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There is a classic dominant fable about the transformational teacher in an urban ghetto high school. The school is failing in its mission: the students aren’t learning, but they are getting into trouble. A transformational teacher arrives on the scene and, through hard work, long hours, commitment to excellence, and empathy for the students wins their trust. The students become interested in the curriculum and their performance starts to improve. The teacher sets a stretch goal and the students meet it. They raise their hopes and career aspirations. And one teacher’s success becomes a model for others.

Three relatively recent films presenting this dominant fable are Stand and Deliver (1989), which deals with a mathematics teacher in East Los Angeles; Dangerous Minds (1995), about an English teacher also in the Los Angeles area, and Freedom Writers (2007), which focuses on another English teacher in Long Beach. Besides their Southern California location – which has the considerable advantage of proximity to Hollywood – they are all based on true stories.

The implicit message of these dominant fables is that ghetto public high schools are not hopeless, and what is needed is simply hard work, dedication, and middle class values – as opposed to more expensive interventions or a more radical reform agenda.

When comparing the cinema’s dominant fables with the actual historical record, the big difference is that Hollywood focuses entirely on the classroom, while it actually turned out that these teachers were also effective organizational politicians, in that they mobilized support within the school and the school system. In addition, the teachers went far beyond the extra mile in terms of their time – and even their own money – invested in the classroom. These facts lead one to question the likelihood of this dominant fable as a model for reform of the public high schools.

Counter-fables question the dominant fable in a different way, namely by telling stories that invert, subvert, or reject it. Here are two recent examples. Half-Nelson, a 2006 film starring Ryan Gosling, tells the (fictional) story of a would-be transformational teacher who has a big personal problem – an addiction to crack cocaine. And teaching in a ghetto high school makes it very easy for him to score. So instead of the teacher inspiring students to transcend the grim social and economic conditions of their lives, the teacher himself is dragged down into the most degrading aspect of that reality.

The HBO movie Cheaters (2000) – very faithfully based on a true story – stars Jeff Daniels as a teacher who coaches the academic decathlon team from a lower-middle class ethnic neighborhood in Chicago. Daniels inspires the team and they work hard and scrape into the last spot in Illinois state finals. They are given an opportunity for instant success – a stolen copy of the exams for the state finals. After considerable soul-searching, coach and team decide to go for it and, after the hard work of prepping for the questions they know they will be asked, the team wins the state competition.

Their meteoric and unexpected success leads to questions, a police investigation, confessions, and – for the coach – dismissal. But the careers of the students themselves are not impaired. The movie succeeds because it is presented in the form of the dominant fable, but its content is satire. Its subtitle (“putting the system to the test”) and its entire narrative question the intrinsic value of the academic and career success that transformational teachers are supposed to inspire. It is both entertaining and disturbingly thought-provoking.

These examples should make clear what I mean by dominant and counter-fables. In this instance dominant fables are intended to inspire, and counter-fables to question the uplifting story. We can learn from both.

Dominant and counter-fables are key concepts in my work on narrative, so I’d better explain them. I start my research about narrative by looking for narratives – movies, novels, plays – that deal in a serious way with organizations and leadership. That immediately rules out those where the organization is just the setting for a personal story, for example office romances. Then I classify narratives by context, for example those dealing with UK politics (for example Yes Minister and The Thick of It, which I discussed in my post of March 13) or those dealing with public high schools.

After studying quite a few of the narratives dealing with a particular context, I start to see common patterns, for example recurring plot structures, types of characters, organizational dynamics, or physical settings. This is what I call the dominant fable. Then I ask what sort of audience would likely appreciate or identify with the dominant fable, and whose interest would it be in to disseminate the dominant fable. With movies, the assumption most analysts make is that if a certain type of film works, then there will be remakes to appeal to, and profit from, the same audience. I don’t think this is the case with management narratives, first because they are rarely big box-office hits, and second because the recurring versions of the dominant fable can be several years, or even decades, apart. Cashing in, in contrast, happens much faster.

