On organisational stories and myths: Why it is easier to slay a dragon than to kill a myth

INTERNATIONAL SOCIOLOGY Vol. 6 . No. 4 pp.427-442 December 1991 ON ORGANISATIONAL STORIES AND MYTHS: WHY IT IS EASIER TO SLAY A DRAGON THAN TO KILL A MYTH Yiannis Gabriel Abstract The author explores how events in organisations are turned into stories. Three major types of story are identified and illustrated: the comic, the tragic, and the epic, as well as a number of hybrids. The emotions generated by these stories are explored as well as some of the meanings which they reveal. The author then discusses why people espouse particular stories with almost religious fervour and suggests that organisational stories are essentially fulfilments of unconscious wishes. In conclusion, he argues that stories and the 'careers' which they pursue in organisations can illuminate that dimension referred to as the unmanaged organisation, where desires and pleasure predominate over rationality and expedience. We all like stories. 'Five for silver, six for gold, seven for the story that has never been told.' Stories entertain and good story-tellers and raconteurs have commanded power and esteem. Remember how Scheherazade saved her life by spinning yarns for the almighty sultan. But good stories also educate, inspire, indoctrinate and convince. Teachers, orators and demagogues have long recognised their value. Think of the Socratic allegories or of Christ's parables and their effect on their audiences. Stories are symbolic reconstructions of events; they infuse facts with value and generate emotion. Within a story, even a chance event, like the collapse of a statue, is transformed into an incident, as described by Aristotle, 'not devoid of meaning'. Story-telling is a uniquely human activity. The human being alone among creatures on the earth is a story-telling animal: sees the present rising out of a past, heading into a future; perceives reality in narrative form' (Novak 1975 : 175-6). But if turning facts into stories is a distinctly human activity, so is listening to stories, reconstructing them, embellishing them and censoring them. Organisational theory has been late to take an interest in stories that people tell in and about organisations. The functions of these stories for group cohesion or for relieving tedium and tension have been noted, but there is little systematic discussion of their content and meaning. Stories were seen as epiphenomena to the real issues of our discipline. The current popularity of the concept of organisational culture stands as evidence that the time has come to write meaning and its close relative, emotion, back into the study of organisations. Far from being part of an organisational superstructure, the symbolic dimension is now seen as a strategic terrain of managerial interventions and a key function of leadership. 'Leadership rests as much in... symbolic modes of action as in . . . instrumental modes of management, direction and control' (1982 : 263), argue Smircich and Morgan, summing up an increasingly prevalent view. This paper explores how events, often simple ones, in organisations are 427 YIANNIS GABRIEL turned into stories. Stories, I will argue, are poetic reconstructions of events in which the accuracy of the narrative is sacrificed in the interest of fulfilling vital needs and desires, sometimes unconscious ones, shared by organisational participants. This paper does not provide systematic interpretations of specific stories; instead, it identifies three major types of stories and explores the feelings generated by each type and some of the meanings which they engender. It then explores why people espouse particular stories with almost religious fervour and are sometimes unwilling to relinquish them against all evidence, by suggesting that organisational stories act essentially as shared wish-fulfilling fantasies. The paper does not deny the social functions of organisational stories nor does it seek to reduce their content to the psychic desires they express. However, by highlighting these desires, I try to demonstrate why many organisational stories are remarkably resilient and why even skilled manipulators of symbols have been known to exclaim that it is easier to slay a dragon than to kill a myth. Stories in organisations Current interest in the symbolic dimension of organisations has led to an awareness that a great deal of symbolic activity goes on in organisations and that some organisations possess a considerable corporate folklore. We are now aware that story-telling, joking and other organisational narratives play a key part in the generation and dissemination of symbols, values and meanings (MitrofT and Kilman 1976; Turner 1986; Mangham and Overington 1987). The value of this material as research material is gradually becoming clear. A story, a joke or a narrative may provide vital clues about an organisation, its members and their outlooks which are not available through more con- ventional survey techniques. In the later 1950s, Charles Winick collected and analysed 944 jokes Americans told about space and space travel. He found that, contrary to survey findings which indicated the Americans' insouciance about the space programme, their jokes revealed both a keen fascination and a deep-seated anxiety. We may also be moving to the view that, through their stories, people can articulate their experiences in and around organisations, in deeper and more accurate ways than through 'straight talk' (Winick 1961). But if the value of stories and other organisational narratives is becoming more apparent, our methods of handling this research material are still quite undeveloped. One of the features of organisational story-telling, commented upon by some writers, is the way the same story crops up with uncanny regularity in their searches. Beynon, for instance, in his study of Ford workers found that: They all tell the