Czarniawska, Barbara Good Novels, Better Managment.

Good Novels, Better Management
Good Novels, Better

Management
Reading Organizational
Realities
Edited by
Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges
Lund University, Sweden
and
Pierre Guillet de Monthoux
Stockholm University, Sweden
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The quickest route to economic wisdom in our
time…is a detour through the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries
Donald McCloskey, 1993
The editors wish to express their thanks

to the Crafoord Foundation in Lund and
the WennerGren Foundation in
Stockholm which supported this project.
Roger Dunbar, New York University, was
of inestimable help in his critical but
sympathetic review of our editing efforts.
Finally, we would like to emphasise that
it was a great honour for us to have
Dwight Waldo introduce our book to the
reader.
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Dwight Waldo
Chapter 1 Introduction: Management Beyond 1

Case and Cliché
Pierre Guillet de MontouxBarbara
Czarniawska-Joerges
Chapter 2 Docteur Clérambault in Zola’s 17
Paradise: Notes on Naturalist
Studies of Passion in Organizations
Chapter 3 Don Quixote and Capitalism in 37
Poland: On the Cultural Context of
Organizing
Chapter 4 On Evil Organizations and Illusory 65
Reforms: A Scandinavian Saga
Bengt Jacobsson
Chapter 5 England Expects: Prosperity, 94
Propriety and Mr. Polly
Robert Grafton Small
Chapter 6 Identity, Economy and Morality in 117
“The Rise of Silas Lapham”
Richard J.Boland, Jnr
Chapter 7 The Merchant and the Preacher: As 140
Pictured by Multatuli’s “Max
Havelaar” (1860)
vi
Geert Hofstede
Chapter 8 Capitalism, Order and Moral Value: 156
Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo”
Maureen Whitebrook
Chapter 9 From Escapism to Resented 177
Conformity: Market Economies and
Modern Organizations in Spanish
Literature
José Luis AlvarezCarmen Merchán
Cantos
Chapter 10 Power, Time, Talk and Money: 201
Organizatiom in Italian Literature
Franca Olivetti Manoukian
Chapter 11 The Man with All the Qualities: Can 237
Business, Science and Arts Go
Hand in Hand?
Barbara CzarniawskaBernward
Joerges
Chapter 12 The Gioconda Smile of the 271
Authorities: An Essay on Fictional
Pictures of Public Administration
and Citizens
Torben Beck Jørgensen
Epilogue: Realism in the Novel, 308
Social Sciences and Organization
Theory
About the Authors 330

PREFACE
by
Dwight Waldo
Now approaching a half-century ago I concluded my

first book with the statement that “if the demands of
world civilization” are to be met, the study of
administration “must establish a working relationship
with every major province in the realm of human
learning.” In the intervening years much has been done
to broaden, as well as to sharpen, our understanding
and competence in administration, as anyone who
opens this volume is likely to know.
In recent decades, of course, there has been vastly
increased research, publication, instruction, and so
forth, paralleling and interacting with the increasingly
large and complex administrative institutions and
practices that are the central ‘working’ parts of our
civilization—and without which there would be no
civilization. But in my view much remains to be done,
not just to increase administrative effectiveness,
efficiency and economy—the long accepted criteria—but
to extend administrative horizons, sharpen
administrative vision and—dare I say it?—increase
administrative Wisdom. As a central integrating
institution (meeting and interacting with markets) in
contemporary civilization, administration needs to be
well and finely integrated with civilization: not just with
its economy, its government and its legal system but
with the entire cultural complex. Decisions and actions
that affect our lives root and branch—and
administrators make decisions which require the widest
viii
and deepest knowledge of effects and consequences, of

affects and implications.
One need not decry or belittle the vast amount of
putatively scientific research to wish for more attention
to be given to areas of learning and activity not
ordinarily—or at least not seriously or deeply—
addressed by students of administration. I instance
history as one of these. Here, while we know much, I am
sure there is much more to be known, disseminated and
appreciated, concerning the interrelations of
administration and civilization. And I am certain that
administrative biography is a fertile, little appreciated
area.
I judge the broad stream of literature (‘literature’ and
Literature) to be a great resource for knowledge and—
again I say it—Wisdom, both for students and
practitioners. A quarter of a century ago I published a
monograph on the novel as a resource easily available
but little appreciated. Thus I am delighted with Good
Novels, Better Management and thank the editors for it.
Anyone who reads it will, I am sure, find it not only
interesting and enlightening, but professionally
rewarding.
INTRODUCTION
Management Beyond Case and Cliché
by
and
The purpose of this book is to show how good novels

can educate better managers. What can reading offer to
people working in business or public administration?
Women and men of action certainly swim in an everyday
broth of texts and tables, of memos and files, and yet
they would hardly regard what they do as ‘reading’ in a
literary sense. Those who earn their living administering
services or managing the production and distribution of
goods consider reading a luxury, a hobby or, at least, an
act of consumption. Their professional texts and tables
are more ‘fabricated’ than ‘written’, and organisational
people would certainly not claim to be literary authors.
They see themselves as word-processing technicians
handling texts. Offices, boardrooms, markets and
workshops cannot be compared to literary salons.
Nevertheless novels are increasingly referred to by
those who investigate the professional worlds of
organizations. One finds literary texts on the reading
lists of management schools: we have seen such lists
and such courses in Edmonton, at Stanford, at Harvard
and in Stockholm. Harvard Business Review encourages
its readers to “read fiction to the bottom line” in order to
find managerial wisdom there (DeMott, 1989). Many
young business students prefer to get their initiation in
administration from Balzac and Kafka rather than some
second-hand textbook in organisational behavior.
Discussions in marketing seminars based on a text of
Zola tend to be more lively than the usual exegesis of
2 • GUILLET DE MONTHOUX AND CZARNIAWSKA-JOERGES
Kotleriana. Managers enjoying books by Heller, Bellow or

Eco might unknowingly join a masterclass in
administration or human resource management. Yet
this is not so surprising. After all, reading novels is not
very distant from using the ‘case method’ in some
management schools.
The case study tradition

In countries and cultures lacking management cases,
‘local’ novels sometimes fulfil the same role while
waiting for the Harvard crew to produce their classroom
stories streamlined according to the Harvard
pedagogical standards. But they do not arrive
everywhere, at least not at once: to transfer this
business teaching technology to former socialist
economies for example may take time. Not only are
trained academics lacking but there are considerable
problems of case data collection from executives and
companies. In any case, can management cases really
replace reading novels? Is perhaps case teaching to be
considered mainly as a first initiation to literary reading
for people in managerial positions; tales for the beginner
that might eventually awake interest in more complex
and ambiguous stories?
Even managers who find little professional relevance
in arts and aesthetics tend to find case reading useful.
What is the specificity of this particular genre and how
does it relate to other, less managerially salient, forms
of reading? A good case according to a Harvard veteran
should create
…the willing suspension of disbelief. In other

words the willingness to take at face value the
situation which the case presents, forgetting that
this is artificial, so to speak, forgetting that this is a
case, forgetting that this is a classroom, being
willing to take the situation at face value and
become the person concerned with it—that is the
MANAGEMENT BEYOND CASE AND CLICHÉ • 3
ideal that a case discussion ought to achieve.

(McNair, 1971, p. 4)
A case should provoke a critical discussion amongst

student readers but teachers are strictly advised to drop
the cases that make readers criticise the teaching
material or teachers themselves. The purpose of the
case method is to provide material for a ‘realistic’
classroom discussion on management. Ideally, it should
work as a simulation of a corporate policy meeting.
The management case is a business replica of a law
case. Harvard Business School was developed as a
pedagogical copy of the famous Harvard Law School
where American common-law jurists were trained in the
art of legal judgement and reasoning. Common law, as
opposed to Roman rationalized law, is said to be ‘judge-
made’. Jurists reflect directly upon a single case rather
than subsume or ratiocinate from a set of rules down to
the single case. The practice of common law was
regarded as a very special craft that could only be
acquired by on-the-job training under the guidance of a
wise master from the guild of jurists.
Therefore when teaching became institutionalised
nineteenth century there was considerable professional
resistance amongst jurists against sending young
students to Law School. The old masters of the legal
trade thought that young jurists needed not so much a
university scholarity but a taste of practice.
Consequently the early Law Schools had to show
themselves able to simulate real life in the courts of law.
What the law students got at Harvard Law School was a
realistic show where the professors drilled them into
legal personae and where they had to take actual cases
and re-enact the court-room argumentation as if it was
‘for real’. This pedagogic rite-de-passage, where students
read themselves into organisational reality, soon
became a model for business schools as well. This meant
that professors no longer lectured on generalities but
took on a Socratic method, stimulating the commercial

philosophising based on reading business cases.
Writing management cases is an industry. The huge
stock of cases in the Harvard Case Library has been
written by teaching assistants, usually recent graduates,
assigned to work under the guidance of a particular
faculty member. The assistant collects data from
corporations following the specifications of the
customers, i.e. the professor and the business school.
The assistant stages a real world in the Harvard theme
park of business.
The research assistants play a vital role in the method
because to a large extent it is they who must be relied
upon not only to prepare the research material which is
to be used but also, by accurate reporting of facts, to
bring back from the field to the teachers and to the
school in general a recognition and an appreciation of
the constantly changing realities of business. This is the
role that the Harvard Case Clearing House Report
prescribes to its authors-assistants according to the
case writing instructions issued by the school. The
assistants are told how to dictate a case to secretaries,
how to make appointments for interviewing, how to fill
in the ‘contact slip’ for the next interview and how to get
a copyright ‘release card’ signed by the interviewed
executive. There are numbers of routines on how to file
cases correctly in the Harvard Case Clearing House so
that they can easily be retrieved and distributed to other
schools in need of classroom realism.
This kind of writing is almost like journalism but one
must not forget that many writers applied naturalistic
methods of writing which fit the Harvard style. Zola
would surely be a strong candidate for writing cases.
Most literary authors from the nineteenth century were
writing for immediate consumption in a craft like
manner as journalists of fiction. It is not only Harvard
assistants who must currently comply with the
requirements of a certain ‘style’ of representing the
world. Editors of journals, newspapers and even books
often actively re-shape an author’s specific text to match

the general world view and style of their publishing
house. Writing is a much less individual activity than
we are inclined to believe.
Neither can reading be considered an isolated action.
It matters a lot, for example, where we read. A school, a
university or literary club provide organised forms for
socialising the experience of reading, But this kind of
socialisation actually starts as soon as we begin to read
a book. It is no more a dusty object on a shelf or just
another mirror to reflect our well known selves. A case,
for instance, is written to put us into a policy making
mood. The writer of cases therefore will create a world in
tune with the paradigm of individual decision making.
He or she will ‘agitate’ and ‘propagate’ for the ideology of
decision-making. Their role as educators is to make us
assume a managerial responsibility. According to
Clearing House instructions:
The case as typically used provides ‘realistic’

educational experience both for the mature
executives in advanced management programs and
for students beginning their study of business
administration. These cases, however, are not an
actual snap-shot or sound movie of what ‘really
took place’. Accepting this paradox, the case writer
does not ask for a case ready made as though it
were on the tip of the tongue of the executive being
interviewed. He [sic] starts rather with the
executive’s experience in dealing with some
operation of the business. He is on the alert for
points at which the management of this operation
involved choice. The choice may not have been the
subject of much conscious or deliberate thought by
the executive, but if it did represent the genuine
alternative the case researcher might take this
occasion to deign a statement of the situation
which would give students an opportunity to decide
for themselves on an alternative. (Case Clearing

House Report 9–345–007)
But what if we abandon the idea of ‘documenting’ or

‘representing’? Case writing might then appear as
creative as that of any fiction. A management case can
be considered a sort of script for a drama on ‘decision
making’ with cognitive connotations. This is not an
accidental similarity: as Alvarez and Merchán (1992)
point out, the way managers usually make decision
reflects scripts already known to them, consisting of
small plots which worked in their previous experience.
Plotting, for which the faculty of imagination is
required, is thus an activity essential to managerial
decision-making.
Cases would never work if they were merely
‘information’ or ‘data’. Case writers as well as authors
must have an artistic talent in addition to manners and
techniques. A work of art influences the world of art
through aesthetic quality, style, empathy and meaning.
In schools less aware of the importance of textual
talents than those using the case method, i.e. in most
universities and training centres of the Western world,
such artistry is disregarded as non-academic. Instead of
art, one speaks of ‘science’; in place of aesthetics,
‘pedagogy’ is discussed, and books become ‘teaching
materials’ stored like bricks in the library. Students are
burdened by endless course reading lists witnessing the
capitulation of quality in the face of quantity.
Such students will never experience the marvels and
meanings of rich texts carefully served and sampled at
the feast of an intellectual seminar table. They will
develop into humanoid word processors without
judgmental skills. They risk becoming modern illiterates
clinging to oral and pictorial sources provided by
teachers, fellow-students and mass media. They take
texts at their face-value without realising that those
texts are creations in need of interpretation and
reflection if they are to provide impulses for action and
enterprise. Without enjoying the art of reality creation,

how could they ever master the art of managing? As a
result of their ‘anaesthetic’ attitude, they will be unable
to shape reality, to make things come trae, to act with
and through the symbols of everyday life. Such ‘one-
dimensional’ readers will hardly provide our
organizations and economies with enthusiastic
leadership and imaginative management. To avert the
risk of both cultural and emotional superficiality, it is
useful to rediscover the novel as a more comprehensive
route to managerial understanding. On the other hand,
reading fiction can be a source of both an improved
plotting skill and of ready made plots. Novels can offer a
more abstract understanding of social, economic and
political processes, but also a repertoire of pragmatically
useful devices.
Is the novel a case?

A novel differs from a case in several ways. The essays
published in this volume try to indicate how to profit
from novels and related literary genres in the teaching
of economics, business administration and public
management.
In an essay on the administrative novel Dwight Waldo
emphasised the novel’s special contribution saying that:
Literature helps to restore what the professional-

scientific literature necessarily omits or slights: the
concrete, the sensual, the emotional, the
subjective, the valuational (Waldo, 1968, p. 5)
This argument, the easiest to concur with and the best

known, is only one of many reasons for why we should
use novels when learning about organizations. Waldo
himself lists several; we borrow from him and add some
of our own.
For example, in the novel this subjective aspect is
often combined with an organisational expertise in a
different way than it is in cases. Many novelists had

personal experiences of organisational reality.
Everybody knows that Kafka worked as a clerk but it is
less known that August Strindberg (see Jacobsson’s
contribution to this volume), Joseph Conrad (see
Whitebrook) and Italo Svevo (Manoukian in this volume)
had inside knowledge of their fields of fiction. Wells
(presented here by Grafton Small), Zola (see Guillet de
Monthoux) and Prus (Czarniawska-Joerges) were
journalists famous for the thoroughness of their quasi-
sociological investigations. With good reason one can
maintain that these novelists were better prepared to
grasp the complexity of the organisational life than most
case writers or economic journalists.
Some novels depicting firms or administrations in
such a personal way may well be of the “first-and-only-
type” whereby a frustrated organisational drop-out gets
his or her bitterness off the chest (Waldo, 1968). But
such subjective autobiographies are rather the
exception in a genre of the administrative novel. More
common is what Waldo calls “the man-in-the-gray-
flannel-suit” genre, alluding to a novel by Sloan Wilson
(1955). This book can be seen as beginning a long chain
of romances featuring a wicked-executive-good-person
character, crowned recently with The Firm by John
Grisham (1991). Before rejecting such works as trash, it
is important to consider that Zola was regarded in his
time as a writer of about same standing as Barbara
Cartland is today. Literary tastes vary, but there is
much to learn even from works which do not aspire to
the highest literary standards, and there are parallels to
be made between this genre and the moral discourse of
Silas Lapham (see Boland in this volume).
Novels, like research, are usually inspired by a quest
for insight and knowledge. A work of art can be very
personal in tone but still have an objective quality. This
aesthetic quality, which some people might want to call
‘truth’, is not subjective or arbitrary. It has an objective
relevance for all of us, by making it possible to approach
salient problems in a personal, although not private,

way. It is perhaps more pertinent to speak about
generality vs. particularity than objectivity v.
subjectivity. Novels talk to us even when written in the
most subjectivist of all styles, the stream of
consciousness, because we read in them a message that
has a general value, that applies to many readers and
not only to this one particular character. Fiction
accomplishes the feat which organization theory often
misses: it combines the subjective with the objective,
the fate of individuals with that of institutions, the
micro events with the macro systems.
Novels also transmit tacit knowledge: they describe
knowledge without analysing it, thus tapping on more
than an explicit message characteristic for paradigmatic
teaching. In broader terms one can say that novels are
rich in narrative knowledge, as the one which depicts the
world in terms of human actions and motives, in
contrast to the logoscientific one, which depicts the
world in terms of causal laws and abstract models.
Attempts to translate narrative knowledge into the
scientific often leads to an absurd reduction, leading the
devoted scientific minds to conclude that there was
nothing sensible there in the first place, but which to us
means simply that the two kinds of knowledge are not
reducible to one another. We all learn from narratives. A
formal model of professional behaviour will hardly be of
use if we wanted to know how to go about publishing
this book: we need to ask our colleagues to tell us
stories illustrating how such things are done.
Which brings us to another point emphasised by
Waldo, namely that “through literature dealing with
organization we can extend the range of our knowledge…
vicarious experience can substitute for personal
experience” (Waldo, 1968, p. 5). Moreover novels locate
such experience in different cultures and traditions.
Knowledge and experience is not decontextualised or
simplified. The essays in this volume are based on
novels from different times and nations. In this way,
they demonstrate a wider reflection on business culture

than is usually the case in management contexts.
Textbooks tell us how things are done in New York and
Pittsburgh but what about values and attitudes toward
business and money in Poland? In Geert Hofstede’s
essay we are presented with a managerial reading of a
novel showing the influence of moral attitudes on the
actions of an administrator stranded in a strange
culture. Hofstede adds that his own quantitative
research (1980) supports the idea that national
characteristics, of the sort qualitatively depicted in the
novel Max Havelaar, are important for economic
development and trade relations. A novel may help us to
grasp processes that are theoretically cumbersome to
represent.
Management research claims to up-date us on
current business behavior. But today’s behaviour often
has roots deep-seated in the past. Value systems are
part of longstanding traditions. We all have a notion of
the Weberian Protestant ethics, but what can we say
about ‘Latin management’? Jose Luis Alvarez and
Carmen Merchán Cantos explore in their chapter are
contradictory demands that organizations based on one
value system (promoting competitiveness and success)
place on actors who have been educated in a different
one, focussed on status and honor. Franca Olivetti
Manoukian provides us with a managerial reading of
Italian texts, where the novels remind us of the
importance of ‘family’ and ‘faith’ for understanding
organizations—two key concepts which hardly figure in
the standard texts on international management. The
historical perspective, represented in these novels,
permits much more than a nostalgic excursion to the
past: it shows what changes and what resists change in
the world of organizations, not a negligible wisdom for
those who intend to change.
In Torben Beck Jørgensen’s chapter we find yet
another contribution that novels can make: they can
provide a grass-root perspective on power. Instead of
telling us stories of success and glory, the novels

whisper despair and helplessness. They articulate the
tacit and the secret.
The voice of the novelist can then be that of a rebel,
the one who opposes the organization and its power.
Fiction offers at least two methods of rebellion
unauthorised within the traditional research: irony and
wit. And so Bengt Jacobsson gives us a feeling for how
the Swedish novelist and playwright, August
Strindberg, analysed social and organisational
developments of the kind which we also wit ness today.
Tongue in cheek, Strindberg pokes fun at institutions
and hypocritical reformers. The same form of irony
opens up new critical vistas when we read H.G.Wells
under the guidance of Grafton Small, and especially the
guided tour into Modernity by Robert Musil. Caricature
is there an epistemological means to gain insight.
Readers should not forget that the naturalistic novels
discussed here emerged at a time when sociology and
administrative science still belonged to philosophy and
when economics was ‘moral philosophy’. The theme of
the connections between moral order and the political
and economics orders, and between private and public
identities, reverberates strongly in Boland’s analysis of
the Rise of the Silas Lapham and in Whitebrook’s
reading of Nostromo.
In the European tradition social sciences are still
called sciences humaines or Geisteswissenschaften and
they cannot be clearly understood without a solid
knowledge of continental philosophy and literature.
What can you grasp of Habermas without Hegel? How
can you approach Foucault without Nietzsche? Is it
possible to appreciate Georg Simmel without some
notion about Kant’s philosophy? While social science
rests upon philosophy, it is also the case that
philosophy, in turn, is deeply rooted in literature,
poetics and art, to an extent that one may even be
inclined to see continental philosophy as primarily a
commentary on art (Rorty, 1989; Welsh, 1990).
When Max Weber suggested that we use ideal types to

describe organizations and institutions he indirectly
urged us to think as artists do—to gestalten our
knowledge in the form of images he called “ideal types”.
Caricatures, ironic portraits, satires or other modes of
fiction are but such figures distinguished from the
ground of reality. It has even been argued that modes of
organising are best understood as different kinds of
poetical figures: Sköldberg (1990) used Kenneth Burke’s
list of tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony)
to analyse organisational events in the same way
Hayden White (1973) analysed historical events.
Manoukian and Whitebrook in this volume make a
strong claim for literary works as a privileged source for
understanding of organisational phenomena.
Suppose we went even further—to claim that our
functionalist models of organizations with their
rationalistic management are nothing more than
stories, dreams and adventures full of heroism and
horrors, but usually ending happily and in harmony?
This question may seem preposterous in the context of
scientific knowledge, but, as Lyotard reminded us, the
narrative knowledge is both older and more basic that
the scientific one (Lyotard, 1979). The narrative
approach to knowledge, as recommended by Bruner
(1986), Fisher (1987) and, in the context of organization
studies, Czarniawska-Joerges (forthcoming) embraces
such inquiry. Further questions can be then
formulated: what stories, what genres are typical of and
appropriate for organizations? Are managers heroes of
relatively simple fairy tales, or are they, when portrayed
by Joseph Conrad or Robert Musil, trapped with one foot
in capitalist cradlesongs and the other in an off-beat
world of contrasting values? The contributions of
Maureen Whitebrook and Barbara Czarniawska with
Bernward Joerges open up a series of possible reflections
on this theme. If modernism, with its monetary,
calculating rationalism, is going to be replaced by some
sort of pluralistic postmodernism, we may end up in a

world where Musil and Conrad gain new relevance.
Management of complexity
Our time is as muddled as Musil’s or Conrad’s. We no
longer have metanarratives that hold and can tell us a
convincing story of progress and emancipation. Europe
is splitting up into historical and ethnical entities
tapping energy from dark sources obscured by a
century of rationalism. Whether we like it or not, we can
identify ourselves with Nostromo or Ulrich. The world of
planning and crystalline solutions is recognised as a
fairy-tale. The increasing acknowledgement of the
complexity of the world makes it necessary to turn to
the rich, thick sources of knowledge, advocated long ago
by Clifford Geertz for understanding cultures (Geertz,
1973). Only in a standardised childishness of an
Eurodisneyland can we cherish the modern manager’s
world untouched. Today’s world is a terrain vague and
we need good authors’ of yesterday to help us reorient
ourselves in the melting pot of tomorrow’s Europe. It is
here where the novels reveal their most unique
capacity: to grasp the complex without simplifying it, to
render the paradox without resolving it in a didactic
tale. The novels which tell how modernity has begun
have the same inquisitive and problematising attitude to
what they describe as the one which we need today
when it has ceased to be unproblematic.
Thus, there is a different role for the manager to be
deduced from this unusual collection of texts: that of a
socially implicated context analyst, rather than a
solitary decision-maker, that of a connoisseur of
complexity and paradoxes, rather than a social engineer.
Actual decisions made in economic organizations may
be seen as effects rather than causes, and may result
from an unpredictable combination of contingencies and
micro political processes (Brunsson, 1985). It is the
understanding of this complex dynamics and of its
embeddedness in the social context of the time rather

than the futile ambition to control which, to an
increasing degree, characterises learning organizations
and their managers.
As we attempt to persuade readers interested in
understanding organizations, in what Waldo would call
an administrative wisdom, to reach for fiction instead
for the textbook in management, a legitimate question
can be asked: why, then, do we try to read the novels
for the readers in this volume? After all, most of the
contributors are not literary critics: what is the validity
of interpretations offered by lay-readers? Marjorie De
Vault (1990) argues that the readings of “cultural
outsiders” expand the space of shared meanings. We
borrow her argument in order to claim that the contents
of the present volume are also the ‘outsiders’ readings’—
outside the literary profession but inside the social
science profession. In our readings, we confront the
world of the novel with the world of social science, best
illustrated in the contribution of Pierre Guillet de
Monthoux in which the concept of desire is used to
connect the world of organised consumption as
described by Zola and the world of psychiatry as
represented by Clérambault. It is from such encounters
between different realities that knowledge emerges.
We attempt to provide an interpretive scheme to
readers interested in the theory of organization and
management, a scheme which focus such interest. In
other words, we do the same as teachers in a classroorn
do when discussing the case. And, just like teachers, we
hope that readers will acquire a taste for further
readings, this time without our interference, in the life
school of management.
The management school of good books

One of our hopes is that this volume will stop managers
complaining that the artists do not care about
managerial worlds. ‘So little is written about us and our
jobs,’ they say. And when they find novels with

‘Business’ or ‘Management’ in the title, they expect
another protest against profiteering, abuse of power or
bureaucracy. They are sick of sloppy books which fail to
get beyond the threshold of understanding by simply
clinging to new editions of old agit-prop, labels such as
“big-cigar-bosses” or “money-greedy-managers” in
“maxi-profit-corporations”. We hope to show that novels
contain useful material for managers, especially when
they are not produced for the executive market. Why
read about corporate organizations in textbooks and not
about organising in novels? Why go for how-to-do-it
when there is so much good art? Our ambi tion has
been to show how well known classics treat topics of
high relevance for managers without flirting with
stereotypes and without losing their narrative force in
superficial prejudice.
We hope that the organisational scholars invited to
contribute to this volume will convince at least some
readers to turn to their local library or bookstore before
signing up for another management seminar on
business. A well informed librarian or bookseller might
be more useful to them than another smart management
consultant or even a professor of business
administration. Enjoy a novel beyond the case and
cliché!
References
Alvarez, J.L. and Merchán, C.C. (1992) The role of narrative

fiction in the development of imagination for action.
International Studies of Management & Organization, 22(3):
27–45.
Bruner, J. (1986) Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Brunsson, N. (1985) The inational organization. Chichester, UK:
Wiley.
Case Clearing House Reports 9–358–003, 9–345–007. Boston:
Harvard Business School.
DeMott, B. (1989) Reading fiction to the bottom line. Harvard

Business Review, (May-June): 128–134.
Czarniawska-Joerges, B. (forthcoming). Narrating the
organization. Dramas of institutional identity.
DeVault, M.L. (1990) Novel readings: The social organization of
interpretation. American Journal of Sociology, 95(4): 887–921.
Fisher, W.R. (1987) Human communication as narration: Toward a
philosophy of reason, value, and action. Columbia, South
Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press.
Geertz, C. (1973) The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic
Books.
Hofstede, G. (1980) Culture’s consequences. London: SAGE.
Lyotard, J-F. (1979/1987). The postmodern condition. A report on
knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
McNair, W. (1971) On cases. Harvard Business School Bulletin,
July-August.
Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, irony and solidarity. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Sköldberg, K. (1990) Administrationens poetiska logik. Lund:
Studentlitteratur.
Waldo, D. (1968) The novelist on organization and administration.
Berkeley: Institute of Government Studies.
Welsh, W. (1990) Ästhetisches Denken. Stuttgart: Reclam Verlag.
White, H. (1973) Metahistory. The historical imagination in
nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press.
DOCTEUR CLÉRAMBAULT IN
ZOLA’S PARADISE
Notes on Naturalist Studies of Passion
in Organizations
by
Victim of passion
On the 17th of November 1934 docteur Gaetan de
Clérambault was found dead in his Parisian home.
Earlier that day he had written a short letter to a friend,
drafted his will and tried out his revolver in the garden.
His body was found sitting in front of a mirror, the
armchair in which he sat kept in place by a bed behind
it. He had shot himself through his mouth. Death was
instantaneous.
Gaetan de Clérambault, the last of the Clérambault
family, was a well-known psychiatrist, a war hero and
an amateur ethnologist of some repute (Papetti et al.,
1981). Amongst his publications were not only
psychiatric articles on L’automatisme and Les psychoses
passionelles but also a detailed study on La
classification des differents drapées—a study of how
Arab women draped their veils. After his death the
police found to their surprise, several life-size dolls
dressed in veils, and also a huge collection of
photographs of veiled women. The fate of the strange
docteur Clérambault is, as we shall see, an illustration
of the secret forces—obscure irrational passions—that
underlay modern commercial organizations (Williams,
1984). To explore enterprise from this angle, we will
have to escape rationalistic perspectives of organization
and search for inspiration in literary fiction, such as the
18 • GUILLET DE MONTHOUX
novel on commercialization of veils by Emile Zola— Au

bonheur des dames1
Passionate paradise
Zola opens the novel introducing Denise and her two
little brothers on their way to look for work with an
uncle in Paris. Suddenly, on the road from the railway
station, they come upon a new drapery store. They are
attracted straight away by the doorway temptations of
cheviots, tweeds, merinos, fur, swan’s down, woolen
gloves, hoods and strips of American bison. The
pavement is covered with goods! A clearance sale?
Arrangements of umbrellas, stockings, scarves. They
become absorbed by the plate glass windows, especially
the one with silks, satins and velvet, captivated by their
feminine flippancy, the vibrating colors, the opera
cloaks, the lace likes creamy snow. The ladies’ paradise.
On the other side of the street, opposite the ‘Ladies’
Paradise’, Zola places a stout man with bloodshot eyes
in his yellow face, his mouth contracted with rage at the
display. This is Denise’s uncle Baudu, owner of the old
dusty black shop where pieces of cloth, mainly for male
attire, are heaped in something that when compared
with the Ladies’ Paradise opposite, seemed like a dark,
damp cellar. Baudu, his wife, their daughter and the
young Colomban to whom the latter is engaged to be
married, run the shop as a traditional family business.
Colomban the employee, has his “washing and mending
done, carefully looked after, nursed in illness—loved in
fact”. But in the “bazaar” on the other side of the street
there is “no affection, no morale, no taste”. As Baudu
cannot feed another mouth, Denise crosses the street
for a job, and is accepted as a probationer at the
Paradise where Oscar Mouret has embarked on the
process of developing his shop into a new “trading city”
1The English edition quoted here is “The Ladies’ Paradise”, 1985,

London: Hutchinson & Co.
DOCTEUR CLÉRAMBAULT IN ZOLA’S PARADISE • 19
based on turnover, while the Old Elbeuf, Baudu’s shop,

struggles to keep sales profits high. Zola introduces the
reader to the workings of Mouret’s commission system.
“Creating between the salespeople a struggle for
existence to foment this struggle was indeed Mouret’s
favorite method. He excited on his employees’ passions
battened on this struggle of conflicting interest” (p. 36).
Zola shows how Mouret succeeds in converting, in a
matter of eight years, a starting capital of 500 thousand
francs into 6 million, by increasing the yearly turnover
from four to twelve times. As in Magasin du Louvre,
carefully researched by Zola for the novel, the fashion
department of the Paradise turns capital over some fifty
times, while the silk department circulates it only four
times. Average profit in this new trade is considered to
be low, some four percent remaining when sixteen
percent general expenditure has been deducted from the
twenty percent sales margin. Many items are sold below
cost to attract customers and this bargain policy,
together with the offer of free return of purchased goods
if the customer is dissatisfied, constitutes another
important innovation in the trade. Prices in this new
form of organization are also clearly marked on tags and
are no longer subject to negotiation between the
individual customer and a shopkeeper of the old type,
who was the only one with access to information on
costs. No more haggling in the marketplace, money made
on turnover and not on margins, and hard negotiations
with suppliers. Tough inside competition between
salespeople, while only Mouret, the top manager, had
the power to stage the mass bargains of the external
competition comedy. Competition inside and
organization outside. New trade turns the old inside-
out!
From the original nineteen departments and four
hundred employees, Zola’s Paradise now grows like his
well-documented models Bon Marche and Magasin du
Louvre, into a thirty-nine department, one thousand
eight hundred employee giant. Monsieur L’Homme, the
dirty little cashier, reports an 80 thousand franc sales

record, at the beginning of the novel. A winter novelty
sale, taking place in a brand store, in the middle of the
story, renders 575 thousand francs. When the story
ends happily with Denise finally accepting Mouret’s
proposal of marriage, the one million target is finally hit
on the first day of the exposition du Blanc, held behind
the new monumental facade.
Zola makes frequent use of his notes of the interior
plans collected at his visits to the Magasin du Louvre,
and from an architect friend (Guiev, 1983). The novel
therefore excels in architectural detail, from the
basement where a “Niagara of goods… Lyons silk,
English woolens, Flemish linens, Alsatian calicos and
Rouen prints” were streaming in “with a roar like that of
a torrent”, to the storage rooms of each department, the
advertising department, the chief cashier’s office, the
pay desks, the bedrooms for unmarried salesmen and
women under the roof of the shop, the kitchen and
dining rooms and all the sales departments which
“seemed bathed in golden light and similar to a city with
its monuments, squares and streets” (p. 39).
During the physical growth of this monument,
carefully depicted in the novel, it becomes obvious that
Oscar Mouret, the organizer, is creating a city under his
reign. He eschews the old symmetrical school of
displaying goods, and instead aims at creating an
intoxicating chaos of products. “He laid it down as a law
that not a corner of the Ladies’ Paradise ought to remain
deserted, he required a noise, a crowd, evidence of life
everywhere, for life, said he, attracts life, increases and
multiplies it”(p. 245). Mouret is anxious to create a
crush at his front doors, to provoke almost riot-like
crowding inside the shop and to have it look as if the
street actually ran through it. What starts out as a large
draper’s shop slowly becomes a state with its own laws,
its time-keepers who oversee arrivals, and four police
inspectors headed by the terrible Monsieur Joive, a
bitter ex competitor tradesman.
Zola gives a clear picture of the management

structure where Mouret reigns at the top as the real
Boucicaut of the Bon Marche, assisted by six
administrators or partners who have invested in the
business and are remunerated on the basis of net
profits. Each partner is the absolute boss over one or
several departments, each with its desks. Thus Madame
Amelie, emancipated by the system, earns some 12
thousand francs, while her husband the gloomy
cashier, l’Homme, gets only 5 thousand for his services.
Salesmen and women are paid both a fixed salary and a
commission on sales. Newly-hired employees or
probationers start on a commission only basis and have
a very hard time (unless they find themselves a
sweetheart to supplement their monthly pay) as they
have to be last in the turn-taking list by which the
managers distribute customers arriving at the desk.
While the Paradise and its ‘new trade’ constitute the
main scenario of the novel, a second scenario, its
contrast, is created by the old trade and traders, with
uncle Baudu of the Old Elbeuf, Bourras the umbrella
manufacturer, the lingerie shop, the furrier, the hosiery
shop and the glove-seller making the characters in it.
This is a world far removed from plain pricing and
bargain shopping. But this old world cannot feed Denise
whom the new world across the street can
accommodate. Boarded and lodged but haunted by the
“money question” of hardly covering the cost of
supporting her two brothers, she still resists drifting
into “simple solutions”. When the dead summer season
arrives, Denise, like many other employees, is dismissed
for some minor breach of the in-house law. She now
takes lodgings with old Bourras, the umbrella maker
who lives in his shop next door to the Paradise and who
has invested his wife’s fortune in his little shop.
He had done so on the advice of a small silk
manufacturer who had been unable to supply his wares
in large quantities and at the low prices required by
Mouret. The big suppliers who have many weavers,
depend on steady outlets and prefer to cover costs by

selling large quantities cheap, for cash, to the large
shops, while making an occasional profit on selling
small amounts to small shops. When manufacturers
grow large enough to have weavers scattered a little bit
everywhere (obviously before centralizing workers in
large factories), they become unable to control their
output and, therefore, accept low prices so long as the
new trade swallows up their production,
Denise’s new boss, Robineau, wants to fight back,
encouraged by a small manufacturer to “kill the big
shops”. He engages in a suicidal price-cutting race on a
heavy black silk, slowly pushing it down from five francs
fifty centimes, its production cost, to five francs. Finally,
he even buys silk from the Paradise and sells it cheaper
in his own shop. In the end Robineau throws himself
under a street car. Baudu’s daughter, Genevieve, dies of
sorrow when her boyfriend falls hopelessly in love with a
vulgar sales woman from the Paradise, who of course
does not care in the least for the boy. Business becomes
a matter of life and death. Life on the sunny side of the
street; in Mouret’s temple of passion—death of the old
world of trade and profits.
Zola’s novel bursts with factual knowledge on the
evolution of trade. Not one fact or comment, collected by
Zola in the field, has remained unused. This is not a
piece of romantic journalism and Zola has, as we shall
see below, ambitions to discover the causes of
evolution. In this quest he introduces a third scenario
where the “forces” behind the development can be
studied directly—the Salon of Madam Desforges.
Crimes of passion
Before entering the Salon let us listen to some real-life
interviews collected by docteur Gaetan de Clérambault,
who took an interest in documenting female thieves
caught stealing in large Parisian department stores.
This crime was a common one at the time and as such
was, of course, used by Zola in a passage of the novel.

In his capacity as a psychiatrist at St Anne’s asylum,
Clérambault was required to treat kleptomaniacs, but
behind his documented accounts we can clearly see the
very personal interest of someone obsessed by “veiled”
passions. Thus Clérambault reports of a patient: “We
learnt that she stole on impulse from a very strong
temptation. Silk attracted her particularly. She refused
to describe her first theft. However, we knew that it had
taken place when she was 32 while fetishist passions
usually have their origins in early childhood” (1981, p.
27).
Another ‘silk thief is quoted exclaiming:
My joy is particularly great having stolen. To steal

silk is delicious, to buy it never gives me the same
joy. My will is not strong enough to resist
temptation. Silk attracts me when I feel its sound,
(she sighs) I get itches under my nails. I have to
take it. But if someone gave it to me when I wanted
to steal, I would not be happy. On the contrary,
this would stop my pleasure. From my 39th year the
thefts have been the same—silk thefts. Silk gives
me a voluptuous feeling. Oh silk, I could not tear it
apart—it would be too…velvet is also nice to touch.
I love the soft materials. Heavy silk that ‘screams’. I
could never carry it, it would excite me too much. I
would love to sleep in silk but how could I ever
sleep in it? It would burn me. Calico and cotton
does not scream, just a little sigh could be heard
when you tear it apart. I could easily tear 600
meters. If you ask me for my opinion I would say
that I am guilty of my crime. I would rather go to
prison than to St Anne’s. (Papetti, 1981, p. 30–31)
Organizing passion
Every Saturday the rich widow Madame Desforges,
mistress of the charming young widower Mouret, who
had so suc cessfully developed the business inherited

from his wife into a “cathedral of women”, offered tea to
her friends. In her salon Mouret met a sample of his
customers—mostly upper middle-class women of the
second empire—and through them his financier, one of
Madame Desforges’ ex-lovers. It was here that Mouret
planned his new ideas for what he called his “machine”,
the business where he was “…throwing himself into
speculation like a poet, with such ostentation, such
desire to attain the colossal, that everything seemed
likely to give way under him.”
Here his talks of his “joy of action” and “gaiety of
existence” in sharp contrast to another guest, a bored
and half-ruined gentry school-friend, struggling on a
minimal salary after a too-long university career. Here
Mouret explained to his financier the
exploitation of woman to which everything

conduced, the capital incessantly renewed, the
system of assembling goods together, the attraction
of cheapness and the tranquilizing effect of the
marking in plain figures. It was for woman that all
the establishments were struggling in wild
competition: it was woman whom they were
continually catching in the snares of their
bargains, after bewildering her with flesh; they
constituted an immense temptation, yielding at
first to reasonable purchases of articles needed in
the household, then tempted by her coquetry and
finally subjugated and devoured. By increasing
their business tenfold and popularizing luxury they
—the drapers—became a terrible instrument of
prodigality, ravaging households, and preparing
mad freaks of fashion which proved more and more
costly. (pp. 79–80)
Mouret emphasized that he did not really “care a hang

for women” but loved to create and hammer in his ideas
in the heads of people. His affairs were not carnal love
affairs. Zola describes one of the most fervent customers

as “incapable of any sexual transgression” but “weak
and cow ardly before the least bit of finery”. Thc desire
Mouret was awakening by the big shop temptation,
which often led to the kleptomania analyzed by
Clérambault, was not a sexual desire. Zola noted that
sex between the employees was strictly forbidden inside
the Paradise, and that marriage and love between
salespeople was not supposed to be good for business.
Denise, a model of virginity, was fired for having kissed
her brother, mistaken by Jouve for her lover. Mouret
lived by creating a mass of consumers and then
inventing new strategies in his “war on women”, while
his partners constantly feared the revenge of the woman.
The Ladies’ Paradise depended on women alienated from
a family context of the capitalistic kind that kept the Old
Elbeuf organization together, gave Robineau his capital
through marriage and made Mouret inherit a drapers
shop. Alienated women were lured by “counter-jumpers”
to ruin their husbands by spending the family fortune
on frippery in a big store, supplied by mass production
and financed by real estate speculators. This is indeed a
novel less about individuals than about the processes of
organizing people into crowds and masses.
In a theoretical essay Zola declared that a novelist
needs more sense of the real than he needs imagination
and fantasy. The more trivial and general a story about
individuals the better because it conveys the general
gist of la vie humaine. The art is to see something while
looking at it, to be observant, not to reconstruct a
psychology (Zola, 1986).
The Danish critic Georg Brandes, a contemporary of
Zola, also noted that the characters of his novels were
of little interest (Brandes, 1987). Certainly Mouret,
Baudu and Denise are far duller and paler than for
instance Dickens’ lively characters. They are often
painted in an old-fashioned, romantic, banal way;
carriers of old fossilized vices and virtues. What makes
Zola an interesting writer is the way in which he
personalizes the impersonal, for instance a landscape or

a crowd (Shor, 1978). In the case of Au bonheur des
dames, it was the way in which he brought life into the
main actor—the business organization.
Not only did Zola bring life into his organizations,
he also seemed to define change, dynamics and
movement as purely structural phenomena. Life, which
the naturalists set out to depict accurately, was
organizational.
Passion’s nature
While Zola used his naturalistic method to research the
forces of passion and their commercial manipulation,
Clérambault, some twenty years later, made the
following psychiatric remarks on cases of department-
store kleptomania:
Fetishist perversion of seeing or dreaming a fetish

is a kind of homage to the adverse sex, and it often
symbolizes an intercourse but silk caresses in our
cases do not at all evoke the same female senses.
Our patients masturbate with silk without dreams,
they do not imagine persons clad in the silk. This
lack of imaginative foundations is the more
intriguing as our patients in no way lack
imagination. The stuff in fact seems to act on them
through such intrinsic qualities (consistence, odor,
sound, reflection) which sometimes are different
from tactile qualities. Had the stuff been used by
someone or impregnated by some physiological
odor, it would most certainly have lost its attraction
of novelty and virginity. This perversion is therefore
different than fetishism. (Papetti, 1987, pp. 34–37)
Clérambault obviously thought he had discovered a

passion of a new kind, unrelated to usual human
desires, a passion proper to a new commercial era, a
very special “modern” passion related to the process of
organizing, which was to be investigated by the

naturalists.
In fact the naturalists’ novel seems to be a method of
understanding and focusing on this huge
organizational power. Zola was himself engaged in a
heated debate on literary method as a means for
studying social processes. Au bonheur des dames is, as
I have argued here, really a study of organization, and
this goes for most novels in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart
series. Organizational scholars might profit from his
view on, and his use of, the naturalist method.
Naturalism—A literary method for

organizational studies
Art and science are inseparable. The scientist has more
in common with the artist than with any other
profession. Paul Feyerabend is one of the latest
advocates of this well-known thesis (Feyerabend, 1984).
Such a perspective on scientific work seems intuitively
plausible in the social sciences. However, for
Feyerabend, mostly interested in natural science, the
analogy between experimenting in physics, and seeing
in painting, is the key issue. Working with words,
instead of with colors on canvas, is more appropriate
when dealing with social relations and interactions
taking place between humans.
In literature there are many examples of authors
motivated by scientific curiosity of discovery. Emile Zola
stated in the preface to his Therese Raquin: “My aim has
been primarily a scientific one. I have depicted the deep
perturbations of a sanguine nature brought into contact
with a nervous nature. On two living bodies I have
performed an analytic work similar to the one done by
surgeons on corpses” (Mitterand, 1986, p. 21).
In another, earlier, declaration of his literary method,
Zola emphasized that writing was for him “the
application to the study of moral facts, of the pure
observation and exact analysis, employed in the physical

science” (Mitterand, 1986, p. 21).
He declared himself a faithful disciple of the
nineteenth century French philosopher and literary
critic Hyppolyte Taine, who had established a new
‘scientific’ form of reading and interpreting literature. To
Taine, literature was a historical document by which
general but invisible patterns of human thought and
feeling were made clear to the reader—provided, of
course, that the reader is equipped with Professor
Taine’s method of interpretation. In 1866 Taine made
his famous statement that: “vice and virtue are products
like vitriol and sugar, and all complex data emerge out
of the unification of simpler facts on which the complex
ones depend” (Taine, 1866, p. 15).
In a study of Protestant churches and music, Taine
traced their strict form to an inner longing for a ‘true’ cult
of God. The rejection of appearances and the need for
truth was to Taine a “primitive disposition”, a general
trait common to a “century” or a “race”. Such a
disposition will, in the long run, according to Taine,
“cause” the structure of religion, art, philosophy, poetry
and human associations such as the family, the state or
industrial undertakings. Human development or history
becomes a product of a social psychology, manifest in
good art. Literature acquires quality by voicing
contemporary sentiments or emotions. Its grandeur
consists in mirroring the emotions of its readers, its own
century and the nation. Art, especially literature, thus
become to Taine the best historical document.
Constitutions, legal or religious regulations or other
dusty archival scriptures are, in comparison to
autobiographies, speeches or novels, poor and barren
documents. The best source of what would later be
called ‘social science’ is, therefore, good literature that
gives us knowledge of psychological laws.
Taine, a critical reader with social science ambitions,
turned the question of artistic quality into a matter of
describing human action. Zola, a creative writer, went
on to propose this doctrine as a means for

“enlightening” writers into producers of “sources”.
Although he ardently declared himself to be the humble
disciple of maitre Taine, the master was rather skeptical
of Zola’s attempts to transform his ideas on
interpretative critical reading into a “scientific”
method of creative writing. Zola saw writing as inverted
criticism and referred to Taine when he defined art as:
“a corner of nature viewed through a temperament of an
artist” (Zola, 1986, p. 223).
When Taine himself presented a writer, for example
Dickens, he first talked of his descriptions like “images
prises au daquerrotype” (Taine, 1866, vol. 5, p. 7) then
like “streams of visions caught by an almost
monomaniac mind with a highly exalted imagination”.
To Taine, Dickens had the faculty of engulfing himself in
one idea and giving it a multitude of often bizarre forms
that were then enlarged and presented to the “eye of the
spectator”, in an impressive form impossible to forget.
Taine advised us to “look” at David Copperfield, not to
“read” it, thereby actually introducing a kind of
cinematographic hermeneutics, long before the
invention of motion pictures (Cogny, 1978, p. 233). What
Zola called simply “temperament” or “personality” was
obviously the innate faculty of writing visually by a
traveling, zooming or editing action with words.
Zola emphasized the importance of the sense du réel
to an author, the way to depict in opposition to the
faculty of imagination of dreaming up a novel. But while
Dickens, so admired by Taine, saw the importance of
the plot, Zola mainly had eyes for the organizational
scene, like the great new store in Au bonheur des dames,
while plots remained largely soap operas. Not
surprisingly therefore, Taine commented, in 1881, on
Zola’s naturalism as an “imitation of a painting of Henri
Monnier and Courbet” and “full of admiration of popular
of bourgeois platitudes” that in the final resort only
“inspire in us disgust for life and horror of literature”
(Weinstein, 1972, p. 146). When Taine died, in 1893,
Zola sadly remarked: “I think he did not particularly like

what I was writing”.
Still, Taine had encouraged Zola to write in the sixties
when the latter was a young clerk working at the
marketing department of the great Paris publisher,
Hachette. At the incredible pace of professional writers
of those days, Zola had produced, from 1871 to 1893,
twenty novels. The Rougon-Macquart family epos
attempted to follow Taine’s model of representing “moral
reality” as the interaction of the three fundamental
components of “race”, “environment” and “moment”. By
using this method Zola claimed to have taken a stand
against the academic literature of his time. His books
first appeared as feuilleton in popular journals. They
were part of the new mode of mass communication that
emerged in France.
This was the time of mass transport by rail, of mass
education, and of mass communication. Zola himself
had worked in this mass media revolution, as the
person responsible for advertising at Hachette. He was
indeed very well prepared to embark on his eleventh
Rougon Macquart, the book which he wanted to become
“an optimistic poem of modern activity. In other words a
totally new philosophy without pessimism on the
contrary showing effort and work’s strength and
childish joy. In all, a poem for this time expressing a
century of action, victory and enterprise in every
direction” (Mitterand, 1980, p. 551).
Significantly enough for this writer of the media age,
the research on the novel Au bonheur des dames started
in 1981, with the reading of an article on new
department stores in Paris, in the Figaro, and ended
with the seventy-five contributions to Gil Blas from
December 17, 1982 to March 1, 1983, the day after
Zola’s book was released.
Zola left behind a mountain of notebooks, clippings
and other material gathered in researching different
milieus for his novels. A naturalist whose ambition was
to create the science of morals, Zola held interviews and
made investigations ‘on location’ for each major novel.

The material for Germinale, the novel about the miners’
strike, was much greater than the novel itself. The
investigation itself can be studied in Carnets d’enquetes
which are complete texts in their own right. We can see
how Zola, like his artist friends, takes his sketchbook
wherever he goes, and takes his croquies home to the
studio where he completes the picture on canvas. For
Au bonheur des dames, there are about seventy
manuscript pages where he tries out the characters of
his drama, the so called ébauche of the novel, and a
further three hundred full of facts concerning the real
actor of the drama—the department store.
The visual documents seem to dominate, and when
Zola takes notes of what he hears, he is equally
interested in recording musical rhythms, sounds and
noises, as in the spoken words. In preparing his novels,
he resembles an anthropologist investigating the
peculiar tribes associated with the emergence of the
nineteenth century commerce and industry. What
makes Zola’s notes interesting is not their textual but
their pictorial aspects. This partly explains why Taine,
purely a man of texts, had trouble with Zola, a painter
with words. Had the movie camera and the tape
recorder been invented, Zola might perhaps never have
turned to literature.
The central characters in Au bonheur des dames,
Mouret and Denise, are only representatives of their
organizations—the new and old trade. Mouret stands for
poetry, adventure and intuition; while Denise is a model
of good conduct, courage and logic. Mouret is seduced
by beautiful, virtuous Denise who through witnessing
the desperate struggle of small trade is slowly convinced
that Mouret’s project is natural commercial evolution,
impossible to reject on logical grounds. For Denise, one
task remains: to turn Mouret, the adventurer and
seducer, into a good employer and husband, thereby
turning the power of his machinery to good use.
Denise first gets hired, then fired and finally hired

again by Mouret who is now so deeply in love that his
partners fear that the “revenge of the woman” will finally
kill him as a businessman. He drifts away into romantic
daydreams and neglects his work. He becomes a
‘nobody’, a dreamer with no sense of the real. When
Denise gets back to the Ladies Paradise, she makes use
of her power based on her virtuous resistance to
Mouret’s attempts, to inspire various reforms for the
employees, whose conditions Zola remarked in his
notebooks to be “au fond opression terrible” (1986, p.
219). Denise takes on the role of the reformer-so-cialist,
arguing that the colossal machine might serve the
interests of employees while itself benefiting from being
built of “good iron”. She wants to transform the bazaar
into a Fourierian “Phalansterium of modern commerce”
and obtains recreation rooms, educational programs,
free health care, hairdressing and holidays—instead of
dead-season-dismissals—for her companions in the
store. Denise, using the power of sexual frustration, now
tames the libertarian Mouret and, so to speak, creates a
second crowd beside the woman customers, turning the
Paradise into an embryo of the nineteenth century trade
unions.
This novel is clearly uninteresting as an individual
drama. When one woman is detached from the crowd of
women she becomes dangerous to the organization. Zola
teaches us how destructive individualism is to
organizations. It seems that even Denise does not desire
Mouret as an individual. On her first encounter with the
Ladies Paradise, the organization, her cheeks flush and
“the woman was aroused within her”. No doubt she is
fascinated, not by Mouret the man, but by his
organizational machine. What Mouret does is not so
much rather detach Denise from the crowds of
anonymous women, but to run the risk of drifting away
from his own organization. Zola carefully remarks that
Denise never acts out of calculation. She has no problem
resisting Mouret. Her refusal is no trick to catch the
man. Mouret sees only her—Denise the individual

woman—while Denise is part of the crowd and the
organization. Mouret on his part, by detaching Denise
becomes so detached himself that finally he does not
even care for the million-franc sales record. The only
way of saving the Paradise is for Mouret to marry
Denise, say all the partners. Only by doing that can he
come back into the machinery. Denise has now become
a matter of life and death to the whole enterprise. By
marrying Mouret Denise saves the whole business and
integrates the old family with the new organization.
Au bonheur des dames is a book on les grand
magasins published in popular magazines; a text on
modern market ing techniques written by an ex-
marketer of texts; a study following Taine’s scheme of
analysis where “race” and “environment” fuse into
moral action in the “moment”. But it is not a novel about
Octave Mouret of the Rougon-Macquart family falling in
love with Denise. It is a novel where ‘race’ is the not a
biological family but a species of trade organization. The
‘moment’ is not the love story of Denise and Octave but
the transition, or rather the dramatic are really but a
landscape for the organizational dragons to roam in.
Painting visual passion

Gaetan de Clérambault both studied and enjoyed a
passion of a sensual kind. He studied it in
kleptomaniacs and practiced it in his so-called
anthropology of ‘veiled women’. Such a passion has no
abstract or psychological explanation. This is the reason
why Clérambault rejected the psychoanalytical fetish
explanation and even invented the special term
hypophile to describe the passion for cloth. ‘To feel’ not
‘to imagine’ is the nature of this passion.
When Zola wanted to find the driving force behind the
commercial organization of the novelty stores, he
referred to “passion”. This is no psychological term and
the reason why Taine did not value Zola’s literary work
was probably because of its poor account of individual

psychology. It might be claimed that Zola neglected both
individuals and their psychology. Emile Zola was
interested in organizations. Passion was to him a strictly
organizational phenomenon. Zola undertook a kind of
textual painting in his novel. “To see”, not “to think” was
central to his naturalistic organizational study. And
through his method of writing he learnt more from the
painters than from the poets.
When Clérambault was found dead, it did not surprise
his close friends. They knew that he was slowly
going blind. Had he lived, he might no longer have been
able to enjoy the passion that Zola seems to point to as
the most powerful force behind the organization of the
Ladies’ Paradise. Neither Zola nor Clérambault provide
us with any clear theory of organizational passion but
they indicate important elements of a possible theory.
The novel, which was written in 1883, depicts the
structural change in trade taking place in the fifties and
sixties in France. Small units were abandoned or
reorganized. Single weavers whose products were
marketed by middle-men were combined into larger
manufacturing firms. The drapers shops on the market
streets turned into departments of a store organizing
the free street shoppers into mass consumers of great
bazaars. While the success of the old trade was based
on profits through the shopkeepers striking bargain
sales with wealthy customers the new trade was based
on fast turnover of a stock bought at low prices from
large manufacturers. Turnover was kept high by means
of a commission system and a plain pricing policy
“disturbed only by the top managers exceptional bargain
offers”. The old trade channeled its profits into the
owners family fortune—often some country estate. In
the new trade few reserves were kept and most revenue
reinvested in stock and buildings. Together with the
‘push-effects’ of production technology not mentioned in
the novel the ‘pull-force’ of passion account for the
dynamics behind this process.
This passion is an organizational passion. It is

disconnected from individual passions like love or
hatred. Although very erotic, it is not really sexual.
Actually, it arises when the more natural family ties are
broken: when, for instance, family firms are transformed
into large organizations disconnected from households.
The crowd of women making Mouret’s mass-market was
composed of wives of second empire civil servants. In
Madame Desforges’ Salon Mouret gained access to
finance money disconnected from heritage or marriage.
Business becomes a passion—generating a show
presented to an audience of alienated consumers. On a
stage with a regular machinery of managerial systems
the top manager becomes an artist, a director more like
a modern rock star than a patriarch of the old trade.
Mouret was the man of the street in the French
revolutionary tradition, a populist manager turning the
street into an organization by means of passionate
visual agitation.
References
Brandes, G. (1987) Emile Zola. In: Braunche, M. and Möller, C.,

(Eds.) Naturalismus manifeste und dokumentation zur
deutschen Literatur 1880–1900. Stuttgart: J.B.Metzkersche
Verlagsbuchandlung.
Cogny, P. (1978) Le naturalisme. Paris: Union Gènèrale d’Edition.
Feyerabend, P. (1984) Wissenschaft als Kunst. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Guiev, J. (1983) Le theatre lyrique d’Emile Zola. Paris: Librarie
Fischbacher.
Lapp, J. (1972) Les racines du naturalisme. Zola avant les Rougon-
Macquart. Paris: Bordas.
Mitterand, H. (1980) Note to Zola, E., Au bonheur des dames.
Paris: Gallimard.
Mitterand, H. (1986) Zola et le naturalisme. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Papetti, Y., et al. (1981) La passion des étoffes chez un
neuropsychiatre. Paris: Editions Solin.
Shor, N. (1978) Zola’s Crowds. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press.
Taine, H. (1866) Histoire de la litterature Anglaise. Paris: Librairie

Hachette.
Weinstein, I. (1972) Hippolyte Taine. New York: Twayne
Publishers.
Williams, R. (1984) Dream Worlds—mass consumption in the late
nineteenth century France. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Zola, E. (1883) Au bonheur des dames. The Ladies’ Paradise.
London: Hutchinson & Co.
Zola, E. (1880) Le roman experimentale. Paris: Librairie Plon.
Zola, E. (1986) Carnet d’enquetes. Paris: Librairie Plon.
DON QUIXOTE AND
CAPITALISM IN POLAND
On the Cultural Context of Organising
by
The topos of capitalism

Central Europe, in the nineteenth century. A young,
bright boy serves wine and food in a wine cellar to earn
his living and spends the rest of time studying. He takes
courses in the Preparatory School and then the Main
School.1 He gets engaged in the political upheavals of
his times, takes part in an uprising, ends up in exile,
but even there continues his education. For a while he
considers becoming a scientist, but the exigencies of life
take the upper hand. He marries his former principal’s
wife and doubles her property. When she dies, the still
young entrepreneur throws his savings into the
whirlpool markets of the then turbulent Europe and
emerges a millionaire. The salons of the epoch, after
some due hesitation, open to the brave self-made man
who marries an impoverished aristocratic beauty. Thus
joining together the two central social spheres, the man
becomes one of the pillars of his nation.
That is, he would if he did. In the novel analysed in this
paper, Lalka (“The Doll”) by Boleslaw Prus, the hero fails
to fulfil his archetypal fate. He falls romantically in love
1After an anti-Russian uprising in 1830, Warsaw University was

abolished. The later liberalization of political life in Russia
permitted the establishment, in 1862, of a crypto-university
called “the Main School”.
38 • CZARNIAWSKA-JOERGES
with the beautiful and shallow (thus the title) aristocrat.

