Storytelling Organizational Practices

Managing in the quantum age

David M. Boje

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135073091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Once upon a time the practice of storytelling was about collecting interesting stories about the past, and converting them into soundbite pitches. Now it is more about foretelling the ways the future is approaching the present, prompting a re-storying of the past. Storytelling has progressed and is about a diversity of voices, not just one teller of one past; it is how a group or organization of people negotiates the telling of history and the telling of what future is arriving in the present.

With the changes in storytelling practices and theory there is a growing need to look at new and different methodologies. Within this exciting new book, David M. Boje develops new ways to ask questions in interviews and make observations of practice that are about storytelling the future. This, after all, is where management practice concentrates its storytelling, while much of the theory and method work is all about how the past might recur in the future.

Storytelling Organizational Practices takes the reader on a journey: from looking at narratives of past experience through looking at living stories of emergence in the present to looking at how the future is arriving in ways that prompts a re-storying of the past.

PART I

Introduction to pragmatic storytelling

Part I covers the “what is storytelling” question: its rich and diverse history, the COPE model of organizational storytelling, and how storytelling is adapting to the quantum age. COPE stands for Critical, Ontological, Post-positivist, and Epistemic (see Preface). I believe there are four kinds of ethical pragmatisms interacting with the degenerative “whatever works” vulgar pragmatism. I am calling for a reconstruction of organizational storytelling through observation and experiment, combining spiritual with material ways of storytelling and thus bringing about a posthumous storytelling that is sustainable, as human-centric storytelling is not making people or the planet healthier.

I will use the term “quantum-liquid” as the combination of Newtonian physics agential cuts with the new agential cuts of quantum physics, still wrestling with quantum metaphysics. The challenge is to connect theory and practice in storytelling, since, as Justice Holmes (a participant in the Metaphysical Circle of the American Pragmatists) says, “theory is the most practical thing” (as cited in Dewey 1920/1948: xli).

Pragmatist storytelling is made up of many paradigms; the storytelling paradigms of several pragmatisms are reuniting, going through a radical revolution, in the quantum-liquid age. Not only are we in a time of quantum indeterminacy, with wave/particle duality, colocation, and entanglement, we are now what Bauman (2011) calls the Liquid Modern World of consumerist materialism. Consumer markets are being colonized and exploited in acts of storytelling choice. In liquid modern times the ethical answerability for our storytelling choice has fallen from the organizations to the individual, who is “now appointed to the position of chief manager of ‘life politics’ and its sole executive” (ibid.: 12). That is a major paradigm shift in storytelling in which, in our consumerist society, we expect consumers to make what Dewey (1929) called individual “desire” a “desirable” outcome for everyone.

The paradigm called materialism has changed its character identity many times since the ancient pre-Socratic atomism of Democritus and later in Aristotle’s Physics and Poetics. Over two millennia later, around 1913, there were storytelling paradigms ranging from materialist through poetic, linguistic, symbolist, futurist, structuralist, and formalist to our focus, contending pragmatisms. By 1929, Dewey had embraced a more ontological and quantum pragmatism, while Peirce remained with epistemic pragmatism (semiotics) and James with post-positivistic pragmatism. Fast forward to 2014 and varieties of COPE pragmatisms (Critical, Ontological, Post-positivist, and Epistemic) are coping with the quantum and liquid modern age of late modern capitalism.

These storytelling COPE pragmatisms are wrestling with how to treat narrative and story in relation to a legion of materialist approaches. The linguists, formalists, structuralists, and some pragmatists have distanced themselves from materialist storytelling, declaring it irrelevant, and it was not until Karen Barad (2003, 2007) declared that the linguistic turn had gone too far that Anete Strand (2011) could revive “material storytelling.” “Quantum storytelling” does not mean the dismissal of the metaphysical, spiritual nor the ethical from the playing field.

1

WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL STORYTELLING?

Let’s define storytelling

We need to create a technical language, to define terms, in order to inquire into how the genres and domains of storytelling inter-play in organizations.

Genres of storytelling

A storytelling genre is defined by similarities in form, function, and style. The genres of storytelling are the BME narrative, living story, and antenarratives (Boje 2001, 2008a, 2011a–d).

What is BME narrative?

The BME narrative genre is defined by a style that is abstract, a function that generalizes, and a form that tries to annihilate living stories’ content. BME is beginning, middle and end.

