 Office Setting as Organizational Structure in “Bartleby the Scrivenerâ€Lori Duin Kelly SAGE Open, 2017, vol. 7, issue 1, 2158244017690430 Abstract: This article uses a methodology from the social sciences known as institutional ethnography to analyze the office setting in Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener†as a site of social organization. This approach contributes to an understanding of how that office came to adopt specific structures as crucial to its functioning and how, as a consequence of those structures, individuals’ roles within the organization’s hierarchies became constituted. As fieldwork occurs inside of organizations, institutional ethnography also provides a tool for identifying and evaluating linguistic markers for an individual’s placement within a larger organizational structure. This approach to the story seems particularly useful for understanding the interpersonal dynamics at the heart of “Bartleby.†At the same time, it provides a method for identifying the larger institutional process at work in Melville’s story, one that contributes to the reproduction of a system of social relations in the workplace that requires subordination and compliance to insure its success. Keywords: interpersonal communication; human communication; communication studies; communication; social sciences; small group communication; organizational communication; literature; humanities; social anthropology; anthropology (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:7:y:2017:i:1:p:2158244017690430 Access Statistics for this article More articles in SAGE Open |
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