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Oct 21

The good-enough mother concept: An interview with Tammar Zilber

Tammar Zilber

Interview with Tammar Zilber, Senior Lecturer, School of Business Administration, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Tammar and I first met in 2007, when she graciously accepted to participate in a Symposium I organized with Ann Langley at the Academy of Management that year, on the theme “Competing Rationalities in Organizations.” When she visited HEC last year, it seemed only natural that I should interview her for this blog. As many of the scholars I’ve approached in this way, Tammar was initially unsure whether she would have anything interesting to say about her writing: “I have no idea how I write.” But (thankfully!) she agreed to be interviewed anyway. Our conversation took place over breakfast, in the student cafeteria at HEC. It turns out that despite her initial misgivings, Tammar had a lot to say! We were so taken in by our conversation that we lost track of time, and the person who was scheduled to meet with Tammar after me had to come find us in the cafeteria to say “my turn!”

What I like about this interview is its transparency – it really shows what writing qualitative research is like – messy, iterative, back and forth between theory and data until a coherent story emerges. Yes, it’s like this, even for those who have been doing it for a long while. Read on to find out more…
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Oct 14

Interview with Alice Munro

The Canadian writer Alice Munro recently won the Nobel prize for literature. She gave an interview with the Paris Review in 1994 where she talked about her stories, her characters and how she writes. Despite the differences in the kind of texts we craft, it’s always interesting to learn about how other writers work!

You can read the full interview here: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1791/the-art-of-fiction-no-137-alice-munro