story about the man who left Ford to work in a sweet-factory where he had to divide up the reds from the blues, but left because he couldn't take the decision-making. Or the country lad who couldn't believe that he had to work on every car: 'Oh no. I've done my car. That one down there. A green one it was.' (1973 : 109) Peters and Waterman (1982) relate numerous stories which they en- countered in the companies they investigated, many about the heroic deeds of 428 ON ORGANISATIONAL STORIES AND MYTHS the founding fathers or of dedicated employees. The 'Bill and Dave' stories are part of the folklore surrounding the founders of Hewlett Packard, their exploits, witticisms and inspirational qualities. Such stories make a point in a symbolic rather than a literal manner, which is far more telling and memorable. Occasionally, such stories embark on separate careers in academic circles, like the foibles of Schmidt, Taylor's famous human ox. They rarely fail to elicit a degree of amusement in the listener, who may think'si non e vero, e ben pensato\ A good story, even if not quite true! Stories and facts Even if not true! This is where many of our problems as social investigators start. While the emotional impact of stories cannot be doubted, we mistrust them - if anything, the better the story, the less trustworthy it seems. And for good reasons. The relation between the stories and the reality they describe is a plastic one. 'Story' shares a common etymological root with 'history', itself a product of the Greek eidenai, to know from inquiry. Herodotus, the father of history, claimed in the opening of his Histories that he sought to create a record 'that the great deeds of men may not be forgotten... whether Greeks or foreigners; and especially, the causes of the war between them'. Yet, many subsequent commentators were unsettled by what they saw as his attempt to pass as fact, stories that he picked up in the courts and bazaars of the Orient or inflated reports of patriotic Athenians. A great story-teller yes, a master publicist yes, but a chronicler of the deeds of men, by no means, argued Thucidides and those coming after him. Here then lies the dilemma in dealing with stories in organisations. Should we treat them merely as symbolic artifacts, the way that ethnographers or folklorists treat fairy-tales and fables, or should we seek to convert them into 'real data', after the manner of proper historians, by corroborating them and testing them? An uncomfortable compromise out of this dilemma is on offer. We may treat stories as organisational vignettes, neither as facts, nor as fables, but as illustrations. But whose point do they illustrate? The danger of vignettising is that instead of exploring the meaning of the story for the 'natives', we recreate it within our own system of meanings; we may regard a narrative as 'a good story', reproducing it in our lectures or even in our introductory textbooks for students. But what makes a good story for an audience of students is not necessarily what makes it a good story for the natives. I sometimes wonder if the 'Bill and Dave' stories, which fascinate organisational theorists, enjoy quite the same currency among Hewlett Packard employees, and whether the reasons academics find them telling or amusing are the same as theirs. I approach organisational stories with mistrust; my mistrust, however, does not grow from doubting their truth value. I believe that the distortions, the embellishments, the omissions, the differences between different accounts of the same story, far from being obstacles to the inquiry, are themselves significant clues, not about what happened but about something equally important: what people want to believe to have happened, and why. 429 YIANNIS GABRIEL What I mistrust is the meanings we read into stories. By treating stories as vignettes, myths, flag-waving, hero-worship, and what I call 'corporate fantasies', one may easily jump to the wrong conclusions; our understanding of the significance of the long-standing ovations accorded to Stalin is flawed unless we know what awaited those who were the first to get tired of clapping. But the knowledge that the fate of the reluctant clappers was exile or worse may itself be part of the embellishment of the story, picked on by Western Cold Warriors. And even if true, we may still misread the story, unless we have a deep understanding of the relation between Stalin and his audiences. Myths and stories are undoubted repositories of meaning - yet, these meanings are contorted and ambiguous, and cannot be extracted outside the context in which the stories were generated. Equally, the emotions generated by a story are frequently ambivalent and far from transparent. In this paper, I want to suggest that stories, like other cultural artifacts, do more than infuse organisational life with meaning and purpose; they provide a cathartic outlet for emotion, they offer a symbolic avenue for conquering pain and power- lessness and a protective armour against suffering and misfortune. The comic story Misfortune itself is a favourite theme of stories. Misfortune can be at the centre equally of tragic or comic stories. Banana skins and pies in the face have long been part of the stock in trade of comics. Similar comic stories abound in organisations. Doctors relish in swapping stories about curious items swallowed by their patients or objects which they recover from their patients' intimate cavities. The notion that the misfortunes and infirmities of others can be a source of amusement for the rest dates back to Plato and Aristotle, but more especially to Hobbes who saw such calamities as conferring a superiority upon the listener. Hobbes argued that our own imperfections are forgotten as we delight in the misfortunes of others. Psychologists and sociologists have developed their view of malice residing in funny stories, arguing that misfortune is funnier