Cinema as an Organizational Text: An Integrative Review for the “Dark Side” for Business Organizations
Abstract
By situating cinema as an organizational text as opposed to a pedagogical tool, this paper develops an integrative and critical conceptual framework to understand the dark side of business organizations. Despite mainstream organizational behavior studies having mostly dealt with such a positive construct as leadership effectiveness and job satisfaction, it has comparatively disregarded the symbolic and discursive processes that produce and naturalize negative organizational phenomenon.
The study methodology is based on an interpretive-critical review, where the literature published since 2000 in the area of organizational behavior, discourse analysis, and critical management studies is analyzed systematically. The inclusion criteria focused on peer-reviewed articles and seminal theoretical materials and excluded the studies that did not have a conceptual value to the meaning building of organizations.
The paper proposes a cohesive model that unites the five connected theoretical perspectives: sense making, social learning, discourse and power, normalization for deviance, and organizational silence. The paper is a synthesis of the concept of Narrative Legitimation of the Dark Side that explains how harmful organizational practices become cognitive acceptances and are institutionalized.
The study contributes to the epistemological approach of organizational behavior research by integrating symbolic, cultural and discursive analyses in the analysis of organizational dynamics. It also highlights the role of cinema as a critical analytical tool in understanding construction and spread of meaning in terms of leadership, power and deviance in organizations.
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