Abstract
Narratives circulating widely within popular culture provide templates for engaging with the actors and institutions they represent. Academics and critics generally assert that popular narratives about business (movies, novels, histories) are invariably critical. This monograph presents a more nuanced view. This chapter outlines an inductively derived structural matrix that is used to analyze 63 narrative texts produced in the US in the last 40 years dealing with three major industries: information technology (IT), automobile manufacturing, and financial trading. The matrix defines an eight-cell array of structuring fables ranging from Nirvana to Nightmare with six mixed or compound fables intervening between these extremes. Texts that cluster in one or a few related cells are defined as instantiating a dominant fable.
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- 1.
“Trading” as it is used here refers to the buying and selling of financial assets by hedge funds, private equity funds, investment banks, and trading desks in other large financial institutions. It excludes commercial banking and insurance.
- 2.
The German media scholar, Monika Suckfüll, has written of the ways our “lifelong socialization and learning process relating to the media” conditions us in a range of “modes of reception,” teaching us not just how to respond but what to look for (Shimamura 2013, 324).
- 3.
“Fiction-like” is used here to denote narrative texts whose primary source materials are fact-based, but whose representational strategies draw on the methods, and generic conventions, of fiction. McLean and Elkind’s account of the Enron scandal, or Hoffman’s narrative of Alan Mulally’s turnaround of Ford, exemplify this fiction-like form. Of the latter, one reviewer noted that it “read more like a thriller than a business book” (Koehn 2012). The formula is common in reviews of many of the nonfiction texts being considered here. And this, no doubt, helps to account for the “best-seller” status of many of them.
- 4.
Herman et al. in Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012) defines emplotment as “the way events are, in being narrated, set out in a particular order that in turn implies a particular way of understanding causal-chronological relationships among them” (71).
- 5.
Film scholars have paid particular attention to the phenomenon of “artefactual response,” noting how readily viewers accommodate shifting from “the perspective within the film to a perspective about the film” (Freeland in Plantinga and Smith 1999, 72). Currie’s essay in the same volume engages suggestively with the differences between “desiring something for a character and desiring something for a narrative” (189) and notes that highly satisfying narrative experiences can be generated not only despite, but because of, a tension between the two types of desire.
- 6.
The search was extensive, but we do not claim it was exhaustive. There are inevitably relevant texts that have been inadvertently overlooked despite the best efforts of highly motivated research assistants. The authors believe the texts selected can fairly be considered representative in scope.
- 7.
There are notable texts produced in the UK that would meet these criteria. The multi-award winning British playwright Caryl Churchill’s play Serious Money , first produced at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1987, is an obvious example. After a successful transfer to the West End, a long run at Wyndham’s Theatre, and a Lawrence Olivier Award for Best New Play, Serious Money was produced Off-Broadway in 1988. It closed after just 15 performances. The set of texts chosen for analysis was restricted to material produced and first distributed in the US precisely because circumstances of production, distribution, and reception can differ so widely from country to country.
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Borins, S., Herst, B. (2018). Conceptual Framework and Methodology. In: Negotiating Business Narratives. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77923-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77923-2_1
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-77923-2
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