Crossroads Writing Organizational Tales: Four Authors and Their Stories About Culture. Introduction

The title of this collection of short essays derives from Tales of the Field (Van Maanen: Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL). In it, John Van Maanen argues that researchers’ writings are “tales”—that is, constructions—rather than objective reports or “mirrors,” to use Richard Rorty’s (Rorty, R. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.) term, of the external social world. Van Maanen writes there about ethnographies, but the point holds for social scientific (and scientific) writing in general. A text-used here in the sense of “the subject matter of a discourse” and not “textbook”—ethnographic or otherwise, is a means of (re)presentation.