Folk tales and organizational change: an integrative model for Chinese management

Ronald Busse

Asia Pacific Business Review, 2020, vol. 26, issue 1, 9-20

Abstract: The pace of both incremental adaption and sweeping change accelerates at all levels in Chinese organizations. Hence, its members develop mental models of simplification to cope with and to make sense of framework conditions recently coined as VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity). I basically argue that stories can support this process. On a conceptual fundament, the main concern of the present article is to shed light on structural and functional parallels between the regular narrative of folk tales and complex organizational reality. To be more specific, I show how Propp’s morphology and Campbell’s hero’s journey are intertwined with the long-surviving ‘change-as-three-steps’ legacy, relentlessly attributed to Lewin. I then suggest an integrative three-act framework to facilitate organizational change in Chinese enterprises.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1080/13602381.2019.1609284

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