A World Scientific Encyclopedia of Business Storytelling

The following sections are included:

• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• Contents

The following sections are included:

• The Mall is the End of the World!
• Is the Mall the End of the World? Can Storytelling Provide Hope?
• A New Terra-Ethics of Sustainability
• Structure of the Book
• References

Nick Land once described hyperstitions as “semiotic productions that make themselves real” — stories that actualize themselves and produce their own realities, imagining new futures for us all. As the full effects of human industrial civilization continue to unveil themselves in the Anthropocene as the beginnings of a process that will soon render the planet Earth uninhabitable, it becomes essential to track the stories that are developing and expanding their own mutant machinic systems of reproduction in order to understand what futures will have been available to us. In this chapter, we seek to become students of the mechanisms of replicative processes of some of the hyperstitions that are at work in organizations, individual and collective, of the Anthropocene. To do this, we track the imbrication of a series of stories of Thomas the fieldmouse, a meeting about something called “sustainable innovation,” and journal entries about a mall that lives forever at the end of the world in order to understand hyperstitions and the role that they can play in the storying of the future.

We focus on the global norm of the supermarket through interorganizational relationships between supermarkets and suppliers, customers, governments, and beyond. Our matter of concern is the supermarket and its intertwined supply chains as an extensive force of neoliberal economic expansion. This supermarket and the ways in which these relations of power matter are explored critically from the perspective of Gaia as multiple stories of what is called the critical zone (CZ). Explicit, hidden, and invisible forms of power legitimize the supermarket as an anthropocentric force of good, enacting the power of its narrative in relation to our behavior, preferences, and knowledge. We argue that the supermarket is a creative and destructive force that is becoming ever more impossible to sustain and in serious need of reorientation, reconfiguration, and transformation of its material-discursive relations in alignment with the economy of the CZ sooner rather than later. Thus, we respond to the new climatic regime and its demand for grounding — down to earth!

How can heterotopias facilitate anti-hegemonic counternarratives in a context designed to deceive environmentally conscious consumers? This chapter uses a layered account autoethnography to provide thick descriptions that highlight personal challenges of working within a heterotopia. We trace one employee’s journey at an archetypal store “Terra Step” and her struggles with personal beliefs juxtaposed with the store’s environmental friendly narrative. It evaluates how a heterotopic environment can influence the lives of those who function both inside and outside of the heterotopia. Of particular interest is the way these heterotopic counternarratives masked environmental waste at the store. Terra Step’s use of story to camouflage capitalistic intentions created a short-term socialization of employees that ultimately dissipated shortly after departure from the store. This chapter contributes to bodies of literature in heterotopias, storytelling, narratives, and sustainability. It is of value to academic researchers, managers, entrepreneurs, and environmentalists.

The fulfillment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is very much an issue about resources: How are resources articulated, created, and utilized? What is considered a resource, what exists in abundance, what is scarce, and when does something cease to be a resource? In our contribution, we address these issues with a focus on seaweed. By analyzing stories from environmental planners and ecopreneurs about seaweed, we demonstrate the phenomenon called resourcification — the social process that makes something a resource. From the stories, we illustrate the contexts of the resourcification and de-resourcification of seaweed. This allows us to show how resources, such as seaweed, are socially produced and become part of life. To conclude, we suggest that resourcification provides a provisional sustainability storyline suitable for working toward the SDGs in the Anthropocene.

This chapter explores the use of critical design and storytelling as tools to motivate a person to choose a more sustainable path and change one’s mindset to consumption and nature. The chapter draws on the epistemological notion of lived experience, arguing that people act as a result of their direct experience and that experience is always lived. Furthermore, it is the guiding principle for this chapter that knowledge without emotion lacks intensity and emotion with-out knowledge lacks direction. As long as we consume products as we currently do, this perspective is relevant because it addresses the transformative force in storytelling and product design. The chapter highlights how industrialized production ideals, such as standardization and precision, alienate the consumer from the production and the product and thereby from the product’s inherent footprint. The chapter starts as a philosophical discussion, connecting concepts of storytelling, self-narrative, and industrial design to address the contemporary challenges posted by the current climate crises. The second part of the chapter zooms in and presents a radical design case, Bee’otopia, that explores how designs can help us fundamentally rethink our relationship to design, nature, and ourselves. The case explores whether a production collaborating with bees can help us rethink our relationship to design, nature, and ourselves. In this case, lamp shades are manufactured in collaboration with bees leaving no waste but honey and pollinated flowers. This fundamentally reframes our relationship to nature and products — by consuming products you can positively impact our world and thereby enforcing a sustainable world of consumption. The final part of the chapter zooms out again and invites the reader to discuss worldmaking and storytelling as essential tools to boost intensities in climatic storytelling that will consequentially help change our present unsustainable alienated approach to nature and product consumption and product lifetime.

