CHAPTER 2: How Story Dialogism Differs From Narrative



CHAPTER 2: How Story Dialogism Differs From Narrative?

David M. Boje

January 17, 2006; revised Dec 3, 2007

Storytelling Organization (London: Sage, for release 2007)

This chapter develops various types of dialogism as the key difference between story and narrative. Dialogism is defined here as different voices (polyphony), styles (stylistics), space-time conceptions (chronotopes), interanimating discourses (architectonics), and dynamic-interplay of these varied dialogisms (I call the polypi). The chapter gives examples from McDonald’s of the interplay of narrative control and story resistance across the five dialogisms.

Dialogism is the main difference between story and narrative. [1] Dialogism (Bakhtin’s, 1973 dialogicality) predates Derrida’s (1978) play of difference and differance and de-centered discourse. Writing in the late 1930s Bakhtin (1981: 284) said, “Discourse, lives as it were, on the boundary between its own control and another alien context.” One way to look at the relationship of narrative and story is that narrative tries to constrain the dialogic manner of story. Story is not an object, for text, or mimetic orality. Story is enacted in social events, with thought, action, and feeling happening all at once, in the moment of Being. As Bakhtin (1973: 13) put it, “narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid and unshakable monological framework.” Dialogism overcomes binary opposition of signifier/signified, text/context, self/other, as well as narrative/story, in order to look at Einsteinian relativity, a more holographic relationship of complexity.

Instead of foreswearing narrative genre models (from Aristotle’s Poetics to Burke’s Pentad), my thesis here is to look at the relationship of narrative-genre-forms to living story. Living story means participating in dialogical processes, asking questions, being answerable, “with eyes, lips, heads, soul, spirit, with [one’s] whole body and deeds” (Bakhtin, 1973: 293, bracketed addition mine). As Shotter (1993: 62) comments, “Those denied this possibility can, to say the least, be expected to feel humiliated and angered.” I want to see how story resists narrative-deadness, is able to escape the narrative-trap, and crack the narrative-forms with a regenerative power. In the social transactions of a Storytelling Organization, there is a dance of narrative and story that yields self-organization. The relation of story to narrative is ‘heteroglossia.’ Heteroglossia is defined as opposing language forces of centripetal (centralizing deviation-counteraction) and centrifugal (decentering variety-amplification). It’s the play of centripetal to centrifugal, that’s thoroughly “dialogized” (Bakhtin, 1981: 14, 273). Once upon a time, story was not the same as narrative, a retrospective “systematic-monological Weitaschauung” (Bakhtin, 1973: 64). The more centripetal “centralizing tendencies in the life of language have ignored this dialogized heteroglossia” in the social sciences (Bakhtin, 1981: 273). Retrospective sensemaking, without prospective, reflexivity, or transcendental sensemaking filters what we attend to and notice.

Narratologists swoop down on living story like hawk searching for prey, ready to make a proper kill. After all, as they say,’ the only good story, is a properly dead narrative form.’ Narratology has made narrative adhere to monologism, while story is ridden with one or more dialogisms. Narrative, across modernity, has turned more monologic, removing itself from a time and a place of telling. If as Czarniawska (2004) theorizes, narrative is petrification. I take the counter-view that story is something more lively. By fixating on one logic, narratology turns narrative into a formula, into a one-dimensional model, into a form (i.e. representationalism). It is a researchable question whether narrative remains invariant (petrified) across human interactions and human plights for a longer time than story. The reason it has been impossible for narratology to understand story, is inherent in the monologic model-form-formulae, such as the sjuzhet and fabula of Russian Formalism (Propp & Shklovsky).

Sjuzhet (usually refers to narrative discourse) is the representation and reshaping of underlying events through narration into plot (& in film by camera angles, in film and novels via flashbacks in temporal sequence, etc.). Fabula usually refers to the stuff of story. Sjuzhet and Fabula are Russian Formalist terms, used by Vladimir Propp and by Viktor Shklovsky.

Jonathan Culler's (1981: 170-172) critique of Sjuzhet and Fabula is that they constitute a narrative double-move. The first move is to set Sjuzhet (narrative) in hierarchical domination over Fabula (story). Story becomes relegated in the first move to a mere chronology of event. In the second move, narrative self-deconstructs its initial duality (the hierarchy of narrative over story), in order to double back to efface supposed underlying order of event (Culler, 1981: 171).

Jerome Bruner summarizes Sjuzhet as the plot of narrative, and Fabula as timeless underling theme (Bruner, 1986, pp. 7, 17-21). He wants them to be more loose fitting: "I think we would do well with as loose fitting a constraint as we can manage concerning what a story must 'be' to be a story" (p. 17). Yet, Bruner is also trying to fashion “story grammar” (p. 14), to take story from its crooked line, its spiral, into a linearity. He perceives a difference in narrative and story: “But the world making involved in its [narrative] speculations is of a different order from what storymaking does” (p. 14, bracketed addition, mine). Bruner is after something, “what is it that makes good stories powerful or compelling” (p. 15) but he is not looking at compelling storyability from the lens of Bakhtin’s answerability (1990, 1991). Rather, for Bruner (1986: 15) he aspires to be one of the “story grammarians” who study minimal structure necessary to create story.

