Four Essential Organizational Elements in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick

This paper attempts to shed a new light on Herman Melville’s well-known novel, Moby-Dick. The novel—though many scholars approached it from various perspectives—has rarely been studied from organizational perspective, even though the sailors of the Pequod make up a business organization whose main purpose is making profit. It argues that the fiction be read as an organizational fiction. In order to prove that, it applies some organizational theories, particularly, those that are focused on the definitions of “organization.” Four essential elements without which a group of people cannot be called “organization” are introduced—group’s goal(s) or objective(s) clearly defined, members that belong to the group, hierarchy and defined roles within the group, and effective communication among the members within the group. Analyzing the text from this perspective, this paper shows, quite different from all the other novels of Melville, all the four elements have indispensable roles throughout the novel, which leads to a conclusion that the fiction may be seen as an organizational novel to which some leadership and motivation theories from Organizational Behavior—a large sub-field of Management—can be applied in order to provide readers with fresh interpretations. As such, this paper’s major contribution to the study of Moby-Dick is bridging two separate disciplines—literature and Organizational Behavior.