Publisher's Synopsis
This book is about the importance of storytelling in our lives and why France has a wealth of such stories on workplace bullying. Storytelling is unlike a research study. It creates empathy between writers, film makers and their audiences. It takes audiences on a journey where they engage with the suffering of bullying targets. It also provides a countervailing dialogue to the constant barrage of corporate and HR communications about how workers should see the world and behave. It examines lived experiences from the employee perspective. This book is for business leaders and managers in general, and human resources (HR) managers in particular. It's for theatre companies that want to perform plays about conflict in modern business. It focuses on everyday moral issues which, arguably, should be important to everybody. After an introduction, it contains translations of three recent French plays about workplace bullying, which are now available in English for the first time. They have been translated to be acted, not as an academic exercise. They are very different in length, style and content. Two - Hard Copy and In Wonderland - have been published in French: at the time of writing, the third, New Barbarians, has not. All three plays have been successfully performed in France and, to date, the first two have been performed by the Company of Ten at the Abbey Theatre in St Albans as live theatre or as video/audio recordings. They are exciting, challenging plays, designed to make people think. I want to give special thanks to the French authors of these three works, Isabelle Sorente, Sylvain Levey and Frédéric El Kaïm, without whose support these translations would never have been undertaken.Martin Goodman is an HR specialist who has worked extensively in the UK, France and elsewhere as an HR director, management consultant, interim and visiting university lecturer. He holds a PhD in French from the University of Leeds in the UK where he researched contemporary French storytelling on workplace bullying in novels, films and plays. He also holds Masters' degrees in Comparative Literature and Management Studies, as well as a Diplôme Approfondi de Langue Française from the French Ministry of National Education. He has a life-long interest in theatre and is currently Chair of one of the UK's oldest community theatres, the Abbey Theatre in St Albans, just north of London, and its repertory company, the Company of Ten.
