Book of Condolences: Barbara Czarniawska

Barbara was the external examiner of my PhD thesis in 2015. I was very fortunate to have her time and attention. She was sharp, insightful, and generous. Her writing was very important to me in developing my own academic voice, and I will always be grateful for her work.

I just had a very brief encounter with Barbara while using her theory of organisation in my research during a conference in Gothenburg, Sweden. I found in her a free spirit and rigorous thinker who made many contributions to organisation theory. I am sorry to know that she left us so early.

R.i.P

When in early March 2020, all of us were confined to our homes due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we were disoriented and didn’t know how to start our days. We weren’t even that good at using social networks to continue the university lessons that had suddenly been interrupted. And the days never passed, never passed, never passed.
My eye fell on books in my library and stopped on Barbara Czarniawska’s book “A Theory of Organizing,” Eldgar, 2024. It seemed like I could see the still, lively, welcoming, and at the same time stern and generous eyes of Barbara, who had been my guest for a visit at the University of Naples Federico II a few months earlier, just before the lockdown: we had discussed with my students her research on “Narratives in Social Science Research” (Sage, 2024), in the Italian edition of “La narrazione nelle scienze sociali” (Napoli, Editoriale Scientifica, 2018 - punto org book series).
As happens when dangerous glances between two people meet, I tried to pretend nothing had happened, but then she won with the strength of her traveling ideas. And so that book came down from my personal library shelf and returned to my hands and under my student eyes.
A few hours later, I wrote an email to Barbara which I left in draft. The subject of the email was “just a fantasy... for now.” The content was to propose my willingness to translate that book of hers into Italian, which truly synthesizes so much of her thought and work.
And the days never passed, never passed, never passed.
So, I decided to click send. I asked her if she agreed and about every aspect related to starting the work. This experience would become our way of grieving the lockdown. Together, so far away and yet so close.
As often happened over the years, Barbara responded after about 25 seconds, attaching the PDF with the latest English version that had gone to print (including small errors she had hunted down and fixed): and we began a beautiful and stimulating journey, another journey into ideas, her ideas, along which, for me, learning to curve her words and ideas into my language, Italian, was a beautiful, formative, difficult, and fun experience: “Per una teoria dell’organizzare”, Napoli, Editoriale Scientifica, 2020 - punto org book series. You know, dear Barbara, even “your” beloved white cat, your first Italian reader, really enjoyed the reading .., playing the piano.
Thank you, Barbara, for this too. Thank you, Barbara, you have given me a little piece of your [im]possible [im]mortality.
Let’s continue, all of us mortal scholars and still alive for a while, to travel with your ideas and to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps and hair, like in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Thank you, Barbara, for your bright, stern, and kind eyes.
Thank you, Barbara. Together we had fun. So much, so much, so much.
Luigi Maria

Urocza Barbaro, żałuję, że nie mogłem chodzić z Tobą ulicami Szwecji, ale wspomnienia i silna więź, którą oboje od razu poczuliśmy, nigdy nie zostaną utracone. Tęskniłeś za mną. Teraz będę tęsknić jeszcze bardziej. Zawsze kocham Daphne

Beautiful soul go softly. Love you.

Basiu, byłaś dla nas inspiracją. Trudno jest jechać warszawskim metrem nie myśląc o Twoich badaniach...

Barbara and I met at MIT in 1981 when she was a visiting scholar at MIT and I was a PhD student having spent 6 months in the GDR, or East Germany, and then several months at the Rand Institute. Barbara was a brilliant colleague, and even though I could not convince her to attend a baseball game, she was a great friend. We met up again when I spent a year at the Stockholm School of Economics, and on other shorter visits too. She taught me a lot, intellectually and about refugee life and resilience, how she moved from country to country, language to language. I am saddened by our loss, and inspired by her strength and commitment to truth. Bruce Kogut

Very, very sad news of the death of a long standing close friend and also a colleague.

Already missing you.

Already missing you.

Thank you for your infectious curiosity, your interest in other perspectives, your meticulous work, which was an inspiration to all of us, and very heartwarming meetings and seminars. I’ll miss you❤️

We have lost a giant of a woman and a paragon of intellectual curiosity unburdened by disciplinary confines. I was fortunate to be her colleague at GRI. What a congenial master. Thank you for everything, Barbara!

Thank you for everything. Your inspirational works lives on through all your books and papers. You will be missed.

Amazing scholar. Her Facebook posts got be giggling all the time. May the Great Architect of the Universe grant her a place in the Lodge above.

barbara was the first academic super-star i ever met in person, and she was an exemplar of an academic. sharp in wits, kind at heart, and always supportive. i owe her much intellectually and personally. i will miss her greatly and so will many others.

Barbara was an inspirational intellectual, someone to look up to and learn from. She was always there for me when I needed advice. Barbara listened, asked questions, and gave thoughtful and helpful answers. Her absence brings enormous sadness but legacy lives on. Odpoczywaj w pokoju, Basiu.

R. I. P.

I didn’t have an opportunity to meet Barbara in person. However, her work and ideas, especially about the time, place and action nets, remain an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me. Thank you, Barbara.

So long, beautiful master.

I had known Barbara way, way before I met her – through her books and articles, which were such a delight to read, so inspiring on an intellectual level and also very encouraging, charting the possibility of a qualitative option in what was then a very positivist discipline. Barbara was a model that one could follow. I was fortunate to meet Barbara when I visited the Gothenburg Research Institute. She was the center around which everything gravitated. I had a lovely evening at her house with Ulla (Eriksson-Zetterquist), and dinner and conversation that covered everything from the personal to world polity, from the mundane to the profane. Barbara sent me home with a list of books she recommends I read. None were academic books, but rather fiction and biographies and whatnot. What a model of kindness and curiosity!

I have lost an incredible source of inspiration and also a close friend. We met in Lugano where she accepted our invitation to give a keynote at the first AIDEA-Giovani international conference and been close since then. I was a young doctoral student, she was already BC. We will all miss you!

So much I want to say, but they fall short of a deep sadness. Your generosity at every level, your time, support, food, conversations and thought-provoking ideas among many things, I am for ever grateful for. Thank you for everything. I will miss you.

My thoughts, my memories, my writings with Barbara's always "there".... I think I remember every word she said when supervising my PhD. I keep as a treasure all her emails, the photos we exchanged during our meetings at Gothenburg and attending conferences, so many great times in UK, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Gothenburg. I have the feeling I am among of those who were privileged by sharing a close personal and intellectual relation with this great woman.