Discovering her indifference and flirtatious nature is
such a trauma to the hero that he withdraws from his
business and explodes himself and the stone bearing a
romantic inscription witnessing the romantic love of
several generations. With Wokulski, such is our hero’s
name, dies the hope of Polish capitalism.
Wokulski identifies himself with Don Quixote, “the
man, who for several years lived in the sphere of poetry
—like he, who attacked the windmills—like he, who
ruined his life chasing an ideal of a woman—like he,
and who, instead of a princess, found a dirty cowgirl—
just like he himself!” (Lalka, v. 3, pp. 219–220).2 For the
readers, it is clear that Wokulski is both Don Quixote
and the miller. I choose, in the following interpretation,
to see the Don Quixote aspect of the hero as
representing the old-fashioned romanticism which, in
the last defence attempt, kills the miller and stills the
windmills of capitalism.
Prus’ novel treats a topic which is very close to that of
The Ladies’ Paradise discussed in the previous chapter,
and this is not an accident. Like Zola, Prus (the
pseudonym of Aleksander Glowacki, 1847–1912) was a
journalist and a novelist; like Zola’s his ideal was a
“neutral observatory” of social events; like Zola, Prus was
fascinated by machines and by biology; and his
aesthetic ideals were, like Zola’s, supplied by Taine. In
addition, Prus’ novels often directly al luded to Zola’s
production. Not only can Lalka be seen as a Polish
equivalent of The Ladies’ Paradise—characters in Lalka
2 All quotes come from the 3rd edition of Lalka, published by PIW
in Warsaw, 1987. It is a reprint of the first edition (1890) with
addition of the original version of Chapter V in Volume 1, then
removed by the Czar’s censorship. Main translations: The Doll,
translated by David J.Welsh, New York, 1972; La poupèe,
translated by Simone Deligne, Wenceslas Godlewski and Michel
Marcq, Paris, 1962–1964; Die Puppe, translated by Kurt Harrer,
East Berlin, 1954 (two editions). In this text, all translations are
mine unless noted otherwise, BCJ.
DON QUIXOTE AND CAPITALISM IN POLAND • 39
read Zola’s novels, and there is a quote from Germinal

which appears as Izabela’s dream. Typically enough, the
person who most often relates to Zola in the novel is
Izabela, the least likely person to do so. This is one of the
most important differences between Zola and Prus,
namely, Prus’ irony. The satirical note emerges in all his
novels, even the most tragic ones. But the most
important point in the present context is that both The
Doll and The Ladies’ Paradise portray the development
of mature capitalism in two very different countries and
cultures.
Interpretation à l’epoque
According to the theories held by the hero himself, the
explanation of his fate is quite simple. He cannot—must
not—survive because of the fatal flaw in his mental
equipment. This flaw is his romanticism. Like a
biological defect, it makes him inadequate and unable to
cope with the exigencies of the situation. Therefore he is
eliminated by Nature, which chooses him as the
executor of its verdict. Too strong to be directly killed by
his environment (when facing dangerous situations, he
either frightens his attackers or is rescued by people who
he helped in the past) the hero must himself help the
evolution whose laws he respects.
It is difficult to say whether the author espoused the
theories of his hero. Boleslaw Prus was—and is—a
symbol of positivist thinking in the Polish literature of
the late nineteenth century. He most certainly accepted
many of the current scientific theories of the time,
especially those of Darwin and Spencer but, apparently,
selectively and with variations: in his own philosophical
writings he claimed that solidarity and mutual support
became more important in the human world than
struggle (Szweykowski, 1972).
His contemporary, the world-famous
writer Sienkiewicz, described him as follows:
…he does not pursue any specific philosophical

theses, be it survival of the fittest or
determinism…. Prus is a democrat, but out of
feeling. He perceives democracy not as an
independent philosophical-social theory, but as the
simplest life situation, that should be practised on
the strength of justice and love of people to their
brethren (Sienkiewicz, 1881/1988, p. 49)
Social Darwinism reverberates throughout the book but

only as expressed by those heroes who swore faith to
the theory. It would be possible to assume that the
author put his own ideas into the mouth of his
characters, except that it is difficult to decide whose
ideas belonged to him. The contemporary critics
assumed, variously, that Prus identified with the main
hero, Wokulski; then with his accountant, Rzecki, and
even with doctor Szuman, the Jewish physician. This
only exhausts the list of the main characters and does
not give any further clue as they tend to contradict each
other. I prefer to assume that Prus, full sympathy
towards his characters notwithstanding, tended to
ironize the laws of social evolution (in the epilogue, the
two potential progenitors of the new, better generation,
end their careers one in a grave, one in a monastery).
It is interesting for the contemporary reader that Prus
managed to present all the fashionable thoughts of his
times by attributing them to his characters. Staying
within the realist tradition, he nevertheless found a way
to illustrate what were then the current systems of
meaning without intrusions from the omniscient author
or any other non-realist literary devices. Whatever the
case is (or rather was), Prus offered his readers bountiful
material for interpretations that have their foundations
more in culture than in biology.
In the following, I shall try to analyse Wokulski’s rise
and fall as an entrepreneur in terms of the cultural
context of organising (Czarniawska, 1986) which he had
to face when developing his business. Although this
issue is of theoretical interest, its practical relevance is

obvious. At a time when most countries in Central
Europe attempt to transplant mature capitalism in their
economies, historical lessons acquire a special meaning.
The political and economic stage
…this Polish or, to be more specific, Warsaw

novel shows an unusual society: immobilised
between the resignation of serfdom and
longing for freedom, between a congealing past
and a future which it rejects, between the
Russian world which it does not want to join
and the West, from whom it is separated,
between the 18th century that doomed it when
in its renaissance, and the 19th century whose
impetus it is unable to follow…(Fabre, 1962/
1988, pp. 419–420)
The action of the novel starts in January 1878 and ends

in October 1879. At that time the so-called Polish
Kingdom (the central-eastern part of the present
Poland), was again under Russian governance. The
century which was coming to an end bore witness to
many wars of independence: the uprising of 1830, the
Napoleonic wars 1848–1849 and 1853–1856 and finally
the tragic and romantic uprising of 1863, were alive in
people’s memories. But the patriotic wounds were at
least apparently healed and the wars continuing in
other countries created prosperity for grain suppliers (for
many centuries grain was the main source of revenue for
the Polish economy). The textile industry was dominated
by Germans, agriculture by Polish landowners, and
merchants were to a decreasing degree Germans and
Poles, and to an increasing degree Jews. The economy
went hand in hand with politics, especially in public
rhetoric.
The economic situation of the country is illustrated
and symbolised in the novel by the Company for
Commerce (…with the Russian Empire, added the

malicious commentators) founded by Wokulski.
Although Prus’ critics pointed out that the commercial
details were never very explicit in his novel, the cultural
context of organising was sketched very clearly indeed.
Wokulski begun his public entrepreneurial career (the
only thing we know about his doubling of the initial
capital by supplies to the Bulgarian war is that it was
done in conditions of absolute honesty) by opening
credits at Moscow’s textile manufacturers for his shop.
This provoked a reaction and a Duke (as there is only
one duke of importance in the novel, we shall call him
the Duke) was asked to intervene:
“Imagine that your projects frightened our cotton

producers very much indeed… Do I say right—
cotton? They claim that you plan to kill our
industry.
“As a matter of fact”, said Wokulski, “I do have a
credit with the Moscow factory owners open up to 3,
maybe 4 million rubles, but I don’t know yet
whether their products will sell.”
“A terrifying!…terrifying figure!” whispered the
Duke. “Don’t you see in it a serious danger for our
factories?”
“Oh, no. What I see is only a significant reduction
of their enormous profits, which is something I do
not care about. My duty is to care about my profits
and a low price for my customers; our goods will be
cheaper.”
“But have you considered this question as a
citizen?” said the Duke pressing his hand. “We
have so little to lose…”
“I think that it is a citizen’s duty to supply the
consumers with a merchandise at a lower price and
at the same time to break the monopoly of the
factory owners who have with us only one thing in
common: they exploit our consumers and our
workers.” (vol. I, pp. 160–161)
This conversation illustrates three points that Prus

made again and again: that the Duke, who was asked to
exert pressure in economic matters, knew very little
about commerce, industry and the economy; that the
argument of ‘patriotism’ was the crucial one in
economic negotiations and that Wokulski, as portrayed
by Prus, was not a profit-hungry capitalist. Rather than
sacrifice his profits on the altar of the abstract
‘patriotism’, he collected his gains, while at the same
time taking care of consumers and workers. (If he had
been born a hundred years later, he would have been
asked to become a Solidarity adviser and to help in
formulating their economic reform program. On the
other hand, in the novel the Duke uses the type of
arguments which typify a benevolent communist party
official, say, Gierek).
The patriotically inspired Duke proposed that
Wokulski should start a Polish textile factory, to make
the country independent of foreign capital (an autarchic
economy was also an ideal for many party leaders, see
Czarniawska-Joerges, 1987). Wokulski refused,
justifying refusal by the resistance to technology which
could be observed in Polish industry. As a result, he
predicted an even more prominent dependence on
imports: “In a few years we shall import even flour,
because our millers do not want to replace the
millstones with rollers” (vol. I, p. 163).
As Wokulski’s department store prospered and the
Duke increasingly listened to his advice, a new
opportunity arose. The rich aristocrats (and some
impoverished ones), the landowners (nobility), and the
Polish merchants, persuaded by the Duke, decided to
listen to Wokulski’s project of the Company for
Commerce. The introductory speech by the Duke
emphasised the nobility’s duty to take care of the public
interest.
Wokulski commenced by explaining the advantageous
geopolitical situation of Warsaw, which could become a
centre of commerce between East and West. The way to
achieve this was by introducing order into the relations

with the West (most likely, cutting unnecessary imports
and developing profitable exports) and by extending
contacts with Russia, as a supplier of cheap
merchandise, of which textiles were the most interesting
item.
The merchants opposed, using the patriotic
argument, to which Wokulski responded in kind:
“I am ready”, Wokulski was saying, “to immediately

give you a list of factories where all the
administration and all better paid workers are
German, whose capital is German, and the board
of directors resides in Germany; where, finally, our
workers have no opportunity to learn more about
their vocations, but are serfs, badly paid, badly
treated and, furthermore, germanised…” (vol. I, p.
242)
As Germans, together with the Russians, were

traditionally the main enemies of Polish independence,
the matter of patriotism was thus settled. The
aristocrats demanded to know the profits; the profits for
the country, corrected the Duke. Wokulski explained
the potential savings made by the consumers, and
finally disclosed the high interest rate that the owners
could get for their capital, if invested. Just as agreement
was about to be reached, the landowners, generally in
conflict with aristocrats, protested, emphasising that
their interests lay in grain, and not in textiles. But for
the next intervention of the Duke, who proposed to open
another Company for that purpose, and, indeed, any
number of Companies as needed, an impasse would
have resulted. Finally, the first offers came: from rich
magnates, who understood little except the last item—
the interest rate named by Wokulski.
The scene is grotesque in its character, which is
typical of Prus’ writing. Unmasking, i.e. revealing the
other side of everything with humour rather than
accusatory passion,3 was very characteristic of his

novels. “It seems as he were telling us: the world is
completely different from what it appears; we succumb
to these appearances, and yet our common sense
should make us understand that an A is also a non-A
and a non-A is also an A…” (Swietochowski, 1890/
1988, pp. 119–120). There was nothing encouraging in
the company from which the future Company was to
arise but the author did not demonise it either (as some
of the later critics would have it): the business can be
done, the deal can be transacted, no matter how
ridiculous the partners might appear.
And done it was, albeit with foreseeable problems. The
shareholders’ attitude was best summarised by one of
the characters who talked to Wokulski after his
breakdown and the subsequent liquidation of
Wokulski’s participation in the Company:
“As long as they thought you were going to cheat

them on this Company for Commerce with the
Empire, they kept calling you a genius; today they
are saying that you are suffering from softening of
the brain, because you gave your partners three
percent more than you promised.” (vol. III, p. 257)
Wokulski’s partners followed both their own greed, and

the traditional mores of Christianity: business is
dishonest and an honest businessman is crazy.
Therefore the Jews who replaced Wokulski in the
company (paying much lower interest rates) were
considered to be appropriate partners, that is, they were
despised and assumed dishonest and could therefore be
taken advantage of.
The ‘Jewish question’ returns on pages of Lalka in on
the basis of certain unflattering portrayals of Jewish
characters, but this is a very peculiar comment since
3 See R.H.Brown, 1977, for the need of unmasking in social

sciences.
there are also many extremely unflattering Polish

characters. Probably, those criticisms were addressed to
the literary scene of a century later where the only
literature accepted was the one that showed positive
relationships between Poles and Jews—everything else
being either a lie or author’s antisemitism. I would
rather follow one of Prus’ contemporary critics who said
that in The Doll the author gave a “picture of the
positivist era in times of its decay: we see there the new
formations growing in its body: mysticism, antisemitism,
Jewish nationalism, students’ socialism… Above all
those formations floats the spirit of
romanticism…”(Feldman, 1908/1988, p. 250). Georg
Brandes, who visited Poland several times just before
The Doll was published, still spoke about Poland as
possibly the only country in Europe where antisemitism
did not show its ugly head (Brandes, 1890).
Indeed, Polish society was fermenting, and this
fermentation is one of the most important aspects of the
novel and one of the most significant elements of the
context in which Wokulski undertook his organising
efforts.
The social stage

With his satirical talents, Prus sketched the social stage
in group portraits with a touch of caricature, whose
traits we see most clearly in collective action. Even the
individuals who we approach in various close-ups, still
reproduce these group characteristics which Prus
wanted to caricature, despite their very human and
personal traits.
The most detailed picture is that of the group which
was of passing social importance: the aristocrats. Still
believing in their “mission for the country”, they spent
most of the time in recreating their own vanishing world.
Some of them were clever enough to maintain sound
finances be hind a blasé facade; most of them were not
and would have to leave the stage. The most cruel

portrait is that of Wokulski’s beloved—Izabela: 4
Miss Izabela had lived since the crib in a beautiful

world which was not only superhuman, but also
supernatural. She slept on down, dressed in silks
and laces, sat on carved and upholstered ebony
and rosewood, drank from crystal glasses, ate from
silver and porcelain as costly as gold. (vol. I, p. 61)
Izabela, in simple words, lived in a complete ignorance of

the human condition. Once only, after having visited an
ironworks in France (Germinal comes in here) she had a
premonition of the end of this world:
Only then did she understand how much she loved

her spiritual fatherland where crystal spiders
replace the sun, carpets replace the ground, and
columns and monuments replace trees. This
second fatherland, where all aristocrats belong,
where the refinement of all times and the most
beautiful achievements of civilisation belong.
Should all this vanish, die out or fall into ruins!…
(vol. III, p. 67)
Izabela was, of course, an avid customer of Wokulski’s

department store, although it was not her that he had in
mind when proposing to buy cheaper textiles.
4 It must be added that Prus did not seem to be exaggeratedly

fond of women in general, especially when they were not eager to
incarnate male ideals. In another novel, one of the first in Poland
on the subject of emancipation, he ridiculed the feminist
movement and then, attacked by female critics, declared that in
relation to the “women’s issue”, he did not care “either for
universities or for voting rights, but for some way to remove all the
injustice that nowadays touches women, wrings tears from their
eyes and ruins their lives” (Matuszewski, 1899/1988, p. 157).
Women’s role, according to Prus, was to be “geniuses of feeling”,
and Izabela fares poorly in this.
Not all the members of the aristocrat class were

equally incognizant. Some of them realised the imminent
ruin of their class, through their personal bankruptcy,
and tried to make new friends. This was how Izabela’s
father reacted to social rejection by his own class:
Almost at the same time Sir Tomasz broke

company with society and to prove his
revolutionary attitude became a member of the
Merchant Guildhall. There, together with previously
scorned tanners, brush-makers and distillers, he
played whist, telling left and right that aristocracy
must not isolate itself in its exclusiveness, but lead
the enlightened bourgeois, and through them, the
nation, To return the favour, the now proud
tanners, brush-makers and distillers admitted that
Sir Tomasz is the only aristocrat who understood
his duties towards his country and fulfils them
diligently. They could also add: he fulfils them daily
between nine o’clock p.m. and midnight. (vol. I, p.
72).
Much was said about aristocracy and its attitude as the

true and real reason for Wokulski’s fall: again, it seems
to be one of the interpretations that met a current need.
We know enough about aristocrats from Balzac and
Zola, if not directly from Prus, and we know what to
expect of them. True, they made Wokulski pay dearly
for opening the doors of their salons; they ridiculed his
manners and at the same time were anxious that he did
not imitate theirs (a merchant cannot have duels: what
about the interest due to his partners?) But they were
also greedy and/or at the edge of bankruptcy: the
money was well thought of and it was most probably the
nouveaux-riches who dictated conditions (that is, if they
did not happen to be romantically in love).
Such were the aristocrats, Wokulski’s social target.
The other most clearly sketched group were the
merchants. Prus made fun of both. Compare the two
scenes where a duel is in offing and the issue of ‘honour’

at stake. According to a baron:
“It’s my rotten luck”, he sighed, “to have a duel with

a petty merchant. If I hit him, it will be like a hunter
who chases a bear and shoots a cow. If he hits me,
it will be like being whiplashed by a cabby… Let
this stupid social revolution come at last and finish
off either us, or those bloody liberals…”(vol. I, p.
301)
And now a quarrel between the accountant Rzecki and

his drinking companion:
“I demand satisfaction”, I roared, banging the table.

“Fiddle-dee!” said Szprot and made circles in the
air with his finger. “It is easy for you to demand
satisfaction because you are a Hungarian officer.
To murder a person or two or even get killed yourself
is like bread and butter for you… But I, mister, am
a merchant, I have wife, children, and deadlines in
business…”.
“You have no honour!” I exclaimed.
This time he started banging the table.
“Who has no honour?… You say that to me?…
What do I do: sell bad merchandise, or go
bankrupt?… We shall see in the court who has got
no honour…”(vol. III, p. 27)
Honour in business, proved in the civil courts instead of

in duels—here comes the new morality. But most
merchants in the book are of the old kind: mediocre,
careful deals and the assumption that” [war] supplies
are something for Jews and Germans; our people do not
have the brains for that” (vol. I, p. 7). It was also the
merchants who, tradition ally, tried to fight competition,
not through prices, but through lobbying aristocrats,
through politics, through rumours and patriotic
arguments. Risk-taking was seen as especially

unpatriotic…
The ‘people’ is the social class whose presentation
makes a contemporary reader uneasy. Prus was always
hailed for his love and sympathy for the poor, the
underprivileged, the exploited. When Wokulski was
struck by all possible misfortunes, all that remained
was “God, the earth and the simple man” (Feldman,
1908/1988, p. 252). If the intentions of the author were
undoubtedly noble and humanistic, the dramatic
change of rhetoric that has taken place in the last
hundred years makes his pictures exasperatingly
paternalistic (which was pointed out later by Marxist
critics, e.g. Kamienski, 1931/1988). The cheap
stereotypes of the ‘fallen woman’, the ‘starving family
father’ fail to capture—unlike the descriptions of other
social groups—the character and the condition of the
poor. Here, too, another leading idea of the epoch—“the
organic work” sounds most false:
And yet there is a simple medicine: obligatory work

—justly paid. Only that can strengthen the best
individuals and remove the bad ones without
trouble…and we would have a brave population in
place of the one we have today, starving and ill.
(vol. I, p. 23)
It is Wokulski who is speaking, but Prus failed to point

out to his hero that the help he was giving to his chosen
‘simple people’ consisted not only in giving them an
opportunity to work hard for decent pay, but primarily
in creating conditions that enabled them to work. And
giving decent work to one ‘fallen woman’ and one
‘starving father’ is not to change society—it is a question
of charity. Therefore, the contemporary reader
sympathises, not so much with Wokulski’s patronising
view of ‘simple people’, but rather with aristocrats’
terrorised view:
“You do not know these people, and I’ve seen

them working… In their hands, the steel rails bend
like ribbons. These are terrifying people. For their
own purposes they can move all earthly forces, at
which we cannot even guess” (vol. I, p. 97)
One thing is certain: this was not a static society, but a

changing one. These
…separate worlds do not lead separate lives, on the

contrary, they enter one another, support one
another, thwart one another; they penetrate each
other, one enters another, one chases, another
escapes, and the other way around. In other words,
the society in “The Doll” does not stand still but, on
the contrary, moves so that the contrasts between
separate worlds vanish or the new ones are
created. It is a society in ferment where we see
different groups of people where each considers its
own interests of primary importance and therefore
conflicts between the groups arise…(Lange, 1890/
1988, p. 130)
This was a society where old (or maybe just nostalgically

fantasised) harmony had ceased to exist and no one
knew what the emerging structure was going to be. This
was, however, not a mobile society in which the ways
upward were suddenly created (in Prus’ eyes, England
was an example of such a society), but rather a
whirlpool where everybody tried to keep others under
the surface. Those who, like Wokulski, managed to
break free and go forward were looked upon with
suspicion, envy and increased scrutiny. In a comic way,
Prus goes through all the strata, presenting their
attitude towards his hero. The aristocrats decided to let
him in and therefore expected him to adopt all their
prejudices and follow all their whims. They were
genuinely surprised that this did not happen.” ‘Harsh
man…selfish…egoist!’—thought the Duke and more and
more wondered about the cheek shown by this nouveau-

riche” (vol. III, p. 103). Noblemen ironised about
Wokulski calling him a “nouveau-riche” and a
“democrat”, but claimed he had noble origins and
contrasted him to Jewish merchants. The merchants,
and even more the industrialists, accused him of being
a nobleman, a grand man, a politician. The poor, or
those among them who were lucky enough to meet
Wokulski, saw him as a benefactor. A “transitional
man” (Boguslawski, 1891/1988), whose identity was
just as unclear for himself as it was for the others.
The old shop and the new shop

But what about the organising itself? The change in
modes of organising are best illustrated in the examples
of two shops: old Mincel’s shop, where Rzecki acquired
his education and which Wokulski inherited from his
wife, and the modern department store, which Wokulski
in the end sold to Szlangbaum, his former employee.
The old shop was mainly a family operation. Owned
by Jan Mincel, a polonised German, it employed his two
sons and two external people, one of them Rzecki. The
shop already had three departments (groceries,
haberdashery and perfumery) and three specialised
salesmen, but supply and accounts were always under
the control of the owner. And so was everything of
importance: the owner trained salespeople (using a whip
if necessary), and lessons in accounting, economic
geography and merchandise were strengthened by
lessons in business ethics: not saving was considered a
crime at the same level as theft. The principal’s mother
took care of the positive reinforcements: coffee at 8 a.m.
(after the shop had been already open for two hours),
dinners in shifts, and Christmas celebration with gifts.
The interior of the shop reminded one of an enormous
cellar, whose extremities Rzecki, as a child, could never
see due to partial darkness. Even the ceiling was used
to store the goods, and the main decoration was a
wooden Cossack soldier in the window, which moved

when the principal pulled the rope.
The clients varied: the dawn of the day (as Prus says,
the only customer who never fails a merchant)
welcomed working people and servants. The grocery
section had most customers. In the afternoon the well-
to-do arrived to buy other goods.
After the death of the owner, the two sons divided the
shop, separating groceries from the rest; and this rest
became the start of Wokulski’s fortune. Not that he
himself considered it of importance: the old ways of
business seemed ridiculous to him:
“Mincels, always Mincels!… They should compare

me with Mincels—today. Alone and in half a year I
made ten times more than two generations of
Mincels in half a century. To earn what I earned
among the bullet, the knife and the typhoid, a
thousands Mincels would have to sweat in their
shops and in their night-caps…. I would rather fear
death and bankruptcy than ingratiate myself with
those who consider buying an umbrella at my store,
than bow to those who are so kind as to acquire
water closets at my place…” (vol. I, p. 49)
The owners stopped working in the shop; they began to

run it instead. Shopkeepers became business people, a
development that Rzecki did not quite approve of:
“In my times the principal was a father and a

teacher to his employees and the most attentive
servant of his shop; his mother or wife were the
housekeepers, and all family members its
employees. Nowadays the principal takes the
income, usually does not know much about
commerce, and his main worry is that his children
do not become merchants…” (vol. I, p. 42)
Indeed, the first condition Izabela made was that

Wokulski got rid of his shop: even owning it was a
shame. Business must not be based on petty
commerce.
But the new shop, or rather department store, was
hardly petty commerce. Following Paris models, it had
five enormous departments situated in separate halls.
One of them presented Russian textiles, therefore
advertising the activities of the Company for Commerce;
another contained more textiles together with dress
accessories. The third, central department, sold bronzes,
crystals, ebony and porcelains. The remaining two
specialised in toys, wooden and metal products and
finally rubber and leather products. Wokulski secured
the supplies, organised the administrative side,
employed salesmen and, much to Rzecki’s sorrow, left
the shop alone. Rzecki was responsible for the accounts
and for window decoration: the latter was the old
accountant’s concession to modernity. The windows
were supposed to summarise the riches of the shop and
at the same time attract attention with fashionable
products and ingenious tricks. Therefore the windows
were redecorated every week.
The salespersons, who in the old shop performed
technical services, like cutting soap into pieces, became
skilful psychologists. Seducing clients was their main
duty, the mundane services left to the servants. The new
shop employed many more people: seven salesmen, of
whom five were employed at once, and their numerous
assistants. Orders sent to the client were taken care of
by special collectors. Organization was becoming
complex, and personnel problems could no longer be
solved in traditional ways. Division of labour, personnel
management, incentive systems—all those were
problems which did not yet have names, but which were
noticed even by the old-fashioned Rzecki. Interestingly
enough, the same old accountant, very much enchanted
by Wokulski, nevertheless managed to notice that
personnel problems were the same under Wokulski the
‘benefactor’ and his Jewish successor: it was the

organization, not the leaders that created—or solved—
problems.
The opening ceremony attracted public attention. “[I]n
my young days”, commented Rzecki as usual,
…merchants also organised blessing ceremonies for

the shop’s opening, taking care that the priest who
fulfilled the ceremony was old and pious, that there
was holy water at the spot, a new incense burner
and an organ-player who was fluent in Latin. After
the ceremony, when almost every cupboard and
each product was prayed over and sprayed with
water, one would put a horseshoe above the
entrance door to attract the guests, and only then
one would think about some snack, usually a glass
of vodka, beer and sausage” (vol. I, p. 219)
This was, of course, not how Wokulski’s new department

store was opened. A journalist visited the shop on the
eve of the ceremony: described the shop and interviewed
the employees, expressing his disappointment that no
scandal was to be reported as yet. (The comic figure of
the journalist might well be an ironic self-portrait of the
author). The main ceremony took place in the best city
hotel: there were 150 guests to dinner, mainly
merchants from Warsaw and Moscow, but also some
from Vienna and Paris (corporate entertainment has a
long history). One duke, two counts and many
noblemen completed the invitation list.
The shop prospered; it served not only as a source of
supply, but as a social symbol and therefore reflected the
social atmosphere. The news of a pest epidemic in
Russia reduced the demand; gossip about Wokulski’s
possible bankruptcy increased it dramatically. The shop
had branches (bankrupt shops that Wokulski bought
out, leaving exowners as managers or accountants) and,
what is more, it set the standard for new shops to follow.
A new era in retail commerce was established.5
Clash of ideas: Positivism contra

romanticism
What went wrong, then? Why couldn’t Wokulski wake
up from his dreams, like Don Quixote did, and take to
organic work, a medicine he himself recommended? The
value system which was part of his (self) education, the
romantic drive for spiritual achievements, diminished
all his achievements in the world of business and made
them meaningless. In order to convince the reader that
this is not a personal tragedy, an idiosyncrasy of
individual character, Prus shows us not one, but three
romantics in whom the ‘positivist’, sober side fights
against their romantic ideals. These are: Wokulski, an
entrepreneur and a private romantic; Rzecki, an
accountant and a political romantic; and Doctor
Szuman, a scientist and a social romantic. All three of
them fought their own battles and arrived at their own,
more or less tragic, solutions. All three of them acquired
their ideals in their early youth, and whatever happened
to them afterwards could not change the values that
were introduced first and which were the most
important.
Wokulski’s education, with the exception of those
years when he hoped to become a scientist, prepared
him to deal with business matters—to earn profits. But
the romantic poets whom he was reading together with
his commerce books, implanted in him another idea:
earning money is good only if it serves some higher
ideal, “an object great and unknown” (vol. III, p. 283).
Wokulski hesitated between Politics, Science and Love—
and finally chose Love. Subsequently, as Szuman dryly
comments, he turned into a dual person, a romantic
from the 1860s and a positivist from 1870s. The latter
made money, the former wondered about the sense of it
5Although, when compared with Mouret’s department store as

described in Zola (at the end of the novel, 50 departments and
3045 employees), it was indeed only a beginning.
“[W]hat should I spend my money on, if not on

securing myself happiness? What do I care about
some saving theories, if I feel a pain in my heart?”
(vol. I, p. 145)
He always carried this pain hidden in his heart, and

this helped him to reach a state of compassion6—an
ability to feel the pain of others, people, animals, plants
—“even objects which are called dead” (vol. I, p. 127).
So, as long as he wrote letters, made calculations,
received purchases, sent agents or loaded the carts, his
heart was quiet. As soon as his business activities
ceased, the heart would hurt again. Romanticism is a
heart disease.
Most of the time, his business side seemed to serve
his romantic soul well, and peace seemed to be near,
together with success. But when his princess turned
out to be nothing but a cowgirl the equilibrium
vanished. “On this earth we chase a phantom that each
of us carries in our heart, and only when it flees, do we
recognise it as madness…” (vol. I, p. 106) But who is to
be blamed? Wokulski accuses the romantic poets: “‘You
have wasted my life… You poisoned two generations!’…
he whispered. ‘These are the effects of your sentimental
beliefs about love’” (vol. II, p. 278).7
But love was not the only ideal and poets were not the
only ones who were guilty. Rzecki, a very proper
accountant, became poisoned in a different way. His
father and all his friends had but one love: Napoleon. No
matter which number he wore, a Napoleon served for
them as a symbol of Polish independence, to which they
dedicated their dreams. Before he began his commercial
education, that is, before the age of seven, Rzecki was
already trained to become a soldier. In 1848, when
Napoleon III entered Paris, Rzecki dreamed of his dead
father and read it as a sign. Soon he was ready to
travel. His romanticism did not ruin his accounting
career only because in those years many people shared
in some or other version of romanticism (the prophet of
romanticism, Adam Mickiewicz, died in the Crimean

war in 1855). Rzecki was joined by another salesman
from the same shop and only the fact that somebody
had to stay stopped the young principal going with them.
They joined the Hungarian army (which fought for
independence against the Austrians) and suffered the
soldier’s fate: fear, hunger, tiredness, death, and doubt.
8 Rzecki’s companion died of the latter: he lost his faith
in equality and justice. The accountant came back to

wait for the next Napoleon, and to fight back the
doubts, which grew together with new phenomena, such
as antisemitism:
“Is this the century that came after the eighteenth,

after this eighteenth century that wrote on its
banners: freedom, equality, fraternity?… Hell, why
did I fight the Austrians?… What did my
companions die for?…
6 “Alllanguages that derive from Latin form the word ‘compassion’

by combining the prefix meaning ‘with’ (com-) and the root
meaning ‘suffering’ (late Latin, passio). In other languages—
Czech, Polish, German and Swedish, for instance—this word is
translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined
with the word that means ‘feeling’…
In languages that derive from Latin, ‘compassion’ means: we
cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with
those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same
meaning, ‘pity’…connotes a certain condescension towards the
sufferer…
In languages that form the word ‘compassion’ not from the root
‘suffering’ but from the root ‘feeling’, the word is used in
approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a
bad or inferior sentiment is difficult… This kind of compassion…
therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination,
the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments,
then, it is supreme” (Kundera, 1985, pp. 19–20).
7 Zola’s Mouret is also in love. But his love is a passion, which
can be countervailed by another passion, that of interest, or love

of gain (Hirschman, 1981). Wokulski’s is a sublime passion, a
virtue, not a demned and rejected the role of interest as a
governing passion.
Stories! hallucinations! the Emperor Napoleon

the IVth will set everything right again.” (vol. III, pp.
200–201)
Death saved the old accountant from seeing his

illusions fall. He—the luckiest of them all—died a
romantic, uncured. But his was the romantic
generation, unlike the two other men, who were younger
and whose fate was to become “transitional men”.
Doctor Szuman, a Jewish physician, is in many
respects Wokulski’s complement. Having read the same
poems, his dream was first dedicated to Love. In love
with a Polish noblewoman, he believed in equality and
the ending of social prejudice, but the fight was unequal
and his fiancee could not stand it—she died. Szuman
tried to commit suicide, but a colleague passing by
saved him from death—and took his practice, since it
was clear that Szuman was psychically unstable and
could not be trusted. This personal tragedy pushed him
towards science, but the romanticism persisted. Instead
of dedicating himself to his medical duties, Szuman put
all his efforts into research on relations between hair
and race, and when the results were published and
interested no one, the doctor began dreaming again. In
times of growing antisemitism, he dreamt about
educated Jews joining forces with Polish people in a fight
8 Prus, as a result of his political adventures (participation in the

uprising of 1863), became also a political realist (Szweykowski,
1972). This attitude cost him an accusation of lack of patriotism
(Piescikowski, 1988). More sophisticated literary criticism,
however, praised the ‘antithetical’ character of his writing, where
contrasting opposite beliefs was seen as a conscious device. This
trait proved to be contagious for his critics: indeed, there is no
thesis in critiques of Prus’ works that was not contradicted by
some other reviewer. It is therefore advisable to recall the
hermeneutical canon, according to which an author lives only in
and through a text. The ‘Prus’ I am speaking about is a fictitious
character emerging from my interpretations of his texts and
others’ texts about him.
against oppressors—the magnates, the exploiters. It was

Wokulski’s turn to call him a dreamer.
Hence the three representatives of positivism, an
entrepreneur, an accountant and a physician, could not
defend their lives from their romantic inheritance. The
old times were over, but they took their price. Wokulski,
says Szuman, “died under the remnants of
feudalism”. Capitalism had to begin on the ruins.9
The most interesting lesson for us today is that the
cultural context that shaped the fates of the three main
characters10 was not the context inhabited by the
characters, the one presented in the previous sections.
It was a past context, that lived at one generation’s
remove, as a result of the intensive socialisation process
which took place in the protagonists’ youth. In other
words, Prus demonstrated how history influences
present events not by deterministic developments, but
by its seeds that, sown in young people, give fruit long
after the main plant is dead (if I may be excused such a
feudal metaphor). This is a lesson which should be
especially crucial for organization studies, which tend to
observe what is visible and take what sits in people’s
hearts very lightly.
Fiction and organization studies

Prus was compared to Zola because of his realism; to
Balzac because of his psychologising sociology; to
Dickens because of his humour. All this made him, in
the eyes of his enemies, an eclectic, additionally tainted
by a touch of—God forbid!—symbolism; in the eyes of
his admirers, an entirely original author, who never
found followers.
In the present perspective, the literary faults or
virtues are of less importance. The crucial question is
whether there is anything that organization studies can
learn from fiction. An instantaneous—and somewhat
malicious—answer would be: good writing, although not
necessarily in the same form. But there is also

something else.
In the first place, novels can be seen as rich and
neglected source of “capta” 11 on both organising
practices and contexts of organising. As to the former,
Zola is a richer source than Prus. It has been rightly
pointed out by his critics that the details of Wokulski’s
successful business in the Bulgarian war, the dealings
behind his shop and the famous “Company for
Commerce” operations are rather vague and do not
progress beyond the fact that he always invests at the
right moment and in the right place (Kotarbinski, 1890/
1988). But as to the context of organising, Prus tells us
more than Zola. Using his literary privilege, he explores
spheres that we, as students of organizations, vaguely
sense but have no license to explore. Zeitgeist,
intellectual fashion, the core of yesterday’s socialisation
system—we mention them carefully, equally convinced
of their role in shaping the actual organisational
processes and helpless in our impotence, unable to
address them directly. Our methods do not permit us to
do so, but literary methods do. We are to deal in facts,
whereas they can deal in fiction. However, novels are
facts, and therefore can be legitimately used—not as
sources of theories to be repeated, but as social facts to
be studied in order to arrive at richer theories.
In the second place, novels, especially of the kind
represented by The Doll, can be direct models for our
undertakings. What impresses me most in Prus’
9 One could question the faith in sanative powers of capitalism,

as expressed in the novel and, most likely, in the positivist
program as such. It can be explained, in Hirschman’s
formulation, as a “desperate search for a way of avoiding society’s
ruin, permanently threatening at the time because of precarious
arrangements for internal and external order” (Hirschman 1981,
p. 130).
10 Izabela, although prominent in the novel, can hardly be called
a ‘character’ at all: she is presented as a mechanical doll, with a

primitive program implanted, unable to change and develop.
attempt is that he does what we should be doing:

focuses on the social stage, on patterns of social actions
and interactions, assuming that it is these patterns that
shape both personalities and social structures which,
in turn, will prepare the next stage for the future social
action. In this sense, he remains on the meso-level, as
Harrè puts it (1981), and is undoubtedly a social
constructionist in the best sense of the word. In this
light, the accusation of psychologism is unwarranted. 12
Prus was not really psychologising: he knew no more
about his characters than anybody who was in their
confidence could learn by reading a diary (Rzecki’s diary
is one of the main devices in the novel) or in
conversation. In other words, he presents the readers
with as much of the personalities as it is necessary in
order to understand their social observations—as
much, in fact, as social scientists would when presenting
their respondents. In this sense, he extends the
possibilities of naturalists: he not only observes the
objects of his interest; he also talks to them, aware of the
basic similarity between them and himself. An ideal
social scientist, one may say, on an ideal analytical
plane: that of the long-desired bridge between the
individual and the societal, between agency and
structure.
11 In concordance with Laing (1967), I claim that we do not

‘collect data’. There is nobody ‘out there’ to give us anything.
What we do, is to capture meanings, using such nets as we
ourselves are able to produce.
12 Prus was additionally accused of being a poor psychologist: his
characters were “unconvincing” and their psychological troubles

“boring” (see e.g. Swietochowski, 1890/1988). Evidently.
Swietochowski had not read Zola… Prus’ psychology is of a
sociological kind. It was rightly said that he was not really
interested in his characters (although he liked them) but used
their psychic processes as illustrations of social phenomena.
Technically speaking, however, he used very advanced
psychologist devices like integral recall, associations and
dissociations, digressive recall—later to be developed to perfection
by Proust and Joyce (Turey, 1933/1988).
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Prusa. In: Piescikowski, E. (Ed.) Prus. Z dziejow recepcji
tworczosci… Warszawa: PWN.
Swietochowski, A. (1890/1988) Aleksander Glowacki (Boleslaw
Prus). In: Piescikowski, E. (Ed.) Prus. Z dziejow recepcji
tworczosci…Warszawa: PWN.
Szweykowski, Z. (1972) Tworczosc Boleslawa Prusa. Warszawa:

PIW.
Turey, K. (1933/1988) Boleslaw Prus a wspolczesnosc. In:
Piescikowski, É. (Ed.) Prus. Z dziejow recepcji tworczosci…
Warszawa: PWN.
ON EVIL ORGANIZATIONS AND
ILLUSORY REFORMS
A Scandinavian Saga
by
Bengt Jacobsson
There is an old rumour claiming that Arvid Falk, the

main character in Strindberg’s novel “The Red Room”
(Röda rummet, 1879), was a member of socialistic and
anarchistic secret societies on the Continent.1 As an
agent for these societies, inspired by Russian nihilists
and the Paris Commune, he collected intelligence on the
distribution of power in Swedish public administration,
on mechanisms of opinion formation, and on citizens’
possibilities to influence their living conditions.
Nowadays, such investigations belong to the realm of
social sciences. Falk’s mission was in a sense identical
with the one that the research programe, The Study of
Power and Democracy in Sweden, was given by the
government about a century later.2 In today’s terms, we
would call his method participant observation or, even
more specifically, action learning.
Röda rummet takes place in the years following the
parliamentary reform of 1866, when the Parliament as
1 All following quotes come from “The Red Room”, 1913, London:
Howard Latimer. Authorized translation by Ellie Scleussner.
2 It was an investigation whose aim was to “take into
consideration the distribution of power resources and influence

among different individuals and within different areas of society.
By gathering empirical information and developing theories, the
investigation should broaden and deepen our knowledge of the
conditions of Swedish democracy and assess whether the general
development of society is bringing it closer to the Swedish ideal of
democracy” (Government’s Instruction, 1985:36)
66 • JACOBSSON
based on the four Estates (the Nobility, the Clergy, the

Bourgeoisie and the Farmers) had been abolished.
Sweden was at the turning-point from an agrarian to an
industrial, capitalist society. The industrial revolution,
prepared for through this parliamentary reform and
through removal of barriers for industry and commerce,
was in the offing.
Although the revolution did not take place until the
1880s, its characteristic traits could also be seen in the
preceding decades. Nevertheless, a great deal of Swedish
production was still untouched by modern machine
technology, even if it was carried out in factories. Also,
much of the industry was still unprofitable (Gårdlund,
1942). But changes were near. Railroads were built, and
other communication facilities had gradually been
improved. Companies were founded. Industry and
commerce expanded. Sweden was changing.
In the 1870s, idealistic and quite fanciful,
homebrewed ideologies still dominated the Swedish
cultural scene. A dominating administrative philosophy
and the leading academic standard was for decades
Boströmianism (Liedman, 1980; Nordin, 1981).
Boström’s philosophy stressed eternal hierarchies, fixed
rights and duties and, at the top, the King and God as
the guardians of social order. Arvid Falk learned all of it
together with other future employees of the Swedish
state bureaucracy at the university in Uppsala.3
According to Boström, Kant had been refuted by Fichte,
Fichte by Schelling, Schelling by Hegel, and Hegel, of
course, by Professor Boström himself.
Stockholm’s high society was also still mainly
untouched by these materialistic currents. The novelist
Hjalmar Söderberg, for instance, claimed that literary
critique in Sweden condemned as dirty everything that
was not about cathedrals, lilacs or the Royal Family.
3 Even today, the motto of the Uppsala University—“It is great to

think free, but to think right is even greater”—sounds appropriate
for a school of public administration.
ON EVIL ORGANIZATIONS AND ILLUSORY REFORMS • 67
Even if times were materialistic, the dominant ideology

was still idealistic (Nordin, 1981).
If not explicitly elaborated by Strindberg, this
institutional background is present throughout Röda
rummet. Strindberg’s primary interest focused on the
power of opinion-formation; the power over thoughts.4
He already knew a lot about the weight of public opinion
from his own experience. His drama about Master Olof,
the main character in the Swedish Reformation, had
never been allowed on stage in Stockholm, in spite of
the fact that it was disguised as an historic drama of
ideas, which was, then, the legitimate way of writing
about eternal problems. In Mäster Olof, Strindberg
elaborated on the impossibility of realisation of high
ideals, and the necessity of giving them up, as much as
on the necessity of holding high ideals, and the
impossibility of giving them up. Thus the tragedy.
When Röda rummet was published, it immediately
turned out to be a great success. Strindberg was
compared to Emile Zola; a writer whom he, up to that
time, had never read. Even in the far North, however,
the Zeitgeist in the late nineteenth century tended more
and more towards naturalism: the book documents in a
realistic way Falk’s experiences. But Strindberg did not
consider writing an experimental, scientific endeavour
as Zola did. August Strindberg described the world in
all its guises, but never tried to con vince anybody that
the observations were objective and independent of the
observer. Quite the opposite, it is apparent in all his
works that events could be experienced from different
perspectives. Moreover, Strindberg was writing with a
4 The Study of Power and Democracy in the late 1980s also

focused on the importance of opinion formation claiming that “…
issues that the mass media chooses to cover and its reflection
and interpretation of different social events, conflicts and
tensions condition the exercise of power” (The Study of Power and
Democracy in Sweden, Progress Report 1987).
68 • JACOBSSON
fair dose of humour and was frequently entertainingly

sarcastic.
Posterity has saluted Strindberg for his rude and
irreverent assault on Swedish society, but has
condemned his hero (Falk) for his resignation and
acceptance of the regime then in force. By true idealists
Falk was interpreted (just like Master Olof) as a
renegade. We should, however, be cautious in our
judgements concerning both the author and the hero.
Falk’s place in the story is ambiguous. He deceived the
other characters by saying that he was writing a
textbook in numismatics (of all topics). Did he deceive
the author as well? Falk might have been busy
documenting the situation in Sweden for his principals,
but we still know little about who the principals were
and what these reports looked like. It is therefore safer
to decode Röda rummet as a story about the origins of
the modern, organised Sweden. And this is what I
propose to do in this chapter.
Strindberg arranged Falk’s experiences in a kind of
Bildungsroman. Falk starts out as a true believer in the
humanitarian spirit of at least some people. Gradually,
he is confronted with the deceitfulness inherent in
individuals and, above all, organizations. Thus we learn
about society at the same pace as Falk did. But before
we confront this knowledge, it is necessary to return to
the plot and briefly sketch the pains that Falk had to
endure during his tour de societé.
The continuing disillusions of Arvid

Falk
Falk’s venture started in early May. Disappointed by a
year of work for the civil service, Arvid Falk decided to
leave his career as a government employee and to take
up literature instead. To get some advice on this he
arranged a meeting with Struve, who—in Falk’s eyes—
was a newspaper writer with liberal ideas and a man of
progress. Struve thought it wrong to terminate an
employment just like that, and asked Falk why he

should resign from a career that brings both honours
and power. “Honours to those who have usurped the
power and influence to the most unscrupulous” (p. 6),
answered Falk, thereby summarising one year of
humiliations in the civil service.
In an entertaining way, Falk told Struve about the
inner workings of ministerial departments like the
Board of Administration of Employee Pensions and the
Board of Payment of Employee Salaries. Clearly, these
offices were not what Weber had in mind when he spoke
about the efficiency of bureaucratic organizations. In
the land of the copyists, the notaries, the clerks, the
comptrollers and their secretaries, the public
prosecutors, the registrar of the exchequers, the master
of the rolls, the librarians, the treasurers, the cashiers,
the procurators, the pronotarys, the keeper of the
minutes, the actuaries, the keepers of the records, the
secretaries, the first clerks, it was difficult to see if any
work at all was done.5
Falk was full of hope, courage and strength, which he
did not want to surrender to the boredom of
bureaucracy. “Soon our hopes will become realities” (p.
5), he told Struve. Falk was like a child who “still
believed in everything, truth and fairy tales alike” (p. 3).
Strindberg let us follow Falk to artists’ colonies,
worker’s associations, theatre companies, publishers,
newspapers (where an editor, among other things, must
be “a little stupid, because true stupidity always goes
hand in hand with conservative leanings; he must be
endowed with a certain amount of shrewdness, which
would enable him to know intuitively the wishes of his
chiefs and never let him forget that the public and
private welfare are…one and the same thing…”, p.
115).
5In a tongue-in-cheek footnote which became famous Strindberg

commented that “since the reorganization of the public offices,
this description is no longer true to life”.
70 • JACOBSSON
Bit by bit, Falk’s belief in institutions vanished. The

parliamentary reform, which he earlier had thought
should introduce changes, proved to change nothing.
The country believed that now it was time for the
dreams to come true, but this was a mistake. It (that is:
the country) slept for years, and when it woke up it was
faced by a reality which looked as it always had. In the
bureaucracy, things which appeared small and
ridiculous to Falk were treated seriously, and everything
that Falk thought of as important was scoffed at. “The
people were called the mob and their only use was to be
shot at by the army if the occasion should arise. The
new form of government was openly reviled…” (p. 12).
Falk could not stand it any longer. He confided, to
Struve, that he detested a society that was not founded
on a voluntary basis; a society that was a web of lies.
When Falk, later that same year, summarised his
experiences in writing, he was no longer a believer. He
felt tired and indifferent. He had been visiting meetings
in the Parliament and in the church councils, meetings
of share-holders, philanthropic meetings, police court
proceedings, festivals, funerals, meetings with working
men. Everywhere he had heard “…big words and many
words, words never used in daily intercourse, a
particular species of words which mean nothing…he
could see in man nothing but the deceitful social
animal” (p. 182). And he had seen that all conservative
journalists who defended and upheld everything that
was wrong (or left it untouched), were treated with
utmost respect.
He attacked Struve, whom he earlier had thought a
man of progress, for committing crime by always
supporting the powerful. Struve claimed that he was on
the side of the law. And Falk answered:
“Haha! The Law! Who has dictated the law which

governs the life of the poor man, you fool! The rich
man! That is to say, the master made the law for
the slave… Who wrote the law of 1734? Mr
Kronstedt! Who is responsible for the law of

corporal punishment? Colonel Sabelman—it was
his Bill, and his friends, who formed the majority at
that time, pushed it through. Who is responsible
for the law concerning joint stock companies?
Judge Svindelgren. Who is responsible for the new
Parliamentary laws? Assessor Wallonius… Who has
written the new law of succession? Criminals! The
forest laws? Thieves! The law relating to bills of
private banks? Swindlers! And you maintain that
God has done it? Poor God!” (p. 202)
Struve was however not unprepared for this outburst. If

Falk wanted to be able to escape the situation of the
burnout that he was in, he had to change his view of
the world. He had to abandon his ideals. Struve advised
Falk to “…take a bird’s-view of the world” (p. 203), and
see how small and insignificant everything was. He
should start with a conviction that the world was a heap
of rubbish and that people were refuse. Then nothing
more should come as a surprise. “You will never lose an
illusion; but, on the contrary, you will be filled with great
joy whenever you come across a fine thought, a good
action; try to acquire a calm contempt of the world…”
(p. 203)
Falk longed for a fight with Struve, but discovered
himself unable to attack the journalist. Instead, he
showed him both kindness and sympathy. His mind
was in a chaos, as he thought about Struve’s advice.
Truth and lies, right and wrong danced together in a
harmony. He managed to work himself into a condition
of a complete indifference, and found fine motives for
the actions of his enemies. It appeared to him that he
had been wrong all along and that is was quite
uninteresting whether the whole was black or white.
And whatever it was, he was not entitled to criticise it.
His current mood gave him a sense of relief and
restfulness that he had not felt in all those years when
he had made the troubles of humanity his own.
72 • JACOBSSON
The journey was not over, however. Falk’s last

illusions disappeared as he followed Olle Montanus, a
free-thinking artist, to the meeting of the Working Men
Association. Falk hoped to finally meet generous people,
free from pettiness. Olle warned him that most things in
life differ from our expectations. And even at the Working
Men Association, the front bench was filled with
members of the aristocracy, officers and government
officials. The Association made a statement against the
unlawful movements which under the name of strikes
were spreading all over Europe. And when carpenter
Eriksson asked permission to speak and claimed that
strikers were right, he was accused of bad conduct. The
meeting also decided to regal a gift to the Duke of
Dalsland as an “expression of gratitude of the working
man to the Royal Family and, more especially, of his
disapproval of those working men’s disturbances which
under the name of the ‘Commune’ devastated the
French capital” (p. 260).
At the end of the meeting, Olle Montanus was allowed
to hold a lecture on Sweden. He had promised not to
exceed half a hour, but he was thrown out of the meeting
before that. Olle, a virtuous man and an idealist,
managed to offend the audience in more than one way
during his speech. He claimed that Sweden was more or
less denationalised. He maintained that the Swedes
were a stupid, conceited, slavish, envious and uncouth
nation, which was approaching its end. As Olle
vigorously attacked everything including the Royal
Family, the ‘workers’ at the meeting finally kicked him
out. Falk told him that the speech was crazy (he should
at least have left Charles the XIIth out of it), and that
the papers would pull him to pieces. Olle admitted that
it was a pity but said that “it was fun to give it to them
for once” (p. 266).
Falk worked then for a while at the staff of the
Workman’s Flag (a radical paper), but became more and
more demoralised by the standards of the editorial
procedures. The rules of the paper were strict: once a
month, the town councillors were to be accused of

extravagance; once a week, the Royal Theatre should be
attacked; as often as possible he should assail the form
of government (but not the Government itself); and
attacks at certain members of Parliament and ministers
were always censored. Falk went into a period of
indecision and melancholy. And, eventually, was found
in the company of two scandal writers in a low public
house, drinking heavily.
Sitting together with these irreverent and sarcastic
writers, he opened the window and looked out. He
fancied that he was sitting in his grave “breathing
brandy fumes and kitchen smells, eating the funeral
repast at the burial of his youth, his principles and his
honour” (p. 288). What a contrast with the situation in
the beginning of the book when Falk had been watching
the city from above. Then, he had been cheerful,
decisive and full of energy. At Mosebacke,6 “…his
nostrils expanded, his eyes flashed, and he raised his
clenched fist as if he were challenging or threatening the
poor town” (p. 3). Now, his societal tour had come to an
end. His perspective of the world had changed.
Both literally and metaphorically, Falk was at the
bottom. Everything smelled of death. Once more, he
looked out of the window eager to find an object which
would not inspire him with loathing…there was nothing
but a newly tarred dust-bin—standing like a coffin—
with its contents of cast-off finery and broken litter” (p.
288). Falk’s thoughts climbed up the fire-escape from
the dirt right up into the blue sky “…but no angels were
ascending and descending, and no love was watching
from above—there was nothing but the empty, blue void”
(p. 288). No God.
No God but Borg, a man of science (of course the
natural sciences) became Falk’s saviour. He took him to
an island in the archipelago of Stockholm, where Falk
was left to recover. And in the Archipelago, in its Eden-
like at mosphere, Falk recovered. In Borg’s words, Falk
was able to re-enter society, register his name with the
74 • JACOBSSON
rest of the cattle and hold his tongue. He did not read
and he did not talk, but he was on the road to sanity.
Back in Stockholm, Falk re-entered civilisation. He
adjusted to the latest fashion in clothes. He started
teaching, presenting both Louis the XIVth and
Alexander as great men, since they had been
successful. He called the French Revolution a terrible
event and, eventually, he re-started his career in the
civil service. With friends, he discussed numismatics
and autographs. He was “so free from fixed opinions that
he is the most amiable man in the world, liked and
appreciated by bosses and colleagues” (p. 302). He took
part in social life, and was popular among women
although they did not know what to think of him as he
always smiled and made sarcastic little pleasantries.
And he could be out-spoken about everything, except
politics!
Falk survived, but Olle Montanus drowned himself. In
his last note, Olle outlined his views of a world in which
the will of princes and people always clashes, and where
one-half of humanity is engaged in spiritual growth
while the other merely has time to get food for the day.
Falk listened together with some friends to Montanus’
last words. Borg asked Falk what he thought about it,
and got the answer: “…the usual cry—nothing more” (p.
313).
In the last chapter of the book (called revue), Borg
writes about what happens in Stockholm and with Falk.
Falk was going to get married, and he could afford it
since the public offices had been reorganised doubling
the salaries and number of posts. In the meantime, he
was enthusiastically writing a textbook on
numismatics, but was totally uninterested in what was
going on in the world. Borg, however, could not make
Falk out. He thought of him as a potential political
6 A hill from which one can see almost the whole city of
Stockholm. It is sometimes translated as “Moses Heights”,

incorrectly though.
fanatic. Between you and me, he told one of his friends,

Falk could be a member of one of those secret
continental societies. Not very long ago, Borg had seen
Falk at the reading of the King’s speech in Parliament…
…dressed in a purple cloak, with a feather in his

hat, sitting at the foot of the throne (at the foot of
the throne!) and I thought—no, it would be a sin to
say what I thought. But when the Prime Minister
read his Majesty’s gracious propositions respecting
the state of the country and its needs, I saw a look
in Falk’s eyes which plainly said: What on earth
does his majesty know of the condition and needs of
the country? That man, oh! that man! (p. 323)
Age of reform—days of illusions

Rien n’est si désagréable que d’être pendu obscurément7
— Voltaire’s words stand as a motto for Röda rummet.
Since the theatres did not put his drama Mäster Olof on
stage, Strindberg felt condemned to silence. He was also
in desperate need of money having experienced
personal bankruptcy. Röda rummet was meant as a
violent attack on a society full of rigidity, greed and
mendacity. During his tour across political
organizations, bureaucracies, companies, newspapers,
workers’ associations and publishers, it became clear to
Falk that greed and selfishness was always hidden
behind more idealistic facades. One good example of
differences between practices and appearances can be
found in the discussion about reforms.
In the centre of Falk’s initial enthusiasm was the
recent change in the Swedish constitution. Democratic
ideas were flourishing both on the continent and in
Sweden, and constitutional change was a way of
responding to such demands. The old Ständestaat
based on the four Estates had been abolished: not with
a revolution, but through consent from both the nobility,
the clergy, the bourgeoisie and the farmers. In the
76 • JACOBSSON
beginning, Falk was sure that this political and

organisational reform also would mean changes in
terms of the real power of citizens. As Strindberg notes,
Falk still believed in fairy tales.8
The discussion about the reform had been going on
for a long time. Strindberg comments that “pamphlets
had been written, newspapers founded, stones thrown,
suppers eaten and speeches made; meetings had been
held, petitions had been presented, the railways had
been used, hands had been pressed, volunteer
regiments had been formed; and so, in the end, with a
great deal of noise, the desired object had been
attained” (p. 113).
Much attention focused on the reform, and many
people were full of enthusiasm. This was the reform of
the nineteenth century, and those who fought arduously
thought that the game was won. But, as Falk painfully
found out, the game may had been subject to a change
in rules but it was definitely not won:
The reform-punsch9 attracted many a politician,

who, later on, became a great screamer; the smell of
reform cigars excited many an ambitious dream
which was never realised; the old dust was washed
off with reform soap; it was generally believed that
everything would be right now; and after the
tremendous uproar the country lay down and fell
asleep, confidently awaiting the brilliant results
which were to be the outcome of all this fuss. (p.
113)
The country, in Strindberg’s accounts, slept for some

years, woke up and found out that nothing really had
changed. No brilliant results were in sight. Politicians
were criticised, and some persons accused the
promoters that the Bill orig inated in another country,
7 Nothing is more unpleasant than to be hanged in silence.

and that the original could be found in a well-known

handbook. There was nothing ‘Swedish’ about it. Olle
Montanus’ reflections about Sweden, in his “speech on
Sweden”, come to mind, where he claimed that Sweden
was being denationalised: “…you all know that we owe
the new Swedish constitution to a Walloon.10 Capable
people, these Walloons, and very honest.” (p. 263) And
as Olle continued to tell about the scum that over the
years had sat on the Swedish throne, he was soon
thrown out from the meeting.11 Strindberg, thus,
implied that reforms were changes initiated from the
outside; a position which is similar to that taken by
today’s institutional theorists (DiMaggio and Powell,
1983).
Developments on the international scene forced even
the Swedish élite to re-think their strategies and actions.
An accurate interpretation of the parliamentary reform
would be that those who used to have power (the
nobility) were in desperate need of legitimation, and
therefore formally tried to co-opt new important strata
of the community (a mechanism elegantly described
later by Selznick, 1965). By voting in favour of the
reform, the aristocracy actively took part in the process
which consequently wiped them out as the major
political actor. The advocates of the reform celebrated
the fact that the streets of Stockholm did not have to be
coloured by the blood of the aristocrats.
In Strindberg’s essay about the “Days of Illusions”
(Illusionernas dagar, in Nya Riket), the King rides
through the streets of Stockholm celebrated by the
people, thinking that “you salute me, because you think
that I can give you a new free constitution, but I can’t
give you any freedom, and, surely, I do not want to do
8 In fact, only 6% of the population were allowed to take part in

the elections to the new parliament. Most of all, the reform
favoured the new middle class.
9 Punsch is a special kind of very sweet alcoholic beverage made
on the basis of arrack, popular in Sweden,

78 • JACOBSSON
it, to an assembly that cheers my pipe-cleaner, and is

so ignorant concerning the constitution, that they think
that I can give them anything… Bread and spectacles! I
haven’t got any bread, but I can give you a spectacle,
that you have to pay for. You want to have humbug!
And you get it!” (p. 9). The King (which was Charles the
XVth, popular among the artists) knew the importance
of staging a good performance, and the difference
between actual political processes and their
presentation. This kind of image-making and the
differences between talk and action are today
phenomena of great interest to the social sciences
(Edelman, 1975; Brunsson, 1989).
Röda rummet shows clearly how sceptical Strindberg
was where reforms are concerned. In his educational
journey, one of Falk’s ambition was to “gain an idea of
the division of labour in so important and
comprehensive department” (p. 7) (he was referring to
the Board of Payment of Employee Salaries), but all he
found was attention to superfluous matters and
contempt for the people. Falk’s experiences in the state
bureaucracy was filled with examples of rigidity,
indolence, laziness and inefficiency. As he entered one
of the rooms, the following scene enfolded:
The redoubtable actuary sat in a capacious easy-

chair with his feet on reindeer skin. He was
engaged in seasoning a real meerschaum pipe,
sewn up in soft leather. So as not to appear idle, he
was glancing at yesterday’s Post, acquainting
himself in this way with the wishes of the
Government. (p. 10)
10 A derogative allusion to Bernadottes, a French family which
rules Sweden since 1818.

