A World Scientific Encyclopedia of Business Storytelling

The following sections are included:

• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• Contents

I started this call for chapters because I wanted to know how business storytelling communication can bring the body back into the organization. This was important because Boje, in 1996, asserted that “Organizational Theory privileged a framework in which an organization is a bounded system that dismisses its organic components and denies the environment to which it is bound and focuses primarily on the organizations’ role in organization communication structure, cultural manipulation, and emotional control of its organic components.” This level of organizational control effected the exclusion of bodies and perpetuated the disempowerment of the organics’ role in organizational creation. Business storytelling communication is that space for social symbolic work that brings the symbolic objects of the organization, the human, and the natural environment into a dialogical relationship (Boje, 1996; Lawrence & Phillips, 2019; Freire, 1970).

In business communication, terms referring to bodies and body parts are common. For example, in the word organization, we find the physical term, organ. According to Turner (1991), the body proved useful for social terminology, such as the head of state, the body politic, and corporate culture, given their common composition of inputs and outputs in relation to a larger environment, regular functions, production and reproduction, and parts and wholes. “More than we realize, we create organizations in our own image” (Barry & Hazen, 1996, p. 148). Similarly, the word corporation was adopted from the Latin root word corpus, meaning body. By attaining status as a legal corporation, organizations comprising multiple individuals and divisions are unified into a “legal body” with a head and members. This chapter proposes that a better understanding of the ontology of embodiment might help us deconstruct and reconsider an age-old discrimination between the head and the rest of the body. Currently, the head is assigned the privilege of providing any important communication to the (often preferably) mute members in order to direct them to take actions they wouldn’t otherwise have enacted, with the desired end state of the betterment of the head alone.

In Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, a very creative use of language is evident. I discuss seven linguistic strategies that Heidegger used in the German text — Sein und Zeit. These strategies are examples of how defying linguistic norms and expectations does not have to be associated with a quick negative value judgment. If one is willing to be flexible and patient, much insight is to be gained. In applying Heidegger’s concepts of “open region” (Heidegger, 1961, p. 4) and “to encounter” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 95) to communication, I argue that we should consider whether we are not shutting down the “open region” of communication too early because of quick negative evaluations — evaluations that have their roots in different histories of “encountering” what is around us. The same word or phrase can trigger different emotions for different people because of different histories of “encountering.” Positive or negative evaluations are already in place when a word or sentence is “encountered” — I call this the subjective evaluation overlay. When there is discrepancy in the subjective evaluation overlay between two people, negative judgments about what is said and about the other person can happen very quickly. The “open region” of communication can narrow or close as a result. We have the option to be patient and flexible, and instead of making quick negative value judgments, we can find out about and take into consideration the other person’s history of “encountering” that led her or him to the current reactions, emotions, and ways of expressing them.

This chapter introduces material storytelling (Strand, 2012a) as a methodology that researches pedagogy with more complexity and consciousness than other method ologies and that is therefore well suited to use with the research and communication with students with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Material storytelling is about making material matter and giving equal agency to human and non-human agents. One of the material storytelling modes is stories of artifacts, which involve using different categories of figurines in a sandbox (storyboard). Strand (2014) named this part of the process “Object Theatre.” Object theater invites students with ASDs to investigate firsthand how material artifacts can be used to scaffold social and interactional processes and catch what happens embodied “behind the bag” and lead to new understandings. Giving time to process is an essential part of doing object theater, the artifacts and the handling of the figurines brings embodied associations to life. Strand (2012a, 2014) has described the material grammar used to depict embodied knowledge by using object theater. Object theater has (re)configured my communication with students with high-functioning ASD. Intra-active pedagogy (Taguchi, 2010) and object theater are about involving the student with ASDs as an equal partner in finding the right solutions for him or her.

There is a growing reaction against the dominant storytelling paradigm found in top-tier management journals, which is typically presented in disembodied textual narratives and fails to be effective in communicating the field’s contemporary and changing sociocultural, disciplinary, and practical contexts. In this chapter, I address this concern by investigating the ethical dilemma which comes into play when a scholar sits down to write an article on business and management: “to conform or not to conform to the existing writing conventions.” In doing so, I suggest how management academics can infuse their writing with meaning and purpose by proposing a new storytelling methodology. Since acceptance and visibility in discourse communities depend on the reader’s recognition of the veracity of the writer’s argumentation, I propose a multi-aspectual model for the textual positioning of writer identity to show the range of rhetorical choices authors have at their disposal to communicate disciplinary knowledge and include or exclude the reader. The identity facets presented in this model (and textually conveyed in authorial voice) are mapped on these aspects of positioning theory (Bamberg, 2010), which focus on the role of identity in making sense of the stories people tell. In this way, I present a transformative vision of the storytelling paradigm in business and management and support the recent efforts in critical management studies to “write differently” to reach wide and diverse audiences and in responsible management education to promote progressive social values.

Organizations stumble and fail for many reasons. One is that a dominant narrative, in the form of a story a company tells itself, one it shares with its audience/ market, or both, does not jibe with the lived experiences of a significant number of its employees and/or customers. This chapter is predicated on the idea that co-created stories are a way communities, organizations, and individuals can ease or eliminate the negative outcomes of dominant narratives. I propose that a basis for the structured co-creation of stories is what I call “game,” and that a definition of the game that can be applied to any co-created story is ERGO, an acronym for environment/roles/guidelines/objective. To explain the concept and its genesis, I take the reader through a community storytelling workshop I conducted in 2013, in which participants practiced applying the ERGO game structures to co-created community stories of drug abuse prevention.