Finally, an increasing number of Native-indigenous authors are positing a more vibrant role of story, beyond Fabula, and in resistance to Euro-American Formalist and Structuralist narrative. For example Leslie Marmon Silko (1981) says, "White ethnologists reported that the oral tradition among Native American groups has died out" (p. 28). Narrative Sjuzhet/Fabula tends to turn native story into museum artifacts, as archetype narratives devoid of "harsh realities of hunger, poverty and injustice" (p. 280), and that Native story traditions were "erroneously altered by the European intrusion - principally by the practice of taking the children away from the tellers who had in all past generations told the children an entire culture, an entire identity of a people" (p. 6). The idea here is that story competencies are taught in the tribe, and the story memory, passed from generation to generation is disrupted by pulling children out of the home, forbidding their language, etc. Thomas King (2005 in The Truth About Stories, argues that narrative compromises story. The Fabula of story, the social fabric of story loses its voice. King argues that story shapes identity differently from narrative. In particular the Indian identity concocted in American-European ethnology, folklore, anthropology, history, and other narrative-literature --- is being challenged by Native storywriters. James Cox (2006) looks at narrative (in the tradition of Euro-American enterprise of Sjuzhet/Fabula) as "tools of domination: (p. 24), and a "colonial incursion" (p. 25).

It is not just Russian Formalism, but European Formalists that posit narrative grammars (i.e. Todorov's simple transformations of mode, intention, result, manner, aspect & status, as well as complex transformations of appearance, knowledge, supposition, description, subjectification, & attitude). Despite cataloguing a list of narrativists who turn story into narrative, Bruner (1986: 32) fails to notice ways narratology turns story into a "virtual text."

Victor Turner (an anthropologist), Tzvetun Todorov, Hayden White (an historian), and Vladimir Propp (a folklorist) suggest that there is some such deep structure to narrative, and that good stories are well-formed particular realizations of it (Bruner, 1986: 15).

The virtual text thesis suffers, once again, from a kind of system thinking (see chapter 1), where as Bruner (1986: 21) says, “each level has its form of order, but that order is controlled and modified by the level above it,” in short, a linearization of hierarchic levels. There is in narrative the presupposition of deep structure, a kind of omniscient eye looking through a linear sextant. Narrative is a speech act, which for Bruner subjunctivizes reality (p. 26). Narrative purports to be inner thought about a retrospective recollection of events according to deep structure models. Perhaps many of the deep structures just lack substance, when subjected to rounds of interpretive reflexivity. Julia Kristeva (Semiotic, p. 146. As cited in Culler, 1981: 104) writes, “in place of the notion of intersubjectivity installed that of intertextuality.” My colleagues and I are looking at ‘narrative noticing’ at all the ways organizations have adopted narrative that dampen reflexivity, and at ‘story noticing’ at the ways in which living story is not willing to become virtual text.[2]

The list of narrativists (and I would add Aristotle and Northrop Frye to Bruner’s list) view deep structure as being innate, and that story stuff is out of bounds, just plain improper, without narrative formula representing deep structure. For example, Turner’s narrative rationality formula is described by Bruner (1986: 21) as “steady state, reach, crisis, redress” is a sort of narrative expectancy. Italo Calvino (1979: 109), on the other hand, seems to rescue story from narrative control:

“I’m producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell…. A space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first…”

As does Bakhtin (1973: 12), who says, “narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid and unshakable monological framework.” Story, for Bakhtin, is decidedly more dialogical than narrative, for example in the “polyphonic manner of the story” (Bakhtin, 1973: 60). We can begin to see that dialogism opens up a related set of domains of contrast between narrative and story.

|Narrative |Domains |Story |

|No |Dialogism |Yes |

|No |Multi-Plotted |Yes |

|No |Multi-Perspectival |Yes |

|No |Eventing |Yes |

|No |Systemicity |Yes |

|No |Unfinalizedness |Yes |

|No |Unmergedness |Yes |

|No |Reflexivity |Yes |

|No |Living |Yes |

|No |Prospective |Yes |

Table 1: Domains of Contrast of Narrative and Story

Narrative can now be defined as monologism, mono-perspective, mono-plot BME (beginning, middle, end), linearity, discrete-events, wholeness, finalized and merged parts, and too explicitly rendered as abstract hierarchy to be more than rational-formulaic, not a reflexivity, but just deadness, in a retrospective grave.

