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The purpose of this paper is to explore corporate buildings as discursive entities. They are machines designed to tell the corporate story; they embody the aspirations of a culture. This is particularly the case with headquarters buildings, which are rhetorical artefacts proclaiming a narrative of identity, designed to legitimise past, present and future decisions and strategies. Buildings such as the Vatican, Windsor Castle, the Houses of Parliament and the old Prudential Insurance Building proclaim that the organisation is old and venerable, trustworthy, a model of probity, stable, and here to stay.

The approach employed in this paper uses literature as a way of representing organisations. This paper works with an archaic genre to present a traveller's tale. This has been used to attempt to open up a third space between literary techniques used to analyse organisations and literature as a management education strategy. By opening up this possibility of a third position, it is hoped that readers will be encouraged to make their own interpretations.

The paper posits that organisations attempt to affirm their “brand” consciously, or unconsciously, through their public buildings. They tell their “stories” materially. However, despite their best efforts at image control, counter‐narratives leach out from these structures as their use of space is experienced by human subjects.

The paper attempts to open up a third space for readers to co‐create meaning with the author and for themselves. There is a clear political purpose here: to expose the oppressive practices of organisations which legitimate their existence in part at least through their corporate buildings, but the paper also signals the aesthetic delight, the pleasure that we can take in allowing ourselves to be enchanted by these buildings.

This paper seeks to use two empirical episodes to investigate gendered critiques of leadership.

The paper uses an action inquiry approach by reflecting on two pieces of work, one collaborative and one individual, to reflect on ideas about women's ways of leading, and women's leadership of groups. The work includes the making of artefacts which it uses as a stimulus for reflection and as a reflective practice in itself. The artefacts which it uses are quilts, and the feminised nature of quiltmaking is also considered.

The paper begins by reflecting on the ability of a leaderless group of women to achieve a task in a highly successful and timely manner. It uses this experience to explore theories of distributed leadership in work groups, and suggests an alternative proxy for leadership. It then uses the creation of a piece of art about Elvis Presley and the Madonna to consider gendered constructions of leadership, including heroic and post‐heroic leadership. Drawing on the work of Fletcher, it considers why feminised post‐heroic leadership is so often vaunted and so seldom seen. It posits the tension between self‐abnegation and self‐promotion and service and individual achievement as an explanation of the slow adoption of this more feminised form of leadership. The paper traces the emergent process of the work itself, and hints at the difficulty of getting the “right answers” from research participants, and reflects on the role of nostalgia as a limiting factor in organisational research.

The collaborative method of the piece synchronises with the ideas under investigation, and builds on the critique of post‐heroic leadership as an observable phenomenon in organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to re‐examine a celebrity CEO account using a variety of literary forms to uncover discourses of colonisation. Focuses on the probanza de mérito and the wonder tale or traveller's tale. Ideas of Non‐Place (Augé) and spatial practices (Lefebvre) conclude the analysis.

A close reading of the account of the building of the Starbucks retail empire, given in the CEO account: Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time against the text, gives insights into the strategy and internal logic of the company founder which might otherwise be missed.

The account reveals the nature of the published account of the growth of the company as analogous to many of the accounts of the colonisation of the new world. The analysis of spatial practices at the company is used to explain some of the most successful resistance to its expansion.

Uses a wide range of theory to unpack celebrity success narrative and reveal counter‐narrative of practice.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise the relationship between novels and organizational change and to introduce this special issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management.

The themes of the special issue are discussed and each paper is introduced.

The relationship between novels and organizational change is a complex, iterative one that should be understood in its historical, political, economic and cultural context. If so understood, novels can enhance our understanding of organizational processes.

Although literature and representation in general have been discussed in studies of organization and management before, the specific literary form of the novel has not been theorised in relation to the question of novelty and organizational change.

This paper explores the potential of Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to understand data as an appearance assumed by the quantitative abstraction of everyday life, which negates a qualitative disjuncture between different natural and social rhythms – specifically those between embodied circadian and biological rhythms and the rhythms of working life. It takes as a case study a prototype performance research method investigating the methodological and practical potential of quantified self technologies to reconnect the body to its forms of abstraction in a digital age by means of the collection, interpretation and sonification of data using wearable tech, mobile apps, synthesised music and modes of visual communication. Quantitative data were selectively ‘sonified’ with synthesisers and drum machines to produce a 40-minute electronic symphony performed to a public audience. The paper theorises the project as an intervention reconnecting quantitative data with the qualitative experience it abstracts from, exploring the potential for these technologies to be used as tools of remediation that recover the embodied social subject from its abstraction in data for critical self-knowledge and understanding.

This chapter takes inspiration from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s artistic work and academic writing to attend to some of the under-utilised dimensions of her work to date, that of making. Using unconventional methodologies from Sedgewick, I present my own unconventional methodologies to queer CMS. In this way through theory and making, we can queer CMS anew.

This paper aims to explore the gendered narratives of change management at Marks and Spencer (M&S) and uses them as a lens to consider the gendered nature of the change process itself.

Two extant stories: Sleeping Beauty and the Trojan War are taken, along with the cultural archetype of the American West gunslinger to explore the gender aspects of change. The Marks and Spencer case is analysed using the corollary patriarchal narrative of Sleeping Beauty, a story whose organising logic is revealed as one of concern for patriarchal lineage, and legitimate succession. The paper, draws on the Marks and Spencer principals' memoirs and biographies.

Sleeping Beauty is shown as a narrative saturated in misogyny, aggression and violence. This violence, which is shown to characterise the Marks and Spencer case, is amplified in the second narrative, the Trojan War, in the highly personalised battles of the über‐warriors of The Iliad. The paper concludes that violent, hyper‐masculine behaviour creates and maintains a destructive cycle of leadership lionisation and failure at the company which precludes a more feminine and possibly more effective construction of change management.

Demonstrates how M&S, gendered from its birth, its development through the golden years, the crisis, its changes in leadership and its recent change management has attempted to respond to its changing environment.

Reading the works of Charles Bukowski is a male, and by extension, masculine activity, and as such it can make a female reader feel as if she is trespassing into some male preserve. Arguably, in entering many organisations, women experience similar feelings. The purpose of this paper is to offer an account of the process of reading Charles Bukowski's novel Post Office as a woman.

In order to evoke her response to the text of Post Office and to reclaim her feminine identity in the face of Bukowski's masculinist project, the author adopts a multilayered, art‐based methodological approach using Bukowski's text as well as her own, Bukowski's biographer's, texts of a number of theorists of research methodology, visual illustrations and notes.

Through the original use of arts‐based methodology, the paper offers insights into the embodied, situated experience of reading Post Office, and gives an account of the author's reflections on organisational sexism, brutality and escape in the novel.

Drawing the attention to the multilayered interweavings of novel, author, organisation, analyst and discipline, the paper moves us beyond a representational reading of Post Office to consider the materiality of the text within the productive assemblage of organisational theory.