Grand plots of management bestsellers: Learning from narrative and thematic coherence

Abstract

Barbara Czarniawska and Carl Rhodes have argued that managers and entrepreneurs often learn from popular culture. The dominant plots offer the accepted interpretations and guide for actions, whereas alternative plots, available but not most prominent, provide schemes for possible departures from the common wisdom. In this article, we propose that not only works of fiction serve this purpose; powerful ideas derive also from popular management books, not only in terms of explicit content but also as what we term, in homage to Lyotard, the grand plots: structures of meaning not usually seen as the overt message of this article. We present the results of our classificatory reading of popular management books, interpreting them in terms of the tacit notions of narrative development and cohesion, emplotted in the background. The contribution of this article is to show the ways in which the grand plots of popular management books are used to achieve coherence in presenting the books’ total solutions for a variety of organizational problems and contexts. What their readers learn is not so much (or not just) how to manage but how to make narrative sense of management regarded as part of wider cultural context.