Storytelling and the Future of Organizations

An Antenarrative Handbook

David M. Boje

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136823763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Storytelling is part of social action and interaction that actually shapes the future of organizations. Organization and management studies have overwhelmingly focused to date on rational narrative structures with beginnings, middles, and ends, where narrative has proved to be a handy concept in qualitative studies. Far less attention is given however to the more spontaneous and 'non-staged' storytelling that occurs in organizations. Storytelling and the Future of Organizations explores the science and practice of 'antenarrative' because that is how the future of organization is shaped.

Antenarrative is a term invented by David M. Boje in 2001, and is defined as a 'bet on the future, ' as 'before' narrative linearity, coherence, and stability sets in. Antenarrative is all about 'prospective sensemaking, ' betting on the future before narrative retrospection fossilizes the past. Antenarrative storytelling is therefore agential in ways that traditional narratology has yet to come to grips with. This handbook contribution is bringing together a decade of scholarship on 'antenarrative.' It is the first volume to offer such a varied but systematic examination of non-traditional narrative inquiry in the management realm, organizing and developing its approach, and providing new insights for management students and scholars.

Part I

Individual, Gender, and Group Antenarratives

Introduction to Part I

Individual, Gender, and Group Antenarratives

In writing these section introductions, I intend to play with the chapter authors and their material, to have a dialogue, something dialogical, that will help bring about this new field of antenarrative inquiry.

I was fortunate to invent the theory of “storytelling organization” which I defined as a “collective storytelling system in which the performance of stories is a key part of members’ sensemaking and a means to allow them to supplement individual memories with institutional memory” (Boje, 1991: 106). There was not yet a term to talk about the packs of future shaping accounts that were part of the sensemaking currency of storytelling organizations. In the 1995 article on Disney as Tamara-land, I started to look more closely at the complexity of storytelling organizations, at the variety of simultaneous storytelling in the Now, and how one kept pace with all the telling happening in different rooms (spaces) at the same time. I knew that there was something missing, some process shaping the future of organizations.

In 2001 I invented the term antenarrative by weaving the concept through every chapter after the book without them had been accepted, and after the final copy proofs:

“This fragmented, non linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted and improper storytelling is what I mean by the term antenarrative” (Boje, 2001: 1).

I did this at the final rewrite, because the initial publishing contract forbade any new ideas, but I decided to break the rules and move in a new direction. After working with antenarrative for a few years, I defined antenarrative as follows: “Antenarratives are prospective (forward-looking) bets (antes) that an ante-story (before-story) can transform organization relationships” (Boje, 2008, p. 13). I began to look at storytelling as a holographic triadic of retrospective narrative, living story webs of now-relationships, and various sorts of antenarratives of prospective sensemaking. I believe the current book goes beyond by getting at the holographic aspects of storytelling.

As the chapter authors began working this past decade with antenarrative theory and research, their studies in this new book, point out how antenarratives are agential, giving rise to future events and situations that would not take place by retelling a retrospective narrative. It is the traversing that is not just some sort of social construction, but an ontological act of enactment. The materiality of storytelling, in all its corporeality, in its intra-play with material Being, with ecology, with bodies, and with quantum physics waves, is a new vista of theory and research in storytelling.

My understanding of antenarrative is being informed by collaboration with the authors of this book. As I understand them, antenarratives are travelers, in packs, moving in and among deep material contexts, morphing situations as they traverse. Antenarrative packs are not just meaning-making, but assemblages that are world-making. For me, antenarrative is much more a verb, not a noun, not ever singular, and always iterative. When antenarrating stops moving, stops being a morphing hoard of travelers recombining, and finally stops iteratively changing context to affect future potentiality, then antenarrating-processes becomes just narrative-reduction, stuck and fossilized into some past-ness of individual or collective memory. Many organizations are stuck in the past, unable to invent futures that depart from replication.