This chapter introduces Hannah Arendt’s perspective on action and storytelling as relevant for the understanding of storytelling as organizing beyond organizational boundaries. A theoretical framework combining Arendt’s concepts with David Boje’s future-oriented approach to storytelling and Barbara Czarniawska’s approach to organizing as the institutionalization of action nets is used to analyze how Closing the Gap, a story from the World Health Organization, was used during the development of a strategy for social sustainability in the city of Malmö. The story enacts or suggests different organizing logics and principles when told in different contexts. The implications concern the politics of social sustainability when framed as questions of public health and when using Arendtian concepts for studying storytelling as organizing.

This chapter elaborates on how the matter of the interior décor of organizational spaces matters in discussions of the socially sustainable futures of organizations. How humans factor in as subjects and agencies of becoming de/humanized is a part of that equation. The argument is that organizational spaces are stages, or scenographies of performances, of material-discursive story configurations that either/or are affecting un/sustainable and in/human actions. Organizational spaces are performative as affective sites of engagements. Those spaces can nurture and engage human relations and, as such, acknowledge and provide the possibilities for being truly Human as bodily, sentient, relational, and responsible beings at work. In the worst case, spaces derive and deplete these human aspects from the lived, everyday practices of the organization. The claim is that, whether we want to or not, the subtleties of our physical surroundings affect us. Something that calls for attention in organizing for the future.

This chapter offers an organizational small storymaking perspective as a useful way for leaders to generate more open and sustainable work environments. Grounded in the notion that organizations are continuously (re)constituted in the discursive practices of everyday organizational life, we develop a storymaking framework, with associated tools for practice, that can guide organizational leaders’ attention toward the small stories that circulate among their employees with a focus on inviting the often quiet or silenced voices into organizing processes. This move offers a means for leaders to foster open and sustainable workplaces capable of creating and maintaining useful tensions among the top-down and bottom-up dynamics of organizing. We bring an integrative view on leadership communication as deeply entangled with, and dependent upon, a specific organization’s storymaking processes. As such, the guidance we provide can help leaders improve their workplaces by attending to diverse voices and stories (both counter to and complicit with more dominant narratives) that circulate in everyday organizing practices. We argue that an organizational small storymaking framework can help leaders incorporate the polyphony of voices and organize stories in ways that will support more transparent, inclusive, ethical, and sustainable work environments. By attending to organizational small storymaking, leaders can better recognize the complexities of organizational life, promote diversity, and generate more egalitarian organizing practices

Management, in general, and organizational theory, in particular, have been criticized for their apparent lack of concern for most human stakeholders. This line of criticism must be greatly extended to include nonhumans. Critics of the radical anthropocentric view of our world are only now beginning to be heard over the deafening and deadening narrative of endless economic growth necessary for humans’ well-being. This chapter proposes Serres’ “Biogea” and Descolas’ ontologies as tools for restorying business narratives in the age of sustainability. In this chapter, we explore the diverse possibilities Descolas and Serres offer us to counter “fake storytelling”, which are used by globalization propagandists to deny or curb efforts toward sustainability, tying humans and non-humans.

Based on Hannah Arendt’s understanding of stories as political action and Latour’s notion of the Terrestrial, this chapter constructs a “terrestrial ethics” of “story making.” This ethics is rooted ontologically in Arendt’s notion of natality — rebirth, renewal, and new beginnings. Arendt frames natality in the context of living a happy life, which lies in a memory of a “past that never was.” This is a memory of being born from the world in all its multiple variations and diverse species that we all depend on. Action is ultimately tied to this encounter with the happy life and to natality. Arendt’s original notion of storytelling is retheorized into “storymaking” to underline the embodied and material character of storytelling. We adopt Arendt’s terms labor, work, and action to reflect upon sustainable business storymaking, which we argue is emergent, situated, and creates spaces for multiplicities instead of being stuck in institutionalized, monologic, and petrified linear narratives. Arendt is concerned with creating what we call “antenarrative processes” constitutive of “storymaking,” with grounding in terrestrial conditions and communities. Sustainable storymaking pursues a thirdness captured by Arendt’s notion of amor mundi — the love that unities self and others, revitalizing history in the present and future, and is embedded in the eternal recurrence of all biological processes, social life, and communities. We contribute four storymaker precepts: abstracting, grounding, rehistoricizing, and futuring.

This epilogue is an exercise of antenarrative speculation toward the not-yet of sustainability and storytelling discourse. It is inspired by an article on Gaia storytelling that we wrote together with colleagues in the Gaia storytelling group. Here, we speculate along similar lines but draw in primary thinking tools of Eastern philosophy to diffract the debate concerning the shaping of a post-learning organization. We do an exercise in the Gaiagraphy of critical zones, and we speculate on how this changes the sustainability discourse when it is used to depict the dynamic of the entangled relations of complementary parties of Gaia organizational learning processes.

The following section is included:

• Index