Storytelling Organizations

David M Boje

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412929776, 9781412929769
• eBook ISBN: 9781446245170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

"Boje does not reflect trends, he is among those who set them" - Hervé Corvellec, Department of Service Management, Lund University

"How can I know what I think until I see what David Boje says? What he says about storytelling will forever change what we thought we knew about stories. With remarkable control over a complex argument, Boje recovers, re-punctuates, and re-animates a world of narrative and sensemaking that we have previously taken for granted!" - Karl E. Weick, Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology,Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan

"Few people understand stories and storytelling as well as David Boje. It is a measure of Boje?s success as a theorist that the word story can never reclaim the innocence and simplicity it once enjoyed. Nor, with the benefit of his work, can organizations be viewed as spaces which occasionally or incidentally spawn stories. Boje?s eagerly awaited book forces us to question many of our assumptions about storytelling; it also demands that we revise several of our assumptions about what organizations are" - Yiannis Gabriel, The School of Management, Royal Holloway University of London

"Our company is made up of lots of stories. We?ve found that ?stories? get told and retold and become the fabric of an organization. ?Policies? lay unread in the company handbook or training manual. David Boje taught me the value of stories in an organization. Stories are the ?oil? that makes the gears work. How do you get your message heard in an organization with thousands of people? David Boje taught me the value of telling stories at Stew Leonard?s!" - Stew Leonard Jr., Stew Leonard Organization

"David Boje is one of the world?s leading authorities on storytelling. His work has influenced a generation of organizational theorists and students. He not only provides new ways of understanding organizations but also provides fresh insights into the way in which stories function to provide meanings" - Heather Höpfl, University of Essex

The idea of organizations using `storytelling? to make sense of themselves and their environment has generated a lot of excitement.

Written by the leading scholar in this field, David Boje explores how narrative and storytelling is an important part of an organization?s strategy, development and learning processes. With excellent examples from Nike, McDonald?s and Disney, readers are shown how the theory that underpins organizational storytelling connects with storytelling in everyday organizational life.

David Boje?s theories and ideas in relation to the study of storytelling in organizations are highly influential and this book will be a `must have? for any student or scholar interested in the area.

PART I

THE COMPLEXITY OF
STORYTELLING ORGANIZATIONS

What is a Storytelling Organization? It is 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).

What is new in this book? It’s a theory of the differences between narrative and story that constitute self-organizing forces of Storytelling Organizations. Specifically, in Storytelling Organizations, narrative-control and story-diffusion are the force and counter-force of self-organizing. Each Storytelling Organization achieves a unique balance between narrative order and story disorder.

The central thesis of this book is that narrative, over the course of modernity, has become a (centripetal) centering force of control and order. The counter-force is that story (when not totally subservient to narrative order) can constitute a (centrifugal) decentering force of diversity and disorder. Narrative has been influenced by modernity to aspire to abstraction and generality, while story, here and there, has retained more grounded interplay with the life world, and its generativity. Several contributions become possible in Part I of this book.

The first contribution is to develop a theory of sensemaking types. In the book’s introduction, I expand Weick’s theory of narrative as retrospective sensemaking for control. I do this by theorizing an interplay of several kinds of narrative story sensemaking: retrospective, here-and-now, and prospective.

Organization scholars have devoted most attention to retrospective narrative sensemaking, that is, noticing Aristotelian narratives with a beginning, middle, and end (BME) plot structure that is quite linear and whole. Less noticed is retrospective sensemaking of narrative fragments, the kinds of disrupted, interrupted, and socially distributed communication that occurs in complex organizations. In the here-and-now, in the moment of Being, there are several modes of story sensemaking: Tamara (means simultaneous stories played out in different rooms, as actors network to make sense of the patterns); horsesense (my wife Grace Ann Rosile’s term for intuitively noticing our embodied relationships, not only with horses, but in human-bodied relationships); and, emotive–ethical (being compelled by complicity in story to act or intervene – what Mikhail Bakhtin calls our ethical-answerability that has no alibi when we are the only ones who can act now to make a difference).

Relatively ignored in organization studies are more prospective ways of sensemaking. The antenarrative (the bet that a before-story can become a narrative) is transformational because it’s a traveler, picking up and jettisoning context as it moves, inviting a different sensemaking of the future. Antenarrative is defined as ‘nonlinear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-narrative speculation, a bet, a proper narrative can be constituted’ (Boje, 2001a: 1). Retrospective narrative, here-and-now storying, and prospective antenarratives are not the only relationships of narrative and story sensemaking. There are ways of narrative and story sensemaking that are not fixated on a temporal axis, and instead are more vertical, more about transcendental, and reflexivity.

