Conceptualisations of Myth

Those looking for an authoritative definition of myth in the related lit­erature, which spans a wide range of disciplines and epochs, will be disap­pointed. There is an absence of a common denominator tying the universe of definitions together, apart perhaps from a broadly conceived ‘persua­sion that “myth” is the socially significant product of humanity’s irrepress­ible urge to construct meaning’ (Von Hendy 2002, 333).

One obvious starting point to systematise myth conceptualisations is the connection between myth and narration. some theorists share the idea of myth as narrative; however, few look at stories in a purely narrative-analytical sense. For others, narratives do not play an explicit role. Instead of focussing exclusively on the non-/narrative form of myth, I use two additional aspects to map conceptualisations of ‘myth’: (1) the sources of myth, which oscillate between strategy and social construction, and (2) the performative effects of myth, which range from ‘ideological delusion’ to ‘necessary fiction’ (Von Hendy 2002, 333-6).² These two dimensions are important because they reside at the heart of the debate about the sociopolitical functions of myth. I start by discussing the con­nections between myth and narrative before turning to theories of myth as structure and sign system, the role of powerful images and (counter-) myths in sociopolitical change, myth and critique in political philosophy, the interplay of myth and societal values in organisations, and finally, the pervasiveness of myth in knowledge. The results of this discussion are summarised in Fig.

Fig. 2.1 The Conceptualisations of ‘myth’³.

Myth and Narrative

Following from Plato’s philosophy and later folkloristic studies, myths are often understood to be stories about significant events of the past, pres­ent, or future presented in the form of a narrative or story that involves specific characters (actants, dramatis personae); consists of a beginning, a middle and an end; and is structured by a specific plot (cf. Segal 2004, 4-6; Flood 2013, loc 860; Lincoln 1989, 24; Gabriel 2004; Münch, Chap. 3).⁴ Through the act of emplotment, a narrative ‘“grasps together” and integrates into one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events, thereby schematizing the intelligible signification attached to the narrative taken as a whole’ (Ricrcur 1984, preface).⁵ Making use of the differentiation between standard forms of emplotment in the Western literary tradition (romance, comedy, satire, tragedy), White (1973) has famously used a narrative approach in order to explain how historiography makes sense of events through plots that resonate with its (Western) audi­ence. In analogy, for a narrative approach to the study of political myth, the emplotment of discrete events and actions into a significant story and the cultural repertoires such emplotment draws upon are a central focus of exploration (cf. Hall 2006).⁶

For some authors, such as Midgley, metaphorical concepts, like the mechanistic imagery of the clockwork, are more important in myth than emplotment:

They are living parts ofpowerful myths—imaginative patterns that we all take for granted—ongoing dramas inside which we live our lives. These patterns shape the mental maps that we refer to when we want to place something. [...] They are the matrix of thought, the background that shapes our mental habits. They decide what we think important and what we ignore.

For Lincoln, the decisive characteristic of myth is that it is a narrative that not only claims truth and credibility (which ‘history’ does, too) but also disposes of unquestioned authority. Myth is then ‘a narrative.for which successful claims are made not only to the status of truth, but what is more, to the status of paradigmatic truth’ (Lincoln 1989, 24, original italics). In this sense myths stabilise social patterns between people, main­taining ‘society in its regular and accustomed forms’ but, as we shall dis­cuss below, myths can also help ‘those agitating for sociopolitical change’ (Lincoln 1989, 25).

Where narrative-focused approaches to the study of myth are used, such as in many interpretive policy analysis works, they have contributed powerful insights into the cultural and social constitution of politics: how an issue comes to be seen as political problem, how certain versions of ‘problems’, ‘causes’, and ‘solutions’ come to resonate culturally with their audiences, and which tangible effects these understandings have. Here, myths are one of the structuring elements of broader discourses which construct political problems and legitimate policy solutions (Münch, Chap. 3). Cecelia Lynch (1999), for instance, has used an interpretive approach to critique dominant mythological narratives about peace move­ments in the interwar period. She shows that, while these narratives main­tain that interwar peace movements are to be blamed for appeasement in Britain and isolationism in the USA, and hence for world war, they are so compelling not because they reflect historical truths but because they are incomplete and analytically confused. Based on an in-depth historical study, Lynch offers an alternative narrative about interwar peace move­ments’ social agency and normative influence, capturing rather their con­stitutive enabling role in building the United Nations (cf.