when it befalls enemies rather than friends (Davies 1984, 1988; Powell 1988; Zillman 1983; for a different view, see Zijderveld 1983). One of my colleagues related to me the story of a businessman delivering a well-rehearsed lecture to an audience of academics. The lecture made heavy use of audio-visual aids and built a gradual crescendo to a final climax presented in the form of a slide; predictably, the projector jammed at the crucial moment, leaving the lecturer in acute embarrassment amidst general mirth and merriment. A good story, undoubtedly, given the ambivalent relations between academia and business. Professional lecturers have long known how to cope with unforeseen mishaps and relish a laugh at the expense of the businessman's embarrassment. Personal misfortunes and accidents are a common source of comic organisational stories. The worker who loses part of his finger in a pie-making machine, for example, becomes the source of formidable organisational folklore (Linstead 1988). But if personal misfortunes are frequently turned into organisational stories or jokes, so too are organisational misfortunes. Military, business and 430 ON ORGANISATIONAL STORIES AND MYTHS operatic disasters invariably find captive audiences. Within organisations, mechanical breakdowns and their close relatives, systems failures, are favourite topics. Hardly a day seems to go by without hearing a computer horror story, which reverses the classical scenario of deus ex machina, the mechanical god, coming to the rescue of humans. Instead, old Fred with his wits about him comes to the rescue of computer cock-ups. One of my students returning from a placement in a prestigious accounting firm with the latest word in information technology, reported how the partners, having lost faith in the bug-ridden system, routinely asked for files to be manually retrieved by a 'little fellow buried in a basement stacked to the ceiling with files'; he alone in the organisation knew where each document was kept, and his imminent retirement was seen as an organisational equivalent of Doomsday. Accidents, cock-ups, and their attendant misfortunes, are the source of rich narrative material in organisations. In his classical study of laughter, Henri Bergson (1980) saw the essence of humour in the chastisement of 'the mechanical encrusted in the human'. We laugh at the misfortunes of those naive enough to believe that the human spirit can be contained and controlled by bureaucratic or technological automatism. Anyone who enters into a pact with such automatisms is begging for a well-deserved come-uppance - and every such come-uppance is likely to be celebrated, embellished and remembered. But we also laugh at the system itself, which for all its rationality, complexity and omnipotence, is liable to failure. As Davies (1988) has argued, jokes provide a symbolic way out of the iron cage of bureaucracy, expressing some of the deeper worries of the individual who, finding him or herself a small cog in an impersonal machine, celebrates every breakdown of the machine. The breakdown of any system - mechanical, informational or social - seems to entail the seed of a joke. In a classical essay, Mary Douglas has argued that 'whatever the joke, however remote its subject, the telling of it is potentially subversive, since its form consists of a victorious tilting of uncontrol against control, it is an image of the levelling of hierarchy, the triumph of intimacy over formality, of unofficial values over fixed ones' (1975 : 98). Whether this temporary reign of anarchy is as short-lived as the laughter it generates is an interesting question. The majority of sociologists who study the social functions of humour tend to favour the view that it acts as a safety valve, which in the long run reinforces the official, formal values. A few, however, like Douglas, have argued that jokes and humour sustain a critical and subversive commentary against these values, especially when these values are under- pinned by authoritarian, rigid regimes. Whether comic stories act as escapism or as subversion may be a false dichotomy, as the two need to be mutually exclusive. In any case, from a psychological point of view, jokes express what cannot be expressed in sober narrative. If jokes provide a way of evading social censorship, they also provide a way of evading mental censors. In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Freud suggested that jokes provide an outlet for previously repressed material. The laughter or mirth that accompanies a joke is the discharge of tension: a quota of affect which was employed in keeping the material repressed has suddenly become liberated. Tendentious jokes, argued Freud, 431 YIANNIS GABRIEL provide a moral amnesty, permitting us to be malicious, or at least critical with impunity. Many sexist and racist jokes may fall into this category. Within organisations, this is often found in jokes at the expense of superiors, especially when criticism of superiors is regarded as taboo. One of my undergraduate students was struck by the number of posters bearing the slogan 'Making friends is our business' at his placement in a financial institution. He asked the manager about them, and instead of an answer he was shown a cartoon of a rugby scrum, surrounded by dust, from a flurry of blows. Most of the blows were directed at team-mates. His manager grinned meaningfully and said 'The management!'