Its poetic style began before Aristotle (1954: 1450b: 25, 233) and has become the ultimate in managerialist storytelling. Aristotle is not to blame, however. Aristotle placed BME narrative in relation to epic stories and to a worked-out history. Narrative, according to Aristotle, requires a story to be a proper “imitation of an action that is complete in itself, as a whole of some magnitude … Now a whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end” (ibid.).

There are BME narratives and counter-narratives. There are BME grand narratives (Lyotard 1984) and master narratives (for convenience, I will just call them all BME). A master narrative, or dominant narrative, can silence the living stories. There are also more complex narratives that are not simple-minded BME. Dennis Mumby (1987) writes about the political aspects of organizational narrative – how it limits what gets told by organizations. Clair (1997) writes about embedded narratives: what it means to be Lakota in Native American narrative, nested within Western culture narrative, and nested again within the US nation narrative.

Walter Benjamin’s 1936 article (mentioned above) contends that storytelling has lost important competencies as a result of changes in capitalist production processes that did not allow workers to practice important storytelling skills as they had in days of old:

The art of storytelling no longer thrives. The ability of the storyteller to weave and spin has been lost. The ability of the listener to engage in moral reflexivity has been lost. It takes community to grow the competencies of tellers and listeners. And these are skills best honed in a “rhythm of work” among craftspeople, in the “milieu of work – the rural, the maritime, and the urban … artisan form of communication”.

(Benjamin 1936: 91)

Benjamin recognized how storytelling was changing with capitalist ways of production. The rhythms of work had changed how people interacted. Workers had to sit in cubicles, or otherwise separated from one another in rows, doing assembly in silence. They could no longer practice not only story telling skills but also those of listening and reflection. Managers, on the other hand, sit around in meetings, executives sit in boardrooms, and they get the practice in organizational storytelling. Benjamin, facing backward and looking at the destruction of storytelling, missed the ways that managers and their leaders began to reduce all storytelling to tidy BME narratives suitable for branding, for stump speeches, and for the hard sell.

There is a difference between those tidy BME narratives that banks tell about themselves and what we call “living stories.” As I write this (October 21, 2013) a living story is unfolding about what happens to a bank that does “whatever works” vulgar pragmatism.

Here is a BME narrative: “JPMorgan Chase is using its scale, resources and expertise to make a positive impact in the communities where we live and work” (JPMorgan Chase and Company 2013: 1). Its quarterly corporate responsibility report begins with how it is helping tornado victims, runners in the marathon, and small-business owners.

The living story of the entire world financial crisis continues to unfold, however, with no end in sight. JPMorgan Chase and Company reached a US$13 billion settlement with the US Justice Department concerning the bank’s alleged bad mortgage loans sold to investors that brought on the global financial meltdown. This can be understood as a set of nested narratives: the narrative of loss of home by the home own, nested within the narrative of JPMorgan Chase narrative, nested within the speculative investment market for derivatives, in turn nested within the global financial meltdown.

JPMorgan Chase is one of five banks that account for 95 percent of the US$648 trillion derivatives market. A derivative is a bet on the future with “variable interest entities” – the biggest casino game in the world, where banks need not have the assets to back up their antes. The four big players and their antes are: JPMorgan Chase (US$70 trillion), Citibank (US$52 trillion), Bank of America (US$50 trillion), and Goldman Saks (US$44 trillion). Keep in mind that total US gross national product is about US$85 trillion. It is alarming that, despite the trauma of the 2008 bailout of banks, the derivative market is actually larger now than it was before.

John Van Maanen (1988) provides a relevant typology from ethnography: the realist tale, the impressionist tale, and the confessional tale. A realist narrative genre is like a snail’s shell. On the outside, the shell may appear empty of life. Yet, inside, a living being may reside, with impressionist and confessional tales. The BME narrative shell is the dwelling place of a second major genre of storytelling, the living story.

What is living story?

“Living stories are not whole, often without beginning or end, and just unfolding in the middle” (Boje 2012e).¹ The living story genre is defined as the unfolding living process that is “in the middle,” not yet ended, perhaps without beginning or ending. Living stories are ontological, thereness, and now-ness. By ontological, I am referring here to both Heidegger’s being-in-the-world and Bakhtin’s distinction between Western narrative and story. As Bakhtin (1973: 13) put it, “narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid and unshakable monological framework,” whereas, on the other hand, we can notice the “polyphonic manner of the story” (ibid.: 60). By “polyphonic,” Bakhtin means the diversity of voices that radiate uniqueness, like refracting rays of light:

It is as if rays of light radiate from my uniqueness and passing through time, they confirm historical mankind, they permeate with light of value all possible time and temporality itself as such, for I myself actually partake in temporality.

