A Day in the Life of ... Ulysses in Dublin

The purpose of this paper is to show how Joyce’s Ulysses can be used to illuminate the complexities in a chaotic yet ordered day in the life of an organization. It draws on the concepts of apophenia, sensemaking, ordinariness, the everyday, the mythical, identity and context. The paper thereby explores the complex relationships between author, narrator and reader, and the apparent conundrums of structuring a non-plot. The approach is based on Sliwa and Cairns’ (2007) treatment of the novel as a resource, a surrogate case and vehicle for organization analysis. We find that through grappling with Joyce’s play on time and place, which is related to narrator and authorial voice, we come to an understanding of how the effort to make sense of mundane diurnal organizational life must allow for indeterminant, undetermined and at times even unidentifiable “voices”.