New book from UofT on the importance of narrative as a management skill

Toronto, September 6, 2011 - A new book from a professor at the University of Toronto examining the importance of narrative for public servants has recently been published. Governing Fables: Learning from Public Sector Narratives is authored by UofT Professor Sandford Borins.

The book advocates the importance of narrative for public servants, exemplifies it with a rigorously selected and analyzed set of narratives, and imparts narrative skills politicians and public servants need in their careers. Governing Fables turns to narratology, the inter-disciplinary study of narrative, for a conceptual framework that is applied to a set of narratives engaging life within public organizations, focusing on works produced during the last twenty-five years in the US and UK. The genres discussed include British government narratives inspired by and reacting to Yes Minister, British appeasement narratives, American political narratives, the Cuban Missile Crisis narrative, jury decision-making narratives, and heroic teacher narratives. In each genre lessons are presented regarding both effective management and essential narrative skills.

Sandford Borins is Professor of Strategic Management at the UofT’s Rotman School of Management and the Department of Management, University of Toronto Scarborough and a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has been a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley, and Scholar-in-Residence in the Ontario Cabinet Office. Governing Fables is Prof. Borins’s eighth book. Prof. Borins was a member of the board of directors of the Ontario Transportation Capital Corporation, responsible for developing Ontario’s Highway 407. He was the President of the Canadian Association of Programs in Public Administration from 2003 to 2007.He did his undergraduate studies at Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He then took a Master in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, and received his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard.

Further information on Governing Fables, including order information, is available at Information Age Publishing.