Some authors connect the narrative approach to myth more explic­itly to sentiment evocation (Lincoln 1989, 8-11)⁷ and the formation of subjectivities in order to explain social effects. Representatives of the poststructuralist Essex School, for example, point to different beatific or horrific types of narratives in order to analyse how dominant social prac­tices and regimes succeed in veiling the contingency and inequality of social relations. Under the label ‘fantasmatic logic’, they show how nar­ratives teach us what to desire, thus creating ideological coherence and concealing that existing social relations are of a non-necessary character (Glynos and Howarth 2007; Howarth and Griggs 2012; in this book see Münch, Chap. 3; Dany and Freistein, Chap. 12). For example, Glynos discusses how ‘fantasmatically structured desires’ help sustain unequal or exploitative work relations and practices through ‘the prospect of big profits, generous pay packets, career advancement, consumption of prize commodities, and hobbies’ (Glynos 2008, 11).

A focus on the narrative side of myths can illuminate why specific socio­political conditions prevail by looking at how certain understandings and beliefs come into being, gain traction, and ultimately even appear to be desirable.

Meaning, Significance, and Cultural Socialisation

Among the theorists used in this book, Chiara Bottici presents the most conceptually open, narrative-centred definition of myth as the ‘work on a common narrative by which the members of a social group (or soci­ety) provide significance to their...experience and deeds’ (2007, 14). In order to qualify as political myth, the narrative has to ‘affect[s] the specific political conditions in which this group operates’ (Bottici 2007, 179); that is, the way a narrative is ‘used’ or ‘worked on’ under the conditions of the specific situation makes it political and also decides on whether it is a form of ideological regression or a means of progressive social imagination (Bottici 2007, 129, 180f.).

What distinguishes myth from other narrative forms, according to Bottici, is that it creates ‘significance’ for those involved in its reproduc­tion, whereby ‘significance’ denotes what ‘brings things closer to us’, being located between mere everyday questions of ‘meaning’ and pro­found religious questions of ‘sense of being’ (Bottici 2007, 125). Being part of the human strife for ‘significance’, a myth is therefore ‘not a single narrative that is given once and for all, but is a process, a process of con­tinual work on a basic narrative pattern that changes according to the circumstances’ (Bottici and Challand 2006, 318).⁸ With reference to Elias and Scotson (2008 [1965]), one should add that significance-creating nar­ratives or myths, while bringing things closer to the group sharing them, usually have the downside of driving people of different groups apart. For example, Bottici and Challand (2006) analyse the ‘clash of civiliza­tions’ as a modern political myth with an old narrative core, born out of people’s anxieties about challenges to US power, and show how the work on this myth has created very tangible cognitive, practical and aesthetic- emotional effects in international politics. Similarly, Kaczmarska (Chap. 11) traces ‘the international community’ as a central myth legitimising and, at the same time, ‘being worked on’ through the international poli­tics of statebuilding.

The idea of myth as ongoing process of significance creation through narration, a constant ‘work on myth’, derives from Hans Blumenberg's book of the same title.⁹ Blumenberg distinguishes between work of myth (its function) and work on myth (its actualisation over time). The basic function of myth consists in naming the unknown and explaining the inexplicable—in ‘converting the numinous indeterminacy into nominal determinacy’ (Blumenberg 1979, 32), thereby providing orientation in the world (Blumenberg 1979, 11-12, 40-67) and ‘interposing a merciful veil of explanation between humankind and its dread of the unknown’ (Von Hendy 2002, 321).

Blumenberg defines myths as ‘stories that are distinguished by a high degree of constancy in their narrative core and by an equally pronounced capacity for marginal variation’ (1979, 40). The fundamental significance of their narrative core is what makes myths survive, while their variation stems from alternative versions created through the ‘work on myth’ over time. While we cannot know myths’ very origins since they lie before our historical time, we can study how myths have been or are being ‘worked on’ (Blumenberg 1979, 68).

