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“Making Narrative Count” Now Available Online
My article “Making Narrative Count: A Narratological Approach to Public Management Innovation” has now been published by the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, the top-ranked public administration journal. Here is an abstract of the article: Though the use of narrative has become widespread through many disciplines, it has yet to establish a strong…
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Sunnybrook Tells its Story
Toronto narratologists certainly must be noticing Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre’s narrative-based fund-raising campaign. You can see the ads on television, on radio, in print, and, if you’ve missed them in the media, on the Sunnybrook Foundation’s website (http://sunnybrook.ca/foundation/). Sunnybrook, located in the Don Valley in suburban Toronto, was established as a veterans’ hospital after World…
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Bertie’s Stammer or The King’s Speech ?
In my study of management and narrative, I occasionally confront a work that challenges the genre’s boundaries. So is The King’s Speech in or out? Is it primarily a buddy story and a therapeutic saga rather than a political or managerial story? Anticipating that to be the case, I concentrated recently on overtly managerial movies…
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My Common Ground with John Boehner
At first glance, Republican House leader John Boehner, the chain-smoking “congressman from K Street,” didn’t appear to be the sort of person I could in any way identify with. But, reading Peter Boyer’s profile of him in The New Yorker of last December 13, I recognized something in common in our family backgrounds. Like my…
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Do the Nation’s Media Have Any Place in the Bedrooms of its Politicians?
A comment on my post about Eliot Spitzer asked about the role the media play in disseminating stories about the personal lives of its politicians, and suggested that the Canadian media are less likely to do so than the American media. I think the point is well-taken, and have some suggestions why this may be…
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Michael Robinson, Artist in Glass
While visiting the Whetung Ojibway Arts and Crafts Gallery last week, I learned that the Metis artist Michael Robinson died last summer at the untimely age of 62. I never met him, but I mourn his passing. I had the good fortune to discover his glass sculptures at Whetung’s thirty years ago. As I understand…
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Eliot Spitzer and the Politics of Sex
The protagonist in C.P. Snow’s novel Corridors of Power, a politician who is having an affair, quotes an old Anglican Church maxim, “You can get away with unorthodox behavior. Or you can get away with unorthodox doctrine. But you can’t get away with both of them at the same time.” That, in a nutshell, explains…
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Fair Game: Speaking, Mumbling, or Shouting Truth to Power?
I admire Jeffrey Skoll and Participant Media, the company he founded. They have a clear vision: hire name directors to make aesthetically compelling political films that show heroic individuals fighting corporate or government bureaucracies and conclude with an actionable message to the audience. Sometimes this formula works well, on other occasions not so well, and…
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The Two Nixons: A Natural Experiment
Recently I attended my first Live in HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s das Rheingold. I’m not exactly a Ringhead, but I’ve always enjoyed the Ring Cycle, in particular because of its attention to the theme of how power corrupts people. This is, of course, one of the main themes of political narrative. Das Rheingold,…
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My Top Ten Public Management Narratives
As part of the last chapter in my book about public management narratives, I developed a list of my top ten. They are not ranked, but rather listed in the order they appear in the book. My main criterion in evaluating these narratives is the extent of my engagement, in terms of enjoying the movie…
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Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job: The Treason of the Technicians
Documentary film-maker Charles Ferguson is a bona fide scholar with a 1989 Ph D in Political Science from MIT and several books about the IT industry with respectable Google Scholar counts on his cv. He also cofounded a high-tech startup, Vermeer Technologies, which was sold to Microsoft in 1996 for $133 million. He has in…
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On Remembrance Day: Man, Book, Machine
The man is Philip Gray, who served in the RAF in World War II as the pilot of a Lancaster bomber. The book is his memoir Ghosts of Targets Past, published in London by Grub Street Press in 1995 and available on line. The machine is the Lancaster bomber that stood on a plinth near…
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The Social Network and the Entrepreneurship Genre
During the 1993-94 academic year, as a visiting professor at the Kennedy School and resident faculty member at Quincy House, I discovered facebook. At the start of the year, the house published its facebook: a softcover booklet with pictures of and biographical information about all the students there, as well as lists showing the students…
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Waiting for Superman: Too Many Stories
I saw Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about American public education, “Waiting for Superman,” at the cinema recently because of its relevance to a chapter of my forthcoming book Governing Fables. The chapter deals with transformational teachers in inner-city public high schools and discusses stories of those who succeed (“Stand and Deliver” and “Freedom Writers”) and those…
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Play it Again, Stone: A Review of Money Never Sleeps
Oliver Stone is a bold man, first to attempt a sequel to as successful a film as Wall Street, and second to choose as its subtitle (even if it is a reference to the original) a phrase so open to parody. The original Wall Street was so successful because it caught the business zeitgeist of…