A World Scientific Encyclopedia of Business Storytelling

The following sections are included:

• Preface
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Contents

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Storytelling in Life and Business
• Innovating Organizational Research Methods
• Grounding the Methodology for Business Storytelling
• Bringing it All Together in This Volume
• References

We encourage fully enacting grounded theory (GT) to help enable organizational science to make a turn toward relational process ontologies (RPOs). RPOs unify practice and philosophy and enable more positive aspirations for organizational futures. How researchers enact GT has changed over three waves, waves which we explore in depth in terms of theoretical mindset and practice. GT is presently inadequate for the complex theorization RPOs require; therefore, we need a fourth wave of GT. Using an RPO of theory-as-historical, we guide the development of a fourth wave of GT. Theory-as-historical sees first- and second-order codes as serving different historical aims, thus second-order codes do not have to build on first-order codes. We discuss the fourth wave GT’s implications for new methods, questions, forms of knowledge, and insights, which enable organizational science to create theories that perform better organizations.

Glaser and Strauss’s grounded theory (GT) was a new theory of conceptual sociology. GT emerged from Glaser’s empirical sociology and Strauss’s pragmatic symbolic interactionism. The result of GT was a practical method to build theory from qualitative data. Unfortunately, the practicality of GT hid its ontology, epistemology, and philosophical foundations. Three waves, or historical periods, of scientific philosophy have attempted to reveal GT’s foundations. These waves, inductivism, positivism, and social constructivism, left GT with no ground and no theory. This chapter pinpoints where GT went off track by examining the foundations of GT. We use Hegel’s philosophy to develop a fourth wave of GT using a foundation of dialectic ontological processes, with precisely what that means being explored in-depth. The intent of this fourth wave of GT is to get it back on track. Fourth-wave GT recognizes the multiplicity of intra-active, self-organizing ontologies necessary to defining ground and theory. Fourth-wave GT embraces Peirce’s, Heidegger’s, Bhaskar’s, and Žižek’s ontologies, resisting the grounding fallacies of logical positivism and social constructivism, contributing to the question of what theory can be, creating both ground and theory by attending deeply to philosophical concerns.

The convergence of research and practice is vital for advancing any field, including business and organization sciences. Advancement of innovative research methods is necessary to drive continuous improvement in these fields. A novel storytelling research method, multi-bystander interpretive narrative storytelling (MB-INS), was used to phenomenologically collect and reconstruct a narrative story regarding employee experience from an inaccessible, force-retired senior executive under a nondisclosure agreement. MB-INS employs a communitarian approach to narrative inquiry. Experiential bystander accounts were collected from family, friends, co-workers, colleagues, and professional coaches through conversational storytelling interviews and analyzed phenomenologically, employing an abductive–inductive–deductive (AID) approach with the use of self-correcting methodology, yielding a study subject narrative that could not be collected from the subject directly. These analyses are used to understand the lived experience and living story and simultaneously to identify problematic organizational phenomena. An AID phenomenological approach, with thematic analysis and interpretive story reconstruction yielded findings of discrimination, toxic and abusive leadership, sabotage, and scapegoating in the organization, potentially forcing the study subject to engage in legal action and retirement. From a methodological standpoint, MB-INS exhibited utility and potential for academic and intervention research where primary stories are inaccessible or witness accounts are important. Furthermore, the study uses conversational storytelling and exhibits the application of a nuanced, modified self-correcting methodology in collecting and analyzing story data during practice-oriented field-based research.

Truth is the telos of research — the ultimate treasure. All depends on it. However, it is often an elusive and difficult objective for the researcher. In a world of increasingly overwhelming levels of accessible information, false presumptions may often appear validated by those skilled at increasing the volume — fake news, special interests, all utilize their unique versions of “truth” toward enhancing their own interests. In the philosophical science of ontology, an unwavering quest for truth, much like that of reality, while ever evolving, serves as the bedrock of all research and theory. To that end, the self-correcting method in storytelling research is fast becoming a preferred methodology for researchers utilizing narratology, as it surpasses the limitations of the structured and semi-structured interrogatory-style dialogic in developing a deeper understanding of the whole story. This allows researchers to travel beyond the confines of the linear, structured investigation, offering admission into the deeper life of the story. Every story has its own continual, ever-expanding life force, comprising all the voices and influences melded from the past, present, and future. Built on the foundational work of Charles Sanders Peirce, through the use of induction, (later enhanced with abductive and deductive processes), the self-correcting method leads to a path of discovery by utilizing a broader, less constrictive, socio-narratology-based method that encourages interpretation through an abductive–inductive–deductive view of the conversational-based relationship. Developing further with the preliminary step of deconstructing the existing narrative, seeking antenarrative, and carefully considering the stories “around” the story being researched (which comprise the aggregated components of the whole), the resulting understanding provided to the researcher often invites entrance into the guarded domain of the study participant, gained only through thoughtful conversational interaction (not interrogation) based on an understanding between the researcher and the participants, as can only be built upon a foundation of mutual respect, honesty, and trust. There are inherent challenges to this methodology, the primary one being the necessity for skillful, nonspecific, indirect exchanges of dialogue required for the mastery of conversational storytelling interviews, while resisting the almost natural interrogatory interviewing tendency of many Western-trained researchers. There are countless stories living and evolving within every story, each with multiplicities interwoven that are inter-dimensionally dynamic with one another. With diligence and intuitive awareness of this, the use of self-correcting storytelling methodology serves researchers well in narratological studies.

