ABSTRACT
This chapter emerged as a by-product of a study of power as an experiential concept (Czarniawska-Joerges 1988). Discouraged by the multiplication of theoretical definitions of power, the present author decided to follow Bittner’s (1961) example in trying to show how people use the concept of power to give meaning to their organizational experience. Students of various disciplines connected with organizations in several countries were asked by their teachers,2 as a non-obligatory part of a teaching course, to write stories illustrating power in organizations they knew from their own experience. Their accounts produced a rich and com plex material which was analysed in its own right (CzarniawskaJeorges and Kranas 1991). The study analysed accounts by students from Sweden, Poland, Finland, Norway, the UK, Ger many and Italy, the choice dictated by rules of difference minimiz ation and maximization (Glaser and Strauss 1970) in terms of the type of curriculum, the national culture, political and economic systems. It was not, however, a traditional cross-cultural study. Each group was treated as a separate identity, consisting of people who shared common experiences, and therefore presumably also a more or less common interpretation of power in the organiza tions which they knew about, in the societies where they lived. In the conventional sense of the term, each group represented only itself; in a social constructivist sense, each group’s accounts ‘re-presented’ a bit of a social reality of which they were both constructors and consumers, creators and slaves.
