Abstract
While Roberto Bolaño never explicitly engaged with the scholarly field of organization studies, the introductory chapter of this edited volume playfully speculates as to what Bolaño might have thought of the field had he come into contact with it and its modes of writing. The introduction surveys existing encounters between organization studies and fiction, exploring the various ways in which literary works have cast light on matters of import to students of organization and management. On this basis, the editors consider the particular lessons and challenges that studying Bolaño may prepare for organization studies, focusing on Bolaño’s insistent effort to speak the unspeakable, to offer no hope when faced with the horror of life and yet to continue expressing that which has no expression and to somehow meaningfully convey the meaningless. This endeavour, they argue, is central to Organization 2666; the study of the impasse of organization towards which all of the contributions to the book gesture.
The editors would like to thank Günther Ortmann and Cori Mackrodt for making this book possible.
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Notes
- 1.
“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay… and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.” (Benjamin 1940/1999, p. 249, thesis IX).
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O’Doherty, D., Just, S.N., Huber, C., De Cock, C. (2020). As if One Could Provide an Introduction to Organization 2666. In: De Cock, C., O’Doherty, D., Huber, C., Just, S. (eds) Organization 2666. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29650-6_1
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