Literary Theory

Literary Theory as a Guide to Literature

The idea that social sciences can be enriched through close contact with literary fiction can be traced to the very beginnings of the social sciences and, more recently, to Lewis A. Coser's book Sociology Through Literature from 1963. Fiction, Coser claimed, is social evidence and testimony, a commentary on events and morals, more likely to be a source of sociological insights than the random comments of untrained informants. Recourse to literature cannot replace systematically collected scientific knowledge but can complement and enhance it. The social sciences stem, after all, from the humanities. Although Coser did not state it explicitly, quotes from literary theorists show that they were his guides in his search for excerpts to illustrate central sociological topics.

In 1968, Dwight Waldo published The Novelist on Organization and Administration. His argument was similar to Coser's in the sense that fiction is to be complementary to science, but he was more interested in a psychological complement. Fiction can add to scientific writing that which was removed in the first place: the concrete, the sensual, the emotional, the idiosyncratic. He also called attention to the gains emphasized later by narratologists: Novels are a source of vicarious experience. Similarly, he was the first to indicate the possibility of genre analysis conducted from the point of view of organizational knowledge.

In 1989, the Harvard Business Review published an article entitled, “Reading Fiction to the Bottom Line” by the literary theorist Benjamin DeMott. DeMott chose a story by Lionel Trilling from 1945, and another by Donald Barthelme from 1980, to show how they captured the social character of their times and how they presaged metaphors and concepts that emerged much later in the social sciences. This claim had been made before: Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian postformalist whose works have become posthumously influential, claimed that the novelists had a keen sense for emerging processes, partly because they did not have to be cautious like the scientists. Milan Kundera, novelist and literary theoretician, pointed out that the novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud did, discussed the class struggle before Marx did, and practiced phenomenology before the term was even invented.

From such a perspective, novels are not a source of information, but a source of meaning. They are among [Page 825]texts to be taken into account while scientific texts are produced; they are models—not for imitation, but for inspiration. They are versions of the world, relevant and valid not because they match the world exactly but because they might contain appealing categories. It is the power of creative insight rather than documentary precision that makes novels both a potential competitor to and a dialogue partner for organization theory.

It was in this spirit that Barbara Czarniawska and Pierre Guillet de Monthoux edited a collection called Good Novels, Better Management; David Knights and Hugh Willmott collaborated on the collection Management Lives! Power and Identity in Work Organizations; and Martin Parker and his colleagues edited a special issue of the journal Organization dedicated to science fiction. Fiction, in their eyes, accomplishes feats that organization theory often misses. It combines the subjective with the objective, the fate of individuals with the fate of institutions, and micro events with macro systems. Interest in fiction continues, and organization theorists are looking for inspiration in literary theory but also trying their hand in the literary theory of organizing.

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