University of Bath School of Management

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• ► Prof Yiannis Gabriel
• ► Organizational Storytelling Seminar series
• ► Unemployed managers and professionals in their 50s

“Losing the plot in the era of the image: When a picture tells more than a thousand words”

Yiannis Gabriel, Professor of Organizational Theory at the University of Bath School of Management, presented his inaugural lecture on Tuesday 12th April.

Addressing a packed lecture theatre comprising family and friends, colleagues, alumni, and special guests, Professor Gabriel explored the powerful relationship between stories and images.

He commenced by introducing the phenomenon of ‘narrative deskilling’ whereby:

“There is an attempt to read a story in every picture, every image…it is symptomatic of an era which has lost its ability to tell and to listen to stories”.

He explained how narrative deskilling involves the inability to develop narratives with individualized characters and plots that grip the imagination and generate meaning so that:

“Every X tells a story. Where X becomes virtually everything.”

Using a range of powerful images he went on to explore how, in our media-dominated culture, stories are transcended by mass-produced images, some of which assume iconic standing. Such images possess considerable emotional and rhetorical power and may even claim to ‘tell a story’.

However, Professor Gabriel argued that a line should be drawn between stories with characters and plots told by individuals singly or jointly and images or ‘photo-stories’ which rely for their effect on very different processes.

He contends that one of the most interesting differences in the ways images and narratives work concerns timing:

“An image is instantaneous whereas a story has to be processed and absorbed.”

In the same way an image can be used to ‘prove’ a story. They make a story incontestable and cannot be ignored.

Professor Gabriel concluded by acknowledging that our consciousness is now saturated with images, and our memories are to a large extent visual ones. He suggests that in current times, narrative deskilling is matched by the development of new skills.

“What we have lost in our ability to construct stories with beginnings, middle and ends, characters and plots, we have gained in an ability to read signs, accepting ambiguity and multivalence; the ability to withstand confusion and cacophony, to filter out relevant information from a huge bombardment of noise, to decode difficult or non-specific signs and to endure multiple plots, and multiple storylines without clear beginnings or ends.”

A full podcast of Professor Gabriel’s lecture is available

 

Notes to Editors

Yiannis Gabriel is Professor of Organizational Theory at the University of Bath School of Management. Earlier, he held chairs at Imperial College and Royal Holloway, University of London. Yiannis has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London, where he also carried out post-graduate studies in industrial sociology. He has a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Yiannis is well known for his work into organizational storytelling and narratives, leadership, management learning, psychoanalytic studies of work, and the culture and politics of contemporary consumption. He has used stories as a way of studying numerous social and organizational phenomena including leader-follower relations, group dynamics and fantasies, nostalgia, insults and apologies. Yiannis is co-founder and co-ordinator of the Organizational Storytelling Seminar series, now in its ninth year.

More recently, Yiannis has carried out a series of studies of leadership and management. He is currently working on a four-year field study of leadership and patient-care in the hospital sector, in which storytelling is used as a major part of the methodology. As a founding member of the Leadership Academy for the South East, Yiannis has hosted and chaired several workshops and has initiated a research project on the needs of unemployed professionals and senior executives in the 50s. He is also known for his use of psychoanalytic concepts and theories in social and organizational analysis. He has used psychoanalytic principles in analysing leader-follower relations, group dysfunctions and organizational identities and narratives.

He is the author of 9 books (Freud and Society, Working Lives in Catering (both Routledge), Organizations in Depth (Sage), Storytelling in Organizations (OUP) and Myths, Stories and Organizations (OUP) and co-author of Organizing and Organizations, The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and Its Fragmentation and Experiencing Organizations (all Sage), Organizing Words: A Thesaurus for the Social and Organizational Studies (OUP, 2008)) and numerous articles of which recent ones have looked at the uses and abuses of PowerPoint, ethics of care and hospital care, image and storytelling and the experiences of unemployed managers and professionals in their 50s. He has been editor of Management Learning and associate editor of Human Relations. He is a trustee of The Bayswater Institute and, until recently, the Tavistock Institute. His enduring fascination as a researcher lies in what he describes as the unmanageable qualities of life in and out of organizations.

See Professor Gabriel’sresearch profile.