. The joke, coming in the form of a cartoon rather than a spoken narrative, expresses in a telling way what the manager may have felt inhibited to express in words. A similar criticism is inherent in the routine jocular griping of hospital patients, reported by Coser, and epitomised in the classical story of the nurse who wakes up the patient to give him or her a sleeping pill. Such stories, argues Coser, express the resentment that cannot be expressed in straight talk, and 'imply a rebellion against the routine, against the "mechanical encrusted upon the living", and against the staff who on the basis of their authority may intrude any time they wish on the privacy of the patient' (Coser 1959 : 173). Many comic stories, then, present a challenge to the organisation's rationality, power and legitimacy, as highlighted in cock-ups, breakdowns, or quirky episodes. Such stories seem to say that the organisation, with all its powerful accoutrements, its bureaucracy and its technology is an absurd farce or a madhouse, not far removed from the caricatures presented in Yes, Minister or MASH. Yet, if comic stories question the established order and allow the underdog a moment of release, or triumph, as humour theorists invariably refer to it, it is important to remember that this triumph is imaginary and frequently based on self-deception. Misfortunes, accidents and breakdowns act as the source of a story-making process, but even when they do not occur in reality, we can readily imagine them to have happened. If the emperor's new clothes were a bit transparent, threadbare or whimsical, in our imagination the emperor stands quite naked, because we want him to be naked. But while imagining that the emperor is not wearing any clothes and enjoying a good laugh at his expense, we are forgetting that much of the time we are paying taxes to him while bowing reverentially. The emperor's new clothes may be phoney, but his power is not. If'freedom is the prerogative of humour', as Zijderveld has observed (1983 : 25), in joking the distinction between reality and unreality fades. The material of joking stories (and as we shall see presently of all stones) is plastic - if the story can be improved by omitting some details or exaggerating others, by changes in emphasis, then so be it. The odds are that we will end up believing that the story as embellished is what indeed happened. The story can then be seen as a wish-fulfilling fantasy. The moral amnesty conferred by the joke extends into a poetic licence, whereby we may recreate the events for greater effect. The nurse did not really wake us up to give us the sleeping pill, for we were only pretending to be asleep, nor did the visiting lecturer lose his composure when the critical slide failed to materialise on the screen, nor is 432 ON ORGANISATIONAL STORIES AND MYTHS there really a little fellow to come to the rescue of the failing software in the accountancy house. In short, then, the pleasure released by comic stories is too precious to be undermined by considerations of accuracy or veracity. The tragic story While many organisational stories have a joking nature, organisational culture often encompasses stories of a more serious character. In a widely quoted article, Pettigrew (1979) has suggested that at the heart of the culture- and meaning-generating process lie organisational dramas or crises. Some dramas result in comic stories; alternately they generate two other types of stories, tragic and epic. Tragic stories, like comic ones, generate a substantial degree of emotion, albeit of a different kind. Instead of the mirth and amusement generated by comic stories, tragic stories are accompanied by grief, pain and, possibly, guilt. An obvious question arises here. If comic stories earn their place in organisational folklore through the vicarious pleasure which they afford, how can we explain the existence in organisations of tragic stories? Tragic stories share a number of features with comic stories - they too grow out of human misfortunes and they too often deal with the unintended consequences of human actions. At a first glance it may seem that the difference between a tragic and a comic story originates in the magnitude of the misfortune. A minor injury or blow to one's ego may generate jokes, death or severe mutilation may generate tragic stories. A drama will, in other words, generate tragic rather than comic folklore if the feeling is that 'One does not joke about such matters'. All the same, there is evidence that even the deranged carnage of Auschwitz generated its own brand of black humour. Many of us would not find such grotesquerie amusing, but the fact that some do suggests that no amount of suffering offers adequate protection against ridicule. More important than the magnitude of the misfortune is the fact that tragic stories rarely have the quality of 'come-uppance', which characterises comic ones. If in comic stories we convince ourselves that the misfortune was 'deserved' or that it was not really serious enough, or that it may have been much worse, or, at any rate it could not happen to us, tragic stories generate no moral amnesty. As Aristotle pointed out, tragedy generates feelings of compassion and anxiety, or pity and fear. 'Pity is reserved for undeserved misfortune and fear for the misfortune of people just like ourselves' (Aristotle 1453a). Attribution of guilt is a key feature of tragic stories. If the point of many comic stories is that suffering is the just reward for foolishness or stupidity, the point of tragic stories is that this is an unjust, unkind world in which suffering is meted out with arbitrariness and with impunity. Tragic stories are less common in most organisations than comic stories. I do not know the extent to which pure tragic stories appear in extreme organisations, which routinely deal with death, such as combat units, hospices, and so on. One type of tragic story, which featured prominently in my field research in the catering industry, is what may be called a Manichean 433 YIANNIS GABRIEL story, which sees all misfortune as the work of a malevolent agent. The suicide of a cook was related to me independently and without prompting by several of his fellow-workers, some of whom were in tears while recounting how management had driven him to his desperate act. For them, the suicide symbolically stood for murder and was presented as the crowning