new year and detective analogy
Happy New Year’s Eve from London! We are celebrating the New Year here by exploring London and its wonderful attractions. There is an emerging theme that I feel very happy about: detective stories. Yesterday we visited Sherlock Holmes’s museum in Baker Street. Later we met with dear friends and discussed recent work by Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell. We are soon off to see the Mouse Trap by Agatha Christie - the longest running show of any kind in the world (https://www.the-mousetrap.co.uk/online/). As you may know, it is an ingenious play with a great twist in the end. Why am I so happy? Because I am a great amateur of crime fiction in its various sub-genres. My greatest favorite – well, one of them – is the Finnish author Matti (Yrjänä) Joensuu. He has written detailed realistic crime novels over a period of more than 30 years. They are literary ambitious and often focus more on the social and societal explanation of the crime than the solving of the crime by the hero (or anti-hero) called Harjunpää.
What does it have to do with organization theory? A great deal because there is an interesting analogy between detective work and conducting organizational research of abductive kind. People such as Barbara Czarniawska and Mats Alvesson & Dan Kärreman have compared qualitative analysis with detective work and mystery solving. I have been working for some time on the idea that the analogy has its pros and cons, but that we should expand the view so that we also see the parallel between mystery writing and research as authoring. I have a paper that I have been working on for some time, but I would love to get feedback on this idea as well as new insights.