In this latter sense, myth is flexible and therefore antithetical to dogma (Blumenberg 1979, Chap. III); yet myth can transform into dogma when it ‘succeeds in inducing widespread notional assent’ (Von Hendy 2002, 216). Von Hendy (2002, 325) sees in this juxtaposition of myth and dogma Blumenberg’s main contribution to understanding ‘the issue of how to evaluate humanity’s double-edged power to construct the fictions by which it lives’, namely myths’ capacity to be both necessary fiction, pro­viding explanations about the world, and ideological delusion, veiling the radical contingency of our sociopolitical conditions. While Blumenberg’s concept is non-political, it is in this ‘double-edged power’ that its value for a study of political myths may lie.

A second major value of Blumenberg’s theory is its usefulness as social(isation) theory, since it shows that,

“work on” myth in the modern West is a matter of nothing more mysteri­ous than intertextual allusion inspired by the cultural prestige of the sto­ries already most impressively entrenched. Here is a social explanation [...]. Certain traditional stories strike us as peculiarly meaningful and moving for the good reason that we have been subliminally conditioned, if not actually trained, to experience them thus (Von Hendy 2002, 326, original italics).

Referring to the example of international intervention in Afghanistan, Kühn (Chap. 8) shows how myths, understood in Blumenberg’s sense as such meaningful assumptions about reality that need not be questioned, coalesce in the process of historiography with other forms of (reason­able) knowledge in indistinguishable ways, providing the truth base for entrenched understandings of ‘the other’ and ‘the problem’—regardless of their often ‘high phantasy’ content—, and building the basis for the formulation of international politics.

Myths as Hidden Paradigmatic Structure or System of Signs

Turning to social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and semiotician Roland Barthes, we leave the centrality of a narrative plot for myth concepts behind. Even though Levi-Strauss finds his material in stories collected by anthropologists in non-European societies, for him the essence of myth is not to be found in the plot, but in an underlying structure that the mythographer needs to unearth. And while Barthes looks at everyday rep­resentations and stories as aspects of mass culture, he is not interested in the stories as such but in uncovering the ways ‘social stereotypes [are] passed off as natural, unmasking “what-goes-without-saying” as an ide­ological imposition’ (Culler 1983, 23). What ties these quite different approaches together is their authors’ interest in uncovering the underlying mechanisms of how myths work (cf. Segal 1996).

Claude Levi-Strauss (1955, 1978) assumes that what surfaces in oral or written stories are only elements of myth, since for him a myth is made up of the totality of a theme’s variants. He is not interested in the chrono­logical order of the plot (syntagmatic structure) but in the underlying structures that appear when a myth is studied as a system of stories (para­digmatic structure)—understood as an unconscious form of human classi­fication ‘subject to laws of thought but on a level unknown to its utterers’ (Von Hendy 2002, 234; cf. Levi-Strauss 1978, Chap. 2). To study the paradigmatic structure of myth, Levi-Strauss develops a complex classifi- catory system of pairs of oppositions, which are ‘resolved’ by myth ‘by providing either a mediating middle term or an analogous, but more easily resolved, contradiction’ (Segal 2004, 114; cf. Levi-Strauss 1955; Leach 1970, Chap. 4). The fundamental contradiction the opposites can be reduced to in this perspective is ‘nature’ (man as animal) versus ‘culture’ (man as human being) as the fundamental binary at the heart of humans’ encounter with the world (Segal 2004, 114-15; Leach 1970, Chap. 3). For Levi-Strauss, myths are not only made up of binary pairs but they themselves are also mirrored by opposite myths, meaning that a study of the entirety of myths provides us with a highly orderly and intellectual understanding of the world through what other anthropologists have clas­sified as ‘primitive’ stories or beliefs.

While the opening up of myth to scientific study is perhaps Levi- Strauss’s biggest achievement, there is nothing inherently political about his concept. It is only when his structuralist approach to myth is read through theories that point out the positionality of those who invoke cer­tain myths, like Pierre Bourdieu showed in his critique of Levi-Strauss’s structuralism, that a discussion of power and domination can be brought in to reveal ideological biases through this structuralist method. Goetze (Chap. 5) shows how a combination of Levi-Strauss and Bourdieu’s works can be used to analyse central myths in international politics, and she employs this methodology to study the myth of the ‘warlord’ and its hid­den mirror, the myth of the ‘state’ (Chap. 6).