Story can be defined as more or more dialogisms, multi-plotted, multi-perspectival, eventing, systemicity, unfinalizedness, unmergedness, and rich in spirals of reflexivity, living in the now, and comfortable with prospective sensemaking. Stories are dialogic not only in terms of being multi-voiced (polyphonic) but also in being multi-perspectival (polylogical), and in differing chronotopes. Eventing is a kind of chronotope in which temporality is not fixed in spatial terms. The term eventing is from Benjamin Whorf’s (1956: 256) study of the Hopi, following up an observation by Franz Boas that the Hopi Natives do not experience themselves, as a narrative grammar of ‘past-present-future.’ Shotter (1993: 109) also refers to Whorf’s “eventing” as an alternative conception of time-space. Story systemicity (see chapter 1) has several dimensions included in Table 1, including the unfinished, unfinalized, and unmergedness, or non-wholeness that is more holographic process, than a linear conception, such as BME narrative. Reflexivity or the transcendental (see introduction to book), as well as implicit knowing (see Chapter 1) is an attempt to interpret, to look at the nature of one’s practices in relation to other social worlds, imagined to be parallel, higher or lower, along side, or hidden.

One reason narratology (including folklore & history) has not sorted out these narrative-story differences is that narrative has been molded by the passage of modernity, and reduced into being a monologic-form-driven theory that attempts to free itself of context. Narrative has been imprinted by modernity with a kind of theory-envy.

In Table 2 we compare John Shotter’s (1993: 113) dimensions of theory versus account, with the Table 1 domains differentiating narrative and story. Shotter does not apply his theory/account dimensions as a way to distinguish narrative-story.

Table 2: Shotter’s Theory and Account Dimensions

|Domains (Table 1) |Theory [Narrative] |Account [Story] |

|Dialogism |--- |--- |

|Multi-Plotted |Predictive |Shapes expectations but not in precise way |

|Multi-Perspectival |--- |--- |

|Eventing |Abstractness |Works by use of examples |

|Systemicity (Complexity) |System Thinking |Elements are intentionally not rule-related|

| | |to one another |

|Unfinalizedness |Completeness |Descriptions are incomplete |

|Unmergedness |Discreteness |Context-dependent |

|Reflexivity |Explicitness |Open to interpretation |

|Living |--- |--- |

|Prospective |--- |--- |

Shotter does not include monologism, mono-perspectivity, deadness, or retrospective grave in his list of theory dimensions, or dialogism and multi-perspectival in aspects of account (he does talk of them elsewhere). The point of Table 2 is to illustrate that, in the main, narrative aspires to be theory, while story seems to be more an account of practice, one that is also dialogic, multi-perspectival, living, and prospective sensemaking. I think Shotter’s use of ‘systematicity’ is possibly derived from Bakhtin (1973: 43) a systematicity that is “unfinalizedness [in] its open-endedness and indeterminacy.” I use the term systemicity (see chapter 1). Reflexivity is openness to interpretation. Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) studies found that when one begins to do rounds of reflexivity-inquiry, one becomes anxious, because what was assumed to be the bedrock foundation of reflexive (representational) knowledge, is very thin, a very shatter-able, very ridden with an openness of interpretation.

It seems to me that narrative is compatible with a managerialist quest for tools, cook book recipes, quick scripts, that are taken to be implicative of deep structure setting limits and control on story, rending them into archetypes.

Next, we address the types of dialogisms.

TYPES OF DIALOGISMS

There are at least five types: polyphony (multi-voicedness), stylistics (multi-layers of diverse styles such as orality, textuality & visuality), chronotopes (interplay of different spacetime conceptions), architectonics (interanimation of cognitive, aesthetic, & ethical discourses), and what I am calling Polypi (dialogism of the various dialogisms: polyphonic, stylistics, chronotopes, & architectonic).

Figure 1 – Model of Polypi Systemicity Complexity of Dialogisms

My contribution is to theorize five types of dialogism interplaying in the Storytelling Organization: polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, architectonic, and the Polypi (dialogism of these dialogisms at a systemicity of complexity, rather than each individually). Polypi dialogism is defined as the dialogism of dialogisms of systemicity complexity (Boje, 2005 b, e, g). I develop each of the dialogisms in relation to Storytelling Organization. The word Polypi comes from Hans Christen Andersen's (1976) adult fairytale: "The Little Mermaid" and is literally a colony of hydra, and for me a metaphor for understanding the interanimation of the four dialogisms (polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, & architectonic). Polypi, at the time of Andersen’s writing, was thought to be both vegetative and animal.

POLYPHONIC DIALOGISM: Its defined as fully embodied plurality of multi-voicedness and unmerged consciousnesses, viewpoints or ideologies where none takes primary importance, not able to impose monovocal or monologic synthesis or consensus integration. Polyphonic Dialogism Theory assumes “multivoicedness of an epoch” is rendered in narrative history. Epic history has just a few voices in a “systematic monological philosophical finalizedness” (Bakhtin, 1973: 25-26, italics original). The monologic and monovocal consciousness is still dominant. It’s what Bakhtin (1973: 12) calls ‘polyphonic dialogicality,’ a “complex unity of an Einstein universe.” The materials of emergent story and narrative control have deep socioeconomic roots in capitalism, in the writing of capitalism. Dostoevsky anti-causality, and anti-evolution is a “deliberate and fully formed polyphony” Bakhtin, 1973: 28).

Every act of creation is bound by the laws of the material on which it operates as well as by its own laws (Bakhtin, 1973: 53).

The plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness and the genuine polyphony of full-valued voices… plurality of equal consciousness and their world” (Bakhtin, 1973: 4).

