Introduction

Citation

James, J. and Weir, D. (2006), "Introduction", Management Decision, Vol. 44 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/md.2006.00144daa.001

Introduction

In our call for papers for this Special Issue we stated that:

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  … there is a growing appetite for new thinking in business, organisation, leadership and management and for a publication that recognises the artistic, poetic, and creative aspects of these activities. The application and connection of poetry to many fields of professional discourse is becoming well established.

  This growth of interest links with other tendencies, the post-modernistturn, shifts to the honouring of right-brain thinking, the celebration of inter-culturality, the recovery of the ethical dimensions of business and management practice.

  At many recent conferences of management scholars there have been tracks on artistic and poetic aspects of theory and practice. But so far there has been no publication dedicated to these interests.

  There is now an opportunity for academics and business and management practitioners to make a significant and innovative contribution to this objective. Accordingly the Editors of Management Decision have generously agreed to dedicate a Special Issue of the journal to these themes.

  The aims of this Special Issue, entitled “Poetry, organisation, emotions, management and enterprise – POEME” are to focus explicitly on the relation between poetry and management and specifically:

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    to bring together some hitherto latent communities; of academics who find that the poetic traditions are relevant to their own scholarly agenda, managers who write or read poetry and have experienced its liberating influences on their own practice, students entering the worlds of knowledge in diverse ways:

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    to link the worlds of management with the central traditions of literary and poetic scholarship.

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    to offer a first port of call to new scholars, new writers, and innovators in pedagogic practice linking the worlds of poetry, business and management.

We have made no secret of our intention to make the case for not just a Special Issue of an established journal like Management Decision but in principle for a specialist journal dedicated to these themes. Moreover we also wished to use the opportunity offered by the publication of the Special Issue to advertise the 3rd Conference on Art and Organisation that will take place in Krakow, 4-7 September 2006, where there will for the third time be a track on poetry and management.

The origins of this Special Issue are in fact quite closely associated with the Art and Organisation Conference. In 2002, David Weir (whose inaugural professorial lecture at Bradford University in 1991 had been built around quotations from poetry and who had with Stafford Beer led day-schools on poetry and management at Newcastle Business School in the late 1990s) organised a track on poetry and management at the first conference in 2002 and Per Darmer led the track at the Paris Conference in 2004. Meanwhile, Louise Grisoni and Jane James were leading workshops on Poetry in Management Teaching at the Bristol Business School. Together with Lyvie Gueret-Talon and Beatrice Bouchrara-Rossi this group has met regularly over the past three years. We all teach management: we all write poetry, we all use poetry in one way or another in our professional practice and apart from the Krakow Conference we have plans for further work as a group whose membership is essentially open to all who share our concerns. A book certainly is being planned and we see the publication of this Special Issue as an important stage in the creation and reinforcement of a vision that management and poetry have not merely much to offer each other: in a real sense they cannot live without each other.

In the event we have been overwhelmed by the response to our call for papers and we have had perforce to omit several papers that are well worthy of publication in their own right. E.M. Forster famously advised “only connect … only connect the prose and the passion” and we have tried in the selection of our papers for this Special Issue to illustrate the multi-layered nature of the possible connectivity between the five words: poetry, organisation, emotions, management and enterprise. We hope to start inquiries that enable us to connect the prose, the passion and the statistics.

The first paper is by Ralph Windle, a former fellow of Templeton College, Oxford and the author of an anthology The Poetry of Business Life, a collection that together with David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused, published in the same year of 1994, had laid out an agenda for discourse between poetry and management. As Windle writes in his preface he was challenged by an assertion in Fortune Magazine that “not many people in business feel an urge to write verse about their work” and set out to prove the contrary. Whyte had, as an English-born published poet, established a consulting practice among the boardrooms of the Fortune 500.

These two books are essential reading. But as well as setting out an agenda they also offered emotional succour to the many managers consultants, business people and academics who knew that what they were doing in linking the disparate realms of control ratios, performance targets and trial balances and emotion, word-smithing and reverie need no longer be a hole in the corner activity of furtive jottings and secret notebooks but was after all OK: everybody was at it and if your dad caught you, there was reward from peer support after the inevitable telling-off. Windle speaks of “the fuller life” and it is the aim of this collection to celebrate that fuller life and to indicate some paths in pedagogy and scholarship to its attainment.

Reva Berman Brown argues that considerations of style influence the management teacher as much as the poetic artist and that we need to uncover the hidden power of style in the words that embody discourse. She identifies some of the craft skills of scholarly work and the poetic tropes of management language, and concludes that we have as scholars to see scientific productions as subject to the same critique as literary works for in both we approach co-existing realities.

