Cultures and Organization
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Опубликовано на портале: 05-01-2003
Martha S. Feldman, Kaj Skoldberg
Cultures and Organization.
2002.
Stories are an important part of organizational life that scholars have studied from
many different perspectives. In this paper, the authors contribute a new way of exploring
the meaning of stories. The authors use a concept from classical rhetoric, the enthymeme,
to help reveal the particular underlying logic contained in the story form, and show
that the construction of this logic accounts, in part, for the engaging nature of
the stories. The authors show that storytellers use enthymemes in the construction
of their stories and also that scholars can use enthymemes to analyze stories). Understanding
the enthymeme and its use in the story form enables interpreters to disentangle the
argument often embedded in a story and to surface meanings that are implicit and
powerful. This paper focus its attention on and examine such implicit meanings in
four organizational stories of change in two city administrations, in order to illustrate
the role of enthymeme in organizational rhetoric.
