Art of Management & Organization Conference 2018 University of Brighton

The Impact of Heroes, Villains and Victims in Popular Wall Street Narratives on Career Identity and Empathy of Business Students and Sales Professionals

Brokerhof, I.M.¹, Bal, P.M., ^1,2 Jansen, P.W.G. ¹, Solinger, O.N. <sup>1

1</sup> Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

² University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Wall Street and the financial crisis have inspired the creation of several popular narratives about this topic. Some of these narratives have a clear critical message towards Wall Street (Inside Job, Margin Call), displaying key characters as villains and customers as victims. They claim to raise awareness for the financial malpractices on Wall Street. Other Wall Street narratives mainly show the excessive lifestyle and greed of the Wall Street culture (The Wolf of Wall Street, Wall Street). Depending on the audience, these main characters might be seen as either heroes or villains, or possibly a combination of both, hybrid heroes.
On a cultural level, popular culture shapes the shared narratives and beliefs surrounding jobs and the workplace (Boozer, 2003; Panayiotou & Kafiris, 2010), and on an individual level, narrative experiences influence people’s personal belief-systems (Appel, 2011) via mental processes that are similar to learning from experience (Mar, Djikic & Oatley, 2008). Such narrative impact processes predict that Wall Street narratives have an effect on people’s perceptions of Wall Street and the financial sector, resulting in differences in empathy and career identity.
This study investigates the impact of different Wall Street narratives on career identity, conceptualized as Possible (Future) Work Selves (PFWS; Markus & Nurius, 1986; Strauss, Griffin & Parker, 2012) and both implicit and self-reported empathy.
The self-reliance mechanism behind psychology of money research and dual-processing theory are used to investigate the impact of Wall Street narratives on viewers or readers. Can critical or realistic Wall Street narratives actually increase awareness of moral frames of PFWS and empathy in business school students and sales professionals? What is the impact of a victim, hero or villain narratives on people that work in or may aspire to work in the financial sector?
Three experiments were conducted 1) a lab experiment with business school students (n = 104), showing movies in ‘cinema style’ with either depicting the main characters as villains (critical perspective), heroes (excess lifestyle perspective) or both (high on excess lifestyle and criticism); 2) an online field experiment with business school students, using written narratives adding a condition with a story form a victim perspective (n = 129); 3) an online field experiment with sales professionals, using movie clips and focusing on a realistic perspective (n = 87). All experiments had a control group watching or reading a story about nature (planet earth or wildlife in Africa).
Results suggest that 1) In the hero-narratives displaying the excess lifestyle of people working in Wall Street the main characters are more often seen as desired PFWS, both by business school students as well as sales professionals. Students also showed lower moral frames for their PFWS. 2) Participants in hero conditions show less implicit empathy right after the narrative, one week later this effect was still significant for the group watching the ‘hero’ narrative. Showing a victim perspective increased implicit empathy of readers compared to the hero-stories.

The Hero’s Journey Reloaded

Prof. Dr. Stephan Sonnenburg

Karlshochschule International University

Faculty Management & Performance

[e-mail]
Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) is one of the most influential and innovative mythographers of the 20th century. His seminal life-time achievement is no doubt his modeling of a single great story, the essence of (all) heroic stories. The basic motif is to leave one condition and finding the source of life to bring the hero’s social world forth into a richer condition. In his foundational work The hero with a thousand faces, Campbell (2008) regarded the monomyth as universal across time and space. Campbell’s comparative observations lead to the development of the hero’s journey, which is the insightful illustration and holistic metaphor for the monomyth. The hero’s journey describes the stages of the transformation that heroes (and villains as heroes!) share. It is a narrative pattern that can appear physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. The narrative pattern is at the same time simplistic and yet rich in its interpretations.

The number of stages in Campbell’s oeuvre varies; even in The hero with a thousand faces he uses stage variations which could lead to confusion. However, the basic outline remains the same: departure, initiation, and return. Over the last decades, Campbell’s stage model was simplified, streamlined and adapted to fit to the transformational needs of specific professional domains and scientific disciplines. The most important developments are a reduction of the number of stages like the nine-step model of creative self-experience (Rebillot, 1993) and the twelve-stage skeletal framework for writers (Vogler, 2007) as well as a renaming of the stages with less impact on the basic description of the stages. Comparing the relevant models of the hero’s journey starting with Campbell’s version, it can be said that all models focus on departure and initiation and lack a deeper description of the return. This is the main weakness as most ultimate boons have to be integrated into the ordinary world.

Therefore, a new version of the hero’s journey with its impact for management and organization is introduced. It is an elaborated synopsis of hero’s journeys (Campbell, Rebillot, Vogler) in combination with considerations from Tarot. The potential of Tarot for the concept of the hero’s journey was already foreseen from Campbell: “The most interesting question I ever got was when I was lecturing here at Esalen in the (Abraham) Maslow Room in 1967. Somebody asked, ‘What about the symbolism of the Waite deck of tarot cards?’ Well, I hadn’t thought about it. … It was a fascinating experience, the most interesting I have had here. … Change the perspective of your eyes, and you see the whole world before you now is radiant. Do you see?” (Campbell, 2003: 172-175).