In contrast to Levi-Strauss’s value-neutral approach to myth, which needs to be harnessed to be able to uncover ideological assumptions, for Roland Barthes ideology is the essence of myth.¹⁰ In his early semiotic work, myth is ‘a type of speech’, ‘a system of communication’, ‘a mes­sage’, and ‘a mode of signification, a form’ (2013 [1957], 217). Based on the semiological core principle of a relation between an empty signifier and something that is signified, which together create meaning as a sign, Barthes holds that

myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system becomes a mere signifier in the second (2013 [1957], 223).

Barthes uses the terms form (signifier of myth), concept (signified of myth), and signification (message of myth) to describe the positions in this second-order semiological system. Important for Barthes’s concept is that the signifier of myth is ambiguous, since it is both the sign of the first-order system and thus full of meaning, and the signifier (form) of the second-order system and thus seemingly ‘empty’. In this way, a myth deforms or alienates the meaning of the original sign by building it into a new semiological system and veiling its historical coming-into-being.

Barthes gives the example of a magazine cover of Paris-Match that shows a young Black soldier wearing a French uniform and giving the military salute while looking at the French national flag. In the second- order system, the black soldier is the seemingly ‘empty signifier’ of French nationalism, exemplifying all French soldiers and rendering this a normal scene in which the problematic history of colonialism disappears in an image ‘that France is a great empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, serve faithfully under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal this young black shows in serving his so-called oppressors’ (Barthes 2013 [1957], 225). This is the purified, innocent myth. As sign of the first-order system, however, the black French soldier is already ‘full of meaning’, symbolising French colonial history and inequalities in contemporary French society; this meaning, however, is diluted in the myth (Barthes 2013 [1957], 228-9; cf. Culler, Chap. 3).

For Barthes (2013 [1957], 240), this deformation of meaning is the ‘very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature’, it naturalises what is essentially historical and thus ideological. It is in this sense that Barthes also speaks of myth as depoliticised, ‘stolen language’, as ‘speech stolen and restored (2013 [1957], 236, original italics, 258). The ideol­ogy Barthes detects in ‘myth today’ is that of (French) bourgeois soci­ety during a particular period of time, shaped by modernist notions of a monolithic, progressive society with mass-produced pleasures right at hand, where myths are constantly created in manifold forms by ideologi­cally biased ‘producers of myth’—journalists and other creators of every­day mass-cultural artefacts—and unconsciously and uncritically consumed by the mass of ‘readers of myth’. Mythography thus becomes a means for leftist social critique and the mythographer its main bearer. Although Barthes concedes that there can be ‘myth on the Left’, overall he sees the Left as being rather immune: ‘[t]he bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; Revolution announces itself openly as Revolution and thereby abolishes myth’ (Barthes 2013 [1957], 259). While myth is defined as depoliticised speech, the language of the Left/revolution is seen as political and non-mythical—an obvious weak point in Barthes’s concept given the deep implications of the West- European Left in its own progress mythology. Barthes thus employs a Marxian understanding of ideology as opposed to other possible modes of thought (science, knowledge, consciousness, revolution) through which ‘outside’ critique and demystification are possible (Lincoln 1989, 5-7).

Powerful Images, Counter-Myths and Sociopolitical Change

In this last assumption, Barthes’s myth concept is diametrically opposed to that of French syndicalist Georges Sorel, for whom myth ‘serves not to bolster society but to topple it’ (Segal 2004, 128), or as Sorel writes in a letter to Daniel Halevy, ‘contemporary myths lead men to prepare them­selves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things’ (Sorel 2004 [1908], 29). Myth is here a form of progress, a moving force of history, in that ‘the action engaged in by human beings in big social move­ments cannot be explained without powerful images such as myths: the more dramatic the action, the more powerful these images’ (Bottici 2007, 160). The power of myths comes from the ‘intuitive’—internal and empa­thetic—knowledge and understanding they enable, and shows itself in that ‘those who live in the world of myths are “secure from all refutation” and cannot be discouraged’ (Jennings in Sorel 2004 [1908], xiii-xiv).