11 Olle’s doubts about the Swedishness of the reform was
provoking. It could be noted that the instructions to The Study of

Power and Democracy took great care to speak about the
‘Swedish model’ and about the “Swedish ideal of democracy”.
Strindberg is not alone in his scepticism toward the

reformatory power of reforms. Let us see how this topic
is viewed by contemporary organisational analysts.
Brunsson and Olsen (1993) argued that reforms of
organisational forms often are presented as dramatic
changes that will solve problems once and for all. In
fact, these reforms reflect stability more than change.
Reforms can be seen as routines that stabilise action
patterns in organizations. They offer seductive solutions
to problems, especially for those who are willing to
forget the previous reform. They seldom solve problems.
And as reforms “lose their appeal over time, they
become easy victims of proposals for new reforms”
(Brunsson 1990, p. 225). Thereby, it becomes necessary
to launch new reforms, and to claim that the sulky
present, through this reform (compare Strindberg’s
reform-soap), will be replaced by a splendid future.
Their contemporary equivalent are administrative
reforms, and more specifically budgetary reforms, in the
late twentieth century. It has been observed that such
reforms recur in the Swedish public administration at
intervals of 8–10 years, and it seems to be basically the
same reform which pops up every time (Czarniawska-
Joerges and Jacobsson, 1989). These reforms represent
continuity through change, which at first glance could
appear paradoxical. However, budget reforms can be
also considered as temporary Utopias which will never
materialise, but at any given period of time give comfort
by establishing whether the organization is heading in
the right direction.
Capitalist firms and the rise of a

political economy
The power élite in the nineteenth century was situated
within the state bureaucracy. Ministers were recruited
from the bureaucracy, and they looked upon themselves
as bureaucrats (Nordin, 1981). However, capitalist
companies began to play an important role and became
80 • JACOBSSON
more and more resourceful as organizations. There was

a rapid increase in joint stock companies in the 1870s,
even if 1878 ended in a crash (when Strindberg himself
became a victim). This was, however, only a short-term
decrease in economic activity. From the beginning of the
1880s, the growth of capitalist companies recommenced.
Joint stock companies were growing in number
and the society was becoming more and more
organised. In the story about the Marine Insurance
Company, called Triton, Strindberg retraced the
mechanisms:
[T]he greatest discovery of a great century was

made, namely, that one could live more cheaply
and better on other people’s money than on the
results of one’s own efforts. Many, a great many
people had taken advantage of the discovery, and
as no patent law protected it…(p. 135)
Levi, another character in Röda rummet, was a man

born and educated for a life in business. As his father
died when he was twenty-five, he had to take care of the
family. All this happened when he was thinking of
finishing work and letting others work for him. But he
was made for business; “…his small feet were made for
walking on the Brussels carpet of a Board-room, and
his carefully manicured hands were particularly
suitable for very light work, such as the signing of a
name, preferably on a printed circular” (p. 135). He
went to his uncle and told him that he thought of
founding a joint stock company. The uncle considered it
a good idea, and knew already how to staff it (Aaron
could be treasurer, Simon secretary, Isaac cashier and
the other boys book-keepers.12)
By his insights into the development of Triton, Falk
was confronted with business life in this era. It was also
natural for a twenty-five year old business-educated
man like Levi, to take advantage of all brilliant
contemporary ideas. Together with his more experienced
uncle, he outlined the company’s strategy. The basic

idea was, of course, to make money, even if it was not
presented like that. As the Chairman of the Marine
Insurance Company (Triton) later said, it was wrong to
call the Marine Insurance Institution a business. It was
not a business; just a group of men who had collected a
sum of money and were ready to risk it. It was a
philanthropic institution in the interest of mankind.
If Triton was to be considered an altruistic and
humane institution, prominent men in the board were
needed: a naval officer, a retired minister of the State, a
count, a professor and (most important) a legal man,
that is a counsellor of a High Court. Then they had to
issue debentures, but little in cash (risk-capital). Levi, in
spite of his education still blue-eyed and innocent of the
mysteries of business life, asked what would happen if
matters should go wrong. The uncle answered that “one
goes into liquidation…declare oneself insolvent… And
what does it matter if the company becomes insolvent?
It isn’t you, or I, or he! But one can also increase the
number of shares, or issue debentures which the
Government may buy up in hard times at a good price”
(p. 138).
It became clear for Levi that he need not risk anything.
At the shareholders meeting for this philanthropic
institution (that is: the Insurance Company), Falk
reported for the Red Cap (another radical paper, which
he joined in a late stage of his societal excursion). He
was astonished when he saw the shareholders. It
required (he did understand that much) great love to
risk one’s money “…for the benefit of the suffering
neighbour whom misfortune had befallen” (p. 139). In
fact, Falk had never seen such accumulation of love
simultaneously at one spot, as he did at the
shareholders meeting. And Strindberg noted: “…
although not yet an entirely disillusioned man, he could
12 These antisemitic ironies are, like many other texts from that
time, taken for granted and never commented upon in the text.
82 • JACOBSSON
not suppress a feeling of amazement” (p. 139). He was

reporting on a gathering of people full of compassion.
As the Managing Director began his speech with
words about the unexpected ways of Providence, the
altruistic and compassionate crowd got somewhat
worried. And as he continued about accidents which
had “…brought to scorn the foresight of the wisest and
the calculations of the most cautious” (p. 143), the
crowd was not that sympathetic anymore, but shouted
instead that they wanted him to come to business. They
wanted the figures!13 The Managing Director was under
pressure, and he had to admit that he could only
propose a dividend of 5% on the paid capital. The crowd
was roaring that it was a shame. Disgusting! Just like
throwing one’s money away. And what should the small
capitalists do? The State ought to help them, and that
without delay. The meeting was closed in disorder, but
with the hope that next year’s dividend might be about
20%.
Later, the situation of the Marine Insurance Company
Triton was discussed in Parliament. The issue of the
state support was voted upon and it was decided that
the government “…in view of the greatness, the
patriotism, which characterised the enterprise, should
take over the debentures” (p. 277). The company went
into liquidation; the state protected the capitalists. Falk
became furious and claimed that he “should like to see
those sharpers in prison; it would help to put a stop to
these swindles. But they call it political economy! It’s
fraudulent!” (p. 278). When today’s scholars talk about
the rise of a negotiated economy (Hernes, 1978;
Jacobsson, 1989) as something characteristic of the late
twentieth century, they should bear the story of Triton in
mind.
Against organizations
Hobsbawm described the 1870s as a breaking point
between the age of individualism and the age of
collectivism. And it is clear in Röda rummet that the

collectivism inherent in bureaucratic organizations
made Strindberg pessimistic.
The argument has since then been developed by
prominent sociologists:
The way things seem becomes, in this context,

more important than the way they are, with the
result that verbal formulas (degenerating readily
into propaganda), and formal organizational
devices, appear to be adequate to fill the need. The
problem becomes one of manipulating public
opinion…(Selznick, 1966, p. 261)
Thus, from a means, organization becomes an
end. To the institutions and qualities which at the
outset were destined simply to ensure the good
working of the party-machine…, a greater
importance comes ultimately to be attached than to
the productivity of the machine. Henceforward the
sole preoccupation is to avoid anything which may
clog the machinery. (Michels, 1949, p. 390)
It has been proposed by Lindblom that the growth of

influence of organizations was gradual and
noncontroversial: “never much agitated, never even
much resisted, a revolution for which no flags were
raised…” (Lindblom, 1977, p. 95). Even if this is true as
the overall picture, some individuals were suspicious
and opposed these changes. He looked upon public
bureaucracies, newspapers and firms as organizations
publicly presenting themselves in a way that did not
correspond to their actual behavior.
13 To come to business was to arrive at figures. The accounts
were (and are) the icons of business firms (Czarniawska-Joerges

and Jacobsson, 1989). To talk about the future and of the
foresight of the wisest, could have been (and can be) a rhetoric
appropriate for a philanthropic institution.
84 • JACOBSSON
Strindberg ridicules the idea of organizations as moral

entities. When Rhenhjelm, Falk’s spiritual brother in the
parallel story in the book, tried to start a career as an
actor, he came upon the statutes of the theatre. The
first paragraph read: “The theatre is a moral institution…
therefore the members should endeavour to live in the
fear of God, and to lead a virtuous and moral life” (p.
171). But if the theatre was a moral institution,
Rhenhjelm thought, why then should the individuals
have to practice “all these beautiful things” (p. 171). In
his perspective, only human beings could possibly act
morally. The idea of joint-stock companies as “juridical
persons” was jested by Strindberg. One of the members
of Parliament that Falk overheard, was fascinated by the
idea of a joint-stock company “but begged to be allowed
to explain to the Chamber that the joint-stock company
was not an accumulation of funds, not a combination of
people, but a moral personality, as such not
responsible…” (p. 105).
Strindberg’s position towards the emerging working
class movement is also ambivalent. The most heroic
character in the book is carpenter Eriksson, who tells
the upper-class ladies that “the next campaign will be
against all idlers who live on the work of others” (p.
194). The influence of the expanding working class
movement is salient, but Falk’s stance is somewhat
ambiguous. Falk has problems in letting himself be
engaged by seemingly good causes. In a letter to Eduard
Brandes, Strindberg himself claimed that:
I am socialist, nihilist, republican; everything that

can be contrary to the reactionaries! This on
intuition, since I am Jean-Jacques’s intimate when
it comes to the return to Nature. I would like to
turn everything upside-down; to see what is placed
at the bottom; I think that we are so snarled, so
exceedingly governed that it cannot be settled, but
has to be burned down, blown up, and then
established again. (Letter to Eduard Brandes,

Dalarö, 29 July 1880)
This is undoubtedly revolutionary rhetoric, but it is also

a nostalgic yearning for an era, where the evil forces of
specialisation and the division of labour did not exist.
Strindberg questions specialisation, the new
technology, and the division of labour. He stands for an
extreme individualism and is suspicious of all forms of
organization and bureaucracy. One of his early ideas
was to travel around in Europe on a bicycle to
investigate the conditions of the aborigines. He wanted
to find the ideal, self-sufficient farmers; those who did
not yet know about the curse inherent in the division of
labour. The latter was seen by Strindberg as the big
crook, which locked people up in their pigeonholes,
unable to take a comprehensive view.
Organizations, thus, stand for the evil. For Falk, it
was Nature that most often brought comfort to life
(Strindberg was an admirer of Jean-Jacques). Nature
plays an important part in the book, symbolising both
innocence and lack of hypocrisy. For instance when
Falk was drinking together with his friends, he found
out that they spoke like human beings (not like persons
in books), and: “even their coarseness was not
unattractive; there was so much nature in it; so much
innocence” (p. 86).
Exit, voice or loyalty

During his societal round-trip, Falk encountered
persons that tried to advise him how to act in a society
which was less than perfect. Such a plot is
characteristic of an educational novel, and all these
advisors had different attitudes and solutions to offer.
Three of the most important tutors were Olle Montanus,
Borg and Struve. They had all chosen differently among
Hirschman’s options of exit, choice or loyalty
(Hirschman, 1970). Neither of them can, however, be
86 • JACOBSSON
viewed as an ideal-type. They all are entertainingly

depicted by Strindberg and, as most of Strindberg’s
characters, they reveal a distinct amount of
paradoxicality and ambiguity.
Olle Montanus was the idealist. He was a sculptor
who believed that art can make a difference in the world.
He had connections to foreign nihilistic movements, and
was also one of the few persons with affiliations to a
working class movement at home. He took Falk to the
Working Men Association, well aware that Falk would be
disappointed. Obviously, Montanus knew that this
organization did not represent workers. This was also
clear from the description of the meeting. Montanus
warned Falk that the working men were not as generous
and free from pettiness as Falk had hoped. As he told
Falk: “…most things in the world differ from our
expectations” (p. 257). And when Olle raised his voice at
the meeting, he was soon kicked out.
In his suicide letter, Olle told about his background
among farmers who had to work hard from sunrise to
sunset. He escaped this tiresome life and became an
artist. But he also fooled himself, thinking that he could
stand above his fellow human beings. Olle was a radical
who had not found his part in the society of artists. He
belonged nowhere. Clearly influenced by nihilistic and
revolutionary ideals, he longed for radical change. For
instance, he noted that “it is a strange thing that the
will of the princes and the will of the people always
clashes. Isn’t there a very simple and easy remedy?” (p.
311).
Olle was a friend of Falk, and it plagued Falk (even
after his ‘recovery’) to see Olle getting more and more
depressed after his failure as a political speaker. When
Falk, entertaining himself with friends one night,
caught a glimpse of Olle, his mood changed. He became
“gloomy like a night on the sea”, and started to drink
heavily “as if he wanted to extinguish a smouldering fire”
(p. 303). Despite Falk’s re-appearance in the civilised
society, Olle’s radical ideas were still attractive to Falk.
Olle was a human being, who could not stand a less-

then-human society. He chose to leave the world, and
wanted to look happy as a corpse. Exit.
A second tutor to Falk was Borg; a scientist and a
pragmatist. He ‘saved’ Falk from chaos and took him to
the Stockholm Archipelago. Borg was a biologist who
regarded mankind “…with calm indifference; men are to
me geological preparations, minerals; some crystallise
under one condition, other under another; it all depends
on certain laws or circumstances which should leave us
completely unmoved” (p. 291). Borg symbolises
objectivity and modern science. Different from
Montanus, he tries to convince Falk about the
importance of a dispassionate attitude. And about the
extraordinary foolishness in giving up a career for the
sake of ideals.
Borg’s role is, however, far from unambiguous. When
Falk was on the road to melancholy, Borg had kept an
eye on him (with the help of a woman), and eventually
managed to stop him from going too far. He was also
able to give Falk a prescription for how he should live
his life as he re-entered the society. Borg saved Falk
with a purpose in mind. There may be a clue to the
ambiguity of Borg in the last chapter. He presents a
realist’s view of the situation in the society: “…all
parties have corrupted one another by presents and
counter-presents, and now all of them are grey. This
reaction will probably end in socialism…” (p. 314).
Furthermore, in the final chapter, it is Borg who says
that he believed that Falk might have belonged to the
secret societies on the continent, societies that had been
triggered by reaction and militarism.
Borg’s scientistic attitude leads him to conclusions
about institutions in a society similar to Falk’s. Instead
of getting depressed by wie es eigentlich gewesen ist,
Borg made some forecasts about future dramatic
changes. And he could see that Falk would have a part
to play in these changes. Falk should, according to Borg,
hold his tongue until his words bear weight. In a letter
88 • JACOBSSON
to a friend, Strindberg also made some forecasts and

commented that “…this whole deceitful building can not
carefully be deconstructed but must once, as the
foundation is touched, fall, and I do not dislike
dynamite in politics” (Letter to Helena Nyblom, 31
January 1882). It may be so that Borg was also waiting
for the right moment to come. Voice, in the future.
Struve was the most interesting of Falk’s tutors. Early
in the book he stood together with Falk at Mosebacke. As
Falk told him about his plans to leave his career, Struve
tried to change the subject. Finally, he told Falk about
the importance of learning the art of living: “…you will
find out how difficult it is to earn bread and butter, and
how it gradually becomes the main interest… Believe
me, who have wife and child, that I know what I’m
talking about” (p. 13). Falk made it clear that he
despised society, since it was a web of lies. “It’s
beginning to grow chilly…” (p. 13), Struve quickly
replied, and the flame of conversation ended.
On a rainy evening in September, as Falk walked
home, he met Struve once again. Struve was in misery,
as he had just lost one child. Falk, ignorant of this,
accused him of always taking the part of the rich.
Struve was, however, not totally defenceless. He argued
on the importance of taking a “bird’s-eye view” of the
world; of being more dispassionate. If not, he thought
that Falk would burn himself to death. Just like in the
first meeting with Struve, Falk had tried to attack—in
search of steel—but, once again, he struck wood. He
ended up lending his dress-coat to Struve and promised
to help him with funeral services.
Struve is a kind of Mephistophelian character that
brought Falk through different stages of frustration. He
preached non-commitment and indifference, and Falk,
who was oscillating between “voice” and “loyalty”, ended
up in chaos. In the darkest moments, it appeared to
Falk that “…it was quite immaterial whether the whole
was black or white”. Whatever it was, he was not
authorised to criticise it. Struve claimed that one had to
cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth. He had chosen

to be loyal.
Struve was well aware of all the greed and folly that
ruled life. In the novel, he is the one who pointed out to
Falk that the world was a rubbish-heap and should be
looked upon from above. Struve always stayed loyal to
those in power; both in his work as a journalist and as a
house-manager in the poor districts of Stockholm.
Struve wished to survive and acted accordingly. Both
Montanus’ and Falk’s idealism contrast with Struve’s
detached attitude. Montanus’ initial “voice-strategy”,
climaxing in his speech on denationalisation of Sweden
at the Working Men Association, failed, thus leading to
an exit; Falk seemed to go from “voice” to “loyalty”.
Struve, as most of us, preferred the bird’s-eye view of
the world.
Conclusions in the form of letters—

revue
Letter from Arvid Falk in Paris to the author August Strindberg in
Stockholm
Arrived yesterday from London. For two months, I’ve
been renting an apartment together with some Danish
and Norwegian friends. The landlady claimed that
Bakunin had stayed there some years earlier just before
he died. Imagine, I have been using Bakunin’s bath-tub!
The Scandinavians, unceasingly, and with appreciation,
speak about the explosion in Stockholm created by
Röda rummet. You have made yourself quite a
reputation. Obviously, no silence. And they didn’t hang
you. At least not this time. Apart from now being
famous, I suppose that you also have made some
money.
I must admit that the book is both witty and
worrying. Success, as you had planned! I don’t mind the
satiric exaggerations, since they are so ingeniously
accomplished. Very much like Dickens (although they
say that you are compared to Zola). However, I met Mr
90 • JACOBSSON
Gradgrind in London, and described the book and told

him about your style. He wasn’t that enthusiastic about
intertwining fact and fiction. Constantly, he asked me if
the stories in the book were true to life. What could I
tell him; I had to admit that you have been using my
research quite unscrupulously!
Some judgement, then, about your composition of my
character (after all, it is me!). I didn’t fancy the end with
me sitting at the foot of the throne dressed in purple
cloak; writing a text-book on numismatics; loyally
accepting all the unfairness and hypocrisy. Me, as a
collaborator! How could that have happened. The
readers must think that Borg provided me with some
kind of drugs out on Ingarö. Not even the overwhelming
nature out in the archipelago, could have had such a
tranquillising effect.
You didn’t outline that much about my international
connections, but I suppose the publisher wanted to
have an optimistic end. I would have preferred the more
nihilistic one. I know that you wrote one. I admit that
you also have provided me with some ambiguity,
especially through the remarks by Borg. To be sure, this
will put me in the centre of the literary debates in the
future.
In London, they are interested in your opinion in the
“working question”. They thought that my statements in
the book were both odd and dubious. Why didn’t you
refer to the strike in Sundsvall? It must have created
much unrest and fear even in Stockholm. And my
friends here are puzzled, as they think that your
solution lies less in dynamite, than in returning to
Rousseau’s nature. I have tried to tell them that you
don’t look upon yourself as someone who has to provide
any solutions, but, still, they want to have your
“program”.
By the way, I’d like to know about what happened to
Struve, whom I strongly dislike, and to Borg, that
soulless scoundrel. And let me know if you hear
anything about the destiny of Beda. Is she still in the
same distinguished trade as before? The Women’s

Question is really on the agenda. For instance, women
are allowed to study at the London University. On the
Isle of Man, women now are getting the same voting
rights as men. How about that!
Enough, this time. The Scandinavian Community is
happy about your success, and would like you to come
here. Especially if the spiritual climate in our native
country is getting chillier. Why don’t you give up on
your plans to find the ideal farmer, and take a look at
the real worker. He belongs to the future. Think about
it. I will hear from you.
A.F. 1880
Letter from Bengt Jacobsson in Tumba, to Barbara Czarniawska-
Joerges and Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Somewhere in the World.
So much for Röda rummet. Accounted in history
books as the first modern Swedish novel. Two years
after Röda rummet, Mäster Olof was put at stage in
Stockholm. Two more years later, Strindberg offended
the church and fled the country. Hundred-and-two
years later, reforms are still proposed, idealistic façades
are still produced, and the politi cal economy is
prospering better than ever.
Röda rummet is still considered a great novel. In
schools, however, children first of all read Strindberg’s
Hemsöborna, which is a naturalistic and witty story
about life among people in the Archipelago. Swedes are
still fond of the Nature. When television, after the
success of Hemsöborna, made a TV-series of Röda
rummet, they ended it with Falk’s boat trip to the
Archipelago. The producer thought the end of the book
too complicated. He preferred a more encouraging and
romantic farewell. As you may have found out, Swedes
rarely miss an opportunity of a boat trip to the
Archipelago!
What happened to Falk, then? He tried to establish
contacts with the Second International, but failed. Back
in Sweden, he resumed his career. In fact, he was one
92 • JACOBSSON
of the instigators of a School of Commerce in Stockholm

in 1909. He wanted young men to get a high-standard
education in the art of business. And, eventually, Falk
returned to the civil service; to the Ministry of Finance.
He spent his last years in office loyally preparing the
King’s budget speeches in Parliament. That man!
B.J. 1990
References
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and actions in organizations. London: Wiley.
Brunsson, N. (1990) Administrative reforms as routines.
Scandinavian Journal of Management, 5(3): 219–228.
Brunsson, N. and Olsen, J.P. (1993) (Eds.) The reforming
organization, London: Routledge.
Czarniawska-Joerges, B. and Jacobsson, B. (1989) Budget in a
cold climate. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 14: 29–
41.
DiMaggio, P. and Powell, W.W. (1983) The iron cage revisited:
Institutional isomorphism and collective ratio nality in
organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48:147–
160.
Edelman, M. (1975) Politics as symbolic action. New York:
Academic Press.
Gårdlund, T. (1942) Industrialismens samhälle, Dissertation,
Stockholms Högskola.
Hernes, G. (ed.) (1978) Forhandlingsøkonomi og
blandingsadministrasjon. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Hirschman, A.O. (1970) Exit, voice, loyalty. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Jacobsson, B. (1989) Konsten att reagera. Intresser, institutioner
och näringspolitik. Stockholm: Carlssons.
Liedman, S-E. (1980) Boströmianismen. In: 17 uppsatser i svensk
idé och lärdomshistoria. Stockholm: Carmina.
Lindblom, C. (1977) Politics and markets. New York: Basic Books
March, J.G. and Olsen, J.P. (1989) Political institutions. New
York: Free Press/Macmillan.
Michels, R. (1915/1949) Political parties. New York: Free Press.
Nordin, S. (1981) Den Böstromska skolan och den svenska
idealismens fall. Lund: Doxa.
Selznick, P. (1949/1966) TVA and the grassroots. New York:

Harper & Row.
Strindberg, A. (1879) Röda rummet. English edition: (1913), The
red room, London: Howard Latimer.
Strindberg, A. (1882/1962) Det nya riket. Lund: Aldus.
ENGLAND EXPECTS
Prosperity, Propriety and Mr. Polly
by
Robert Grafton Small
As Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecúchet is able to lampoon

France’s archetypal bourgeois because it was written
when they and their habits were established to the
point of being common knowledge, so The History of Mr.
Polly by H.G.Wells1 is a good-humored examination of
England’s lower middle classes and their development
at the turn of the twentieth century. That some of us in
Britain are still laughing, though the joke is literally at
our expense and no longer funny, is why Well’s original
insights were so telling and why his criticisms still
apply.
Granted, a great many others have remarked on the
English as a nation of shopkeepers. Indeed, Henry’s
father, Joseph Wells, actually ran a successful
hardware store, yet the very ‘market forces’ that were of
such importance to him and to Zola’s series of
department store romances, or is that chain-store
novels, were now vital to Margaret Thatcher’s abiding
impact upon Britain in at least two ways. ‘Market
forces’ have turned Napoleon’s insult into a boast, if
only where the English are concerned, for a great deal of
Thatcher’s much vaunted economic revival was founded
on a massive, if somewhat volatile, expansion of trade
within the retail sector (Gardner & Sheppard, 1989).
1 All quotes come from the edition published by Pan Books,

London, in 1963. The History of Mr. Polly was published for the
first time in 1910.
ENGLAND EXPECTS • 95
These same ‘market forces’ have also been responsible,

as anything from an excuse to a metaphor, for changes
in the social and economic fabric of contemporary
Britain that parallel those vast programmes of urban
and industrial development which Dickens once
lambasted and Wells chooses to mock in “Mr. Polly”.
To business, then, and the matter in hand. Mr. Polly,
or Alfred as he is occasionally called, though usually
just Polly, is a one-time retailer of haberdashery and his
history is written from his own middle-age in 1910.
Chronologically, he is forty years old and if the story he
tells is taken at face value (a particularly dangerous
practice nowadays, I admit, though not then) Polly
believes himself to be at the end rather than the mid
point of his life. That, or he sees no reason but death
itself to fall from the peak his life has led him to.
Mr. Polly has, in effect, grown up with department
stores as a part of his everyday life and consequently,
his family, his career and his social circle are shaped by
those very forces that Zola finds so intriguing. The
History of Mr. Polly is, therefore, not only an alternative
view of the pressures that would drive M.Baudu and his
daughter out of business but also a significant critique
of entrepreneurship in late nineteenth and early
twentieth century England. For this, Wells depends on
the implicit links between Polly’s failings as a
haberdasher and husband, the demands of a rapidly
maturing urban economy and the recent spread of
industrial society to those very parts of England where
Mr. Polly’s personal drama is acted out.
More specifically, in every episode of a life told
through vignettes covering all the significant aspect of
existence bar, notably, parenthood, Polly is made to
appear amusingly out-of-touch with the already
established mores of popular industrial society. Equally,
Polly the entrepreneur and symbol of England’s lesser
trading classes epitomises those hapless types who can
only react to the demands of contemporary commerce
and culture, never seeming able to learn from either
96 • GRAFTON SMALL
their circumstance or their experiences. In sum, Alfred

Polly can neither manage his personal life, he is ever at
the mercy of other people’s desires, nor even conceive a
strategy for his own chosen business. This inability to
plan for the future and his lack of any recognisable
sense of purpose run through the book, showing the
extent to which Polly has, almost without noticing it and
certainly without understanding, fallen behind the
advance of Modernist thought and practice into English
social structures and the twentieth century, leaving
Alfred to fade with the afterglow of Victorian High
Romanticism.
The flaws, however, are not all of Polly’s making.
Throughout the book, it is made apparent that he is
both an individual and an archetype, meant to
represent the failure of thousands just like himself. Nor
does this failure begin with the man for Polly is as much
undone by his parents’ thoughtless vanity as by his own
well-practised incompetence. In fact, the majority of
Polly’s biography is based on the continual interplay,
and the tension, between his open acknowledgement of
public propriety and his repeated inability to fulfil
communal expectations of him. That a final resolution
should only prove possible when these conventions are
overturned, and by their staunchest supporters, is
surely the point Wells wishes to make though we will
return to this later. Until then, it will be enough to note
that The History of Mr. Polly as a lesson in morality and
prosperity accrues solely to those who appreciate
propriety sufficiently well to abandon it when they
should.
Mr. Polly’s history begins with reminiscences of his
childhood, of which there is little before the death of his
mother when he was seven, and thereafter the part that
Education played in loco parentis. Polly went to a
National School at the age of six and left a private school
at fourteen yet learned practically nothing from either in
the entire eight years. National Service Schools were
publicly funded from the rates, a local property tax that
was not replaced in England until the spring of 1990,

and therefore overly economical in their approach to
education in general. The largely untrained staff offered
Polly sums he did not understand, a Bible without
explanation and various other subjects which his mind
simply refused to entertain. From the age of twelve,
Polly spent two further years at a dingy, pretentious and
incompetent private school, meaning one which is run
as a business and where pupils, or rather their parents,
pay fees. Here he failed to grasp either French or book-
keeping, though he was offered both, and much of his
self-confidence was caned out of him.
As a result of his schooling, Alfred Polly is unable to
speak or write proper English. He cannot do mental
arithmetic, nor make sense of any form of science and he
thinks of Divinity as an infinite capacity for setting rules
and punishing their transgression. Whilst this all
sounds very much like the sort of criticism Richard
Critchfield has made of English education relatively
recently (The Guardian, 10th August, 1990), Wells does
show, through other characters in the book, how more
suitable alternatives would have been available for Polly
had his parents considered the roles he was likely to
play in later life. Alfred’s education was, in effect, a poor
imitation of that which prepared entrants for the Civil
Service and so on yet he, by virtue of his lower middle
class origin, would always be debarred from any such
post.
Alfred does, nevertheless, gain one thing from his eight
years at school, a taste for ‘pulp’ literature of the most
sentimental sort which stays with him until at least his
middle thirties. The rest of Polly’s diet is equally suspect
and with similarly long-lasting results for, despite hints
from his monthly nurse and the family charwoman,
Alfred’s mother had never learned anything about the
rearing of children. Thus, by the age of five, Polly has
already become a victim to chronic indigestion and a
life-time of the same poor catering is soon to follow. We
soon realise, though signifi cantly they do not, that at
every turn in the story, be it major occasions like his

father’s funeral or his own wedding—which boasts a
green salad!—or simply his midday meal, Polly and his
peers all dine on variations from one short menu. This
encompasses cold meat, potatoes, beer, bread and
cheese, followed as often as not, by some typically
English pudding based on suet.
Incidentally, it is worth pointing out in this context
that Wells has understood the importance of brand
names two generations before Tom Wolfe. Only one item
of Polly’s diet is described in specific rather than generic
terms and that is Rashdall’s Mixed Pickle, an industrial
intrusion into what was once a purely domestic preserve
(p. 18). The meat, the bread and the beer also come from
commercial suppliers and no-one remarks on the
matter. By the 1890s, England’s newly industrialised
society is well enough established for the dietary
deficiencies of contemporary Britain to be clearly
evident in at least one of those classes that has the
money to choose what it eats but not the education or
the palate to discriminate. In addition, green vegetables
are rarely mentioned at all by Wells and fruit other than
apples is apparently unknown or unsought after. The
apples, by the way, seem to occur only as a pie-filling.
Eventually, of course, Polly’s father decides it’s “time
that dratted boy did something for a living” (p. 25).
Despite his mental and physical uncertainties, Polly is
apprenticed to “one of those large, rather low-class
establishments which sell everything from pianos and
furniture to books and millinery, a department store” (p.
26). The whole tenor of this decision is astonishing. It
shows, in short, that the turmoil of the world’s first
Industrial Revolution has already been crystallized into
a social structure of amazing complexity and great
rigidity. Even so, Polly’s father is not concerned with
finding his son a vocation or securing him a future.
Polly is seen as an avoidable expense, in financial rather
than emotional terms, so he is disposed of. Here, too, we
find tones of contemporary culture and a certain
attitude to paternity and the role of men in the raising

of children.
Polly’s apprenticeship involves life in a company
dormitory along with five other apprentices and work in
one of three townships “grouped around the Port
Burdock naval dockyards” (p. 26) for in Victorian as in
contemporary England, the Defence Budget offers a
vital underpinning to commercial and popular well-
being. Here, at last, Polly begins to learn what is
expected of him as an adult. This is particularly
meaningful when seen against the current background
of complaints from British industry about illiteracy and
innumeracy amongst the workforce as well as shortages
of other social and commercially useful skills. These
same employers are nevertheless inclined to hire each
other’s staff rather than invest in training schemes so
latter-day Alfreds must discover for themselves what
Polly is taught about friendship, money and girls, even
the need for regular washing. His work, though, is
tedious if a lot less tense than school, there being few
beatings given out in a department store. There are,
however, certain public standards to be met, even by
apprentices.
Polly and his pals, Parsons and Platt, two other
trainees at the Port Burdock Drapery Bazaar, cause an
uproar in the company dormitory when they decide to
buy ready-made working men’s hob-nail boots and not
the more genteel bespoke items of their station. The
apprentice threesome enjoy the surrounding
countryside, in a foretaste of Polly’s future, perhaps, but
cannot afford bicycles so they spend their money on
footwear that will last, the fault being that they put
their own pleasure and convenience before the
reputation of their employers and their appearance at
work. Whilst this may at first sight seem a trivial
example of the English obsession with degrees of status,
Polly and his pals being pure petit bourgeois and not at
all working class, the same debate lives on in the dress
codes that companies still enforce even nowadays, and
not just in Britain. Consider, too, the attention paid to

the allocation, or not, of company cars.
These declassé boots do, nevertheless, enable Polly to
discover Fishbourne, the little seaside town where he
will eventually set up his own business. That the place
itself is a product of late nineteenth century holiday
making, or tourism as it has now become, is literally not
worth Wells’ mentioning. By the time Polly’s history is
written, it is commonly understood that in the new
industrial society, some people at least can afford not to
work all the time whilst others will earn their living
taking care of these hedonists.
This combination of social and commercial
accommodation is also apparent within the Port
Burdock Drapery Bazaar, specifically when Polly’s friend
Parsons gets himself dismissed. Parsons has finished
his apprenticeship and become a window-dresser for the
Manchester department, meaning that which sells
nothing but goods from what was then one of the great
industrial centres of the world. Parsons feels sure of his
job because his displays sell goods and he refuses to
believe that Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and
managing director of the Bazaar, would sack such an
employee with ease. Parsons also claims that window-
dressing is in its infancy as a commercial art and it is
this which leads to his undoing. He puts together a
huge asymmetrical display of the sort we would
recognise instantly, one involving white and red
blankets “twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly
richness”, with “large window tickets inscribed in
blazing red letters: ‘Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices’, and
‘Curl up and Cuddle below Cost’” (p. 38). In addition, he
uses electric rather than natural light because it gives a
warm glow to the window. Bearing in mind that this
must have happened in about 1890, Parsons is clearly
something of an innovator, though hardly to be
censured given his sales record. Not so. Mr. Garvace
orders another more conventional dresser to redeem the
window he considers to be an outrage and Parsons
refuses to allow it. In the subsequent mêlée, blows are

exchanged and ultimately Parsons is arrested. He is
then summoned to appear before the Magistrate’s Bench
and as he himself explains to the rest of the dormitory,
“What’s the good of a Cross summons, with old Corks
the chemist and Mottishead the house agent and all
that on the Bench?” (p. 42).
A hundred years on, the wider implications of stifled
innovation are a clearly acknowledged problem for
British businesses but at the time, the social and
organisational significance of this vignette escape Mr.
Polly altogether. He does, however, lose interest in his
work when he loses his friend and even he knows what
is meant by his employer’s refusal to grant him a raise.
Polly resigns from the Port Burdock Drapery Bazaar
without a job to go to but with a reference from the
company, Parsons having been punished more by the
loss of this commendation than by the fine he paid to the
Magistrate’s Court. Polly’s friend has, in fact, become a
warehouseman in a London shop which does not
require references, a significant belittlement, given the
understanding that, in industrial societies, one’s job
and one’s wider standing are inextricably linked parts of
the same very subtle set of rules and social structures.
Without doubt, Wells’ first readers would realise, just a
surely as we do, that Parson’s transgression within the
Bazaar betokens a more serious challenge to the social
order outside. After all, each of us recognises the system
in question as our contemporary!
The same can be said for Polly and his search for
work; he, too, finds himself testing the job market in
London. In a scene that echoes the hiring fair in Hardy’s
Far From the Madding Crowd, Polly competes against a
press of would-be shop assistants of every age and
ability who gather at the Wood Street Warehouse to meet
prospective employers from all over the country. Largely
because he knows the nuances of a nicely chosen neck-
tie, Polly finds himself working in Canterbury, which he
enjoys very much and where he has his own apprentices
to care for. Even so, it is this apparent advancement

which forces Mr. Polly to admit he cannot compete
against “the naturally gifted, the born hustlers, the
young men who mean to get on” (p. 52). A case, perhaps,
of Polly’s Precursor to the Peter Principle?
Torn between the need to work and the prospect
of leaving outfitting altogether, Polly is clearly caught.
The one thing he does, he does badly and there is little
possibility of him being able to make anything else of
himself, already a notable handicap in a society built
upon and committed to entrepreneurship and personal
advancement on an industrial scale. Polly, however,
understands none of this despite the social upheavals,
the widespread political debates of the time and the
palpable distress of all those other people with similar
frustrations. In an obvious prelude to the ‘dependency
culture’ so derided by Margaret Thatcher during her
premiership, Polly feels himself to be both blameless
and helpless, until, that is, his father dies.
This simple incident determines the rest of Polly’s life.
It introduces him to the ‘property-owning democracy’
and thereby the difficulties of familial expectation and
public propriety, whilst giving him, through his father’s
life-insurance, the opportunities and the duties of
private capital. Though in his early twenties himself,
Polly had not expected his father to die when he did.
Nor had the cousins with whom Polly’s father and, on
occasions, Polly took lodging. Significantly, Wells also
touches on the other side of life-expectancy amongst the
lower middle classes in late Victorian England. The
doctor in attendance on Polly senior is sure the old man
has died of “imagination” but, in shades or maybe the
light of Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, puts “the appendicitis
that was then so fashionable” (p. 55) on the death
certificate. There is no post-mortem.
In the few days between the death of Polly’s father and
his actual burial, Harold Johnson suggests, among a
number of things, that Mr. Polly might do worse with
the money “than put it into a small shop” (p. 60). Harold
even goes so far as to show Polly suitable premises

being built nearby and in an area with a rapidly
developing commercial life, too. The funeral itself is not
only a gathering of Polly’s appropriately dutiful family, a
morbid dry run for the wedding that will soon follow,
but also an opportunity for Wells to present a range of
archetypes, perhaps even stereotypes, representing at
least part of the new and the old social
order. Consequently, we are introduced to Uncle
Pentstemon, “a fragment from the ruder agricultural
past of our race” (p. 65)—presumably Wells means the
English—and Polly’s cousins, the Larkins sisters, who
work in factories as dressmakers, a practice which
scandalises Uncle Pentstemon.
He thinks the Larkins girls ought to be “in service”,
because of their background, a view their mother sees
as a distinct slight and which she criticises accordingly.
The subsequent argument allows Wells to emphasise
the difference, and thereby the friction, between one
form of order and morality, old and crumbling like Uncle
Pentstemon, and another, Aunt Larkins’ emergent
industrial society. Whilst he’s bucolic, conservative and
increasingly ill-at-ease with the rituals and mores of
Polly’s progress, Aunt Larkins is entirely at home with
life in a factory town. Wells even goes so far as to
provide a symbolic underlining for any reader who
might feel some sympathy for the integrity of Uncle
Pentstemon’s views. He is twice widowed and childless
whereas Aunt Larkins has lost her sole husband yet
still has three daughters, one of whom is to marry Alfred
Polly and share the social, if not the Darwinian sterility
of his fruitless High Romanticism.
Polly’s employers, on the other hand, have their own
view of filial propriety, and Alfred is fired, for overstaying
his funeral leave. At this point, however, Polly’s
inheritance makes itself felt for he is able to take a
holiday rather than return to Wood Street in search of
work. For Polly, holidays are “his life, and the rest
merely adulterated living” (p. 75) but he has no-one to
share his good fortune with, his apprentice friends

having long since disappeared. Instead, he leaves
London and returns to Easewood where he takes a room
with the Johnsons. He also buys a bicycle and a
number of the books that have always fascinated him,
though these are increasingly a matter of second-hand
shops and jumble sales and he still cannot read them
as an adult might
Confronted with this expanse of decaying
literature, the ever-practical Harold Johnson suggests
that Polly would be better advised to “get yourself a good
book on book-keeping” (p. 78). Alfred ignores him
completely, being at heart a High Victorian Romantic
and one with other things on his mind. Quixote-like, his
new bicycle takes him, with increasing frequency, from
Easewood to nearby Stamton and the dingy little cul-de-
sac where his cousins, the Larkins, all live. From his
first visit, Polly is a great success and he soon finds
himself torn between the pleasures of not working, yet
being able to enjoy his cousins’ company, and the
increasing urgency of Harold Johnson’s attempts to get
him “into something” (p. 85). Not that Harold is
intending to use Polly as a cat’s paw or surrogate for his
own ambitions. Harold simply hates waste, anybody’s
waste, much more than he desires profit though his
wife, mindful perhaps of the rent involved, is more
inclined to let Polly loiter.
During one such dalliance, at the Larkins house in
Stamton, Cousin Minnie who now works in a “carpet-
making place” (p. 96) and not a dressmaking factory,
comes home late with a detailed and highly technical
complaint about her manager and his calculation of the
piece-work rate. Polly grasps very little of what this
implies and talks instead of his own aspirations as a
shop-keeper. Significantly, these are the result of his
need to contribute something to the conversation and
not his audiences with Harold Johnson. Polly even
confesses to hating “cribs” (p. 99), that is, working for
other people, but as we know from his reaction to
Cousin Harold’s investment proposals, he is no

entrepreneur either. Nor does he have Minnie’s insight
into factory life so he is equally incapable of explaining
why he is so out of place, so completely alienated.
Nevertheless, Polly clearly recognises the threat in
discovering he has spent a seventh of his inheritance to
no real purpose. Caught between this and his promise
to marry Miriam Larkin, a contract which seems to owe
more to her desire and her mother’s man-management
than to any great initiative on Polly’s part, our Alfred
makes not one but two investments. In addition to a
wife, he also decides to take a shop, each
being apparently a part of the same system of property
and propriety, at least where Miriam and Polly are
concerned.
However, in making these commitments, Polly has
managed to offend another set of proprieties for his
other cousins, the Johnsons, know nothing of either his
wife-to-be or his plan to rent a property in Fishbourne
rather than the arcade in Easewood which Harold
Johnson has promoted so vigorously. To compound the
error, and before saying anything about his plans, Polly
asks Cousin Harold to prepare a set of costings for such
an investment. As a result, Polly learns that he would
have a real chance commercially but only if he were to
take the newly completed premises nearby and go on
living as he has done, that is, cheaply and unmarried
and with the Johnsons. This prompts the ever
incompetent Alfred to declare his hand while Harold’s
wife, Grace, is equally characteristic in her valedictory
blessing.
After all the trouble we’ve ‘ad to make you

comfortable and see after you—out late, and sitting
up, and everything; and then you go off as sly as
sly, without a word, an’ get a shop behind our
backs, as though you thought we mean to steal
your money. I ‘aven’t patience with such
deceitfulness, and I didn’t think it of you, Elfrid.
And now the letting season’s ‘arf gone by, and what
I shall do with that room of yours I’ve no idea (p.
106).
Once away from Easewood, Polly’s problem is that

having made his own decision, he has no means of
managing the outcome. He lacks the insight to
appreciate his own shortcomings in commercial terms
and his ineptitude has completely estranged Harold
Johnson, the one person he might have accommodated
as both a friend and business partner. Consequently,
the following fifteen years of Polly’s life as a “respectable
shopkeeper in Fishbourne” are ones “in which every day
was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they
had gone in a flash” (p. 123). He still reads old
books when he can but physically, Polly is gone to seed
and childless, a lack which links him more with Uncle
Penstemon and the supplanted past than any bounty to
come with the industrialised future. He hates the
business, too, though he has at last realised he took it
“to escape the doom of Johnson’s choice” (p. 123).
In other words, Polly the petit bourgeois entrepreneur
and prototypical venture capitalist did what he did not
for profit but simply because it offered an immediate
solution to his most pressing problems. He hated having
other people manage his life, he had a wife and a sum
of capital to protect and he liked Fishbourne. His
haberdashery business has no other basis and he
himself has no long term plans whatsoever, so his story
is episodic, one of drifting into the daily difficulties any
reader could anticipate, then or now.. Miriam hates the
house equally, never having seen it before the wedding
and not having been considered when Polly chose it.
She insists, nevertheless, on “‘aving everything right” (p.
124) and equips the place accordingly. Unfortunately,
though, she is Polly’s equal in that her earnestness is
matched a notable inability to manage anything
practical.
In essence, then, we as readers are confronted by an

undertaking which depends on an entrepreneur with no
commercial abilities and a housekeeper who can’t keep
house. Even so, it is Miriam who first realises that the
haberdashery is only of marginal profitability at best
and she who harangues her husband, the owner and
manager, to do something. Polly defends himself by
arguing that you can’t make people buy flannel trousers
if they don’t want to. Whilst this is true, he never seems
to realise that if there’s no real demand for
haberdashery there is no need for a supplier like him.
Polly’s business is also extremely seasonal and depends
on tourists and passing custom, which he and the
neighbouring traders soon learn is not enough to keep
any of them.
Instead of a thriving commercial district like the one
picked out by his cousin, Harold Johnson, Polly has
chosen to invest in an area where the shopkeepers have
no singular or collective future. He can therefore neither
sell up nor take on more business. His push-bike, too,
is wearing out after some twenty years of use and he
can no longer afford a replacement. It is noteworthy,
even so, that Polly’s incompetence in commercial affairs
is often matched by his competitors and fiercest social
critics. In Fishbourne High Street, where he rents his
shop, many of the properties change hands frequently,
but only to go from a bankrupt concern to another
marginal investor like Polly, who will soon be that way.
Incidentally, and despite wearing one out, Alfred Polly
has not really learned to ride a bicycle either. At least,
he has not adapted his technique to allow for the ever-
growing number of private and commercial motor
vehicles on the road where, personally and symbolically,
he no longer has a place. That this growth in passing
traffic could well mean a loss of passing trade, because
people on wheels do not stop where pedestrians or
public transport might, eludes both Mr. Polly and his
neighbours. Clearly, though, business in the region has
expanded enormously but its focus has moved away
from Fishbourne High Street. Polly’s judgement is, once

again, a poor second to the reality of his circumstances
and also, by implication, to the wisdom of Harold
Johnson’s proposal.
Just as the shrinking of his inheritance forced Polly
into his original investment so an unprecedented yet
entirely predictable inability to pay the rent on his shop
forces Polly into a terrible irony. To escape the shame of
his position, Polly decides on suicide as the only
sensible way out and, for the first time in his life, his
plans are indeed scrupulous.
His passionate hatred for Miriam vanished directly

the idea of getting away from her for ever became
clear in his mind. He found himself full of
solicitude then for her welfare. He did not want to
buy his release at her expense. He had not the
remotest intention of leaving her unprotected, with
a painfully dead husband and a bankrupt shop on
her hands. It seemed to him that he could contrive
to secure for her the full benefit of both his life
insurance and his fire insurance if he managed
things in a tactful manner (p. 147).
Whilst it can be argued that, under these

circumstances, even Alfred Polly must appreciate what
lies in store, this still says a lot about understandings of
marriage at the time. Miriam had stopped listening to
Polly the day after the wedding yet their union, and the
business that was to support it, were a direct result of
him wanting something to say to her. Polly admits, in
turn, to feeling an obligation, not a desire, to marry her,
any notion of love being neither here nor there despite
his Romantic readings. Polly intends, all the same, to do
in death what he has failed to do in life, namely, provide
for his wife in a proper manner.
Polly has endured, without complaint, years of tedium
in his marriage and his business. Still, he would rather
kill himself than live with the dishonour of bankruptcy.
Suicide was, in itself, a shameful thing, if not a criminal

offence, in England at the time and Wells’ original
readers would have known this, hence the need for Polly
to destroy himself as well as his crime. Equally, Miriam
should not be left with his guilt as her burden.
Consequently, he plans to burn himself and their shop
to ashes while she is at Church, Polly having long since
abandoned the habit. This, in passing, says much
about the lessening importance of religious observance,
and spirituality in general, in everyday industrial
England. However, secular propriety is such that his
failure as a businessman prompts Polly to commit a
mortal sin, and on a Sunday!
Perhaps in divine retribution, Polly’s plans go severely
astray and though he burns down the shop, along with
much of the surrounding High Street, he not only fails
to kill himself but manages, entirely by accident of
course, to emerge from the flames a hero. Originally,
Polly had intended that only he should die, and not
those of his neigh bours who were too old or infirm to go
to Church, so he is forced by his conscience and the
gathering fire to save Mr. Gambell and the Widow
Rumbold. Immediately after the disaster, and with his
plans in ashes, Polly goes to a meeting of all the traders
whose business had burned down, ostensibly to assess
the damage to their property.
Not one of these excellent men but was already

realizing that a great door had opened, as it were,
in the opaque fabric of destiny, that they were to
get their money again that had seemed sunken for
ever beyond any hope in the deeps of retail trade.
Life was already in their imagination rising like a
Phoenix from the flames. (p. 163)
Not surprisingly, then, no-one is prepared to question

Polly’s considered account of the fire’s beginnings for
the entire community has an interest in an innocent
explanation. Polly and Miriam even agree to start again,
in “a better house”, as she puts it “a better position

where there’s more doing” (p. 165). Obviously, given the
opportunity fifteen years ago, she would have listened to
Harold Johnson! By the same token, Polly finally has an
insight very reminiscent of Cousin Harold. As
circumstances in Fishbourne neither please nor
constrain him, and given the insurance money, Polly
can simply “clear out” (p. 167). His crime undetected, he
will take just a little of the settlement and leave his wife
to be provided for, exactly as he had planned. That
Miriam might want for more than money never crosses
his mind, largely because theirs is not so much a
marriage as a trading agreement by another name. In
the following five years, he is to think of his wife
infrequently and rarely, if ever, of how she might be
managing life alone, with the shame of being deserted.
Honour otherwise intact, Polly becomes a vagrant,
meaning he now does on foot what he used to do on a
bicycle in the days before he met Miriam. He is,
however, still woefully ignorant of his own country’s
past and its geography. He is also at risk from speeding
motor cars where once there were none. Eventually, he
lands at the Potwell Inn, a riverside tavern run by a
large and very able woman called Flo. She is in many
ways a composite antithesis to Polly and Miriam for she
has his build and her eye for commercial opportunity yet
manages better by herself than they do as a couple. Flo
is, in addition, the moral touchstone of the story. She
considers Polly for the post of odd-job man and asks if
he has “done anything”, implicitly anything criminal.
When he admits to arson, his casual honesty is taken
as a joke.
“It’s all right if you haven’t been to prison”, said the

plump woman. “It isn’t what a man’s happened to
do makes ‘im bad. We all happen to do things at
times. It’s bringing it home to him and spoiling his
self-respect does the mischief. You don’t look a
wrong ‘un. ‘Ave you been to prison?”(p. 176)
So we understand that arson is not a proper crime, it’s

being caught that matters. This Wells demonstrates at
some length by way of Uncle Jim, a violent recidivist
who is related to and preys upon the landlady of the
Potwell Inn. Polly finally sees him off, without ever
knowing quite how, and in effect takes Uncle Jim’s
place as Flo’s dependent. Polly is, in fact, now back in a
“crib” but it no longer irks him because he doesn’t resent
what he is expected to do. Naturally, the insight escapes
him as he is still not inclined to that sort of reflection
and besides, he abandoned haberdashery when he left
Miriam.
At the Potwell Inn, Polly even proves to be something
of a salesman. In an incident which echoes the
predictions of his long-lost friend Parsons, Polly paints
two simple signs outside the tavern. One says
“Museum” in large letters while the other reads
“Omlets”, his characteristically ungrammatical version
of “omelettes”, a dish which Flo actually cooks very well.
The slogan is another unintentional triumph. Boat loads
of passing holiday-makers, caught by the sign and
wishing to remark on it, stop at the inn and become
customers, hungry for Flo’s cooking. Business booms
and the place becomes famous but as “Omlets” and not
as the Potwell Inn (p. 208).
Softened by his great good fortune, Polly finally feels
remorse for Miriam and five years after leaving her, he
returns briefly to Fishbourne, to see how she is coping.
That he is physically much changed and confident of
going unrecognized is not entirely incidental under the
circumstances. In Fishbourne High Street, rebuilt for
the better after the fire, Miriam and her sister Annie, the
unwed one who doesn’t care for housework, have
started a tea-room with the money Mrs. Polly got from
his arson and his life insurance! In a brief conversation
with her supposedly dead husband, Miriam admits that
she knowingly identified as him the body of a man, in
fact, Uncle Jim, who drowned whilst wearing clothes he
had stolen from Polly at the Potwell Inn. She, too, is
only concerned with being found out and not at all with
the loss of her spouse. Thus reconciled by their mutual
fraud, they part for the final time, finally partners, in
crime.
What more can we draw from all this? In terms of the
original intention, Polly’s failings as a haberdasher and
husband should be self-evident. As an archetype, he is
also significant because the entire lower middle class of
England seems similarly fated and for similar reasons.
Consider, for example, the tea-room that Miriam and
Annie have opened. It may be a worthwhile enterprise
and in a well-chosen site but neither of the sisters has
any experience of managing such a concern and they
have both shown distaste for the household skills that
might make a café inviting. Nevertheless, their capital is
to them as Polly’s inheritance was to his haberdashery
though, of course, Mrs. Polly and her sibling have
committed fraud to start rather than liquidate their
business.
This apparently widespread willingness to value
wealth for its own sake rather than its origins,
remember who benefitted from the Fishbourne fire, is
remarkable in a number of ways and not just in terms of
social and moral order. The same mercenary tendency is
evident in the current public disquiet in Britain over the
likes of “Funny Money” from the City of London and
“Insider Trading” on The Stock Exchange. Such a
linkage may seem at first to be somewhat stretched
until, that is, Flo’s dictum is brought to mind. She is
simply putting into words what the petit bourgeois
traders of Stamton have always assumed in their
criticism of Alfred, the poor neighbour.
As Polly’s history has shown, these people regard the
maintenance of public seemliness as vital because their
place in the new industrial society, as well as their
individual and group morality, is based on the propriety
of ownership, hence the expropriation of production,
and consequently no-one can afford to question the
ethics of acquisition too closely. Nowadays, we know
this as “status panic” (Fussell, 1984, p. 39; after

C.Wright Mills) though in Polly’s time, as he has proved,
property and propriety were life-and-death issues.
Polly’s petit bourgeois peers are themselves under a
great deal of pressure as many of them lack the
necessary skills to survive outside larger organisations
like the Port Burdock Drapery Bazaar or the factories
where the Larkins sisters work. “Cribs”, however, do not
appeal to Alfred and his ilk. These people have instead
naive yet inflexible notions of commerce, to rent a shop
and stock it is to guarantee their living, and just enough
capital, though not enough business sense, to invest in
such a venture. In spite of this, Wells clearly feels that
these lower middle class entrepreneurs are responding
to the very ‘market forces’ which made them for whilst
England’s great commercial concerns are rarely if ever
mentioned by name, their influence upon the rest of
society is explicit and undeniable.
So the Potwell Inn becomes Omlets and flourishes by
catering to customers who earn their living as
apprentices or clerks in the now well-established
industrial conurbations. Fishbourne itself only exists
because of the wealth generated by these unknown
business giants and, thanks to Polly, we already know
about the trade in mass-produced clothes which
matches this commercially sponsored holiday-making.
Similarly, the railways that permeate the South-East of
Alfred’s England are surely the equal, as distributors of
industrially generated goods and standards, to any of
Zola’s grands magasins.
M.Baudu’s dilemma may be seen in the same light.
Had he and Robineau accepted the new bases of
commerce and tried to accommodate, rather than
resist, the influence of the department stores and their
kind, the old-fashioned traders might have stayed in
business, albeit as employees or agents. Of course,
abandoning his independence, his view of the world and
perhaps even his daughter, as Polly’s Pa did him, could
also have led Baudu to fraud but surely everyone
recognises profit as the reward for risk-bearing.

Similarly, the understanding that kinship does no more
than moderate the tendency for people to treat each
other as commodities is fundamental to The History of
Mr. Polly and not entirely alien to contemporary thinking
either. Harold may encourage Cousin Alfred to invest
his money, not waste it, but there is an expectation of
payment in kind for this free advice; Polly will continue
as a single lodger, though at a reduced rate, no doubt.
How, then, does Polly accede to Heaven on Earth for,
in some men’s eyes at least, the Potwell Inn is surely a
secular paradise where Alfred is paid for his hobbies,
and by a capable but unattached landlady who has her
own pub! Not that Wells is particularly prejudiced in
this way as Flo can cope with almost anything apart
from male violence and the punt which Polly propels.
Nor it is entirely an accident that the hero of the book
has a woman’s name and is generally undone when he
attempts to play the accepted male role of the time. We
might, even so, raise an eye-brow at the implications of
Flo, the earth mother, who cares for Alfred in his second
childhood, a “crib” being also a cot or cradle.
The Potwell Inn has a further and more current
significance as part of the mythology of the
Industrial Revolution. The surrounding countryside is
presented as disciplined and manageable, a place where
people from the nearby urban expanses can go walking,
rowing and fishing, in other words, as a ‘leisure
resource’. The rhythms and the harshness of the old
bucolic order, of Uncle Pentstemon and “the ruder
agricultural past”, are distanced and made safe for city
folk, which means most of us. We appreciate, too, the
assumptions that Wells characters make about the
value of other more commonplace commodities than the
countryside. Clearly, there is nothing new in the notion
that industrial goods are not only the visible signs of
success but also proof of their owners real worth and
worthiness.
Accordingly, Polly’s parents are a clear warning to

those, of whom there are more than a few at the moment,
who would let ‘market forces’ determine the provision of
their children’s instruction. Alfred’s schooling is, after
all, a product of snobbery; he is given the veneer of an
expensive, hence enviable, education and not the
substance. Polly’s real enlightenment begins with the
first employers who house their trainees because, like
domestic servants from an earlier era, they own their
apprentices completely. However, despite the fact that
British Rail has recently considered a return to
company housing because its workers cannot afford the
price of property in London, Wells is not describing an
English ancestor to the Japanese or, indeed, the Quaker
concept of companies that will care for their employees
“from the cradle to the grave.”
Though Wells develops most of his criticisms of
British capitalism, he talks of England yet includes
Glasgow, through the medium of Mr. Polly, it is quite
clear the Port Burdock Drapery Bazaar and Minnie
Larkins “carpet-making place” are just as guilty of the
same transgressions. What makes these organizations a
true measure of the new industrial order and its
overwhelming impact on English society is the way their
hierarchies, their obsessions and their casual brutality
come to shape every life in Alfred’s history yet go so
unremarked. It can hardly be a coincidence, then, that
Mr. Polly finds Heaven in a rural retreat and a Romantic
view of the past while Zola uncovers urban ecstasy in
The Ladies Paradise. Consider, too, that Margaret
Thatcher is herself a grocer’s daughter from
Lincolnshire, which was hardly the heart of industrial
England, and her parents, Alderman Roberts and his
wife, were of an age with Alfred Polly.
References
Fussell, P. (1984) Caste marks: Style and status in the USA. New
York and London: William Heinemann.
Gardner, C. & Sheppard, J. (1989) Consuming passion: The rise

of retail culture. London: Unwin Hyman.
Wells, H.G. (1910/1963) The History of Mr. Polly. Pan Books:
London.
IDENTITY, ECONOMY AND
MORALITY IN “THE RISE OF
SILAS LAPHAM”1
by
Richard J.Boland, Jr
The Rise of Silas Lapham tells the story of a successful

paint manufacturer who encounters a series of business
problems as he and his family awkwardly seek
acceptance in the cultured society of Boston in the
1880s. William Dean Howells published The Rise of
Silas Lapham in 1885, establishing his reputation as a
leading American novelist. It was the first realist novel
of American business and did not follow the familiar
romantic tale of ‘rags to riches’ success.
The Rise of Silas Lapham has been interpreted and
reinterpreted by critics since its publication and Pease
(1991, pp. 1–28) recounts the history of its readings by
progressivists, modernists, formalists,
deconstructionists, feminists and new historicists,
among others. I will draw upon some of these
interpretive efforts in this essay (Pease, 1991; Goldman,
1986; Young, 1992), but for the most part will make my
own reading of this classic from the unique perspective
posed by the editors of this volume, who ask: what can
we learn about management from novels? I will organize
my reading by considering the surface level of events
and economic conditions depicted in the novel, and then
exploring the symbolic level of their meanings for Silas
Lapham and for a present day manager.
1 Thanks to Katrine Kirk for helpful comments on a draft of this
chapter.
118 • BOLAND
At the surface level, we can learn from a realist novel

like The Rise of Silas Lapham by comparing those
elements in the text which describe the world of
business and its characteristics in 1885, with those of
today. Through this kind of comparison we can learn
something about what is truly new and different in the
managerial world of today, as well as what elements are
relatively unchanged. At this first level of analysis, Silas
Lapham’s managerial world appears much more similar
to ours than we usually consider it to be.
We can also learn about management by considering
the meaning of being a manager as it is dramatized in
this novel. We can learn about the experience of being a
manager by interpreting the motivations, anxieties, joys,
and moral dilemmas of Silas Lapham. Reading the
meanings of management found in this novel reveals the
way personal identity, a sense of economy, and
questions of morality are intertwined and mutually
constitutive. Silas Lapham’s life reveals how the self is
invested into a business by a manager; how the
distribution of business rewards and suffering
challenges notions of responsibility and self for the
manager; and how moral questions of managing are
framed as a kind of economic calculation and are
plagued by an ambiguity between being honorably
unselfish or needlessly self-sacrificing. Howells uses a
lovely phrase to describe the proper distribution of
rewards and sufferings in life, calling it the “economy of
pain”. Silas Lapham’s questioning of self and his
allocation of pain in the moral economy of his business
dealings is both the occasion for his “Rise” and an
important lesson for today’s manager.
Following a short synopsis of the novel, I will discuss
some of the surface lessons and parallels that can be
drawn for today’s manager. Finally, I will explore ways
in which the entanglement of identity, economy and
morality can be seen in Silas Lapham, and the
implications of this complex sense of self for a manager
today.
IDENTITY, ECONOMY AND MORALITY… • 119
The story
The story opens with Silas Lapham being interviewed in
the office of his paint company by a reporter, Bartley
Hubbard, for a profile in a local newspaper. Through
this interview and other reflective devices throughout
the novel, we learn that Silas Lapham was raised on a
family farm in Northern Vermont, near the Canadian
border. He began working in a nearby town, eventually
marrying Persis, the local school teacher, and buying
the town hotel. Following her suggestion that he find a
way to improve the appearance of the hotel, he
experimented with making mineral paint from deposits
that his father had discovered on the family property
several decades before. By baking the mineral base and
mixing it with linseed oil, he developed “a paint that will
stand like the everlasting hills, in every climate under
the sun.” (p. 11)
The Civil War interrupted his plans to develop the
paint business, and he joined the Northern forces,
eventually achieving the rank of Colonel. When he
returned from the war, Lapham found that Persis had
kept the paint business going and he set about
expanding it. He took a partner named Rogers in order
to get the capital he needed for expansion, but just as
profits began to grow, he forced Rogers to accept a
buyout. Although Lapham believed that Rogers was a
hindrance and had been paid a fair price, Persis held
that her husband had, in effect, stolen the share of
growing future profits which Rogers’ investment had
made possible. She tries throughout the novel to make
Silas see his moral failure and recompense to Rogers
somehow.
After the newspaper interview, Silas Lapham goes
home. Lapham, Persis and their two daughters,
Penelope and Irene, live in a fine house in an
unfashionable part of Boston. Howells makes it clear to
the reader that the Laphams had not learned to spend
their money as the accepted families of society did. Tom
120 • BOLAND
Corey comes from such a family, but is not interested in

the life of the idle rich that his father has proposed for
him. He asks Lapham to let him invest in the paint
company and open branches outside the United States,
beginning with Mexico. Silas Lapham would not consider
another partner, but does take Tom Corey on as an
employee. Tom’s frequent visits at the Lapham house
make it clear he is interested in one of the daughters,
but both the Lapham and Corey families mistakenly
assume it is the younger daughter, Irene, that he loves.
When, instead, he proposes marriage to Penelope, she
feels she has betrayed her sister and rejects him. By the
end of the novel, however, she overcomes her misgivings
and they are married.
The other major plot of the novel involves the return
of Rogers into Silas Lapham’s life. Playing on Lapham’s
confused sense of guilt, Rogers succeeds in borrowing
money from him, and gives as collateral some
questionable securities and the deed to a mill property
out West. At about this time, the mineral paint business
slows considerably, and a competitor emerges in West
Virginia producing an equal quality paint at a lower cost
than Lapham’s. All the while, Rogers keeps working on
Lapham, borrowing more on the promise of making good
for previous losses.
Compounding these problems, a house when Silas
Lapham has been building in a fashionable part of town
burns down several days after his builder’s insurance
policy had expired. The sum of these financial pressures
is about to push Lapham into bankruptcy when he
strikes an agreement to merge with the West Virginia
company. But he needs capital to do so. This sets the
stage for his moral rise.
Rogers appears again, this time with some agents for
a charitable group in England who want to start a
utopian community on the mill property. They offer
Lapham a high price that will cover all of Rogers’ debts
to him. Lapham knows that the property is served by a
spur line of a railroad company intent on buying the
property for a bargain price. By restricting service, the

railroad can reduce the value of the property to
whatever price it wishes to pay. Considering this,
Lapham refuses to sell to these agents, even though
they assure him their clients are aware of this risk and
willing to assume it.
Shortly afterward, a potential investor in Lapham’s
paint company appears, offering substantial new
capital. Lapham, however, reveals all the details of his
financial and market situation and makes it clear that
he will use the money to buy into the West Virginia
company as a last chance to avoid bankruptcy. This
potential investor withdraws, and Lapham turns his
business assets, as well as his Boston house and
furnishings, over to his creditors. The Laphams then
return to their family home in Vermont where Silas
Lapham is able to continue making a small line of
specialty paints. Tom Corey becomes a part owner of the
West Virginia paint company and he and Penelope leave
for Mexico to develop new markets.
Lessons on the world of management:

then and now
Silas Lapham is both an entrepreneur and manager. He
is an entrepreneur in that he took the raw materials for
mineral paint that had been unearthed on the family
farm by his father decades before, and developed a
thriving paint business. He and Persis created an
enterprise where there had been none—taking risks and
nurturing its growth. But the period of time presented in
the novel finds the Lapham Paint Company at its
apogee. Silas Lapham is very much the manager in this
novel. He is not developing new products or founding
new enterprise. He is instead trying to control
inventories, balance cash flows and cope with declining
demand and increased competition.
At an immediate, surface level, the elements and
incidents in the novel enable us to compare a realistic
122 • BOLAND
depiction of business conditions in 1885 with those of

today. In doing so we find a remarkable example of the
old adage, “the more things change, the more they
remain the same.” It seems that many of the features of
today’s management world which we see as unique to
our own time, were also seen as the unique, almost
defining features of Silas Lapham’s business world. Like
today’s manager, Silas Lapham felt he lived in a new
and suddenly different world where all the rules had
changed. It was a world of large enterprise, globally
interconnected with rapidly changing markets. He faced
strong competitors and was challenged by the press and
the younger generation about his attitude and behavior
toward the environment.
In 1865, when Silas Lapham returned from the
American Civil War to his family farm in Vermont, he
tried to pick up where he had left off in running his
fledging paint company, but he couldn’t. “I found that I
had got back to another world. The day of the small
things was past, and I don’t suppose it will ever come
again in this country” (p. 16).
In order to succeed in the face of fluctuating American
market demand for mineral paint, Lapham expanded
sales of his paint globally. In his warehouse we see
labels in many languages including Spanish, French,
German and Italian. These distant lands are more
familiar places to do business than areas in the Western
United States.
“We ship to all parts of the world. It goes to South

America, lots of it. It goes to Australia, and it goes
to India, and it goes to China, and it goes to the
Cape of Good Hope… We’ve got our agencies in
Cadiz now, and in Paris, and in Hamburg, and in
Leghorn.” (p. 17)
We like to think that today’s manager faces a different,

more global world, but novels such as Silas Lapham can
help us gain a sense of perspective on how its newness
may be primarily a function of our declaring it to be so.