His self-conscious lives on its unfinalizedness, its open-endedness, and indeterminancy (Bakhtin, 1973: 43).

The unmergedness in polyphonic dialogic complexity is of “unmerged consciousness(es)” (Bakhtin, 1973: 6).

It is precisely on polyphony that the combination of several individual wills occurs and the bonds of an individual will are fundamentally exceeded” (Bakhtin, 1973: 17).

In Dostoevsky’s novels, Bakhtin (1973, 1981) implies in polyphony an equality of author’s voice with any hero’s voice, each equally valued in the dialogism. Keep in mind this is not saying that there is no power and domination. It’s not an idealized equality of voices; there is hegemony here, as well as equality. “Polyphonic manner of the story” (Bakhtin, 1973: 60) is beyond the four master narratives (framework, control, mechanistic, open) but not quite beyond organic narrative hegemony. “The story is told … oriented in a new way to this new world” (Bakhtin, 1973: 5). There is in Dostoevsky novels a “destruction of the organic unity of materials” but that narrative metaphorization is still in force (Bakhtin, 1973: 11). Story is no longer presented “within one field of vision, but within several complete fields of visions of equal value… joined in a higher unity of a second order, the unity of the polyphonic (Bakhtin, 1973: 12). Bakhtin’s material conditions of narrative and story presages Derrida’s (1978) preference for writing over orality; the difference is that Bakhtin treats the modes of telling (oral & writing) as dialogically implicated.

STYLISTIC DIALOGISM: Its defined as a plurality of multi-stylistic story and narrative modes of expression (orality, textuality & visuality of architectural & gesture expressivity). Multi-stylistics juxtapose and layer in an intertextual complexity manner that may or may not be polyphonic.

A dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents [that] weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merge with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group and all this may crucially shape discourse, and leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile (Bakhtin, 1981: 276).

There are five stylistic modes (Bakhtin 1981: 262): artistic, skaz, everyday writing, scientific writing, and official writing that I will illustrate in McDonald’s strategic stylistics.

Artistic style – Includes the architecture that tells its own story, as well as artistic décor of French McDonald’s restaurant choices is called ‘McStyle.’ McDonald’s even has a “McStyle” website where customers and owners, sort through some nine décor and architectural themes, selecting their preference. Any given city across the US, Europe, Asia, or Australia, may exhibit a variety of artistic styles in photos, sculpture, décor or architecture. Each style took shape in an historical moment (classical Americana Speedy drive-in of 1950s, nouveau modern drive-through of 2000s, etc.). These restaurant styles intersect with seasonal themes. There is something about French social aesthetics that demands such differentiated styles. The chronotope of Clown-Rogue-Fool (Ronald, Hamburglar, & Grimace) is expressed stylistically differently in Europe (except Netherlands) where a younger version of each occurs, as compared to the older characters in the U.S.

Skaz – taking a fragment of someone else’s everyday speech, and re-narrating with another narrator’s intention (e.g. a corporate one) through it (examples: “I’m lovin’ it,” or Nike’s “Just Do It!). Skaz “lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own context and another, alien context” (Bakhtin, 1981: 284). McDonald’s is filled with alien, accented, a Tower of Babel of extra-artistic skaz, with “Mc” words, such as McJob, McWork, McMeal, McFamily, McFun, etc. It’s the McDonaldization of language, and McColonization of story stuff. McJob, for example, for the corporation, once meant hiring the physically or mentally challenged, who would work for less money. McJob has become an alien word meaning from the point of view of the corporation. It was described as "a low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one." (Coupland, 1991: 5). The term, McJob, was redefined, given a counterstory, meaning dull, repetitive, low-pay, dead-end work, and became an entry into Meridian-Collegiate Dictionary, Oxford Dictionary, and many others. The corporation’s narrative writers struggle to dominate the meaning put to “Mc” words by culture jammers, living wage, animal rights, environmental, slow food, vegetarian, anti-sprawl, and other activist groups. In an open letter to Merriam-Webster's, former CEO Cantalupo said that "more than 1,000 of the men and women who own and operate McDonald's restaurants today got their start by serving customers behind the counter".[3]

Everyday writing (example: a letter, a diary, annual report, and so forth). There are narated bits from a CEO letters to shareholders with references to dead CEO Ray Kroc in McDonald’s websites and annual reports, and many references to Ronald, a simulacra virtual leader strategically constructed (Boje & Rhodes, 2005a, b). Kroc and Ronald speak to the shareholders, and employees, through the everyday writing by executives, and quotes of their folksy speech.

Scientific, Non-artistic Writing (examples: a scientific statement, a chart of numbers from an account, an ethnographic description, or a philosophical treatise). For example, look on the tray-liners at McDonald's and the brochures available --> they have scientific narrating of how nutritious, and fitness-conscious parents are who give their children fast food. 

Official Writing (examples: Ronald McDonald, Grimace, Hamburglar, but also Bob Greene, Ray Kroc, or a new CEO. An official sign about do or don’t to this or that on the wall is part of the telling. As is a pamphlet quoting McDonald’s official position is on this or that issue.

