Organizing stories of organizational life: four films on american business

Film-makers verge on the ethnographical in their study of organizations. This paper discusses four films about business, and how the film-makers invoked a narrative strategy to portray contemporary perspectives on organizational life during the emergence of post-modern society. The remembered shards of a life in The Power and Glory (1933) reflected America's ambiguity towards robber barons. The comedy of manners surrounding the middling clerk in The Apartment (1960) conveyed America's questions about White Collar life. The quest for a voice to speak out against the system in The China Syndrome (1979) beat to the electronic countdown pace of the self-destruction of a nuclear reactor. The historical realism of Wall Street (1987) overwhelmed the viewer with information about a system where information is money.