Making Sense of Managerial Work and Organizational Research Processes with Caroline and Terry

The story of Caroline and Terry is a tale of a manager and a participant-observer researcher. It is also a tale of organizational politics, gender relations and the relationships between human resource managers and other managers. The story is in part a fiction. But, at the same time, it is a piece of social-science writing. It is `made up' but it is also `true'. It uses imagination but is also theoretically informed and draws upon research fieldwork. The story demonstrates how ethnographic research accounts can be written in a way that bridges the genres of creative writing and social science. This `ethnographic fiction science' has eight characteristics, four of which give it a fictional dimension and four of which make it social scientific.