In sum, stylistic dialogicality is strategic interactivity of multiple modes of expression (oral, written, theatric, architectural, & so forth).

I situate stylistic dialogism as a property of “image” management. In organization’s there are many managerialist attempts to control story with official narrative. There is a strategic, centered (or centripetal), orchestration of multiple stylistic modes of expression. In more “bottom up” governance, the stylistic multiplicity that consummates the firm’s image is more a living story, than a managerialist orchestration of public faciality or image narrative.

Now consider the global challenge of orchestrating stylistic multiplicity, caging any pluralistic story and counterstory into managerialist central administrated narrative, crafting the image of the corporation, around the world. The stylistic modes of McDonald’s corporate narratives interact with more local stories of traditions. The architecture itself, for example, varies from locality to locality, keeping the familiar “M” emblazoned everywhere, accenting with “Mc” skaz. In France for example, McStyle web page lists some 13 thematic narrative-choices of restaurant architecture and décor.[4] In a country with over 400 official cheeses, consumers are unwilling to limit their stylistic choice to the plastic styles of American McDonald’s. We will explore the range of stylistic differences in the next part of the book, with a chapter on stylistic dialogic strategy. Here, I want to continue to list the types of dialogisms.

Stylistic modalities of Storytelling Organization construct dynamic image complexity. Image storytelling can be more than simple sign BME narrative vision, value, and mission adventure strategy. Stylistic dialogism does not succeed or displace polyphonic dialogism.

Holographic strategy is multi-voiced, multi-languaged, and polyphonically and now multi-stylistically dialogic. Holography moves the field of strategy beyond oral telling or analysis of text. Some styles are visual tellings without worlds. Stylistic dialogism is all about image management in a variety of stylistic modes that are dialogic. There is a widening of the circle in a multiplicity of expressive modalities. Branding is an example of a reduction of stylistic dialogicality into a singular narrative-expressivity and faciality

What is styled must become restyled to retain contemporary enthusiasm in acts of re-contemporalization of established images. A ‘finalized monological whole’ stylistic-narrative is uni-modal, and an anathema to ongoing renewing of a plurality of stylistics. The stylistic modes of story and narrative are accomplished in an assemblage of stylistic modes that are in “constant renewal” (Bakhtin, 1973: 87).

CHRONOTOPIC DIALOGISM: Chronotope is defined as the relativity of time and space. Narrative unity depends upon maintenance of particular sorts of spacetime chronotopes (i.e. those that are retrospective sensemaking), where as for story there are prospective sorts of sensemaking. For Boulding it is complexity where symbols differentiate from signs and images. Chronotopicity is literary fusion of space and time. Its admix is temporalities and spatialities. The chronotopic manner of story is exhibited when idea images of past, present, and future mix with diversity of spatial images narrated and storied to become its own dialogism. Chronotope is “vertex of dialogically intersecting consciousness” that also interacts with “polyphonic” and other dialogisms (Bakhtin, 1973: 73-74).

There are more than ten ways Bakhtin (1973, 1981) conceptualized "chronotope" defined as the relativity of time/space in the novel.[5] The theory is the chronotopes are embodied in ways of writing, visualizing, and telling stories and narratives. I have sorted the types into my own categories (adventure & folkloric). Chivalric is actually #5 in Bakhtin's (1981) historical presentation of the first nine. The 10th (Bakhtin, 1973) is disputed, a mystery I choose to tackle.

In contemporary Storytelling Organizations, the ten chronotopes are dialogic to one another. Unlike Boulding, Bakhtin’s properties are cumulative, in the holographic, rather than linear-order sense of levels. As Volosinov (1929/1973: 80), a member of the Bakhtin Circle, puts it, “contexts do not stand side by side in a row, as if unaware of one another, but in a state of constant tension, or incessant interaction, and conflict.” In other words, the eighth chronotope could have properties of the tenth, or the seventh, but leave out proceeding ones. Or we can look at them as holographic, as a multi-accenting of one another.

The dialogic nature of chronotopes is a cutting edge research topic in strategy, leadership, and organization change. In subsequent chapters I will assert that most strategy writing is mostly about adventure chronotopes, leaving the folkloric (especially orality) ones untheorized. Meanwhile, as I will illustrate briefly, in practice, the folkloric ones are quite strategically realized. Complex strategy, may exhibit combinations of ten chronotopic properties. For Bakhtin, they are hierarchically ordered. For me, they are not.

Table 3: Ten Chronotopes in Dialogicality

|ADVENTURE CHRONOTOPES: |

|1. |Greek Romantic |

|2. |Everyday |

|3. |Chivalric |

|4. |Biographic |

|FOLKLORIC CHRONOTOPES |

|5. |Reversal of Historical Realism |

|6. |Clown-Rogue-Fool |

|7. |Rabelaisian Purge |

|8. |Basis for Rabelisian |

|9. |Idyllic |

|10 |Castle Room |

FOUR ADVENTURE CHRONOTOPES

Calvino (1979: 218) challenges the linear-hegemony of the adventure plot:

How long are you going to let yourself be dragged passively by the plot? You had flung yourself into the action, filled with adventurous impulses: and then? Your function was quickly reduced to that of one who records situations decided by others, who submits to whims, finds himself involved in events that elude his control.

