Management and Organisation Research Community Seminar – Professor Tammar Zilber
Title: The Inner Workings of Hype: Hollow Success Stories, Fantastic Failure Stories, and Best Practice Guidelines
Date: 17 June 2024
Time: 15:00- 16:30
Location: NUBS.2.03
If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:
Speaker: Professor Tammar Zilber
Tammar B. Zilber is a professor of organization theory at the Hebrew University Business School in Jerusalem, Israel (TZilber@huji.ac.il) and the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. She is interested in institutional dynamics and how ways of organizing are grounded in broadly shared beliefs and understandings reflected in words, materials, structures, and practices. She uses ethnographic and qualitative methods (e.g., life story interviews and narrative analysis) to connect macro-level cultural ideas and understandings with micro-level thought, action, and interaction by and between people in organizations and organizational fields.
Abstract:
In this seminar, I will present work in progress and situate it within the various traditions of the study of narrative and storytelling within organization studies. In the empirical example, I focus on stories told in entrepreneurs’ training courses at the height of the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, and contemplate their role vis-à-vis other kinds of texts and the hi-tech hype.
Whereas best practice guidelines offered ordered and rational know-how, hollow success stories and fantastic failure stories added fantasy and irrationality. Both linguistic texts selectively resonated with the theme of the dot-com hype. These intertextual dynamics rendered the entrepreneurial project under hype doable and plausible but also mystified it. Through the best practice guidelines and the two kinds of stories, the training course performed the promise of both hype and entrepreneurship. My study emphasizes the need to explore stories in their holistic linguistic context rather than focusing on stories and narrative dynamics alone.