The Child is 'Father' to the Manager: Images of Organizations in U.S. Children's Literature

Abstract

A person's approach to organizational life is grounded in an elaborate and largely unarticulated meaning map, which provides tools for analysing situations, beliefs about how things ought to be done and rationales for those beliefs. This meaning map is socially constructed. We argue in this article that children's literature is a part of this process of social construction, and that these stories in the United States are reflective of one of the dominant strands of the U.S. national culture, namely, technical rationality. We analyse thematically a set of twenty-nine chil dren's stories, and discuss the repeating themes which emerged from that analysis. The implications for the study of organizations are discussed.