Organizations and Popular Culture Information, Representation and Transformation

1. Introduction Carl Rhodes, Swansea University, UK; and Simon Lilley, University of Leicester, UK

2. Management she wrote: organization studies and detective stories Barbara Czarniawska, Gothenburg Research Institute, Sweden

3. ‘We just make the pictures…?’ How work is portrayed in children’s feature length films Paula McDonald, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

4. Military, masculinity and mediated representations: (con)fusing the real and the reel Richard Godfrey, Leicester University, UK

5. ‘I love the dough’: Rap lyrics as a minor economic literature Alf Rehn, Åbo Akademi University, Finland; and David Sköld, Lund University, Sweden

6. Poetry in motion: protest songwriting as strategic resource Nuno Guimarães-Costa, Miguel Pina e. Cunha, and João Vieira da Cunha, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

7. Making Sense of a Transnational Merger: Media Texts and the (Re)construction of Power Relations Annette Risberg, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; Janne Tienari, Aalto University, Finland; and Eero Vaara, Hanken School of Economics, Finland

8. Coffee and the business of pleasure: The case of Harbucks vs. Mr. Tweek Carl Rhodes, Swansea University, UK

9. Fiction and humor in transforming McDonald’s narrative strategies David Boje, New Mexico State University, USA; Michaela Driver, East Tennessee State University, USA; and Yue Cai, New Mexico State University, USA

10. ‘The performative surprise’: parody, documentary and critique Kate Kenny, National University of Ireland

11. Organizational gothic Martin Parker, Warwick Business School, UK

12. Commodification of utopia: The lotus eaters revisited Anna-Maria Murtola, Keele University, UK

13. The man in the black hat Ruud Kaulingfreks, University of Humanistics, The Netherlands; Geoff Lightfoot, University of Leicester, UK; and Hugo Letiche, University of Humanistics, The Netherlands

14. Afterword Doug Kellner, UCLA, USA

Biography

Carl Rhodes is Professor of Organization Studies at Swansea University, UK. His research interests focus on ethics and politics in organizations, organizations in popular culture, and theory and method in organization studies. He is currently senior editor of the journal Organization Studies and Associate Editor of the journal Organization. Previous publications include Bits of Organization (2009, with Alison Pullen), Critical Representations of Work and Organizations in Popular Culture (2008, with Robert Westwood) and Humour, Work and Organization (2007, co-edited with Robert Westwood), and many journal articles.

Simon Lilley is Professor of Information and Organization, and Head of the School of Management at the University of Leicester, UK. He is editor of the journal Culture and Organization. His research interests focus on the relationships between (human) agency, technology and performance. Previous publications include Management and Organization: A Critical Text, 2nd Edition (2009, with Stephen Linstead and Liz Fulop), and numerous journal articles.

"The essays edited by Carl Rhodes and Simon Lilley on Organization and Popular Culture collect some of the best articles published in the journal Culture and Organization. Ranging from studies of how popular culture represents business and organizational institutions to how corporations make use of popular culture, these studies demonstrate that scholars within the field of management and organization studies provide interesting perspectives on key aspects of contemporary culture and society." Professor Douglas Kellner, UCLA, USA and author of Media Culture and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy