The Inner Workings of Hype: Hollow Success Stories, Fantastic Failure Stories, and Best Practice Guidelines

This seminar has been organised by the Management and Organisation Research Community.

About the speaker

Our guest speaker is Professor Tammar Zilber.

Professor Zilber teaches organization theory at Hebrew University Business School in Jerusalem, Israel, and Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. Her research focuses on institutional dynamics and the ways organizations are shaped by widely shared beliefs and practices. She employs ethnographic and qualitative methods, such as life story interviews and narrative analysis, to explore the connection between cultural ideas and individual behaviors within organizations.

Research title

 "The Inner Workings of Hype: Hollow Success Stories, Fantastic Failure Stories, and Best Practice Guidelines"

Abstract

"In this seminar, I will present work in progress and situate it within the various traditions of the study of narrative and storytelling within organization studies. In the empirical example, I focus on stories told in entrepreneurs' training courses at the height of the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, and contemplate their role vis-à-vis other kinds of texts and the hi-tech hype.

Whereas best practice guidelines offered ordered and rational know-how, hollow success stories and fantastic failure stories added fantasy and irrationality. Both linguistic texts selectively resonated with the theme of the dot-com hype. These intertextual dynamics rendered the entrepreneurial project under hype doable and plausible but also mystified it. Through the best practice guidelines and the two kinds of stories, the training course performed the promise of both hype and entrepreneurship. My study emphasizes the need to explore stories in their holistic linguistic context rather than focusing on stories and narrative dynamics alone".