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Standard apologies for cross posting. Hopefully some of you will be interested in the following: MATTERS OF FACT/MATTERS OF FICTION A special issue of Culture and Organization Special Issue Editors: Simon Lilley (University of Leicester School of Management – [log in to unmask]) and Alan McKinlay (School of Management, University of St Andrews - [log in to unmask]) How do we imagine change in a world of facts? If we accept, with Castoriadis, that we live within institutions of society which are essentially imaginary - and we further accept that in order to participate that these institutions must be treated as extant and real and not be immediately and endlessly re-imagined – when and how do we imagine and implement change? This is the question that the special issue seeks to address. And we might find answers through attending to the relationships between the reading and writing of facts and the reading and writing of fiction. Recent scholarship in Management and Organization studies has increasingly attended to literary sources in its attempts to illuminate its subject matter, whilst ethnographic writing in the field is increasingly seen to mimic the novel in its modes of scene setting and narration (Bate, 1997). Meanwhile, social history has been re-thought by, amongst others, Catherine Gallagher (1985, 2006) and Mary Poovey (1995). Rather than treat, say, public health reports as proxies for the ‘real’, these texts are analysed in terms of the categories they develop and deploy to understand and act upon the social world. Gallagher (2006) traces conceptions of the body in the Victorian novel and political economy; Poovey examines the construction of social populations in economic and public policy documents. Alongside these developments, both within our field and beyond, long overdue texts have been appearing that seek to problematise, explore and work the fragile seam between the fictional and the social scientific (see, for example, De Cock and Land, 2005; Watson, 2000). And perhaps an even more urgent need is also to question the simplicity of the models of reading texts and the assumed virtue of so doing that have been carried in some of the work in which fiction is mobilized (see, for example, DeVault, 1990; Walder, 1996; Jones, 2003; and McGrath, 2005). We invite contributors to utilize these overlapping concerns to read key texts that inform our organizing and our making and remaking of our institutions. We have in mind those cultural productions that either present in factual form apparently fictional accounts or present in fictional form apparently factual accounts. Examples of the former might include Defoe’s A journal of the plague year or, in more contemporary vein, the ‘documentaries’ of Michael Moore. They might also include the public health reports, to which Poovey (1995) attends, through which categories for appropriating and acting upon ‘populations’ are imagined and instantiated. Examples of the latter might include Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or De Lillo’s Libra. Such texts offer a different way into elaborating, qualifying and further interrogating the relationship between fact, fiction and organization. In essence then, the call invites reflection upon the stability of the categories of fact and fiction and the relationship of that stability to differing contexts, times and conditions of reading. Reversing this, the question becomes how certain conditions of reading themselves stabilise, or destabilise, texts. Themes to be addressed include, but would not be limited to, the following: the literary conventions of realist accounts of management and organization (be they fictional, administrative or social scientific in their purported domain of origin); rhetorical styles in ethnographic stories about managing and being managed, organizing and being organized (be they fictional, administrative or social scientific in their purported domain of origin); the narratives devised by interlocutors to connect grand social and political rhetorics and everyday life; the implicit social narratives of politics, economics and organization; literary styles of social and organizational theorists; fictional writing as a template for innovative theory and practice; the emergence of collective and/or invisible authorship – the sympathies between the death of the author and instantiation of depersonalised ‘facts’ from the realm of opinion Practicalities of participation The editors of the special issue would welcome abstracts for consideration for the special issue by 1st September 2008. All papers will be subject to the journal’s normal double blind reviewing process. References Bate, P. (1997) ‘Whatever Happened to Organizational Anthropology? A Review of the Field of Organizational Ethnography and Anthropological Studies’, Human Relations, Vol. (9): 1147 – 1175. Castoriadis, C. (1997) The imaginary institution of society, tran. K. Blamey, Cambridge: Polity Press. De Cock, Christian and Land, Christopher (2005) Organization/literature: Exploring the seam. Organization Studies, 27(4): 517-535. DeVault , M. (1990) ‘Novel Readings: The Social Organization of Interpretation’, The American Journal of Sociology, 95 ( 4): 887-921. Gallagher, C. (1985) The industrial revolution of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1932-1867, University of Chicago Press Gallagher, C. (2006) The Body, Economic Life, Death & Sensation in Political Economy of the Victorian Novel, Princeton NI: Princeton University Press Jones, C. (2003) Resistances of Organization Studies, PhD Thesis, Keele University. McGrath, T. (2005) Shakespeare and management : a study in cultural appropriation, PhD Thesis, University of Leicester. Poovey, M. Making a Social Body, British Cultural Foundation, 1830-1864, University of Chicago Press, 1995 Rose, D. Living the ethnographic life. London: Sage, 1990. Walder, D. (1996) (ed.) The Realist Novel, London: Routledge. _________________________________________________________________ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/msnnkmgl0010000002ukm/direct/01/