After the dominant fable has been around for some time, we start to see counter-fables. A counter-fable begins with the dominant fable, but then rejects, inverts, or subverts it in some way. Counter-fables are often satires or parodies but not always. Exactly what the counter-fable rejects, inverts, or subverts depends, of course, on the nature of the dominant fable, which thus influences the form and tone of the counter-fable.

This semester I have been finding in my Narrative and Management course at the Rotman School that the students have readily picked up on the concept of a dominant fable, and when I suggest a presentation looking at two or three movies in a particular genre, the presenters readily identify and analyze common elements in plot and character. The idea has purchase. Next week’s narrative turn will discuss movies about transformational teachers in urban public high schools to show how dominant and counter-fables play out in that context.

I recently discussed the 1957 film Twelve Angry Men in a session of my MBA Narrative and Management course dealing with decision-making in small groups. The film, adapted for the theatre in recent years, is widely regarded as a classic. The question I posed of my students is why. What makes it a classic?
We came up with three answers. First, as long as the common law system of justice uses juries, it will be relevant. In essence, it is a story of twelve people locked in a room attempting to reach unanimity in deciding another person’s guilt or innocence. Its very title has led to criticism that it is out-of-date and not reflective of contemporary diversity; my response would be that while the jury in the film was composed entirely of white males, it had considerable diversity in terms of the ages, social status, and ethnic origins of the jurors.

The second answer, particularly appealing to management students, was the set of persuasive and management skills displayed by juror number 8, the architect portrayed by Henry Fonda. Juror # 8 was adept at beginning a conversation many of his fellow jurors wanted to terminate and skilled at reading which of the other jurors would support him when he appeared to be completely alone. He was willing to confront the jurors who were most convinced of the accused’s guilt, thereby empowering the jurors who were wavering, encouraging them to apply their own experience to the case. That character provides a model for MBA students attempting to improve their own leadership skills. In the real world, a person with the leadership skills of juror # 8 would be in a senior management or professional position and would likely be excused from jury duty, which is unfortunate.

The third answer revolves around the nature of the intellectual process in the movie. The prosecution presents a coherent narrative along the following lines. A teenager, after a particularly vehement argument with his father, storms out of the house after dinner and buys a switchblade. He returns before midnight, another argument ensues, and he stabs his father to death. The murder is witnessed by two people in nearby apartments, one who sees it through the windows of a passing elevated subway, the other who goes to his window after hearing a thud. The son runs away for several hours. When he returns home, he is confronted by the police, who have come to investigate the murder. The son says he was out of the house at a movie when the murder happened, but cannot recall the name of the movie he has just seen.

The jury weighed the evidence and found places where it did not accept the prosecution’s narrative, particularly in terms of the credibility of the witnesses’ recollections and the accused’s failure to remember the name of the movie. The jury’s conclusion was that the accused was not guilty because they had reasonable doubts about various aspects of the prosecution’s narrative. There was no requirement for them to come up with an alternative narrative, they only had to cast sufficient doubt on the prosecution’s narrative. In that, the movie very nicely explains how the burden of proof in criminal cases is supposed to operate in our justice system. From a narrative point of view, what the jury did was deconstruct the prosecution’s narrative, rendering it sufficiently doubtful or incoherent that it could not be used to convict. So Twelve Angry Men showed us how an effective jury’s deliberations are a kind of deconstruction of the state’s narrative, written a few years before the deconstructionist movement’s heyday.

Ultimately, a work becomes a class because it maintains its audience, and Twelve Angry Men has. And I think we’ve given some good reasons why it will.

In my public management course this term, I showed an episode from Yes Prime Minister and an episode from the BBC’s 2005 political satire The Thick of It, both on the topic of bouncing (i.e. outsmarting) the Treasury.

The Yes Prime Minister episode “The Smokescreen” involved Prime Minister Hacker’s stratagem to overcome the Treasury’s opposition to a 1.5 billion pound tax cut. An opportunity presented itself to force the Treasury’s hand when the Secretary of State for Health – a medical doctor and anti-smoking zealot – urged on Hacker a proposal for confiscatory taxation of tobacco products and a ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorships, which would reduce tobacco sales dramatically and diminish net government revenues by a projected 4 billion pounds. Hacker tacitly supported these then-radical initiatives to lever the Treasury into agreeing to his smaller tax cut, made the deal with Cabinet Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby (acting on behalf of the Treasury), then “rearranged his priorities,” and finally, bought the support of the disgruntled health minister by giving him a promotion to a ministerial position in the Treasury.