proof of the malevolence of their managers. Other dramas that functioned as sources of tragic stories were forced redundancies, disciplinary incidents, certain types of strike and serious accidents (Gabriel 1991). The key feature of such tragic stories is the attribution of responsibility or guilt to a supernatural principle such as fate, or, more commonly, a malevolent agent or a scapegoat. This could be 'all management', a particular supervisor, a strike-breaker or some other individual or group. I suspect that many 'trouble-maker' stories recounted by management fall into a similar category. By interpreting the world in terms of a fundamental opposition of good and evil, in which the forces of decency, courage and integrity confront those of malice, duplicity and oppression, such stories provide a cathartic outlet for grief, and exonerate the individual of any responsibility in the drama. As with comic stories, tragic stories can then be seen as wish fulfilments, through which individuals cope with guilt and pain. A more superficial type of tragic story commonly encountered in or- ganisations is what can be described as the chagrined gripe. Attribution of responsibility here takes the standard form of 'passing the buck'. Here humour does not come to make light of the hardships, as in the case of the jocular gripes (discussed earlier). If the moral of the jocular gripe is 'You don't have to be mad to survive in this organisation, but it helps', the moral of the chagrined gripe is 'grin and bear it'. Here is a standard example of this rather trite but all too recognisable type, as reported by one of my students returning from placement: Bloody typical. We ask the boys upstairs what exactly they want, receive no reply, and then we use our initiative, what happens? They throw the report back in our faces and tell us to start again. And here is another story of the same genre related to me by the Head of Computing Services of a large organisation: A secretary got me out of bed early one Saturday morning. She had to prepare a report for her boss and her machine had packed up - nothing showed on the screen. I asked her to check that the machine was switched on and properly booted. No use. I got there to discover that the brightness control was turned all the way down. And she got me out of bed for this! Such routine griping, which is extremely common in some organisations we are all familiar with, may be at the borderline of what constitutes a story - its plot is quite rudimentary, its characters sketchy, and it hardly seems to warrant repetition or embellishment. It does, however, display the two features of the tragic story - it grows out of misfortune experienced as trauma, rather than as cock-up; it looks at misfortune as undeserved and seeks to apportion blame and responsibility. 434 ON ORGANISATIONAL STORIES AND MYTHS The tragi-comic story Zijderveld has observed that 'with the lapse of time many tragedies are slowly transformed into comedies' (1983 : 23). The same can be said of some tragic organisational stories. Given time we learn to see the funny side of things. This is especially true of bizarre tests and punishments or initiation rites, which are common in public schools, military organisations, the police and other such institutions (Holdaway 1988). These may initially be experienced as traumatic events, but with time they become shrouded in blithe nostalgia, as the emphasis shifts from the humiliation of the victims to the wit of the perpetrators. I shall return to such stories presently. A different type of tragi-comic story is summed up in the expression 'grace in adversity'. In a baked-bean processing plant, women liked to recount the story of how management had, with the help of some psychologists, trained pigeons to do the extraordinarily tedious job of identifying defective beans and picking them out of a continuously moving conveyor. Sadly, the RSPCA was alerted to this fact, and ruled that it amounted to cruelty to animals, whereupon the job was assigned once again to the women. The bitter-sweet irony of this joke is not unlike that of the stories quoted earlier from Beynon. Such stories refuse to succumb to self-pity, to seek solace in escapism or in scapegoating, and in a symbolic way make light of the hardships, turning victimhood into victory. Freud rightly distinguished this type of humour from the wit of the straight comic stories. Humour, he argues, 'refuses to be hurt by the arrows of reality or to be compelled to suffer. . . . Humor is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies the triumph not only of the ego, but also of the pleasure principle, which is strong enough to assert itself here in the face of adverse circumstances' (1927 : 205). The self-mocking quality of this type of story gives it a higher and finer quality. It is a kind of story which I have not found very often in organisations - certainly a lot less often than the jocular or chagrined gripes. Unlike them, it denies the reality of victimhood, and highlights what my colleague David Sims sees as the organisational paradox of people pursuing with the utmost seriousness matters of seemingly total triviality. The epic story If most tragic stories and a great many comic ones focus on victimhood, epic stories focus on agency and in particular on noble or heroic deeds. These are the stories which are often elevated from folklore to official mythology. The employee who defies storms, earthquakes and other adversities to discharge his or her mission, the executive who cuts the red tape of bureaucracy with the aplomb of Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian knot, the little man rising to the top, the big man coming to the rescue of everyone else. Epic stories, like comic and tragic ones, may spring from dramas and crises but, unlike the other two, highlight the resolution of the crisis through great deeds of courage, force or wit. Epic