(Bakhtin 1993: 60)

In Bakhtin (1990, 1993) the ethical answerability that takes place in once-occurring being-as-event-ness is a compelling action – that is, an ethics of living story that is quite pragmatic in ways that John Dewey (1929) calls “intelligent action.” If we have the intelligence of action we cannot claim the bystander role and stand by while people suffer, are mistreated, or suffer financial ruin. Heather Höpfl contends that organizational textbooks, with few exceptions, do not deal with the issue of gender. The result is a patriarchal, masculine conception of organization in abstract, rational, purposive behavior terms. I want to make some storytelling contentions between Höpfl’s work and my own.

First, I believe that Höpfl’s concern with patriarchal, masculine abstraction can be extended to organizational narratives. Second, Höpfl develops the “maternal organization” as a way to “restore the m/other to the text and thereby, give emphasis to the organization as embodied experience” (Höpfl 2008: 349). Third, for me, the living stories are embodied and ontological, and a way to restore the m/other. Höpfl also privileges the present moment in her living stories (ibid.: 353). Finally, we both are followers of Julia Kristeva. Kristeva worked on Bakhtin’s concept of intertextuality (how one text is referencing a text of the past or anticipating one yet to be written). Höpfl follows Kristeva in that ethical concern for the “discourse of maternity” as a new “emergent paradigm of organization which gives primacy to embodied present-centered experience” and needs to counter the often-male centric organizational narrative (Höpfl 2008: 352).

Pratt’s thesis (2002, 2003) argues that the American pragmatists exchanged pragmatic ideas and practices with Native American pragmatists. If that is the case, then they learned pragmatic practices from each other. For instance, Kaylynn Twotrees (2000) provides rich insight into how living stories are materially situated in the life-world of the Lakota tribes, in practices such as the Medicine Wheel, in what she calls the seven directions: four cardinal ones, plus up, down, and looking within oneself.

When Kaylynn does organizational storytelling, it is not the typical half-day or two-day workshop. It takes four months to a year for an organization to understand living stories and how they can be developed by participatory practice into an organization storytelling. That storytelling may not include the living story of every person, but the rays of light, as Bakhtin calls them, refract to each person. This book is about how COPE pragmatic storytelling, done at an organization level of intervention, can change the embedded “whatever works” organization storytelling praxis.

Jo Tyler (2010: 62) participated in the same 2006 conference that Twotrees, Ken Baskin, and I facilitated, and she wrote about living stories as having “story aliveness.” During the conference Tyler says that she “arrived at the threshold of the idea that stories are alive” and “alive whether or not we tell them” (ibid.: 64). We (Tyler & Boje 2009) produced a piece on living story in relation to workaholism for the Journal of Business Ethics in which we said: “Living story recognizes the plurality of selves that constitute our identity, and our reflexivity” (ibid.: 173).

A banking example of BME narratives

Jamie Dimon, Chairperson and CEO of JPMorgan Chase and Company, shares a simple BME narrative in a corporate social responsibility report:

B → If we can help our clients grow around the world,

M → they will in turn generate the jobs, small business growth and other economic activity that builds strong, vibrant communities

E → and generates more sustainable economic growth and prosperity for all.

(JPMorgan Chase and Company 2013: B M E, my addition)

It can be a good thing to focus, to laser in on a simple BME narrative to close a presentation or to let the busy customers know what’s happening. Include some Q & A:

Question:

In the wake of the financial crisis, your industry continues to face high scrutiny and low trust. How is society better off because of what JPMorgan Chase does?

Dimon’s answer:

I can understand why the financial services industry has lost the confidence of many people. Like all companies, we’ve made mistakes. What is most important, however, is that we need to learn from them, continually improve and become a stronger company. We also shouldn’t let our mistakes distract us from the critical role large banks play in driving economic growth …

(ibid.: 3)

When it comes to complying with the rules and regulations that govern our industry and our company, there is no room for compromise … There is no piece of business, no deal, no revenue stream that is more important than our obligation to act responsibly, ethically and within the rules.

(ibid.: 62; excerpt from March 2013 message to all employees from the firm’s Operating Committe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: storytelling practices in the quantum age are pragmatic
• Part I Introduction to pragmatic storytelling
• Part II Pragmatic storytelling theory
• Part III COPE pragmatic storytelling praxes
• Part IV Pragmatic storytelling research methods
• Glossary of pragmatic storytelling terms
• Bibliography
• Index