Organization/Literature: Exploring the Seam

In this paper we develop a particular way of understanding literature and organization with the aim of drawing on and extending the relationship between the two. Hence our subtitle: exploring the seam. Although the use of literary concepts and theories within our discipline is now well established, the way in which such ideas are taken up often neglects debate and contestation by treating ‘literature’ as a relatively homogeneous field. By following some of the ardent debates relating to issues of representation, the relation between text and extra-textual reality, and literature’s disclosure of its status as fiction, we find a discussion of (social) organization at the heart of contemporary literary theory. It is the oscillation between literature and organization that structures this paper and gives us our argument: that ‘organization’ and ‘literature’ are mutually co-articulating and interdependent concepts and fields of enquiry.