Narrative tries to couple with antenarrating, to make linear or cyclic replications, but that is just past-representation volition to control the shape of the future, and keep it as it was. Linear and cyclic antenarrating turns out to be narrative just being future-controlling.

Several main contributions are made by this book. Perhaps the major one: Sensemaking is not only backward looking, retrospective narrative, but also prospective antenarrative. Second, the enactment process is iterative, which means the narrative stuck-in-the-past cannot successfully map the unfolding process in the Now-ness of Being, in the event-ness of enactment. Third, a veritable wave function that is holographic storytelling is occurring as sensemaking enactment folds past, present, and future into one another, in iterative acts of sensemaking. Finally, this book explore the ways the past narrative is ill-equipped to account for the unfolding enactments as people and material actants unfold an entire field of potentialities. So many futures are co-generated that are nonlinear, not controlled by precedent cycles, that the concepts of spiral, and all those Deleuzian rhizome-assemblages, mean whole new ways of sensemaking are being invented that our chapter authors set out to explore in their disciplines as wide-ranging as corporate strategy, math education, information technology, banking, and social movements.

The chapters in the first section, address how antenarratives move, how they unfold, refold, sort, sift, change, transform, and shape the future field of potentiality by working iteratively, connecting, making differences in reality, between individual and group roles, as well as between group and larger collective situations. Antenarratives are present in philosophy, education, strategy, marketing, accounting, theology, law, and literature. What is new about antenarrative is it gives some alternative to linear thinking and the same approaches in business to instrumental ethics and managerialist control.

Frits Schipper and Barbara Fryzel’s Chapter 1 explores responsible use and power of antenarratives. Antenarrative is a kind of resistance force to managerial control that makes narrative representation a tool. This chapter starts by describing 1) various areas in which the notion of ‘power’ is being used, and 2) different modes of using it. These philosophers say that the important contribution that antenarrative makes is the focus on variety and having some ethically answerable complicity with a connection to the rationalizing forces of narrative. The chapter authors pay particular attention to the relationship of power and rationality. The practical contribution is contextualizing the intra-play of antenarrative and antenarrating in some constitutive situation change that presupposes power, but what kind? Power requires answerability for its use. Schipper and Fryzel raise the issue that antenarrative power is both in epistemology (knowing) and ontology (Being). Empirically, antenarrative is constitutive of Being-ness, acting in concert with other antenarratives, in a moving assemblage. Antenarrating has power to bring about something in a process, power over is the reality-effect brought about by antenarrating, and power with is about the means by which effects of Being are realized in specific situations by antenarrating. The final part of the chapter focuses on power and (ante)narrative, discussing semantic power, closure, and responsible use and abuse of power, referring to the example of Flextronics and use of narratives in air traffic safety. For Schipper and Fryzel the coupling of narrative to linear-cyclic antenarrating is rather instrumental-control, all about, mean-end chains. Spiral antenarratives, and what I am calling rhizomatic-assemblages, do not have such grand aspirations to control the outcome, just co-generating. The authors seem here and there to agree with William James that life is before narrative, before its does all that abstracting, reduction, and marginalizing of little ‘wow’ moments of individual and group experience. For Schipper and Fryzel, it’s the expulsion of experience by narrative that is where antenarrative comes into play. What do they add and contribute to antenarratology? As they see it, antenarrative and narrative are in a twofold connectivity (1. as proto-narrative anticipation of potential story or antenarrative to be, and 2. as narratives coming before antenarratives). Both ways of connection come together in their composite term, ‘ante(-)narrative.’

