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Nara the Organization Dramas of lnsatudonal Identity, by Barbara Czarniawska. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 234 pp. $45.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-226-13228-5. 5$15.95 paper. ISBN: 0-226-13229-3.
In 1995 I reviewed in these pages Deirdre Boden's The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action. I praised the book as demonstrating the importance of talk/text/language as constituting a core element in organizations and as data for their study. In Narrating the Organization Czarniawska has demonstrated an equivalently central descriptive and analytic role, for the study of organizations, of stories/ narratives and a dramaturgical perspective. Czarniawska asserts that stories rule our lives and are the very basis for the construction of society (p. 5); she seems to believe that the centrality of narrative as the main source of knowledge "in the practice of organizing . . . is not likely to generate much opposition" (pp. 5-6; I find this surprising, if true). Her project is to apply the narrative perspective (for which she credits Jean-Francois Lyotard) to elucidate continuities and change in Swedish public institutions/organizations at various governmental levels. The argument is dense and the examples unfamiliar, but the demonstration is persuasive both for the organizations studied and for the application of the perspective to other...