stories come at the micro-level, epitomised in the 'Bill and Dave' genre 435 YIANNIS GABRIEL mentioned earlier (Peters and Waterman 1982), as well as the macro-level Tacocca saves Chrysler' and their popularity coincides with the rediscovery by capitalism of its heroic heritage. Whatever else it may be, business has become an arena for heroes, whose exploits are narrated and celebrated, just like those of King Arthur and his Knights. It is not accidental that epic stories are the ones which have caught the attention of organisational theorists in the last ten or twenty years (Mitroff 1984; Martin et al. 1983; Kanter 1983; Ingersoll and Adams 1986; Bowles 1989). While tragic stories unleash grief, and comic stories mirth, epic stories generate pride, commitment and purpose. Their usual subject matter is battles won, and occasionally lost, and their emphasis is on integrity, courage, honour and glory; they are usually far more straight- forward than comic or tragic stories, lacking their ambiguity and ambiv- alence. Numerous authors have commented how a corporate mythology, full of heroes and villains, martyrs and traitors, great courage and noble sacrifices, missions, struggles and ordeals, reinforces the organisation's values and strengthens its culture. Like comic and tragic stories, epic stories are wish- fulfilling fantasies; if anything, their wish-fulfilling character is even more evident than in the other two cases. 'Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish', wrote Caesar (1915 : hi, 18). People crave for heroes, hence they mythologise them. Few things are as inspiring as full identification with a hero (Becker 1962), few quite as painful as the cutting to size of a hero. The potential of heroes for enriching organisational culture has been emphasised by authors like Deal and Kennedy. They argue: It is time that American industry recognised the potential of heroes. If companies treated people like heroes even for a short time, they might end up being heroes. . . . When companies make heroes out of bosses and workers - that is when we all accept the responsibility of playing to a world stage - will we banish the sterility of modern organisation. (Deal and Kennedy 1982 : 57) Such arguments have encouraged the view that organisations can virtually manufacture heroes; this would be a foolhardy conclusion. For just as as people may interpret everyday actions as heroic, if they wish to perceive someone as a hero, the self-same actions may be perceived as devious or plain stupid by people determined to perceive someone as a villain or a fool. The need for villains and fools may be every bit as strong as the need for heroes. A deep-rooted mistrust of management will not be eradicated if the manager engages in the type of heroics described by Deal and Kennedy; such actions are more likely to be cynically dismissed as clumsy attempts at manipulation and image massage, the equivalent of internal advertising or PR. Not all epic stories, then, automatically reinforce corporate values. Even strongly integrated organisations involve competing and opposing values, some of which cannot be assimilated in the official culture. Some epic stories are distinctly counter-cultural. The Honda employee who walks back home in the evenings straightening the windscreen-wipers of every Honda car parked on the side of the road or the man who invents Seilotape in his spare time may be turned into part of the organisation's official mythology. By contrast, the 436 ON ORGANISATIONAL STORIES AND MYTHS following incident described by Hochschild (1983) remained firmly part of the unofficial organisational lore: A young businessman said to a flight attendant, 'Why aren't you smiling?'. She put her tray back on the food cart, looked him in the eye, and said, Til tell you what. You smile first, then I smile'. The businessman smiled at her. 'Good', she replied. 'Now freeze, and hold that for fifteen hours.' Then she walked away. (Hochschild 1983 : 127) The epic-comic story Like tragic stories, epic stories can come in humorous varieties. One such especially interesting type, suggested by the above story, is where a crisis is resolved through cunning and wit. This is a favourite theme in mythology, whether in Aesop's fables, in Odysseus outsmarting the Cyclops, or Jerry outwitting Tom. In organisational stories, this centres on the little man who outsmarts the bureaucratic obstacles, often by using the bureaucracy's own provisions against itself, i.e. by 'playing the system'. Numerous examples spring to mind - the worker who refuses to work until all health and safety provisions are fully observed, the official who gleefully applies every letter of every regulation to harass superiors and customers alike. Consider, for instance, the following two stories reported by students, but which pursue independent careers in numerous organisations: STORY 1 A security guard greets a departmental head arriving for an early start at the office: Guard: 'Good morning, Joyce, have you got your security pass?' Joyce: 'Sorry, I accidentally left it in my office yesterday.' Guard: 'Sorry Joyce, can't let you in.' Joyce: 'But you know me, I am the head of Sales . . .' Guard: 'Sorry Joyce, a rule is a rule.' STORY 2 The report had taken all week to prepare and the manager had already changed his mind about what should go in it several times. The deadline was Friday, 2 p.m., and by 1 p.m. the figures wouldn't match up, so we quietly adjusted the lot. Nobody ever found out. The two stories make an interesting comparison; one involves the over- zealous application of rules, the other their blatant violation; yet, in both cases, subordinates score little victories at the expense of superiors, by using bureaucracy against them, rigidity in one case, inertia in the other. The heroes of this type of epic-comic story is the trickster, a character familiar to anthropologists (Apte 