Silas Lapham was following long established traditions
of global trade. This novel helps us to ask how, in the
absence of the computing and telecommunications
technologies that make global operation almost
inevitable today, managers were able to create such
operations over a century ago.
Another theme that seems unique to our times is a
concern for the environment, but here again we see some
familiar relations between the press and the manager,
and between different generations of managers as
represented by Lapham and Tom Corey. In his opening
interview with the reporter, Bartley Hubbard, Silas
Lapham brags:
“In less’n six months there wa’n’t a board-fence,

nor a bridge-girder, nor a dead wall, nor a barn,
nor a face of rock in that whole region that didn’t
have ‘Lapham’s Mineral Paint—Specimen’ on it in
the three colors we begun by making.” (p. 14)
Defending himself against articles in the press critical of

this form of advertising he argues:
“I don’t see what the public has got to do with it.

And I never saw anything so very sacred about a
big rock, along a river or in a pasture, that it
wouldn’t do to put mineral paint on it in three
colors… I say the landscape was made for man,
and not man for the landscape.” (pp. 14–15)
Later, as Tom Corey begins working for Lapham’s

company, he assures his parents, “I’ll use my influence
with Colonel Lapham—if I ever have any—to have his
paint scraped off the landscape” (p. 101).
Whether we as managers or educators are discussing
rapidly changing markets, global operations, intense
competition, generational gap or cynicism toward
management values, we seem to believe that our time is
124 • BOLAND
like no other. Perhaps this is helpful for managers,

making it easier for them to rise up and meet a new
challenge full of hope for ultimate success in a
foreseeable future. We like to speak of decision making
and problem solving as if managers could take action
that would, in a sense, end a problem rather than
merely cope with it temporarily. If, instead, managers
realized that the organizational and environmental
conditions we consider so unique to our own time have
been faced in very much the same form, over and over
again, by managers through the ages and will continue
to be, it could reduce the enthusiasm and optimism
with which they meet today’s version of these enduring
struggles.
These functionalist speculations aside, the lesson
remains that the world of managers and organizations is
not the radically new one we often propose it to be.
While the details are endlessly changing, much of the
substance of management experience remains familiar,
and novels give us access to reasoning, dialogue,
motivations and action as they unfold in a way that is
accessible and immediate. Novels can inform the world
view, strategy and style of a manager in a way that no
accounting or information system report could ever
hope to. And novels can also help us see into
characteristics of the personal life and psychology of
managers that have also remained essentially the same
since perhaps the earliest management settings. In
particular, I will consider the enduring sameness of the
role played by the horse for Silas Lapham and the car for
today’s manager.
While telling Bartley Hubbard about an early work
experience caring for horses at the town hotel, Silas
Lapham interjects: “I always did like a good horse” (p.
9). And throughout the novel we see him seeking relief
from difficult situations or simply enjoying himself on
the weekend by taking out a horse. Not just any horse,
but a high spirited one that could go right to the edge of
being dangerous. At different points in the story, Silas
Lapham invites Bartley Hubbard and later Tom’s father,

Bromfield Corey, to go with him and ‘speed’ his good
horse. Both decline, and the senior Corey remarks: “Oh,
no, no, no: thank you! The better the horse the more I
should be scared. Tom has told me of your driving!” (p.
143). On one such horse ride with Persis, a thrilling
scene unfolds as Lapham announces “I’m going to let
her out”.
Nothing in the immutable iron of Lapham’s face

betrayed his sense of triumph, as the mare left
everything behind her on the road. Mrs. Lapham, if
she felt fear, was too busy holding her flying wraps
about her, and shielding her face from the scud of
ice flung from the mare’s heels, to betray it; except
for the rush of her feet, the mare was as silent as
the people behind her; the muscles of her back and
thighs worked more and more swiftly, like some
mechanism responding to an alien force, and she
shot to the end of the course, grazing a hundred
encountered and rival sledges in her passage, but
unmolested by the policemen, who probably saw
that the mare and the Colonel knew what they were
about, and, at any rate, were not the sort of men to
interfere with trotting like that. (pp. 35–36)
Substitute a Mercedes or BMW for Lapham’s mare and

we have today’s manager. Take for example Victor
Wilcox, the new Managing Director for the Pringles
factory complex in David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988). As a
condition of accepting his position, Wilcox had insisted
upon and held out for a Jaguar, convinced that it “is
superior to every other car on the road…” (Lodge, 1988,
p. 28). As he drives to work one morning,
A red Toyota Celica draws up beside him, then

inches forward as its driver rides his clutch,
evidently intending a quick get away. The lights
turn to amber and the Toyota darts forward… Vic…
126 • BOLAND
presses the accelerator hard. The Jaguar surges

forward, catches the Toyota in two seconds, and
sweeps effortlessly past—Carly Simon, by happy
coincidence, hitting a thrilling crescendo at the very
same moment. Vic glances in his rear-view mirror
and smiles thinly. (Lodge, 1988, p. 30)
For Victor Wilcox, and no doubt countless managers

today, driving an automobile to and from work is a
powerful, sensuous moment. “It is an interval of peace
between the irritations of home and the anxieties of
work, a time of pure sensation, total control, effortless
superiority” (Lodge, 1988, p. 28). This is the same
experience sought by Lapham with his horse. He
explained to Tom Corey:
“There’s one thing I always make it a rule to do…

and that is to give my mind a complete rest from
business… Why, I suppose if I hadn’t adopted some
such rule, with the strain I’ve had on me for the
last ten years, I should ‘a’ been a dead man long
ago. That’s the reason I like a horse. You’ve got to
give your mind to the horse; you can’t help it,
unless you want to break your neck…” (p. 79)
The horse and car both allow a vivid experience of

power unleashed, yet controlled. As the manager travels
between home and office, the transition is mediated by
an evocative conveyance—one that can mix feelings of
sexuality, separation, and dominance in a strong,
sensual experience. In the uniquely personal space
provided by their rides to and from work, Silas Lapham
and Victor Wilcox can, for a brief time, find a mastery
over nature and others that eludes them both at home
and the office. Home and office are two different realms
providing two different faces for the self. The ride
mediates a transition between these primary sites where
the manager shares the two faces of self with others,
and does so in a way that keeps alive the hope for both
a better family life and a better office life. It does so by

allowing the manager to experience what is missing from
each realm while moving between them. The
possibilities for physical mastery over persons and
things, and for sensuous enjoyment without guilt are
available everyday in the ride. The ride keeps managers
going, if they can give their mind to it.
Lessons on meaning in management:

the question of personal identity
In addition to comparing the events and practices of a
man ager’s life in the present day with those of the late
nineteenth century, a novel such as The Rise of Silas
Lapham can also give us an insight at a symbolic level
into the meanings associated with being a manager; on
how being a manager is intimately related to one’s
identity as a person, and how a manager’s identity is
founded on an affinity with the business. Throughout
the novel we see the identity of the manager depending
on a deep, almost religious belief in the product. Early
on Lapham tells Bartley Hubbard, “I believe in my
paint. I believe it’s a blessing to the world.” (p. 17) When
Tom Corey first asks to join with Lapham in the paint
business, he explains:
“I haven’t come to you without making some

inquiries about the paint, and I know how it stands
with those who know best. I believe in it.”
Lapham lifted his head and looked at the young
man, deeply moved.
“It’ the best paint in God’s universe,” he said with
the solemnity of prayer.
“It’s the best in the market,” said Corey; and he
repeated, “I believe in it.” (p. 76)
After Tom joins the company, Bromfield Corey visits

Lapham to express his acceptance of his son’s
involvement and comments:
128 • BOLAND
“… And he seems to have gone into your business

for the love of it… You might think he had invented
it, if you heard him celebrating it.”
“Is that so?” demanded Lapham, pleased through
and through. “Well, there ain’t any other way.
You’ve got to believe in a thing before you can put
any heart in it…” (p. 141)
Even after Silas Lapham realizes that the West Virginia

paint company can produce an equivalent paint at a
lower price and tells young Corey to look for another job,
Tom’s belief is unshaken.
“I don’t wish to give it up,” said the young fellow,

setting his lips. “I’ve as much faith in it as ever; and
I want to propose now what I only hinted at in the
first place. I want to put some money in the
business.” (p. 250)
The basis of one’s identity with the business goes

deeper than a belief or commitment, and is portrayed as
a fundamental inner quality—almost a genetic
characteristic. Lapham explains to Bromfield Corey that
when Tom first proposed joining the paint company,
“… I saw that he meant business from the start. I

could see it was born in him. Any one could.”
“I’m afraid he didn’t inherit it directly from me,”
said Bromfield Corey, “but it’s in his blood, on both
sides.”
“Well, sir, we can’t help those things,” said
Lapham, compassionately. “Some of us have got it
and some of us haven’t…” (p. 142)
Later, when Mrs. Corey confides to Persis that Tom

worked all summer without his usual vacation, Persis
confirms “Yes, he’s a born business man…. If it’s born
in you, it’s bound to come out” (p. 167).
The intimate relation of personal identity on the one

hand and the product and business entity on the other
is visceral and flows in the blood of the manager. The
life of the factory and the life of the manager become
one. Howells brings this lesson out quite powerfully by
linking the fire in the factory used for heat treating the
paint to the fire in Silas Lapham’s heart. Although
market demand fluctuates through the years, Lapham
keeps the factory fires going, hoping the market will
improve. Towards the end of the novel, however, with
mineral paint glutting the market and the West Virginia
company able to produce at a lower cost, Lapham tells
Persis that he has taken the decision to shut down the
plant.
“Shut down the Works!” she echoed with dismay.

She could not take it in. The fire at the Works had
never been out before since it was first kindled. She
knew how he had prided himself upon that; how he
had bragged of it to every listener, and had always
lugged the fact in as the last expression of his
sense of success. “Oh, Silas!” (p. 288)
When the fire goes out at the plant, the fire goes out
within Lapham as well. He returns to Vermont, weak
and “more broken than he knew” (p. 354). The West
Virginia company did not try to compete with him on
the fine specialty paints he had produced (named the
Persis Line), leaving him a significant market niche, but
his “flagging energies” could not develop that
opportunity.
This identity of self based on product and
organization, taking place as it does in a market context,
is an inherently unstable relationship. It’s like being in
love with someone who only cares for you in a
contingent, utilitarian sense. The manager, in loving
and finding a self through an organization and its
product, is being set up for heart break. The market is
fickle, making the product and the organization an
130 • BOLAND
unreliable object of affection. The manager finds a self

through loving the product and factory, but ultimately
finds that it does not love or remain faithful in return.

the moral economy of pain
The ‘new world’ of large scale enterprise that Lapham
experienced after the American Civil War is importantly
a new kind of economy. In both a financial and moral
sense, it is characterized by a new degree of
interconnection. The growth of railroads, canals and
steamships brought distant suppliers and customers
within reach as never before, enlarging the scope and
increasing the dynamism of markets. It also created a
new sense of causal interconnection, in which local
events could be seen to have distant consequences and
distant events had direct local effects. A rail strike based
far away, could shut down a local plant. Or, as
happened to Lapham, a distant customer with different
local conditions goes out of business, leaving Lapham
short of cash. Suppliers from other regions, moving
toward shorter payment cycles than were customary in
Lapham’s local market, put further strains on his cash
position. The discovery of natural gas on property
owned by the paint company in West Virginia changes
their cost structure relative to his, and destroys the
value of his factory in upstate Vermont.
This new sense of interconnection in the financial
realm, in which actions taken locally have consequences
at a great distance, is associated with an expanded
sense of causal relations in the moral realm as well.
Persis Lapham dramatically reflects this newly
expanded causal universe as part of her campaign to
get Silas Lapham to acknowledge his guilt in the Rogers
affair. Silas Lapham wants to contain the question to a
narrow accounting in which Rogers’ contribution to the
firm had been repaid to him along with a fair return for
the use of his money. Persis, instead, sees a vastly
expanded set of causal connections. By her accounting,

all the profits earned since Rogers was forced out were
actually caused by Rogers’ initial contribution and have
been wrongly taken from him .
When Lapham points out that Rogers has a history of
business failure and he is fortunate to be rid of Rogers,
Persis counters that all the financial difficulties Rogers
had had were caused by Lapham’s action.
“Well, I want you should ask yourself whether

Rogers would ever have gone wrong, or got into
these ways of his, if it hadn’t been for your forcing
him out of the business when you did. I want you
should think whether you’re not responsible for
everything he’s done since.” (pp. 261–262)
The self which finds an identity in the product and

factory is entangled through the new market economy
with causal interconnections to distant persons and
events that stretch the self to extremes financially and
morally. It is against this nexus of identity, economy
and morality, which appears to create impossible
demands on the self, that Howells introduces the notion
of an ‘economy of pain’ and chastises the role of
romantic, idealist novels in creating a false
understanding of its workings.
Recall that after Tom Corey had proposed to Penelope,
she felt responsible for her family’s mistaken belief that
Tom was interested in Irene, and also for the pain her
sister was to suffer. Penelope believed it would be wrong
for her to find happiness with Tom if her sister were so
unhappy and Penelope were in part to blame. And so,
she refused to marry him or even allow him to visit her.
Silas and Persis Lapham were perplexed and sought
counsel from Reverend Sewell.
“One suffers instead of three, if none is to blame?”

suggested Sewell. “That’s sense, and that’s justice.
It’s the economy of pain which naturally suggests
132 • BOLAND
itself, and which would insist upon itself, if we were

not all perverted by traditions which are the
figment of the shallowest sentimentality…”
‘No,’ cried the minister, “we are all blinded, we
are all weakened by a false ideal of self-sacrifice. It
wraps us round with its meshes, and we can’t fight
our way out of it…” “…
I don’t know where this false ideal comes from,
unless it comes from the novels that befool and
debauch almost every intelligence in some degree.”
(p. 241)
The economy of pain, in which suffering is selectively

distributed to minimize its total effect, is in contrast to
the newly interconnected world of commerce and causal
relations generally. Wai-Chee Dimock (1991) argues
that the economy of pain as depicted by Howells in The
Rise of Silas Lapham indicates a self limiting cognitive
structure characteristic of free market capitalism. When
self interest as a prime motivator was coupled with the
expanded causal universe associated with American
capitalism in the late nineteenth century, it created
opportunities for an almost limitless sense of moral
obligation for the individual. The economy of pain is a
self limiting feature of the managerial world in that it
plaees a check on the unbounded expansion of moral
responsibility and shifts our dialogue from exploring all
the things one could be responsible for, to exploring how
one could most economically distribute rewards and
sufferings among the actors in the vast network of our
financial relations.
Dimock argues that novelists play an active role in
constructing our understanding of the moral economy
of capitalism.
For in the composing of a plot, in orchestrating the

destinies of characters, distributing benefits and
assigning suffering, the novelist is necessarily a
practicing economist, enforcing some model of
resource management. Indeed, if the task of the

novelist is, as Howells says, to portray “human
feelings in their true proportion and relation,” some
principle of apportionment—some way of
adjudicating rival claims and affixing balances—is
crucial. ‘Resource allocation’ might turn out to be
as much a necessity in the composition of a novel
as it is in the composition of a society. (Dimock,
1991, pp. 74–80)
Building upon Dimock’s view of the novelist as a moral

economist, we can see several ways in which Silas
Lapham deals with the ethical questions of the extended
responsibilities for his actions by invoking the calculus
of an economy of pain. When Lapham finally takes the
decision to shut down the plant in Vermont, Persis asks
about the impact on the workers. Lapham replies
“They’ve shared my luck; now let ‘em share the other
thing. And if you’re so very sorry for the hands, I wish
you’d keep a little pity for me. Don’t you know what
shutting down the Works means?” (p. 288) Note the
complex economy of pain Lapham draws upon here.
One element of the calculation balances the sharing of
monetary gains and losses over time between Lapham
and his workers. Another element, perhaps more
important, balances the pain to his self, his identity as
constituted through the product and the Works, to
theirs. In this sense, Lapham as owner and manager is
suffering a far greater loss of self than can be ascribed
to the workers and is even more deserving of his wife’s
pity.
Another example of the economy of pain is in evidence
when Lapham first considers assigning his non-cash
assets to creditors under terms that might keep the
business going for awhile. He makes a calculation in his
managerial moral economy that balances his own
willingness “to give up everything, to let the people he
owed take all, so only they would let him go out with
clean hands…” (p. 308) with the way he had not found
134 • BOLAND
his creditors “so very liberal or faithful with him” (p.

308). As a result, “he asked himself why they should
not suffer a little too,” (p. 308) and refused the
assignment. But along with this calculation comes
another:
Above all, he shrank from the publicity of the

assignment It was an open confession that he had
been a fool in some way; he could not bear to have
his family—his brother the judge, especially, to
whom he had always appeared the soul of business
wisdom—think him imprudent or stupid. (p. 308)
Once again, we have a question of the self being the

deciding factor. Just as he had with the workers at the
plant, Lapham’s moral economy as a manager
distributed suffering primarily based on the quantity of
pain associated with a loss of self. Lapham’s identity is
so deeply entwined with his love of the product and its
market that his pain in loss of self outweighs the pain of
his creditors.
Behind both these examples in which the economy of
pain is adjudicated through balancing questions of
identity and self, there are suggestions of a basis for
moral judgment in evidence throughout the novel that I
would propose as a major lesson for managers to learn
from The Rise of Silas Lapham. Repeatedly, the
characters in this novel grapple with the ambiguity of
whether their actions will be seen as ‘not selfish’ or will
be seen as ‘self-sacrificing’. In the many adjudications
of the economy of pain portrayed by Howells, we always
see a tension as to whether individuals are accepting
personal suffering because they have chosen to make a
self-sacrifice or because they are avoiding being selfish.
An important message of Howells’ realist novels is that
accepting suffering as a self-sacrifice is an inappropriate
basis for moral judgment. It represents the moral
economy of the sentimental, romantic novels that he is
trying to displace.
Penelope’s decision to refuse Tom Corey’s proposal of

marriage because her family had believed he was
interested in Irene, is the novel’s principle example of
the “false ideal of self-sacrifice,” that so enraged
Reverend Sewell, who had “grown quite heated and red
in the face,” while telling the Laphams:
“And I’m sorry to say that ninety-nine young people

out of a hundred—oh, nine hundred and ninety-
nine out of a thousand!—would consider that noble
and beautiful and heroic; whereas you know at the
bottom of your hearts that it would be foolish and
cruel and revolting.” (pp. 241–242)
In the densely interconnected world of the expanding

market economy, the possibilities for tracing chains of
distant effects resulting from our actions poses a
universe of moral responsibility in which the
individual’s obligation is potentially unbounded.
Howells uses Persis Lapham to dramatize this lesson as
she considers her own responsibility for the pain
experienced by Irene and Penelope over the mistaken
intentions of Tom Corey. She begins to question her own
responsibility for their suffering, but rejects this familiar
romantic way of thinking about moral obligation.
Instead, she comes to see this willingness to blame the
self for the suffering of others and to self sacrifice as if
in atonement, as a selfish and unworthy act:
The time had been when she would have tried to

find out why this judgment had been sent upon
her. But now she could not feel that the innocent
suffering of others was inflicted for her fault; she
shrank instinctively from that cruel and egotistical
interpretation of the mystery of pain and loss. (p.
231)
136 • BOLAND
Howells is more direct in applying this principle to Silas

Lapham. Recounting his initial decision to force Rogers
out of the partnership, Howells notes:
It was a time of terrible trial. Happy is the man

forever after who can choose the ideal, the unselfish
part in such an exigency! Lapham could not rise to
it. (p. 50)
Later in the novel, Lapham’s moral rise is also tied to a

judgment of what course of action is unselfish, and this
judgment of the unselfish course is praised as the true
mark of a gentleman Bellingham, a business advisor to
Lapham tells Tom Corey of Lapham’s financial condition
and confides that in turning down Corey’s offer of help,
Lapham “behaved very well—like a gentleman… It’s
hard to behave like a gentleman where your interest is
vitally concerned.” (p. 300)

then and now
In looking for management lessons in The Rise of Silas
Lapham, we have seen how the economy of pain
provides a basis for moral judgment. It warns us
against the false romantic notion of self sacrifice, which
distributes suffering according to a repugnantly
egotistical ideal, and proposes instead that we take
actions to allocate suffering and loss in as unselfish a
way as possible. This formula both limits and
transforms the self. It limits the self by cutting short the
chain of causal relations for which the manager could
be morally responsible, but it also transforms the self by
involving it in a complex calculative space. The economy
of pain frees the manager from a hopelessly expansive
set of moral responsibilities, but in turn forces the
manager to address fundamental questions of defining
the self with a calculative practice.
In the romantic ideal which Howells tries to displace,

the individual can experience an expanded causal
responsibility for the suffering of others and can choose
the seemingly heroic course of self sacrifice, without
considering others and without considering the relative
distribution of suffering or rewards among them. In the
contrasting realist alternative which The Rise of Silas
Lapham presents, the individual must necessarily
consider others by making calculations of how
sufferings and rewards are to be allocated among self
and other. In order to determine whether one is acting
selfishly or not, the distributive consequences must be
taken into account. Self and other must be brought into
a calculative space in which the accountings for rewards
and sufferings can be balanced in an economy of pain.
Calculations in this moral economy of pain are no
easy matter for the manager. Because the manager
finds identity and self through product and organization,
and because the manager is expected to act wisely in
promoting and maintaining the business, the balance
between actions which reflect appropriate self interest
for the business, versus those that re flect inappropriate
selfishness of the individual are essentially ambiguous.
We can see how keenly this ambiguity is experienced by
Lapham when he chooses to unselfishly refuse the sale
of the Western mill property to the agents for the
English utopian group, and when he reveals to the
potential investor from New York that he needs to merge
with the West Virginia company. Both these decisions
reflect an unselfish choice for Lapham, but a failure to
act in the self interest of the company which is a basis
for his identity. Lapham, struggling at the limits of his
economy of pain, fears he will appear foolish for having
taken these actions. He fears that others might feel he
had mistakenly chosen the false ideal of self sacrifice
and that it wasn’t a question of being selfish at all.
Because of this fear, Lapham told Bellingham only in
the most cursory way about the New York investor, and
said nothing of the Englishmen.
138 • BOLAND
He believed he had acted right in that matter, and

he was satisfied; but he did not care to have
Bellingham or anybody, perhaps think he had been
a fool. (p. 352)
At the end of the novel, Reverend Sewell counsels

Lapham on the inherent ambiguity of an unselfish
choice in an economy of pain. He tells Lapham that the
“operation of evil” in the “moral world” is “often so very
obscure”, but that with respect to Rogers, “your fear of
having possibly behaved self-ishly toward this man kept
you on your guard, and strengthened you when you
came face to face with a greater…emergency” (p. 364).
For the manager, then, the lesson is a hard one: when
in doubt as to allocating loss or pain in a manager’s
moral economy, choose with a fear of being selfish. Even
in error, you will find strength.
Concluding thoughts
In The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells dramatized the
profound shift in social and economic relations with
accompanying changes in cognitive structure that
characterized the move toward free market capitalism in
late nineteenth century America. The expanded network
of causal interconnections in both an economic and
moral sense that marked that shift, and the moral
economy of pain that provided its self limiting
characteristic, are still important features of the world
of management today. Our established, taken for
granted ways of thinking and talking about ourselves
are perhaps only visible to us when encountered in a
novel such as this, which helps us to see ourselves from
afar.
Today, the use of calculative practices for allocating
rewards and sufferings in our moral economy, and the
use of imagery from business and the capitalist market
to define ourselves as persons in both our home life and
our work life are so prominent they have become
invisible. Perhaps one of the most important lessons

about management that we might learn from novels is
how these everyday ways of thinking and talking—of
defining our identity as persons, of locating ourselves in
a moral economy, of moving between a home life and
office life, of being seen as rational—is historically
bound and contingent. By reading good fiction, we can
open ourselves to view the origins of these familiar
realities and can also open ourselves to the possibility
for changing them.
References
Dimock, W-C. (1991) The economy of pain: Capitalism,

humanitarianism and the realistic novel. In: Pease, D. (Ed.),
New essays on the rise of Silas Lapham. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 67–90.
Goldman, I.C. (1986) Business made her nervous: The fall of
Persis Lapham. The Old Northwest, 13 (4): 419–438.
Howells, W.D. (1971) The rise of Silas Lapham. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Lodge, D. (1988) Nice work London: Penguin.
Pease, D. (1991) (Ed.) New essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Young, A. (1992) The triumph of irony in The Rise of Silas
Lapham. Studies in American Fiction, 20 (1): 45–55.
THE MERCHANT AND THE
PREACHER
As Pictured by Multatuli’s Max
Havelaar (1860)
by
Geert Hofstede
Multatuli and Max Havelaar

Max Havelaar or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading
Company is generally considered the masterpiece of
Dutch nineteenth century literature. As is often the case
with masterpieces, its author was completely unknown
to the public before the novel appeared in 1860. Eduard
Douwes Dekker who wrote under the pen name
Multatuli (Latin for ‘I have borne much’), started his
literary career with this book and never equalled its
success in his later writings.
The theme for the book is autobiographical, but its
presentation is a mixture of autobiographical and
caricatural elements. Dekker was born in 1820 as the
son of a sea captain. He started an education to become
a minister of the Church, then worked as an apprentice
in a trading company, and at the age of eighteen was
taken by his father to the Dutch East Indies—the
present Indonesia—in order to try making his fortune.
He joined the Dutch colonial administration where he
became known as an intelligent but impulsive young
man. He married in 1846; his wife, Tine, plays an
important role in the novel. After several other posts,
Dekker was appointed Assistant Resident of Lebak, in
western Java, in 1856, by a personal decision of the
Governor-General.
HOFSTEDE • 141
In the Dutch colonial administration the direct

authority in a district was carried out by a member of
the native nobility known as the Regent. Regents
received a salary from the government and enjoyed
additional traditional privileges in terms of goods and
services from the population. Next to and over every
native Regent stood a Dutch Assistant Resident, and
several of these reported to a Resident. Dutch colonial
officials had to take an oath promising loyalty to the
King of the Netherlands, and to “protect the native
population against oppression, ill-treatment and
extortion”. All Dutch in the colonial administration were
able to communicate in Malay, the trade language, and
sometimes also in local languages.
The district of Lebak, at the time, was known to be in
trouble. It was one of the poorest districts of Java and
there were rumours of exploitation of the local
population by the Regent and his family. Many
inhabitants emigrated to more prosperous parts of
Java; others joined an insurrection in nearby southern
Sumatra. Dekker’s predecessor had tried to get support
for redressing the abuses, but he had died suddenly.
When Dekker arrived, his predecessor’s widow indicated
she assumed her husband to have been poisoned by the
Regent’s son-in-law.
In the novel the new Assistant Resident is called Max
Havelaar. One of the most famous parts of the book is
Havelaar’s inaugural speech to the Regent and the other
native Chiefs of Lebak which is no doubt authentic. In
oriental metaphor he refers to the plight of the starving
district and his mission to improve the status of the
population and to redress abuses.1
“Radhen Adhipatti, Regent of Bantam-Kidul, and

you, Radhens Demang, who are the Chiefs of the
Districts in this Division, and you, Radhen Jaksa,
1 All quotes are from the translation by Roy Edwards, which
appeared as a Penguin Book in 1987.

142 • THE MERCHANT AND THE PREACHER
whose office is to see to justice, and you also,

Radhen Kliwon, who exercise authority in the
Divisional Centre, and you, Radhens, Mantris, and
all who are Chiefs in the Division of Bantam-Kidul,
I greet you!
And I say unto you that I feel joy in my heart,
seeing you all assembled here, listening to the
words of my mouth.
When the Governor-General commanded me to
come to you as Assistant Resident of this Division,
my heart was rejoiced…. I perceived that your
people are poor, and for this I was glad in my
inmost soul. For I know that Allah loves the poor,
and that He gives riches to those whom He will try.
But to the poor He sends the one who speaks His
word, that they may lift up their heads in the midst
of their misery….
Chiefs of Lebak, we have made many mistakes,
and our land is poor because we have made so
many mistakes. For in Chikandi and Bolang, and in
Krawang, and in the regions round Batavia, there
are many who were born in our land and who have
left our land. Why do they seek labour far from the
place where they buried their parents? Why have
they fled from the dessah where they were
circumcised? Why did they choose the coolness
under the tree that grows there rather than the
shade of our forests?
And even yonder in the north-west, across the
sea, there are many who should have been our
children but have left Lebak to wander around in
alien regions with kris and klewang and rifle. And
they perish miserably, for the power of the
Government is there, which strikes down the rebels.
Chiefs of Lebak, I ask you, why have so many
gone away to be buried where they were not born?
Why does the tree ask: ‘Where is the man I saw
playing at my foot as a child?’…
HOFSTEDE • 143
I should like to live on good terms with you all,

and so I ask you to look upon me as a friend. If
anyone has erred, he may count on a lenient
judgment from me, for, since I err only too often
myself, I shall not be severe…that is to say, not in
the matter of ordinary offences of commission or
omission in the service. Only when neglect of duty
becomes a habit shall I seek to combat it. I will not
speak of grosser misdemeanours—of extortion and
oppression…”
and so the speech continues.

Afterwards, poor farmers visit him during the night to
complain about gross extortion. The body of one of them
is found in the river the next morning. In public
sessions, complainers remain silent, afraid of being the
next victim. Havelaar/Dekker then proposes to his
superior, the Resident, to summon the Regent to the
Resident’s office and to arrest the other Chiefs so that
complainers can witness without fearing for their lives.
The careful Resident (called Slymering in the novel),
judging this action too drastic, refuses. Havelaar/
Dekker, assuming that his nomination by a personal
decision of the Governor-General justifies direct access,
bypasses the Resident and addresses the Governor-
General. This, however, is considered insubordination.
Havelaar/Dekker is suspended and offered another
post, but on an impulse he resigns. He then tries to get
an audience with the Governor-General who, however,
refuses to see him. Dekker is never reinstated, although
his accusations against the Chiefs of Lebak are proven
true, and first some of the subordinate Chiefs, later on
also the Regent are fired. Dekker returns to Europe
where he henceforward lives a poor and bohemian life.
The novel has been written as an appeal by Dekker to
the general public in order to be vindicated. The miracle
is that this document which resulted from a personal
grudge— Havelaar told the Colonial Office that he would
not publish it if he was reinstated—is at the same time a
literary masterpiece. The same originality and

spontaneity which made Dekker fail as a civil servant
made him succeed as a writer. He writes in a style
which differs greatly from the solemn, bombastic word-
use of his contemporaries in the Netherlands, and even
today looks fresh. He has also made his dramatic
autobiographic story part of a complex caricatural plot
which at first bewilders but then enchants the reader.
Max Havelaar or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trade
Company has been written as a story in a story. The
book opens in Amsterdam, with notes written by a
supposed Batavus Droogstoppel (Drystubble), coffee
broker, a prosperous businessman and pedantic
bourgeois. Droogstoppel meets an old schoolmate who
obviously has not fared well in life: this man does not
even have a coat to protect himself against the winter
cold, and goes around wrapped in a scarf. This
Sjaalman (Scarfman) offers him a parcel of his notes to
look at. Droogstoppel sees that some of the notes deal
with the Dutch East Indies, and imagines they may be
relevant to his one great passion, the coffee trade. He
charges a young, romantic German apprentice, Stern,
with turning a selection of the notes into a novel. And
then the Havelaar story starts, with occasional
comments from Droogstoppel in Amsterdam who is
hardly pleased with the way the plot develops.
After Havelaars speech to the Chiefs of Lebak,
Droogstoppel quotes a sermon by the Rev. Wawelaar
(Blatherer), the name obviously a perversion of Havelaar.
The sermon deals with “Gods love in his wrath against
the nonbelievers” and is in all respects a caricature of
Havelaar’s speech to the Chiefs. Some fragments follow:
“Cast your eyes upon the islands of the Indian

Ocean, inhabited by millions upon millions of the
children of the accursed son—the rightly accursed
son—of the noble Noah, who found grace in the
eyes of the Lord! There they crawl about in the
loathsome snakepits of heathenish ignorance—
HOFSTEDE • 145
there they bow the black, frizzy head under the

yoke of self-seeking priests! There they pray to God,
invoking a false prophet who is an abomination in
the sight of the Lord! And, Beloved! as though it
were not enough to obey a false prophet, there are
even those among them who worship another God,
nay, other gods, gods of wood and stone, which
they themselves have made after their own image,
black, horrible, with flat noses, and devilish!… But,
Beloved, God is a God of Love! He will not that the
sinner shall be lost, but that he shall be saved by
grace, in Christ, through faith! And therefore our
Holland has been chosen to save what may be
saved of those wrenched ones! Therefore has God,
in His inscrutinable Wisdom, given power to a land
of small compass but great and strong in the
knowledge of Him, power over the dwellers in those
regions, that by the holy, ever-inestimable Gospel
they may be delivered from the pains of hell! The
ships of our Holland sail the great waters, to bring
civilization, religion, Christianity, to the misguided
Javanese! Nay, our happy Fatherland does nor
covet eternal bliss for itself alone: we wish to share
it also with the wretched creatures on those distant
shores who lie bound in the fetters of unbelief,
superstition and immorality!…
The duties that we had to perform on behalf of
those poor heathens included the following:
1. Making liberal contributions to the missionary
society.
2. Supporting the Bible Societies, to enable them
to distribute Bibles in Java.
3. Furthering prayer meetings at Harderwijk
[a garrison town in the Netherlands, GH] for the
benefit of the colonial army recruiting depot.
4. Writing sermons and hymns, suitable for our
soldiers and sailors to read and sing to the
Javanese.
5. Formation of a society of influential men whose

task it should be to petition our gracious King:
a. To appoint as governors, officers and
officials only such men as may be considered
steadfast in the true faith;
b. To have permission granted to the Javanese
to visit the barracks, and also the men-of-war and
merchantmen lying in the ports, so that by
intercourse with Dutch soldiers and sailors they
may be prepared for the Kingdom of God;
c. To prohibit the acceptance of Bibles or
religious tracts in public houses in payment for
drink;
d. To make it a condition of the granting of
opium licences in Java that in every opium house
there shall be kept a stock of Bibles in proportion
to the probable number of visitors to the institution,
and that the licensee shall undertake to sell no
opium unless the purchaser takes a religious tract
at the same time;
e. To command that the Javanese shall be
brought to God by labour.
So far the Rev. Blatherer, as quoted by Batavus

Droogstoppel.
In the last chapter of the book, Multatuli appears
himself and dismisses Stern. The finishing lines of the
book dwell in the mind of many a Dutch schoolboy or -
girl:
“… I dedicate my book to you, William the Third,

Prince, Grand Duke and King… Emperor of the
glorious realm of Insulinde, that coils yonder round
the Equator like a girdle of emerald…
You I dare ask with confidence whether it is
Your Imperial will: that the Havelaars be spatted
with the mud of Slymerings and Droogstoppels?
and that yonder Your more than thirty million
HOFSTEDE • 147
subjects be maltreated and exploited in your

name?”
Havelaar as an exponent of Dutch

culture
Dutch colonial wealth dated from the seventeenth
century when the Netherlands had been a world power.
The most important colonies were in the East Indies,
where the Dutch acquired overlordship of a population
ten times the size of that of the mother country. This
overlordship was mostly exercised in indirect ways, by
leaving the local rulers in place and playing them
against each other. A relatively small military
contingent was used as a final resort. From 1795 to
1813 the Netherlands were occupied by the Napoleonic
French, and the East Indian colonies by the British,
who, however, gave most of them back in 1815. Since
1830 the native population was compelled to grow the
crops prescribed by the colonial government, on behalf
of the Dutch Trading Company (the so-called ‘Culture
System’), hence the novel’s reference to coffee, although
the Lebak district did not grow coffee.
The Dutch have always been ambivalent about their
wealth. A book dealing with the Dutch ‘golden age’, the
seventeenth century, was called by its American author,
historian Simon Schama (1987) The Embarrassment of
Riches. To the present day, many Dutch people show
evidence of a role conflict between the merchant and the
preacher within themselves.
The success of the Dutch as merchants is on the one
hand due to the geographical position of the country,
which equipped it with several good seaports at the
estuary of large navigable rivers. This is a necessary but
not sufficient condition. On the other hand, the Dutch
in comparison with other people showed distinct
cultural traits sup porting the merchant role and well
recognized by their trading partners: most were thrifty
(greedy, according to some of their partners),
egalitarian, peaceful, and oriented towards maintaining

good relationships. In my own research on present-day
value differences between matched samples from over
fifty nations, these traits were confirmed (Hofstede,
1980a, 1991).
At the same time, there is a preacher inside many
Dutchmen and Dutchwomen. In this century, Dutch
novelist Menno ter Braak has expressed his resentment
of this character in a novel Afscheid van Domineesland
(“Farewell to Preachers’ Country”). The Dutch Preacher
is a Calvinist, even if he or she is Catholic, Jew,
Humanist, Communist or Agnostic. The Preacher
admonishes others in their own best interest, even
across the national borders. The Italian journalist Luigi
Barzini (1983) wrote: “The Dutch see themselves as the
only sane people in an insane world: they defend all
moral causes”, and the Swiss Ernest Zahn (1984), who
for many years was university professor at Amsterdam,
calls the Dutch “the most meddlesome nation in the
world”. A remarkable term in the English language to
describe a person inclined to preaching is ‘a Dutch
uncle’. “Talk to one like a Dutch uncle”, according to the
Oxford Dictionary, is to “lecture him paternally”, and
this expression has been part of the English idiom at
least since the early nineteenth century. In my own
research the Dutch, accompanied by the
Scandinavians, produced extreme scores in two
respects: strongly individualistic, that is, inclined to let
individual interests and individual opinions prevail, and
at the same time strongly feminine, that is caring for
others, with a desire to help the weak and to maintain
warm personal relationship with others. This is the
profile of the Preacher who honestly wants to help
others, but in his way because he alone knows where the
other persons’ best interests lie.
There is an obvious conflict between the merchant
and the preacher role, and their combination has led to
curious paradoxes. Where commercial interests were
involved, some preachers (the Wawelaar type) justified
HOFSTEDE • 149
the fact that certain peoples were excluded from the

national trend towards generosity, and were turned into
objects for trade. This ambiguity had also allowed the
Dutch involvement in the international slave trade in
the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The double
standard which resolves the conflict between the
merchant and the preacher has always been wielded by
the bourgeois regent (plural: regenten; not to be
confused with the title of the native chiefs in the
colonial administration). The regenten are the members
of the informal class of ‘nice people’ who pulled and to a
large extent still pull the informal ropes of Dutch
society. Regenten today are found in all political parties,
from left to right, and on the boards of voluntary
associations, charitative bodies, and business
companies. They are non-heroic leaders and they are
replaceable: one hardly notices the substitution of one
by another. They are pictured on the large seventeenth
century paintings by Rembrandt and others: they form
the Night Watch of Dutch culture. In Batavus
Droogstoppel, Multatuli has created the archetypal
regent.
On the other hand this double standard has also
regularly been under attack. Havelaar personifies
another archetype, another kind of preacher who from
the embarrassment of his riches proposes a universal
standard in dealing with other people and peoples; a
spiritual heir of Humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam and of
Hugo Grotius, the founder of international law. The
appeal of this other preacher in Dutch society explains
why the novel became one of the forces leading to the
gradual abolition of the Culture System after 1860.
Later on, an “Ethical Movement” developed, receiving for
a time strong support from colonial administrators.
Today’s Development Cooperation with the Third World
reflects the same ethos: in per cents of Gross National
Product, the Dutch with the Scandinavians are world
champion donors. The Dutch “exceed in generosity all
the nations of Europe”, the Italian journalist Edmondo

de Amicis wrote as early as in 1873 .
Havelaar’s ethical single-standard approach raises
the problem whether it is right to apply the standards of
one culture to another. The behaviour of the Javanese
Chiefs is no doubt less extreme in Javanese eyes than it
looks in Dutch eyes. In my own research carried out
around 1970, I found Indonesians scoring much higher
than Dutch respondents on “Power Distance”: the
extent to which inequality in society is accepted and
expected (Hofstede, 1983). The opinion that Chiefs
should enjoy privileges would be disputed by few
Indonesians even today.
Dekker was quite conscious of the cultural differences
between Indonesians and Dutch. In the book, he lets
Havelaar look at the Regent’s behaviour from the
Regent’s point of view, and shows a sympathetic
understanding for the fact that the Regent needs to
fulfil many social obligations corresponding to his high
rank, such as receiving neighbouring Regents and
building mosques, while the District is very poor and
therefore yields few benefits. Such considerations may
also have explained the Resident’s hesitation to act
although Havelaar attributes to him (Slymering) less
noble motives. In spite of his understanding of the
Regent’s culturally determined dilemma, Havelaar feels
compelled to accuse him because of his own oath “to
protect the native population against oppression, ill-
treatment and extortion”, and because he feels that the
Chiefs’ deeds are intolerable even by Javanese
standards. Forms of abuse of power like the Chief s in
Dekker’s novel are probably not rare even in present-
day Indonesia. An admirable film based on the novel,
produced in the 1970s, was not shown in Indonesia
until recently because it was seen as politically
subversive.
Because he raises a fundamental conflict issue within
Dutch culture, Multatuli, probably alone among all
nineteenth century Dutch authors, is still able to raise
HOFSTEDE • 151
controversy after a century or more. When I was at

school, a classmate from a conservative family called
him “a dangerous trouble-maker”, The conflict between
the merchant and the preacher is still going on and
often referred to in the Dutch press. A study of the post-
World-War II Dutch for eign policy has been called:
Peace, Profits, and Principles (Voorhoeve, 1979).
Havelaar and the emergence of modern

Dutch business corporations
The Netherlands in the nineteenth century were one of
the last European countries to industrialize. The
country had a past as a trading and agricultural nation;
wealthy merchants would invest in the shares of British
industries rather than found industries at home. The
separation from Belgium in 1830 was a further setback
because it split the industrializing south from the
trading north. The source of Dutch wealth was still very
much the colonial trade, since 1815 exercised under the
auspices of the Dutch Trading Company.
The Netherlands have not produced any major
literature about industrial life, neither in the nineteenth
nor in the twentieth century. Industrial activity does not
appeal to the Dutch in a way that anybody would become
lyrical about it, or sufficiently moved to describe it as a
social problem. There is no equivalent to Max Havelaar
in an industrial setting, although there would have been
sufficient case material for a social novel in the
revelations of the Parliamentary Investigation on Child
Labour which led to a 1874 law prohibiting such
labour; the very beginning of the Dutch Welfare State.
When the Netherlands finally industrialized, after
1870 and after a tax which spared capital gains but
charged industrial activities had been lifted, it produced
several remarkable pioneers who tried to establish a
social entrepreneurship. They were moved by the same
concern for equality and humanity which radiates from
Multatuli’s novel. J.C. van Marken (1845–1906) was a
church minister’s son who became the founder of the

first Dutch biochemical industry, the Koninklijke
Nederlandsche Gist-en Spiritusfabriek (Royal Dutch
Yeast and Spiritworks). Among other things, he built a
village for all his personnel including himself, created a
Works Council of elected representatives of the
personnel in 1878, and published a personnel journal in
1882; the latter two have survived until the present day.
When the textile workers in another part of the country
struck against their miserable work situation, van
Marken publicly sided with the workers against his
colleague factory owners. C. T.Stork (1822–1895) was
another pioneer who founded an engineering company;
he copied most of Van Marken’s ideas and added a
range of adult education acitivities.
In the twentieth century the Netherlands have been
economically successful in spite of one of the fastest
population growth rates in Europe. This was not
achieved by the creation of large production factories;
the ones that were set up, like in textiles and
engineering, went down again in international
competition. Rather, the country excelled in high-value
agricultural and horticultural products, such as seed
potatoes and flowers, in services, such as banking,
consulting and transport, and in developing
multinational businesses. Three of the largest
multinationals in the world are Dutch or Anglo/Dutch
with a Dutch majority; Philips electronics, Shell oil and
chemicals and Unilever branded consumer products. In
the past decades more than half of the Dutch Gross
National Product has been earned by exports of goods
and services, including management. In a competitive
world market the Dutch seem to be able to hold their
own due to their trading, customer relations, and
negotiation abilities.
It is extremely likely that national characteristics of
peoples play a role in the development of their national
economies and businesses, the more so in period of a
relatively free international flow of money, goods and
HOFSTEDE • 153
services. My own research provides strong support for

this assumption (Hofstede, 1991). In the case of the
Dutch, I suggest that their particular position in world
business can be understood from the dialectic between
the merchant and the preacher. This dialectic has been
personified by Multatuli in Droogstoppel and Wawelaar
on the one side, and Havelaar on the other. Wawelaar is
the tame preacher, the one who soothes the merchant’s
conscience by equalling business interests with God’s
will. Havelaar is the wild preacher, who asks painful
questions and interferes with the business; the one who
matters.
Paradoxically, I believe, Dutch business would never
have played the role on the international scene that it
has, without its share of Havelaars inside and outside
its organizations. There is even a small piece of
Havelaar inside many Droogstoppels. The Havelaars
inside are the managers and employees who are
prepared to raise fundamental questions as to the
course the business is taking. In the short run, these
persons may be a nuisance; in the long run, they assure
an awareness of issues in the social, political, cultural
and ecological business environment which forces the
leaders to be proactive rather than reactive.
The Netherlands never produced enough political
conservatives to form a Conservative Party; there are
conservatives within the other parties but the
leadership, both within politics and within business,
tends to go to the moderately progressive thinkers.
Political reactionaries in the Dutch multinationals seem
to have a lesser chance of promotion than progressives,
probably because the former are out of touch with
mainstream feelings in their society. Even right-wingers
on the Dutch political scene would be considered left-
wing in many other countries.
The Havelaars outside business are found within
various invited or uninvited stakeholder groups: the
government, the churches (that actually produce as
many Havelaars as Wawelaars), the press, relatives of
employees, consumer organizations, environmentalists,

and pressure groups around certain issues, like the
liberation of women, of Sub-Saharan Africans, or even
of animals. In a case study of successful stakeholder
action I once described how politically mobilized
consumers forced the country’s largest coffee roaster to
stop importing from preindependence Angola (Hofstede,
1980b). Even if the stakes of such groups are not
recognized by a business’ management as legitimate,
these Havelaars do have a proactive influence on the
management’s decisions.
The presence of all these Dutch Uncles in and around
Dutch business, I believe, is a competitive disadvantage
in the short term, but through their impact on long-term
strategies and policies, they in fact reinforce business’
base. This even holds true for those groups that try to
do the opposite, from an anti-big-business ideological
stance. Max Havelaar is alive and well in the
Netherlands today, and the country owes him a lot.
References
Barzini, L. (1983) The Europeans. New York NY: Simon &

Schuster.
de Amicis, E. (1876/1985) Nederland en zijn bewoners. Utrecht:
Veen.
Douwes Dekker, E. (1860/1983) Max Havelaar of de
koffieveilingen der Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij’.
Rotterdam: Ad Donker. English language version: Max
Havelaar or the coffee auctions of the Dutch Trading
Company, translated by Roy Edwards. Harmondsworth
Mddx.: Penguin, 1967/1983 .
Hofstede, G. (1980a) Culture’s consequences: International
differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills CA: Sage.
Hofstede, G. (1980b) Angola coffee—or the confrontation of an
organization with changing values in its environment.
Organization Studies, 1(1): 21–40.
Hofstede, G. (1983) Cultural pitfalls for Dutch expatriates in
Indonesia. Deventer, Neth.: Twijnstra Gudde International
and Maastricht, Neth.: Institute for Research on Intercultural
Cooperation (IRIC).
HOFSTEDE • 155
Hofstede, G. (1991) Cultures and organizations: Software of the

mind. London: McGraw Hill.
Schama, S. (1987) The embarrassment of riches: An interpretation
of Dutch culture in the golden age. New York: Alfred A.Knopf.
ter Braak, M. (1931) Afscheid van Domineesland, Brussels: Stols.
Voorhoeve, J.J.C. (1979) Peace, profits, and principles: A study of
Dutch foreign policy. The Hague: M.Nijhoff.
Zahn, E. (1984) Das unbekannte Holland: Regenten, Rebellen und
Reformatoren. Berlin: Siedler.
CAPITALISM, ORDER AND
MORAL VALUE:
Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo
by
Maureen Whitebrook
Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard1 can

be read as a discussion in fictional form of the effects of
the introduction of capitalist organization into a
particular society. Conrad shows very clearly both the
influence of Western capitalism in a developing country,
especially its effect on attempts to set up a state order,
and the incompatibility of capitalist values with other
more political and/or moral requirements. And he does
this in a mode which is transitional between realism
and modernism, so that the form of the novel
contributes to the meaning to be drawn from the
content. Nostromo thus constitutes a sound
contribution to social theory, offering organization
studies a study of the events resulting from the
regeneration of a business—a silver mine—in an
emergent modern society. ‘Capitalism’ and
‘organization’ are embodied in and depicted through the
life of the mine, the coming of the railway and the
effects of these business ventures on the society of
Costaguana. The introduction of capitalism has an
organisational and ordering outcome which has a
profound impact not only on the economy and therefore
on the development of the state but also on the lives of
individuals and therefore on the moral nature of society
—“the core achievement of Nostromo is the searching,
1 Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (London:
Dent, 1904); all references are from the Uniform Edition, 1923.
WHITEBROOK • 157
delicate investigation into the relationship between

material interest, material changes, and the hearts and
minds of characters…” (Hawthorn, 1979, p. 58).2
This novel depicts the effects of the introduction of
capitalism, commenting on capitalism and modernity
and provoking consideration of those forces in a way
which transcends the specificity of the setting. A major
theme of the novel is the way in which a society is
westernised, confirmed in its development from a
colonial past, under the impact of European business
methods and North American capital. The politically-
disordered South American setting may serve as an
analogy in fictionalised form for nineteenth century
Europe and, indeed, for contemporary Eastern and
Central Europe.3 It can be thus be read in a way that
provides a kind of commentary to this collection of
studies of mature capitalism in fiction: the progression
of Costaguana towards twentieth century advanced
capitalism offers an experimental setting in which the
results of the introduction of capitalism and business
methods can be examined. In Nostromo the social
themes are clear and inescapable but so are the human
dilemmas that are a result of social forces (Raval,
1986).4 The interaction of social and individual is
related to the apparent contradiction in Conrad’s
writing, noted by many critics, between skepticism and
faith. Such contradictions result in a consideration of
matters that are of central interest to the social
2 For other relevant criticism of Nostromo, see Hay, 1963;

Fleishman, 1967; Howe, 1961; Cox, 1974; Bantock, 1958;
Wilding, 1966; Jameson, 1981.
3 The critics who think that this is a novel ‘about’ a ‘typical’ South
American situation place an unnecessary limitation on the novel;

cf. Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges, “Don Quijote and Capitalism in
Poland” (in this volume). Her comment on nineteenth century
Poland could perfectly well describe Costaguana—“This was a
society where old harmony had ceased to exist and no one knew
what the emerging structure was going to be”. (Chapter 3, p. 58);
cf. chapter 3, pp. 64–65.
158 • CAPITALISM, ORDER AND MORAL VALUE
scientist; these are not treated didactically or

programmatically but precisely as problems, so that
novels such as Nostromo are effectively discussions of
those problems.
The introduction of capitalism: Plot

and characters
The story recounted in Nostromo takes place in a
country experiencing the introduction of capitalist
finance and organization through the medium of a
European railway company and United States backing
for a European-run silver mine, the Gould Concession.
These economic and business ventures take place in a
country prone to political upheaval: the narrative is on
one level an account of the attempts to move, with the
help of the resources of the mine, from “Fifty Years of
Misrule”—the title given to an account of an unstable
period of revolts, counterrevolts, and short-lived
governments—towards modernity. The emergence of the
state is thus clearly tied to the introduction of
capitalism.
The major protagonists represent the influence of both
Europe—the old order in both economic and political
sense—and North America—the source of new capital—
on such a regime. The old order of Europe is
represented by characters such as Sir John, Chairman
of the railway company, and Giorgio, the ardent
Garabaldino. Europe is also, more significantly, where
the young Gould made a decision to develop the mine
abandoned in despair by his father. This choice
provides a narrative link to the new capitalism of the
United States embodied in the financier Holroyd (though
Holroyd’s capitalism and, specifically, his venture into
the affairs of Costaguana, have a Christian background,
4Raval’s chapter on Nostromo, “The Politics of History” is a very

helpful analysis of the novel as depicting “the operation of
political forces in society”.
WHITEBROOK • 159
thus linking this ‘new’ man to another kind of old

order). Both of these traditional orders are brought to
bear on the underdeveloped and politically disordered
South American society of Costaguana.
Order and disorder

This connection between old and new, developed and
underdeveloped is individualised in the character of
Nostromo, the eponymous central figure of the narrative.
Nostromo’s story is linked inextricably with the
development of the province and specifically with the
silver of the mine. In his character as “the Incorruptible”
he is able to save the silver which “must be kept flowing
north to return in the form of financial backing from the
great house of Holroyd” (Part 2, Chapter 6, p. 219). His
name identifies him as an essentially public persona
—‘our man’ (It. nostro uomo). He is an Italian seaman,
protegee of Giorgio, who has settled in Costaguana and
there made himself indispensable to the Europeans as
“a sort of universal factotum—a prodigy of efficiency in
his own sphere of life” (Part 1, Chapter 6, p. 44).
However, that he is known as “Nostromo” becomes
increasingly ironic as his motivations become more and
more personal. His Christian name, Gian’Battista (John
the Baptist) is also ironic in that it suggests that “he
prepares the way for the control of Sulaco by the
economic imperialists and is thus an inaugurator of its
capitalist era” (Watts, 1982, p. 178). But his part in the
maintenance of order and, thereby, the economic
development of his chosen homeland is counteracted by
both personal greed—he steals the silver he has been
entrusted with, and re-emerges as Captain Fidanza
(“Faithful”—thus further reinforcing the irony of
his namings)—and affiliation with indigenous political
movements which may threaten the precarious order
imposed on the province.
Nostromo deals on several levels with the effects of
social and political disorder; specifically, the novel
presents the implications of order being established on

the basis of capitalism. For the duration of the narrative,
the Gould mine imposes a certain order on a disordered
system, to meet its own need for order. Conrad is quite
explicit about the situation pertaining in Sulaco: the
mine functions as a state-within-a-state. “The
authorites of Sulaco had learnt that the San Tome mine
could make it worth their while to leave things and
people alone. In fact, the mine…was a power in the land”.
The mine imposes a “steadying effect…upon the life of
that remote province” and Charles Gould is “the visible
sign of the stability that could be achieved on the
shifting ground of revolutions”. And “the San Tome mine
was to become an institution, a rallying point for
everything in the Province that needed order and
stability to live. Security seemed to flow upon this land
from the mountain-gorge” (Part 1, Chapter 8, p. 110).
As the working of the mine is established it brings
order to the province: to preserve that order, Gould is
drawn into political affairs and backs the Ribierist
party. By the time of the Monterist defeat of the
Ribierist government he is so involved that he is
prepared to blow up the mine if necessary. “The Gould
concession has struck such deep roots in this country
that…nothing but dynamite shall be allowed to dislodge
it from there”. In the event, destruction is unnecessary
because Sulaco is liberated by Barrios assisted by the
San Tome miners; then Gould asserts that “the San
Tome mine is big enough to take in hand the making of
a new state” (Part 2, Chapter 5, p. 205; Part 3, Chapter
4, p. 380). So the organization of the mine becomes the
basis of the politics of Sulaco, capable of underpinning
civil government,
The Gould Concession is shown as the equivalent, for
Sulaco, of rational-legal authority, a basis for
organization in the context of which the life of the
province can proceed peacefully. Imperialist money
injected into the province assists in the achievement of
peace—and is more successful in that respect than the
WHITEBROOK • 161
‘liberal’ Ribierist government. It could be argued that

this is an acceptable state of affairs—and it is indeed
what various characters in the tale claim that they
want. Several critics, including Robert Penn Warren
judge that the final state of affairs in Sulaco is better
than what has gone before (Warren, 1960).5 It is indeed
a common assumption that material prosperity, the
conditions flowing from the order of the mine, can only
bring good to Sulaco. But the novel shows that it cannot
be simply assumed that (imposed) law and order will
improve social order as a whole. The establishment of
order by way of the mine and the eventual ‘stability’ in
Sulaco represents a decrease in arbitrariness rather
than the establishment of a politico-economic system
within which interests can compete and develop. Order
is partial and limited because the connections between
individuals and the system are weak or non-existent.
Although imposed rule is accepted, that in itself helps to
explain the expectation that there will be more disorder
in the future. The ‘law and order’ imposed on the
province is a product of external influences rather than
a development from within society itself. It is significant
aspect of the novel that it deals directly with the basis
of modern state order in capitalism and shows that
order as an unsatisfactory framework for political life on
both the collective and the individual level. As Raval has
it,
The narrative of Nostromo…recognises the need for

scientific and technological advance, but recognises
as well that socio-historical forces do not
harmonize with such advance. In their
contingency, these forces, however recurrent in
man’s history, are catastrophic… Economic and
political activity in Costaguana is the very cause of
violence and disorder… Nostromo is about the
coming of capitalism in a world which is not
prepared for it. In Nostromo Conrad undermines
the idealism which aligns capitalism with justice,

morality and order. (Raval, 1986, pp. 92–94)
As Raval points out, Holroyd wants to give laws for

everything but disdains politics in favour of profit; and
in general, self-interests do not act as countervailing
forces to the passions but in fact intensify the prevailing
disorder (see also Hirschman, 1977).
The fact and idea of capitalism