Linstead describes an art-form that crosses the boundaries of narrative, music, folk-drama and working-class politics in his analysis of The Radio Ballads of Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker. These ballads encompassed stories of work, songs of everyday life of fishermen, train drivers, road-builders and political engagement in the authentic voices of participants, giving life to John Grierson’s demand that art should “make the everyday significant.”

Grisham engages with a very current theme in management education, that of leadership in cross-cultural contexts, considering the role of metaphor in effective communications as leading from obscurity to a kind of clarity that enables action. While as Wittgenstein observes “words are deeds”, nonetheless what in the positivistic worlds of science and business are taken to be truths may turn out to be “images of truth that prove, in the end, to be metaphors.” Grisham quotes Gannon’s work on physical representations of culture and in particular Gannon’s metaphor of the Japanese garden as an image of Japanese culture and argues that in this culture identity may merge with mood. Here indeed, every picture tells a story.

Saunders, like Windle and other contributors in this Special Issue, is a published poet. Here she offers another take on the special role of poetry as a basis for performances, efforts and accomplishments. What business schools and CEOs define as “leadership” is just one of these accomplishments. Her theme is that it is the very “gratuitousness” of poetry that gives it special status, but that this quality to be effective has to be existentially grounded. Wordsworth of course believed the same and would have concurred in the next of Saunders’ criteria, that the poet, like the scientist, has to be hyper-aware of language. Like Grisham, Saunders wants poets to engage with the cultural dimensions of human action but goes further in requiring that poets are to be “unashamedly metaphysical”. Her last point emphasises the central significance of the ethical dimension. The Editors of this collection, indeed the POEME group as a whole, share this belief that both the poet and the manager can and must exert moral agency.

Grisoni and Kirk show how these concerns connect with the way we do our work as management teachers and illustrates the link with the currently favoured methodologies of critical incident analysis and the theoretical frames of sense-making. Grisoni draws from her experience as a teacher and manager and has the effrontery to bring her dreams into the analysis and illustrates with examples how reality emerges in the space between dreaming and waking.

Islam and Zyphur draw their analysis from a consideration of the poems of Robert Frost and show how central to Frost’s vision are the workaday realities of personal liberation and cultural oppression. Frost is rarely cited in histories of the evolution of the disciplines of management but this insightful deconstruction of Frost’s poetic world could as easily function as part of a parallel mythology of the origins of our trade as does the approved canon of Taylor, Fayol and Gilbreth. Other, perhaps more significant truths may be revealed because as they write “Central to the understanding of poetry is the idea that the metaphors, figures, and rhythms embedded in verse are themselves central to an intellectual message that could not have been stated as propositional knowledge”. It was Frost who wrote that “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by” and this poet would doubtless recognise the angst of many managers successful in their organisational careers desperately trying in their middle years to remember the precise point at which their own two paths had diverged and what pressures in our results-oriented culture had promoted one set of choices as inevitable.

Islam and Zyphur write (applaudingly perhaps) of “the stoic laborial ethic of the New England farmer, its humanistic focus, and its virtually unending considerations of the relations of work to life, happiness, and the world.”

These themes could segue into the narratives of the entrepreneurs recounted by Hamilton whose tales of “reversals, recognition, and suffering” conform to the classical Aristotelian structures of plot. As all consultants with family businesses well understand there are two important things to know about the symptoms and problems these businesses present with. They are always unique, idiosyncratic, different, special but they are always the same; they are strictly located in historical time as vehicles for academic analysis but they are also epics of fathers and sons, daughters and sisters in inner time as experienced by the participants in these dramas. Freud who claimed that only two things mattered – love and work – is not far from the surface in these myths either. Hamilton claims Ricoeur in support of her recommendation that “a close examination of aspects of the narratives is a worthwhile way to understand family businesses over time”.

It is conventional (and doubtless indicative of the intrinsic modesty of business and management academics) to add a coda to research papers that “more research is undoubtedly needed”. But Darmer, another member of our POEME group, goes further in maintaining that poetry can play a central role in the research process itself as a “technology of enquiry” that adds different insights to the positivistic paradigm. His poem emerges as a rock song.

Perhaps this is the right place to stop this introduction to our first collection: the lights are dim, the hall is packed, the band is ready and the instruments of scholarship and performance are well tuned. Nothing else to be said to our readers then but “Join In! Rock On!” (Although as Ira Gershwin noted “ Nice work if you can get it – and you can get it if you try!”)

Jane James and David WeirGuest Editors