ABSTRACT
This theme of this chapter was inspired by the title of the 2001 European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS) conference, “The Odyssey of Organizing”. The Odyssey (Homer 1946) is perhaps the best-known epic in the Western world today and arguably the greatest. Indeed, the term “odyssey” has passed into the English language as meaning “a series of wanderings; a long adventurous journey” (Oxford English Dictionary, 9th edition). Myth was being explicitly appealed to as the organizing concept of the 2001 EGOS conference. But to what extent is myth essential to the concept of organization itself? I shall analyse this question on a number of different levels in this chapter-as allegory, as ideology and as ontology.
