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Comic strips can be used as a style of visualization on a human–computer interface because they can represent a wide variety of affairs with contexts or time series. This paper describes two systems for sharing personal context as comic strips: ComicDiary and Comic-FOAF-Viewer. Both the systems depict personal experiences or profiles including personal relationships in their comic strips and hyperlinks among related comics based on other characters in the story. ComicDiary allegorizes individual episodes that happen during touring exhibitions by creating a comic from a user's touring records accumulated from personal guidance systems and environmental facts, e.g., social events. For example, a ComicDiary might show a user's personal diary during a Japanese academic conference. The comic describes where the conference was held, the most interesting presentations, what happened, and so on. Exhibitions are places visited by people of all generations. Comic representation of a personal diary with amiable expressions fits such places. The comic strip is automatically generated, composed of 12 frames, and shown as a diary. Users can view their diaries at information kiosks located at exhibition sites. Friend of a Friend (FOAF), which is an XML/RDF application for expressing personal information and relationships, has attracted attention from Web developers because its files can describe human-centered networks such as Social Network Service (SNS). Current FOAF visualization tools utilize graphs or tables; however, it is difficult to represent a variety of relations. Comic-FOAF-Viewer aims to represent the multifarious relations and personal information that FOAF has to offer for surfing interfaces in FOAF networks.

In order to create effective storytelling agents three fundamental questions must be answered: first, is a physically embodied agent preferable to a virtual agent or a voice-only narration? Second, does a human voice have an advantage over a synthesized voice? Third, how should the emotional trajectory of the different characters in a story be related to a storyteller’s facial expressions during storytelling time, and how does this correlate with the apparent emotions on the faces of the listeners? The results of two specially designed studies indicate that the physically embodied robot produces more narrative attention to the listener as compared to a virtual embodiment, that a human voice is preferable over the current state of the art of text-to-speech, and that there is a complex yet interesting relation between the emotion lines of the story, the facial expressions of the narrating agent, and the emotions of the listener, and that the empathizing of the listener is evident through its facial expressions. This work constitutes an important step towards emotional storytelling robots that can observe their listeners and adapt their style in order to maximize their effectiveness.

The transdisciplinary Drought Risk and You (DRY) project aimed to interweave storytelling and science as a way of increasing the different voices and types of knowledge (specialist, local) within drought risk decision-making in the UK. This paper critically reflects on our emergent process of drawing across different methodologies to create Adaptive Participatory Storytelling Approaches (APSA). APSA enable more tailoring to people and setting than existing methods, recognizing the specificity of local risk contexts and communities, and in terms of social dynamics, cultural values and local knowledge. APSA are situated, storytelling methodologies applied in the social sciences and arts/humanities, giving strong attention to meaningful participation and sustainable coproduction in both process and outputs. The paper offers other researchers and practitioners insights into working with APSA as a suite of creative storytelling options prioritizing methodological principles of active listening and adapting. APSA require creative thinking along multiple spectra, including how to balance different axes in APSA including: topic (drought risk)-focused with topic (drought risk)-peripheral or oblique, participant-led with researcher-led, and visualization-led with audio-led. We reflect on the challenges, opportunities and values of co-working with APSA, and offer a flexible framework for its application and iterative evaluation embedded through the process. We propose this as a starting point for other transdisciplinary projects to tackle themes that prove difficult for communities to connect with during community-engaged research, in this case, hidden risks like drought and climate change. This is timely given the power and mounting popularity of storytelling for behavior change, research insight and policy, and the need to capture and share different knowledges for climate resilience.

Global reports indicate a steady increase in the number of people who are facing mental health concerns. Among those affected are students who struggle with balancing the demands of a hybrid learning environment. Recent studies are emerging on the use of chatbots as an accessible technology-based alternative to help address the challenges faced by school counselors in accommodating the influx of requests for consultations from students. This paper explores the potential in using a chatbot to provide a first-respondent service to help students maintain good mental well-being, a necessary precursor for individuals to practice self-care while reducing the risks of mental illnesses. We designed a chatbot that leverages storytelling strategies to assess the students’ well-being and to guide them in formulating actions necessary to sustain an optimal mental health. End-user validation captured students’ feedback regarding their perception on the support afforded by the chatbot from their three-day sessions. Expert analysis of the chatlogs revealed insights on the user expectations of the role of the chatbot and the impact of storytelling-based conversation flow in addressing support seekers’ needs toward sustaining positive mental health and well-being.

Based on a comparative study on the operation waiting area of Shanghai Children’s Medical Center before and after renovation, Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) toolkit for Built Environment was used to track the interactive mural of “beach rainbow” and “mini-submarine” parent-child reading space for a year. Fear is a common cause of children’s psychological stress before surgery, and the stress of children will be transmitted to family members and medical staff, which has a negative impact on the degree of preoperative cooperation and medical experience. The narrative space based on tangible interaction is more immersive and has a sense of storytelling compared with pure virtual interface interaction. It can effectively reduce the crying rate of preschool children and the anxiety of older children by positive distraction, and improve the degree of preoperative cooperation and user satisfaction with medical treatment. In the future, with the wider application of 5G and IoT, tangible interactive narrative space will become a more effective means to relieve stress used in children’s healing environment.

Based on the idea of a living planet Gaia, who can express her observations and share her visions on a sustainable future society in which a new entrepreneurship can evolve, this paper develops ideas for a framework for the Gaia entrepreneurship. Gaia storytelling serves as fundament to allow new perspectives on life and to create new actions on behalf of the survival of all. This chapter encourages the reader to pursue new intellectual pathways, which influence personal well-being and the well-being of planet Earth anew. It gives reason to believe in a living planet Earth. The chapter puts new values on the term “Gaia” and allows the reader to see through previously inaccessible perspectives. Gaia storytelling transforms from words into actions into Gaia entrepreneurship.

This chapter follows the journey of Doc’s Bar & Grill and how the social capital of local firms can be used to overcome emergency situations. To explain how this is possible, this article employs the use of the layered account autoethnography. The setting of this article is mainly at Doc’s Bar & Grill in Potosi, Texas. It illustrates how social capital helped Doc’s overcome extreme circumstances by using storytelling and theory “vignettes” to provide insight on particular circumstances and how the social capital of Doc’s was used to help the firm survive. This article is of benefit to academics and practicing entrepreneurs alike because it displays at the single level how Doc’s Bar & Grill survived multiple disasters by the use of its social capital to call on stakeholders to support the bar survive in its most vulnerable moments.

My story is one where I thrust myself into an entrepreneurial endeavor at one of the world’s largest innovation hubs, achieving some successes, but ultimately falling short of the mission I set out to complete. Through an application of autoethnographic research, I propose the concept of coherence as a practical way to align entrepreneurial storytelling and management techniques as both are critical to successful venturing and key ingredients for an ensemble may be required to sustain the exploitation of an opportunity.

Autoethnography is a recognized research method used broadly in the social sciences, particularly in storytelling. Its use has been scarce not only within the area of entrepreneurship but also specifically on intrapreneurship processes and those applied in academic university environments. I used analytical generalization following Chang (2008) that is based on my experience as the leader of the university’s entrepreneurship teachers’ transversal academy and former director of the university’s business incubator, where the aim was to promote entrepreneurship as the engine of a paradigm shift within the university (located in Mexico). The results of this study suggest a broad reflection of organizational, social, and cultural aspects, which are immersed in the processes of change in every institution, where intrapreneurship can be viewed and analyzed under chronological, kairological, and aionological time process, resulting in a novel view on both entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship studies.

Money laundering is a global phenomenon from which data can be aggregated from local communities to societal levels. At the societal level, we generally address this phenomenon institutionally through public policy and economic theories, perhaps through community awareness or financial educational programs. From this vantage point, we hope to discover trends and patterns in this behavior in ways to better understand money laundering and merit future research. There are several overlapping and often confusing dimensions to the money laundering phenomenon. What motivates people to launder money from the perspective of the entrepreneur? In this discussion, we examine an array of possible motivations related to composite scenarios. Some individuals may experience psychological triggers based on need when presented with the opportunity to launder money. The purpose is to make these illicit finds appear legitimate. Financial laundering, or the “cleaning” of illicit financial proceeds gained from criminal activity, also has significant effects in the international political economy. Future inquiry would involve continued research exploring social network theory or perhaps the neural networks of the human brain. However, for the purposes of this discussion, we survey this illicit transitional process phenomenon through an entrepreneurial lens at the individual, community, and international levels.

Many organizations lack an authentic link between its brand and its business story. Promises made to internal stakeholders can’t be kept toward external stakeholders. This chapter examines how a brand can be strengthened by a successful story. The results of a systematic literature review have shown that cognitive dissonance among internal employees and external stakeholders arises if an organization’s brand and its story are inconsistent. The famous campaign “Facing The North” by Mercedes-Benz and The North Face illustrates our findings regarding an experience-based brand story. This chapter addresses researchers and practitioners in the fields of entrepreneurship as well as marketing and enables them to learn how to use an affecting business story to strengthen an organization’s brand.

Our understanding of an entrepreneurship varies by our interpretations. Since there is no widely accepted definition of entrepreneurship, there is a dilemma in the literature because we cannot first understand entrepreneurial behavior. The reason why there is no widely accepted definition of entrepreneurship is the competing antenarratives that influence entrepreneurial behavior. Entrepreneurial behavior manifests itself from three internal antenarratives that are the soul, individual psyche, and the collective unconscious. How you view the world will determine which of these antenarratives guide your interpretation and understanding of entrepreneurship and will lead to different types of behavior. Therefore, this chapter expands upon these three antenarratives to provide an outline and a deeper understanding of how entrepreneurial behavior manifests itself to orient the reader to what entrepreneurship means to them.

How can storytelling help create more inclusive workplaces and bring about consent with things as they really are? This chapter presents our intervention tool, Collaborative Story Craft (CSC), as a way to involve more members in the collective story at the workplace. From our positions as researchers and practitioners, we give an account of the tool’s theoretical framework, specifically schools of sensemaking and social worlds, to describe and connect our method to practice. In this chapter, we also introduce a fictional story to highlight the sensemaking process of using CSC as a meaningful way to include more voices into the collective story.

Storytelling has been understood as more than a way of promoting a re-storying of the past, in which one single actor would be “the teller of the past.” Storytelling has progressed into a process in that a variety of voices are negotiating in the present how to tell the history in the future. In this context, a variety of tensions can take place. Such tensions can support versions of the past or promote forget-fulness about pieces of the story. However, the storytelling around political and power disputes between groups that have divergent interests have to be studied. In this study, I attempt to promote a political understanding of the relationship between businesses in the extractive industry, local governments, and communities. To understand the context of extractive industries in Brazil, I am exploring a link between antenarrative theory and decolonial thought. I analyze the narratives of different actors that are disputing discourses around the impacts of mining operations. The findings show that communities located in Brazilian mining areas have been concerned about water issues, environmental disasters, and economic welfare. These issues, in particular, have sparked most of the resistance against the expansion of iron ore production. There is a narrative that opposes the type of economic development and well-being that is currently promoted through mineral extraction activities. In conclusion, general dissatisfaction with the current model of development of societies is observed. However, mining companies have many economic and political resources to maintain a privileged relationship with governments and states. Therefore, they are more likely to be the guardians of the story that will be told in the future.

In this chapter, I study the concept of emancipation as one of the core ideas of critical theory. I trace how, with the changing material conditions, critical theory could not articulate the conditions of possibility for emancipation. I then introduce the thought of Allama Muhammad Iqbal, the revolutionary philosopher-poet from the East and use one of his poems, as a form of storytelling, to articulate his idea of emancipation as submission, his concept of khudi and its three dimensions. As an empirical illustration of Iqbalian ideas, I present a short case study of Akhuwat, an Islamic microfinance organization in Pakistan. This case shows how Iqbal’s theologically inspired idea of emancipation liberates men from oppressive conditions through psychological empowerment and creates agency when none would be thought to exist from a material perspective of critical theory.

The experiences of factory recuperations observable in Argentina after the crisis in 2001 and the ones of the workers’ collectives in Greece in the aftermath of 2011 are comparable and connected. The reason can be found in the stories of ethico-political prefiguration they all contribute to, and that reverberate from one factory to another, from one country to the other. By telling these stories of resistance, horizontalism, openness and autonomy these scattered workers become movement, and find their place in the longstanding stream of self-determination. The first argument here presented is that storytelling is their fundamental art of resistance and prefiguration, and that it can be performed by workers and scholars alike. Embracing storytelling as academics means becoming allies of the movement studied by both contributing to its evolution and by framing their stories for other activists and scholars to use. This is the second claim of this contribution, centered on the proposal to move beyond academic activism. The choice for scholar-activists seems to be either leaning towards a passive neutrality or an aggressive interventionism. Rather, here I suggest that partisan storytelling makes us revalue the significance of the decolonization of knowledge and praxes taking place at movement’s level. The scholar, hence, has the responsibility to appreciate his/her own partisan capacities to bring this decolonization in the narrative of the academia. It is no longer a matter of walking on a thin wire but to fully commit to both. The resulting analysis returns a picture of the movement which is much less fragmented into artificial categories of knowledge and much more powerful in conveying the message of prefiguration the movement is sending. Drawing from a year-long investigation within the movement of self-management (or autogestión) in Greece and Argentina, I consider the stories these workers tell, the significance of their prefiguration, and the potentialities of the approach of partisan storytelling. In conclusion, the contribution aims at explaining why storytelling is an inescapable part of our existence as political beings.

This chapter takes up the question of what kinds of economic cooperation are necessary in the projects of truth and reconciliation in Canada today. In particular, the question of how to reimagine respectful business relationships in the matrices of colonial laws and Indigenous legal orders that coexist across kinship, transformation and time. The chapter begins by setting the 2015 vision of “partnership” offered by the Prime Minister of Canada in conversation with the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and British Columbia’s partnership laws. It then moves into a close and careful reading of the Secwépemc story The War with the Sky People in order to contextualize the myriad ways that responsibility, leadership, community, kinship, intervention, repair, success and story are integral to what it means to do public-private partnership in postcolonial times. By engaging with the conflicts between the Bird, Fish and Sky peoples, a diversity of governance and community ways of being and knowing sits at the heart of this reimagination. The chapter models that the intellectual and affective work of building meaningful partnerships — within families, in business structures and intersocietally — requires a genuine openness to legal pluralism in order to decolonize our current patterns of business storytelling.

Extant scholarship on Indigenous business communities of India explicates their core values, systems and operating principles that enable them to prosper on an ongoing basis. In doing so, the role of women, their skills and the daily labor is restricted to the household only and not viewing them in any way interacting with what businessmen practice in the bazaar. However, our ethnographic inquiry of an Indigenous business community in a postcolonial society revealed that homemakers play a crucial ongoing role within the framework of vernacular capitalism. Our microstoria provides an antenarrative to the dominant patriarchal view through the stories of Marwari homemakers, whose daily labor within the household space characterized by their skillset was found to be harmonious to and facilitative of fundamental commercial principles of the Marwari business community in India. We show how the homemakers’ daily labor goes into making the family life that is in tandem with the Indigenous commercial values and strategies of Marwaris such as frugality, immunity against volatility, and intelligence gathering. Towards this, we also highlight the female child-rearing practices of Marwaris that genders them into womanhood, and in process inculcating long-held inter-generational logics of the business community.

Storytelling in leadership research is usually approached positively and seen as a non-problematic resource or even a “tool” for leadership purposes. However, using stories and narratives involves challenges for leaders. Storytelling may result in intended outcomes, but it also carries a risk for undesirable leadership consequences. In the storytelling approach, there is a hidden assumption that listeners are homogeneous and that they are not critical or active. Empirical studies rarely approach failed storytelling experienced by leaders: the feelings of failure, reasons, and consequences. In this chapter, we focus on the risky nature of leadership storytelling as well as the element of learning to be a better leader inherent in it. Based on empirical qualitative data, we apply thematic and content analysis on interviews from 13 leaders. Based on the findings, we present the following five special dimensions/themes of failure, illustrating the risks involved in leadership storytelling: (a) diversity of the audience, (b) situation/context, (c) loss of authority, (d) storytelling skills, and (e) audience misinterpretation. We interpret the findings in the context of the leaders’ personal experiences, their meaning for the leaders’ self-reflection, and the leaders’ leadership learning for the future. Moreover, we discuss these dimensions from the perspective of diversity and the hidden assumption in the storytelling approach that the listeners are a homogeneous group.

In this chapter, we reflect on an example of organizational storytelling that was used to strategically navigate tense social and political power dynamics within a collaborative watershed planning initiative, the Bras d’Or Lakes Collaborative Environmental Planning Initiative (CEPI). The Bras d’Or Lake watershed is located in Unama’ki/Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. It is located in the traditional and unceded territory of Mi’kmaw’ki, Atlantic Canada. The social dynamics of primary concern to the organization are those related to settler-colonial and Indigenous counter-narratives around Indigenous rights and responsibilities, environmental governance, and justice. When the CEPI was formed in 2005 with an intention to address environmental policy gaps, CEPI adopted a guiding principle of Etuaptmumk, a Mi’kmaw word translated to “Two-Eyed Seeing,” a pedagogical approach developed locally to teach integrative sciences (Hatcher et al., 2009). It is an approach that weaves between Western and Indigenous knowledge systems to create space for collaborative co-learning across different ontologies and epistemologies (Bartlett et al., 2012; Denny & Fanning, 2016). The Spirit of the Lakes Speaks document was one of CEPI’s first attempts at creating a different kind of environmental plan guided by two-eyed seeing, thus we consider how storytelling was positioned within its development.