Jawad Syed and I develop in Chapter 2 a ‘negotiated diversity management’ antenarrative approach that changes the cycle of ways the multiplicity of living stories are typically being excluded by official retrospective-narratives they call, ‘retro-narratives.’ Retro-narrative constructs the identity of oftentimes culturally diverse employees. Like, Schipper and Fryzel’s chapter, this chapter is about power. Syed and I critique of the diversity management narratives that promise economic gains and use technocratic rationality, but subvert the importance of unequal power relations. We suggest a triadic theory of storytelling, where such managerialist (often linear) narratives are one aspect, and opposed by two other kinds of storytelling: the living story of people in unequal power relations, and antenarratives (defined as ante, a bet, and before narrative fossilization sets in). We are interested in how non-linear (spiral and rhizomatic) antenarratives interplay with stabilized, often linear (sometimes recurring-cyclic) narratives and more fragmented living stories of people situated in unequal power relationships in organizations. We suggest that diversity management makes rather managerialist bets about the future situation of diversity in organizations. What is necessary is to cultivate antenarratives that present a critical appraisal of the future, and a counterforce to narratives whose (retrospective) sensemaking is stuck on the past.

Diane Walker’s Chapter 3 contributes a Tesseract Antenarrative Model to enable schools and other organizations to move from linear narratives to multidimensional antenarratives for holistic critical antenarrative literacy. She is concerned about the ethics of No Child Left Behind, and wants to teach math literacy in a new way, using Tesseract Antenarratives. She happily engages in resistance using her critical pedagogy. Her model is based on mapping individual personal stories onto factor lattices to represent a multidimensional storytelling hologram. She uses mathematical drawings, photos, and sculptures to represent relationships between the factors of whole numbers. By mapping stories onto the factors, she conceptualizes a shape-shifting four-dimensional tesseract that illustrates the stories within stories and around and between stories. Walker wants to help teachers and students use her holographic storytelling to make connections between math, literacy, and other content areas. This can provide an antenarrative way of producing personally satisfying and meaningful works of literature and art. In sum, Walker’s Tesseract Antenarrative Model introduces holographic complexity into storytelling in teaching and learning.

Grace Ann Rosile’s Chapter 4 is an antenarrative and ethics analysis of catching her students cheating. This chapter builds an antenarrative analysis of causes of cheating by identifying the type of antenarrative represented by each unfolding perspective: linear, cyclical, spiral, and rhizomatic. Her contribution is to theorize a link between antenarrative-potentially used to explain the causes of cheating and the narrative theme emerging and cohering from four sorts of antenarrating, and finally identifying the ethical perspective she finds most compatible with the results of this antenarrative becoming narrative process. Linear antenarrative reflects an applied, rulebased (cause-effect or crime-punishment) ethics. Cyclic antenarrative, in the cheating, brings out pleas for Aristotelian virtue ethics. Spiral antenarrating is about a sort of instrumentality (greatest good for the most folks). And Rhizomatic (assemblage) brings forth more of a Bakhtinian answerability ethics, an emotion-volition to intervene in the social, recognize one’s complicity in the assemblage of cheaters and non-cheaters, and to change the situation producing the cheating.

Kevin Grant’s Chapter 5 takes us into spirituality practices of leaders. It is about the antenarrative analysis of the ‘metanoia’ experience. A metanoia experience is a spontaneous, unpredicted transpersonal encounter that really gets your attention. Grant analyzes my own close encounter with transpersonal, a contemporary miracle, and a munchable sign that it was time to devote myself to storytelling. Some leaders do not change behavior as a result. For other leaders, it can mean that what they do next is life-changing, deeply transforming the poetics of everyday life, including changing how they think and feel, and maybe turning-about, acting in organizations a whole lot differently. Metanoia, therefore, is the unpredictable outcome of the living story relational encounter with the transpersonal. What makes it an antenarrative, not the linear or cyclic sort, but one that spirals or results in a re-assemblage, whose outcome is unpredicted? In Gnostic Christianity, metanoia means awakening ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to Agential Antenarratives That Shape the Future of Organizations
• PART 1. Individual, Gender, and Group Antenarratives
• PART 2. Organization and Writing Antenarratives
• PART 3. Antenarratives and Organization Change
• PART 4. National and Globalizing Antenarratives
• Index