The depiction of capitalism in the novel is focussed in
the financier, Holroyd. He is shown as a character
whose very embodiment of an idea is complicated by his
expression of it—“manifest destiny” is combined with
Christian charity and something approaching real care
for Gould himself. In contrast with the concrete
portrayal of capitalism in a character, Holroyd,
Nostromo also presents the idea of capitalism through
the recurrent fact and image of “the silver of the mine”.
Literary critics such as Jacques Berthoud have wanted
to explain away the introduction of overt capitalist
forces into the story as evidence of Conrad’s intention to
show history as subject to forces beyond man’s control
(and thus on a par with the forces of nature alluded to
in the narrative). But this is to ignore the specificity of
the references to capitalism, for example, the
organisational methods Gould employs. So, for
instance, there is concern for the safety of the men, but
this entails their organization into villages closely
controlled by the officials of the mine. Albert Guerard
5 Avron Fleishman comments “It is one of the minor ironies of

literary history that Warren, like other New Critics, has been
critical of the values of modern industrial society, yet when a
judgement of society is to be made he bases it on typically
capitalist norms: political stability, the security of life and
property, expanding production and trade” (Fleishman, 1967, p.
165).
WHITEBROOK • 163
notes that in defence of material interests, “the Gould

Concession must work in an imperfect world of men and
manners and must stoop for its weapons”. The use of
bribes may serve to increase or decrease the overall
corruption of this society. But Guerard suggests that
however questionable the methods the mine employed,
at least they encouraged a kind of “nepotistic energy”
which counteracted the normal culture of this regime.
(However, Guerard also notes that the indirect effects—
which do imply some choice—become direct intervention
in the affairs of the whole society when Gould chooses
to finance the Ribierist revolution—Guerard, 1958;
Berthoud, 1978).
Most critics discuss the mine and particularly “the
silver of the mine”, as a given fact, a matter of content
and plot without comment on the significance of the
organization as such or the effect of change on the
society depicted.6 One characteristic of this interaction
between economic and political developments is that
words and ideas become important. As Jeremy
Hawthorn notes, “industrialization and the societies to
which it gives rise rely more heavily on precise verbal
expression than on non-verbal forms of communication”
and Holroyd, the capitalist financier’s claim that “we
shall be giving the word for everything…” “can have a
wider sense than just imposing an alien set of meanings
upon a people; it can involve planting the seeds of a far
more ‘verbal’ culture”. And again, “it is the ability of
human beings to speculate, to imagine states of affairs
other than those that they are actually experiencing,
that allows of the financial sort of speculation. And it is
this sort of speculation which can set the wheels of
imperialism in motion” (Hawthorn, 1979, pp. 64–65). So
he notes that “Conrad’s significant insight in Nostromo
is to have seen that although, fundamentally, it is
material interests not ideas that effect historical
change, material interests effect this change through
ideas” (Hawthorn, 1979, p. 160).
If the silver of the mine can work its effect on

hearts and minds—of Holroyd and Gould as well as
of ‘the workers’—only through ideas, those ideas
can themselves have currency only through their
constitution in words. Words without the backing
of material interests may be vain but material
interests need words to gain sway over hearts and
minds of men. (Hawthorn, 1979, p. 63)
The story begins and ends with the silver of the mine;
the imagery of the silver is used to indicate the basis of
the tenuous public order that does exist and the
destructive effects on the moral personalities of all those
who become associated with it. The material presence of
the mine has an adverse effect on individuals. All the
characters most closely connected with the mine are
corrupted by it (even where, as is the case with Mrs
Gould and the Avellanos, there is an attempt to use the
silver for public good).
The disordering effect of capitalist

order
Nostromo gains prestige through his ability to cope and
his incorruptibility; he is entrusted with the silver if the
mine but then is believed to have lost it. When he re-
enters society, therefore, it is as a ‘new man’ who will
need to regain recognition and identify—hitherto only
achieved through public acts. The events of the
narrative suggest that Nostromo should be able to
reestablish his status and, thereby, his identity. He is
persuaded to save Sulaco by riding to fetch Barrios, and
his mission is successful. But the success only
increases Nostromo’s isolation. The ride does not serve
6 The literary critics come close to a discussion which would

engage with the concerns of social science when they enter into
discussion of the materialist/idealist split evident in Conrad and
his writings.
WHITEBROOK • 165
to dispel his grievances against the world at large, the

treasure becomes the justification of every action and
confuses his moral values:
First a woman, then a man, abandoned each in

their last extremity for the sake of this accursed
treasure. It was paid for by a soul lost and by a
vanished life. The blank stillness of awe was
succeeded by a gust of immense pride. There was no
one in the world but Gian’ Battista Fidenza,
Capataz de Cargadores, the incorruptible and
faithful Nostromo, to pay such a price … The
treasure was putting forth its latent power… “I
must grow rich very slowly” he meditated aloud.
(Part 3, Chapter 10, p. 52)
Irving Howe argues that Nostromo “as he staggers under

the weight of his secret and the loneliness which is its
price, develops what he never before knew or needed: a
political awareness” (Howe, 1961, p. 107). But this is
only an awareness of his own loss of power and some
understanding of the power of the mine. And his
eventual ‘politicisation’ is as much a function of
“material interests” as is Gould’s incursion into political
activity (Fleishman, 1967, p. 175). Nostromo comes to
need material reward rather than mere praise for
carrying out services to the Blancos, so that his second
identity reflects the increasingly corrupting effects of the
silver of the mine. Nostromo, the self-made man
apparently does not depend on a place in society for his
identity. But when he fails in a task carried out for
society, he loses—or feels that he lost—the respect of
that society and, therefore, his identity.7 And the
narrative makes clear that his public and private lives
are separated by the silver which eventually destroys
him: his death results from his use of the silver to try
and re-establish a kind of public repute. For Nostromo
there is no integration of public and private.
It might appear that this is better achieved by Charles

and Emilia Gould who are the embodiment, within the
structure of the novel, of the order established by the
mine. The Goulds are instrumental in bringing a
measure of stability to Sulaco through the San Tome
mine. But this is achieved at the expense of the
breakdown of their marriage and of their relationships
with each other and with society. So, finally,
It was a colossal and lasting success; and love was

only a short moment of forgetfulness, a short
intoxication, whose delight one remembered with a
sense of sadness, as if it had been a great grief lived
through. There was something inherent in the
necessities of successful action which carried with
it the moral degradation of the idea… An immense
desolation, the dread of her own continued life
descended upon the first lady of Sulaco. With a
prophetic vision she saw herself surviving alone the
degradation of her young ideal of life, of love, of
work—all alone in the Treasure House of the world.
The profound blind, suffering expression of a
painful dream settled on her face with its closed
eyes. In the distinct voice of a unlucky sleeper,
lying passive in the grip of a merciless nightmare
she stammered out aimlessly the words: “Material
interest”. (Part 3, Chapter 11, p. 520)
Thus the Goulds both focus the order of the mine and
point directly to the inadequacy of an order reliant on
capitalist values.
Charles Gould is, like Holroyd, an embodiment of the
effect of capitalist forces. The problems this causes are
easily recognisable—as Raval points out, Gould’s
decision to safeguard material interests “perverts the
very meaning of progress for Costaguana, since the
7 But see Raval, 1986, p. 96 and Winner, 1988, pp. 13, 43 for
alternative interpretations.
WHITEBROOK • 167
progress he envisions has very little relationship to the

happiness which human beings seek” (Raval, 1986, p.
95). And Hawthorn speaks of the “indirect mediation of
human contact through material interest that Gould
champions” as “inhuman. When human interests are
personified in material interests they are, effec tively,
lost” (Hawthorn, 1979, p. 67).8 Berthoud discusses
Charles Gould in terms of “materialist, as opposed to
political, action” (Berthoud, 1978, pp. 103–104). But
that materialist activity, stemming from Gould’s
involvement in capitalist enterprise, does have political
consequences. Gould has insisted on “order first, justice
second”; he needs “law and order” for the smooth
running of the mine (from which prosperity may well
follow for the province as a whole). But Gould is shown
as incapable of understanding political activity as
anything more than the establishment of law and order,
and there is no necessary connection between his
inclination for “leaving things and people alone” and the
development of “a rule of common sense and justice”.
Raval suggests that
Gould’s failure is the most shattering and the most

suggestive because he dreams of uniting middle-
class morality and capitalist economic practice: this
dream is a mystifying moral event, cast far into the
future, which legitimises the capitalist in the
present. Nostromo thus has the structure of a myth
that has failed to be mythical; it retains the
bitterness and failure of history (Raval, 1986, p.
97).
Public and private order

The connection between identity and the capacity of the
social and political order to allow its recognition is
central to Nostromo. Berthoud notes that although
identity is the theme of most literature, “what is modern
about Conrad’s treatment of it is the form he gives it—
or, more accurately, the form it assumes as he

struggles to give it definition” (Berthoud, 1978, p. 187)
and in this novel it is not just thematically but
structurally important. Nostromo’s personal tragedy is
structurally interspersed with the development of
Sulaco’s prosperity and Emilia Gould’s suspicion of
material interests. Attention is thus drawn to the
precarious position of the individuals who exist within
the unstable social order depicted in the novel. The lack
of cohesion between public/political and private/
personal is a consequence, to a large extent, of the
imposition of a particular kind of law and order, and the
personal tragedies of the book, notably the Gould’s
marriage, Decoud’s death and Nostromo’s loss of
identity are all related to the mine.
It has been argued that the failures and tragedies of
personal life depicted in Nostromo stem from the
contradiction between personal morality and public
activity. The world of action makes certain demands that
“subtly alter motives, involve personalities in
equivocations”. This judgement is usually associated
with Conrad’s pessimism and conservatism. Thus
Jocelyn Baines comments: “Nostromo is an investigation
of the motives of human behaviour, in which idealism is
set against scepticism, illusion against disillusion, and
responsibility against irresponsibility” (Baines, 1982, p.
301). But Conrad depicts a necessary interaction
between private and public life, and he does not
privilege the former or dismiss the latter.9 What Conrad
shows in Nostromo is that the disjunction of public and
private is not necessarily due to the incompatibility of
the two spheres—the inability of the public to match the
level of worthiness of the personal—but to the
inadequacy of the public in failing to provide an order
within which the two spheres may be reconciled.
8 But see Cox, 1974, p. 72 for a reading which suggests that
these kinds of analysis of Gould are wrong and that his failure is
the result of personal weakness and irrationality.
WHITEBROOK • 169
The silver of the mine appears to give the major char

acters of Nostromo their identity, but it also underlies
their failures as moral beings—“material interests”
certainly do not constitute a sufficient moral value,
capable of underpinning both individual and social
behaviour in such way that there is coherence on both
an individual and social level—order, that is (Hawthorn,
1979).10 Not only do material interests fail to unify, they
actually separate—the Goulds from each other,
Nostromo from his fellows, Decoud from life itself. But
the problem is not a purely personal one—it is not, as
Frederick Karl has it, that “the mine is the public
symbol of each private failure; as cause and effect,
instigator and outcome, it is the symbolic embodiment of
private neuroses” (Karl, 1960, p. 157). The “failure” is a
failure to integrate private and public and it is the form
of public order, the organization of the mine and the
pursuit of material interests which works on—if not
determines—personal life.
Nostromo shows the moral dimensions of the failure to
integrate personal and public order. Because the socio-
political order depicted in Nostromo is inadequate and
incomplete, individuals cannot reconcile their public
and private existences, lack of integration leads to a
moral failure (Leavis, 1948, p. 229). The problem
depicted in Nostromo is not that public order (of any
kind) cannot comprehend the personal, but that the
pursuit of, and dependence on, material interests works
to the detriment of moral development.
Capitalist values and (moral) order

Integration—between public and private, politics and
morality, reality and illusion—is not possible in the
9 Itwould appear from Conrad’s treatment of Decoud that he does

not pit “illusion” against “reality” in such a crude way as some
critics tend to think: see Bantock, 1958, pp. 122–135; and see
Conrad, 1923 Part 3, Chapter 10, p. 497.
society depicted in Nostromo because that society lacks

a coherent set of values to which citizens could adhere.
The imperfect order modelled in Nostromo follows from
the conditions which Conrad lays out in the novel by
way of form and structure, plot and characters: that
human existence is confused and ambigous, and
without some unifying moral idea, individual
aspirations cannot coexist with the requirements of
economic and political stability. Simply, there is no
fundamental norm entailing the everyday rules (and
thence behaviour) of society which enough people can
recognise as binding on themselves for the benefit of the
political community (King, 1974; 1976). What the story
shows very clearly is that the only common element in
the lives of the characters who inhabit that territory is
the silver of the mine. The only constant ‘rule’ is
expediency and ‘order’ follows as a means to
commercial prosperity: these are hardly norms which
can serve as the basis for a well-or-dered, integrated
society. Gould proclaims:
What is wanted here is law, good faith, order,

security. Any one can declaim about things, but I
pin my faith to material interests. Only let the
material interests get a firm footing and they are
bound to impose the conditions on which alone
they can continue to exist. (Part 1, Chapter 6, p. 84)
But as Monghyam points out, the Gould authority

becomes a potential force for dis-order:
There is no peace and no rest in the development of

material interests. They have their law, and their
10See also Said, 1985, pp. 109–110, 115: Said argues that the
use of the silver as the sustained metaphor of the novel does not
entail pitting “spiritual interests” against material interests but
accepts the latter as a fact; see also Hay, 1963, p. 209,
Hawthorn, 1979, pp. 58, 60.
WHITEBROOK • 171
justice. But it is founded on expediency, and it is

inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the
continuity and the force that can be found only in a
moral principle…the time approaches when all that
the Gould concession stands for shall weigh as
heavily upon the people as the barbarism, cruelty
and misrule of a few years back. (Part 3, Chapter
11, p. 511)
The ‘pessimism’—or irony—of Nostromo lies in its

conclusion that order based on economic organization
and rational-bureaucratic principles has failed to
achieve political order (Hawthorn, 1979, p. 71). The
narrative shows Sulaco eventually achieving a kind of
stability but it also depicts individuals as unable to live
under the conditions of that stability—an apparent
paradox. The major characters all come to a tragic end;
and although the novel could be read simply as an
account of law and order being brought to an
undeveloped society, a closer reading shows that this
involves the loss of integrity and failures of personal
order. Whatever order exists is shown to be incapable of
involving its subject in a joint enterprise for the good of
the whole.11
Literary order: Political order

Conrad’s major theme of ‘order’—the order of the mine,
the order introduced to a disordered society by
capitalist organization—is mediated through a
particular approach to literary order: the concept of
order provides a link between content and form. The
conjunction of social order as a theme with questions of
literary order in terms of technique, intention and effect
make this novel a complex but, accordingly, very
suggestive example for the social sciences. The order of
literary discources can alert the reader to problems and
possibilities surrounding the idea of order in human
affairs: this is clearly the case in this novel where an
apparently disordered narrative sequence has

specifiable links with political events and human moral
dilemmas12. The “disordered” structure of Nostromo and
the way that the reader has to engage with it is a
positive aspect of the novel—Albert Guerard suggests
that it compels the reader to organise; he speaks of “the
extraordinary effort we must make to apprehend and
organise”. This is an important point if the novel is to be
taken as a contribution to understanding of
organization and order. At the basic level of structure,
the ordering of the novel, order is not to be taken for
granted.
Guerard queries whether it is not the case that the
structure reflects a theory of history “as repetitive yet
inconsecutive, devoid of reason, refusing to make sense.
The method would then reflect the material in an
extreme example of organic or imitative form” (Guerard,
1958, pp. 175–176, 215). This, like similar judgments,
is clearly wrong—it is a mistake to think that order—
literary, political or economic—is simple and
immediately perceptible from surface appearances. A
(premodernist) assumption that the reader ought to be
personally and morally involved in a narrative has led
some critics to adopt Ian Watt’s suggestion that Conrad
has to be “decoded” (Guerard, 1958, p. 182). However,
Bruce Johnson argues in “Conrad’s Impressionism and
Watt’s ‘Delayed Decoding’” that the effort to decode
Conrad is wrong because virtually all of Conrad’s main
instances of delayed decoding imply not so much an
11 cf Chapter 8, below; see especially the suggestion that order in
a Hobbesian sense may be imposed at a star-level while disorder

arrives below this level; and see Chapter 11, p. 271: Sørensen
confirms my claim that fiction can show both the apparent
success and the actual weakness of order.
12 Thus Raval notes that the structure of Nostromo “reveals a
curious logic, operating through history in such a way that

events initially disparate proceed seemingly in accord with the
hopes of men, only in the end to proceed with profound
indifference to those hopes” (Raval, 1986, p. 74).
WHITEBROOK • 173
initial misunderstanding that will subsequently “clear

up” as they do an initial unguarded perception that may
be far more revealing for the reader than the
subsequent decoding. Conrad’s meaning depends not on
eventual decoding but on “preconceived nets of meaning
which instantly trap an event, sight, sound, comment,
alleged fact or what have you” (Johnson, 1985).13
Nostromo well sup ports Johnson’s argument. The form
of the novel ensures that the reader is required to
experience events before they can be “ordered”; events
are “later” explained by other events actually
chronologically prior to the unexpected one. Conrad
effectively carries out his own decoding within the
narrative; this is important for this reading of Nostromo.
In particular, the underlying power of the silver of mine
is a pervasive influence which itself “explains” much that
happens in the story as it unfolds (Karl, 1960).
The inadequacy of capitalism as a basis

for order
A conclusion to be drawn from reading Nostromo might
be, in naive terms, that peace and stability have been
achieved in a hitherto disordered country, and that the
conditions exist for peaceful progress and economic and
social development. Such opinions are voiced within the
novel by Captain Mitchell, the only character who does
evidence integration between his private and public
world and for whom there is no problem in witnessing
the effects of the mine upon the society. His belief that all
is well is expressed in asides which have the function of
making clear that the story of Nostromo is, through all
its structural convolutions, a tale told to a visitor who
can see with his own eyes the prosperity that exists in
the “present” to which the disordered events of the
13cf Watts, C., 1982, Part 2, “The Art of Conrad”, especially pp.
116–117 for comments on Ian Watt’s argument; and see note 10
above.
narrative turn out to be a prelude. So, on the most

simple interpretation of the novel, on the basis of its
surface reality, revolution fails and a kind of liberal
regime inextricably tied to the capitalist organization of
the mine succeeds.
However, a less naive reading offers much more,
including an indication of why works of literature ought
to be taken seriously as contributions to understanding
in the social sciences. Nostromo offers both a particular
argument and a general example of the value of taking
literary texts as source material for the social sciences.
The novel has, as I have argued, direct relevance to the
themes of this collection. The fusion of form and content
as a way of addressing the idea of order has a socio-
political significance which the literary model also
shows to have profound moral implications. Recognition
of the contribution of form as well as content should
remind the social scientist—and many political literary
critics—that literary texts are to be taken seriously in
their own right, and as a distinct form of discourse.
Nostromo taken as an account of an ‘experimental
situation’ shows that capitalism may impose an order
on society that is not itself good, or beneficial, for that
society. If the novel can be taken as a model in this
way, the setting is significant—this is an exaggerated
case, a non-European society, subject to political
disorder—and hence the supposition made by some
critics that it represents a kind of parody of South
American politics (and hence also, presumably, the
failure of those same critics to see a serious political
point to the story). A more sophisticated analysis is
possible (deriving from work in politics and sociology)
whereby the ‘failure’ depicted in this novel can be read
as indicative of the inap—propriateness of Weberian
rational-bureaucratic analysis for non-Western social
systems. That is, Conrad might have been
foreshadowing those contemporary theories which
suggest that what is perceived by Weberian analysts as
disorder in Latin American states might be more
WHITEBROOK • 175
accurately understood as a manifestation of normal or

appropriate behaviour in the culture of those states.
Such an interpretation can be related to the relevant
literature—magic realism depicts a certain kind of non-
rational order and Conrad’s ‘disordered’ narrative
structure might more properly be seen as an
appropriate mode for the presentation of the social and
political tensions he depicts so accurately. The fact that
the ‘experiment’ fails, that Weberian rationalism does
not result in the conditions for continuing economic and
political development is not, in any case, dismisseable
as a failure of the setting, as though the introduction of
capitalism would work any better in, say, a European or
North American setting14. Conrad may have had a
variety of reasons for choosing to place his “tale of the
seaboard” in a fictional South American country, but it
demeans the author and the text to suppose that this
choice is irrelevant or insignificant for a (social science)
reading of the novel. It may precisely be important to
take this disparity, between setting and system,
seriously. The novel taken as a whole provides an
extreme or exaggerated case of a general possiblity—
that the order being imposed is of itself inadequate for
the functions demanded of it. That is largely what I have
argued in this chapter.
References
Baines, J. (1982) Conrad: A critical biography. London: Weidenfeld

and Nicholson.
Bantock, G.H. (1958) Conrad and politics. ELH, 25:122–136.
Berthoud, J. (1978) Joseph Conrad: The major phase. Cambridge:
Conrad, J. (1923) Nostromo: A tale of the seaboard. London:J. M.
Dent and Sons.
Cox, C.B. (1974) Joseph Conrad: The modern imagination, London:
Dent.
14 See next chapter for an argument that this may be so.

Fleishman, A. (1967) Conrad’s politics: Community and anarchy in

the fiction of Joseph Conrad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Guerard, A. (1958) Conrad the novelist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Hawthorn, J. (1979) Joseph Conrad: Language and fictional self-
consciousness. London: Edward Arnold.
Hay, E.K. (1963) The political novels of Joseph Conrad. London:
Chicago University Press.
Hirschman, A.O. (1977) The passions and the interests: Political
argument for capitalism before its triumph. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Howe, I. (1961) Politics and the novel. London: Stevens and Sons.
Jameson, F. (1981) The political unconscious: Literature as a
socially symbolic expression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Johnson, B. (1985) Conrad’s Impressionism and Watt’s “Delayed
Decoding”. In: Murfin, R.C. (Ed.) Conrad revisited: Essays for
the eighties. University of Alabama Press: 51–70.
Karl, F.R. (1960) A reader’s guide to Joseph Conrad. London:
Thames and Hudson.
King, P. (1974) The ideology of order: A comparative analysis of
Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. London: Allen and Unwin.
King, P. (1976) The concept of order. Paper presented at the
International Political Science Association Congress,
Edinburgh.
Leavis, F.R. (1948) The great tradition: George Eliot, Henry James,
Joseph Conrad, London: Chatto and Windus.
Raval, S. (1986) The art of failure: Conrad’s fiction. Boston: Allen
and Unwin.
Said, E. (1985) Beginnings: Intention and method. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Watts, C. (1982) A preface to Conrad. London: Longmans.
Warren, R.P. (1960) On “Nostromo”. In: Stallman, R. W., (Ed.),
The art of Joseph Conrad: A critical symposium. Michigan
State University Press.
Wilding, M. (1966) The politics of Nostromo. Essays and Criticism,
16 October: 441–456.
Winner, A. (1988) Culture and irony: Studies in Joseph Conrad’s
major novels. Charlotteville: University Press of Virginia.
FROM ESCAPISM TO
RESENTED CONFORMITY
Market Economies and Modern
Organizations in Spanish Literature
by
José Luis Alvarez & Carmen Merchán Cantos1
Spanish literature and the world of

market economies and modern
organizations
Compared with other literatures, like that of the United
States, where narrative on business topics has
influenced the popular imagination and ideas on
economic activities (MacLeod, 1980), or even other early
industrialized European countries, it is remarkable that
so few works of fiction in the Spanish language deal
directly with the social and moral aspects of modern
economies. This is even truer in terms of the world of
modern corporations—i.e. those organizations which, at
least to a minimal degree, develop the characteristics
Weber attributed to bureaucracies and which became
the means of ‘getting things done’ in nine teenth century
industrial societies. It is equally true of the personal and
professional life of their managers and entrepreneurs.
An obvious reason could be the lag in economic
development in Latin countries, when compared to that
of Anglo-Saxon or Northern European nations. The
industrial revolution of the nineteenth century did not
take place in most Latin American countries. Even in
Spain, the industrial and bourgeois revolutions are
1 We wish to thank Alan Smith (Boston University) and Bill Bain
for their helpful comments.

178 • ALVAREZ AND CANTOS
considered to have failed in the nineteenth century

(Nasal, 1976), and both had to wait until the 1960s to
fully succeed.
However, the mere absence until very recently of a
high economic development does not seem to provide a
full explanation for the scarcity of such works. Since the
1960s, Spain has been one of the most industrialized
countries in the world: it has become an urban society
where current social customs bear little resemblance to
those of a society that, decades ago, was officially
considered one of the last bastions of moral
conservatism. Yet, in spite of becoming a society quite
similar to that of the United States and other Western
European countries, where economic activities are
based on modern corporations and entrepreneurial
businesses, literature reflecting (in the broadest sense
of the term) modern economic activities and the social
and organizational world they generate is still not
abundant or usual.
The huge success of Latin American literature, which
has dominated fiction in the Spanish language for the
last two decades, has been mostly based on the so-
called magical realism of authors like Carpenter, Grace
Marquees, Rule, and others. The very name of “magical
realism” suggests its lack of connection with the
economic and business world. In the novels of these
authors Nature is a major force: immense, invincible,
autonomous, overcoming the civil society where
economic activities take place. Another typical
background in these works is utopia: the adventurous
attempt, that always ends in defeat, to establish a place
outside time and history—the most anti-business
situation we can imagine (Founts, 1969).
Although not abundant, there are, of course, novels in
the Spanish language that deal directly or indirectly
with the realities of a market economy, its business
organizations and their social and cultural
requirements. This paper refers to three novels set in
very different but crucial moments of Spain’s economic
FROM ESCAPISM TO RESENTED CONFORMITY • 179
development. First, Quijote’s geopolitical imperial but

economically impoverished country. Second, the early
(and ultimately unsuccessful) attempts by the emerging
but weak bourgeoisie to industrialize and modernize
Spain in the second half of the nineteenth century and
which constitute the social environment in which the
plot of La Desheredada (“The Disinherited Lady”)
unravels.2 These two novels are discussed in the next
section, on the beginnings of Spanish modernity and
industrialization. The third novel Amado Amo (“My
Beloved Master”),3 takes place in the 1980s, when Spain
had a golden economic period with a full-fledged market
economy and was joining European society and
markets. Since Amado Amo is the only one of the three
novels that fully focuses on organizational life, it will
receive special attention.
These three works are not proposed as statistically
representative, thematically or stylistically, of Spanish
literature. They have been selected because they are
illustrative of the way modern economies and corporate
life are depicted in Spanish literature, and because they
provide us with some hints that approximate an answer
to a broader question: the possible ways in which
Spanish culture at large has influenced the frameworks
through which Spaniards live and experience business
activities and work in organizations.
2 Pérez Galdós, Benito (1881, 1970), La Desheredada. Madrid:

Aguilar. Compressed English version (“The Disinherited Lady”),
Exposition Press (1977). Page references appearing here
correspond to the Spanish edition. Translation of all quotations
by the authors.
3 Montero, Rosa (1988), Amado Amo (“My Beloved Master”).
Madrid: Debate. There is no English translation yet. Translation

of all quotations by the authors.
The beginnings of Spanish modernity

and industrialization: Don Quijote and
La Desheredada
Since the argument of Don Quijote is well known, only
two of the novel’s dimensions will be briefly mentioned
here, in order to connect it to the other two novels
discussed in this paper. First is the fact that all novels
contain within them, one way or another, Don Quijote’s
deep structure and themes. The main reason for this is
that Cervantes’ masterpiece inaugurates the novelistic
genre, which is the most representative type of narrative
fiction in the modern era. And it is important to realize
that in Don Quijote’s representation of the transition
from the feudal to the modern world, Cervantes
presents the topics that will dominate the imaginary
lives of those characters in modern literature—as well
as in the real lives of their readers—which are in a
relationship of ‘anomie’ with their societies and
circumstances: reading, madness, imitation, delusion,
life as dreaming, and so on.
The second dimension that must be considered is that
Don Quijote constitutes not only a symptom of Spanish
attitudes towards economic activities, but perhaps one
of its causes. The two other novels discussed here will
follow its path and may be considered as variations on
the same Quijotic themes.
The main character of La Desheredada, Isidora Rufete,
is a young woman from La Mancha (like Don Quijote)
who arrives in Madrid with little more than a handful of
dubious documents, stubbornly determined to prove
with them her noble origins and her right to the
marquisate of Aransis. The novel narrates how she had
been deceived by her family regarding her inheritance,
and the consequences of her disappointment. The novel
is divided into two parts, each ending with Isidora’s
symbolic death. There is first a suicide, which takes
place when she finally discovers the lack of foundation
of her claims to aristocracy, and in desperation sexually
surrenders to an arriviste Joaquín de Pez, becoming his

mistress. The second symbolic death alludes to her
decision to become a prostitute, that is, to put her
beauty, previously a sign of nobility and status, up for
sale (Gilman, 1981).
The novel’s title has a political meaning. “The
disinherited classes” was a commonplace synonym for
“the poor” in the language of the time. The majority of
society felt disinherited because poverty is experienced
as an injustice, originated either in the unequal and
unfair distribution of wealth through inheritance (as the
protagonist believes) or in political favoritism (as many
other characters in the novel—like Isidora’s brother
Marino Rufete, the prototype of the terrorist, and
Joaquín de Pez and all his family, which represent
bureaucracy and economic parasitism—sustain). People
try to reach a high position in society through birthright
(dreamers like Isidora) or from political clientelism
(Joaquín de Pez and most of the rest), for individual
initiative and hard work are useless. As Joaquín de Pez
says:
Here? Work here? You are being silly. Merit does

not pay in Spain. What a country! Well, I could
work, devote myself to something, but what would
happen? The writers, the artists, the industrial men
and even the shopkeepers are dying of hunger…
There is no way of making money here except to get
into a business favored by the government. (p.
1109)
However, the novel shows how the competition for

higher social positions causes important personal
strains in many characters. Only people who renounce
upward mobility and accept the status quo escape from
the spiritual and psychological toll caused by ambition
and its paths: social parasitism and personal
dependencies and humiliations. As a fellow inmate of
Isidora’s father, who is locked up in a mental health

institution, affirms:
One of the illness of the soul which brings more

individuals to this institution is ambition, the drive
for aggrandizement, the envy that the low have for
the high, and the will to rise by hitting and
overrunning those who are on top, not through the
scale of merit and hard work, but through the loose
scale of intrigue, or violence, we could say, pushing,
pushing…(p. 994)
All the inequalities, and the frantic attempts to upward

mobility, made the novel’s author—Galdós, the most
important Spanish novelist after Cervantes—qualify his
society as confused: “The confusion of classes is the
false currency of equality”. This is one of Galdos’ most
straightforward criticisms of modernity: the modern era,
although very vocal in its celebration of the values of
freedom, equality and solidarity, has produced not
freedom but parasitism and servility, not equality but
“confusion of classes”, not solidarity but rivalry, by
prompting false hopes of economic improvement. In
sum, it has brought about perhaps new and more
subtle means of slavery.4 The results of this forced
rivalry are resentment, envy and hate: feelings which
are absent in the Quijote, emergent in La Desheredada,
and dominant in Amado Amo. The intensity of these
sentiments, and the destructive effects on both their
holders and recipients, increases with the development
of modern economies and with the sophistication of
their organizations.5
Throughout La Desheredada, the author plays with
the two meanings of the word ‘noble’. On the one hand,
it refers to a social class (nobility or aristocracy); on the
other hand, it refers to a moral quality: a noble person
is a morally good person. The irony is that the story’s
heroine, Isidora Rufete, who is convinced of her nobility
(status) looses almost all her nobility (moral quality)
when she finally accepts that she is not an aristocrat but

a commoner. So, the main question of the novel—is
Isidora a member of the nobility or not?—becomes a
moral question: is she good or not? The novel shows the
progressive degradation of her character, pari passu her
increased acceptance of reality: she goes from lover to
lover then into prostitution. Her descent to hell
symbolizes Spain’s own decline in the nineteenth
century (Cardona, 1970), when the country, trying to be
different, to live up to its historical past, foolishly
thinking of itself as a great power, ended up losing its
colonial possessions to the hands of emerging empires,
like the United States of America, and losing its internal
freedoms to authoritarian regimes. César Miranda, the
protagonist of Amado Amo, will parallel Isidora Rufete’s
fall.
Although Isidora Rufete is the victim of a lie invented
by her family, and kept alive by other characters like
Joaquín Pez, an aristocrat by marriage and her first
lover, who remorselessly manipulates her dreams, her
own personality, with strong ‘quijotic’ features,
contributes much to her disgrace. For most of the novel
she uses only fantasy, uncontrolled imagination, and
not reason, to confront reality. This provokes in her a
constant state of psychological and spiritual turmoil.
Another similarity between Don Quijote de la Mancha
and the heroine of La Desheredada is that both are
voracious readers, books of chivalry in his case,
romance in hers. The interesting thing is that for both
characters books are not only suppliers of materials for
the fabric of their imagination but their peculiar “reality
principle”:
4 On the pervasiveness and polymorphism of slavery and social

parasitism, and on the dialectic relationship between freedom
and oppression, see Patterson (1991).
5 Sociology as a field (Durkheim, Simmel, Tönnies, and others)
started with the acknowledgement of the distressing effects of the

new industrial societies on social relations and personalities.
Through Isidora’s mind was passing such a

splendid vision that she was smiling: “It is not
anything new; not a bit of it”, she was saying.
“Books are full of similar cases. Why, I have read my
own story so many times! And what more beautiful
thing is there than when these accounts paint for us
a very poor young girl, who is very pretty, like the
angels, and absolutely honorable, more so than the
angels, weeps a great deal and suffers because a
few wretches want to defame her…and the girl
suddenly changes her position, and lives in palaces,
and marries a young man, who in times of her
poverty, wooed her, and she loves him…” (p. 1094)
In both cases the uncontrolled imagination fueled by

their readings gets the better of both Don Quijote and
Isidora Rufete, causing the death of the former after the
failure of his adventures, and the symbolic death of the
latter: she, who dreamed of being a distinguished
member of the upper levels of society because of family
heritage became a prostitute, ‘providing service’ to low
class clients with whom she sustains market links. In
her very person takes place the transition from
feudalism (status) to capitalism (markets): she is ‘seller
and commodity in one’, becoming, as Walter Benjamin
said of prostitutes, the ultimate image of a society of
merchants and merchandises (Fernández Cifuentes,
1987).
Moreover, in a very feudal style, she shows a great
need for luxurious consumption, spending her money
foolishly, without calculation—the very opposite of the
Calvinist spirit of careful evaluation of the relationship
between means and ends that Weber posed as basic for
modern economic activities. It is important to remember
that Spain was the armed leader of the Counter-
Reformation movement that fought the spread of the
Protestant Reformation. Isidora—like Spain itself for
Galdós—both in her imagination and her way of life, did
not know, did not want to accept the constraining
requirements of cultural and social life in a capitalist

society…and when forced by necessity to do so she
completely embraced those ‘real’ principles of reality and
ended up fully losing her dignity.
Examples of this anti-economic and anti-modern spirit
—which some prominent Spanish intellectuals, like
Unamuno, have proposed as constitutive and essential
to the country’s culture—abound in the three novels. In
the famous passage in Don Quijote where he fights
windmills (an economic artifact) thinking that they were
mythological evil giants, the machines defeated him, the
representative of a medieval spirit and holder of an old
fashioned and cavalier code of honor. The protagonist of
La Desheredada reveals sympathies for the ancien
regime when she becomes deeply disturbed in realizing
the coming of the new social times:
From a tavern, where half a dozen men were

shouting, amid smoke and alcohol fumes, came a
phrase which sounded something like: “We are all
equal”, a phrase which struck Isidora’s ear as they
were passing. From the ear the phrase passed in to
make a deep impression on Isidora’s soul and she
took a step backward to peer into the interior of the
bar… Isidora dwelled upon the fact that business
of all being equal and the King going home
indicated an exceptional happening, a cataclysm…
she was invaded with such sharp pangs of
desperation that she thought that she must not live
any longer. (p. 1077)
It is the very modern idea of egalite which provokes

Isidora’s anguish. The old, stable, highly differentiated,
hierarchical and ‘top-bottom’ ordered ancien regime
fitted Isidora’s ‘noble’ spirit much better.
César Miranda, the protagonist of Amado Amo, in a
time of success and celebration of the efficiency of
market economies and the wonders of modern
organizations, will further develop some of Isidora’s

pathological features.
Full-fledged market economies and

their organizations: Amado Amo
Briefly, the synopsis of Amado Amo is as follows. César
Miranda, ideal man and executive of an advertising
agency, Golden Line,6 who had had a satisfactory
private life, gets himself increasingly immersed in a life
crisis. The plot shows the different and successive
manifestations of César’s crisis, which reaches its peak
when the protagonist fears that he will not receive the
invitation to attend the company’s Annual Reunion.
This invitation symbolizes that an employee still ‘exists’
for the corporation. The end of Amado Amo, written in a
tragical mood, leaves a bitter taste: under pressure from
the management, and in order to remain in good
standing with his boss, Morton (an American manager),
César allows his boss to manipulate him into signing a
letter against a former girlfriend and co-worker, Paula,
and making it easy for the company to fire her.
The two main physical locations in the novel are
César’s apartment and his workplace at the Golden
Line, a United States multinational with a subsidiary in
Spain. The company was founded under the name
“Rumbo” during the Francoist dictatorship, prospering
in part thanks to being a pioneer in the Spanish
advertising sector. At the end of the 1960s things
started to change: the totalitarian political regime began
its final stages and competition came into the industry.
After Franco’s death in 1975, Rumbo’s owner sold the
agency to the United States company: “going in this way
from the most rank feudalism to the most advanced
capitalism, jumping in a second over a bunch of
intermediate social systems.” (p. 150).
6 In English in the original.

Although the time setting of the main story is not

explicit, it seems obvious that it takes place in the
mid-1980s, when Spain’s economic growth, after a very
grave crisis during the previous decade, rocketed, with
the highest percentages of economic growth in Western
countries. In the development of the main story the
author intercalates several flash-backs that explain
César’s childhood (private realm) and the origins of the
Golden Line (professional/—public realm).
This way of presenting the main story as a series of
episodes which become fully intelligible through flash-
backs is especially important in Chapter 4, which is a
sort of justification of the novel itself. In it, César, as a
result of a brief encounter with his boss in the elevator
of the firm’s facilities, thinks of the enormous difficulties
he had when he was the company’s art director. He
wishes that his new boss knew all the obstacles and
difficulties that he had to overcome, most of them
caused by the mauvaise foi of his colleagues. However,
he thinks to himself: “those things cannot be told” (p.
98).
Revealingly enough, in this statement the use of
fiction can be found: novels serve to tell what usually
cannot be told. And what “cannot be told” is not only
what socially or institutionally will be of bad taste or
politically inconvenient to relate. Only fiction can show
the values behind the facts, the motivations behind the
behaviors, the deep experiences behind the acts. This is
the reason the novel is useful in showing and
investigating human relationships. And the procedure
adopted by Rosa Montero in Amado Amo, the interior
monologue or free indirect style, is especially useful in
showing the evolution of conscience with its fears and
hopes, its remembrances and projects, in sum, the past
and the future which give meaning to the present.
Amado Amo is a novel about power, about the eternal
dialectic of master and slave, as experienced in modern
and contemporary organizational settings in the
relationship boss-subordinate. This central theme, that
gives the novel its title, is expressed in two ways: one of

them predominantly conceptual and the other mostly
metaphorical.
An example of César’s more conceptual arguments
may be found around the middle of the novel, when he
assesses his boss’ savvy:
Morton exercised his tyranny through seduction;

and everybody, including Quesada, loved him as
well as hated him… Power possesses that secret
energy, that uncanning alchemy: the ability to
bring together love and suffering. And thus, in all
subordinates there seemed to exist a compulsion of
personal surrender to their bosses. Like the dog
that licks the hand that beats it, or the Bolshevik
peasant who weeps after cutting his master’s
throat. Beloved master. (p. 142–143)
The dualistic division of the human species between

masters and slaves is presented as eternal. The dialectic
struggle between these two sides reveals the romantic
underpinnings of Amado Amo’s protagonist. René
Girard, in Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque
sustains that the romantic consciousness—on which
the modern mentality was based—has a manichean view
of the world: good/evil, I/the others, myself as a private
person/myself as professional, etc.
This dualism is present throughout the novel. From
Chapter 1 onward César thinks of himself as distinct, as
unique, as the hero. When a colleague of César, Matías,
realizes that he has been dispossessed of one of the
status symbols (a reserved parking space) awarded by
the company, used to send messages to the employees
that have started their fall into disgrace, César repeats
to himself insistently that his case is different (although
he does not have an assigned parking place either).
This feeling of being different is sometimes proudly
experienced by César, particularly in regard to his
successful professional past, and other times as a
stigma. The latter sentiment will win out as the plot

develops.
Perhaps the chapter that best illustrates the sense of
difference as stigma is the third, in which César attends
a high society party, where he feels socially and
culturally isolated and apart from the wealthy:
Why do they get married only to each other? These

rich people. The aristocracy. Why, although they
always present themselves as the least prejudiced,
most modern and democratic, do they get married
only to each other? Nobility to nobility, family
names to family names, fortunes to fortunes. Or
better, family names to fortunes and vice versa.
And he, César, who has neither of them, what
could he do? (p. 54)
Here, César unflinchingly questions the capitalist ideal

of the ‘self-made man’. For César, rags to riches stories
are, in the best of cases, the exception that proves the
rule, and most of the times an ideological trick, since
society’s structures are basically invariable, no matter
how much social mobility is preached.
His acute sense of ‘difference’ typical of all romantic
heroes, will lead César to paranoia, a pathology that
appears at the very beginning of the novel and it is
present throughout. For instance, in Chapter 7, César is
having a medical checkup, regularly provided by the
firm. The doctor’s appearance seems so understanding
that César confesses to him his problems with Golden
Line. The doctor has to leave the room and since he
does not return quickly, César panics for having
confessed his thoughts, suspecting that his interlocutor
is really a spy for the firm and that he will soon inform
the management of what he has just heard:
And what if everything were preordained and

programmed? What if it were a trick to medically
justify his unfitness for the job? He said that
Golden Line is a house of serfdom, that is what the

doctor-spy would inform… Antisocial, lacking in
corporate spirit! That is what they would say about
him! He is an outsider, they would conclude. How
is it that he was so stupid as to give all those
opinions to an enemy envoy? (p. 160)
César was not the only one who suffered paranoia. All
his co-workers had it too, to a greater or lesser extent:
… César, who in any case considered Quesada

dangerous, thought that his vice-director was
becoming paranoid. Like Pepe, like Miguel, like all
the others, including himself; because all of them
were cooking themselves alive in the thick
persecutory sauce imposed by the company. (p.
151–152)
The company, through ambiguous messages (messages

similar to what Calvinists called the decretum horribile,
in which the condemnation or salvation of the believer
was proclaimed) promotes that paranoia. As in the
episode of Matías’ parking space, the “states of grace or
disgrace” were announced suddenly and surrounded by
ambiguity: “All of us paranoid, of course, because the
firm’s message was always ambiguous and promoted
hostility and paranoia.” (p. 89)
César’s thoughts are in a very metaphorical vein, and
sometimes his language has obvious Kafkaesque
resonances:
Now he understood everything. Now César captured

the design of the conspiracy. That spider’s web
whose innumerable strands were, all of them,
intertwined: hierarchically, geometrically, united by
the intangible substance of Power, the fine fabric of
domination. And there were no other options, one
can be only one of the two: strand of web or
trapped fly. (p. 147)
To César all types of organizations are basically

identical: business firms, the army, even heaven, with
its carefully ordered ranks of angels, show the same
hierarchical structure, as if a vertical order were
essential in both divine and human relations (in the end,
as an educated Catholic as César knows well, the latter
have been created “as image and likeness” of the
former).
The insistence on using religious metaphors and
imagery to describe situations that take place in
business organizations points to César’s inability to
think of himself and his circumstances in a fully secular
way, out of religious frameworks and apocalyptic
references. Not fully surprising for a man educated in a
society that for centuries considered itself the spiritual
reservoir of the Western world.
An especially revealing passage in this regard appears
in Chapter 4. César is trying to make out the obscure
meaning of a salutation that Morton gave him in the
elevator. The ambiguity of the greeting makes him panic
and ask himself if “the beginning of the end” has started
for him yet, as has already happened to Matías and to
another colleague, Pepe, who for many years had been
“condemned to a purgatory” of silly administrative tasks.
In his obsessive search for meaning he discovers the
company’s way of operating with its employees:
…the company imparts rewards out of the most

total secrecy. People never know if things have been
done badly or well, only if an employee was in state
of grace or disgrace, mortifying or beatific states
that the employees could guess only through small
revealing signs… Or, on the contrary, through big
funerary symptoms… These signs were all but the
guesses of what was to come: flashing promotions
or little defined condemnations to demeaning
secretarial tasks… Something which, falling into
instant disgrace, constituted the main fear of the
agency’s employees, The Great Menace, the
corporate version of the “it’s all over now, pal”. (pp.

86–88)
It is not only the work environment that is thought of as

a replica of the religious universe. In the same manner
that the believer is encouraged to try to gain merits in
order to deserve divine grace, employees have to work
restlessly to be in the “company’s grace”.
César recognizes the origin of this credo: the United
States of America.
At least once a year, the Golden Line announces

drastic changes in the company: pay rises,
demerits, promotions, nominations and firings…
These sorts of upheavals, César had read in an
American book on management, energize the
workers, make the working machine more dynamic
and increase productivity; there is nothing worse
for a firm, the handbook warned, than the fact that
employees feel secure in their jobs. (p. 89)
While at the political level, the modern state has

developed a capability for overcoming a Hobbesian
“state of nature”, at the professional and business level
the free-for-all-fight-of-all seems, to César, not only to
continue but also to be considered as the normative
process of economic activities. In the absence of
primitive terrors, modern economic subjects are
immersed in a managerial version of the homo homini
lupus, a bloodless war—a war befitting not the strong
and noble but the mean and astute—but war
nonetheless.
César Miranda, our contemporary, confronted with
the hardships of market economies and business
organizations, shows his nostalgia for a lost Arcadia,
and also tries to escape into a world of dreams, like Don
Quijote and Isidora Rufete, who longed for the
hierarchical structure of the ancien regime in which,
they believed, aristocracy and moral nobility would

coincide.
But now, while he was going over, without actually

reading, the pages of Prince Valiant and was
drawing in melancholy, César felt irresistible
desires to move to a simpler life. To find shelter in
rural tranquillity. To abandon advertising and the
ferocious competition and devote himself to
cultivating potatoes, or beets, or turnips… Because
in the country one does not need to be constantly
fighting to keep one’s identity; in the country one
simply “is”. One is farmer or shepherd or cowboy
from birth to death; managers, however, have to
conquer their domain and substance everyday. (p.
167)
He even starts thinking about another possibility of

escape—joining a sect: “Catholic or Buddhist monks,
cells of a collective body who have resolved in this
manner, depending on others, the terrors of
individuality” (p. 168). The expression “the terrors of
individuality” is key to understand the behavior of César
and co-protagonists, Isidora and Quijote, as it will be
discussed in the Conclusion.
The novel ends with an example of the sort of
actions demanded for survival in this all-out-anything-
goes war: César betrays his co-worker and former lover,
Paula. A sense of tragedy builds throughout the last
chapter. César has a meeting with Morton. His anxiety
is extremely high because he has not received yet the
blue envelope with the invitation to the firm’s annual
reunion, the sign of his still being among the chosen.
There is an “apocalyptic dusk” (p. 192) and the
“beginning of the end” (p. 195) is imminent. It is then
that César remembers the story that, not long ago, just
before she dumped him, his other lover Clara told him:
The most famous “land run” [sic] (César knew it

well after hearing the story from Clara so many
times) took place on April 22, 1889, in Oklahoma.
That day a vast territory taken away from the
Indians was parceled and given to the colonists
gratis: all you had to do was to reach a field before
anybody else. The army drew an imaginary line
around the border of the territory, held the farmer
candidates behind it and, at high noon, the great
race was on… Clara perorated, burning with social
justice, that the race was not won either by the
most honest men nor the most intelligent, not even
the quickest; the winner was the strongest, the
cruelest, the least sympathetic and most
inhuman… And this apotheosis of the abuse,
finally, had not been the only “land run” in the
recent history of the United States… That is, drove
Clara home, lifting a slanderous and accusing
index finger, it was not the result of an error, but of
a perverse will, of the desire to build a society on
those bases; and the carnage as a natural means of
selection seemed to them just fine. (pp. 196–198)
In a paragraph very similar to the one quoted from the

La Desheredada on the same topic, in which one of the
character warns of the illness of ambition, César
remembers Clara’s discourse on the land run and
thinks of it as the perfect metaphor for competition and
social Darwinism:
Yes, perhaps she was right. That is the way the

world is, César told himself in despair. That is what
everybody does, running desperately towards
nothing, running over the person in front, hitting
the guy next to you, mutilating the fallen,
disemboweling colleagues just for being competitors
over a market niche. (p. 198)
This tale will be premonitory: César does do “what

everybody does”, in order to be able to continue his
career. Like Isidora Rufete who became a prostitute, that
is, a “public woman” César becomes a “public man”, a
person whose actions and loyalty can be bought and
traded.
The nine chapters of Amado Amo could be seen as the
gestation of César’s betrayal, a betrayal which is the
tribute that César pays to his beloved master and to the
organization. A well-known Galdós scholar sustains
that by creating the character of Isidora Rufete as a
representation of nineteenth century Spain, the author
“seemed to arrive at the conclusion that a nation that
has so prostituted itself ought to die, but,
unfortunately, cannot. Thus the shameful continuation
of Isidora’s life” (Gilman, 1981). Similarly, at the end of
Amado Amo we could also imagine the “shameful
continuation” of César Miranda’s life. Like Isidora,
César ends up acting in accordance with the required
patterns of behavior, and in so doing, loses his personal
decency.
Conclusion
The three protagonists of the novels referred to in this
paper—Don Quijote, Isidora Rufete, César Miranda—
show important problems of adjustment to the reality
demands of their respective stages of economic
development of Spain. While obvious differences exist
between them, a common denominator is their acute
nostalgia for the old, aristocratic, pre-industrial values,
an intense longing for a Gemeinschaft situation, as
Tönnies would say. This nostalgia is their reaction
against the dynamics of mercantilization,
instrumentalization and, in many respects, social
homogenization, brought by market economies. And the
more developed the economy, the more service-oriented,
and the more sophisticated the organization, the more
so.
The expression “the terrors of individuality”, used by

César to explain his continual escapism, is without
doubt a key expression in understanding César’s
rejection, as well as Quijote’s and Isidora’s, to one of the
basic foundations of market economies: individualism.
The key point here is that these protagonists’ terror
does not really come from the fear of being different, of
having strong and distinct individualities. On the
contrary, this is what they truly want. Their real fear is,
precisely, that under the disguise of discourses
promoting individualism—which is supposed to foster
competition, the engine of the system—modern societies
are quite homogeneous and massified—as the Spanish
philosopher Ortega y Gasset in The Rebellion of Masses
was one of the first to warn.
The terrors of the individuality suffered by these
characters are the terrors prompted by a distinction-
less or meritless society. They do not seem to believe
that market economies have truly opened up the run for
social mobility. For them, hard work in economic or
business activities is fruitless (that mobility is not really
possible) or it is morally worthless (in the end, work is
not a noble task but a biblical punishment). And rising
in society can only be achieved by parasitism or servility.
This demands personal dependency and humiliation,
and therefore lack of nobility, in the moral sense.
For the three protagonists of these three novels, “the
terrors of the individual” are, in sum, the terrors of
wanting to be different and noble in the aristocratic and
moral sense and the impossibility of achieving it. If they
accept the demands of modern economies and their
business organizations, they lose their real nobility, as
Isidora Rufete and César Miranda did. But if they do not
accept those requirements they will be terribly lonely
with no one recognizing their cherished difference. Very
narcissistic fears.
There is, however, one characteristic that very
painfully separates César from Quijote and Isidora
Rufete: his lucidity. César Miranda is not as lucky as
Don Quijote, who lost his mind, or Isidora Rufete, who

ended in delirium. While the excesses of imagination
and of romanticism of his predecessors were so extreme
that they both ended in complete escapism by entirely
living in the solipsist domain of their fantasy, César
Miranda’s tragedy is that he is, first, lucidly aware of the
ways organizations work, and, second, neurotically
conscientious about his basic, almost physiological,
incompatibility with them, about his own ‘anomie’.
Moreover, he realizes the moral price he is paying in the
end: betraying a friend and colleague, and offering his
self-esteem and moral worth in sacrifice to his beloved
master, all in order to survive in the firm—a survival
which, in any case, is never fully guaranteed. In the end,
César conforms, and becomes even more resentful.
Although exaggerated in his conceptualization of
them, and experienced as attacks on the integrity of his
self, most of César’s perceptions about the Golden Line
show very strong signs of verisimilitude, since they
coincide with much of what scholars have said about
organizational life, most particularly, about small,
professional, service firms, like his (Levinson, 1972).
The intentional use of ambiguity in organizations is
generalized and it is harmful from the point of view of
the personality development of the employee (Argyris,
1990); fringe benefits and perks are used to generate
differentials in status (Beer, 1984) and they have a
strong impact on workers’ self-esteem (Alter, 1991); the
intensity and peculiarities of some organizational
cultures can negatively affect the psychological
development of their employees (Miller & Kets de Vries,
1986); employees’ compliance with corporate values are
sometimes surveyed by management spies (Sathe,
1985); the more entrepreneurial and creative the
professional life the more diffi cult it is to strike a
balance with the realm of private life (Kanter, 1986);
most management decisions are taken not because of
their organizational rationality but because of their
political expediency (Jackall, 1988); etc.
But César is even sharper regarding power dynamics

in organizations—something management scholars
started to recognize not very long ago (Pfeffer, 1981).
César realizes that the exercise of leadership may obtain
energy from unhealthy developments of human
personality and that organizations may serve to further
and to externalize those pathologies (Zaleznick and Kets
de Vries, 1985); that organizational power and influence
are an inescapable fact of organizational life (Kotter,
1985); and that an uneven distribution of power in
society generates powerlessness and resentment
(Scheler, 1961). Moreover, César knows that
organizational life both mirrors and transmits, through
what Kanter (1977) has called “homosocial
reproduction”, the power inequalities existing in society.
He is also very aware that these inequalities have
always existed, and that the supposed rationalities of
economic and business activities do not exempt
organizational life from those dynamics. Moreover,
César comes from a culture where not only has there
always existed widespread skepticism on the virtues of
organizing, but also where economic activities have
never been fully backed by the predominant religious
spirit, where they have traditionally been seen as
something foreign, dubious, and too worldly.
Amado Amo underlines the ‘foreignness’ of
management in regard to Spanish culture.
Organizational and business systems are an American
development. Their agents of transmission and
execution are in the novel, American managers working
in the Madrid office of a US multinational company.
Even the individualism and competitiveness upon which
life in organizations is based, exemplified in the novel by
the “land run” story, and of which César, even while
submitting, becomes so resentful, is something very
external to Spanish culture.
The homogenization of society that the three
main characters in Don Quijote, La Desheredada, and
Amado Amo so much dread, is then not only a
homogenization among individuals and classes, it is

also a homogenization among societies and cultures
where, in regard to management, the US model has
become a dominant influence.
While Don Quijote and Isidora Rufete had the
representation of the pre-modern world close enough to
give force and verisimilitude to their dreams, fueling
their escapism, César Miranda is too modern to believe
in the feasibility of a return to the past. His escapism is
not an option in the era of the iron cage of modern
corporations. He is irremediably trapped in it, and his
conformity is all but a forced solution; thus the
bitterness and resentment in his life.
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POWER, TIME, TALK AND
MONEY
Organizations in Italian Literature
by
Franca Olivetti Manoukian
Literary works constitute a privileged source for

understanding of organisational phenomena. This
statement will be discussed and elaborated in the
present article on the basis of an analysis of three
Italian novels in which the work organization is the
central topic.
The analysis of literary texts is an interesting
instrument for understanding organizations for at least
three reasons. Firstly, the writers exhibit exceptionally
direct and vivid imagination in dealing with the
problems of human condition. What is more, in the
societies in which they live they tend to assume an
attitude of observers and privileged interpreters of the
novelties emerging in the life of collectivity or in the
culture of specific social groups (Vittorini, 1961).
Secondly, the most recent developments in organization
theory witness frequent recourses to the analysis of
tropes, especially in attempts to illuminate and explore
the multiform complexity of contemporary organizations
(Morgan, 1986), where the other types of analysis are
not very helpful. The tropes are semantic figures, a
medium of expression and cognition typical for the
world of fiction. Their heuristic value lies in that they
lead to fantasy and creativity. In other words, fiction
writers can propose new metaphors and maybe new
ways of thinking about organizations and the most
obscured aspects of their functioning.
202 • OLIVETTI MANOUKIAN
Thirdly, the empirical studies of organizations,

especially those conducted in Italy in recent years1 have
a tendency to formulate their results in aseptic terms,
purified from imaginative and emotive aspects, as if this
proved the ‘scientificity’ of the work done. In contrast,
the fiction writers who describe organisational matters
present a ‘living’ organization, with terms filled with
compassion, coming up with meaningful visions of
diversity and stratification present in the everyday life of
organizations. In this way, they are able to reach an
exceptionally fine level of interpretation, of which Kafka
is perhaps the best example (Kundera, 1986).
Organizations in Italian literature of

the last century
In the novels published in Italy during the last century,
work organization is neither a recurring nor a central
theme. Until twenty or thirty years ago Italian literature
never placed a description of the organised world of
labour at the centre of its work except as a plaintive
pretext to denounce difficult living conditions (Forti,
1961). In the second half of the nineteenth century the
organization theme was taken up and described by
Italian writers through the individual stories of
emerging professional figures, both in new industries
and in the newly constituted public administration.2
In some of the literary works of the last decades, the
organization was considered often in its wider
expression such as an administrative extension of the
1 For a general review on social research on the enterprise

published in Italy in the post-war years see Gallino, 1981 and
Butera, 1984. Among the relatively few Italian monographic
works on organization, I recall as particularly interesting those of
Bonazzi (1975 and 1979). Typical of the slant mentioned above is
the recent work of a team of researchers at the Institute of
Business Economics at Milan Bocconi University and of the
Strategy Area of the Management School at the same University
(Invernizzi et al., 1988)
POWER, TIME, TALK AND MONEY • 203
State or in the social organization of a geographical area,

of a town or a country community or otherwise in its
minor examples such as those of family ties and
relations. Intermediate organizations, such as industrial
firms, schools, public authorities and public services,
hospitals, etc. in most cases form the background of the
stories, a carefully described landscape, a setting to
throw into relief the characters in the foreground—a
technique much used in Italian Renaissance paintings.
This social structure that permeates and marks the life
of the individuals does not seem to possess, as yet, a
literary place of its own, a specific literary right of
citizenship, a status of an independent source of
inspiration. It is indeed curious, for instance, that the
family and family relations and feelings as a whole have
been in the past, and still are, an inexhaustible source
for literary works and writers who manage to achieve
introspection and intuitions of great subtlety, discerning
and remarkable interpretations. This type of
investigation as far as work organizations are concerned
is fairly rare.
In the mental picture the Italian authors have of work
organizations—especially in the post-war years—there
seems to be a sort of condensation, as a result of which
work organization appears to coincide tout court with
the factory.3 To enter work organization means entering
2 For instance, Le miserie di monsù Travet by V.Bersezio (1863),
Demetrio Pianelli by E. De Marchi (1890), Il romanzo di un maestro

by De Amicis (1890) or the autobiographical stories by M.Serao.
For an examination of these works see the essays by Cassese and
Bini published in Storia d’Italia, 1981. In the late 1950s and early
1960s there was a renewed interest in the world of organization,
especially of industrial organization: L Bianciardi, Il lavoro
culturale (1957), L’integrazione (1960), La vita agra (1962); L
Bigiaretti, Il Congresso (1963); G.Buzzi, Il Senatore (1963);
L.Mastronardi, Il calzolaio di Vigevano (1959), Il maestro di
Vigevano (1962); O.Ottieri, Donnarumma all’ assalto (1959), Tempi
stretti (1964); P.Volponi, Il memoriale (1962). Calvino’s short
stories La speculazione edilizia (1957) and La nuvola di smog
(1958) were written in the same period.
a factory, in other words, industrial organization. Even

when actually referring to a school or an office or a
small enterprise, the narrative point of reference is the
large industrial enterprise. It is as if according to an
implicit postulate, the big enterprise were the depository
of those ‘new things’ that can influence society as a
whole, that must be decoded, possessed, and with
which writers can measure themselves in order to put
forward their interpretation. Here we find the intellectual
roots of attitudes that are still fairly common in our
society and which originated thirty years back when a
large proportion of the working population was indeed
actually employed in industry or in all cases wished to
be so employed. Such ideas still persist today, even if
the sectors of work are increasingly varied and although
the number of those employed in big industry is
proportionally in constant decline (Enriquez, 1989).
The writers tell tales of factories and enterprises
“within limits that are from a literary point of view pre-
industrial”, as if they were overawed by this world and
therefore either distanced themselves from it or
approached it limiting their interest mainly to the “old
natural reality” to which new objects and new gestures
must be “merely annexed” (Vittorini, 1961, pp. 15–16).
The writers who have the courage to face the theme of
work organization, are carried away by their ideology.
If one chooses to write a novel on a factory, this
appears to be a result of a social and ideal commitment
that is shared in a specific political area. And this
would seem to be an impossible task because it means
that one has to simultaneously identify with two
opposite poles: the factory, industry or the inexpressive
3 See the special issue of the review il Menabò devoted to the

theme “Industry and Literature” (April 1961). Such an attitude
can be found not only in Vittorini’s introduction but also in the
articles of Scalia, Pirella, Forti, in the extracts from Ottieri’s
Taccuini (“Notebooks”) and in Sereni’s poem entitled precisely
Visita in fabbrica (“A visit to a factory”).
place where one works without speaking and the

outside world, that is art, expression, thought. Ottieri
wrote in his Taccuino (Notebook) in 1954: “The world of
the factory is a closed world. One doesn’t enter or exit
easily. Who can describe it? Those who are in it, can
give us some facts but not their elaboration… How can
artists who live outside penetrate a factory?” (1961, p.
21).
Literature, or better still the writers, attempt to write a
factory-based novel, a significant tale of vicissitudes and
emotions: they are expected to attempt “a profound and
new reflection on industrial alienation”, in order to open
the road to redemption, to “anticipate the development
of freedom from industrial alienation”, (Scalia, 1961, p.
108). In my opinion writing on the work organization is
for all these writers a form of autobiography and also a
fundamental part of a sort of political project for
renovating society and the relations between people and
between social classes.
Some of the novels published between the end of the
1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, seem relatively
monotonous and repetitive, with a one-sided and
definitive vision of organization, as if they intended to
prove something, to denounce and fight; a didactic
intention that can choke and fetter the richness and
freedom of expression of the story—that is still,
however, created by the writer.4
Three novels
In order to analyse the point I have made in greater
detail I have chosen three works published in three
different periods, all three referring to the work
organization of companies located in towns of Northern
4 I am referring, for instance, to Bianciardi, La vita agra (“The
Sour Life”) or Mastronardi in Il maestro di Vigevano, also to