It is not important which elements the myth is made up of in detail or whether it ultimately materialises: ‘Myths must be judged as a means of acting on the present; all discussion of the method of applying them as future history is devoid of sense. It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important’ (Sorel 2004 [1908], 116-17, original italics). What counts is that, ‘[i]t is only because people taking part in big social movements can represent their action as an event within a narrative that assures the triumph of their cause that they engage in such actions’ (Bottici 2007, 161; cf. also Shantz 2000; Münch, Chap. 3). Whether it be Greenpeace’s belief in the possibility of ‘protecting the earth’ or the peace movement’s ultimate goal of achieving ‘world peace’, these ideas and the narratives into which they are embedded provide a fiction of a better future, based upon which members of the movements can act in the present (cf. Cooke, Chap. 4, on the notion of hope). Among the concepts discussed here, Sorel’s reflections represent perhaps the purest form of myth as strategi­cally formulated, socially shared and fervently believed ‘necessary fiction’ in the service of a greater cause.

Underscoring this agential understanding of myth making and remak­ing, Lincoln (1989, 25-37) specifies three ways in which myths—authori­tative narratives representing paradigmatic truths—can effect sociopolitical change. First, actors can employ new or counter-myths to ‘contest the authority or credibility of a given myth, reducing it to the status of history or legend and thereby deprive it of the capacity to continually reconstruct accustomed social forms’. Second, actors ‘can attempt to invest a history, legend, or even a fable with authority and credibility, [...] and thereby make of it an instrument with which to construct novel social forms’. Third, actors ‘can advance novel lines of interpretation for an established myth [...] and thereby change the nature of the sentiments (and the soci­ety) it evokes’ (Lincoln 1989, 25; for illustrative examples, see Lincoln 1989, Chap. 2). Read through Sorel or Lincoln, myths can become instru­mental and enabling in different ways in evoking sociopolitical change.

An academic example for this, perhaps, is Michael Loriaux’s (2008) study of the referential power of the ‘Rhineland frontier’ as a myth of place that has haunted the European Union in its attempt to generate legitimacy amongst its citizens. Loriaux argues that, ‘EU debate, from the beginning, has occurred within a linguistic framework of named spaces, named peoples, and the “naturalness” of the frontiers that separate them. This discursive frame has had the effect of hiding, or of distracting deliberation from, European Union’s original purpose’ (Loriaux 2008, 2). The study decon­structs the EU’s mythical references of place in order to reveal ‘the con­tours of a Europe that is not simply about using markets to tame frontiers, but about deconstructing frontiers so as to bring to light a civilizational space that is, like daily life in today’s Europe, intensely urban, cosmopoli­tan, multilingual, and less hierarchical than in the past’ (Loriaux 2008, 2). In this sense, Loriaux’s work pursues an enabling and constitutive, in addi­tion to a deconstructing aim (cf. also Loriaux and Lynch, Chap. 15).

Political Philosophy and Critique

Other important scholars who like Barthes are closely associated with an ideology-critical conceptualisation of myth are political philosophers Cassirer, and Horkheimer and Adorno.

Ernst Cassirer represents the unique case of a theorist whose evaluation of myth changed drastically from his early writings on symbolic forms to his posthumously published The Myth of the State. In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1953 [1923], 1955 [1925], 1957 [1929]), Cassirer is interested in the evolution of human thought. Man is seen as animal sym- bolicum, since he cannot grasp the world immediately but only through different ‘symbolic forms’ that mediate between him and reality (cf. also Elias 2011). Myth is an early, primitive, pre-logical symbolic form; other species of the same genre are language, art, poetry, history, and science. All these forms objectify reality. What distinguishes myth on one pole from science on the other is that myth intuitively objectifies emotions (Cassirer 1955 [1925], part II), while science is the objectification of analytic rea­soning and therefore seen to be on a higher level. ‘Indeed’, as Cassirer (1955 [1925], xiii) suggests, ‘the history of philosophy as a scientific dis­cipline can be regarded as a single continuous effort to effect a separation and liberation from myth.’¹¹

Cassirer’s judgment of the harnessing of myth in the modern civilised West changes dramatically with the experience of the role of modern polit­ical myth in Nazi Germany, which is the topic of The Myth of the State (1967 [1946]). Here, myth is an irrational force that surfaces in times of crisis, when people are more prone to make sense of these unplanned con­ditions through irrational symbolic forms, as myth ‘is always there, lurking in the dark, waiting for its hour and opportunity’ (Cassirer 1967 [1946], 280). What characterises modern political myths in this reading is that,

here we find myth made according to plan. [...] [The new political myths] are artificial things fabricated by very skilful and cunning artisans. It has been reserved for the twentieth century, our own great technical age, to develop a new technique of myth. Henceforth myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same methods as any other modern weapon—as machine guns or airplanes (Cassirer 1967 [1946], 282).

