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Hijacking the Fairy Tale: Genre Blurring and Allegorical Breaching in Management Literature

Massey University, New Zealand, n.monin{at}massey.ac.nz

John Monin

Massey University, New Zealand, d.monin{at}massey.ac.nz

Our paper argues that genre is more than the packaging of a message: it is integral to both the story told and the reader’s response. Drawing on formalist and behaviourist approaches, we suggest that the fairy tale, a traditional and universally familiar narrative genre, lives on in organizational storying; and we re-read The One Minute Manager as a fairy tale. We note that eighteen of the thirty-one functions of the fairy tale fabula distinguished in Propp’s morphology are elements of the tale; that the thirteen discarded functions, the tale not told, all relate to the theme of villainy; and that genre initiates an intertextual play of meaning. We conclude that although fairy tales may be invaluable sources of folk-knowledge, this familiar mode of storied knowledge-making may lull the reader into acquiescence with a one-dimensional experience. On the other hand, creative approaches to the narrative genres of management theory should be applauded: genre-breaching, which defamiliarizes the familiar, enables new insights.

Key Words: genre • structuralism • managing • fairy tales • intertextuality

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