EGOS Notes: Reports from the 17th EGOS Colloquium 'The Odyssey of Organizing', Lyon 5–7 July 2001.

The article reports on issues and themes discussed in the seventeenth conference of European Group for Organizational Studies held in Lyon in the month of July. To start with, the first topic of discussion was focused on the analogy of organizing and narrating sectioned under the heading "Narratives We Organize by." It described narrative approach to cover a wide range of perspectives, interests, and epistemological orientations in context to business organizations. Another issue for presentation focused on re-discovering history in studying organizations. A distinction was offered between organizational history and historical organization theory as a way of conceptualizing the intersection on whether organizational analysis needs to take history seriously. Other important focus of the conference acknowledged the question of whether public organizations be brought back in industry. As a result, it raised many voices for new public management, changing nature of bureaucracy, the public sector reform process, and the nature of organizational change.