One of the more interesting things I’ve done in the past few years is to look at how “myths” influence corporations and other organizations. In February, my friend and colleague at Insignia (I’m the Anthropologist in Residence there) Lydia Zorn and I presented some of this at the MRIA QRD conference in Toronto. While the specific examples we were using related to tourism, we have applied the same concepts to other types of applied organizational problems.

When most people hear the term “myth”, they tend to think that it is synonymous with “fable” or “story” and, in some senses, it is. Now, I will freely admit that I have a rather odd take on myth which derives from Vladimir Propp, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Victor Turner. I view “myths” as the taken-for-granted (in the phenomenological sense) patterns of perception that underly how members of cultures view certain aspects or segments of “reality”. The “stories” or “fables” that are the texts of myths are, for me, the material manifestations of the underlying pattern that is the “myth”. You could use a biological analogy where the “myth” is the genotype and the stories produced are the phenotypic expressions of that myth; the visible narrative of the invisible genre as it were.

Looking at myths in this manner is not really new. In the early 1970’s, and I’m afraid the date currently eludes me, Pierre Miranda presented a paper analyzing the probability states of one set of myths, i.e. the probability of a given text going from one state to another. This gave him a flow chart (actually, a Markov chain), that would allow him to generate “stories” that, while not “traditional”, would, nevertheless, fit the “myth” and might have been “real” Indeed, there is some anecdotal evidence that at least one anthropologist (who shall remain nameless) ended up recording a bunch of similar “made up” stories during the 1930’s (he was paying $5 a story which was a pretty decent sum back then!). Despite the fact that they were “made up”, the “stories” were actually generated out of the existing elements of the myth and fit the underlying pattern.

How does this relate to corporations and organizational problem areas? That is an interesting question, and the answer lies not so much in the intra-organization mythology as in the mythology surrounding the organization (or company) and problem area. Let me take the example of tourism since that research is in the public domain.

What is the myth surrounding visiting Canada? Well, it varies significantly depending on which target population you are looking at (France, the UK, Germany, South Korea, the US, etc.). Let’s look at the UK mythic environment as an exemplar.

First, and this is common to almost all target populations, Canada is viewed as “vast Nature”; almost a “frontier” to test oneself against. In the UK, this plays into our historical relationship with them as one of the “colonies” and, later, one of four Dominions. This historical relationship is important, since myths require time to settle into that taken-for-granted attitude.

Let me give you a personal comment on this. In 1979, I was in Vienna singing at a music festival (that’s another story) and was chatting with some of the members of a British choir who were there. One of the first things I was asked was if I used a canoe for transport (latter on, after several beers, I managed to half convince them that our public transit system was double-decker, husky drawn sleds!). Now, being asked about canoes was, for me, fascinating since my great-uncle had been asked the same thing when he went to Oxford before World War I!

Now for the British, the canoe is actually somewhat of an iconic image of Canada. It is tied up in many different stories of which, possibly the most (in)famous is that of Grey Owl (picture of Grey Owl and his pet beaver Jellyroll from Parks Canada).

Now, Grey Owl was born Claude Archibald Stansfeld Belaney of Hastings, England, and came to Canada in 1906. He adopted a persona that, in the 1920’s and 30’s, became an icon for both Canada and conservationism (early environmentalism) and his “story” was given a movie adaptation in 1999 starting Pierce Brosnan; a testament to the ongoing power of the myth.

The Grey Owl story, along with others, all fed into the British perception of Canada as containing a vast wilderness and Canadians living in “harmony” with it (hence the canoes - great gas millage on a canoe for those of you who don’t know ). Aside from the canoe (and beaver) iconograhy, the Grey Owl story also tied in with another core component of the Canada myth for the British: people would leave the UK and “go native” in the colonies. All canoe jokes and icons aside, this points to a core, historical reality: many inhabitants of the UK came to Canada and settled here, and this myth helped, in part, to explain that movement or, at least, part of the attraction of coming to Canada.

This ties in to a very basic question that people ask - why do people leave “here” and go “there”? The mythic environment surrounding Canada helps to answer that. At the same time, and in a much more pragmatic and applied sense, it also helps to explain some of the barriers to increasing tourism from the UK to Canada. After all, if the myth of Canada or, rather, part of it, says that people come here for a visit and end up staying for the wilderness, isn’t it “dangerous” to come to Canada? Mightn’t “we” be “seduced” by that raw, vast nature into staying there? Perhaps not surprisingly, when interviewing UK potential travelers to Canada, elements of worry about “nature” showed up. Some were worried about their cars breaking down, others were worried about meeting dangerous animals, while still others were worried about tipping canoes (I’m not joking here!).

Now, if you know anything about the reality of tourism in Canada, you will know that what we really have is not “raw” nature, but “cooked” (with apologies to Lévi-Strauss). “Nature”, in our tourism industry, is not “wild” but “civilized” as anyone who has been to Banff or Niagara Falls knows. But that reality is at odds with the myth and in terms of determining whether or not someone in the UK will come to visit Canada, the myth will win out over the reality. And it is in this juncture, the myth vs. the reality, that the use of advertising comes in. How do we “sell” the reality of Canada and Canadian tourism to the UK? How do we show that we are “cooked” and not “raw”? How we will be doing it will be determined in the future, and I look forward to seeing the ad campaign.

As a final note, I want to point something out: all Canadians do not know how to use canoes. The fact that I learned when I was six and that my father actually builds canoes is irrelevant - isn’t it????