Review: Organizing Words: A Critical Thesaurus for Social and Organization Studies YIANNIS GABRIEL. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 368 pp. ISBN 9780199213221 (hbk); ISBN 9780199213214 (pbk)
本书由组织叙事专家撰写，收录227个关键词，从社会建构主义视角探讨语言如何构建社会现实，适合社会与组织研究者参考。
From an expert in organizational storytelling comes this engaging and stimulating collection of stories about 227 keywords relevant to organization and social studies.The reversal of the latter part of the book's title here is intentional, as the entries have a definite organizational emphasis.The 'social' in the title should be read as a way of positioning Gabriel's view of organization studies as located firmly within the context of the social studies, and as a way of defining the book's audience.The word 'critical' is, of course, another big giveaway of the book's intellectual orientation, although for some a greater epistemological and ontological diversity might have been required to justify such a description.As it is, 'critical' is clearly interpreted through a social constructivist lenswords (including the 227 keywords) are said to 'not merely describe social realities but constitute them' (Introduction: xiv), to 'work for us' (emphasis in original) and to 'organize our experiences, our thoughts and even our feelings' (hence the 'organizing words' of the title; ibid).Such 'emphasis on how language constructs reality', as one of the entries in the book suggests, is a particular feature of post-structuralism (Poststructuralism: 229).The keyword collection is also expressive of this emphasisthrough the proliferation of entries widely associated with post-structuralism and social construction (eg.aesthetics, bricolage, culture,