1983), sociologists (Fine 1983) and increasingly organisation theorists (Turner 1986). Tricksters and jokers have inspired some of the world's great myths, and it comes as no surprise that they also feature prominently in organisational stories. In some respects, tricksters are the perfect heroes of organisational stories. They represent humanity's champions in its confrontations with massive impersonal technological and 437 YIANNIS GABRIEL administrative machines which threaten to overwhelm the individual. Trick- sters seem able to defy or twist rules and regulations, to violate organisational taboos, to steal, lie and avoid work with apparent impunity - they seem to throw the book out of the window and, frequently, they are celebrated as 'getting away with murder'. They break the routine and reveal chinks in the armour of over-rational systems. They introduce play in a very serious environment. In my own experience in a military organisation, the majority of stories centred on tricksters. Among the enlisted men, trickster figures were those who flagrantly violated the regulations, systematically avoided hard work or unpleasant assignments, extricated themselves from apparently irretrievable situations and played a variety of more or less vicious practical jokes on their colleagues. Equally, however, several officers, invariably known by nicknames, were centres of rich folklore. They combined an open disrespect for rules and regulations with a taste for naughty, and often infantile, pranks. Some of them specialised in colourful punishments which they inflicted in the most whimsical and arbitrary manner on new recruits, such as shaving a statue in the barracks forecourt, counting the bricks of a building, or inspecting the conscripts' underwear and refusing them leave of absence for failing to wear regulation underpants. The exploits of such officers, recounted in a characteristic half- menacing, half-jocular manner, underwent continuous embellishment and elaboration. Some of these stories combine epic, comic and tragic qualities; in them, we find the extraordinary deed of the epic, the imaginative incongruity of the comic, and the undeserved suffering of the tragic. What is particularly interesting is that different groups read the stories in a different way. New recruits found them unsettling and intimidating. To them such stories were tragic. They said: 'Army life is a minefield. Be prepared to be on the receiving end of pretty unpleasant humiliations.' The old recruits delighted in scaring the newer ones with descriptions of such ordeals. They saw the stories as comic ones: 'Army life is fun. You never get bored', the stories seemed to say to them. Arguably, officers read these stories as epic ones, as they competed against each other as to who could inflict the most colourful humiliations on the conscripts. It is possible then that one group's comic story can be another's tragic or epic one. While I propose these interpretations with a degree of caution, I wish to highlight two themes. First, the prevalent types of organisational stories may be connected to the general ethos as well as to structural features of the host organisation. Trickster stories may be especially suited to the closed, oppressive, no-nonsense environment of military organisations and total institutions; cock-up stories may be widely celebrated in the more liberal ethos of academic institutions; the black-humour of tragi-comic stories may be perfectly suited to the rigours of working in an environment which daily confronts death and serious illness. Epic stories may prosper in organisations or parts of organisations that take themselves rather seriously in the pursuit of their objectives and manage to imbue their members with the same seriousness. 438 ON ORGANISATIONAL STORIES AND MYTHS Second, even within a single organisation, the 'same' story may have multiple meanings, and may therefore be part of different folklores. Soci- ologists have noted how the same ethnic joke may appeal to both top dog and underdog as they feature in the joke, simply because they read the joke in completely different ways (Davies 1984 : 155). The same would seem to hold with some organisational stories. For example, manager and workers may reproduce the same story in different versions. The owner of a small engineering firm recounted the story of how he tried to strengthen team-spirit by organising a Christmas dinner for his employees only to be embarrassed by the fact that all the workers chose to crowd around one table while he and his wife were left at the second table by themselves. He read this incident as proof of the futility of trying to bridge the class realities in his firm. One of my students encountered exactly the same story, in an organisation where she did her placement; this time the joke was recounted by the workers for whom the point was that a hollow management gesture earned its just desserts. Turner has argued that 'insensitive attempts [by managers] to impose ceremonies may backfire, and the manager must therefore consider the importance of how well his staff will be able to participate in the ceremonies he wants to foster, and how to avoid ceremonies which inadvertently help one group to assert themselves rather than another' (1986 : 106). His argument, illustrated in the earlier story, extends to management interventions in other symbolic areas in organisations, besides ceremonies. For example, a golden heart (or the proverbial golden banana) awarded in recognition of services to the company, may quickly be interpreted as a silly gimmick of cheap sentimentality, when a proper reward was called for. The moral of these stories is that the symbolic dimension of organisations is a minefield of potential disasters for those who believe that just because individuals are yearning for meaning, they will buy any meaning. If anything, the symbolic dimension may be the hardest dimension