Reflexivity is, for me, more about the dialectical, such as George Herbert Mead’s I–we, or Paul Ricoeur’s dialectic of identity of sameness with identity of difference, Kant’s containment of metaphysics to what is a priori to sensemaking (time and space reasoning), or Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. But these kinds of dialectic reflexivities are different from a number of dialogisms. Bakhtin is the pioneer in theorizing that whereas narrative is a monologic bid for order, story can be more dialogical. My contribution is to apply several types of dialogisms to Storytelling Organizations. I use the term ‘polypi’ to mean the interplay dynamics between polyphonic dialogism (many voices), stylistic dialogism (many styles), chronotopic dialogism (many time–space conceptions), and architectonic dialogism (discourses of cognitive interanimating with ethical and aesthetic discourses). It is this dialogical story sensemaking (along the more transcendental as opposed to dialectical) that allows us to open up an exploration of complexity, collective memory, strategy, and organization change.

A contribution developed in Chapter 1 is the paradigm shift from systems thinking to complexity thinking about Storytelling Organizations. Systems thinking has been a monological narrative about organizations, as if there were a linear ordering of levels of reality, a tower of systems that is an all-encompassing deep structure of our world. The first challenge to the field is to go beyond mere open system thinking. Storytelling shapes systemicity at the level of image, symbol, and transcendental aspects of dialogism. The move to complexity thinking can be informed by looking at the variety of narrative and story sensemaking. My contribution to complexity thinking is harnessed under a new word, ‘systemicity.’¹ Systemicity is defined as the dynamic unfinished, unfinalized, and unmerged, and the interactivity of complexity properties with storytelling and narrative processes. The second challenge I make is to break the hierarchic ordering of the properties, to see them in any combination, as holographic.

In Chapter 2, (how story dialogism differs from narrative), the contribution is to posit story dialogism as quite different from narrative monologism. Dialogism is a word Bakhtin never used, and is defined as different voices, styles, and ideas expressing a plurality of logics in different ways, but not always in the same place and time.² Dialogism is defined as different voices (polyphony), styles (stylistics), space–time conceptions (chronotopes), interanimating discourses (architectonics), and dynamic interplay of these varied dialogisms (which I call the polypi). Story is more ‘dialogized’ than narrative, with fully embodied voices, logics, or viewpoints (Bakhtin, 1981: 273). There is something called a ‘dialogized story’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 25) that is not only the polyphonic (many-voiced) story, but one dialogized with multi-stylistic expression, diverse chronotopicities, and the architectonics of interanimating societal discourses, including cognitive, aesthetics, and ethics. It is a rare and endangered species. Out of the polypi of dialogisms, wells up emergence.

In Chapter 3, the contribution is to develop types of collective memory that interplay in Storytelling Organizations. Exploring collective memory is a project I began with the office supply company ethnography (Boje, 1991) and at Disney (Boje, 1995) where I noticed more than one collective memory, interacting in complexity. Collective Memory is like a tapestry of group’s and some errant individuals’ collective memories, interpenetrated by strands or threads of thoughts interwoven across many groups. The chapter explores the relation between collective memory and emergent stories. Emergent story can be defined as absolute novelty, spontaneity, and improvisation, without past or future. Emergent stories are conceived in the here-and-now co-presence of social communicative intercourse of narrative-memory prisons ready to capture and translate emergence. Managerial collective memory posits a center point. Punctual collective memory develops silos, while feigning multiplicity, which it seems to suppress. Multilineal collective memory breaks with horizontal and vertical points to break from the unitary memory. Polyphonic collective memory has multiplicity of memories (or anti-memories) that deny the kinds of center points of memory endemic to managerial memory. Narrative and story research in organizations has been particularly negligent of non-oral ways collective memories are renarrated or restoried. For too long it was assumed only one BME rendition exists (i.e. managerialist). If there are several collective memories vying for recognition or control, then you can see that this makes an organization holographic, punctuated by currents of sensemaking-storytelling, and out of all the dialogic plurality wells up emergence.

The ideas in Part I inform what follows: Part II deals with the application of these key concepts (self-organizing opposition of narrative and story forces, interplay of narrative-story varieties of sensemaking, dialogisms of emergence, and interacting collective memories) to the field of strategy; Part III applies concepts of Part I to how story consulting is, and could be, done; and Part IV examines frontier issues of living story method, and the book closes with a Socratic Story Symposium.

