Abstract:
The paper discusses how genres of writing are practices that writers engage in to stage authority by
presenting knowledge in conventional forms. What is argued is that writing cannot neutrally represent
'reality' but rather that, through genre, writing itself constructs the reality that it purports to represent.
Focussing on narrative and storytelling approaches to Organisation Theory, the paper proposes a narrative
approach to writing about organisation that accounts for power and authorship. This is done through a
theorisation of the 'heteroglossic' organisation - one that suggests that organisations can be conceived as
a range of different generic textual practices that simultaneously represent different points of view and
different ways of expressing those points. The paper concludes by suggesting that by taking a
heteroglossic perspective, an understanding of writing about organisations can accept that rather than
portraying their essential characteristics, research texts exist amongst the many competing claims to
organisational knowledge. The paper is written in two parallel streams. The first seeks to explicate a
theory of writing described above. The second seeks to problematise this explication on its own terms and
to demonstrate some of the ironies that emerge from writing about writing.
