Untold Stories in Organizations

Michal Izak, Linda Hitchin, David Anderson, Michal Izak, Linda Hitchin, David Anderson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317654452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The field of organizational storytelling research is productive, vibrant and diverse. Over three decades we have come to understand how organizations are not only full of stories but also how stories are actively making, sustaining and changing organizations. This edited collection contributes to this body of work by paying specific attention to stories that are neglected, edited out, unintentionally omitted or deliberately left silent.

Despite the fact that such stories are not voiced they have a role to play in organizational analysis. The chapters in this volume variously explore how certain realities become excluded or silenced. The stories that remain below the audible range in organizations offer researchers an access to study political practices which marginalise certain organisational realities whilst promoting others. This volume offers a further contribution by paying heed to silence and the processes of silencing. These silences influence the choice of issues on organisational agendas, the choice of audience(s) to which these discourses are addressed and the ways of addressing them.

In exploring these relatively understudied terrains, Untold Stories in Organizations comprises an important contribution to the organizational storytelling space, opening paths for new trajectories in storytelling research.

1 Introduction

Michal Izak, Linda Hitchin, and David Anderson

Organizational Storytelling

It is often argued that human lives are imbued with stories and storytelling. Common sense of research converge to suggest that stories do more than describe the sequence of events (Campbell, 1976). Story offers a space to vent emotions and collectively examine the word around us (Gabriel, 1995). Indeed, in our stories we find means to metaphorise reality. It is through stories that we can work to both secure or change such realities as story provides a means to challenge, change, or preserve deeply rooted meanings, inherent in our fictions and myths, across generations (Armstrong, 2005/2006).

Contemporary organization and management studies scholars have increasingly realized the importance of stories to organizational life. In organizations, stories are around us as our creations, companions, and oppressors (Boje, 1991, 1995; Gabriel, 2008; Rhodes & Brown, 2005; Sims, 2003). Thankfully, stories and storytellers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and the work of story cannot be fixed or held down in particular places. Stories of success and failure are mirrored by organizational narratives of conquer, progress, or decline. Stories that attempt to overpower and control have counter stories that attempt to release and liberate. In such a melee of tales, storytelling shapes organizations (Boje, 2011).

Even where organizational stories appear to consist of a relatively limited range of themes (Martin, Feldman, Hatch, & Sitkin, 1983), they seem to have potential to fulfil a number of purposes. Research from different traditions has revealed how stories may serve as devices for mapping the territory of organizational sensemaking (Wilkins, 1984); disseminating knowledge (Campbell, 1972/1988); expressing deeply embedded organizational mythologies (Kostera, 2008); and glorifying past and/or future organizing ethos (Ybema, 2004). However, that is not an end to it, since somewhat shifting of research attention, stories have been revealed as technologies contributing to the formation of identity (Bamberg, 2010). Stories are at work in overtly managed spaces of organization enforcing control and performing resistance (Wilkins, 1983) and at work in psychic landscapes, including unmanaged spaces (Gabriel, 1995).

It is evident that stories provide means to make sense of human experiences (Sole & Wilson, 2003), shape individual lives (Sims, 2003), and access the worlds of others (Rennie, 1994). Crucially, by bringing external cogence and coherence to convictions, stories provide resources that shape appropriate responses to the stories and work of other people (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1995).

The criticality of the diverse approaches to story and storytelling is inherent in their intention to reveal the storyteller’s strategies and hidden agendas, the mechanisms employed in creating stories or the unintended consequences which telling certain stories may entail. Hence, criticality resides in the ability to illustrate the politics of story whether that is from a position where story-politic contexts are considered subject to limits (Gabriel, 1995) or conceived as more open and ‘messy’ (Boje, 1991, 2006).