Bakhtin’s challenge to linearization of narrative emplotment is to point out the variety of adventure chronotopes, and then to show their dialogic interplay.

Greek Romantic Adventure - Abstract, formal system of space and adventure time; link to time and space in more mechanistic than organic ways. Time sped up to overcome spatial distance and conquer alien worlds. Adventure time in systemicity is a large space with diverse countries, but without ties to place or history. The strategic systemicity of McDonald's is well known. Its campaign to invade the world is well known. The telling of Ray Kroc's founding is a romantic adventure narrative of the franchise expansion. He succeeded the McDonald brothers, who invented the system of fast food Taylorism.  Heroes in Greek Romantic adventures have Aristotlian ‘energia.’ Their dramatic persona does not change, traits are merely discovered; energia is consistent with Kroc's autobiography.

Everyday Adventure: Chronotopes are cumulative. This one mixes romantic adventure with everyday adventure. The hero’s life is sheathed in context of metamorphosis of human identity. The course of hero’s life corresponds to travel and wandering the world. McDonald's operates in global space of diverse countries, avoiding local historical ties when possible, adapting the menu when it must. This chronotope is about strategic emergence and adaptation of the grander narratives of McDonald’s. There is a type of metamorphosis is mythological cycle of crisis, so person becomes other than what she or he was by chance and accident. McDonald's heroes wander the world, such as Charlie Bell, Jim Cantalupo's successor (after his fast-food heart attack). Suddenly CEO Charlie Bell fell ill, was replaced, and passed away. Both CEOs had health issues that are allegedly related to fast food diet. McDonald's everyday adventure narrative is interactive with Everyday adventure of has many suddenlys. This includes CEO’s sudden death (Jim Cantalupo and Charlie Bell), release of Spurlock's Supersize Me documentary, McLibel trial of Helen Steel and Dave Morris, and the celebrated trial of José Bové in France, McFat children trials.[6] Since Cantalupo's heroic turn around of the company's failing stocks and sliding same store sales record), and the sudden entry of "McJob" into many dictionaries. Strategic narrative of McDonald's has had to adapt to everyday story emergence.

(Auto) Biographical - Early biographies in ancient times had unchanging energia personalities, not the kind of contemporary personality that transforms in reply to growth experiences. Energia is Aristotle's more ideal time-space.  The struggle is with the public square, where the non-hero, the invisible servant or slave may come forward and deconstruct the lionizing heroic-identity told by (auto) biographers. Formally, biographical time is the metamorphosis of the hero seeking true knowledge of the self. There are also many conversion narratives of biographical time that dissolves into abstract time of ideal era. It’s laying one’s life bare, illuminating it on public square in theatre of self-glorification, a masked identity completely on the surface, an exteriority (energia & bios).  McDonald's official (auto) biography-narratives are besieged by counter-story biographers, who tell the other side of the story of change in identity. Ray Kroc (1977) and other writers such as Westman (1980), crafted official narrative biographies. There is counterstory writing, began with Boas & Chain (1976), replicated by Schlosser (2001), and continued with Ritzer's (2002) McDonaldization thesis, which is in turned countered by Watson (1997). In sum, the works become increasingly dialogical to one another, citing and countering one another. The graphic display of this spiral of counterstories to official narrative biographic is part of Boje, Driver, & Cia's (2005) work.

[pic][pic]

Figure 2 Novelizaiton of McDonald’s (auto) Biographies)

Chivalric Adventure - Hyperbolization of time with other-worldly verticality (descent). This one mixes with previous chronotopes, in the testing of heroes’ fidelity to love or faith in chivalric code. Sometimes its fairy tale motifs are linked to identity and enchantment. This is the epitome of McDonaldland. A more mundane example is the chivalric creed of Quality, Service, Cleanliness, & Value code at McDonald's. Portraying one's corporation as chivalric (or ethical in its code) is a narrative strategy. Corporations like McDonald's, have war rooms to track their narrated lines, to spin more favorable press, and hire many so-called ‘story consultants’ to run focus groups, author and direct story behaviors of the corporations.[7]

SIX FOLKLORIC CHRONOTOPES

The more folkloric chronotopes are absent in traditional strategy writing, but it’s very much a part of everyday practice. Whereas the adventure chronotopes start out being centering (centripetal) kinds of more monological narratives, the more folkloric ones are more about difference (centrifugal) forces. As such the folkloric chronotopes become counterforces to the adventure ones. There’s a web site I maintain for illustrations and study guides on dialogic inquiry into McDonald’s strategy.[8]

Reversal of Historical Realism - Reversal of here-and-now time/space into a futuristic ephemeral temporality. An inversion to folkloric fullness of here-and-now reality, and material world (folkloric historic realism) becomes transformed by mythic thought into either epic past or ephemeral future (given more concreteness by the appropriation); the here-and-now of systems becomes exceeded by the historical inversion. Examples: the six McDonaldland videos produced by Klasky-Cuspo studios (makers of Rugrats, Wild Thornbirds, & The Simpsons).[9] McDonaldland was strategy enacted by Ray Kroc to imitate his war buddy, Walt Disney's success with Disneyland; there is now an on line version of McDonaldland.[10]

