ABSTRACT
Recognition of the role of texts, and text analysis, in management theory has a short history. It is not yet two decades since Organization Studies published a series of papers that introduced readers to the influential work of French philosophers Jacques Derrida (Burrell 1989) and Michel Foucault (Cooper 1989). Five years earlier an attempt by Gibson Burrell to publish in this area was repulsed with scorn by another prestigious journal:
In 1984 . . . a piece written on Foucault’s contribution to organizational analysis was submitted to ASQ. I treasure its referees’ comments to this day, for all three questioned the relevance of ‘an unknown French philosopher’ and asked ‘what could an American audience learn’ from such thought.