Volponi in Il memoriale. This interpretation can, however, be a
product of a more detached sensitivity which we possess today.
Italy and all based in autobiographical experiences: Una

vita (“A Life”) by Italo Svevo (1892), Tempi stretti (“Fast
Pace”) by Ottiero Ottieri (1964) and Le mosche del
capitale (“The Flies of the Capital”) by Paolo Volponi
(1989).5 All three authors worked for many years in a
company. Ettore Schmitz, born in Trieste in 1861 (who
had chosen the pen name of Italo Svevo) worked for
about fifteen years in a bank in Trieste and
subsequently in a paint company in the same town,
first as an employee and then as an executive, until his
death (Svevo Fonda Savio and Maier, 1981; Anzellotti,
1985). Ottiero Ottieri, born in Rome in 1924 (four years
before the premature death of Svevo) worked for more
than twenty years with Olivetti (in various positions) in
Ivrea, Milan and in the South. Paolo Volponi, who was
born in Urbino the same year as Ottieri, was also an
Olivetti executive in the personnel and the social service
sector; in latter years he also worked as an executive
with FIAT.
The three novels tell stories of three men, whose life
and fate are greatly influenced by their work, by their
position in their company’s organization and by the ties
they have with the latter.
Alfonso Nitti—the hero of Svevo’s novel—is a young
employee of the Maller Bank, who has left his native
village and his widowed mother to live in town; his
employment in the bank is considered not just a job but
is invested with economic expectations, expectations of
social promotion, of an improvement in his human
condition. A letter from Alfonso to his mother, placed
right at the beginning of the novel, is a sort of premise,
an immediate and brutal statement of bitterness—
because the town and the bank do not offer the
imagined prospects, because the organization does not
5The quotations from the novels are taken from the following
editions: Una vita, Mondadori, Milano, 1985; Tempi stretti,
Einaudi, Torino, 1964; Le mosche del capitale, Einaudi, Torino,
1989.
understand or encourage the abilities, interests and

aspirations of the single individual. Instead, it places
him in a narrow space (“a goose coop”) and at the same
time exposes him to relationships with fellow clerks and
bosses that are strained and painful. The pay is a mere
pittance. One feels that one belongs to and is, so to
speak, at the mercy of a system that dictates the rules of
life and does not allow one to have an independent
control over one’s salary, which disappears without the
employee really understanding where and how.
Everything is a source of anxiety: one can only leave,
escape.6
This is the theme that is only suggested with a note or
two as in an overture and then developed in the book by
analysing the relations Alfonso has with his work, other
employees and with his superiors, especially with his
boss, the proprietor of the bank that allows him to visit
his house and be on friendly terms with his daughter.
Alfonso becomes the daughter’s lover but the fulfilment
of this desire does not satisfy him—it creates new
problems and new complex decisions that must be
taken. The death of his mother, followed by selling his
parents’ house which means leaving his native village
for good, leaves him even more prey to his existential
confusion and to the productive-sentimental
mechanisms which dominate the bank. When he is told
that he will be moved to the book-keeping department
—“he Siberia of the bank”—he cannot bear to take it
lying down; he attempts to renew informal relations, but
when he is rejected—and precisely by the proprietor’s
son—he sees no solution except total escape from social
organization, suicide. And one is left in doubt as to
whether in such manner he ends up by being a victim,
defeated, a loser or instead in some way a winner,
6 This theme of industrial organization seen as the town

organization that drives one away from rural life, and from an
idyllic countryside is also at the centre of Calvino’s short story La
nuvola di smog (“The Cloud of Smog”).
master of his fate, having made a choice of his own. The

organization, in all cases, survives without being shaken
by the loss of one if its members and in its irresistible
production work, entrenched in its procedure, language
and ritual relations, proclaims “the reasons that drove
our employee Mr. Alfonso Nitti to commit suicide are
completely unknown”.
Tempi stretti is a sociological novel (romanzo
d’ambiente), describing a particular environment
hosting many personal histories and in which several
work organizations become in themselves, far more so
than in Svevo’s novel, characters among characters. In
Una vita the bank is the work organization, the only
existing one and the only imaginable one, and appears
to be always the same into the regularity of its
hierarchy, in the distribution of roles and tasks. In
Ottieri’s book, besides the Alessandri printing works,
where Giovanni Marini, the main character, is employed,
there is the Zanini company and Smai; a network of
various organization nuclei, various firms, each with its
own particular production, but also with its specific
strategies and orientation, its specific divisions in its
management, with features that can also be discussed
and changed in certain circumstances. These
organizations have to face various external and internal
upsets, a number of economic and production
problems; they are often in a turmoil, in critical
situations that require decisions, interventions and
changes.
Marini is a technician who has emigrated to the big
city in the North from the Tuscan countryside; he is
divided between political and union commitment,
solidarity with his blue collar comrades and his career,
the possibility of emancipating himself and of entering
the bourgeois world. His interest is also divided between
two women: on the one hand, Teresa, the lady, wife of
an engineer, who attracts him with allusions and
innuendoes, and with the lure of futile, ephemeral
things and of affluence; on the other there is Emma, the
factory worker from Umbria, who works all day at the

presses, bowed down by the tempo of piecework and the
number of parts that pass each day under her machine,
in love with him, jealous, ready to follow him anywhere.
Marini does not choose. He remains in the printing
works, does not accept the post of technical manager
which the engineer-owner offers him but in a certain
sense acquires a special position because he exerts a
power of his own, uses his technical and political
influence to get a job in the firm for a friend who has
been dismissed from another business. He does not side
with the owner but maintains a particular type of
relation with him: he belongs to the shop stewards’
committee but does not mingle with the blue collar
workers and is still sensitive to the “waving of the career
flag”. At a certain point in the book it seems as if his
liaison with Emma is about to become more intense and
exclusive, but in the end matters do not turn out this
way. At the end of the book Giovanni Marini likes seeing
Emma, visiting her, and feeling affectionately accepted,
but he takes no initiative. And it is as if his sentimental
life and his work life were both dominated by interesting
and satisfactory possibilities for future developments,
albeit uncertain possibilities: he does not know how
long he will still be able to enjoy “the small amount of
freedom he has achieved, miraculously”, freedom in his
relations with women and with his employer, freedom
that appears to be ensured precisely by putting up with
uncertainty, indecision or by accepting to choose day by
day without the protection of definitive choices (or
certainties).
Le mosche del capitale is a poignant, dramatic,
allegorical composition on the life of two big Italian
industrial corporations and in particular of their top
management, which seems to be entirely devoted to
planning elaborate projects and strategies, endorsed by
scholarly cultural elaborations, for the development of
their organization, to complicated manoeuvres of
appointments and resignations, influenced by subtle
complicated and varying assessments on the subject of

competence, reliability, orientation and attitudes—
all this taking place in imposing offices, elegant
mansions and exclusive restaurants. A flood of
conversations, quotations, meetings and comments, a
torrent, an excess of words (the book seems weighed
down by words) piled up, one after another, which end
with just one or two substantives, the ones that are the
basis, the gist of all talk in the organization and
concerning the organization, ‘power’ and ‘money’: two
everyday and prosaic words of ancient origin, over-used,
but from which one cannot escape. The book tells the
story of Bruto Saraccini, “almost rich, almost in love”,
still young, the first in his exemplary town and even in
the Region; the most intelligent, well-balanced and
capable manager of his glorious Corporation. He works
in the general management of the Personnel
Department of the MFM, in close contact with the
president. He is very professional and attempts to
introduce enlightened and rational criteria for the
management and development of human resources, by
means of studies and research targeted to a unitary and
many-centred skills and collective integrated
management. The President offers him the post of
Managing Director: Saraccini argues, refuses at first,
because this does not fit in with his vision of
organisational reform, but then is flattered and accepts.
At the same time he is offered a post of Personnel
Manager of a big canned meat corporation, that has its
headquarters at Bovino and plays a dominant role in
the Region and in the country as a whole. Suddenly, the
President dismisses his candidacy for the post of
Managing Director of the firm in which he has spent his
life. His position becomes shaky and he decides to hand
in his resignation and accept the offer of the Bovino
corporation. But his plans for technocratic and rational
management, his industrial policy strategies do not find
even there the field of action he hoped for. He does not
become Personnel Manager after all and only manages
to obtain from the President of his old firm a modest

consultancy contract as a mark of gratitude for not
having chosen a career elsewhere.
The story of Professor Saraccini is quite a simple tale
but the novel also narrates a story of organizations,
thence its interest and forcefulness. It is a story about
firms, people and groups that live in and for them: the
bosses, the executives, the various assistants, the
secretaries, the offices, the factory, Tecraso the factory
worker, other employees, the cleaners. Everything in the
corporation is animate and can reveal secrets and home
truths about everyone, everything tells a story: chairs
bags, plants, the dog and the parrot of doctor Astolfo.
But every story is about oneself for oneself; these are in
all cases handled ‘elsewhere’; it is a manner of
expressing oneself, of showing off at times; an
explanation directed to those outside, to the reader.
Similarities and differences in the

three novels
The three novels are set respectively at the time of early
industrialisation at the end of the last century, at the
time of industrial development in the second post-war
years (in the years of the “economic miracle”) and at the
beginning of the post-industrial phase. From a
geographic point of view the books cross Northern Italy
from East (Trieste) to the centre of the Pianura Padana
(Milan) to the West (Ivrea and Turin). The stories involve
two small or medium-sized companies (the Maller Bank
and the Alessandri printing works) and two large
national or multinational corporations (which no longer
carry the names of their owners: the families of the
owners are still there, but are less involved in the
corporation’s operation). The firms belong to different
productive sectors (finance, printing, big production of
consumer goods) and are involved in processes of
market organization, development, the creation of new
productive schemes, liaisons and mergers with other

concerns or the problems of their internal structure.
The three main characters, who are aged between
thirty and forty, are employees. Alfonso Nitti is a clerk,
one of the latest arrivals in the bank and on the lowest
rung of the hierarchical ladder; Giovanni Marini is the
technical vice-manager of the printing works; he has, so
to speak, “risen from the ranks” but sits in the heart of
the firm, at an intermediate level, fairly close to the
management; Bruto Saraccini “is a second-grade
executive in charge of personnel, social relations and of
the corporation’s image and its services, of advertising”;
this means he has a senior position in the firm’s
hierarchy, is in the top grade of employees and is in
contact with the President and the Board of Directors.
These three characters possess common traits: they
have been transplanted, they are people who have left
their place of origin (which they recall with varying
degrees of nostalgia or homesickness) in order to enter
the firm’s organization; people that come from other
cultures and that have more or less equipped
themselves to find, maintain, acquire a place in the firm
and a recognised position in society. They are also
people who suffer. They have a measure of success, see
the results of their work, but above all they have
physical and psychic problems, are plagued by malaise,
uneasiness, fears.
Uneasiness and disquietude are indicated and
described several times in the novels. Let us take, for
instance, the following passage from Una vita:
Since he had been employed his robust organism,

that had no longer the outlet of country labour for
arms, and legs and that did not find sufficient
compensation in the inconsiderable intellectual
exertions of his work as an employee, contented
itself with getting his brain to create entire worlds.
(p. 15)
“My pain is in no small measure increased by the

haughtiness of my colleagues and superiors.
Perhaps they look down on me because I am not so
well dressed as they are. They are all dandies that
spend half the day before the looking-glass. Silly
creatures! If it were a Latin classic I could comment
on the whole of it, whereas they do not even know
its name. Such are my troubles…” (p. 4)
A similar passage from Le mosche del capitale:
That night Saraccini could not get to sleep. At three

o’clock he was tossing and turning, gripped also by
the fear of losing energy for the days to come. He
turned to two Valium pills with the absent-minded
and weary air of a head of State, of a great creator
who feels his sovereignty is forced to make
compromises, even with himself, to make a
different, increased use of the organs of his body,
as if drawing on his nervous and mental resources.
(p. 16)
He is afraid. Afraid of comrades disciples priests
of hidden prophets. Afraid of the cutting
simplifications of the production engineers. Afraid
of the common sense and the jokes of the salesmen.
Afraid that the physicists and mathematicians of
the computers might come to ask him for
indispensable input and, while awaiting his
answer, should stop, blocking all information,
Afraid of having to dismiss, change piecework
calculations completely and all other parameters
for salaries, rearrange categories, plan promotions,
return an answer to the union…(p. 15)
And from Tempi stretti:
Marini and Paolo hurried silently towards their

usual trattoria on the corner; it was late. The place
was full of factory workers at the end of their meal;
inside, cigarette smoke and noise. Paolo was

suffering behind his contrite thin face and his
glasses. As soon as they were seated at a table
covered in oilcloth, Giovanni asked him: “[Surely],
if Alessandri did not shout, the firm would go to
pot?” They were brought cold and greasy stuff; each
time Giovanni remembered the food in Tuscany,
where he had come from many years before. (p. 21)
“We will have bosses as good as we are, as
reasonable as we are, is it not so, Paolo?” Then he
added, on the doorstep of the works, “these
continual batteries require too many deaths.” (p.
24)
As the means of more detailed analysis, I decided to

examine the first chapter of the three novels. This
choice was dictated not by pragmatic necessities only. It
is based on an observation made by several students of
social perception, that the first images, the first words
encountered in a new situation have a crucial
importance for the following act of cognition (Secord and
Backman, 1964). Not only do they create a basis which
defines the level and the quality of the following
exchanges, but oftentimes they present, in a condensed
form, the aspects and elements which will be developed
and elaborated in what follows (Olivetti Manoukian,
1983).
The strong presence of ‘the boss’

In these three books the reader is made acquainted
immediately with the situation, plunged directly in the
midst of things in the work place office, factory,
industrial town and informed of the relations existing
between the people who were there. And together with
the descriptions of the furnishings, the conversations,
the people and the roles, there is a figure that stands out
clearly and puts all the rest in the shade, a character
that dominates the picture. It is ‘the boss’, to use the
most hackneyed and banal word; engineer Alessandri,

Mr. Maller, President Nasàpeti, to call them by their
name; in organisational language, the person who
possesses the greatest authority and power. We are
given a real and proper portrait of each of these
characters as seen in their place of work. They even
seem to resemble one another. Alessandri has “a big
head”, “big eyes, big glasses”, “iron grey hair”, “a big
mouth”, “a wide face”. Mr. Maller “was a strong man of a
robust build, fat but tall…he was nearly completely bald,
his full beard was thick, not long, fair bordering on red…
he wore gold-rimmed glasses. His head had a vulgar
look on account of the deep red of his scalp”. President
Nasàpeti appears “with various flushes”, “increasingly
flushed”, “a deepening flush spreading”, “his flush
subsiding as he sucked a big cigar”, “he appeared less
flushed, his nose lying between the opposite almonds of
his face, similar to the observable heavy dimensions of
his intentions”; “his face, reflected in the transparent
circle of the liquor, took on a golden hue, eyes and nose
included”. This last character is seen against the
background of an expensive restaurant, a special place
for confidential meetings and negotiations, well-suited
to a person who not only possesses and rules a
productive organization with clearly marked boundaries
and space, bit directs and controls financial operations,
political choices, social processes in a much larger area,
which is also potentially in expansion:
“I shall put you…together with engineer Sommerso

Cocchi.” “But I …” objected Saraccini… “You will do
so,” repeated Nasàpeti,” you will help me, you will
do it and do it well… You know our currents and
our coastline and will be able to chart your course.”
“But this does not only involve sailing along,”
countered Saraccini gravely, “not only sailing but
directing currents, reconstructing ports, enlarging
the harbor, by degrees but with decision, towards
the open seas, to establish relations also with the
oceans, their arsenals, markets, silos all over the

world”. (Le mosche del capitale, p. 12)
The owner-managers of earlier decades possessed an

office, inhospitable, with drab furniture but with
carpets; it was the only room in the concern that had
the floor covered by a carpet. Possible differences in the
accommodation reserved for the ‘bosses’ do not modify
the way they interact with their employees, which, in
the three novels—although these were written at a
distance of several decades one from the other follows
the very same lines. The boss summons and speaks
benevolently to the youngest of his collaborators, allows
him to enter his private life, the privacy of his home, of
his thoughts and plans, approaches him with open and
amiable familiarity:
“I wanted to have a little talk with you,” said the

engineer smiling… “I want also young Marini, who
comes so to speak from the ranks—but this is to
his credit—to get to know me and our problems
better, to get into the heart of things”.
And Alessandri’s confidential talk immediately
excited the two members of the technical
management, because they had been admitted to
the rare intimacy of their employer; “I also have a
right to be tired,” he continued, “but not to look
tired. Tired of having a hundred eyes—I wish I
could trust everyone, I would like to decentralize.
My life would not be only here…if I had not been
compelled to give up all personal possibilities”.
(Tempi stretti, p. 12–13)
“You will be doing me a favor if you come
tomorrow evening to tea” … “Why torment your
mother by writing that you are dissatisfied with me
and I with you? Don’t be surprised! I have it from a
letter your mother wrote to miss… The good lady
complains about me…” (Una vita, p. 16)
He smiled, in order to give the impression of

great confidence and also to indicate how light the
facts looming ahead and the tasks to be faced,
would prove as a result of reciprocal trust and
understanding. Nasàpeti on his side was less
carried away, he was pleased with himself for
having managed to say and propose everything
without having to overcome the difficulties and the
effort of the necessary formalities, and in addition
in a manner that appeared confiding and
generous…satisfied with himself for having also
managed to convince and excite that young man
who was, indeed, valiant and good-looking but also
uncooperative and reserved, not to say unsociable…
(Le mosche del capitale, p. 12–13)
The employees consider this “a rare privilege” and their

hearts overflow with affection, they feel a bond of
positive feelings, they feel attracted:
“Indeed?” thought Giovanni. In all cases his

employer was a man: he had laid bare the works
that made him tick on… He [Giovanni] used,
involuntarily, the tone of an understanding and
gruff friend. The engineer appreciated this
immensely and revealed an even deeper layer of
himself… While he waited he gave them a wide
smile, a silent sign of friendship, to dismiss them.
Marini then felt a surge of affection for him mingled
with annoyance and fear. (Tempi stretti, pp. 13–15)
He had to admit that Mr. Maller looked kind and,
being of an impressionable nature, his position in
the bank seemed to have improved; finally someone
was taking notice of him! (Una vita, pp. 16–17)
In his turn Saraccini withdrew himself into the
warm web that the impetuous love for the professor
had blown up around him, around his head. A
total, infinite love, as he himself defined it, like one
possessed, like a leader for his cause, the same as
for his town and for his own big concern (Le mosche
del capitale, p. 12)
The ambiguity of the situation remains: almost

immediately, the young employees seek a retreat:
The sudden interruption led them, while they took

refuge in their narrow office on the lower floor…
dazed and with a feeling of floating on air: the
engineer’s confidential talk had acted as a sweet
poison that had to be got out of their system. (Tempi
stretti, p. 16)
He regretted, however, that he had not behaved
with greater frankness and greater sincerity; why
had he denied the truths he had confessed to his
mother? He ought to have repaid his principal’s
kindness by a frank explanation of his wishes and
would have had the satisfaction of seeing some of
them satisfied, with the advantage of starting a
friendly relationship with his principal, because
there is nothing wrong in asking for protection.
(Una vita, p. 17)
Saraccini was silent for the rest of the evening.
The investiture him down and made him feel
unsteady. In the last part of his meeting with the
President he was polite and formal and took
pleasure in seeming surprised and almost
overwhelmed. (Le mosche del capitale, p. 15)
Seen from the bosses’ point of view, this meeting with a

collaborator seems an important episode and not strictly
connected with production issues; indeed it appears to
be instrumental for exploring, re-establishing, keeping
up relations of active, faithful dependency, for creating
ties, making the whole weight of one’s benevolent power
felt and communicating with intensity and warmth
one’s own values, one’s own concept of the organization
and of the behavior that was rewarded in it. Mr. Maller,
when he assures Nitti “that in the office they are fond of
him”, placing him in a position that is completely

symmetrical to his own (“we are all men”) tells him
somewhat shortly and in no uncertain terms that
complaints are not tolerated in the firm, that all the
degrees of the hierarchy must be respected and that he
must work better. The engineer reminds the boy Marini
who is intelligent but pays too much attention to the
conditions of blue collar workers that he himself “as a
boy had only time for work”, “to work in order to study
in the evening” and that in his heart of hearts he would
always see relations between people differently, “more
poetic, more human”, but “everyone must pursue his
responsibilities to the end, because no imperative is
greater than this”. President Nasàpeti does not even
camouflage his strategy for making use of his young
executive, “a popular agreeable collaborator”; he wants
to test him, to verify if he understands that “to
command is better than…”, “that to be powerful is
rewarding everywhere”, “that money is the best thing in
the world”. Only in such a manner can he be co-opted
among real managers.
These inscriptions provide interesting indications as
to how subordinates relate with their superiors. I wish
to stress just a few elements that are self-evident and
fairly suggestive. Consider, for instance, the bodily
representation of these characters: they all posses a
certain impressiveness, some ‘imposing’ trait—big, fat,
tall. As if the people who occupy important positions in
the social hierarchy should of necessity prove their
superiority by their looks. It has also been noticed by
researchers in the field of social psychology that the
position, the role of a leader is commonly perceived as
associated with a strong and attractive physique.
Physical attributes appear to be an important factor
contributing to their legitimation and inspiring respect,
even if they have little to do with ability and competence
intrinsically required for the role.7 In the three novels it
is the head of our bosses that is described, the higher
part of the body that symbolises the outward signs of
their high office, but also to stress a grossness, a lack of

refinement; they remind one of those descriptions of the
parvenu industrialists, of the nouveaux riches, the
profiteers who in first and second post-war years
appeared on the social scene in Italy, looked down on by
the aristocracy and by the intellectual bourgeoisie,
hated by the working class from whose ranks they had
risen.8
The relations between boss and employee are very
affectionate; it is not, however, the love that, according
to Freud, binds the individuals belonging to the large
organised masses (the Church and the Army) to their
leaders, a love which is imbued with idealisation and
based on the illusion that the supreme commander
loves all the individual components of the mass with
equal love (Freud, 1922). In the organisational
situations described in the three novels, the boss is
near his subordinates. There is a constant relation
between them, certain aspects of which are captured in
face to face encounters. The boss does not excite an
unconditional admiration, nor does he demand total
dedication. He is not a superman, he is a man, but not
only a man because the relationship one has with him
is distinctly asymmetrical: he is a “man-father”. It is not
mere chance that family references become explicit
when this character enters the scene. “Why make your
mother unhappy by writing that you are dissatisfied
with me and I with you?” (Una vita, p. 16), Mr. Maller
asks Alfonso Nitti, as if he were about to scold his
adolescent son for confiding to his mother matters that
should be dealt with only between men. And President
Nasàpeti finds himself compared to the father of
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Leopold Mozart: “promoter,
7 In a study of how business administration students in various
countries perceive organisational power, a group of German

students described the power-holders in the companies they
knew as equipped with similar physical attributes (Czarniawska-
Joerges, 1990).
organizer, persecutor, consoler” of his son, “father-

enterprise”, “ruthless, ambitious, blinded by success”
but also a father who helps and keeps an eye on one,
who protects one “in order to organize and guide work in
a scientific and social sense” (Le mosche del capitale,
pp. 8–9). The Ottieri’s novel describes in its first pages
the celebration of a 25th anniversary of the family-firm,
its “silver wedding” in which Alessandri, “father and
founder” explains how he faced and faces day by day all
the problems connected with the continuation of work
because “our firm is a big family. I am only its guide,
and therefore, if you will allow me, I am to certain
extent your father. A father will naturally always take
care not to abandon his children” (Tempi stretti, p. 10).
And on the employee’s side affection seems to make it
possible to face fear, which one experiences inevitably
as one has in all cases to reckon with an interlocutor
who—precisely on account of his position—is a stranger
and elusive, a source of uncontrollable and menacing
demands.9 The most immediate feelings when
summoned by the principal appear to be apprehension
and anxiety; in spite of this one must assume a proper
attitude, not reveal one’s difficulties but instead come
forward with a free-and-easy demeanour, while
remaining carefully alert in order to notice every sign
that helps one to decode the other person’s position.
One is greatly relieved when one finds with incredulity
that indeed the other is a person (“he had to admit that
Mr. Maller looked like a kind person”, “in all cases his
employer was a man; he revealed the mechanisms that
made him tick”), who has ideas with which one can
agree, who wants to give one a special task (“surprised,
slow to feel the happiness of being able to show and
enjoy the surprise”).
8 Such descriptions remind one of the typical caricatures of

capitalism or, to be more exact, of capital, that is personified by a
large thickset man, with a big head, big hands full of rings and a
big cigar in his mouth.
In the organization described in the three novels,

enterprise organizations, the relations between the
superior and the subordinate are at first considered
hard and menacing, as Volponi says, a reality that is
“organised above and ruthless below”: they can be
softened by placing them in a family context where by
definition feelings must in all cases be directed to a good
purpose, a context that can prove, in some measure,
protective both for who is on top and for who is at the
bottom, precisely because one is not in a real family
where in the name of familiarity everything is permitted.
These relations can be tempered by extending them
through multiple and diversified interactions, not
predetermined only by the position superiority-
subordination.
The invisible boss: Time

Another factor exerts a great influence on the life of the
organization: time. It qualifies the tasks carried out in
working activities, in the sense that, generally speaking,
one has to produce within specific time limits so as not
to exceed specific costs, and also—as in the case of the
Maller bank—because the success of certain services
depends on their timeliness; a day delay in sending off a
letter with a subscription offer means losing customers
and subscribers. The length of the time the various
individuals take to carry out their tasks is a measure of
their diligence but above all of their ability, manual or
otherwise. Sanneo, who is a master of efficiency in the
correspondence sector of the bank, who is always on his
feet and effects every operation with prodigious rapidity,
9 Ottieri remarks in 1954 in his Taccuino industriale “Fear plays a

big role in hierarchical relations, some employees feel it very
strongly; maybe it has distant origins: one is afraid of exciting
displeasure for a mere nothing, Factory workers have an
economic fear, and we have a psychological fear. We are more
frightened than is necessary, and we write in prey of this
deforming feeling” (1961, p. 42).
is the reverse of the proof-reader in the Alessandri

printing works, who accumulates delay and in his haste
lets printing errors escape him. The time that individual
workers are prepared to devote to work, without a pause
and without unnecessary distractions, with evening
overtime, is the gauge of their devotion, their interest in
the smooth running of production and in the whole set-
up of the firm. It is the “fast pace” of piece work that
guarantees the profitability of the concern.
Time is a factor that more directly refers back to the
very corner stone of every firm’s organization, its very
foundation and the final end for which every firm’s
organization exists: money, brass “the best thing in the
world”, “the more there is of it the better the world is”;
“money that is the world, the real world, the only
possible one inhabited by man, the centre of the
universe” (Le mosche del capitale, p. 14). And even in
the large multinational concern, where capital returns
do not depend only on production and sales but also
and above all on intelligent financial allocations and
initiatives, time, invisible and inexorable, marks success
or failure. If time, as a result of technological progress
and automation, no longer controls work and the
worker, it in all cases controls capital.
Every five minutes interest is calculated, every ten

the rate of inflation, every half hour…the price
index of raw materials. every three hours the
exchange rate of the dollar, the Swiss franc. (Le
mosche del capitale, p. 14)
Time is the basis of organisational order. The time-table

of working hours is part of the rules regulating the
workplace, but it has a meaning that greatly transcends
mere practical requirements: it is a sort of unwritten law
to which everyone is subject, witnessing the existence of
a pact that cannot really be discussed between the
individual and the organization; it is an order that
individuals cannot consider established for their use
and consumption but that is in force because it is

contained in the very existence of work organization.
“I am not interested in your private affairs, if you

work better under artificial light or in sunlight.
What interests me is the fact that you repeatedly
did not keep to your working hours, that you, and
you alone, want to make your own timetable, while
everyone, myself in the first place, has for twenty-
five years obeyed an internal law of work, a
necessity, a necessity of order.”
Alessandri shouts these words at his unpunctual

employee and specifies angrily: “Who are you to take the
liberty of coming and going whenever you like? You
consider yourself a genius with laws of your own. We
are all equal! You are nothing more than a primary
school teacher!” (Tempi stretti, p, 19). Working hours are
the most tangible and visible element in the rules to
which the individual is subject; respecting them means
respect for the organization; not respecting them leads
to a refusal of the individual by the organization. “You
are only a primary school teacher!”, this sentence
pronounced in a disparaging tone by engineer
Alessandri, concludes the harsh rebuke directed at the
proof reader and seems to drive him back vehemently to
a minor role in the social scale (where one works with
children, but is not up to measuring oneself with
adults) and at the same time proclaims publicly that he
is inadequate, unworthy of belonging to a concern.
These comments inspire further reflections of a more
general nature on the subject of the difficulties that
have arisen in many firms with the adoption of flexible
working hours and especially with the introduction of
part-time work. In particular it allows one to
understand the hostility of public employees (especially
those who have a defined professional position) towards
clocking in. Submitting to time regulations means
submitting to the “law of organization”.
Production of what?
What is being produced in organizations described by
Svevo, Ottieri and Volponi? In the Maller bank
production takes place with a varying input transformed
by means of a division of work that tends to break down
the operations which individual clerks have to carry out
in sequence. It is a matter of writing and sending off
letters; the original letter is written by the head clerk, the
clerks have to copy a certain number of letters changing
the addresses and the number of shares offered. The
first clerk who finishes copying a letter passes it on to
his colleague who uses it as an original to copy. The
completed letters have to be passed on to the head to be
signed and then they are posted. For greater speed long
letters—four-page-letters—are divided between several
employees and the accountants are added to the clerks
assigned to correspondence. As the task is standardised
it is possible to insert operators that are not specifically
qualified for the job. There is a strong, rigid time-
interdependence in the execution of the work (known as
segmental independence, Thompson, 1967) within the
subsystem of the correspondence department and the
correspondence and mailing subsystems. An employee
can only start working if a colleague passes him the
letter to copy and the mailing can only begin when the
letters that have been written reach the mailing sector.
These points of contact are also points of conflict both
between colleagues and between the head and his
employees.
In the Alessandri printing works the production is
dominated by the machines which must work without
interruption; every time they stop means an intolerable
expense and all the work process seems to hang on the
necessity of feeding the machines without stopping.
The flow of orders varies a good deal and provokes
serious problems in the planning of production. The
technical management, placed very near the workshop,
in an office separated only by a glass partition, has to
reduce “a torrent to a river”. The production in small

series has to face an input that varies considerably and
is unpredictable (Woodward, 1965). The most visible
form of division of labour is between type—setting and
printing that are linked together by the foreman who, all
by himself “ran about all day”. The worker behind the
machines stands straight up and does not move, as if
he were not doing anything, for hours on end. The
production consists of printed sheets in thousands of
copies.
In both situations those who are directly involved in
the production process do not seem to be much involved
and interested in the specific results of their work. Nitti,
who has to copy the letters, reads them without making
any comment, exactly like someone who has to take
note of the words to be able to transcribe them. The
factory worker Consonni, whom Giovanni Marini
observes, standing in front of the machine with a black
overall, does not even know what is written on the
sheets that are printed; also for Marini this is an
unimportant detail. To produce means keeping up with
orders than either accumulate or stagnate. What is
important is for the sheets to pile up regularly in their
thousands.
In both cases, although work does not require either
muscular or intellectual effort, it is tiring; it creates a
great lassitude; one is terribly sleepy and bored, but one
must not let one’s mind wander, even if one is dazed
and moves slowly, numb and inert. One comes to life
again, at the idea of doing something different, being
given another job or even just going out to have a meal.
What is the result of organisational actions? What is
produced by the individuals and the organization as a
whole? In the eyes of the writers, the concrete objects
such as letters, printed pages, etc. are not important
outcomes of organisational work. We are observing
small companies where the employees are not numbers
or function codes, but are known by their names and
surnames. Nevertheless, there is a message that
organizations produce, rather than goods and services,

constraints, stressful operating procedures and limiting
structures. Not even the people in the top positions
know very well what the organization is supposed to
deliver and why.
The parabola of an industrial company is

mysterious. We create it but it has a fate like a live
person. What fate await ours? Perhaps to pass from
father to son. But my sons have other interests…
Let’s leave it at that. (Tempi stretti, p. 14)
The company production is kept in some measure

under control by its top ranks, but they also seem to be
a long way away from the specific quality of what is
produced. What is printed in his firm does not seem to
Alessandri to be in itself so important; it does not seem
be the object of particular interest, of particular feeling,
but it is a means for promoting the expansion of the
concern and, consequently, his own social success.
In the Volponi’s novel, the factory worker is “registered
and incorporated in the big meat canning factory. He is
a metalworker rather than a butcher or a cook”. What is
emphasised is this paradoxical observation that the
technical competence is completely irrelevant to the
organization’s output. In the factory there is a bit of
everything: from “a lively escapade with one of the
cleaners or some other woman in the canteen or in the
offices” to drugs, the shop stewards’ committee,
dismissal. A series of relationships is produced, made
possible by sharing of same conditions. On the other
hand, products appear to be indifferent also to the top
brass who know them essentially for their value added…
The people we see at work in this case are the president
and high-grade executives; they must write letters,
memos—each one different from the other—addressed
to the shareholders, the press and the management,
saying that the budget closed with a four billion deficit
and there will be no dividends. It escapes them all that
the results of their works is not to publish their budget

but to legitimate their attempt to remove two members
of the Board, a task that has little to do with production
but a lot to do with power.
The works under scrutiny reveal a representation of
organizations where the structures of coercion and the
social and relational dimensions are especially visible.
The ‘tasks’ of the organization are given little attention—
this is, clearly, not a factor of great importance for
organisational functioning. This thesis which seems to
be proposed by the writers contrasts greatly with the
researchers assuming the task analysis as the main
perspective (Woodward, 1970; Butera, 1983). The
understanding of organizations requires, instead, the
recognition of the way it is construed, and especially of
the internal connections, which appear to be crucial for
finding one’s place and orientation in an organization.
One could hypothesise that it is the organisational
structures, as present for those working there, are the
most irnmediate arena of interest for understanding an
organization. This could be the result of a widespread
internalisation of knowledge transmitted by means of
various social and training processes. But could it be
due to the fact that attention paid by individuals to
“organisational forms” corresponds to the need to find
one’s place in the system of relationships before
considering the production processes and the results of
one’s own and other people’s work? Such queries are not
just marginal. They restate a problem that is still
unsolved concerning the nature of the bond between the
individual and the organization. Such a bond takes form
of a degree of “belonging”; it is sought after (or refused)
in order to “be part of’, it is kept up (or severed)
according, for instance, to the place it ensures in
internal relations, and consequently in social relations;
it is developed by acquiring and promoting everything
that strengthens organisational unity, that is to say
obedience to established authority, consensus for
traditional values, support for orthodoxy. The hero of
Bigiaretti’s novel (Il Congresso, 1963) goes to the point

of asserting:
“For me, perhaps, at this stage of my life,

apparently neither Christ nor Marx appear to
matter; the meaning they have for such a big
proportion of humanity, the different hopes they
engender no longer have any effect on me. A much
greater influence on my destiny is extorted by
Cavaliere del Lavoro Giorgio Usai [the hero’s boss],
risen from the ranks, as he says, solid, compact,
without even the smallest hole in the block of his
certainties. He is, unknowingly, the ideologue who
has slowly warped my mind and adjusted it to
its function. (pp. 196–197)
At the same time, the bond with the organization

signifies also “taking part”, “having a part in”, i.e.
knowing and working to create objects and projects,
occupying a position, having at one’s disposal methods
and means, using forms and procedures for making,
building, providing something that is appreciated and
recognised both for one-self and for the organization.
While “belonging” is easy to recognise and to
communicate, “taking part” is more uncertain, because
it is relatively more undefined, negotiable, conflictive. It
is no mere chance that the dimension of the relation is
stressed more often by those who have other ties, belong
to other types of group (in addition to the work
organization), for instance a professional order, a social
group or a scientific community. According also to the
theories developed by Freud in his Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego, it would seem that the
individual has with the organization a bond in which
what is done in the organization is marginal. The highly
organised masses, artificial masses, who are under a
head, such as the Church or the Army, are integrated
by means of identification processes, that is to say by
means of intense relations between individuals: it is a
collection of individuals who have assumed as an ideal

if the Ego the same object and that therefore have
identified themselves with one another one their Ego
(Freud, 1922).
Here the term object is used with a particular psycho-
analytical meaning, in the sense of another person with
whom the individual is in touch; and this other person,
in the present case, is the head who is shared by all the
members of the organization.
What acquires special significance in the eyes of the
novelists is exactly that what is considered improper or
irrelevant by the classical theories of organizations, even
if of recent there are attempts to rehabilitate these
topics (Ashford and Fried, 1988; Kets de Vries and
Miller, 1987; Schneider and Shrivastava, 1988; Zan,
1988). Companies do not pro duce so much goods and
services as stratified procedures, styles of action and
interaction, processes of positive and negative
identification and, above all discourses, denominations,
linguistic products which allow to consolidate and
maintain the organisational order (Czarniawska-Joerges
and Joerges, 1990). In the novel by Volponi, which is
the most recent and therefore reflecting the spirit of a
contemporary business organization, these phenomena
are especially evident. The life and the vitality of the
companies appear to be concentrated not on
technologies or any other aspect of the concrete process
of production, but on conversations, talks, interviews,
alliances, missions, resignations, nominations.
Production, if production there is, appears to be only a
production of words:
And thus how could he burrow under the words of

the concern, still colder and more distant,
mechanical and automatic, and even more distant
from the ones pronounced a moment before by
doctor Astolfo and find under them a deposit of any
sort of truth that was socially acceptable or even
exchangeable? He really had the impression of
walking, living and working only on words, on the

terms of reports, statements, principles, orders and
organization charts. (Le mosche del capitale, p. 216)
The allegorical manner of telling the story emphasises

this image. We can also surmise either that this was
done on purpose or that the author’s perception is
warped and therefore, as a result of his ideas, he tends
to illustrate only this side of organisational reality. We
can, however, also suppose that in every organization
(including industrial corporations and not only in
National Health Centres or in regional agencies, Olivetti
Manoukian, 1988), individuals have a subjective and
organisational difficulty in understanding the
productive dimension and the overall task of the
organization: for those on the lower and medium levels
there is alienation-estrangement resulting from the
subdivision and the complexity of operations; in the
higher grades interest is directed elsewhere (Turani,
1989). In this perspective, the production of discourses,
of slogans, of passwords, fulfils an important
maintenance function because it provides the
organization and the organisational actions with
meaning.
A non-idyllic organization
The analysis of organization made by these privileged
witnesses-the fiction writers—not only contradicts but
also refers to the concepts known from classical theories
of organization. Let me point out some of these.
Environment is considered crucial in all the novels: it
qualifies the choices and the running of the concern, it
influences the behavioural and management models of
individuals. All that exists, however, beyond the limits
of organization can be read and interpreted in different
ways by various actors and the reactions to the stimuli
of the environment need not necessarily be the same.
Organizations are materialised in their structures. In
Volponi’s novel this process of reification and acquiring

of a life of their own invests a series of inanimate objects
that are to be found in the workplace, and such objects
prove as present and influential as people, if not more:
the plants, the president’s personal briefcase, donna
Fulgenzia’s chair, the desk, the computer terminal, the
door, the dog and the parrot are a sort of trait d’union
that emphasises the lack of difference between human
beings and objects: people become objects and objects
persons. They are organisms with a life of their own, a
destiny of their own, are dominated by a strong and
univocal rationality, even if this does not always prove
to be completely coherent with the ends they explicitly
pursue. Their objectives, indeed, are several: the leaders
of an organization try to simplify them and reduce them
to a small number of elements, but the very same
leaders find it difficult to distin guish and follow
directions and to substantiate wishes.
There is one point emphasised in all these analyses:
the great attention is dedicated to the importance of the
presence and actions of individuals, on the relations that
exist between them and in particular on the non-
symmetrical relations, intensely impregnated with
power. This word, which is absent (expelled?) from a
large section of “scientific” works on organization—
slanted mainly to find functional models, that can be
prescribed for the solution of operational problems—
bursts into the scene, with liveliness and violence, in
the descriptions of novel writers. Organisational
integration is obtained by coercion, there are no
converging interests between individuals and groups
and if they exist they are instrumental and dangerous:
the consensus, the participation required from those
who work in the concern may allow one more room for
action but the risk of being manipulated hangs heavily
over all this. Therefore a power has been identified, the
power of capital, or the power of the top echelon of
society, power that overflows from organisational roles,
goes beyond the limits of the exercise of hierarchical or
functional authority, the authority required to govern

the processes of work rationally. And this power can be
observed coming into play especially in interpersonal
relations, in the micro relations that are the substance
of daily work.
The importance which this point of view assumes for
the authors is inevitably connected with the need to
rework their own experience. This indicates that in
order to develop an understanding of organization,
individuals cannot be reduced to dependent variables,
they are actors representing interests and also creators
of the meaning of their own and other people’s actions
(Zey-Ferrell, 1981). It also highlights the fact that being
placed in an organization is for an individual a difficult
and problematical experience.
In a wider perspective this suggests an image which is
disenchanted and bitter, a hard, non-idyllic image of
organizations. It is an image that emphasises the drama
of individual: a resigned adaptation to the logic behavior
in orga nizations, that legitimises only the extreme
choices, which became the fate of the protagonists and
the authors alike. These choices consist, on the one
hand, of a resigned adaptation to the logic of
organization with its protective rules and its depressing
impersonality; on the other, of taking a plunge into
informality, with its variety and richness but also its
risk of disappointment in personal contacts. Marini, in
Ottieri’s book, is driven by his personal history, by his
friends, by reasons of solidarity to side with the
workers, to be with them, to defend job and salary with
them; at the same time he is interested in getting a
position with greater technical and organisational
responsibility and even perhaps in rising in the social
scale; Saraccini, i.e. Volponi, wishes to introduce
innovation, professionality, promotion, consensus and
harmonious participation, but when he finds himself
facing indifference or authoritarian brutality he is
respectful towards the latter, admires it, is almost
fascinated by it.
The situations in which such complexity (both internal

and external) is actually expressed vary in the three
novels but all of them stress the pressure of time, the
rapid succession of events, of organisational rhythms,
of the unwritten rules of behaviour. It is impossible or
very difficult to reflect. One finds oneself in a condition
of emotional confusion, uncertainty. It is hard and
painful to decipher the ambitions, frustrations, feelings
of hate, admiration, solidarity that trouble one’s interior
world; and it is also difficult to interpret the ambiguous
events that happen around. People act in organizations
as if it was impossible to use one’s faculties of thought,
and consequently to meditate, examine, form an idea,
make room in one’s mind for the various events. It is
not clear whether it is a subjective incapacity or a subtle
prohibition, impediment or discouragement that
permeates all the organisational context.
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236
THE MAN WITH ALL THE
QUALITIES:
Can Business, Science and the Arts Go
Hand in Hand?
by
Barbara Czarniawska and Bernward Joerges
Introduction: Estranged worlds and the

Arnheim pattern
Biographies and autobiographies of business leaders
and entrepreneurs point out their aversion towards
knowledge codified in disciplinary canons: intuition,
hunches, and above all accumulated experience and
Fingerspitzengefühl play the important roles in their
lives and successes (Johannisson, 1992). In contrast,
academic intellectuals and professors of economics often
busy themselves demonstrating the superiority of purely
intellectual learning.
Viewed from the seat-in-life occupied by practising
business men and women, intellectual preoccupations
may belong to some elevated, or at least faraway,
impractical culture. But within that culture, another
divide opens, as famously presented in C.P.Snow’s Two
Cultures (1959). It has traditionally been marked by
opposites such as science and literature, faction and
fiction, objective and subjective and so on. Note that in
Snow’s scheme, both practical busi ness and
management science would be lumped together under
the (inferior) culture of ‘science’.
For the purposes of our discussion here, we suggest a
“three culture”-notion: the cultures of business, of
science, and of literature,1 recognizing both the divide
between practical and intellectual and between factual
238 • THE MAN WITH ALL THE QUALITIES
and fictional. It is important for our argument here, that

we see management sciences as sitting, rightfully if
uneasily, on the hedges separating the three cultures
from each other. In this view, the “science of
management” partakes in varying shares in practical
business, analytic science and, in its narrative aspects,
literature. Some may attribute this state of affairs to the
comparative youth of a discipline which has not yet
undergone the conceptual purifications typical of older
fields, like its parent disciplines economics and
sociology. In our view it has much to do with the subject
matter of management sciences—the organising of
modern business and administration—and its
methodological consequences.
If management as an intellectual genre cannot but
partake in “business, science and the arts”, the issue of
their unity becomes a crucial one for the discipline. In
order to demonstrate this argument, one must define a
vantage point somewhat outside the three cultures
themselves. In search of this point we came across
Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities, where
Musil describes, above all through his main protagonist
Ulrich (the man without qualities) the projects of one
Dr. Paul Arnheim (the man with all the qualities) who in
turn is modelled after Walther Rathenau, the German
businessman, politician and writer. The purpose of this
presentation is “the Arnheim pattern”, as Ulrich puts it,
a “combination of mind, business, good living and well-
readness…”. The Arnheim pattern is one version of the
“unity of business, science and the arts”, the integration
of the three cultures, and is strongly problematised in
the novel.
1 Wolf Lepenies has another “third culture”, exemplified by
sociology and other social sciences. In his scheme, management

science would also fall broadly into this third culture (Lepenies,
1988). We would stress the uncertain epistemic and practical
status of disciplines such as business and public administration,
but also the engineering disciplines (Joerges, 1979).
CZARNIAWSKA AND JOERGES • 239
Before we look through Musil’s text at the Arnheim

pattern, we should like to add a few remarks about our
rationale in choosing this particular novel and in
juxtaposing it with certain other, seemingly less
fictional texts.
Musil the semiotic writer

The story of Arnheim/Rathenau is a subplot within the
spiritual odyssey of Musil/Ulrich across the modern
era. It can be read as the story of the possibilities and
pitfalls of merging Money, Mind and Soul, as Musil often
call the three cultures.
Analysing only a part of Musil’s novel creates certain
difficulties. Authors of fiction create worlds—realist,
symbolic, hyperrealist, surrealist and so on. A semantic,
that is, a naive reader, enjoys them as they come and
lives in them, as it were. A semiotic or a critical reader,
analyses how the worlds were made, in order to
increase, not to diminish, the joys of the reading.2
In this essay, we take Musil to be a ‘semiotic writer’,
an author who not only has lived the world which was
contemporary to him, but also took interest in its
makings by reading and listening to certain key texts. We
join him in his readings, treating his work as a kind of
ethnographic account of the shaping of modernity. We
will take interest in his descriptions of the perplexing
attempts and failures in this shaping, as exemplified in
the Arnheim pattern—descriptions which have a
peculiarly de constructive impact, compelling us to
comment on how Musil the author and Musil the
narrator set about their task. In our reading, Musil
cruelly (and misogynously) lays bare not only the taken-
for-granted realities of his time, but also the making of
its master-narratives.
2 The distinction is borrowed from Eco, 1989.

Among his varied cast, we will refer to four basic

characters: Musil, Ulrich, Arnheim, Rathenau. Two of
them are ‘historical’ and two ‘fictive’.3 But they can be
separated only at peril, because they are two pairs of
Siamese twins, or of doppelgangers: Ulrich is Musil’s
alter ego, and Arnheim an alter sui of Rathenau. Musil
created Ulrich, presumably, as an open and unfinished
dream version of himself. He created Dr. Paul Arnheim
in the image of Walter Rathenau (1867–1922), and as a
negative version of Ulrich (and by implication himself).
Arnheim fits our bill because his central project—
reconciling Money, Mind and Soul—is of interest to
management science.
A caveat is in order before we continue our journey: at
no stage are we interested in personalities, whether
‘real’ or ‘literary’. Musil chose to analyse the ways his
world was made by using a polyphonic narrative. The
characters psychologise and psychoanalyse a lot in his
text, but this was symptomatic for the times in which
Musil set his stories, and it is not relevant for the
present analysis, focused as it is on matters of
interorganisational and interprofessional discourse. We
will therefore treat Musil’s protagonists not as
personalities but as Characters—spokespersons for the
Author.
A consequence of this stance is that we will be
compelled to quote Musil at great length. It is he who
does the analysis for us, and although we often step out
and comment and resort to what we know about Musil
and Rathenau/Arnheim from other sources, it would be
3 The difference is not so important since for us both Musil and
Rathenau are fictive characters—our information about them is

based on texts: their own writings and those of their biographers.
For Musil we rely mainly on Corino (1988) and on The Man
Without Qualities; for Rathenau mainly on Buddensieg et al.
(1990) as well as the Walter-Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe
(Rathenau, 1977) (hereafter WRGA) and Nachgelassene Schriften
(hereafter NS; Rathenau, 1928).
unsatisfactory to try and replace his elegant, sarcastic

prose with our own words.
Given the historical figures of Rathenau and Musil,
and the fictional pair Arnheim/Ulrich, we will add a
subtext to our interpretation of the Arnheim episode in
the novel. We do not claim to provide ‘historical context’
but rather add to the book’s narrative about Arnheim/
Ulrich bits and pieces of a narrative about Musil/
Rathenau. This subtext—quotes, biographical material,
reflections on historical circumstance—is presented in
italics as in the following:
Walther Rathenau, son of Emil Rathenau, the

founder of the German electrical concern Allgemeine-
Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), was a multi-talent.
He studied philosophy, physics, chemistry and
engineering. After having held a number of executive
positions in German industry, he organised the war
economy from August 1914 to the spring of 1915
and German economic recovery after the war. In
1922 he became Germany’s foreign minister. He
was assassinated on the way to his office on June
24, 1922.
Rathenau was particularly well suited for Musil’s
purposes because he was a writer himself,
struggling with similar material, scientific, moral-
political, and spiritual-religious issues as Musil
himself. When Rathenau was murdered, Musil wrote
to Efraim Frisch, editor of the Neuer Merkur: “Do
you plan any protest because of Rathenau? Would
come too late. Should it happen in spite of this,
please count me in, even though I belonged to his
literary enemies.” (Corino, 1938, p. 85)
Let us then take a look at Dr. Paul Arnheim, “the

German nabob, a rich Jew, an eccentric who wrote
poems, dictated the price of gold and was the personal
friend of the German Emperor”, in other words a man
talking many languages and speaking for many, as
Musil created him. The other story, that of Walter

Rathenau, will serve both as a complement and a
contrast. This may help us to gain an insight into the
world which created them all: Arnheim, Musil,
Rathenau and Ulrich.
The triple font of power

“Arnheim was a man on a grand scale” (48:224).4 His
fame sprang from three sources: his writings and art,
his knowledge and scientific expertise, his money and
business acumen. Accordingly, he is named “Superman
of Letters”, “Scientific Intellect” and “Prince of
Commerce”. To Musil and to us this triad symbolises
fundamental divisions of labour and discourse
characteristic of the Modern Project.
Yet as always, symbols veil as much as they reveal.
Arnheim does not just stand for the triad of skill,
intellect and inspiration, he also stands for will. He is
undoubtedly a power-broker, a politician—both in the
meaning of a diplomat clever at negotiations, and of a
statesman, in that he considers the affairs of the State,
indeed of states his business. His ambition is to turn
his assets, literature, science and money, into sources of
political power.
But this only strengthens the analogy between Musil’s
world and the world we experience, where the most
fundamental requirement for keeping the division of
labour intact is to ignore impurities of specialisation.
Thus we shall follow Arnheim in his three main roles—
as superman of letters, as scientific intellect, and as
“prince of commerce”—and subsequently try to
approach his particular “mystery of the whole.”
First his writing:
Once or twice a year he retired to his country estate

and there wrote down the experiences of his
intellectual life. These books and dissertations, of
which he had now composed quite an imposing
number, were much sought after, went into large

editions, and were translated into many languages.
(48:224)
Rathenau’s best known works are: Zur Kritik der

Zeit (A Critique of the Time, 1912), Zur Mechanik
des Geistes (The Mechanics of the Mind, 1913), Von
kommenden Dingen (The Shape of Things to Come,
1917), Die neue Wirtschaft (The New Economy,
1918) and Die neue Gesellschaft (The New Society,
1919). But he also wrote essays on about
everything, satire, utopian stories, letters, and
poetry.
Beauty, for Arnheim, lay in ideas, and ideas came from

a realm deeper than intellect itself. Though he
possessed a great intellect, his paramount ambition
transcended the intellectual sphere. Success in
business and politics is grounded in love for beauty,
virtue and the unintelligible.
With intellect alone one cannot either be moral or

conduct the business of politics. The intellect does
not suffice. The things that are decisive take their
course above and beyond its reach. Men who have
achieved great things have always loved music,
poetry, form, discipline, religion, and the knightly
virtues. Indeed, I should even go so far as to say
that only men who do so turn out to be fortunate!
For these are so-called imponderables, which go to
make up the leader, the true man, and there is
even an undertone of it, an uncomprehended
4 Quotes are taken from the Picador Classics edition of The Man
Without Qualities, London, 1988. In order to facilitate
identification of quotations, page numbers are preceded by
section numbers.
residue of it, in the common people’s admiration for

the actor. (76:23)
Further descriptions of the “superman of letters” reveal

him as an embodiment of the nation’s best qualities
rather than a mere writer:
Hence the least that is expected of a superman of

letters is that he should own a motor-car. He must
travel extensively, be received by cabinet ministers,
and give lectures; he must make on the leaders of
public opinion the impression that he represents a
force of con science to be reckoned with. He is
charge d’affaires to the spirit of the nation whenever
evidence of a humanitarian outlook needs to be
shown abroad. When he is at home he receives
visits from notabilities, and all the time he has to
think also of his business, which he has to perform
with the nimbleness of a circus artiste, whose
exertions must not be apparent. (95:154)
This is neither the first nor for the last time Musil/
Ulrich spitefully reveal Arnheim/Rathenau as the
businessmen behind the splendid facade and ridicule
them in their other roles in “putting culture, politics and
society into the service of business” (112:295).
But Arnheim’s power had a second font: his scientific
mind. Arnheim as a Scientific Intellect was again
unusual in the sense of combining what was usually
kept separate.
…although it may certainly fill a man’s life entirely

if he devotes himself to research into the physiology
of the kidneys, yet even then there are moments,
what one might call humanist moments, when he
feels obliged to utter a reminder of the connection
between the kidneys and the nation as a whole…
But if an academic personage wishes to make it
particularly evident that he possesses not only
learning but also a mind that is alive and joyfully

aware of the possibilities the future holds, he will
best prove his claim by referring to writings
acquaintance with which not only reflects honour at
the moment but also promises more honour, like
bonds that are going up in value; and in such cases
quotations from Paul Arnheim enjoyed increasing
popularity. (48:225)
Arnheim, much like the young Rathenau (Joerges,

