Telling Tales : Work, Narrative and Identity in a Market Age

Broad ranging, interdisciplinary, this book seeks to understand the corporate conceptions of identity and work, and how they are reflected in our wider culture - through novels, cookery writing, autobiography and the many constructions of narrative. -- .

This book''s broad-ranging and compelling narrative uses literary analysis to examine how identities are influenced within organisations by corporate communication and how they are resisted and challenged by writing coming from other lifestyles.

It claims workplace ''empowerment'' is a rhetorical misrepresentation causing stress particularly to public sector employees whose personal identity and fulfillment relies on a quality of service defined by their professional occupations, which conflicts with calls for increasing quantity of output required by companies organised for ''fast, flexible and responsive'' production. It proves this claim by reading identity through the language of labour expressed in other types of cultural communication - the novel, the writing of celebrity chefs and travel autobiographies - to show how psychological stress is alleviated when personal and occupational values are re-aligned, when work is conducted closer to the rhythms and regulated time of natural processes and when power for ''speaking-the-self'' is restored to the individual.