Clown-Rogue-Fool - Out of depths of folklore pre-class structure are three medieval masks emerged. Obviously at McDonald’s this is Ronald McDonald, the clown, Hamburglar the rogue, and Grimace the fool. It’s ironic that the world's no#1 fast food corporation has appropriated Bakhtinian Clown-Rogue-Fool chronotope, exploiting its grotesque humor, while emasculating its force as socio-cultural and political commentary (Boje & Cai, 2005; Boje & Rhodes, 2005a, b). In other words, McDonald’s grotesque trio uses the masks in a parody, as an attractor to children, but not as a way to speak back to power.

Rabelaisian Purge - The purge begins with (Everyday adventure, the suddenlys) of the Supersize Me documentary or a McLibel or a José Bové trial. It continues when McDonald’s wage servants and slaves begin to express counterstories to the official corporate vernacular. And in this chronotope, the Rabelaisian Purge, it’s grotesque humor that is used by the activists to poke story-fun at the McDonald's icons, and at their spiritualization narratives (such as Ronald performing transmutations), such as McSupper, and the McJob skaz controversy, already mentioned.[11]

Folkloric Basis for Rabelaisian. This is grotesque humor. Folkloric time is collective and part of productive growth, measured by labor events. Generative time is pregnant time and concrete here-and-now, a time sunk deeply in the earth, profoundly spatial and concrete, implanted in earth and ripening in it (metamorphosis). Pre-class consciousness. For example, the slow food movement is focused on slow time to eat, on using organic foods, on avoiding the fast and furious. It’s the antidote to McDonaldization by home cook festivalism, visiting the non-chain, local restaurants, where people take their time. McDonald’s strategic move is to invoke grotesque humor of hybrid characters, such as Hamburglar, part burger-head and part boy. Their humor resets the culture jamming, into a more romantic adventure chronotope. Animal slaughter is countered with McFry Kids, and the McNuggets, as well as Birdie. Each is part animal or human and part fast food.

Idyllic - Idyllic is organic localism that fragments modernity’s quest for global. Idyllic folkloric time is agricultural, craft and labor time. It’s family organically grafted to time events and spatiality (place), living organically in familiar territory, in unity of place; rhythm of life linked to nature and cyclic repetition that is separated from progress myth; not a stage of development; a rebirth. Growing your own food, taking time to be rooted in a community, its non-fast food places.  It would be a form of labor, where workers own their tools, apply their trades, learned in apprenticeship. The previous chronotope is extended in the idyllic. McDonald's apes the idyllic by invoking a family trope in its McDonaldland stories, complete with McNugget aunts and uncles, McFry kids, a sort of gay marriage of Ronald the Father, and Grimace the Mother; parenting of sister and brother, Hamburglar and Birdie. In short, resistance comes out of the idyllic (& the generative & grounded) as a centrifugal counterforce to the abstractness of global narratives that are without time or place.

Castle Room – In addition to the major chronotopes introduced thus far, Bakhting has several minor chronotopes. These can be seen in interplay in several of the earlier chronotopes, such as the meetings that occur in everyday and travel adventures. Bakhtin refers to time/space of trope of being in a Gothic "Castle" or “Salon” that affects the sense of temporality and spatiality in the storying going on there. One could also say that “Meeting” at McDonald’s is its own type of chronotope.[12] This is “a real-life chronotope of meeting is constantly present in organizations of social and governmental life” (Bakhtin, 1981: 99). In such Gothic, as compared to more modern and postmodern meeting spots, there is a change in the discourse, in the atmosphere, in temporality and spatiality. A medieval castle, in novels, carries a premodern temporal resonance, of feudal oppression and irrationality (Bakhtin, 1981: 246 for castle/see pp. 97-98 for meeting as device).[13] In Lincoln (UK), there is a castle converted to a prison in 18th century, where prisoners attended church, seated in an arrangement where they could see and be seen by the speaker at the podium, but could not see other prisoners. One could argue that various kinds of meeting places in modern corporations afford have an historic way of orienting our discourse, such as the Mahogany board room, a Playplace at McDonald’s where plasticity of play is different from play in the forest, or meeting in a McDonald’s without a Playplace is different from one with. One could argue that various kinds of meeting places in modern corporations have an historic way of orienting our discourse, such as a Playplace at McDonald’s where plasticity of play is different from play in the forest, or meeting in a McDonald’s without a Playplace is different from one with. In sum while the chronotopes are developed by Bakhtin in their genealogical emergence in changes in the novel, its clear that it is not a hierarchic ordering, but rather a kind of holographic interplay among them, where the more centripetal ones of narrative are countered by the more dialogical manner of story in conceptions of time and space that are more centrifugal.