1994) thought himself as a scientist, who is also able to
perceive the world beyond science.
I myself never play billiards,…but I know that

one can play the ball high or low, from the right or
from the left. One can strike the second ball head
on or merely graze it. One can hit hard or lightly.
One may choose to make the cannon stronger or
weaker. And I am sure there are many more such
possibilities. Now, I can imagine each of these
elements being graduated in all directions, so that
there are therefore an almost infinite number of
possible combinations. If I wished to state them
theoretically, I should have to make use not only of
the laws of mathematics and of the mechanics of
rigid bodies, but also the law of elasticity. I should
have to know the coefficients of the material and
what influence the temperature had. I should need
the most delicate methods of measuring the co-
ordination and graduation of my motor impulses.
My estimation of distances would have to be as
exact as a nonius. My faculty of combination would
have to be more rapid and more dependable than a
slide-rule. To say nothing of allowing for a margin of
error, a field of dispersal, and the circumstance that
the aim, which is the correct coincidence of the two
balls, is itself not clearly definable, but merely a
collection of only just adequately surveyable facts
grouped round as average value. (114:331–332)
The point of this speech is that the billiard player

reveals all this complex knowledge in split second,
intuitively and a-theoretically, a typical Arnheimian
conclusion. But it was not this reverence for the
intuitive and experiential as opposed to formal
knowledge that made his status as a scientist somewhat
dubitable:
The expeditions that he undertook into the territory

of the sciences in order to support his general ideas
did not, frankly, always satisfy the strictest
demands. They did doubtless show an easy
command of great reading; but the specialist
unfailingly found in them those little errors and
misunderstandings that enable one to recognise a
dilettante’s work… However, it must by no means
be thought that this prevented the specialists from
admiring Arnheim. (48:225)
All these sarcasms, together with the “kidney-and-

billiard” metaphors, could well have been aimed at
Rathenau’s Zur Mechanik der Geistes (1913), where he
easily moved back and forth between the realms of
mechanised industry, larger society and the inner life.
Musil/Ulrich acknowledge however the difference
between the familiar nineteenth century dilettante,
moving from one intellectual field to another, and
Arnheim, who “moved between them at the same time,
thus propagating the sciences outside their realm and
bringing the other realms closer to those of the
scientists who wanted to know how the kidneys relate to
the rest of the nation.” And the true specialists were
grateful and called him brilliant and genial, “or quite
simply a man with an allround mind, which among
specialists amounts to much the same as when men
among themselves say of a woman that women think her
good-looking” (48:225).
“The third source of Arnheim’s fame lay in

commerce” (48:225).
The continuation of this quotation reads like a

passage from a Rathenau biography: “He did not do
too badly with those old salts, the seasoned
captains of industry; when he had a big deal to
bring off, he did down even the most alert of them. As
a matter of fact, they did not much think of him as a
business man and called him ‘the Crown Prince’ to
distinguish him from his father, whose short thick
tongue was not mobile enough to talk with ease but
made up for that by picking up the subtlest taste of
anything like business for miles around. Him they
feared and revered. But when they heard of the
philosophic demands that the Crown Prince made on
business men as such, and even wove into the most
matter-of-fact discussions, they could not help
smiling. He was notorious for quoting his poets at
board-meetings and for insisting that commerce was
something that could not be kept apart from all other
human activities, that ought, indeed, to be
considered only in the larger context of all the
problems of national life, including the life of the
mind and of the spirit itself. And yet, even though
they smiled at these things, they could not entirely
fail to see that it was precisely the fact that Arnheim
junior adorned business with these trimmings that
made him of steadily increasing interest to public
opinion”.
In fact, Walter Rathenau was pushed by his father
first into engineering and then into business, and
seems not to have thought of his business
achievements as an important part of his life’s work.
His main historical ambition and significance was
most certainly political. But back to Dr. Arnheim.
Before we look more closely at Arnheim’s business

antics, we take a glance at his origins. Arnheim was the
prince because his father was the king of commerce. To

avoid Musil’s ironies, we allow Arnheim to speak as he
relates his family history to enchanted Diotima:
Foolish people imagine it is a pleasure to possess

money. In fact it is an uncanny responsibility. I
don’t want to talk about countless individual lives
that are dependent on me, so that for them I
almost occupy the place of destiny. Let me only
speak of the fact that my grandfather started as a
rag-and-bone dealer in a middle-sized town in the
Rhineland…
In this refuse-refining process…my grandfather
laid the foundations of the Arnheim’s influence in
the world. But even my father was still what one
would call a self-made man, for one must bear in
mind that inside forty years he expanded the firm
to the dimensions of a world-wide concern. He had
no more than two years at a commercial college, but
he can see through the most involved world
situation at a glance, and knows everything he
needs to know sooner than anyone else does. I
myself studied economics and every conceivable
branch of science, but they are quite outside his
ken and there is no way of explaining how he does
it, yet nothing he touches goes wrong….
When a business has reached a point of
expansion like the very few of which I am here
speaking, there is scarcely anything in life that it
does not become involved with. It is a little cosmos
in itself. You would be amazed if you knew what
seemingly quite uncommercial problems—artistic,
moral and political— I sometimes have to bring up
in conference with the senior chief of the firm. But
the firm is no longer shooting up at the same speed
as in its early days—what I should like to call its
heroic days. No matter how prosperous a business
firm may be, there is a mysterious limit to its
growth, as there is with everything organic…. You
will find the same mystery in the history of art and

in the strange relationships in the life of peoples,
cultures and epochs. (69:320–321)
Here we have it: business as a poetic mystery, full of

beauty and yet following the laws of nature! Arnheim
anticipates the heydays of the “organization as
organism” metaphor (Morgan, 1986). In contrast to the
metaphor of the machine, the image of the organism
expresses the desire for a more satisfyingly efficient
unity of business by scientific as well as intuitive
management.
Although he was insistent on the merger of science
and commerce, Arnheim was more reluctant, felt greater
tension, and acute incongruence with regard to a
possible merger between commerce and the arts. He
coped with it by dealing with the two separately in
succession:
Sitting in one of his directorial offices and checking

sales figures, he would have been ashamed to think
otherwise than commercially and technically; but
as soon as it was no longer the firm’s money that
was at stake, he would have been ashamed not to
think the other way around and insist that
mankind must be made capable of evolving
upwards on some other way that the erroneous
path of regularity, rules and regulations, norms,
and the like, the results of which are so utterly
lacking in inner meaning and are in the last resort
inessential. (106:254)
Like Rathenau, who believed that “national economy is

the fate”, but that nationalism “not in a hundred years
has produced a single work of art or poem of great
value”, Arnheim the Prince of Commerce celebrated the
moral superiority and strength of the arts.
What did the true entrepreneur, Arnheim’s father in

the novel, think about his son’s scientific and poetic
mind?
It seemed to please the old Arnheim, too, that the

younger Arnheim knew so much and was so
accomplished. But when there was an important
question to be decided, and it has been discussed
and analysed for days on end and from the point of
view of technique of production and finance, of
economics and of its bearing on civilisation, the old
man would…not infrequently give orders for the
opposite of what had been proposed…but sooner or
later it would always turn out that the old man had
been right, in one way or another. (112:295–296)
In a view that Musil/Ulrich and Arnheim share, old

Arnheim was always right, and he was often wrong.
Ulrich resolves the contradiction by a bit of interpretive
philosophising: “it is not exclusively the exactness of the
forecast that matters, because after all things always
turn out differently from the way one expects anyway,
and the main thing is to be cunning and tough in
adjusting oneself to their waywardness.” Arnheim tends
to mystify it and thereby probably tries to come to grips
with his own feelings of inferiority and non-identity.
Money turned into a supra-personal, mythical

power, for which only the most original and
genuine people were wholly a match, and he set his
ancestor among the gods. (112:301)
Having achieved this, he could place himself at a

decent, if not so elevated level. He says to Ulrich:
We business men,…on’t make calculations, as you

may perhaps believe. But we—I am speaking, of
course, of the leading men—the little ones,
admittedly, may spend all their time doing
calculations—we learn to regard our really

successful inspirations as something that defies all
calculation, just as the personal success of the
politician does, and the artist’s as well. (66:325)
Not bothering to take the detour through Ulrich, Musil

here injects his sarcasm straight into Arnheim’s direct
speech. If we believed this utterance, we might be led
into believing that Arnheim was neither a writer, nor a
scientist, nor even a business man. In response,
Arnheim/Rathenau, but even Musil/Ulrich might have
pointed out that their specialty and greatness lay in
none of these fields but in their talent to combine them
all: “What all others are separately Arnheim is in one
person” (47:221).
How was it done? The novel provides three versions of
a possible answer. One is the Narrator’s (Musil
narrating through Ulrich), the Character’s (Arnheim’s),
and the Author’s (Musil interpreting).
The mystery of the whole:

Interpretations and interpreters
The Narrator so describes how Arnheim reached this
extraordinary unity:
It was understandable that he could talk to big

industrialists about industry and to bankers about
finance; but he was capable of chatting just as
freely about molecular physics, mysticism or
pigeon-shooting. He was an extraordinary talker;
once he had begun he did not stop, any more than
a book can be finished before everything has been
said that has to be said in it. But he had a quietly
dignified, fluent manner of speaking, a manner
that was almost melancholy about itself, like a
stream overhung by dark bushes, and this gave his
loquacity a touch of necessity. His reading and his
memory were in fact of unusual extent, he could
give experts the subtlest cues in their own field of

knowledge, but he was just as well acquainted with
every important personage of the English, French
or Japanese nobility and was at home on race-
courses and golf-links not only in Europe but also
in Australia and America. So even the chamois-
hunters, hard riders and those who kept their box
at the Imperial theatres, who had come to see a
crazy rich Jew…left Diotima’s house wagging their
heads respectfully. (47:221–222)
An extraordinary talker! Arnheim himself saw it more

mystically:
In some mysterious way the whole counts for more

in life than the details do. So although small people
may be made up of their virtues and faults, the
great man is he who himself endows his qualities
with their rank. And if it is the secret of his success
that it cannot quite be explained by any of his
merits or any of his qualities, the fact is that die
presence of a force greater than any single one of
its manifestations is the mystery on which all the
greatness in life finally rests. (48:228)
Musil the author comments under that: “This was the

way in which Arnheim described it in one of his books;
and when he wrote this down, he almost believed he
had caught the supernatural by the hem of its cloak, and
let as much to be apparent in the text”. He himself has
an altogether better explanation and quite a simple
one:
People liked listening to him because it was so nice

that a man who had so many ideas also had money.
(50:236)
Musil, much as Ulrich, detested Arnheim’s brand of

mysticism: forever short of material resources, he
steadfastly refused to translate his poetic mastery

into political and moral presumptuousness,
maintained a fundamentally unromantic
Weltanschauung as expressed in the “utopia of the
inductive attitude”. His ideal as a novelist was to
learn from Mach and Einstein, not from literature
and poetry. He went at the mystery via
contemporary mathematical speculation, positivistic
science and a fascination with Nietschean
philosophy.
Which explanation of the “mystery of the whole” is

correct? Organization studies has taught us that, rather
than trying to answer this kind of question, it is
important to draw attention to the multiplicity of
interpretations necessarily present in every
organisational context. How is Arnheim seen by others?
Let us listen some more to two of the novel’s characters,
Diotima and Ulrich. They represent very different
categories of spectators. Diotima is naive, very much a
replica of fashionable opinion and highly enchanted by
Arnheim and his visions; Ulrich is sceptical, thoroughly
and arrogantly disenchanted.
As a woman, Diotima represents the naive spectator
in its most dramatic version.5 Here is her rendition of
5 Women are given a lot of space in The Man Without Qualities and
are presented in several variations on the same theme. With the
exception of Agatha, Ulrich’s sister, they are all dealt with in a
fashion, best summarised by Ulrich watching Diotima:
She…struck him as being like a tall, plump heifer of good stock,
sure-footed and with deep gaze regarding the dry grasses on
which she was grazing. In other words, even then he did not look
at her without the malice and irony that took revenge on her
spiritual nobility by using similes drawn from the animal kingdom
and which originated in a profound annoyance directed less at
this foolish model child than at the school in which its
performances enjoyed success. “How pleasant would she be,” he
thought, “if she were uneducated and easy-going and as good-
natured as a big warm female body always is when it hasn’t any
particular idea in its head!” (67:328)
Arnheim talking:
Arnheim sometimes talked, in a breath-takingly

interesting way, about the ramifications of
international capital, about overseas trade, and
about the political background… One needed only
to have heard him speak once about, say, Franco-
German antagonism…: in his exposition it became
a Gallo-Celto-Alpino-thyreological problem
interlinked with that of the Lorraine coal-mines and
further with that of the Mexican oil-fields and the
antagonism between Anglo-Saxon and Latin
America. (78:229)
What irritated Ulrich most was precisely that no matter

how ridiculous Arnheim was, he was right in the centre
of developments and, in the eyes of many, not only
Diotima, correct in what he did. So Ulrich dissects
Arnheim, beginning with his looks:
It was not any details of his physiognomy to which

[Ulrich’s] distaste attached itself, but simply the
whole of it. Although these details—the Phoenician
hardness of the master-merchant’s skull, the sharp
face that was yet flat, as though formed out of too
little material, the English-tailored repose of the
figure, and, at that second place where man peers
out of his clothes, the somewhat too short-fingered
hands—were sufficiently remarkable, it was the
good proportions between all these elements that
irritated Ulich. It was this sureness that Arnheim’s
looks also had: the world was all right as soon as
Arnheim had regarded it… Ulrich suddenly felt a
guttersnipe desire to throw stones or mud at this
man who had grown up in wealth and perfection
(44:209).
It would be hard to emulate these sentiments

looking, for example, at the well-known full-length
portrait of Rathenau painted by Edward Munch (one

of whose pictures he had acquired as early as 1893,
being the first in Germany). Elsewhere Musil states
that Arnheim “did not look Jewish” presumably he
was being ironic about the popular attitude of the
circles he describes, where open anti-semitism was
in bad taste whereas “not looking Jewish” was
considered one of the best attributes a Jew could
possess. For an interpretation of Rathenau’s
assimilationist attempts to resolve this particular
issue see Kaplan (1992).
But the aversion goes much deeper: Ulrich
could not endure Arnheim, could not endure him in

principle, simply as a form of existence, the
Arnheim pattern. This combination of mind,
business, good living and well-readness was
something he found in the highest degree
intolerable. (43:207)
Is it the perfection of Arnheim that so infuriates Ulrich?

One would think envy is the source of aversion, perhaps
understandable in the light of the fact that Diotima was
wholly taken with Arnheim and treated Ulrich as just a
young man. Ulrich tried to unmask his rival and put
him down.
There was a confidence-trick involved in this union

between the soul and the price of coal, a union that
was at the same time a useful dividing-line between
what Arnheim did with his eyes wide open and what
he said and wrote when he was under the twilight
spell of his intuitions. (67:334)
So Ulrich stages ambitious rhetorical duels. But no

matter how hard he tries, he cannot wound the man:
“When Arnheim the man of the mind seemed to be lying
vanquished on the ground, then, like a winged being,
Arnheim the man of reality rose up with an indulgent

smile and hastened away from the idle toyings of such
conversations towards action in Baghdad or Madrid”
(67:335).
The confrontation between the man with no qualities
and the man who had them all is illuminating. Arnheim
speaks for pre-modern man and leads his peers into
modernity. Ulrich is born in modernity, has no past, no
conversion in his biography. Arnheim is a historical
man, Ulrich an a-temporal being. His lack of qualities
resembles an affliction of a later epoch, the “unbearable
lightness of being” (Kundera, 1988). And when Ulrich
was not too irritated by Arnheim, he recognised him for
what he was—the epitome of modern times, even if this
image, too, borders on sheer caricature: “…in the mirror
of this Epicurean connoisseurship Ulrich saw the
affectedly simpering grimace that was the face of the
times minus the few really strong lines of passion and
thought in it…” (67:335).
The encompassing judgement comes in a little scene
with Count Leinsdorf, from the last generation of
Kakanian aristocracy:
“Incidentally”, Ulrich said referring to the object of

[Count Leinsdorf’s] gaping, “that is something one
can no longer call a mind. It is a phenomenon like
a rain-bow that one can seize hold of at each end
and really feel under one’s hand. He talks about
love and economics, about chemistry and canoeing
trips, he is a learned man, a landowner and a stock-
jobber. In that, what we all separately he is in one
person. And this is what amazes us”. (47:223)
Ulrich, in fact much like Diotima, feels that “this was

the new type of man whose vocation it was to take over
the helm of destiny from the old powers” (78:230). And
he fears what she desires.
But in order to put him in the perspective of the
times to come we have once more to shift away from
Arnheim’s and look at ‘context’—the period as Musil the

Narrator presents it.
The texture of the times

Almost all and every concern of Arnheim/Ulrich
remains on today’s agendas. The twentieth century has
been a long replay of them. The Arnheim pattern—
talking commerce, science and the arts together—is in
fact set within the novel in a context of ‘things to come’.
Reading this context against historical hindsight can be
intriguing.
In a long series of musings on the triple relationship—
Money, Mind and Soul—Musil leaves open who exactly
is talking, providing a mirror of his time and opinions on
these matters which read like tongue-in-cheek
commentaries on both Arnheim’s and Ulrich’s
pontifications. On commerce and business:
And it must not be thought that the presidents,

chairmen of boards of directors, governors,
directors, or managers of banks, concerns, mines
and shipping companies were at heart the bad men
that they are often represented as being. Apart from
their very highly developed family sense, the inner
reason of their life is money; and it is a kind of
reason with very strong teeth and a hearty
digestion. They were all convinced that the world
would be much better if it were simply left to the
free play of supply and demand, instead of being
run with the help of men-o’-war, bayonets,
potentates and financial ignoramuses of diplomats.
But the world being as it is, and there being an old
prejudice to the effect that a life that primarily
promotes one’s own and only secondarily and
indirectly the public advantage is less estimable
than chivalry and loyalty to the state, and public
commissions ranking, as they do, morally higher
than private ones, they were the last people not to
reckon with all this; and it is well known that they

made thoroughly sound use of the advantages to
the public welfare offered by customs negotiations
backed up by armed force or by using the military
against strikers. But it is along this road that
business leads to philosophy (for it is only
criminals who presume to damage other people
nowadays without the aid of philosophy). (48:226–
227)
Ironic and cruel; do the sciences and arts fare better?
For members of the inteligentsia curiously enough

often have no money, but only projects and talent,
yet they feel themselves not in the slightest
diminished in value as a result, and nothing seems
to them more obvious than to ask a rich friend, to
whom money does not matter, to support them, for
some good purpose or other, out of his superfluity.
They will not realise that the rich man would like to
support them with his ideas, with his ability, and
with his personal attractiveness. By demanding
money from him they put him, furthermore, into a
position antagonistic to the nature of money; for
the will of this nature is set on increase, just as
animal nature is set on procreation. (92:142–143)
If it is unclear who is ridiculed in this passage, irony

here is directed specifically at the closest of kin—writers.
Is Musil speaking about Thomas Mann, as some have
claimed, or about himself?
Musil’s situation after Hitler’s rise to power in

Germany with respect to the most obvious issue of
the relationship between literature and money, the
material base of writing is described by Eithne
Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, his translators: “What
enabled him to survive and carry on with his work
was the foundation, after 1933, of what is known as
the Musil-Gesellschaft. This was a small number of

people—professional and business men—who
banded together to give Musil financial support. He
accepted this arrangement as his due, for he was a
believer in patronage as an obligation owed to the
artist, either by the State or by anyone else…It is
recounted that he liked to keep check on the
contributors to the Musil-Gesellschaft and would, if
it seemed necessary, ask why So-and-So had not
yet paid up for the quarter”. (Vol. 1, xxix-xxx).
For the fact is, that most men of letters would

gladly be supermen of letters, if they only could…
the only really indispensable qualification for
becoming a superman of letters remains this: one
must write books or plays that will do equally well
for high and low. One must be effective in the world
before one can be effective in the cause of good;
this principle is the basis of every super-literary life.
(95:155)
The real difficulty in the existence of a superman
of letters arises mainly from the fact that, although
it is customary to take a commercial attitude in
intellectual life, long tradition still makes it
necessary to talk like an idealist. (96:158)
While the worlds of business and science are rendered

as caught in the struggles between tradition and a new
age, the spirit of the times is given its most distinct
expression in the dreams of the young artists visiting
Diotima’s salon. Talk was about
The reconstruction of man on the basis of an

Americanised world-labour plan, by means of
mechanised energy…
Lyricism combined with the intensest
dramaticism of life… Technicism—a spirit worthy of
the age of the machine…
Blériot…was at that moment soaring over the

English Channel at a speed of thirty-five miles an
hour! This thirty-miles-an-hour poem was what one
ought to write, and chuck the whole rotten rest of
literature on the dung-heap!
Accelerism was what they demanded, which
meant the maximal increase of the speed of
experience on the basis of the bio-mechanics of
sport and circus-acrobatic precision…
Photogenic rejuvenation through the cinema…
And then all of them said that man was a
mysterious inner space, for which reason he should
be brought into relation with the cosmos by means
of cones, spheres, cylinders and cubes (89:119–
120).
And where was Arnheim in this breath-taking futurist

picture? Actually very much at home: “After all, he had
long been well up in the problems that concerned them.
He knew about the cube and its relationships. He had
built garden-suburbs for his employees. The machine,
with its rationality and its speed, was something he
knew well” (89:121).
“A modern force was on its way” (26:124), and
Arnheim stands as protagonist of the new epoch and
transformer of the old. He performs new variations of
old functions: tutor to kings, universal Renaissance
Man. But he also represents new aspects solely
appearing in modernity, exemplified by revolutionary
changes in patterns of communication and
transportation: Arnheim as media-man and network-
creator.
Arnheim was a darling of the journalists. They took to
him immediately and under any circumstances. Here is
how Musil explains it:
The world of those who write and those who have to

write is full of big words and ideas that have lost
the objects to which they refer. The epithets applied
to great men and great enthusiasms outlive the

causes to which they were originally ascribed, and
as a result a great many epithets are left over. They
were coined at some time or other by some
distinguished man to be applied to some other
distinguished man; but these men are long dead
and gone, and the surviving concepts must be put
to use. That is why there is a constant search for
the man to fit the epithets… But it must be
someone whose importance is already an
established fact, so that the words can intelligibly be
pinned on him, though it does not in the least
matter where. And such a man was Arnheim. (76:
26)
As he himself put it to Diotima: “A great deal of a man’s

real importance…lies in his capacity to make himself
intelligible to his contemporaries” (76:27). And so
Arnheim is depicted as an early-modern media-
produced guru.
News of him appeared now in the financial, now in

the political, now in the literary and artistic
columns of the leading newspapers of all nations: a
review of a book that he had written, a report of a
noteworthy speech that he had made somewhere,
news of his having been received by some ruler or
some art association. And in the circle of great
industrial magnates, who for the most part operate
in silence behind double-locked doors, there was
soon no man of whom there was so much talk
outside as there was of him. (48:226)
If scientists admired the guru for establishing a link

between the world of science and other worlds, business
people similarly
become accustomed to regarding [him] as a kind of

a papal legate in their affairs. For all the irony with
which they regarded his tastes, it was agreeable to

them to possess, in him, a man who was capable
of presenting their case just as well to a conclave of
bishops as to a sociologists’ congress…(48:226–227)
He served as a link because he himself was symbol and

proof that such a link was possible:
The fundamental pattern of his success was

everywhere the same. Surrounded by the magical
halo of his wealth and the legend of his
importance, he always had to associate with people
who towered over him in their own field, but who
took a fancy to him as an outsider with a
surprising knowledge of their special subject and
were intimidated by the fact that in his person he
represented connections between their world and
other worlds of which they had no idea at all. (48:
227–228)
If Arnheim was a media-darling, Musil is a favourite of

post-modernist intellectuals. Indeed, The Man Without
Qualities offers surprising glimpses of postmodern
views. Although the prescience has frequently been
reclaimed for novelists (Kundera, 1988), it continues to
amaze one that all the fundamentals of the postmodern
writing already existed in this novel. On the discussion
of signifiers and signifieds (see above) or, for another
instance, about the importance of ‘the surface’ and the
role of fashion in changing ideas: as a pre-modern
proceeding on his brilliant transition into modernity but
tending to lose his breath in the face its pull, Arnheim
ponders over his glimpse of the after-process, not quite
grasping it:
In the cinema, at the theatre, on the dance-floor,

and at concerts, in motor-car and aeroplane, in
water and in sunshine, in tailoring workshops and
commercial offices, there is constantly coming into
existence a tremendous surface consisting of

impressions and expressions, gestures, attitudes,
and experiences….
What is important to bear in mind is what
great and probably vain exertions would have been
necessary in order to bring about such revolutions
in style of living along the road of intellectual
development, so rich in responsibility, by way of
philosophers, painters, and poets, instead of by
way of tailors, fashions and chance; for from this
one can guess how much creative energy is
generated from the surface of things, and by
contrast how barren is the wilfulness of the brain.
(90:127–128)
Historical man that he was, and somewhat perturbed by

his glimpses of postmodernity, Arnheim was sometimes
caught by nostalgia:
This is the dethronement of the ideocracy, of the

brain, the shifting of the mind to the periphery; and
this, as it seemed to Arnheim, was the ultimate
problem. Admittedly, life has always gone this way.
Life has always been reconstructing man from
outside inwards. (90:120)
His antidote for postmodern heresies was the comforting

modern belief that order was possible, and that it was
business order ennobled by higher values that would
win the day:
[He] knew that sooner or later empires would have

to be governed in the same way that factories are
run… Capitalism, as the organisation of egoism
based on a hierarchy that develops from the
capacity to get hold of money, is positively the
greatest and at the same time also the most
humane form of order. (106:252–253)
One consequence of all this is that advertising,

marketing and generally image-making becomes a
powerful force in shaping society: “So now whatever
counts as great is great; only this means that in the last
resort whatever is clam orously advertised as great also
becomes great” (96:158).
If we read nostalgia even in this statement, it is surely
Musil’s and not Arnheim’s, who
pictured the brain of the age replaced by the

mechanism of supply and demand, and the
painstaking thinker replaced by the business man
as a regulating factor, and he could not help
enjoying the moving spectacle of a vast production
of experiences that would freely combine and
dissolve again, a sort of nervous blancmanger
quivering all over at the slightest jolt, a gigantic
tom-tom booming with enormous resonance at even
the lightest tap. (90:128–129)
So here we are, a century later.6 The age of modernity is

said to have moved from its inception to its ‘high’, ‘late’
onto its ‘post’ and ‘post-post’ stages. What has
happened to the Arnheim-project of unification on the
way?
Rhetorical feuds and alliances—then

and now
Arnheim’s secret was hidden in his talent to bewitch his
audiences, whether in the salon or on the global stage.7
His was a rhetoric of union and mutual enrichment: of
synergy, as we would call it today. He brought to
business talk the fine arts and the authority of science.
When he is into business and politics, he makes people
believe that business is dependent on its affiliation with
arts and pure science. When he is into writing and
visions, he never forgets that the true luxuries of the
mind and soul need a capital base.
In contrast, Ulrich (and by implication Musil) con

struct the three domains—Money, Mind and Soul—as
incompatible. Theirs is a discourse of
incommensurability and aporia. The dealings between
the three spheres, especially between the world of
money and the worlds of mind and soul, are seen as
zero-sum games. Immersion in the world of business
and practical politics means betrayal and threatens the
loss of mind and/or soul.
Yet both desire or at least consider a state of affairs
where the tensions, contradictions and dilemmas are
overcome: a solution for the “mystery of the whole”, a
union between business, science and literature. Ulrich’s
solution is mystical and escapist—presented in the form
of a novelised Machian inductive philosophy. Arnheim’s
is innerwordly and rationalist—presented in a cloak of
soulful mystification. Musil’s final message (though the
critics cannot agree on it) seems to be that the Soul has
lost out for good, beaten to death by the atrocities of two
world wars and suspected of sharing responsibility for
them.
Has the triumphant mind, that is science, forged an
iron alliance with money which became the only
legitimate one in the Western world for a long time?
Have literature and the arts, while certainly securing
some access to wealth, ceased on the whole to be on
speaking terms? Of recent, in any case, the soul—
whether we call it the irrational, morality, arts or culture
—seems to experience encounters with business and
science via many different routes. There is the plea for
re-introduction of moral principles both in science (as in
the opposition against laboratory experiments on
animals) and in business (provoked mostly by the
growing concern about the state of the environment).
6 Assuming that the nineteenth ended belatedly around the time

of the Collateral Campaign and that the twenty-first is already on
its way…
7 And so was Rathenau’s (see Joerges, 1994).
Culture itself is increasingly discovered to be a

promising business field. Art sells at higher prices and
more commonly than ever before; entertainment and
show business is one of the most lucrative of
businesses; in management sciences a new field of
‘culture management’ is emerging (Björkegren, 1992);
Gary S.Becker received the 1992 Nobel prize for
extending the neo-classical economics to just about
everything between birth and burial.
Yet money and high culture do not speak the same
language, and characters like Arnheim, however genial,
cannot alone change this state of affairs. The first
concern would then be a transformation of perspectives
on money (business) offered by the arts to students and
practitioners of business. Ulrich/Musil offer an elitist,
ironic, and at times contemptuous picture, but the
character of Arnheim announces certain
transformations that have characterised capitalist
economies since World War II: numerous versions of
alliances between state an private capital, the
emergence of various types of welfare state, the idea
that business is not only about making and selling
products, but about the fabrication of corporate
identities, consumer lifestyles and such. Arnheim can
be read to have foreseen and advocated many such
transformations.
In Die neue Wirtschaft (“The New Economy”, 1918),

Rathenau prophesied the industrial self-government
combined with employee participation and state
control as the inevitable form capitalism would have
to take. Through his writings and public
communication skills he became highly influential in
projecting new forms of mixed economy concepts
and a kind of proto-welfare state or corporatist
notions of the respective roles of private capital,
state and even supra-national cooperation in a post-
imperial Europe.
And he was in command of all the repertoires. He

managed to enlist the most unlikely and distant
interests into his grand schemes, his main talents being
rhetorical and narrative. He was attractive because he
had money but, above all, he succeeded in making
money attractive.
But even if Ulrich/Musil have, on the whole, ridiculed
the Arnheim/Rathenau solution to the problem, the
counter-solution—glorifying arts—is ridiculed too. The
world of business may be prepared to choose someone
like Arnheim/Rathenau as its Patron Saint and seek
new alliances with those standing for Mind and Soul.
But, as seen from the fence, that is the uneasy
intellectual and moral position of management science,
it may still be too much to expect Money to enter into a
dialogue with those who in return offer scorn and
ridicule.
The next step would be an attitudinal change on the
part of the arts toward business. Cedric Watts in his
book Literature and Money (1991) points out that,
considering the role money has played in the
development of societies and cultures, one would expect
literature to give it a positive or at least neutral
treatment. Instead, his study reveals that money is
consistently demonised and presented as a negative
albeit mystical force.
Postscript for a semiotic reader

As Musil shows through Arnheim, the deeply
entrenched divisions between intellectual, expressive
and profit-seeking labour are part of the ‘modern
project’ (and like the epoch are still doing quite well).
Beyond romantic criticism of each of the three forms, a
vision persists—of joining practical, utilitarian skill,
truth-seeking science and literary imagination. The
dream of compensating for the poverties of each or of
synthesising the strengths of all these ways of knowing
is still alive. Management science, more than other
social science branches, par force remains vulnerable

and open to the dream.
In a sense, Musil’s work is too sophisticated to learn
directly from it. He analysed possible ways of ‘world
making’ in a situation where traditional orders are
crumbling, described how the Modern World was made
out of the accessible social worlds and life-forms. This is
why at the outset we called him a “semiotic author”: he
read the contemporary world and consciousness in a
critical way, made notes on the notes his protagonists
made of their realities, which we then get to read. In
other words, a meta-meta-work. Reading parts of
Musil’s narrative as teaching us something about the
organization of the modern project, we had to undertake
the task of critically reading Musil criti cally reading
authors of the modern world such as Walter Rathenau.
Both Musil and Rathenau exemplify the openness of
the social text in particularly striking fashion. Both have
repeatedly deconstructed their identities as authors,
and both died before their works were somehow brought
to an end.
Musil died with the unfinished-unfinishable novel at

his hands in 1942 and a literary controversy is still
raging over the posthumous manuscripts of The Man
Without Qualities. There are many grounds for
interpreting the novel as leading to Ulrich’s failure in
his quest to embrace “the mystery of the whole”: the
literary controversy over these matters may be
resolved, in the sense that Musil didn’t know
himself (Berger, 1978, pp. 365–67). But this only
means that the problem has been passed on that
part of the story which in this essay is printed in
italics.
Much like many later, so-called postmodern novels, The

Man Without Qualities early on drives home the very
point made by present-day social theorists: the meaning
of our private lives as well as of our organisational
identities is not given or imprinted on us

authoritatively. It is to be created, negotiated, traded
and supplemented. And it is irreducibly paradoxical,
necessitating constant deparadoxification in order for
practical/collective action to continue (Luhmann,
1991). Business people and business organizations are
not exempt; much of their organising activities can be
understood as coping with the paradoxes produced by
the peculiarly modern division of labour which
Arnheim, and indeed the Rathenau mercilessly ridiculed
in him, aspired to overcome.
Management science, in so far as it is meant to
contribute to a theory of organising and organizations,
must not unduly join in the deparadoxification that goes
on in the organizations under study. Rather, it could
make organisational action intelligible by presenting it
as a process of conferring meaning by means of
narration. And much as the narrative paradigm can
considerably add to the method ical basis of
organization studies, extending it to a conversation with
novelistic narratives about worlds of business and
organization may contribute a useful perspective in
managerial training. May Musil’s and Rathenau’s,
Ulrich’s and Arnheim’s texts (and similar ones) prove an
instructive medium for students of business and
teachers of business schools.
References
Berger, P. (1970/1978) The problem of multiple realities: Alfred

Schütz and Robert Musil. In: Luckmann, T. (Ed.)
Phenomenology and sociology. London: Penguin, 343- 374.
Björkegren, D. (1992) Kultur och ekonomi. Stockholm: Carlssons.
Buddensieg, T., Hughes T.P. and Kocka J. (1990) (Eds.), Ein
Mann vieler Eigenschaften: Walther Rathenau und die Kultur
der Moderne. Berlin: Wagenbach.
Corino, K. (1988) Robert Musil: Leben und Werk in Bildern und
Texten. Reinbek: Rowohlt.
Eco, U. (1989) The limits of interpretation. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Joerges, B. (1979) Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse: Überlegungen zu

einer Soziologie der Sachverhältnisse. Leviathan, 7 (1): 125–
37.
Joerges, B. (1988) Berger, Musil und der Dichter Feuermaul.
Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 17 (5): 401–402.
Joerges, B. (1994) Ein Zeitalter der Energie, WZB Jahrbuch, I.
Berlin: Edition Sigma.
Johannisson, B. (1992) (Ed.) Entreprenörskap på svenska. Affärer
& förnyelse. Malmö: Almqvist & Wiksell.
Kaplan, L. (1992) Walther Rathenau’s media technological turn
as mediated through W. Hartenau’s “Die Ressurection Co.”:
An essay at resurrection. Working Paper in Research Group
Large Technical Systems, FS II 92–502. Berlin:
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.
Kundera, M. (1988) The art of the novel. London: faber and faber.
Lepenies, W. (1988) Between literature and science: The rise of
sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luhmann, N. (1991) Sthenographie und Euryalistik. In:
Gumbrecht, H.U. and Pfeiffer, K-L. (Eds.) Paradoxien,
Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche. Situationen offener
Epistemologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 58–82.
Musil, R. (1930–42/1988) The man without qualities. London:
Picador.
Rathenau, W. (1977) Walter Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe. Edited by
Hellige, H.D. and Schulin, E.München.
Rathenau, W. (1928) Nachgelassene Schriften Berlin.
Schneider, Rolf (1988) Die späteren Eigenschaften. In: Härtling, P.
(Ed.), Leporello fällt aus der Rolle: Zeitgenössische Autoren
erzählen das Leben von Figuren der Weltliteratur weiter.
Frankfurt: Fischer, 198–215.
Snow, C.P. (1959) Two cultures and the scientific revolution. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Watts, C. (1990) Literature and money: Financial myth and literary
truth. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
THE GIOCONDA SMILE OF
AUTHORITIES
An Essay on Fictional Pictures of Public
Administration and Citizens
by
Torben Beck Jørgensen
In his classic essay on control from 1922, Max Weber

distinguished between two original forms: control
exercised through a market, by virtue of own interests
and economic capacity, and control exercised by virtue
of authority, i.e. authority to command and the
corresponding duty to obey (Weber, 1971a). Weber
ascribed public administration imperative control by
virtue of authority. It is crucial to understand this
second form of control as it is inherently related to one
of the important trends in European history: the
construction of the modern nation-state and its
‘apparatus’.
In general, public authorities face two quite different
user groups: business organizations and citizens.
Business organizations can often be regarded as a
powerful user group. Their power base includes
organisational and financial resources as well as
political resources. Typically they are organised in
national associations and have the option of using the
corporate channel of influence. Some might even be able
to escape public authorities by moving production and
capital from one country to another. They might, using
Hirschman’s (1970) concepts, influence public
authorities by voice and exit.
In the present article I will deal with the comparatively
weaker user group: the citizens as the direct users of
concrete goods and services.1 Citizens as clients,
patients, etc. are in many cases supplicants. A
272 • BECK JØRGENSON
supplicant is a person, who humbly asks for something.

Passport, day nursery, building license, study loan,
postponement of the filling in of one’s tax return, health
services, social security, place of study, etc. In other
cases we try to avoid the public authority. Then ‘it’ finds
us. ‘It’ is the police, customs and excise, control- and
custodian authorities, etc. Whether ‘it’ issues
permissions, helps or punishes, ‘it’ is an authority.
Language gives us a hint on what public authorities
fundamentally are. It is hardly a coincidence that public
organizations are named directorates, inspectorates,
administrations, and in general referred to as
authorities. These words are surrounded by an
atmosphere of authority and paternity, which is further
stressed by the fact that public authorities have the
monopoly of legitimate use of physical violence—
society’s right to punish.
When people comply with a public authority, it is not
only because it is a formal duty to do so. It is also owing
to the fact that authority is perceived of as legitimate. In
this context, Max Weber especially points at the growth
of legal authority, i.e. the authority resting on rules and
regulations. Because of the public sector’s still
increasing and differentiated usage of expert knowledge,
it seems reasonable to add an expert authority, i.e. an
authority based on a specific professional knowledge, as
for example scientific, medical, psychological, social or
pedagogical knowledge.
When investigating the relationship between the
citizen and the administration, it is important to
understand the conflicts implied, and the norms used to
regulate conflicts.
1 Three levels of interaction between citizens and public
authorities can be distinguished: a) the constitutional level

(citizens as voters), b) the policy level (cirizens as participants in
e.g. collective decision making concerning specific programmes),
and c) the street level of administrative reality (citizens as the
direct users of concrete goods and services); Wirth, 1986. We are
dealing with third level.
THE GIOCONDA SMILE OF AUTHORITIES • 273
In the following, this discussion is carried out on the

basis of fictional descriptions of authorities and
citizens. Several circumstances make this method
relevant. First of all, fiction accentuates the informal
aspects of the relationship between authority and
citizen, which is important to evaluate in connection
with formal changes in practice. Secondly, through
fiction we may reach an understanding of the actor’s
perception of the relationship between authorities and
the citizen which form the basis for action. Thirdly, the
sources are numerous and representing different
cultures and historical periods. It is thus possible to
evaluate, whether stable traits of the relationship
between authority and citizen can be established in
spite of actual differences in time and place; traits,
which because of their constancy, may be called typical
for all kinds of administration. And, on the other hand,
it is possible to detect crucial differences, due to diverse
local conditions and distribution in time.
It is natural to ask, to what extent fiction reflects
reality.2 It can hardly be said to give empirical and
historical correct descriptions of certain conditions or
events. It does not represent a reliable and testable
documentation according to traditional scientific
standards. It is safe to say that it gives a distorted
picture of reality, compared with the picture obtained by
carrying out an empirical investigation, studying
legislation, government reports, etc.
But this is not synonymous with a wrong picture of
reality. The difference can be illustrated by comparing a
photograph with the drawn object pictures, earlier used
in schools. A photograph of, for example, a street scene
gives a true picture of street-life, but only at the time it
was taken, while the object picture shows a typical
street scene with the things typical of a street, but
2A thorough discussion on the reflection of reality in fiction is

outside the frame of this article (see Beck Jørgensen, 1986 and
McCurdy, 1973).
which are naturally never present at the same time. The

object picture is not incorrect. It is distorted, but at the
same time it seems genuine because it isolates some
characteristic traits (Tiedeman, 1986).
In this sense the relationship between fiction and
reality may resemble the usage of ideal types within
social science research. The ideal type is a theoretical
construction that “one-sidedly emphasizes one or
several points of view and summarizes a large number of
dispersed single-phenomena with undefined limits—
more of less substantial and sometimes not at all—
individual phenomena which comply with the
emphasized one-sided points of view and develop into a
total mental image” (Weber 1971c, pp. 199–200).
Thus, literary statements should not be considered as
being purely empirical. Such an assumption entails a
risk of the reduction of literature to doubtful and trivial
‘truths’ like for instance “public employees are sour and
contentious” or “public offices are typically dull with
faded curtains, light-green walls and dark-green filing
cabinets, with the exception of the foreign office
cabinets being royal blue”. My point of departure is
therefore not to consider literary statements as pure
empirical: ‘so it is’ but rather as theoretical statements:
‘so it could be interpreted’, or ‘so it could be constructed’.
The authorities as a mirror

In fiction one can find descriptions of a long range of
concrete functions which public organizations perform
towards the citizens. You will easily find descriptions of
public organizations transferring money, setting a
broken leg, teach, controlling traffic, issuing passports,
fighting sea battles, refusing applications, etc. Rarely,
however, the focus is on these concrete activities as
such. On the contrary fiction lit erature typically
concentrates on reflections on the objectives, the
implications of the concrete activities and the political,
moral and organisational context. What is the
significance of the activity and the way it is organised to

the public organization, to the civil servant and to the
citizen?
Erich Maria Remarque depicts in Night in Lisbon
public authorities issuing passports. The aim of
Remarque is obviously not to present us a technical
(and empirically correct) description of how you apply
for passports and how they are issued. He is concerned
about something quite different, i.e. what significance
the ‘political shortage’ of identity forms during the
second world war bears on the homeless, the political
refugee, the immigrant. This significance is depicted in
social, political, moral and psychological dimensions—
not technical. The right form is not a question about
technicalities but identity and freedom. Therefore, the
dearly desired result—the official form and the stamp—
become the regalia of the authority.
The Danish author Jens Baggesen wrote in 1792–93 a
satire on exactly the same problem. He was about to
travel around Europe when he discovered—on a Sunday
—that he had no passport. His ‘travelling’ in
Copenhagen that Sunday morning to different (sleepy
and seedy) civil servants is a brilliant analysis of what it
takes of strategies on behalf of the supplicant.
Remarque and Baggesen touch here on an important
common theme in fiction literature: the salience of
public administration is the capability to mark the
citizen in moral, mental and intellectual terms.
Metaphorically speaking, the authorities hold up a
mirror to the citizens, enabling—or forcing—them to
realise their own worth. But this mirror does not just
reflect. It reflects purposefully. It shows the worth of the
citizen as the authority sees it.
Based on the function of the mirror the
administrations depicted in fiction may roughly be
divided into two main categories. There are mirrors
which reflect parabolically. They concentrate and focus.
Authorities reflecting parabolically we shall denote the
Old Testament type. And there are mirrors which reflect
hyperbolically. They disperse and locate the object in a

context. Authorities reflecting hyperbolically we shall
denote the New Testament type.
Authorities of the Old Testament type primarily
emphasise to the citizens that they have a capacity to
fail and thus are responsible for themselves. In
Dostojevskij’s novel Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov
discovers that he cannot ignore the law. Although he,
intellectually, is able to convince himself that the world
is better off after he has murdered the cancerous tumour
of a greedy pawnbroker, he cannot convince himself
morally. In the eyes of the law and authorities he is a
criminal. He is mirrored by the authorities, and he
seeks their mirror. He is a criminal looking for
judgement and punishment in order to expiate his guilt.
When he gives himself up, he accepts the limits set by
the authorities and the course of development indicated
for his future.
The same point we find in the Icelandic writer
Laxness’ historical trilogy Islands klokke (“The Bell of
Iceland”). Because of intrigues in Copenhagen, the legal
authorities in Iceland are replaced by new authorities.
When this happens, three criminals, convicted by the
old authorities, are awaiting their sentence. But the new
authorities retract the judgement. And one of the
criminal’s reaction is: They deprived me of my sentence.
I am no longer an honest criminal. Who am I now?
What can I believe in?
The Old Testament type of authorities mirror the
citizen parabolically, penetrating the core of the soul.
They are the mirror which flatters not but exposes guilt
and responsibility. They set the limits to which the
citizen must obey. And they show a way: expiation.
Especially within the classic functions of the state, we
find authorities like: police, law-courts, the judicial
system, etc., the watchmen of the State whose
watchword is “help yourselves”. Their belief and
prerequisite is the honest criminals; the criminals, who
deep down inside accept the social order they have
broken, and which they want to be re-integrated into,

the guilt-conscious criminals.
The New Testament type of authorities are,
histori cally seen, a more recent phenomenon. They are
especially described in fiction dealing with the modern
social administration and the modern instruments of
treatment. The authorities—typically represented by
social workers, psychologists or social pedagogues—are
not censorious, but understanding. They are not formal
and bureaucratic, but on the contrary warm and close
to the client. Both in Henning Mortensen’s Frk.
Frandsens efterår (“The Autumn of Miss Frandsen”) and
in Herdis Møllehave’s Lene, the social worker is devoted,
using herself as a person and subverting the boundary
between authority and citizen. The citizen is regarded as
a fellow person who by no fault of his or her own is in
need of help.
This picture of the citizen appears in both minor and
major events. Alice—the social worker in “The Autumn
of Miss Frandsen”—is sitting home on Saturday
listening to the radio:
Suddenly the phone rings, she turns out the radio

and answers it.
—Alice Frandsen.
—Alice, you must come—I have the jitters!
—It is Saturday, Åse.
—You must come!
—What about me? Am I never off from work?
—I was almost emptying a glass last night, Alice,
—are you coming?
—Åse, you are a damned fool!
—I know.
—Yes, I’m coming.
—Now?
—Yes, now.
—You’re a darling.
The New Testament type of authorities mirror human

beings hyperbolically as a product, ambiguously
generating his or her own situation. While the citizen
under the supervision of the Old Testament authorities
is latently sinful, the New Testament authorities rather
feel sorry for the citizen. And they are the ones feeling
guilty, if they have not rendered the help necessary.
While the first acts authoritatively, the latter acts with
consideration. They are the servants of the welfare
state. The two types of authority are outlined in the
figure below:
Old Testament Type New Testamet Type

The citizen as sinful and guilty The society and circumstances
as guilty
The authorities mark and The authorities help
Guilt can be expiated through The authorities feel guilty
punishment when help is not adeuate
The authorities are boundary- The authorities act without
setting boundaries
The authorities reflect The authorities reflect
parabolically hyperbolically
No matter how different the two types of authorities

are, behind the opposite expressions and relations to
the citizen they do have one thing in common: they
normalise. Only the methods differ. As a matter of fact,
it may be said that if the administration is to have a
unifying mission, then it is to normalise the deviant
citizens. There are citizens that have not (as yet) learned
normal behavior, they are to be normalised (socialised)
through day nursery, kindergarten, youth centre,
schools etc. And there are the regrettable types, who
later on in life show a deviant behavior. They too are
normalised.
There are many ways of being deviant. Physically,
socially, economically, mentally and legally. The public
authorities normalise throughout the whole spectre.
Broken legs are set, crooked teeth are straightened,
social relief offers the minimum of ‘normal’ living

conditions, people with a deviant mentality are
stabilised and re-integrated, criminals are admonished
and re-socialised. Especially deviant persons,
demanding extra treatment, are placed in institutions,
which are specialised in normalisation production.
Some neither can nor will submit to normalisation. They
often remain in an institution in order to protect society
and the deviant from each other.
This normalisation process is an underlying theme in
fiction, which is especially visible in literature describing
therapeutic institutions in a broader sense. This applies
to, for example, Knuth Becker’s description of a
Christian Borstal institution in Verden venter (“The
World is Waiting”), Knut Hamsun’s description in På
gjengrodde stier (“Overgrown Paths”) of the psychiatric
ward he stayed in for some time, and P.C.Jersild’s
description of the modern large hospital in Babels hus
(“The House of Babel”). In Peter Seeberg’s short story
Patienten (“The Patient”) this normalisation is tried to
the limit. The patient is subjected to transplantation of
several malfunctioning organs. Finally his head is
replaced as well.
Although the normalisation process is the common
function it is worth noting the significant differences in
control devices. In the Christian Borstal institution at
the turn of the century, control and behavior
modification are based on religion and moral. Principal
Monrad prays to God—and thereby seeks divine
legitimation—prior to carrying out the necessary
punishment of the inmates. Knut Hamsun is, when
imprisoned just after the end of World War II, subjected
to para-scientific psychiatric control with Jesuitical
overtones. The control in the House of Babel of modern
times is rooted in science and technology.
It may sound as if all public authorities freeze
society and its more or less innocent citizens in a static
average normality. This is due to a misinterpretation of
normality. The public authorities’ perception of
normality, may perhaps be what is presently the

average, but normality is usually to be understood as
what ought to be normal.
This reflection contains several positive sides. The Old
Testament authorities make demands and give the
citizen something to respond to; the New Testament
authorities give security. As a whole they may be
regarded as a means of stabilising and developing
society, This takes us to a further important point: the
double side of authorities, which complicates the
discussion. Sennett writes:
The need for authority is basic. Children need

authorities to guide and reassure them. Adults
fulfill an essential part of themselves in being
authorities; it is one way of expressing care for
others. There is a persistent fear that we will be
deprived of this experience… Today there is
another fear about authority as well, a fear of
authority when it exists… The very need for
authority redoubles this modern fear. (Sennett,
1980, p. 15)
The task of authorities can also be interpreted as the

duty not to let citizens alone. Why? The key to this
interpretation can be picked up in Thomas Mann’s
novel The Death in Venice, when he—admittedly in quite
another context—writes:
Solitude develops originality, boldness and the

marvellous beautiful, the poem. But solitude also
develops the odd, the disproportionate, the absurd
and the inadmissible.
The task of the authorities is obviously to guarantee

that the latter consequences of solitude will not come
true. Very often it might be at the cost of missing the
former. This points to the fact that the authorities’ task
—to mirror the citizen—is not without costs, neither to
the citizen nor to the authority. And this is where fiction

often digs deep and mercilessly.
The problem of the citizen

The problem of the citizen differs from one type of
authority to the other. As to the Old Testament
authorities, the limit may be too fixed, the mirror too
stigmatised. This is exactly the point in Scherfig’s Den
forsvundne fuldmægtig (“The Head Clerk Who
Disappeared”). Small-holder Jens Jensen—in whose
household the disappeared head clerk has rented a room
—is chairman of the social welfare committee in a small
rural parish. He patronises people applying to him for
National Assistance:
–Do you really intend to go on the parish? I

wouldn’t have believed that about you. Aren’t you
ashamed of yourself?
–But there is nothing dishonorable about
receiving social benefits. It is not comparable to
poor relief.
–Well, help is help, no matter how you look upon
it. And you are really not ashamed of going on the
parish? It is as well that your parents don’t live to
experience that. They would have been
overwhelmed with shame.
Jens Jensen is capable of convincing many
people to waive their dishonorable attempts.
Thus, he frames them in a guilt-complex, makes them

accept that misery and poverty are eaused by
themselves, and that they alone bear the responsibility.
He does not do this just for their sake, but also for his
own in order to win the respect of the powerful ones in
the parish, the farmers.
We also find this phenomenon in Anders
Ehnmark and Per Olov Enquist’s Dr. Mabuses nye
testamente (“The New Testament of Doctor Mabuse”). A
society, where all actions are prohibited until they

explicitly are permitted, is described through a
policeman’s dream; a society in which human beings
are only of importance to the authorities in their
capacity of potential law-breakers. When the Old
Testament authorities go to extremes, they may thus
run the risk of creating a society consisting of totally
adapted or rebellious citizens.
Deprivation of control over oneself and guilt-
consciousness as a problem are pushed to the extremes
in The Trial by Kafka. This is a cultivated description of
the oppression carried out by an ambiguous system,
ambiguity in itself being the main instrument of control.
Already in the first scene, Josef K. is deprived of control
over himself, as he is arrested without being told why:
“… You can’t go out, you are arrested.” “So it

seems,” said K. “But what for?” he added. “We are
not authorized to tell you that. Go to your room and
wait there. Proceedings have been instituted
against you, and you will be informed of everything
in due course. I am exceeding my instructions in
speaking freely to you like this.”
The deprivation is completed in the end, when K. is

expected to carry out his own execution without
knowing why. He is unable to kill himself. The
authorities take over, and till the very last minute they
hold their mirror up in front of K.:
But the hands of one of the partners were already at

K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife deep
into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing
eyes K. could still see the two of them immediately
before him, cheek leaning against cheek, watching
the final act. “Like a dog!” he said; it was as if the
shame of it must outlive him.
This is presumably the utmost tapering of the Old

Testament authorities. The citizens have to accept an
undefined and general guilt. Almost just because they
exist. Every notion of rule of law or Rechtstaat is left
behind.
The New Testament authorities have their problem,
too. In Frk. Frandsens efterår (“The Autumn of Miss
Frandsen”) as well as in Lene, the clients are deprived of
self-control by the excessive helpfulness of the
administration. The authorities almost take the blame
and assume responsibility, and the clients show an
infantile development through the interplay of strategic
exploitation and servile adaptation. This is
demonstrated quite clearly in the following dialogue
between the social worker (Alice) and her client (Åse):
Åse looked aggressive—like a child, but suddenly

she crouched and buried her face in her hands.
Then she rose her head a little but without looking
at Alice. “There is a bottle of sherry in the fridge,”
she snivelled. “In the fridge? What a peculiar place
to put a bottle of sherry.” “Won’t you get it, please?”
“No, Åse…” “Let’s have a glass. Just one.” Alice
shook her head in despair. She was getting angry.
Probably just as much at herself as at Åse. Then
she went to fetch the bottle. “You’re all right,” Åse
said when Alice returned. Glasses?” “Let’s just use
those two,” Åse said pointing at two beer glasses
patterned with dried-up froth. “Do you mean to tell
me that I’m also to wash up the glasses?” “Would
you, please?” “Damn it, no!” “I’m feeling terribly
ill…” For a moment Alice remained hesitant, then
she took the glasses and went out into the kitchen
where she rinsed the glasses under hot water.
There was no dishtowel so she returned to the
sitting room with two wet glasses. She poured two
glasses of sherry and slammed one of the half-filled
glasses on the table in front of Åse. “You like it
yourself,” Åse said looking at Alice with a
strange shining face. Her voice sounded lecherous

and brutal behind the servile surface. Alice felt that
she had to be careful. The situation was filled with
traps.
This problem accelerates and almost becomes

transgressional in Henrik Stangerup’s novel Manden der
ville vœre skyldig (“Thc Man Who Wanted to Be Guilty”).
The main character, Torben, kills his wife in a fit of rage.
The future society’s street level bureaucrats—the helpers
—react fast. Torben is picked up and sent to hospital for
mental observation. But the subsequent development is
incomprehensible to Torben:
He could not understand all the kindness. The

nurses were kind to him, they were kind to him in
the canteen, the guards were kind and the
psychiatrists—most of all the psychiatrist, who
attended to him and once a week had a talk with
him, which usually lasted most of the afternoon.
The psychiatrist was short and flabby cheeked with
small curious eyes behind intelligent glasses, and
every time he visited him (in his private villa on the
outskirts of the hospital area) a bottle of sherry was
waiting.
After a short stay at the mental hospital, the psychiatrist

tells Torben that he is free to leave. Torben reacts like
the criminal in Islands klokke (“The Bell of Iceland”):
“Yes, but you cannot just release me,” he said

hearing how pitiful he sounded. “I am guilty! I have
committed murder! I have killed my wife!”
The psychiatrist’s answer is central:
“Guilt,” he said with a slight contempt. “But you

know that society is about to abolish the guilt
concept once and for afl!…” “Yes, but I killed her,”
he heard himself repeating. “I killed her!” “Or you

were driven to do it. There is a difference.” “If you
kill, you kill!”
Now the psychiatrist lost his temper: “An eye for
an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Is that what you want?”
“No, God forbid! But I am still guilty of murder!”
“Take it as you wish,” the psychiatrist said in
despair, turned around and disappeared into the
administration building.
As the story develops, Torben tries to maintain his guilt

and responsibility. Torben does not want to be a
patient. He wants to be a criminal. To be convicted. To
be punished. And not just any punishment, but a good
old fashioned imprisonment for a specified period of
time, when he can atone his crime. Maybe he read
Dostojevskij?
But the authorities deprive him of the mirror that he
searches for. They think that he “brought about” his
wife’s “demise”. He was driven by “circumstances”. Later
on the authorities change their opinion and say it was
“an accident”. This leads Torben to think that he may
get his child back, who has been forcefully taken from
home. But the authorities answer: “You are considered
unbalanced”.
The language and words used by the authorities are
interesting. They say something important about the
rule of law—or rather the lack of it. Just like the citizen
is freed of responsibility, it seems that this also applies
to the authorities.3 This becomes especially clear when
Torben protests against the “helpers” ransacking his
home during his absence, in order to remove his
deceased wife’s belongings, ostensibly to eliminate
“unconstructive memories”. Torben asks who
authorised this order and gets the answer: “By what
authority? Let us say that we did it for your sake.”
It is interesting to note that although Stangerup’s
authorities do not employ judges but psychiatrists and
social workers and do not sentence and punish but help
they do have one thing in common with the Kafkaesque

authorities: they are absolutely non-bureaucratic in the
Weberian sense and their behavior is thus
unpredictable. One does not know where, when or how
to find them. In both cases the result is the same:
individual’s deprivation of control.
The problem of the authorities

Within fiction, power is almost exclusively conferred on
the public authorities—not the citizen. Even in the more
ambiguous descriptions of power relations in for
example Lene, the client answers her social worker dryly
—and rightly: “But you hold the winning cards”. It is a
power that admits the holder to mirror the citizen, and
thus influences the citizen’s identity. Here we find a very
characteristic difference between those authorities
which interact directly with the citizen and those which
act in a more unobtrusive manner.
The outpost of authorities

These parts of public administration are the directly
performing organizations: hospitals, social service
departments, correctional institutions, police. There we
find the streetlevel-bureaucrats and the professional
cadres, which make decisions with direct impact on the
citizens. Consequently, we find there a direct exercise of
power. In Foucault’s terms, we find ourselves in the
capillaries of society, and fiction gives us outstanding
studies in the micro physic of power.
People exercising direct power over citizens may be
divided into two main categories. One consists of those
who are worn out by the burden of having to make
3 There is an interesting cultural difference between Stangerup’s
Danish story and Ehnmark and Enquist’s Swedish story. While

the former might be seen as an absurd blow-up of a permissive
society, the latter is a satire on a totalitarian society.
decisions concerning other people. The two social

workers Lene and Alice in respectively Lene and Frk.
Frandsens efterår are pressed, misused and misled by
their clients. Their willingness to help and belief that it
is the right thing to do, are also their weak sides. They
strain themselves physically and mentally as well as in
their private lives. Especially the social worker Lene,
who is subjected to self-reproach, when in the end she
is forced to dissociate herself from her client. And this is
not done without problems. Lene is visiting her client
Birgit:
“Thirdly,” Lene ran her fingers through her long

hair, rubbed her scalp a bit, she was about to get a
headache. “You’ll have to go to the estate-agent’s
office yourself. You have plenty of time until you
find a job.” “What a damned sharp tone you have
taken up,” Birgit stated, “and fourthly?” “You will
have to change your tone when you phone. You
issue orders. It seems rather conspicuous. Rumors
are spreading that you are receiving more than
others.” “Who has started that talk,” Birgit wanted
to know. “Different people in my department.” “It
can only be your boring secretary.” “From today I
have a new secretary, in the future you are to talk
to Hanne,” Lene said. “So you couldn’t stand her
either?” “No, that’s not why, but Birgit, you
must…”
“There is perhaps a fifth problem?” “Yes, you
must change your tone. And in the future you will
turn up at the office. I cannot justify spending my
time on coming to your place. You have plenty of
time.”
“Damn it, what’s the idea of this new style?”
District judge Erik Sørensen in Prœsten i Vejlby (“The

Vicar of Vejlby”) belongs to the same category. Blicher
describes his torturing remorse, when he out of loyalty
to his office is forced to sentence his future wife’s father
to death. In Grisejagten (“The Pig Hunt”) by P.C.Jersild

we find the description of a head clerk who, while
carrying out an absurd task in the field, slowly dissolves
as a human being.
The other category consists of those who seize power,
use it and are brutalised by it. This consequence is
described by Dostojevskij in The House of Dead Souls:
Anybody, who has experienced power, the

unlimited possibility of humiliating another human
being…automatically loses control of his own
senses. Tyranny is a habit with its own organic life,
which finally develops into a disease. The habit
may kill or brutalize even the best of human beings
and reduce him to a wild animal. Blood and power
are intoxicating. The tyrant loses his human sense
and ceases to be a citizen. To recapture human
dignity, remorse, and recreation almost becomes
impossible.
Traits of this process can be found in principal Monrad,

in Verden venter (“The World is Waiting”), and in small-
holder Jens Jensen in Den forsvundne fuldmægtig (“The
Head Clerk Who Disappeared”). In Stangerup’s Manden
der ville vœre skyldig (“The Man Who Wanted to Be
Guilty”), we find a description of a petty official, who
filled with elevated self-righteousness enjoys her power
as “gate-keeper” to the authorities.
“Do you continue?” asked the lady behind the

counter. She was around sixty and looked the type,
who could have been employed in any office, one of
the authorities’ obedient servants, powdered and
plastered with jewels, who dispassionately would
attend to all cases passing through her, whether
they concerned applications for patents for the
extraction of solar energy or confinement of
minority groups in prison camps. Presently the
cases concerned children. There were people, who
were allowed to have children, and there were

people, who were not. It was as simple and natural
as that, and she would do her best to see that no
human feelings disturbed the desired balance of
account.
The back-stage of the authorities: The

inner world of administration
The exercise of power and its consequences exist not
only in connection with the direct interaction between
the out-post of the authorities and the citizen. Although
this is where we find the most obvious consequences,
we should not jump to the conclusion that exercise of
power is absent from the inner world of administration.
It exists, but under other conditions, in another way
and with other consequences. C.S.Lewis excellently
expressed the difference in The Screwtape Letters:
I prefer bats to bureaucrats. I live in the age of

organization, in the world of administrative
machinery. The highest degree of wickedness is no
longer exercised in dirty “dens of crime” as depicted
by Dickens, yet not even in concentration and work
camps. There, we only see the final result. It is
conceived, carried out, broached, supported,
implemented, and recorded in clean, carpeted, well
heated and lit offices by calm men with white
collars and well trimmed nails and close-shaven,
who do not need to raise their voices.
But when we move inside bureaucracy we find with the

help of fiction literature a most ambiguous world. The
mirror of power dissolves in paradoxes. Apparently, the
power centre looks like a strange imaginary world which
is cut off from any relation with the outer social reality.
It looks like living its own life on its own terms. From
outside we may see a picture of an imperturbable power
organization, although sometimes with indefinable
properties. Kafka captured this indefinable power in the

very first lines of The Castle:
It was late evening when K. arrived. The village was

buried in snow. The mountain of the castle was
hardly to be seen, wrapped in fog and darkness as
it was, and not the slightest gleam revealed the
great castle. K. stood a long time on the bridge
which led from the main road to the village and
stared up at the apparent emptiness.
Looking from inside the administration is described as

marked by powerlessness, lack of capacity and
conservatism. It is a stationary world which does react
on stimuli from the outer world but does it in an
incalculable manner. Both exertion of power and
especially its consequences to those exercising it are of a
more subtle character within the administration than
outside at the front.
The infallibility of the authorities

