations are illustrated through four novels: David Lodge’s Nice Work (Penguin, 1988), Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Faber and Faber, 1989), Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (Faber and Faber, 1990) and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (Picador, 1988). The interactions of the main characters in the novels are described and then reflected on in the light of the themes. The theoretical exploration of the themes is done in the light of the illustrations from the novels. This approach is effective. There is good iteration between the events selected from the novels and the application of the themes. Within the main themes, as for instance within the exploration of power and inequality, responses such as stereotyping, domination, subordination, indifference and resistance are discussed and illustrated by vignettes from the novels.

Using fiction in the classroom as an approach to stimulating the study of people in organisations is well‐established. What this book contributes is a way of exploring some of the existential elements of life in organisations, which are typically difficult to study. It will be on my reading lists. Hopefully, this example, and the regrettably few others which exist, will contribute in the long term to the reformulation of how the lived experience of organisational life may be explored in the classroom.