Poetry and the business life

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to look again at the ideas set out in the author's 1994 anthology, The Poetry of Business Life.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is based on a large sample of poems on business themes by a variety of “professional” and “practising managerial” poets. It supplies a spontaneous, empirical first taxonomy (organised as “Cantos” in the eventual 1994 anthology) of the areas of “economic life” where the domains of “poetry” and “business” seem most to intersect. Such spontaneous classification yields important but mainly unsurprising “topic cells” (Cantos) – “Money”, “Work”, “Markets”, “Corporate life”, “Politics and power”, “Technology” etc. – each requiring further research. The residue of less predictable themes, however, includes “Travel and movement” as an important but (by analysts) relatively neglected, obsessive source of metaphor and poetic focus.

Findings

Across these “vertical” structures of topic and theme the paper points towards the more generic “lateral” implications for all of them of the differences between the “language of poetry” (evocation, relational) and the conventional “language of business” (information, measurement, separation). This is the author's main area of future interest.

Originality/value

The paper confirms the need to pursue critical analysis of “business poetry” by the exacting criteria of poetry generally rather than merely as an esoteric, separate sub‐category.

Citation

Windle, R. (2006), "Poetry and the business life", Management Decision, Vol. 44 No. 4, pp. 457-463. https://doi.org/10.1108/00251740610662992