The child is 'father' to the manager: images of organizations in U.S. children's literature

Klein, Gillian 1985 Reading into racism: bias in children's literature and learning materials. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Luthi, Max 1984 The fairytale as art form and portrait of man. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Lystad, Mary 1984 At home in America: as seen through its books for children. Cambridge. MA: Schenkman. Virginia Hill Ingersoll The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, U.S.A.

Guy B. Adams College of Business and Public Administration, University of Missouri-Columbia. Columbia, Missouri, U.S.A.

Introduction

Recent interest in 'culture' in organizations has focused renewed attention on to, among other phenomena, the symbolic environment of organizations (Turner 1990). In this article, we explore one element of that shared symbolic environment, children's literature, to see how it informs the images, ideas and symbols of organizational life in the United States. We have chosen to look at children's stories and tales for two reasons: first, they are widely told and read throughout the various national cultures, so one would expect them to form a significant part of the shared consciousness of a particular national culture. Second, people encounter the stories and tales at two, especially impressionable, periods of their life -- in early childhood and when reading stories with their own children.

We are not prepared to argue that children's stories determine one's later organizational behaviour, or to even influence that behaviour in any directly correlatable, one-to-one relationship. Rather, we would like to suggest that children's literature is a part of the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967), which does powerfully impact organizational life. Within a seamless process, people, through their thoughts and behaviour, continuously enact and construct social reality, the culture at large or national culture. At the same time, the culture at large, through a wide variety of social processes, shapes and moulds people's thought and behaviour. Berger and Luckman (1967: 173) aptly term this process the 'social dialectic'. People enter into organizational life 'socialized', that is, with a meaning map (Ingersoll and Adams 1992) made up of certain beliefs and assumptions about how organizations work, about what constitutes appropriate behaviour in various circumstances, and so on. Their organizational experiences variously reinforce and remould this meaning map. We want to argue here that certain perceptual 'readinesses' (Vickers 1965: 48) are developed in early childhood, and that children's literature plays a role in developing these readinesses. Some of these, but only some of them, bear on organizational life. Thus, children's stories, particularly modern ones for reasons we discuss below, help to induce readinesses to perceive aspects of organizational life in some ways and simultaneously not in others.

We would like to suggest here that the culture at large in the U.S. has fostered both a children's literature and an organizational life-world which reflect strongly one of the chief strands of that national culture in the modern age -- technical rationality. In cultures where modernity is as pervasive as it is in the U.S., one would expect to find similar technical rationalization reflected both in children's stories and organizations. Conversely, one would also expect to find important differences in both areas within national cultures less enthralled with modernity. Although we focus our analysis here on one national culture, that of the U.S., we none the less hope to encourage cross-cultural and comparative analyses of organizations, children's literatures and other aspects of socially constructed realities, or cultures.

In this paper, we first discuss what others have written on children's literature, and its social and organizational implications; here, a distinction between modern children's literature in the U.S., and folk and fairy tales, mostly from other parts of the world, is important. Next, if children's stories are a part of the larger symbolic environment, they should be reflective of one of the dominant strands of the U.S. national culture in the modern age -- technical rationality. Technical rationality is indeed manifested in U.S. children's literature, and it inevitably shapes people's socialization and the meaning structures they bring with them to organizational life. We go on to describe how we selected a set of children's stories from the U.S. for analysis, and how we analysed them thematically. The repeating themes, which we found widely represented in the stories, are then discussed; these include the relationship of the individual to the social/organizational structure, motivation and human personality, problem solving and organizational routines. These repeating themes support and reflect U.S. culture in the modern age as characterized by technical rationality. The larger symbolic environment, within which organizations are nested, helps to account for the way in which the concept of culture has been brought to bear on the study of organizations, and helps to focus the possibilities for future research and thought on organizations.