Modern politicians as the manufacturers of modern political myth ‘fulfil the functions that, in traditional societies, were performed by the homo magus and the homo divinans’ (Bottici and Challand 2006, 321), by employing techniques such as the magical use of words, the use of rituals, and the recourse to prophecy (Cassirer 1967 [1946], Chap. XVIII; cf. Klemperer 2006 [1957]). Understood in this way, myth amounts here most strongly to manufactured (strategic) totalitarian ideology.

While for Cassirer the totalitarian resort to myth is a regression and thus an exception in the process of enlightenment confined to times of crisis, for Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno ‘myth’ and ‘enlightenment’ build the very core of the permanent struggle of modernity, as expressed in their two dialectically related theses: ‘myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973 [1944], xvi). Reconstructed out of the context of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘“[m]yth” signifies, approximately, any form of oppres­sive belief or cultural standard that creates a despairing sense of fatality’ (Von Hendy 2002, 294). Classical myth, as a form of understanding the world ‘before’ philosophy, ‘is already enlightenment’ because it ‘intended report, naming, the narration of the Beginning; but also presentation, confirmation, explanation’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973 [1944], 8). Mythical narration thus articulates a will to entrench the world in a bind­ing, god-made order, which transforms what is unfathomable to men into something intelligible, reducing our fear of the unknown. In this sense, myth is enlightenment, irrationality is reason (cf. Cooke, Chap. 4). At the same time, however, the binding, god-made order also appears unrelent­ing and unalterable to the individual (Hetzel 2011, 391).

It is the seeming fatality and irreversibility present in myth, which for Horkheimer and Adorno also characterises the disenchanted world of enlightenment, where reason reverts to irrationality and violence (cf. Cooke, Chap. 4). The highly scientific, positivist myth of facticity creates new conditions of coercion, in which societal organisation appears imperative rather than contingent. ‘Positivism’ here means broadly

a cognitive tendency, which dominates the worldview of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This tendency is characterised by an extreme scientific trustfulness: all major conundrums of humanity could ultimately be solved through scientific methodology, and in the long term scientific progress would also solve the practical problems of humanity (Hetzel 2011, 392; translation BBdG; cf. also Midgley 2004).

It is in the sense of this unrelenting and unalterable positivist world­view that ‘enlightenment reverts to mythology’: to ‘hegemonic identity­thinking that will tolerate no thinking-otherwise’ (Von Hendy 2002, 297). Only critical thinking can, for Horkheimer and Adorno, keep enlighten­ment flexible and humane.

Organisations and Societal Values

In their critique of the myth of positivism, some core ideas of Frankfurt School representatives Horkheimer and Adorno resonate surprisingly closely, albeit in a completely different theoretical context, with the myth concept developed within the Stanford School of international sociology. For its representatives John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan myths in modern societies have ‘two key properties’:

First, they are rationalized and impersonal prescriptions that identify various social purposes as technical ones and specify in a rulelike way the appropri­ate means to pursue these technical purposes rationally. Second, they are highly institutionalized and thus in some measure beyond the discretion of any individual participant or organization. They must, therefore, be taken for granted as legitimate, apart from evaluations of their impact on work outcomes (Meyer and Rowan 1977, 343-4).

The authors suggest that myths are both: the unconscious, widely held beliefs about rationality in modern Western society that impact on the generation of formal organisational structures; and elements such as pro­fessions, programs, and technologies in which these beliefs are institution­alised by organisations in a ‘dramatic enactment’ of the rationalised myth pervading modern Western society. They distinguish between ‘production organizations under strong output controls whose success depends on the management of relational networks’ and ‘institutionalized organizations whose success depends on the confidence and stability achieved by iso­morphism with institutional rules’ (Meyer and Rowan 1977, 355).

