Fiction, including novels, plays, and films, can be a powerful force in educating students and employees in ways that lectures, textbooks, articles, case studies, and other traditional teaching approaches cannot. Works of fiction can address a range of issues and topics, provide detailed real-life descriptions of the organizational contexts in which workers find themselves, and tell interesting, engaging, and memorable stories that are richer and more likely to stay with the reader or viewer longer than lectures and other teaching approaches. For these reasons, Exploring Capitalist Fiction: Business through Literature and Film analyzes 25 films, novels, and plays that engage the theories, concepts, and issues most relevant to the business world. Through critical examinations of works such as Atlas Shrugged and Wall Street, Younkins shows how fiction is a powerful teaching tool to sensitize business students without business experience and to educate and train managers in real businesses.
Industry Reviews
This richly annotated bibliography of novels, films, and plays could be read in conjunction with studying business. Arguing that these imaginative works offer insights not found in textbooks or case studies, Younkins explicates their power to represent as well as entertain. After a summary introduction, the author presents 25 brief, chronological chapters, each focusing on a separate work, beginning with William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and ending with Oliver Stone's film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010). In summarizing these works, Younkins emphasizes universal themes, such as amorality in Theodore Dreiser's The Financier, the American Dream in Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, individualism in Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, and competition in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. After a brief conclusion that again summarizes the content, the book ends with appendixes that list additional business novels, plays, and films . . . [T]his volume serves as an ideal primer for an instructor who wishes to include literature in a business course. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; faculty; general readers.
