Good Novels, Better Management: Reading Organizational Realities in Fiction. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Dec, 1996  by Lloyd E. Sandelands

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For better and worse, most edited volumes escape their editors' intentions. This collection of 11 essays, sandwiched between an introduction and epilogue by the editors, by 12 authors from 10 nations of Europe and the United States is no exception. Whereas the editors intend a lesson on how literature can contribute to contemporary management studies and practice, the contributors offer something much greater, an image of business in society as a play of life. For this, above all, I recommend this book to anyone interested in management and especially to management scientists whose habits of mind may lead them from its living forms.

This book is a celebration of life. Each of its 11 essays considers one or more novels written by compatriots of the contributors. All of the novels are about business and society at the time of industrialization (mostly in the late-nineteenth century). All of the novels depict a business life animated by conflicts and tensions, a play of culture and personality. A Frenchman, Guillet de Monthoux, finds in Emile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise an account of the organizing passions of the modern department store in contrast to the traditional family shop. A Pole, Czarniawska-Joerges, analyzes the cultural context of the rise and fall of a nineteenth-century entrepreneur in Boleshaw Prus's The Doll. She finds a vital play of ideas - of spiritual romanticism, on the one hand, and the hard logic of social Darwinism, on the other. A Swede, Jacobsson, traces a similar dynamic in Strindberg's The Red Room, whose hero, Arvind Falk, finds Swedish society corrupted by industrialization. A Scot, Small, sees in H. G. Wells's The History of Mr. Polly a lesson about manhood in a changing economy. Mr. Polly, torn between middle-class English propriety and the new industrial order, fails both as a haberdasher and husband and eventually finds peace in abandoned self-reliance as kept handyman of a country innkeeper. An American, Boland, traces moral tensions in American industry in William Dean Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham. An "economy of pain" puts the manager-owner between the rock of honorable unselfishness and the hard place of needless self-sacrifice. A Dutchman, Hofstede, interprets Multatuli's Max Havelaar or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company as an exploration of the antimony in Dutch culture between mercantilism and humanitarianism. In Max Havelaar we understand the personal dimensions of conflict between the economics of world trade and the missionary ideals of Dutch colonialism. An Englishwoman, Whitebrook, deconstructs Joseph Conrad's Nostromo to illustrate the incompatibility between capitalist economic order and other political and moral requirements of society. Industrial capitalism, again, is an ambivalent development. Two Spaniards, Alvarez and Cantos, trace "terrors of individuality" in Spanish industrialization and modernity in three novels - Miquel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Benito Perez Galdos's The Disinherited Lady, and Rosa Montero's My Beloved Master. These terrors come in the desire to be different and noble in a new social and economic order that allows neither. An Italian, Manoukian, also ranges over three novels - Italo Svevo's A Life, Ottiero Ottieri's Fast Pace, and Paolo Volponi's The Flies of the Capital - to explore tensions in the relationship between boss and subordinate in the modern industrialized corporation. It is a portrait of social-psychological dynamics that even while disavowing Freud owes much to the master. A Pole, Czarniawska, and a German, Joerges, team up in the book's penultimate essay to interpret Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities to understand how literature, science, and business are related. Musil's protagonist, Arnheim, is accomplished in all three areas, and the unresolved question is how is this possible? At last, a Dane, Jorgensen, reverses the procedure of the others by posing and answering the question of how fiction describes authority in public administration. In fiction he finds an image of how political order is maintained or defeated.

Whereas it is the novelist's art to picture life without saying it, it is the social scientist's challenge to say what life is and how it's made. In its best moments, this book goes beyond its novels to meet this challenge. Here is Lange (quoted in Czarniawska-Joerges) describing the society depicted by Prus: ". . . the society in The Doll does not stand still but on the contrary, moves so that the contrasts between separate worlds vanish or new ones are created. It is a society in ferment where we see different groups of people where each considers his own interests of primary importance and therefore conflicts between the groups arise." Here is Boland describing the emotional hazard portrayed by Howells that comes to the new industrial man who finds self-identity in the corporation or its product: "This identity of self based on product and organization, taking place as it does in a market contest, is an inherently unstable relationship. It's like being in love with someone who only cares for you in a contingent, utilitarian sense. The manager, in loving and finding a self through an organization and its product, is being set up for heartbreak. The market is fickle, making the product and the organization an unreliable object of affection. The manager finds a self through loving the product and factory but ultimately finds that it does not love or remain faithful in return" (p. 127). And here is an excerpt of Montero's My Beloved Master (quoted in Alvarez and Cantos) relating the essence of power in the boss-subordinate relationship: "Power possesses that secret energy, that uncanny alchemy: the ability to bring together love and suffering. And thus, in all subordinates there seemed to exist a compulsion of personal surrender to their bosses. Like the dog that licks the hand that beats it, or the Bolshevik peasant who weeps after cutting his master's throat" [Beloved Master, pp. 185-186].