Narrative Studies of Organizing: The Next Chapters

Stories about organizing have been fascinating to scholars within organization and management studies since the discursive turn. Stories have been utilized to study and conceptualize a variety of organizational processes. In her work, Tammar B. Zilber have used narratives to study the micro-foundations of institutions – connecting individual experiences and intra-organizational interactions with macro-level institutional dynamics. Yet, the adoption of narrative in our discipline is somewhat narrow and partial, giving precedence to researchers' stories over those of organizational members, blurring the distinction between what is story and what is not, and focusing on stories as content rather than action. In her inaugural lecture, Tammar maps current uses of narrative in our discipline and offer avenues for an even broader and deeper use of narratives to understand organizing. Distinguishing between using stories as empirical data, method, and conceptualization, Tammar invites the community to discuss how we can embrace and use the narratology tool kit more fully.

Tammar B. Zilber is a part-time professor at CBS and a full professor of organization theory at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her research focuses on how individuals, groups, and organizations come together to create a shared reality that they experience as given and how they maintain or change this social world. She uses Institutional Theory to understand how broad social meanings – e.g., feminism in the context of a rape crisis center, Modernism in the context of Israeli high-tech, capitalism in the context of CEO compensation in the USA, and science in the context of academic research – influence organizations and are influenced by them. Tammar uses narratives in her research, teaching, and public engagement with diverse audiences, including leadership training in the private and public sectors.