Telling tales Work, narrative and identity in a market age [Hardcover]

This book's broad-ranging and compelling narrative uses literary analysis to examine how identities are influenced within organisations by corporate communication and how they are resisted and challenged by writing coming from other lifestyles.

It claims workplace 'empowerment' is a rhetorical misrepresentation causing stress particularly to public sector employees whose personal identity and fulfillment relies on a quality of service defined by their professional occupations, which conflicts with calls for increasing quantity of output required by companies organised for 'fast, flexible and responsive' production. It proves this claim by reading identity through the language of labour expressed in other types of cultural communication - the novel, the writing of celebrity chefs and travel autobiographies - to show how psychological stress is alleviated when personal and occupational values are re-aligned, when work is conducted closer to the rhythms and regulated time of natural processes and when power for 'speaking-the-self' is restored to the individual.

1 Business

I: Taking charge: management and self-management in a flexible culture

II: Manuals of becoming: self-help for the failing

2 Identity

Sink or swim: the dilemma of the failing middle-class professional

3 Trauma

Ian McEwan's Saturday: a tale of the vulnerable professional

4 Escape

Heaven, heroes and horticulture: the search for solace and meaning

5 Recovery

Narratives of becoming: slow working towards a better life-story

6 Autobiography

Writing the self

Conclusion

The meaning and value of self-mastery

Appendices

Bibliography

Index


Angela Lait offers a brilliant analysis of the rhetoric of business-speak. This is a distinctive and important interdisciplinary contribution to analyses of the world of work. -- Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology, New York Univelsn