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Management
S C A N D I N AV I A N J O U R N A L O F

Scand. J. Mgmt. 21 (2005) 473–481

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Book reviews

Barbara Czarniawska, A Tale of Three Cities. Or the Glocalization of City Management,

Oxford University Press, Oxford, ISBN 0-19-925270-X, 2002 (161pp., in English, cloth).

As an established scholar in management theory and narrative analysis, Barbara

Czarniawska tells in ‘A Tale of Three Cities’ her own story of how three European cities
(Rome, Warsaw and Stockholm) have been and are being managed by way of
contextualized practices, ‘glocal’ discourses and situated knowledges. And it should be
stated from the beginning that she does it in a very interesting and though-provoking way
(theoretically, empirically and methodologically).
Czarniawska’s ambition is to unravel the way city management techniques and practices
are influenced by ideas and imaginations that travel ‘globally’ and are reconstructed and
implemented ‘glocally’ (the notions of ‘global’ and ‘glocal’ being abstracted ideas and
imaginations as well). This set of techniques and practices Czarniawska conceptualizes as
action nets, that is ‘seamless webs of interorganizational networks’ (p. 4), complex and
disorderly in their character. The action net, globally dispersed but connected by the focus
on the same activities, could in a sense also be regarded as a constantly changing
organization field. In order to counteract the lack of research on the contemporary
metropolis and simultaneously to extend the scope of organization studies, Czarniawska
orients quite a long way towards a network ontology (nowadays well established through
the writings of Foucault and Deleuze, and crystallized into the academic field of
Actor–Network Theory) that stresses activities rather than actors, the organization of
changes rather than changes of organizations and the connections rather than the nodes.
However (maybe on purpose, in order to exemplify that we are all ‘semiotic animals’ in the
so-called prison house of language, i.e., language users trapped in the ‘aporetic binds of
identity thinking, of the necessary lies that secure [im]proper names to [in]definite
descriptions’ (Doel, 1999, p. 44)), Czarniawska ‘falls’ into the language trap, and writes
that ‘Rome combined all y’, ‘Warsaw and Stockholm’s reforms y’, etc. This may be
impossible to avoid, since the use of representations is necessary in order to be able to
present a clear, easy-to-read text. Nevertheless, these formulations (Rome combined y,
etc.) express the traditional spatial ontology whereby cities are conceived and represented
as social agents. At the same time, this is the world-view Czarniawska explicitly tries to
avoid by focusing on the action nets, stressing that it is humans and non-humans ‘within’
these seamless interorganizational networks that ‘act’, and not ‘cities’. The result is a text
that is not totally consistent in ontological terms.
In order to stress further the need to follow the re/creation of connections among actions
rather than actors, using observations and interviews as her main methods, Czarniawska
chooses to preserve ‘voices’ from the ‘field’ or arenas of action by adopting the collage as a
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writing strategy. This collage, or ‘montage of the present’ (if you prefer to see spoken
words as images, as a constitution of a ‘set of distant, not so distant and very recent
[geographical hi]stories, a totality of fragments which brings the past into tension-filled
constellations with the present moment, which speaks to the here and now in strikingly
unexpected but potentially meaningful and politically charged ways’ (Pred, 1995, p. 24))
works very well. This writing technique is difficult, but Czarniawska creates a collage that
is fragmented but connected, just like the action nets that she unknots.
Having made these general remarks, it is now time for a more systematic description of
‘A Tale of Three Cities’. The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1works as an
introduction to the study of the management of ‘glocal’ cities. In Chapter 2, Czarniawska
discusses the identity–alterity interplay that occurs constantly in the representational and
managerial practices conducted within each city’s action net. Chapter 3 deals with
sociological and geographical imaginations of urban traffic and transport, as represented
in mass media. Here, the section about Rome as a war landscape within a military frame of
discourse is especially interesting, and Paul Virilio’s work on the city as fortifications of the
dromological order, that is the militarization of society constituted as a speed order, comes
to mind (Virilio, 2005). Chapter 4 discusses the phenomenon of ‘Europeanization’, i.e., the
attempt by the policy and planning apparatus of the European Union to ‘harmonize’
policy and planning practices at local, urban, regional and national levels within the
European Union, by using the example of public tenders.
In Chapter 5, the invention of tradition (as a reading of history rather than historical
reconstruction) and the reproduction of (bodily) social memory are introduced in order to
reflect upon the question how far the history of city management determines its present, or
whether tradition is simply a convenient invention. Czarniawska’s answer is that ‘y
traditions are compiled from selectively combined elements of an existing repertoire y’
(p. 111) for pragmatic purposes, but the immediate past is entrenched in rituals and
embodied practices. Chapter 6 addresses the cultural contexts of organizing, colored by
two contrasting tendencies: idealism and pragmatism. The final Chapter 7 addresses how
ideas, technologies and practices circulate from context to context and create the
‘fashionable city’, i.e., city regimes that ‘copycat’ each other through acts of translation
(creating, at least seemingly, a higher degree of isomorphism within the organizational
field). In sum, Czarniawska is calling for research to take more interest in how cities are
(re)framed within the discursive practice of city management, and the need to address
processes of alterity construction as well as identity construction (p. 14). This is a very
valuable insight that could enrich urban studies in general, not in the least studies about
cities’ marketing and branding processes. The (badly needed) research on ‘city framing’ as
a managerial practice, however, should abandon once and for all the ‘globalization
notion’. City management, according to Czarniawska, is glocal, i.e., the local (contextual,
situated) interpretation and translation of normative ideas, management practices, popular
cultural imaginations, etc., circulating within and between different action nets.
To conclude this review we would like to raise two issues of a more general character.
The first is the use of the analytical concept of glocalization, very much in fashion these
days within the social sciences. Czarniawska discusses glocalization based on what has
been written by cultural theorists such as Roland Robertson and stresses that glocal
diversification in city management is a result of attempts to imitate (apparently) successful
management practices that circulate in networks around the world. However, as a
geographical term, there is more to it than this. As a word with ‘semiotic appeal’,
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Book reviews / Scand. J. Mgmt. 21 (2005) 473–481 475