However, to date, research on storytelling typically focused on those stories the content of which is known from the start or can be revealed to the reader in the course of interpretation. The stories in question were somehow made explicit. Their authorship, even if multiple, was in principle discernible. We think that these (tacit) assumptions regarding storytelling should be problematised. Our goal is to provide an initial reflection on those experiences and emotions which for many reasons never entirely made it to the surface, which were not (fully) formulated and ‘read’ as stories, or which, despite appearing were ignored.

Our area of inquiry is a difficult one, yet not paradoxical—whether expressed, experienced, read or not, it is evident that there are untold interactions between individual and social worlds. The neglected, edited out, unintentionally omitted, or deliberately left silent stories provide blank spots—potential reference points on the map of organizational sensemaking that are no less indispensible to the map reader than those ‘realities’ which can be made explicit with current resources. Untold story research begins at the edges of current story research and attends to the emerging challenges in the field. Consequently, playing out the means to map ‘blank spots’ on the research agenda will inevitably challenge the limits of current analysis and possibly the politics of research conventions. The mature research offers a point of departure to reconceptualise story and story research through the very idea of ‘untold’. In their own way untold stories may hold one key to making the complexity of the social world more comprehensible.

Untold Stories

To acknowledge the storytelling perspective means to denaturalise the ways in which the social world is typically construed by us and for us. As the focus is the social world, social context is inevitably a core concept and problem. Consequently, denaturalising story poses certain challenges that are shared across social studies of action and meaning. Understanding human actions through stories and storytelling entails not only comprehending underlying intentions of story and teller by reference to a context as surrounding matter, but also examining context as relationships of social experience and thought worlds (as generative social interactions [Schütz, 1973; Kristeva, 1986; Berger & Luckmann, 1967]). Hence, it is through story interactions in context that we offer justifications and rationales for action and examine consequences. In (story) research, tracing story interactions, justifications, and rationales provide means to enhance contextual understanding (Garfinkel, 1984).

The degree to which any rationale can be sustained by popular reception depends on particular social expectations with which justifications are (or are not) aligned. Both social sensemaking frameworks (such as ‘rationality’) and meanings produced within them can be approached in terms of narratives (Reed, 1999; MacIntyre, 1981/1990, respectively). The repertoire of narratives or stories legitimised within and by such frameworks can be varied, but not infinite (Czarniawska, 2004) and therefore it may provide a key insight into the context of stories’ production. The ‘success-despite-obstacles’ organizational story, for instance, will be sustained by its listeners provided that they share the notion of ‘success’ with the storyteller who, for example, may or may not qualify as such a government bailout covered by taxpayers’ money. Similarly, a ‘sacrifice story’ may or may not be applauded depending on the current social weightings of particular values being saved and sacrificed (vide human offerings to gods in ancient Carthage or Warsaw upraising), and ‘social progress story’ may also be booed if the voices of those who were sacrificed in its name start to be heard.

However, we must also attend to the problem of criteria. Not only can criteria for ‘acceptable’ storytelling be themselves construed as stories, but also factors which shape criteria and carry their authority can also be rendered as narratives; as in the case of scientific paradigms (Czarniawska, 1995), or social agendas (Reed, 1999). Consequently, hidden under a story are precepts, tenets, and beliefs that precede decisions over how to arrange story-making ingredients and align them in a particular way. Which stories will appear and which will not depends on other stories, those which became expressed in the form of criteria for a particular form of storytelling. But these stories may become un-told, the criteria may change, the river-bed of thoughts may shift (Wittgenstein, 1969). Hence, not only very few stories get to be told, but also those that do, render a number of other untold. ‘Telling’ a story supplements the potentiality of an untold story to remain so. Whether such a ‘supplement’ merely adds a new ingredient to the untold or replaces it, seems not as much ‘undecidable’ (Derrida, 1976) as rather context-dependent, since stories may be variously constructed.