In recent years, storytelling has attracted widespread scholarly attention, both in and out of the study of organizations. Yet, one key part of the process of storytelling has been overlooked — the practice of storylistening. This chapter explores how the practice of careful storylistening might become a valuable tool for organizational managers. It begins by examining one current neurobiological theory of how humans construct their conscious experience. Because our unconscious minds so strongly shape that experience, different people are likely to experience the world differently, filtering out different elements of experience without realizing they’re doing it. The body of this chapter applies this theory to a research study the author performed, interviewing employees at three American hospitals. That study suggested that listening carefully to the stories of people across organizations makes it possible to learn about different phenomena, ranging from personal relationships to organizational dynamics, and can even provide a way to measure the success of programs in cultural change.

The ideology of neoliberalism serves to obscure the true costs of neoliberal influence on university campuses. In recent decades, for example, university faculty have increasingly come to be viewed as “employees” serving “clients,” a move that serves to centralize power in the workplace, undermine academic independence, and justify increasing faculty workloads. These trends are bad news for faculty with disabilities, including those who live with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), because they have served to perpetuate ableism in the academic workplace. This chapter includes a brief autoethnographic account of academic work life written from the perspective of a faculty member who lives with ADHD. It concludes with a call for a two-pronged response to neoliberal demands for hyper-productivity. Such a response would combine appropriate workplace accommodations with the promotion of modes of self-care that prioritize critical reflection.

Our research on dyslexic workers has led us to discover natural links between their neurological singularity and their life course. Thus, from the beginning, the researcher took into account this particular context. The storytelling and the life story were thus imposed on the method of research and analysis.

“Wrong jobs,” such as teacher and manager, for individuals with high-functioning autism, informally known as Asperger’s, stereotypically require considerable social interaction. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-V guidelines, those with high-functioning autism generally lack the ability to converse back and forth, maintain proper eye contact, understand gestures, and show facial expression. This chapter chronicles the child and adult life stories of an individual on the autism spectrum who was in several “wrong” jobs. It outlines the Asperger’s-related failures, successes, and revelations in his jobs, namely store manager, archery instructor, planetarium presenter, business statistics tutor, teaching assistant, course coordinator, professor, and department chair. Cement blocks represent the monotonous, boring, and rigid state of individuals on the autism spectrum. The cement block metaphor provides the backdrop for revelations coming from each job experience. For example, to be a good teacher, those on the spectrum don’t have to be a cement block with that bland look. The block can be painted with a variety of colors. Lectures are one color. Discussions and games represent other colors. This chapter is not designed to present a rosy picture of what individuals who have high-functioning autism can learn from their job experiences and be successful. Each individual has unique strengths and challenges.

The chapter shows some ways to get off the cement block and at least try to succeed in jobs they stereotypically should not do. There are no “wrong” jobs but jobs that might be done with relevant training and experience.

We investigate how citizens engage in storytelling on social media. We look at how citizens’ stories about a city’s industrial past are brought forward in a Facebook group. Institutional storytelling neglects parts of the city’s industrial area. We track how users establish a co-created counternarrative by means of sharing fragmented memories (posts) and how this narrative rests in parallel to the institutionalized narrative. Employing a case study approach, we applied a variety of qualitative methods, such as qualitative interviews and participant observation, as a means to investigate social media as a digital space for keeping memories alive. Consequently, we conducted a thematic narrative analysis of the data. Citizens use social media to tell their stories and share memories, and they value the opportunity to do so as provided by the Internet: First, users reminisce experiences connected to blue-collar work and the industrial past. Second, users acknowledge the benefits of post-industrial changes (e.g., less pollution) without devaluating the nostalgia. Third, users wish for the industrial past being included in institutional storytelling. Finally, the Facebook group is a space to vent about perceived conflicts of identity, here the elite, as included in the institutionalized narrative, and the working class, as glossed over. Our study provided theoretical insights on the notion of counternarratives, which get collected coherently when shared in a virtual space. These web-mediated narratives run parallel to institutionalized master narratives. In practice, governing bodies might benefit from these insights into class consciousness and storytelling and include citizens’ narratives in strategic communication.

This chapter examines a complexity-inspired model for multilevel analysis of situations. Originally termed relational introspection (Wakefield, 2012), other adaptations include fractal relationality (Boje & Henderson, 2015) and the self–others–situation (SOS) model described herein. I then adapt it for use in open-plan office environments, where workers are able to observe one another’s every move. This adaptation leverages storytelling in the form of a self-narrative, as described by Chang (2016), to explore unfolding patterns of behaviors and perceptions, ultimately adding an emotional intelligence component in the interest of encouraging constructive patterns in settings where one’s own influence may not necessarily take center stage.

We began first with the hope that a conversation regarding individuals with autism and employment may be broached. Then, we spoke of the social environment in which these individuals with autism are oppressed through exclusion by tucking them into a vulnerable population. Then, the conversation shifted to pulling individuals with autism out of their vulnerable social group so that they may be a single individual with autism, only to be countered that, even as a single person, an individual with autism will still behave so differently from societal expectations or even my own expectations. Then, the conversation shifted to considering that perhaps it is for the own good of the individuals with autism, perhaps the workplace is no place for such individuals, and it would just hurt the person themselves to be there. Then, to push the conversation again to invite them into the workplace, again there is this counter that, even if those poor individuals would like to be a part of the workplace, they cannot fulfill the demands of work, the organization itself would not be a functional organization. Then, the conversation is pulled back into asking what is more important. Is it more important to keep an organization that cannot function for its people or to keep a functioning organization that is successfully hurting people? How about this instead: Let’s end the conversation with the hope that a world will be created with love for all, as we call for more organizational studies that include not just individuals with autism but also all kinds of authentic individual ways of being that are reaching for connection to entities, time, place, and persons to be desired and legitimized in organizations. For it is not impossible to create a functional organization when we discover that every authentic person is a legitimate being in the world.

The following section is included:

• Index