glocalization should be used with some care because ‘y of its apparent implication that
two geographical scales, the global and the local, dominate contemporary rescaling
processes y For, in addition to the global and the local, a variety of other scales—
including the body, the urban, the regional, the national, and supranational—are likewise
key arenas and targets of currently unfolding rescaling processes’ (Brenner, 2004, p. 45,
italics in the original). To take this argument even further, some British geographers argue
that space should no longer be ‘y seen as a nested hierarchy moving from ‘‘global’’ to
‘‘local’’. This absurd scale-dependent notion [is instead] replaced by the notion that what
counts is connectivity y’ (Thrift, 2004, p. 59). This last statement can of course be
regarded as rather extreme, but it nevertheless indicates that the ‘scale question’ and
the construction of scale as an aspect of, rather than something disconnected from,
the production of space needs to be further discussed in the social science disciplines.
The concept of action nets, for instance, seems to be a potentially fruitful entrance into
such a shading of scale and the production of ‘cities’ as an ‘amalgam of often disjointed
processes and social heterogeneity, a place of near and far connections, a concatenation of
rhythms; always edging in new directions’ (Amin & Thrift, 2002, p. 8).
The second issue addresses the question of spatiality and is directly related to the issue
above. Although we would not go so far as to claim that ‘A Tale o Three Cities’ is ‘y an a-
spatial narrative, with little understanding of the spatial and material side to its study
object’ (Jensen, 2004, p. 96), we are concerned at the way the social and the spatial
interplay (usually conceptualized as spatiality) is not addressed in the book. Management
and organization need to take an interest not only in the contemporary metropolis per se
(p. 1), but also in the spatiality of the contemporary metropolis. For instance, the city
maps in the end of ‘A Tale of the Three Cities’ are for illustration only, but could have
been brought into an analysis of the spatial prerequisites for glocal city management in
Stockholm, Warsaw and Rome (especially in Chapter 3 on traffic and transport). We
would therefore like to conclude this review with a call for a spatial turn within the
academic field of organization and management studies.
This should mean, among other things, that the study of change and transformation (in
organizations as well as in action nets) as cognitive processes unfolding in time be executed
in tandem with studies how ‘different spaces let different events emerge’ (Kornberger &
Clegg, 2003, p. 87) and how ‘space is inextricably linked to power: it limits and enables, it
creates and hinders through precise spatial arrangement’ (Kornberger & Clegg, 2003,
p. 78) in different geographical scales, as for instance the ‘urban’. In the context of the
‘Tale of Three Cities’, the specific spatial arrangement that organizes the flows
(Kornberger & Clegg, 2003, p. 79) within the action nets clearly determines which actions
might take place, which actions do take place, and which actions are never realized. That is
a tale that still remains to be told.