Typically, social scientists enjoy clarity and like to ‘tell’ their stories with confidence, indeed the very notion of academic argument tends to be struggle over the story. However, the same is not the case for managerial phenomenon where lack of clarity provides the space for managerial reproduction and action. It might seem that the only way in which a managerial phenomena such as motivation, teamwork, or strategy can be listened to attentively depends on ensuring that none of the multiple renditions of the phenomenon is in any sense ‘final’. The space for reinterpretation and reformulations is not empty; on the contrary it is populated with multiple elements (interpretations, arguments, topics) which were discarded, forgotten, rejected, or which were never arrived at. These resources can be now mobilised into new forms or, more likely, reformulations of the existing ones. They may not be ‘told’, but they make ‘telling’ possible. The abundant ontology of the untold is not more problematic than human imagination itself, inasmuch as both enable creative sensemaking.

Into the Untold

How can we talk about the ‘untold’? We would like to suggest that possibilities are numerous. In fact, taking literary and cinematic fictions as reference points, when it comes to storytelling, we should expect that plots will unfold around organizational stories which are not-told. Take for example, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county saga (see for instance 1929, 1936, 1959). Faulkner employs the tactic of focusing the reader’s attention on seemingly insignificant phenomena that appear as asides or spinoffs of the main story. The deliberate literary technique here, is to draw readerly attention to fringes or blank spots. If somewhere in the story crime is committed, we are more likely to learn about the texture of leafs in the distant part of the county rather than about any of the expected (normative) details of the crime scene. The crucial plot-driving details are typically enmeshed with immensely developed (rich) descriptions which not only seemingly, but often actually, have nothing to do with the plot kernel of the story. Hardly a surprising turn is we consider that Faulkner’s work is often not plot-driven in the first place. The strategy of decentring the storyteller’s (and story-reader’s) attention away from where the action is may indeed be common. In John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) we are faced with innumerable stories most of which appear as either dead ends or containing marginally important information or facts of the plot. The feeling is that the author remains ostentatiously uninterested in telling us anything about the main protagonist’s story, in fact he appears to actively resist revealing what such a story might be. A different approach to not-telling-a-story can be found in the works of Mario Vargas Llosa (see Conversation in a Cathedral, 1978) or Julio Cortázar (see Hopscotch, 1966) who repeatedly undermine the reader’s attempts to identify the storyline.

Although hiding a story away from the reader may appear to be a hallmark of our times, such textual tactics can be traced back to Cervantes (1615/1950), Potocki (1815/2008), and to some extent Homer. Unsurprisingly, cinema recurrently employs similar storytelling tactics. In the culminating scene of Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), the camera ostentatiously turns away from the action to show us the empty space outside and leave us wondering what occurred. In Blow-up (Antonioni, 1966) by the same director we are once again reminded about the precariousness of a story—as implied in the final scene, we have to decide for ourselves whether the story (of a murder) was told to us or not. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) develops along the lines of a conspiracy-buster movie, only to take a drastic turn towards espousing a near metaphysical incapacity to grasp the actual story, which always eludes both the viewer and the protagonist. Perhaps less sophisticated non-telling unfolds in The Divide (Gens, 2011), which starts with the apparently apocalyptic scenario in which a city (or a country, or the whole planet) is under threat, but upon the conclusion of the first scene we find our protagonists in a cellar which (spoiler alert is in place) they practically never leave for the rest of the movie. They are vividly interested in what happens outside, and so are we, but this story is never revealed to us. Finally, in what may be one of the most explicit references to ‘untold stories’ in the history of cinema, Dalton Trumbo’s antisystemic Johnny Got His Gun (1971) places the main protagonist in the position of losing any means to communicate with the external world and still having an intense inner life. It is not as much an inability to tell the story that is implied here, but rather the fatalistic conviction that some, even most beautiful stories may be ignored, and that there is nothing we can do about it.

Our interest in the untold is not motivated by epistemological sceptic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PART I The Silence, Subconscious, Meaning, and Narrative: The Ecologies of Untold
• PART II Untold Stories on the Social and Political Agenda
• PART III Untold Story and Methodology
• Contributor Biographies
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects