A World Scientific Encyclopedia of Business Storytelling

The following sections are included:

• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Contents
• Introduction: Others’ Stories and Building Counter-Hegemonies

When the Salmon Spoke is part of an ongoing initiative by its creators to cultivate tribal and First Nations relationships across imposed political borders and amplify Indigenous voices fighting for wild salmon and sustainable mining practices in the “transboundary” region of Southeast Alaska and Northern British Columbia. When the Salmon Spoke features first-person stories from communities of the Stikine River watershed, including coastal Tlingit and inland Tahltan. Their stories are illustrated and supported by cinematic place-based imagery, Indigenous music and visual art, and additional artistic work contributed by non-Indigenous allies. When the Salmon Spoke utilizes the power of storytelling with the understanding that it is a foundation to learning and a practice that sustains community while validating experiences and Indigenous epistemologies. We argue that this Indigenous storytelling methodology is integral because there is a long-standing tradition in Western society that imposes Western stories as universal truths, tells the stories of others and misrepresents non-Western narratives. This community-engaged approach, co-led by Indigenous culture bearers and their allies, explores the ways in which transboundary peoples experience and respond to the ongoing looming mineral claims. When the Salmon Spoke demonstrates the ways in which communities can reclaim their relations to one another, land, and culture. This dual form of storytelling — both performative and archival — creates a cultural moment for change, awareness and transboundary solidarity to protect critical and threatened salmon watersheds in the face of aggressive industrial-scale mining in BC. This storytelling project encourages the protection of vital salmon-bearing watersheds while reinforcing the inextricable ties to a sense of place and oral history amongst trans-boundary nations and communities.

This chapter describes the way that the Kukama people from the Peruvian Amazon are daily resisting not only territorial but also ideological invasions. For centuries, the Kukama have been told colonial stories of themselves by missionaries, rubber barons, and later the Peruvian state and oil companies. This chapter describes the varied ways in which the Kukama respond to the deceptive stories with powerfully diverse and dynamic counter-narratives. The Kukama are retelling their stories by asserting land sovereignty, revitalizing their languages, denouncing environmental damage, and recognizing the value of their cosmovision. In doing so they navigate hybrid worldviews.

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.

In this chapter, I discuss how expats working in Egypt strive to transition towards cosmopolitan selfhood by narrating their encounters with local others in enthusiastic terms. Leaning on theories by Ahmed, Butler and Spivak, I argue that by “knowing through others” expats self-transform, thereby approaching desirable selfhood and becoming professionally versatile. Their knowledge of/through otherhood enables them to maintain a position of knowingness from which relations with others are re-storied in ideologically updated terms. On organizational levels, expatriate stories aggregate into a business storytelling of egalitarianism and cultural sensitivity, heralding the inclusion of local others. This manifested inclusion simultaneously conceals that the presence of others is “partial,” narrative rather than epistemological, as westerners continue to be constituted as those who “know” and define boundaries for what knowledge others may have.

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.

In this chapter, we examine the case of Vance Miller, a notorious UK kitchen installation entrepreneur, now operating abroad in China and Indonesia (Warren and Smith, 2015). For some time, between 2000 and 2015, Miller appeared in the UK media as a legitimate entrepreneur building up a sizeable business in the face of what appeared to be Establishment discrimination against him. His was a classic “rags-to-riches” story and he trod on many Establishment toes in his rise to fame and fortune. Always a controversial character, he had a history of brushes with the law, in the UK and overseas, involving, allegedly, diamond smuggling and involvement in the drug trade (Newton, 2009). He appeared to “toy” with the public, presenting an ambivalent identity as a legitimate entrepreneurial hero, combined with a villainous “Kitchen Gangster” identity of his own making. In his first brushes with the authorities, he benefited from a poorly executed Trading Standards prosecution which he successfully rebuffed. As a result, the UK police took up the case for the prosecution and he eventually fell afoul of the law to such an extent that he was forced to leave the country, relocating first to China, and then to Indonesia where he now appears to operate by proxy from overseas. His emigrant status provides a covering veil in that he no longer has to defend himself to the UK media, although many of his close business associates were prosecuted successfully in the UK. We use Hall’s (1988) notions of distancing, hiding and self-imposed silence to examine Miller’s behavior in escaping his delegitimized identity in the UK and from there, draw implications for developing a new entrepreneurial identity in postcolonial contexts.

The purpose of this chapter is to bring literature closer to ordinary management, demonstrating that the former is a possible place for research that wants to tell new stories about business and administration from a post/decolonial point of view. We associate these two concepts in order to demonstrate that it is possible to adopt literature as a space of research and possibilities within the epistemological scope of Organizational Studies. Therefore, we go back to the colonial process of subjecting knowledge to a power matrix, in addition to developing the theoretical contributions of studies on daily life and ordinary management. In our discussion, we contributed to the promotion of registries on other ways of organizing, shifting our gaze to the cracks of everyday life as new possibilities for generating historically located knowledge.

Equity has become a fundamental concern in contemporary discussions on legal and socio-economic aspects of property rights. From the legal perspective, equity is seen as a reflection of distributive justice and it is taken as a matter of political deliberation on socio-economic grounds, while leaving the accomplishment of equity standards totally to legal and economic measures. In this backdrop, the importance of the concept of equity as an ethical and virtuous concern from a moral and ecological perspective has been largely neglected in the contemporary property rights discourse. This lack of attention on the moral aspect of equity in property rights permits limitless exploitation of natural resources. Failure to extend the moral aspect of equity over the entire ecological domain in a holistic approach has created a lot of failures in preserving natural environment and ensuring sustainability. Having noticed the need for scrutinizing the role of property rights in upholding equity in a broader moral and ecological ground, this chapter seeks an alternative approach to fill the gap of philosophical and ethical insights in the current understanding of the concept of equity in property rights. As a reflection of time-tested wisdom accumulated over generations, Indigenous knowledge brings a wide range of solutions to this problem. Thus, the present study aims at investigating the underlying ideological concerns embedded in the Indigenous systems of property rights in Sri Lanka, based on ante-narratives found in archival sources. Accordingly, the fundamental principle behind Indigenous systems of managing property rights which ensured sustainability was seen as the balance of interests, manifested in conciliation between rights and obligations, exploitation and conservation, and self-interests and collective interests. In fact, it shows the possibility of incorporating the moral aspect of equity into property rights through different context-appropriate strategies, upholding equity in a broader sense to promote sustainability.

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.

The following section is included:

• Index