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1 Bakhtin (1981: 152) uses the term ‘systematicalness’ to denote unmerged parts, and unfinalized wholeness of systems. I prefer a new word, ‘systemicity.’

2 Bakhtin used dialogicality. I use dialogism and dialogic interchangeably to mean dialogicality. Holquist’s (1990) reading of ‘dialogism’ describes Bakhtin anti-Hegelian dislike for Absolute Spirit dialectic. Bakhtin preferred neo-Kantianism more ‘speculative epistemology’ (Holquist, 1990: 17), a move from Newtonian to Einsteinian worldview (i.e. relativity of time/space).

INTRODUCTION

torytelling Organizations is about how people and organizations make sense of the world via narrative and story. Narratives shape our past events into experience using coherence to achieve believability. Stories are more about dispersion of events in the present or anticipated to be achievable in the future. These narrative-coherence and story-dispersion processes interact so that meaning changes among people, as their events, identities, and strategies get re-sorted in each meeting, publication, and drama. This book will identify eight types of sensemaking patterns of narrative coherence in relation to story dispersion that are the dynamics of Storytelling Organizations.

For 15 years I have written about what I call the ‘Storytelling Organization.’ Every workplace, school, government office or local religious group is a Storytelling Organization. Every organization, from a simple office supply company or your local choral group, your local McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, to the more glamorous organizations such as Disney or Nike, and the more scandalous such as Enron or Arthur Anderson is a Storytelling Organization.¹ Yet, very little is known about how Storytelling Organizations differ, or how they work, how they respond to their environment, how to change them, and how to survive in them. Even less is known about the insider’s view of the Storytelling Organization, its theatre of everyday life. Where you work, you become known by your story, become promoted and fired for your story. It is not always the story you want told, and there are ways to change, and restory that story.

Obviously the glamorous entertainment companies such as Nike, Disney, and even McDonald’s and Wal-Mart are Storytelling Organizations. But, think about it, so are the less glamorous, less boisterous, ones like your hardware store, your building contractor, your realty company. They all live and die by the narratives and stories they tell.

This book is not an argument about there being only one way, narrating or storying, or a choice between narrative and story. It is not that there is only one form of narrative coherence and story dispersion. Nor, being only retrospective, in-the-now, more prospective, or the neglected transcendental and reflexivity. It is that retrospective, now, prospective, transcendental, and reflexivity are in interplay creating dynamic forces of change and transformation of an organization with its environment. To treat what is different, as the same, blinds us to dynamics, with important implications for how these multiple ways of sensemaking dance together. It is this dance among sensemaking differences that gives us new understanding of complexity, strategy, organization change, and methodology.

The structure of the book is as follows: the introduction will map, for the reader, eight ways of sensemaking (two are narrative-coherence; six are story-dispersion processes). Part I of the book looks at the complexity and collective memory implications of storying and narrating. The key point is the transition businesses and public organizations are making from Second World War system thinking (in one logic) to complexity thinking (that is a dance of diverse logics and languages of sensemaking). Part II is five chapters applying implications of the dance of narrative coherence and story dispersion to strategy schools. Each chapter contributes a new frontier for traditional strategy schools to explore. Part III is a couple of chapters on how narrative and story are being used in organization development and change programs. The final part of the book gives attention to method implications of how to study the interplay of narrative and story, as well as storying and narrating processes. Key is the concern for a ‘living story’ method in relation to ‘dead narrative’ text ways of study. In the final chapter, I have a bit of fun, and give tribute to dead narrative and story scholars who have influenced ideas expressed in this book. They are people I always wanted to meet and have a conversation with (Bakhtin, Benjamin, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Stein).

MAP OF SENSEMAKING TYPES

At this point, putting together the eight ways of sensemaking into a map, will simplify their presentation, and give you, the reader, a way to visualize important interrelationships. Figure I.A maps important dynamics among eight ways of narrative and story sensemaking.

More research has been done on the past ways (BME and Terse fragments) of sensemaking, than on future ways (antenarratives), or the now ways (Tamara, Horsesense, and Emotive–Ethical). Even less is done with reflexivities (Dialectics), and hardly anything with the transcendentals (Dialogisms).

Reflexivity refers to the (often subconscious) proce...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements and Dedication
• PART I: THE COMPLEXITY OF STORYTELLING ORGANIZATIONS
• PART II: STORYTELLING ORGANIZATION STRATEGIES
• PART III: CONSULTING TO STORYTELLING ORGANIZATIONS
• PART IV: STORY METHOD
• Glossary
• References
• Index