Negotiating Academic Stories Every day: Science after the Narrative Turn in the Humanities

Abstract

Flows of ideas and paradigmatic wars are easier to trace through informal memoirs than methodological drill manuals. Sc’MOI’s emergence, flourishing, and decline are linked to a floating group of social scientists with the ambition to introduce managerial research into the humanist fold. Elective affinities linked David Boje and the undersigned to the Chicago economist Deirdre McCloskey, the Cardiff critical theory analyst Hugh Willmott, and the Lund organizational sciences guru Mats Alvesson. The drift from the International Academy of Business Disciplines to the Standing Conference on Management and Organizational Inquiry was accompanied by the Journal of Organizational Change Management. Marginal? Perhaps? But evolution picks up random cultural drifts and turns them into destinies of knowledge production. The narrative, humanist turn survived and kicks forward.