References

Amin, A., & Thrift, N. (2002). Cities. Reimagining the urban. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Brenner, N. (2004). New state spaces. Urban governance and the rescaling of statehood. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Doel, M. (1999). Poststructuralist geographies. The diabolic art of spatial science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Jensen, O. B. (2004). Book review: A tale of three cities: On the glocalization of city management. Acta
Sociologica, 47(1), 95–96.
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Kornberger, M., & Clegg, S. (2003). The architecture of complexity. Culture and Organization, 9(2), 75–91.
Pred, A. (1995). Recognizing European modernities. A montage of the present. London: Routledge.
Thrift, N. (2004). Intensities of feeling: Towards a spatial politics of affect. Geografiska Annaler Series B: Human
Geography, 86(1), 57–78.
Virilio, P. (2005). Negative horizon. An essay in dromoscopy. London: Continnum.

Ann-Mari Ek
Department of Business Administration,
Lund University, P.O. Box 7080, 220 07 Lund, Sweden
E-mail address: Ann-mari.ek@fek.lu.se (A.-M. Ek)

Richard Ek
Department of Service Management,
Lund University, Campus Helsingborg, P.O. Box 882,
251 08 Helsingborg, Sweden
E-mail address: Richard.ek@msm.lu.se (R. Ek)

doi:10.1016/j.scaman.2005.09.002

Daniel Hjorth, Chris Steyaert, Narrative and Discursive Approaches in Entrepreneurship:

A Second Movements in Entrepreneurship Book, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham (UK), ISBN
1 84376 589 6, 2004 (Hardback, 328 pp, £65.00), ISBN 1 84542 427 1, 2005 (Paperback,
328 pp £25.00).

This book is a collection of essays about entrepreneurship, based on qualitative

empirical research and aimed at mapping the current and potential uses of narrative in
entrepreneurship studies. The central theme addressed is the connection between narration
and discourse: how narrative and discursive approaches operate within entrepreneurship
studies, what there is to gain from these approaches, and how we can be affected by them.
The book is an interesting read as well as a signal to its readers, as the intention behind the
book is not to serve as a summing-up of research, but rather as an opening up of the field
and an invitation to it.
The chapters I have found most interesting are based on empirical research, portraying
entrepreneurship in the making as storytelling in practice. Sami Boutaiba depicts a small
company called Yala-Yala and portrays entrepreneurship as social activity, narrating the
entrepreneurial dynamics in the making. What emerges is not one story but several
interwoven stories that all emerge simultaneously and that subsequently merge, change
shape and flow towards a more coherent ex-post narrative, more typical of the
representation of start-ups. The actors are shown as storytellers and as each others’
audiences, continuously producing stories as they construct their companies.
The chapter by Monica Lindh de Montoya tells the story of a taxi-owning family in
Caracas. The attitudes, strategies and problems of all the individual owners are quite different.
The taxi drivers adopt different strategies, too. The chapter reveals both differences and
connections between the stories, using a lively and rich ethnographic narrative in the tradition
of interpretive organizational ethnography (e.g. Czarniawska-Joerges, 1992).