Parallel to the idea of the authorities’ significance is the
idea of the same authorities’ infallibility. This idea is
necessary for two reasons. Firstly, it may be said that
organizations, making decisions, which seriously
influence people’s living conditions, must not commit
mistakes. The more important a decision is, the more its
validity must be checked. This is an ethical argument.
The administrative manifestation is the rule of law.
Secondly, it may be said that organizations ascribed
the special importance of possessing the legal right to
punish need the idea of infallibility. Naturally they can
fail, but the consequent detriment of the mirror’s
legitimacy is irreparable. In this context the idea of
infallibility is a political-psychological necessity. Thus, it
is hardly a coincidence that much literature is occupied
with the fear of mistake. Seen from the authorities’
point of view, it is the fear of exposing themselves; seen
from the citizen’s point of view, it is the fear of getting

into a jam.
The universe which Kafka describes in The Castle
contains exactly these two spheres. One sphere is the
authorities and their way of functioning, and the other
one the outside world, symbolised by surveyor K. The
authorities—the Count’s administration offices at the
Castle—are described as the perfect bureaucracy, so
perfect and limply structured that nobody thinks it
possible for mistakes to occur. Naturally problems
arise, because nothing is ever perfect. However, since the
basic principle of the authorities is infallibility, it is not
possible to relate to mistakes which may occur. It is
true that there are many (or only) controlling
authorities, but as no gross mistakes occur, it is not
their job to look for them. And who knows, what may
look like a mistake, may not be in the end? As the
organization is perfect, it is not possible to inquire
about irregularities in other departments. Anyhow, they
would not answer if they notice that the inquiry
concerned a mistake! This is the explanation surveyor K.
receives from the local authorities.
Alleged mistakes may also be difficult to rectified. The
principal infallibility of bureaucracy makes mistakes
irreparable. And then, as the case is continuing, it is
only natural that a little mistake occurs, one that in itself
is inferior. The administration offices react like a
machine running wild—without alarm signals or
standard procedures for discovery of mistakes. It is the
stagnated mind that cannot react to contingencies, that
cannot repair itself and that goes on administering
without thinking about the people depending on the
decisions. The suggestive conclusion is that only a
hair’s breadth separates the two polarities: the perfect
machine and the Kafkaesque nightmare. One simple
human mistake transforms the limpid bureaucracy into
an enigmatic bureaucracy. In this sense Kafka’s
bureaucracy is an illustration of the dark side of
bureaucracy which Weber feared (1971b).
Many other writings also fasten upon the mistake or

the idea of infallibility as an important key to the
understanding of the administration. In Samarakis’
novel The Mistake, an error in the authorities’ plan
becomes fatal for the system itself, as it loses credibility
in the eyes of its members. In Horst Petersen’s Husets
tjeneste (“At the Service of the House”) the theme of the
possibility and oc currence of mistakes is repeated again
and again; a telephone rings—maybe by mistake, a head
clerk is definitely promoted by mistake, the manager of
the House is seen lying on top of one of the secretaries,
which is serious, unless he is lying there by mistake
etc. In Ålbæk Jensen’s novel Sagen (“The Case”) the
managing clerk Sten has to place the responsibility
somewhere for a regional development blunder, His
problem arises, when in the end he has to blame his
own administration: the Directorate for Regional
Development.
In Sven Clausen’s play Bureauslaven (“The Office
Slave”) the idea of infallibility is transfixed in the
following short dialogue. A local rebellion has been
crushed by the gendarmerie, and the leader of the
action (a colonel) and the guardian of legality (a judge)
are discussing the next step:
The colonel: “In my opinion the most appropriate thing
to do, would be to let the civilian and
military authorities cooperate on issuing a
kind of proclamation—calling on peace,
proclaiming that the culprits have been
apprehended and will be severely punished
and finally state the point on which you
have changed your attitude”.
The judge: “We must not under any circumstances
admit that we have changed our opinion.
That would be the same as admitting that
our previous opinion was erroneous.”
The colonel: “Well, yes—”
The judge: “A public authority cannot be wrong.”
The colonel: “To err is human.”
The judge: “A public authority is not human—is not a

human being. It is something more.”
The colonel: “Nevertheless, I do not doubt that you will
succeed in uniting a changed opinion with
the one you held earlier.”
The judge: “I indulge in the fact of being a rather clever
jurist. What is called for is a change of
reality combined with the maintenance of
formality.” (Encouraged by this cheerful
prospect). “I will immediately make a draft.”
The inscrutability of authorities

Mistakes are committed, inasmuch as the
administrative offices are staffed with human beings.4
But what is more interesting is that remnants of
inscrutability as to the authorities’ decisions always will
remain, a core of irrationality, which makes the concept
of mistakes more ambiguous.
Why is that so? This is not mysterious. Public
authorities’ decisions concerning citizens must rest on
legislation. But no legislation or rule can be as detailed,
precise and actual that it can cover all possible
situations. Legislation must, to a certain extent, be of a
general character. Therefore, it has to be interpreted.
The public servants are thus ascribed the role of a high
priest. Just as the signs and auguries of a god has to be
interpreted and the text expounded, the law also has to
be interpreted. Naturally, this always implies a
judgement, which becomes more important
concurrently with the increased usage of discretionary
acts and experts exerting discretionary power.
What does such a judgement express? Mistakes? It
may, of course, be a more or less responsible
judgement. But it would probably be more correct,
generally to characterise the judgement as an
expression of discretion (arbitrariness), i.e. something
outside the realm of rational arguments, but
nevertheless possibly extra-ordinary right.5 This is
exactly what the chairman of the parish council in The

Castle thinks, when he says that sometimes there is a
higher controlling authority—you do not always know
what or why—that cuts through with a groundless
decision, which is, however, usually self-evident. The
truth in this connection resembles that of revelation or
intuition—not that of a deductive character.
Not everything, then, can be deduced from legislation.
Something must be said to be neither here nor there.
And this implies a practical contradiction. A
contradiction between discretion and the infallible
authority.
How is the contradiction administrated in practice?
Well, to a certain extent it may be said that Sven
Clausen’s judge tries to revoke this contradiction, when
he claims that an authority is not human—it is
something more than a human being. This must imply
that it is not subjected to demands for rationality,
created by human beings. This was earlier expressed
through the King, who by the Grace of God could grant
favourable positions to lucky citizens out of an “odd
grace”, i.e. decide something that lacked reason, but did
not either need justification, We still find this
phenomenon today—albeit in a degenerated form—when
the civil servant to a colleague indicates that one or
other decision is a “purely political decision”. This
implies that there are no (objective) reasons, but also
that it would be nice, if there were.6
The contradiction between discretion and infallibility
is also—very elegantly—administered through the
classic complaints system. In spite of the idea of
infallibility, public authorities are furnished with either
4 The good judge would probably have committed a mistake, if he

had just claimed that administrative practice cannot be changed.
As it is, he is referring to the fact that a change of practice could
be interpreted as a proof that the previous practice had been
erroneous, which is something quite different. It is precisely an
issue of political-psychological necessity of infallibility.
an actual complaints system or the possibility of filing a

complaint at a higher level of the hierarchical
administration. This means that another administrative
authority will have to judge whether a mistake has been
committed. Naturally, one would say. That is an
excellent and reasonable principle of law and order.
Thus, an ethical justification is retrieved.
But, it also means that although mistakes may be
acknowledged, it is possible to avoided blaming the
administration in question. It has not committed a
mistake. Other authorities have the right to undo a
decision. If the administration in question was to
correct a decision, it would be forced to admit a
mistake. It is relieved of this charge by others. The
political-psychological necessity of maintaining the idea
of infallibility is thus satisfied.
Finally, discretion is protected against improper
external insight. The administration is, for example, not
very willing to offer detailed arguments for its decisions.
The discretion is protected by expressions like “the
nature of the matter”, “the merits of the case”, etc. The
administration rather prefers: “Referring to the details in
connection with…we hereby inform you that…” in stead
of writing: “We are not sure, but nevertheless we have
decided that…” Preferably the administration just refers
to the sections of an Act which authorise them to make
a decision.
The obscure decisions of the administration is a point
which fiction almost instinctively picks upon. Finn
Søborg’s short letter from the Ministry of Reconstruction
5 Arbitrariness is often understood negatively, e.g. as coincidence,

or doing as one pleases. However, arbitrariness can also be
understood positively, e.g. as an opening for flexibility and
individual decisions. A discretionary act or decision can then be
interpreted as an act implying reflection in contrast to an
involuntary act. In the present chapter the word is used neutrally.
6 It may be appropriate to mention that Max Weber would have
preferred an element of atbitrariness implanted in the

bureaucracy as a counterpart of its superior technical rationality.
(Sådan er der så meget) is an excellent sharp description

of such letters that sometimes resemble theological
writings:
In your letter dated…you have applied to the

ministry for permission to produce a special kind of
burner for apparatus to be used in connection with
the frying and cooking of food by the use of gas (so-
called gas rings). Referring to the above, the
ministry with reference to order no. 387 of 17. July
19.. paragraph 6 and 7 on production of apparatus
and other equipment to be used for private house-
holds, according to paragraph 13 in order no. 434
of 19. September 19.. on the regulation of and
control with industrial companies not
comprehended by law no. 529 of 23. August 19…is
to inform you that the application for permission to
produce the mentioned items must be written,
according to the rules of order no. 278 of 23. March
19… Further we draw your attention to the forms
mentioned in the above order under paragraph 12,
which can be obtained by personal application at
the ministry all week days between 12–5 p.m.
On behalf of the Ministry
E.B.
and an illegible signature
They might as well have referred to half a dozen Bible

passages. The mere reference to the authorities’ sacred
text not only protects the administration (and citizen)
against the contradiction between discretion and
infallibility, but it also endows the decision with an aura
of something divinely evident.
The same protecting function exists when expert
opinion only are stated and corrected by experts, as is
the case with for example medical judgements. That
way, the expert knowledge is protected against vulgar
foolish criticism of the layman. But at the same time,
the aspect of significance is maintained, capping the
discretion against supervision. Because what goes on in

the higher spheres of the administration is not always
of a divine character.
In Mika Waltari’s novel Sinuhe, The Egyptian, Sinuhe
is trained to be an Amon priest. In Egypt at that time it
meant that he would not only become a religious
authority, but also to a certain extent a temporal one.
As a part of his training, he has to spend the last night
in the very centre of the temple with the Amon statue.
Here the god will reveal itself to him and give him the
definitive authority and legitimacy. But nothing
happens. The statue is silent. Sinuhe is, therefore—like
all the other priests—forced to pretend the existence of a
god to administer. He now belongs to the initiates, and
the core of the initiation is the burden of knowing that
there is nothing to know, and at the same time maintain
the illusion that there is.7
Administrative decisions and acts have always a core
of irrationality and inscrutability. Something that is not
deducible, but must be decided on, and therefore, in the
end reflects discretion. The citizen can live with this
arbitrariness because it is hidden. It is exactly the
burden and responsibility of the administration that it
must produce illusions. And certainly the illusion of a
clear and logic connection between what the
administration does (the internal world) and the
problems of the citizens (the outside world). It is a
general trait of much fiction that no such connection
exists. As a matter of fact, many writers portray the
authorities in a way bringing about associations with
one armed bandits. They may react upon external
stimuli, but in an unpredictable and inexplicable way.
The problem of the public servant

But public servants? How do they manage their daily
life being conscious of this contradiction? And how do
they learn to live with it? The problem is that the young
public servant expects, like the citizen, that the higher
up in the system you get, the closer you get to the core
of rationality. But in practice it is the other way around:
the higher up in the system you advance, the closer you
get to discretion and therefore arbitrariness.
Thus, when the frames are set out for the work of new
employees and orders and instructions given, it is not
just because they are ignorant of what the work
involves. It is also, and especially, because they need a
defined area within which decisions can be made
without using discretion. Later they slowly grow
accustomed to the discretion. Nevertheless, they may be
shocked the first time they participate in a meeting at
top level or are present at a minister’s report and
suddenly realise that nothing divinely is going on. But
that does not matter, as long as they keep it to
themselves like Sinuhe. Therefore, socialisation up
through the system is characterised by subtlety. The
official, who—as the child in H.C.Andersen’s fairy tale
The Emperor’s New Clothes—has a tendency to say “But
he is naked” is not mature enough to be confronted with
arbitrariness. But at this time, most of them have
probably learned that if they do not have anything
positive to say, then they “feel that…”; not to say
anything straight, but “to indicate”—preferably
“discreetly”.8
This results in a characteristic culture, which is
described in Ulrich Horst Petersen’s book Husets
Tjeneste (“At the Service of the House”). The contact
between the servants of the House, in the many closed
rooms, is of an explicit indicative character. Nothing is
said directly. As a matter of fact, according to the logic of
the House, nothing is said directly as it would be
synonymous with indicating some kind of a mistake, a
defect, something that could be done differently, and
this is inconceivable in the House. When something is
indicated, it is done so discreetly, so probingly, that if
7 See also the discussion on authority and illusion in Sennett

(1980).
any opposition exists, nothing has been indicated and

certainly not as to what caused the aversion. If the
hints, indiscretions, aphorisms, the casual remarks are
raised to a higher collective level, an organization
emerges groping, searching and speculating to find a
reality which disappears exactly because of the nature
of the attempts.
How do the officials feel then? They do not feel too
content. The reason is that the system does not offer
any precise opposition from, or cooperation with other
people. The administrative authorities mirror the
citizens. But they do not mirror each other, because
then they would reveal the arbitrariness, they would
raise something to the level of collective consciousness
and thus name what must be unspoken.
The public servant has to pay for this lack of
reflection. Within fiction we find several examples of it.
Scherfig’s Den forsvundne fuldmægtig (“The Head Clerk
Who Disappeared”), Pontoppidan’s Naar Vildgœssene
trœkker forbi (“When the Wild Geese Migrate”), and
Viggo F.Møller’s Ordet, som ikke blev udtalt (“The
Unspoken Word”) all portray the private life of a public
servant, which is emotionally amputated and imbued
with habits from the official life of the administration.
The private life of Horst Petersen’s “House Manager”,
Birch, has gradually become rudimentary, to the extent
that he wants to stay overnight in the House. Personnel
manager Bing suffers especially from the inability to
act. As a matter of fact, very little action is going on in
the House. The persons are too occupied considering
what to do. Any action may thus cause a shock, which
may severely try the person incidentally involved—as is
the case when Bing suddenly becomes aware of loud
and abnormal sounds from the office next to his. The
manager of the House, Birch, is apparently raping
8 It is probably no coincidence that the words “discreet” and
“discretionary” have the same root.

Bing’s secretary. And now Bing is faced with the

demands for action:
Bing was in agony, he would have preferred a longer

period of peace and quiet, time to devote himself to
the case, to contemplate the pros et cons, and
finally to act serenely and authoritatively on behalf
of his superiors, and then this episode occurred,
suddenly, without warning, altogether unpleasant.
We find the same description in Leo Tolstoy’s novel

Anna Karenina. Anna’s husband is a public servant and
Tolstoy’s description of his reaction when he learns of
his wife’s infidelity is almost archetypal. He regards the
problem as a case, which has to be settled. In the
beginning, he finds it difficult to view the problem that
way, which bothers him very much, until he finds a
principle to base his decision upon. In his mind he sorts
out the arguments logically, and beyond questioning.
But when the wife returns later in the evening, he is
unable to utter a word.
The most extreme consequence may be the
development of schizophrenic traits. In its most pure
form this consequence is described in Dostojevskij’s The
Double The main character, councillor Goljádkin, is
employed in a department in St. Petersburg. Various
analyses of The Double have suggested that Goljádkin
already is oppressed or becomes so through
wickedness, humiliation or unjust treatment. Most
likely the explanation is to be found in the fact that
Goljádkin, as a human being, is left in the lurch by the
department. We are all accomplices, if we do not mirror
each other and offer counter actions or cooperation.
Goljádkin gets neither. His superiors are mysterious
and implicit, his colleagues are smooth and scheming,
while he is actually an open and honest person, but of
the clumsy type. He always loses, when he tries to get
on in the department. He does not comprehend the
administration’s norms of being imprecise in a precise
way. It is as if he has to violate the system all the time

to be able to express himself. He is a human being,
searching for certainty but finding inscrutability. He
looks for limits but his superiors refuse. And, in the
majority of cases, you understand them, because
Goljádkin’s ‘method’ is almost provoking disaster. In his
hazy surroundings, he travels to and fro between a
superiority and a inferiority complex, constantly
exaggerating and out of balance, either humble or
sickeningly complacent.
The Double may be interpreted in several ways. In the
end Goljádkin accepts the notion that he is insane.
Does he, by doing so, preserve remnants of honesty
within himself? Does insanity become his way of
expressing himself? Or, does he finally adapt to the
surrounding’s perception of him?
However, if we accept these interpretations, we cut
out the importance of Goljádkin’s double. This double is
totally different from Goljádkin. He is sly, smooth, quick
at sensing, adaptable—and he has a fling with the
administrative intrigues. When Goljádkin is taken away,
the double runs after him a part of the way “looking
extremely satisfied and merry”—as if to make sure that
the honest and unpleasant part of the soul is gone for
ever.
If we imagine that the double after some years has
matured, it is not impossible that he will end up
resembling the head clerk Lehn in Huset (“The House”),
whose way of walking is described as having a touch of
…legitimacy, it was not just any casual way of

walking, but a more superior walk, an institutional
walk, which, ensured of its own justification in a
higher legal sphere, carried the whole of Lehn,
whose importance to the world was indisputably
expressed at the same time.
This result is caused by the fact that the authority has

to establish its own inner order and identity. It is an
identity, which must contain several elements. It has to

unite the idea of infallibility with inscrutability, and the
ambiguous connections between the internal and
external with the importance of relations to the citizen.
Ideal typically it becomes a fictitious world with internal
as well as external facades. The external facade is a
protection against the citizen (reality), the internal one a
protection against itself (unreality).
Within fiction, we find several fragments of this world;
some of the classic descriptions of the administration
deal especially with the apparent lack of any relevant
activity within the administration, such as Hans Egede
Schack in Phantasterne (“The Dreamers”), Strindberg in
Röda rummet (“The Red Room”) and Scherfig in Den
forsvundne fuld mægtig (“The Head Clerk Who
Disappeared”). But not only these earlier descriptions fit
into the picture. We find unmistakable traits of
unreality in Göran Hägg’s Lejontecknet (“The Sign of the
Lion”) in his description of the modern management
oriented Swedish Ministry of Environment.
The construction of administrative,

organisational, and political reality
What might we thus have learned about public
administration? Indeed, we have not learned very much
about the technicalities of administration. Rather,
fiction offers some good ideas on how the phenomenon
of public administration can be interpreted and put in
perspective.
What is emphasised in fiction is the significance of
public administration for the citizen and—although
indirectly—its societal role. Whatever the administration
might be seen as a controlling or helping agent (in its
old or new testament manifestation), public
administration is perceived of as a normative structure,
the significance of which being the normalisation of the
citizen in moral, psychological and political terms.
Normalisation always implies behavior modification

and this is rarely accepted in total. The boundary-
crossing behavior between authority and citizen is
marked by that: struggle, subordination, strategies and
anti-strategies. The ‘ego’ of authorities reminds us thus
of the parental ego in transaction analysis (the critical/
authoritarian parent in the old testament type; the
caring parent in the New Testament type), whereas the
citizen fits well in the role of the adapted or the
aggressive child. The basic pattern of subordination
remains unchanged.
From this interaction a political order emerges—or is
called in question. On the micro level we might observe
change, chaos, friction, turbulent processes, a looking
for authorities, an escape from authorities, a
confrontation with authorities, an attempt to penetrate
authorities. Those are the processes with which fiction
literature are concerned.
The interpretation of micro level processes in some
way presupposes the maintenance and reproduction of
basic structures. At least we often observe in fiction the
world as unaltered at the macro level of a political order
despite the interactional disturbances on the micro
level.
To some extent this model fits also parent/child
relations in the direct sense. Through crises and revolts
the child grows up, matures and becomes parent itself.
The process on micro level is quite noisy. On the macro
level we observe pattern maintenance, using Parsons’
(1951) concept. The difference being however that the
citizen does not grow up and become authority. Thus,
like the domesticated cat, some childish behavior
remains.
In sum, this perspective in fiction literature comes
quite close to that of political institutionalism with
regard to its interest in processes of learning,
socialisation and symbol construction. The potential of
fiction literature might therefore be its analysis of how a
political order is maintained or defeated, the costs
associated and the peculiar weakness of the basis of an

order.
It might also be worthwhile to take a closer look at
how behavior is conceptualised in fiction literature. A
rather basic distinction in organization theory is
between organizations understood as rational vs.
natural systems (Scott, 1981). The conception in fiction
is at the same time precise and ambiguous. The public
administration is often described as rational or at least
intended rational in its self-conception, the point being
that organizations are much better understood as
natural systems, i.e. systems of social interactions
emerging from the actors subjective situational
interpretation. Here, fiction comes close to the
“verstehen-approach” of Weber. For example, the
organization in Joseph Heller: Something Happened is
outlined as a set of delicately balanced relations of fear.
Hans Kirk describes in Borgmesteren går af (“The Mayor
Resigns”) the administration of the City of Copenhagen
as processes of gossip and intrigue-making. Both The
Castle and The Trial contain descriptions of
organizations which ostensibly are endless
manifestations of formality and rationality but at a
closer look might be everything else.
Fiction literature is in fact very close to contemporary
organization theory, e.g. studies of organisational
culture and the conceptualisation of organizations as
loosely coupled systems. This idea we also find in the
conceptualisation of the inner and the outer world of
authorities. Behind the facades of rationality, infallibility
and importance we may find quite a different world. The
administration might at the boundary display an image
which signals the adoption of societal values as
rationality. It might offer symbols and interpretations of
life and construct meanings in an absurd world. But
activities and attitudes in the inner world might only be
loosely coupled to the environment, thanks to the buffer
capacity of the facades.
K. attempts in The Castle to penetrate the court

authorities. He does not succeed. He searches a
meaning in an absurd landscape of offices. He does not
find the key to the interpretation of the authorities,
maybe because a meaning cannot be discovered, only
constructed. Smiling, the castle accepts the challenge. It
can do that safely. Behind the facade—the Gioconda
smile of Authorities—only illusions can be found.
To me the famous smile has always resembled the

smile of a woman who had just had her husband for
supper.
Lawrence Durrell: Justine
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EPILOGUE
Realism in the Novel, Social Sciences
and Organization Theory
by
It would be wrong to conclude that the present

collection of essays is unique in its attempt to bring
closer literature and science. If we adopt a historical
perspective, we can see that the modern novel and the
social sciences emerged as separate genres at about the
same time in the nineteenth century. Thus the
legitimating efforts were directed not only at
establishing each of them as genres, but also at
distinguishing between what at the beginning looked
very much alike, especially as both used the realist
style. The following historical excursion may help us
understand better which expectations from the reading
public are the same for fiction and for social sciences
and which are different; which of them are conventions
that can be easily discarded and which are crucial for a
genre’s survival; and what can organization studies
learn from a genre which is older, more developed and
better established—the novel.
The novel and science: a first

encounter
When Auguste Comte was developing his positive
science of sociology, few of his admirers were so ardent
as Emile Zola, who considered his work the embodiment
of the new scientific ideal. Little did he know that, in
times to come, he would be judged as unscientific by
the scientists and as non-literary by the literati. This
CZARNIAWSKA-JOERGES • 309
judgement, however, was issued much later, when

Positivism separated itself from the ‘humanities’ in the
pursuit of true science. The beginnings were different.
The Age of Realism was the age of railways and of

wireless telegraphy and of countless other
mechanical inventions that collectively
revolutionized the nature of society and the quality
of human life within a short span of time. It was
the age during which what used to be called
‘natural philosophy’ was rechristened ‘science’,
having finally ridded itself of the few shreds of
speculative idealism that still adhered to it. It was
the age of the expansion of Europe into Asia and
Africa, after which the legendary ‘terra incognita’
disappeared from the atlases. It was the age of
nationalism and rampant commercialism, but also
the age when international revolutionary
movements began to threaten the security of the
wealthy governing classes. (Hemmings, 1978a, p.
9)
Hemmings traces the earliest recorded use of the word

‘realism’ to Le Mercure français which, in 1826, wrote
about “a literary doctrine…which would lead to the
imitation not of artistic masterpieces but of the originals
that nature offers us…the literature of truth” (pp. 9–10).
In April of the same year, Comte begun a series of
lectures on a “system of positive philosophy”. Both
doctrines aimed at a representation corresponding to the
world as it was—undistorted by any subjective or
partial vision.
Within the world of literature, this Promethean task
was not seen as particularly formidable: the fear was
that dulness and boredom would be the result. Writers,
used to the ‘running commentary’ technique a la
Richardson, could not see the point of an unemotional
relation of the facts of life ‘as they were’. However, when
put into practice, the principle itself proved untenable:
310 • EPILOGUE
All through the ‘age of realism’ novelists will be

faced with the same dilemma: social institutions,
human relationships, the separate courses of
individual lives, all these cannot be presented in a
work of art without a certain measure of trimming
and tailoring… However firm his allegiance to
realism, a novelist has to impose his own peculiar
vision on what he sees, partly because this vision is
inseparable from his artistic consciousness, and
partly because without it his work would lack
shape and point and would finally prove
unreadable. (Hemmings, 1978a, p. 33)
This dilemma attracted the attention of social scientists

much later: unused to reflecting upon their research
and writing, they only recently have begun to ponder
over the paradoxes of ‘objectivity’ and ‘correspondence
theory of truth’. But the novelists were not only ahead
of the social scientists in their self-reflectivity, they were
also ahead in reaching the wider public, Comte (1798–
1857) formulated the Positivist program; it was not until
Durkheim (1858–1917) that this program was applied to
societal problems.
Throughout the nineteenth century it was still the
novelists and historians who were describing the
formation of mature capitalism. The economists, like
Smith and Malthus, were laying the fundation of a
normative science, under the aegis of moral philosophy
or causal laws. The science (art?) of business and public
administration, with its peculiar mixture of eco nomic
and sociological methods and interests not yet existed;
the realist novel was its close approximation.
This statement must be qualified in relation to specific
contexts. Literary realism and its radical version,
Naturalism, were born in France and adopted in
countries under direct French literary influence, like
Poland and Portugal. Other countries, with more
competitive literary cultures, reacted in more complex
ways. In Russia, realism was never far removed from

symbolism, as illustrated by the debate on
Dostojevskij’s Dead Souls, focusing “…the necessary
paradoxical character of all realism in literature, how it
presumes to reflect a reality that needs be apprehended
subjectively by a writer who has nothing more adequate
than language with which to objectify his own version of
the real” (Freeborn, 1978, p. 90). This multilayered
realism aimed at reflection of societal developments
which still contained only early and primitive forms of
the use of capital. Financial and industrial
organizations usually belonged to foreigners and, when
serving as topic for novelists, were used to show how
they clashed with the host culture.
In Germany, on the other hand, the realists kept to a
‘village tale’, as a kind of opposition to industrialisation
which they disliked and distrusted. This reaction was
embedded in the intellectual life of Germany of the turn
of the nineteenth century. The realist novel, condemned
as a typical expression of the nascent bourgeois society,
was not popular among German writers. In Germany
writing and reading were traditionally solitary acts, and
literature which concerned itself with matters of society
had always been counted superficial and ‘non-German’.
In contrast, poetry was given a special place in German
culture (Lepenies, 1988).
In Spain, the main trend was that of naturalismo,
considered by some to be a synonym of realism, by
others a crude variation of realism, but by most as “…a
conscious attempt to apply to literature the discoveries
and methods of nineteenth-century science, particularly
the biological sciences” (Rutherford and Hemmings,
1978, p. 284). Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921)
analysed this trend, and found Zola wanting, especially
in his allegiance to Darwinism, which was difficult for a
Catholic audience to accept. Pardo Bazán postulated the
supremacy of an all-inclusive, objective realism based
on testable laws, and not untestable speculations (like
those concerning evolution). This postulate reflects the
312 • EPILOGUE
progress of the Positivist program, which more and

more clearly saw itself as free from ‘fiction’ of any kind.
As Hemmings put it, they had “no interest in weakening
the force of their findings by wrapping them up in the
distracting packaging of art” (Hemmings, 1978b, p.
302).
In Italy, Angelo Camillo De Mais (1817–1891),
Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of
Bologna, expressed his opinion on realism as follows:
The novel of science, the extraordinary story of

reason: can there be a more absurd combination?
Of course not. (Carsaniga, 1978, p. 344–345)
And although there were Italian realists describing the

emerging world of organizations (see Manoukian in this
volume), De Mais’s opinion became general by the
1890s. The novel returned to Romanticism, science
moved toward Positivism. The following epitaph,
although written in 1978, gives a good summary of the
feelings prevailing at the turn of the previous century:
Long before Zola proclaimed the novelist to be a

social scientist, his predecessors had been
dignifying their activities by using scientific
terminology to describe them: they claimed to be
writing studies rather than works of imaginative
fiction; they analyzed social problems; they
collected data by diligent enquiry and research… [I]
n all this they were doing no more than duplicating
in an amateurish sort of way those who were…
laying the foundations of twentieth-century
academic sociology, (Hemmings, 1978b, p. 362)
It is either historical justice or a historical irony that the

next turn of the century again sees scientists (not only
social) dignifying their activities by an amateurish (that
is, loving) duplication of the rhetoric of literary criticism.
By joining this effort, we hope to avenge Zola. It might
be appropriate to quote George Bernard Shaw who

commented on Zola’s work in a letter to Augustin
Hamon in 1910:
Zola was vulgar; Zola had no humour, Zola had no

style. Yet he was head and shoulders above
contemporaries of his who had refinement, wit and
style to a quite exquisite degree. The truth is that
what determines a writer’s greatness is neither his
accomplishments nor the number of things he
knows by observation; but solely his power of
perceiving the relative importance of things. (Shaw,
1910/1971, p. 914)
Romanticism and positivism: two

rhetorics of modernity
From the point of view of literary history Romanticism
could be seen as a literary phenomenon of the early
eighteenth century, preceding Realism which was
followed by Symbolism. In the following discussion,
however, I wish to present Romanticism as a habit of
mind1, or a rhetoric, which can be contrasted with
Positivism (Richard H.Brown, 1980, 1987, 1989).
Together, they constitute the two main rhetorics of
modernity. Representing opposite stances produces a
tension which guarantees dramatic results for the
audience, but a closer look reveals that that the two
rhetorics not only contradict but also complement each
other.
In the positivist version of scientific realism for
example, society and individual became separated from
one another. The individual became part of a cybernetic
system, ruled by laws uninfluenced by will or personal
1 The concept “…refers to those societal or epochal structures of
consciousness that provide the ordering principles for accounts

in everyday life” (Brown, 1989, p. 9). See also Bourdieu’s concept
of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977),
314 • EPILOGUE
history. Reality and knowledge became the sole domain

of positive science, which offered guidance in all matters
relevant to society. “Science has emerged as a kind of
religion, an ultimate frame of reference for determining
what is real and true” (R.H.Brown, 1980, p. 548).
Experts appropriated the public voice, leaving lay
persons an illusory choice between exit (into individual
privacy) or loyalty, to borrow Hirschman’s phrase
(Hirschman, 1977). “Public” as a term was slowly
changing its meaning from denoting the informed
citizenry collectively making its decisions, to mean that
experts’ opinions are publicly known, rather than
reserved for the powerful only. Judgements of good and
evil were replaced by estimations of profit or political
expediency, moral evaluation of people and the results of
their actions by calculating their utility (as in the
human resources tradition or in social accounting).
Additionally, while officially rejecting rhetoric, Positivism
developed a new vocabulary: that of scientific rationality,
particularly systems theory. The two mastertropes of
this rhetoric were the Baconian ‘objectivity’ and the
Cartesian ‘causality’.
This reified—and reifying—picture of reality, where
moral agency had no part to play, met with violent
opposition from Romanticism. Unlike the protagonists
of the early realist novel, where society was a vehicle for
an individual, the romantic heroes and heroines fulfilled
what they saw as their moral duty against the law of
society, and often at the cost of their lives. Those who
still tried to achieve harmony between the public and
the private, were condemned to absurdity, as in Kafka.
One kind of romantic protest regarded peak experiences
as rebellion against the institutionalization of the self, a
way out which was propagated in high culture by poets
like Rimbaud and Byron much as in today’s New Age
low culture. Another kind of protest is represented in
Kundera’s The Art of the Novel (1988): it re-establishes
the romantic quest for the European spirit—“an
imaginative realm of tolerance”—within “the wisdom of

the novel”.
A way of thinking trying to reach beyond the agonistic
dualism of romanticism and positivism adopts a
diacritical rather than a dialectical point of view. From
such a vantage point, the two antithetical perspectives
do not contribute to a higher level synthesis, but simply
acquire meaning through the difference between them
(R.H.Brown, 1989). Romantics needed the bourgeoisie in
order to shock them by repudiating their ideals. Rebels
need a well-defined social order to rebel against.
Similarly, a system which produces and thrives on
positivist reality and knowledge, creates both the need
and the possibility of emotional safety valves in the form
of organisational rituals, vicarious peak experiences in
massmedia and so on.
What is more, the two antagonists find themselves
immobilised in the deadlock of a language of extremes.
While some authors on both sides never tire of fencing
with the old clichés, their audiences become more and
more disenchanted—be it on aesthetic or moral grounds.
Brown sees a forced choice—between bureaucratised
social life and alienating private withdrawal—as denying
the possibility of both individual moral action and
collective public discourse. In this, the two alleged
enemies surreptitiously join forces to form a duopoly of
modern discourse. Rorty calls it “a cultural hegemony”
(1989).
The disenchantment led, among other things, to
challenging the barriers between science and ‘the arts’,
including science and the novel. Science ought to be
dealing with “an outer world of things”, and the arts
with “an inner world of choice” (Brown, 1987, p. 162)
but neither positivist science nor the romantic novel
were able to delineate the frontier between the two. This
becomes more understandable in the light of a growing
recognition that both ‘worlds’ belong to the same
socially constructed system of symbols.
316 • EPILOGUE
The two domains—science and the novel—reacted to

this questioning of old dualisms separately but in
parallel. A new kind of criticism emerged in the literary
realm, a criticism that rejected both the objectivist
determinism of Positivism and the subjectivist
humanism of Romanticism. Science underwent a
similar process of self reflection which, at least in the
social sciences, was as much influenced by
developments in literary criticism as it was (and still is)
by developments in natural sciences. A truly post-
positivist and post-romantic discourse has yet to
develop, concludes R.H.Brown, who himself, following
Bakhtin’s lead, proposed A Poetics for Sociology in 1977.
In searching for such a discourse, social sciences and
the novel meet again. Let us trace some of the forms
which this encounter takes, and the implication it has
for the scientific paradigm and the literary style both
known as realism.
Although literary realism was conventionally
associated with positivism rather than with
romanticism, if we assume that the romantic and
positivist rhetorics evolved in close relation to each
other, realism must be also seen as connected to both
of them and their common fate. Indeed, one could claim
that the realist novel never properly learned to
differentiate between the two. From its beginnings, it
celebrated holism as the only proper perspective on both
society and the individual. It celebrated individualism
but in a framework of society which was the proper field
for personal praxis. This tradition survived in the US-
novels about self-made heroes and heroines, a kind of
narrative that came to be considered naive within both
positivist and romanticist traditions. This kind of
narrative presupposed, as a scene on which public
action by moral agents could unfold, a stable social
order, a clear-cut political economy and a collective
psychology in which personal character and public
conduct were assumed to be inseparable. When such
assumptions became untenable, some proclaimed ‘the
end of the novel’. Others, like Tom Wolfe and Malcolm

Bradbury, announce a revival of the realist novel.
Indeed, although the meaning of ‘realist’ might change,
there are no indications that the form is anything but
thriving. If this is so, it should open opportunities for
renewed encounters between the novel and this other
realist genre: the social sciences.
Naturalism and critical realism in the

social sciences
The notion of a paradigm shift (from positivism to, let us
say, post-positivism) has attracted so much attention in
the last two decades or so that it would be superfluous
to repeat it here. I have chosen here to sample two
versions of an emerging paradigm—naturalism and
critical realism—because both are relevant for
organization studies, and because they appreciate the
value of realist reporting while avoiding naive
assumptions about iconic correspondence between
words and non-words, between knowledge and the
world.
Of the two, naturalism, true to tradition, is the more
radical. Although the name pays its historical debt, it is
clear that this time we have to do with a ‘social nature’
and the kind of realism espoused is all but naive (the
paradigm is also called a “naturalistic hermeneutics”,
Manicas and Rosenberg, 1988).
Guba (1985) attempted to formulate the basic tenets
of this approach for the use of organization studies. To
begin with, there are many constructions of reality (thus
many realities) which will always lead to divergent
inquiry results. Therefore, the outcomes of a scientific
inquiry can contribute much to an increased
understanding, not to prediction and control. This is
much like belles lettres. Also, there is no obvious border
between a ‘subject’ and an ‘object’ of research, the
objects being human and therefore subjects themselves.
Inquiry is an interaction. Knowledge is idiographic in
318 • EPILOGUE
character—attempts at nomothetic descriptions of the

human world are in vain. Social phenomena are
overdetermined (a Freudian notion applied to
organization theory by Weick, 1979) and fruitless efforts
at establishing simple causality should be abandoned in
favour of detecting patterns of actions, events,
processes. There is never a single answer to the
question why an organization changed as it did but they
are illuminating and instructive ways of describing how
it changed when it did. Finally, all inquiry is inextricably
value-laden (a sobering acknowledgement on the part of
the scientists, not the least because this was
supposedly the decisive difference between science and
non-science).
Lincoln, elaborating the consequences of the
programme sketched by Guba, points out that the “case
study reporting mode”, that is, the one closest to a
traditional novelistic narrative, serves the emergent
paradigm best (Lincoln, 1985).
Interestingly enough, the ‘new naturalists’ seem to
share a tendency to exaggerate with their literary
predecessors. In particular, their ways of achieving
trustworthiness lead both to painstaking research
audits (Skrtic, 1985), where “human instruments” are
checked and controlled, and to a difficulty of political
reflection in the light of the fact that the “member check”
is made the final authority (i.e. the actors in the field
have to accept a report for it to be trustworthy).
Critical realism2 in contrast to Positivism but in
company with other contemporary trends in philosophy
2 I adopt the term used by Isaac, 1990, whose insightful
discussion I am going to relate at some length. Critical realism is

also a term used to describe fiction, where Turgenev and Conrad
are the most quoted examples. The authors to whom this
perspective is attributed include Bhaskar (e.g. Bhaskar, 1989),
Harré (who calls his variety of realism a “referential realism”,
Harré, 1986), Manicas (who uses terms like “conventional” or
“single-barrelled” realism, see e.g. Manicas and Rosenberg,
1988).
(see the next section), explicitly acknowledges its

proximity to belles lettres and often trespasses on its
grounds, not the least in the conscious use of
hermeneutic methods. It avoids the pitfalls of naturalism
but encounters some other problems.
Critical realists assume that social life emerged from
nature, and therefore both nature and society are
constituted and constrained although not reducible to
the laws of causal determination. Having made this
claim, they maintain traditional realism’s ambition of
discovering and describing these causal laws, and they
reject idealistic influences by indicating that “all social
existence has an irremediably ‘material’ dimension,
located in space and time, and expressed through
material engagements with a world” (Isaac, 1990, p. 5).
Organisations may be conceived as symbolic systems,
but they were conceived as tools for changing the
material reality.
Unlike traditional realists, critical realists see
knowledge as a social and historical product, and social
life as symbolic. They hasten, however, to add—in order
to protect themselves from a dangerous proximity to
social constructivism—that social life is not reducible to
the concepts and meanings of the actors, who draw on
pre-existing configurations (“social structures”).3 They
make concessions to social constructivism by admitting
that these structures are constantly reinterpreted and
renegotiated, and are subject to historical
transformation. Nevertheless, “the task of generalizing,
explanatory social theory is to analyze the properties of
such structures, as media and outcomes of human
practice” (Isaac, 1990, p. 6) and not, as social
3The evils of social constructivism vary from one critic to another.

While a typical attack accuses social constructivists of
propagating a conservative, apologetic stance (if we are the
constructors of reality, we must like it), the critical realists
accuse them of luring people into believing that the change is all
too easy—see Giddens (1990, 1991).
320 • EPILOGUE
constructivists would have it, the very process of

production and reproduction of these structures.
The assumptions of ‘critical realism’ can attract many
people—writers, social scientists, and management
theorists alike (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992). The
attractive part is its softened epistemological
assumption (knowledge is contained in stories), but its
attempt to expurgate the spectre of relativism by firmly
sticking to a causally structured reality leads to
problems. Fay (1990), introducing the metaphor of
cartography shows why this strategy of keeping the cake
and eating it, filled by an unavoidable tension, is not
really necessary.
In cartography there is a terrain mapmakers want

to map, and they devise various modes of projection
by which to represent the various aspects of this
terrain. (Indeed, there are no contours of the terrain
as such, independently of any mode of representing
them. The terrain is an entity in part constituted by
some form of representation or other). Of course,
what aspects of the terrain they will map will in
part be the result of where and how they look at it—
at what level, so to speak, they perceive it (maps of
the earth drawn from the perspective of the moon
will look quite different from ones drawn from the
perspective of the earth itself). Also, which mode of
representation is employed will be a result of what
is that they want to represent, and for what
purposes. There is no ‘One Best Map’ of a
particular terrain. For any terrain there will be an
indefinite number of useful maps, a function of the
indefinite levels and kinds of description of the
terrain itself, as well as the indefinite number of
modes of representations and uses to which they
can be put. (Fay, 1990, p. 37)
Observe that the notion of ‘terrain’ does not exclude the

‘objective’ existence of earth—on the contrary, it
assumes it. What is refuses is the ‘correspondence’—

even as a “rough ideal of adequacy” (Isaac quoting
Manicas, 1990, p. 5). Borges in his Historia universal de
la infamia mockingly recounts the story of a map which
was identical with the country it represented—leading to
the end of the discipline of cartography in the country
(“Del rigor en la ciencia”). A scientific description which
equals what it describes is an absurdity. ‘Realism’ must
mean something else, and both naturalism and critical
realism try to construct it.
What are the possible uses—or misuses—of
naturalism and critical realism in organization studies?
The methodological antics of naturalism do not
contribute to an understanding of contemporary
organizations, but its main aim—to study people in
their ‘natural’ setting rather than in the sterile
environment of thought-up models—is important.
Critical realism, on the other hand, scrutinises the
philosophical issues which can provide material for
crucial kind of reflection: what do we study? what do we
present as a study report? Both schools of thought
recommend realism as the reporting mode for scientific
studies. The advice can be taken directly into studies of
organizations. Consequently, we need to take literature
more seriously in order to perfect our own genre.
Conversing while worlds are made

While realist philosophy is still largely occupied with
counting (epistemological) angels on the top of an
(ontological) pin, literature takes greater liberties.
Kundera claims that this was always the case: “The
novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud, the class
struggle before Marx, it practised phenomenology…
efore the phenomenologists” (Kundera, 1988, p. 32).
Bakhtin explains this ‘prescience of the novelists’ by the
artists’ “keen sense for ideological problems in the
process of birth and generation”,which is often keener
than that of “the more cautious ‘man of science’, the
322 • EPILOGUE
philosopher, or the technician” (Bakhtin/Medvedev,4

1928/1985, p. 17). Instead of dropping realism in the
face of growing critique, the realist novel incorporated
the critique itself.
Thus it can be said that the novel accepted and
understood the paradoxicality of social life before the
postmodern thinkers did. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
trained his readers to accept the intricacies of magic
realism, where it became even more clear that old
dualisms of materialism-idealism and involvement-
detachment can no longer be sustained. When Umberto
Eco and Salman Rushdie described the present and the
past, our own and exotic cultures, it becomes possible
to accept the lack of clear boundaries. Writers of my
generation— Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, Patrick
Süskind and Jeanette Winterson—seem to reach beyond
modernism and postmodernism, both modernist
inventions—to the country of last things which does not
yet have a name, but which maintains realistic
appearances.
Their kind of realism accepts the fact that, not only
works of art, but all re-presentations add to reality
rather than repeat it. Only the easily scared are still
shaking their heads over Goodman’s “irrealist” claim
that we are all world-makers (1984). Examples of social
science perspectives that parallel the literary
developments are Brown’s “poetic for sociology” (1977)
and Richard Rorty’s pragmatism (Rorty, 1980; 1982,
1989). Rorty’s position is interesting insofar it avoids
the self-imposed problems of critical realism and it
seems directly applicable to the studies of
organizations.
First, the realist ontology is moved into the realm of
belief. It is sensible and convenient to believe in the
world of causes ‘over there’; after all, the organisational
actors base all their professional existence on such an
4 The precise authorship of this work (and some others by
Bakhtin) is uncertain.
assumption. To organise, to manage, to undertake—all

this requires a faith that there is a world of causes and
that people can be agents in the world. This does not
mean, however, that there are ways of describing this
world which correspond to it ‘as it really is’.
We need to make a distinction between the claim

that the world is out there and the claim that truth
is out there. To say that the world is out there, that
it is not our creation, is to say, with common
sense, that most things in space and time are the
effects of causes which do not include human
mental states, To say that truth is not out there is
simply to say that where there are no sentences
there is no truth, that sentences are elements of
human languages, and that human languages are
human creations. (Rorty, 1989, pp. 4–5)
Secondly, and consequently, the superior notion of

episteme (knowledge) becomes identical with doxa
(opinion), until now held by science in disregard (Rorty,
1991). We have opinions on all kinds of matters (indeed,
the ‘self can be seen as a constantly reweaving web of
beliefs) and we test them in action. Most organisational
actors would easily agree that what works matters more
that what is ‘true’ (for whom? for how long?).
Pragmatism is a philosophy meant for people of action;
it is a kind of theory which explores practices rather
than explains principles.
Science, in this formulation, is a conversation of the
humankind, and its logic of inquiry is rhetorical.
McCloskey (1986, 1990) showed it most convincingly for
economics. Social science is a kind of writing, and its
various disciplines can be best compared to literary
genres. Thus it should be only natural that organization
theory, as a genre, engages in a conversation with other
genres. The present book was intended as an
illustration and an attempt to persuade readers that
such a conversation is possible and desirable.
324 • EPILOGUE
In this perspective, novels are not sources of

information, but sources of meaning. They are texts to
be taken into account while other texts are produced;
models—not for imitation, but for inspiration. They are
versions of the world, and insofar as these are relevant
and valid, it is not by virtue of correspondence with ‘the
world’, but by the virtue of containing right
(“entrenched”) categories and of being acceptable
(Goodman, 1984). Such versions of worlds gain
acceptability, not in spite of, but because of their
aesthetic features. It is the power of creative insight and
not documentary precision that makes novels both a
potential competitor and a dialogue partner for
organization theory.
Were such a conversation to start, would organization
theory not remain in the role of pupil rather than
teacher? Kundera claims the novel’s “extraordinary
power of incorporation: whereas neither poetry nor
philosophy can incorporate the novel, the novel can
incorporate both poetry and philosophy without losing
thereby anything of its identity, which is characterized…
precisely by its tendency to embrace other genres, to
absorb philosophical and scientific knowledge”
(Kundera, 1988, p. 64).
Indeed, a dialogue between a teacher and a pupil. Is
there a danger that with such a teacher all organization
researchers become novelists? Hardly. After all, the
analogy between novelists and organization researchers
is only an analogy, and as such has its limits. Novelist
and organization researchers have one thing in common:
the topic of organizational life. I am also suggesting that
they should have another thing in commmon: a
conscientious and reflective manufacturing of the works
in their respective genres, At this point, however, I
should indicate the limits of this comparison.
An organization researcher is in many respects more a
literary critic than a novelist. The organizations which
the researchers describe are only in a certain sense
products of their mind (in the sense that they are
responsible for their own texts); the organizations are

originally written by organizational actors. They, like the
literary authors, have quite a lot to say about the
critics’ opinions of their production. Organization
researchers work on an uncertain footing, insofar they
undertake mediation between the ‘organizational
authors’ and the academic theorists. The latter,
however, meet again on a similar level with their
colleagues pursuing the theory of literature, and the
experiences between theory-makers can be exchanged
on a more equal footing.
In defense of reflective realism

If the analogy between novelists and organization
researchers can be accepted inspite all its limitations, a
question still remains whether, with so many genres in
existence, Realism is a good teacher to learn from. There
seems to exist a contradiction between pragmatism’s
refutation of the “mirror of the mind” metaphor of
science (Rorty, 1980) and literary realism’s eager
espousal of it. But these are two different mirrors. When
Stendhal said that “a novel is a mirror riding along a
highway” (Levin, 1973, p. 66) he could not have had in
mind “the notion of knowledge as inner representation”
(Rorty, 1980, p. 46). Mirrors are also versions of worlds.
One could say, with the critics of the literary realism,
that novelists simply got the precepts of Science wrong.
Alternatively, one can join the critics of scientism in
claiming that it is literature that offers a better insight
into the social character of human cognition. The
difference is located elsewhere: “[t]he world of one single
Truth and the relative, ambiguous world of the novel are
molded of entirely different substances” (Kundera,
1988, p. 22). A good novel makes the readers believe in
its worlds by the force of persuasion (just like good
science), not by the force of external authority.
Realism is one way of worldmaking which in the
present volume was selected for inspection for two
326 • EPILOGUE
reasons: because it was a dominating discourse in the

period which was of interest to us, and because it
employs the rhetoric closest to that of our own
discipline. As Latour (1988) points out, one common
device used to build up an impression of ‘reality
representation’ is by alluding to the fact that the
authors posses ‘proofs’ supporting what they say.
Scientific realism is characterised by the fact that the
authors mobilise the documents within the text (tables,
graphs, references). Additionally, the reader is promised
a possibility of checking on these documents (by, say, a
visit to a laboratory, author’s office or library). Indeed,
the journalists who interview researchers at their office
tend to believe that their computers ‘contain the data’.
The novelists understood this technique long ago and
used it for their own purposes, as for instance in Jean
d’Ormesson’s The Glory of the Empire, complete with
footnotes, page references and all5).
Although the debates on realism—in science and in
literature—continue, there is a growing consensus on
understanding the concept in the way indicated above:
not as a “way of writing corresponding to reality” but a
“way of writing corresponding to the contemporary
criteria of realist writing” (Levine, 1993). The main issue
is then an institutionalised preference for a given style of
writing over another.
Accordingly, realism is but one literary style which
offers insights into social reality. For organization
theorists, however, it may be the most attractive style in
which to present their knowledge, because it is both
legitimate and expected. The question is then not
‘Whether realism’ but ‘What kind of realism’? The main
message of the present book concerned read ing novels
as a source of organisational knowledge. A
complementary message concerns novels as inspiration
5 La Gloire de l’Empire, Paris, Gallimard 1971.

for writing—as a model for a conscientious and

reflective formation of style.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
José Luis Alvarez is Head of the Organizational

Behavior Department at the Instituto de Estudios
Superiores de la Empresa (IESE), in Barcelona, Spain.
He holds a Ph. D. in Organizational Behavior from
Harvard University and his current research interests
focus on the sociology of knowledge as applied to
business ideas and management education.
Torben Beck Jørgensen is Professor of Public
Administration at University of Copenhagen. His
empirical and theoretical research focuses on public
organization theory, theories of governance and control,
and cut-back management. Among recent publications
is “Modes of governance and administrative change” in
Jan Kooiman (Ed.) Modern governance (SAGE, 1993).
Richard J.Boland, Jr. is Professor at the
Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western
Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio. His research
over the last 15 years has emphasized interpretive
studies of how individuals experience the process of
designing, implementing and using information systems
in organizations.
Carmen Mérchan Cantos holds a Doctorate in
Philosophy from the University of Barcelona. She spent
two years as Associate in Education at the Philosophy
of Education Research Center of the Harvard Graduate
School of Education. Currently she is working on the
relationship between literature and philosophy.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS • 331
Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges holds a Chair in

Management Science at Lund University, Sweden. Her
field research focuses on control processes in complex
organizations in different cultural contexts. She is
interested in the narrative approach to organization
studies, the use of anthropological methods in field
studies and the origins and status of managerial
knowledge. She has published in the area of business
economics and public administration in Polish, her
native language, Swedish, English, and of recent even in
Italian. In her own opinion, her most important
publications (until this book) are Exploring Complex
Organizations, SAGE, 1992; Styrningens paradoxer (The
Paradoxes of Control), Norstedts, 1992 and The three-
dimensional organization, Chatwell-Bratt, 1993.
Robert Grafton Small is a member of St. Andrews
University, Scotland, and reputedly Britain’s first formal
appointment in Organisational Symbolism. Also a
lecturer in Marketing, his interests include the
anthropology of consumption, problems of text and
narrative and the built environment. Despite his
effective lack of French, he is a flâneur in word and
deed, as evidenced by his long-running series of articles
for Note Work, the network journal of SCOS, the
Standing Conference on Organisational Symbolism. Not
surprisingly, given his culture and his upbringing, he is
precluded from attaching any great importance to
whatever he has written, but only after it is published.
Pierre Guillet de Monthoux holds a Chair in
Management Science at Stockholm University, Sweden.
He is currently working on a project on Art as an
economic resource for enterprises. He has published
works on the philosophy of management such as Action
and Existence—Art and Anarchism for Business
Administration, Wiley, 1983; and The Moral Philosophy
of Management from Quesnay to Keynes, Sharpe, 1993.
He runs the European Center for Arts and Management
(ECAM), which organizes useful as well as bizarre events
in places as different as the Venice of the North, called
332 • ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Stockholm, and the village of Gattières on the French

Riviera. Pierre was born after World War II as a
Frenchman in exile. He nevertheless intends to stay
European and have fun as long as possible. If you see
him, you would never believe that one of his favourite
topics is actually aesthetics.
Geert Hofstede is Professor of Organizational
Anthropology and International Management at the
Department of Economics and Business Administration
of the University of Limburg at Maastricht, the
Netherlands (Emeritus as of October, 1993). He is a co-
founder of the Institute for Research on Intercultural
Cooperation (IRIC). His career has alternated between
practice in various roles in different business
organizations, and research-plus-teaching in different
countries. His contributions to organization theory
cover the areas of power and control, the impact of jobs
on people, and differences due to national and
organizational cultures. His best known publications
are The Game of Budget Control (Van Gorcum/
Tavistock, 1967/68), Culture’s Consequences (SAGE,
1980) and Cultures and Organizations: Software of the
Mind (McGraw Hill, 1991).
Bengt Jacobsson is Professor of Public Management
at Lund University, from where he networks extensively,
most recently in the direction of “Public Sector in
Common Europe”, a newly emerged group of
organization researchers interested in public
administration studies. His research focuses on
interorganizational control and decision-making,
regulation of societal sectors and national consequences
of European integration. He has published in Swedish
books on governmental control (Hur styrs förvaltningen?
Studentlitteratur, 1984), on interorganizational
decision-making (Kraftsamlingen, DOXA, 1987) and on
industrial policies (Konsten att reagera, Carlssons,
1989). As to his writing in foreign languages, nothing
really worth reading—as yet!
ABOUT THE AUTHORS • 333
Bernward Joerges is Professor of Sociology at the

Technical University Berlin and a director of a research
group at Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für
Sozialforschung. His research focuses on science
studies, large technical sys tems, technology in everyday
life and urban studies. Not being in command of Polish,
he has published widely on these topics in German, of
recent Technik ohne Grenzen (with Ingo Braun,
Sührkamp, 1994), His most recent publication in
English is “Expertise lost: An early case of technology
assessment”, Social Studies of Science, 1994, 24 and in
French Les technologies de la vie quotidienne (with Alain
Gras and Victor Scardigli, Harmattan, 1992).
Franca Olivetti Manoukian is senior consultant at
the APS Institute (Studio di Analisi Psico-Sociologica) in
Milan, Italy. She has been practicing for more than
twenty years consulting and research on the problems of
human resources management in organizations and she
has been studying and making interventions in the
functioning of public agencies producing social services,
at local as well as national level. Basing her activities on
theoretical premises developed within the sociology of
organizations and the psychoanalisis of collective
phenomena, she developed an effective practice to
confront the multiple and manifold realities of social
services. At the same time, in her writings she struggled
to conceptualize her concrete experiences and to
produce methodological tools to cope with those. Her
writings include papers and projects on organizing
services in public administration. Among her books she
relates most to Lo Stato dei Servizi (“The State of
Services”, il Mulino, 1988). Her most recent article is
“From intervention to intervene”.
Maureen Whitebrook is Honorary Research Fellow in
the Department of Politics, the University of Sheffield,
England, having previously been Senior Lecturer in
Political Theory at the Nottingham Trent University. Her
research focuses on the connections between politics
and literature, particularly the representation of
334 • ABOUT THE AUTHORS
political ideas in works of fiction; she has also worked

on the place of literature in political education, and has
carried out research in the USA on politics and
literature teaching in higher education. Her most recent
publications is Reading political stories: Representations
of politics in novels and pictures (Rowman and Littlefield,
1992) to which she contributed the Editor’s Introduction
and “Depicting liberalism: Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of
the Journey”.

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Good Novels, Better Management

Good Novels, Better

harwood academic publishers

ISBN 0-203-98550-8 Master e-book ISBN

Donald McCloskey, 1993

The editors wish to express their thanks

Chapter 1 Introduction: Management Beyond 1

About the Authors 330

Now approaching a half-century ago I concluded my

and deepest knowledge of effects and consequences, of

The purpose of this book is to show how good novels

Kotleriana. Managers enjoying books by Heller, Bellow or

The case study tradition

…the willing suspension of disbelief. In other

ideal that a case discussion ought to achieve.

A case should provoke a critical discussion amongst

took on a Socratic method, stimulating the commercial

often actively re-shape an author’s specific text to match

The case as typically used provides ‘realistic’

for themselves on an alternative. (Case Clearing

But what if we abandon the idea of ‘documenting’ or

enterprise. Without enjoying the art of reality creation,

Is the novel a case?

Literature helps to restore what the professional-

This argument, the easiest to concur with and the best

different way than it is in cases. Many novelists had

salient problems in a personal, although not private,

they demonstrate a wider reflection on business culture

telling us stories of success and glory, the novels

When Max Weber suggested that we use ideal types to

sort of pluralistic postmodernism, we may end up in a

embeddedness in the social context of the time rather

The management school of good books

jobs,’ they say. And when they find novels with

Alvarez, J.L. and Merchán, C.C. (1992) The role of narrative

DeMott, B. (1989) Reading fiction to the bottom line. Harvard

novel on commercialization of veils by Emile Zola— Au

1The English edition quoted here is “The Ladies’ Paradise”, 1985,

based on turnover, while the Old Elbeuf, Baudu’s shop,

dirty little cashier, reports an 80 thousand franc sales

Zola gives a clear picture of the management

depend on steady outlets and prefer to cover costs by

was, of course, used by Zola in a passage of the novel.

My joy is particularly great having stolen. To steal

had so suc cessfully developed the business inherited

exploitation of woman to which everything

Mouret emphasized that he did not really “care a hang

affairs. Zola describes one of the most fervent customers

personalizes the impersonal, for instance a landscape or

Fetishist perversion of seeing or dreaming a fetish

Clérambault obviously thought he had discovered a

organizing, which was to be investigated by the

Naturalism—A literary method for

observation and exact analysis, employed in the physical

on to propose this doctrine as a means for

Zola sadly remarked: “I think he did not particularly like

made investigations ‘on location’ for each major novel.

Denise first gets hired, then fired and finally hired

man. Mouret sees only her—Denise the individual

Painting visual passion

was probably because of its poor account of individual

This passion is an organizational passion. It is

Brandes, G. (1987) Emile Zola. In: Braunche, M. and Möller, C.,

Taine, H. (1866) Histoire de la litterature Anglaise. Paris: Librairie