The conflict in The Thick of It is between Chris Abbott, the harassed Secretary of State for Social Affairs, and his harasser, Malcolm Tucker, a Number 10 enforcer whose role is to ensure departmental compliance with prime ministerial initiatives. In episode I showed in class, Abbott tells Tucker he has the prime minister’s support for a new policy gimmick – establishing a squad of civil servants to detect citizens fraudulently receiving social benefits. Concerned that the Treasury does not support the idea, Tucker tells him to cancel the initiative. Soon after, Tucker tells him to reinstate the squad because the prime minister doesn’t want to be seen in the media, which has caught wind of the story, to be stymied by the Treasury. This entails Abbott persuading the media to retrospectively report that he announced the initiative in a previous speech in which, then acting on Tucker’s orders, he had deleted any reference to it.

While the underlying issue – the ongoing power struggle between the Prime Minister and the Treasury – was the same in both series, the context in which it was played out was very different. In Yes Prime Minister, it all happens in private negotiations among politicians and permanent secretaries. In The Thick of It, the media is deeply involved because, in this satire of Tony Blair’s government, policies and programs are judged by the media attention they receive.

Not only is the political context of the two programs different, but the narrative style is radically different. Yes Prime Minister was classically theatrical, with a studio resembling posh Whitehall and Westminster offices, well-spoken characters (remember Sir Humphrey’s flights of bureaucratese), tried-and-true gags (in “The Smokescreen” characters entering and exiting the prime minister’s office through different doors), and an in-studio audience laughing along. The Thick of It is modern and edgy, shot with a jerky video cam in a non-descript office building, and lacking theme music or opening and closing images. Instead of Yes Prime Minister’s elegant wordplay, The Thick of It emphasizes profanity, especially curses delivered – in a deep Scots accent – by enforcer Malcolm Tucker.

So what was the students’ reaction? I was concerned that they would be put off by the profanity (none of which I will repeat here to prevent filters blocking this post), but my warning just heightened their interest. A very strong majority of the class preferred edgy to classic. Edgy represents their world. They tell me they use profanity a lot (though not in class, I’m glad to say). And they consider jerky images, non-descript offices, and supply-your-own-laughs to be much more authentic than smooth staging, fancy offices, and laughter built into the sound track.

So there you have it. I happen to think Yes Prime Minister will endure because of the intelligence of its analysis of politics and language. But, to my Net Generation students, its aura is now definitely retro.

John Tory’s by-election defeat last week, and the predictable end of his political career, raise questions about the Ontario Liberal’s political strategy. Believing Tory to be a weak leader, the Liberals could have let him run unopposed, or with token opposition, to return to the Legislature, where the Liberals would kick him around before the 2011 election.

By campaigning hard to defeat him, the Liberals must be thinking that for the Ontario Conservatives, the process of choosing a new leader will be time-consuming and messy, and the likely new leader will be even less electable than Tory. The process will leave the Conservatives divided and leaderless for several months during a period of bleak economic performance. The Liberals expect that the Tories will turn to the right, likely to a younger veteran of Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution like Tim Hudak. Or perhaps an older CSR veteran like Jim Flaherty, John Baird, or Tony Clement, will renounce the moderation developed in the context of a recession-fighting federal government, to return to CSR theology in Ontario.

Either way, the Liberals must be salivating at the prospect of the Conservatives executing a turn to the right, which leaves them alone in the political middle for the next election. This will be even more so, if the NDP’s new leader Andrea Horwath moves to the left. Bad economic performance is a necessary but not sufficient condition for defeating a government; the opposition parties need credible plans. The Liberals are betting that the majority of voters in the political middle won’t see the hard-left NDP or hard-right Conservatives as credible, thereby making a McGuinty three-peat possible.