to manage. The effect of management interventions in this domain are highly unpredictable. Most importantly, a substantial part of this dimension may be entirely un- manageable. The meanings that individuals read into events, as they transform them into stories, derive from the deeper and frequently repressed wishes and desires. Unlike many other forms of behaviour in organisations, this process does not lend itself to rationalised impersonal control. People resort to story-telling, jokes and gossip, because such narratives are plastic - they permit the reconstruction of reality according to shared wishes and cannot readily be controlled by thought policemen. Stories offer a way of humanising the impersonal, highly regulated and unemotional spaces of modern organ- isations, offering an outlet which cannot readily be rationalised, standardised and controlled. They are a chief ingredient of what I would call the unmanaged organisation, the murky spaces within the organisation in which people can engage in all kinds of unsupervised, spontaneous activity, where they can distort reality in the interest of pleasure, where emotion prevails over expedience. This is the true dream-world of organisations, the world in which 439 YIANNIS GABRIEL desires, anxieties and emotions find expression in fantastic and highly irrational constructions. The juxtaposition between the ostensibly rational activities of the visible organisation and the unmanaged domain of fantasy is not a static, fixed one. There is no sharp line separating the two, but a contested terrain, an area where different interpretations, diverse meanings and diverging symbolisms and rationalisations coexist, merge and compete. In this terrain neither the pleasure nor the reality principle can forever claim the upper hand. Conclusions and summary In a revealing passage in his Poetics, Aristotle wrote: The fantastic quality is a source of pleasure, as appears from the fact that we all tend to embellish a story, in the belief that we are pleasing our listener. Homer more than anyone else has taught us how to tell lies in the right way. ... [In stories] a likely impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility. (Aristotle 1460a; cf. 1963 : 45-6) Over 2000 years later, Mark Twain wrote: If you wish to lower yourself in a person's favour, one good way is to tell his story over again, the way you heard it. (Twain 1959) If in story-telling poetry and pleasure take precedence over accuracy and veracity, it is because the stories fulfil vital psychic needs. The stories are far too good to be given up merely because they are untrue. Different stories are 'good' or 'telling' for different reasons. Three principal types of organisational story were identified: 1. The comic story, surrounding deserved misfortunes, cock-ups and other quirky or unusual events; it is accompanied by mirth and laughter, and provides a moral amnesty by permitting the expression of ideas which would otherwise remain silent. 2. The tragic story, spawned by undeserved suffering and trauma; it generates the Aristotelian mixture of fear and pity, and may lead to the attribution of guilt to legitimate objects of aggression or to supernatural principles. 3. The epic story, centring on battles or contests won and the great deeds through which crises are resolved. It generates pride and inspires commitment. A number of hybrids were also identified, which combine some or all of the above elements. All these stories display a tendency of becoming gradually detached from the events which gave birth to them and acquire an existence of their own. I suspect that a longitudinal study will reveal that stories, like people, have 'careers'. Some become gradually embellished and augmented with each recital, eventually becoming organisational myths. Others may atrophy and disappear altogether, or may be rediscovered later and start new careers. Some stories may pursue multiple careers as different groups discover 440 ON ORGANISATIONAL STORIES AND MYTHS different meanings in them. These would include the stories that embark on distinct careers in academic debates long after their native careers have faded away, F.W. Taylor's story of Schmidt being one of them. Organisational stories, then, should not be seen as descriptions of events, but as conveying meanings and messages. They reconstruct events in a fantastic manner to amplify these messages, making full use of poetic licence in achieving their aims. While this paper has not attempted an in-depth interpretation of specific stories, a number of psychic needs which are fulfilled by organisational stories were highlighted: — Stories give an outlet to creative imaginative qualities, in environments which usually thwart them. — Stories permit the discharge of emotion, in situations which normally seek to minimise emotion. — Stories express ideas and wishes that are normally censored externally or repressed internally. — Stories humanise impersonal surroundings, they personalise conflicts and oppression in contexts where they are usually invisible and impersonal. Above all, stories were seen as people's 'primary, unreflecting, and spon- taneous attempt to understand all experience in terms of its purpose and meaning for themselves' (Elias 1978 : 255). In particular, stories were seen as attempts to read meaning into suffering and misfortune. 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He studied engineering and industrial sociology at Imperial College, London, and obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His main research interests lie in social and psychoanalytic theories, especially as they apply to work and organisations. He is currently carrying out a piece of research on organisational folklore with the help of a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. Address: School of Management., University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK. 442