The Child is 'Father' to the Manager: Images of Organizations in U.S. Children's Literature

Abstract

Since ancient times, literature has served as a medium for instructing youth in the manners and morals of society, and for instructing them on the major problems of adult life. The books young people read, therefore, often provide reflections of what society assumes to be valuable, and of the standards it holds.' Abstract A person's approach to organizational life is grounded in an elaborate and largely unarticulated meaning map, which provides tools for analysing situations, beliefs about how things ought to be done and rationales for those beliefs. This meaning map is socially constructed. We argue in this article that children's literature is a part of this process of social construction, and that these stories in the United States are reflective of one of the dominant strands of the U.S. national culture, namely, technical rationality. We analyse thematically a set of twenty-nine children's stories, and discuss the repeating themes which emerged from that analysis. The implications for the study of organizations are discussed.

Popular Culture and Workplace Gendering among Varieties of Capitalism: Working Women and their Representation in Japanese Manga

“…Scholarly interest in how the workplace is depicted in popular culture is increasing, from novels (Phillips and Knowles, 2012), to television soap operas (Czarniawska et al, 2013;Hancock, 2008), Hollywood movies (Godfrey, 2009), children's films and literature (Ingersoll and Adams, 1992;McDonald, 2009), and video and board games (Rehn, 2008). Although research acknowledges that the boundaries between representation and praxis are porous, as producers construct their own visions of and for their worlds (Godfrey, 2009), what remains lacking in the social sciences is robust theoretical understanding of how and in what forms contemporary and popular culture have purchase over socio-economic behaviour and, consequently, the institutions of the national political economy (Lipschutz, 2010).…”

Children: Their Place in Organization Studies

“…Of the articles that did discuss children, almost all framed children as an ‘object of worry’ for organizations, either in terms of child labour or child welfare. Organization Studies has published only one article that is ‘about’ children: Ingersoll and Adams’s (1992) study of images of organization in US children’s literature. Organization has published no paper on children or on the organizing practices that are inculcated during childhood.…”

“…Another line of inquiry could focus on those aspects of management discourse that are most embroiled within children’s culture (Ingersoll & Adams, 1992; Grey, 1998; Rehn, 2009). While children are managed through management discourse, they also (manage to) appropriate this and other discourses and through doing so manage their own experiences and context.…”

“…Rhodes (2001) effects a similar exercise in his study of The Simpsons which, he argues, functions in a liberating manner not unlike Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. Ingersoll and Adams (1992) take a similar approach in their study of children’s literature, which, they posit, is an important and ignored part of the process of social construction.…”

Whistle While You Work? Disney Animation, Organizational Readiness and Gendered Subjugation

“…At the same time, however, the lore is itself a product of the cultural expectations, images and ideals that have influenced its production and interpretation between the 1930s and today. As Ingersoll and Adams (1992, p. 497) argue: Within a seamless process, people, through their thoughts and behaviour, continuously enact and construct social reality, the culture at large or national culture. At the same time, the culture at large, through a wide variety of social processes, shapes and moulds people’s thought and behaviour.…”