The influence of digital technology on our modern workforce is significant and has been instrumental in the creation of new jobs in new marketplaces to satisfy new needs. Although we may not know the direction of future technological change, what is known is that change will invariably benefit some groups and not others. One group who have not benefited are Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. With very few Māori employed in the information technology (IT) sector, the benefits to Māori from the increased opportunities are yet to be realized. Historically, Māori have been the subjects of research as end users of technology rather than as technology workers. The dominant narrative being that Māori are underachieving and that Māori will want to participate if they either acquire the technical skills or see the benefits of working in IT for themselves. The aim of this study was to push past this narrative and explore, via the experiences of Māori IT workers, why so few Māori work in IT. At the heart of this research was the question that drove this study: How can Māori IT workers be enabled to thrive in IT? Seeking answers, I traveled throughout Aotearoa New Zealand to kōrero (discuss, converse) with Māori IT workers. A newly developed approach called kaupapa tika was used, where unstructured insider-based interviews were conducted as a co-creation exercise to explore participants’ complex lived experiences. What was uncovered was that while working with IT is fun and exciting, in many cases, working in IT is not.

This chapter elucidates the science of business storytelling uniquely applied through the prism of Rosile and colleagues’ storytelling diamond. It draws on a nascent study of business venture creation for poverty eradication in an Indigenous South African setting. It is one of the first qualitative single-case studies — to the knowledge of the author as the writing of this chapter — to apply self-correcting storytelling science using Karl Popper’s deductive falsificationist epistemology. The chapter begins by explicating the newly emerging fourth-wave relational ontology and then proceeds to demonstrate the practical applications thereof, drawing on this landmark sustainable development study.

One of the most intriguing and up-and-coming debates within qualitative research concerns a discussion about the role of ontological significance regarding distance versus depth within research. Traditional qualitative methodologies for interpreting experiences and stories, such as first-, second-, and third-wave grounded theory and structured interviewing techniques, are built on underlying assumptions regarding linear assumptions about experience rooted in traditional Western approaches (Boje, 2019; Boje & Rosile, 2020). These methodologies prioritize the role of distance, which refers to the tendency to fit experience within preexisting narrative structures with a clear and linear beginning, climax, and resolution. The result of this tendency to prioritize the distance within qualitative research has come at the expense of exploring depth within qualitative research, which refers to rejecting traditional Western assumptions about linearity in favor of nonlinear approaches to examining experience in light of ontological significance. This chapter explores the implications of exploring depth over distance within qualitative research and examines a methodology designed to access greater ontological depth in qualitative research through the use of nonlinear conceptualizations of the nature of experience, the triskelion multiplicity of ontological understanding model (TMOUM). TMOUM is a Heideggerian self-correcting phenomenological methodology that incorporates living stories to reveal multiplicities of ontological understanding (Saraceno, 2021). This model incorporates storytelling, grounded theory, and a variation of a Peircean self-correcting methodology to engage in a spiraling toward an aspect of the ontological structure of phenomena.

Grounded theory, as a qualitative research method, constructs theories grounded in data on previously unexplored phenomena. To this end, it requires the researcher to be able to form concepts and ideas from the data, to withstand uncertainty and a lack of understanding, and to accept the return, at any point, to the initial stage of the research process. Although grounded theory permits the required flexibility to produce and interpret themes that emerge from the data, its three dominant “waves” are techniques of knowing that are separated from “being-in-the world.” This means they discard the existence of the researcher’s ontological status and that of others in time, space, and matter. This state of affairs maintains the “(inter)subjectivity–objectivity” dualism and yields a “disembodied organization research” that develops and turns inductive inferences into general categories. Against this backdrop, this chapter discusses the fallacies of each of the three waves of grounded theory and advances a fourth one that adds theoretical anchoring and, therefore, provides a basis for developing theories.

Storytelling is not a novel concept in most aspects of our lives. As a natural occurrence, we tell stories throughout our lives for numerous reasons, including communication, entertainment, transferring knowledge, instruction, and self-actualization (Drake, 2002; Kowalewski & Waukau-Villagomez, 2011; Polkinghorne, 1988; Shufutinsky, 2019; Walker, 2017). Recently, storytelling has increased in popularity in a diversity of organizations for numerous reasons, be they for operations, building rapport, or root cause investigations in workplaces, among other purposes (Boje, 1991, 1995, 2018; Choy, 2017; Driver, 2009), such as marketing, leader influence, and employee motivation…

The following section is included:

• Index