But in the wake of Auschwitz and the gulags and the devastation wrought by two world wars that were themselves wars fueled by clashing grand narratives, the collapse of these narratives was a good thing, Lyotard hinted. An overview of Grand Narrative Grand narrative or “master narrative” is a term introduced by Jean-François Lyotard in his classic 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in which Lyotard summed up a range of views which were being developed at the time, as a critique of the institutional and ideological forms of knowledge. Like other Postmodern writers, Lyotard rejected the notion of the Western master narrative, which was a narrative of command and control; and, in fact, he is the philosopher associated with the pronouncement of the end of the grand récit or the grand narrative. A metanarrative is the “big picture” or all-encompassing theme that unites all smaller themes and individual stories. Hayden White (b.1928), an American historian, suggests that there are four Western master narratives: Greek fatalism, Christian redemptionism, bourgeois progressivism, and Marxist utopianism. A healthy and effective group will assign these roles to members of the group, or as is usually the case, the members will themselves adopt one or more of these roles. And what is this theory about “grand narrative” really about? All of this work has been done in the context of small groups with a “facilitator” or “leader” who both observes and manages the activity of the group. Lyotard's term for the totalizing narratives or metadiscourses of modernity which have provided ideologies with a legitimating philosophy of history. An organisation which is oriented outwards frequently changes its leadership, its meetings are open and the concept of membership is relatively diffuse. Narrative knowledge is knowledge in the form of story-telling. A Fraction is a sub-group of a larger organisation, made up of members sharing some common interest, for example, all members of a political party belonging to a certain union, or all members of a union belonging to a certain party. Federation is typically the chosen form of organisation for groups having distinct languages or cultures or being located faraway from each other; in each of these cases communication would suffer not improve if the federation were to be prematurely resolved. To mandate a delegate is to give instructions on how they are to vote and otherwise participate in the superior body. While a bureaucratised trade union constitutes an extreme example of the “logical” organisation which has lost touch with its raison d'�tre, clearly a union which ignores the need to maintain good levels of membership, healthy finances, skilled officers and so on, is equally bound to lose its way. Committee: a committee is generally a formal working group within a larger organisation, often formed by election, often having authority or legitimacy of some specific kind. Nevertheless, unless there are such people sharing social interests or beliefs, there can be no organisation to get started. When a particular body deliberates and selects and/or mandates their delegate, then the particular body is mediating between the individual and the universal, conditioning the relationship between the individual delegate and the universal – i.e., the assembled national council or possibly its delegated authority in the form of a leadership body. He is well-known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. Initiator; Information-seeking; Information-giving; Opinion-seeking; Opinion-giving; Clarifying; Elaborating; Coordinating; Procedure-developing; summarising; Philosopher-critic. When workers successfully mobilise against a proposed down-sizing for example, the benighted change manager experiences exactly the same series of stages: at first he refuses to see that his plans are doomed to failure, then when he first begins to see that he’s not going to get away with it, he blows his top; sooner or later, realising that the workers have got the better of him, he will come to the negotiating table to rescue something from the exercise; he’s pissed off, but gradually he gets over it, and begins planning for the next exercise in bullying. The initial response of a person in denial is not at all irrational. I will explore the compelling intersections between Baudrillard’s simulacra and Lyotard’s grand narratives that are evident in selected visual tropes in Tarantino’s films where Lyotard’s “metanarratives” 4. are often contested, and examples of … When the delegate reports back, she is likewise mediating between the universal and particular. A Dictionary of Media and Communication », Subjects: There are nowadays a plethora of systems of team role and so on generally related to personality profiling which proliferate around the management consultancy industry. Nevertheless, intelligent attention to group roles is an indispensable part of effective working class organisation. A federation can work effectively because each of the participants works effectively; in the event that a federation goes forward to form a unitary organisation, then the native organising and decision-making methods of all or some of the participants may be lost. According to Lyotard, in the postmodern period, people no longer believe in grand narratives, and consequently, to the armies of postmodern pen-pushers, ipso facto, “grand narratives” are old fashioned and oppressive – oppressive because one grand narrative excludes another and doesn’t my narrative have just as much right to truth as yours? Critics suggest that this could be seen as just another grand narrative, and some have seen it as Eurocentric. The principal concepts for analysis of group structure are: representation, delegation and mandation; mediation; hierarchy; membership and periphery.