This latter type of organisation, whose legitimacy depends on judge­ment by society, is prone to engage in ceremonial activities at the struc­tural level to display similarity with societal beliefs about rationality. As these structures are often not best suited to produce the desired organ­isational work outcomes, however, the organisations adopt a simultane­ous informal strategy of decoupling in order to keep functioning at an operational level (Meyer and Rowan 1977, 355-9). The myth is thus an external facade, which reflects and responds to mythical beliefs in society and hides the informal ways in which an organisation functions behind this facade. Hensell (Chap. 14) uses this approach to look at ‘coordination’ as a pervasive rationality myth in contemporary international interventions and its tangible effects at the organisational level.

While for Meyer and Rowan the modern rationality myth exists within the environment that an organisation needs to strategically adapt to in order to be legitimate, thereby causing internal tensions, for Dvora Yanow, in contrast, unconsciously created myths allow organisations to carry on with their work despite deep unspeakable ‘verboten goals’ at their heart. Yanow defines an organisational or policy myth as ‘a narrative created and believed by a group of people that diverts attention away from a puzzling part of their reality’ (1992, 401). Narrative here only designates the idea that myths are ‘not propositions of logic or arguments of rhetoric’, even though they usually consist of matter-of-fact statements.

As social constructions, myths are public, always rooted in particular cultures, times and spaces, and reality for those who believe in and reiter­ate them. In that sense, ‘[constructing the myth is not done explicitly or necessarily with the intention of deceiving or manipulating; rather, the myth is a product of tacit knowledge that is created tacitly and commu­nicated tacitly’ (Yanow 1992, 402). The function of organisational and policy myths is to veil tensions between incommensurable values of an organisation that would undermine not only its work, but perhaps its very existence, if discussed publicly (cf. also Yanow, foreword; Münch, Chap. 3). As socially constructed beliefs, these myths are not only reproduced in discourse, but also enacted in organisational rituals and practices.

Yanow’s concept has been used, for instance, to explore the myths designed to mask tensions in the non-negotiable beliefs of the International Crisis Group, a major transnational think tank reporting on violent con­flicts. Through the myths of ‘field facts’, ‘flexible pragmatism’, ‘unique­ness’, and ‘neutrality/independence’, the organisation is able to hide three incommensurabilities, namely between problem orientation and success orientation in its knowledge production; between its moral claims and its lack of a clearly defined moral standpoint; and between its claims of inde­pendence and its deep entanglements in the international policy commu­nity. If discussed publicly, these incommensurabilities would undermine the group’s expert authority and thereby its raison d’etre (Bliesemann de Guevara 2014).

Knowledge, Power, and the Pervasiveness of Myth

Two contributions in this book take Yanow’s core ideas a step further. In her study of the international policy of the ‘democratic control of the armed forces’, Millar (Chap. 9) combines Yanow’s concept with Michel Foucault’s ideas of productive power and normalisation to explain the per­severance of policy myths. She suggests that, rather than searching for the ‘success’ of myths in the vague notion of belief, myths should better be seen as an integral part of the construction of ‘truths’, understood in the Foucauldian sense as the product of a diffuse, productive form of power that creates meaning and subjectivities (Foucault 1980). The function of myths, in this reading, goes beyond mere belief in that they construct ‘truths’, which are depoliticised, naturalised, and thus not perceived as historically contingent or particular. Being ‘outside’ of myth is impossible in this reading, and critique thus a constant task of enquiry into the gene­alogy of today’s truths.

Resorting to Jacques Derrida,¹² Robert Cooke (Chap. 4) draws parallels between Yanow’s ‘incommensurable values’ and the Derridean concept of differance. Looking at myth from this postmodern perspective, he ques­tions the understanding of myths in terms of the dichotomy mythos/logos, in which myths have come to embody creative fiction contrasted with the facticity of historical narratives or the immanent experience of reality. Rather, he argues that myth has to be understood on its own terms as something that is neither true nor false, thus always based on incommen­surable principles, which cannot be decided through simple logocentric acts of naming or definition without doing violence to this fundamental ambiguity. Taken to its most extreme conclusion, this reading suggests ‘myth’ as the proper term to designate all of our cultural constructions, including scientific and philosophical knowledge, and reminds us to always remain ‘suspicious’ of the logocentric ideas of ‘knowing’ and ‘truth’.