This is the report of a research study of the 'founding stories' of 30 voluntary organisations, 15 in the UK and 15 in India, as told by the chief executives. , suggest that an analysis of these stories may prove fruitful in deepening our understanding of the voluntary sector and of the ways in which leadership is understood within it. The study explores three propositions; 1) that these founding stories can be regarded as analogous to creation mythology in the functions they fulfil for the organisation, 2) that chief executives make use of these stories as a heuristic in sensemaking, and 3) that the symbolic meanings latent within the stories may be revelatory of differing constructions of the meaning of society and of social change in the two cultures. I have drawn on hermeneutics for developing an interpretive methodology. Two chapters discuss the theoretical background for the study, concentrating on the themes of mythology and hermeneutics. The study includes a review of the literature on storytelling in an organisational context and of the voluntary sectors in the UK and in India and concludes with a suggestion that one meaning of the metaphor of the voluntary sector may be to provide a space for the construction of contemporary understandings of ethical behaviour.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:532483 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Schwabenland, Christina |
| Publisher | University of East London |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0111 seconds