Mobilizing Myth in Management: A Literature Review

Over the past decades, managers have been recast as ‘mythical’ (Fournier & Grey, 2000, p. 12) figures who rely on a nebulous set of leadership qualities and charisma. At the same time, critical scholars have been pointing at the persistence of an anti-discursive bent in business practice and scholarship, focusing on what is quantifiable, predictable, and efficient, an outlook that is anti-mythical by its nature. To investigate the resilience of a modernist approach to organizing and the concomitant mythical recasting of the role of the manager, I iteratively reviewed the organization and management theory (OMT) literature, focusing on its usage of the term ‘myth’, resulting in a list of 46 publications.