ARCHITECTONIC DIALOGISM: Its defined as the interanimation of three societal discourses: cognitive, aesthetic, and ethic. The cognitive architectonic was invented by Immanuel Kant (1781/1900: 466): "By the term Architectonic I mean the art of constructing a system... Reason cannot permit our knowledge to remain in an unconnected and rhapsodistic state, but requires that the sum of our cognitions should constitute a system." Bakhtin in (1990) added ethical and aesthetic discourse to Kant's cognitive architectonic. Bakhtin preferred the term "consummation" to construction, and was careful to not assume a monophonic, monologic, or mono-languaged system (rather he preferred to look at the unmergedness, the unfinalizability of system, or what I defined above as systemicity. Ethics here is not ethics of conceptions of beauty, but the very notion of answerability. Aesthetics is about how and for whom a given systemicity is consummated. There are no strategy studies or theories of architectonic strategy (exception, Boje, Enríquez, González, & Macías. 2005).

POLYPI DIALOGISM: Polypi is a manner of story at an order of complexity above the separate dialogisms. In polypi there is dialogic interplay between official master-narratives (sign-representation monologisms) and the more dialogic intercourse among respective dialogisms. Polypi, then, is a plurality of dialogisms, in struggle with modernity. The polypi manner of the story forces a Socratic interrogation of modernity. It’s problematic questions of unknowable, unfinalizedness, unmergedness, indeterminacy of systemicity combine with the most problematic question of all the transcendental. At any moment the plurality of dialogic story can degenerate, be reduced to mere plasticity of individual dialogism or just narrative monophonic.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s (1974) adult tale of The Little Mermaid, the transcendental question is raised, as the crude underworld of the sea, comes into an encounter with the human world. The purgatory of sea-foam, and the world of here-after. In my Wilda storytelling, I pick up on what I see as a further problematic, how late (post) modern capitalism tells stories of its own spirituality and religiosity ((Boje, 2005 e, g). Wilda is my grandmother’s name, and my sister and I believe she too was an enchantress, who lived in the wildness. Wilda, the enchantress of the polypi, is a businesswoman, willing to exact a dear price of suffering for a shot at immortality (Boje, 2005 e, g). The fantasy life of corporate storytelling organizations, here and there, does embrace the transcendental, and on the public square, now the marketplace, once again there is an interrogation about ultimate questions. Yet, in a moment, the polypi can self-deconstruct, into separate dialogisms, no longer an encounter of unknowable with knowable, this world, the underworld, and what’s next. Polypi is emergent story complexity antecedent and interactive to transcendental and retrospective sensemaking.

In Andersen’s tale, the enchantress is protected by the Polypi (hydra colony), where she lives and works, selling her mystic potions for a dear price. Bakhtin (1981: 139) says “capitalism brings together people and ideas just as the ‘pander’ Socrates had once done on the market square of Athens.” To me, Wilda brings capitalism onto the market square, where an interrogation can take place. I intend an interrogation of the relation of multiple spiritualities and religiosities to the storytelling of capitalists and their enterprises; how the transcendental is brought into business. Globalization, for example, is quite the evangelical project.

In terms of emerging story, the implication is that each story is socially in motion, relative to sensemaking between bodies (physical, political, social, bodies of ideas, etc.), and to another way of telling (para Holquist, 1990: 20-21). Each dialogism is a systemicity complexity property that is “unfinalizedness [in] its open-endedness and indeterminacy” (Bakhtin, 1973: 43).

Polypi is a manner of story that addresses the struggle of narrative control of story, and more critical counterstory of transcendental business of business escaping its instrumental ethic. The official utopia-narrative is opposed by counterstories exposing transcendental fakery. The plurality of dialogisms becomes a struggle of the phantasmagoric interrogation on the public square (now just a market place), with the legitimating of business in transcendental storytelling. And “life seen in a dream makes normal life seem strange” (Bakhtin, 1981: 122).

For example, McDonald’s has a rich fantasy life, with grotesque characters (burger-headed sheriff, mayor, and child-burglar), and a clown, who in recent years, has an executive office, a seat on the board of directors, and is spokes-clown for the “Go Active” nutrition and fitness global strategy. But also, this clown is a transcendental figure, contemporalized as a savior, as a Christ-like super-hero-representation. And what’s “McDonaldland,” if not the idyllic-netherworld, capitalism descending into the underworld, then born again into the human world, with special powers (spirit representation to sell fast-food). Polypi is a manner of story that invokes the holography of systemicity, with a special role for transcendental as counterstory. As we shall explore in subsequent strategy chapters, the polypi of dialogisms, can be orchestrated quite strategically by storytelling organizations. Yet, our theory and empirical work lags behind what is common practice to so many storytelling organizations, the manipulation of narrative and story.

Polypi manner of story exceeds single dialogic context, subtext and intertext, to invoke transcendental dialogic angles. The polypi manner of story does not replace or nullify monogonic monologic narrative. Dialogized story is interactive with the linear manner of BME narrative. Retrospective narrative generic models (Aristotle’s Poetics, Burke’s Pentad, Turner’s Breach, etc) reconstruct a living story life to be context-free, nuance-free, and no longer generative.

As we address more complexity, the polypi of dialogisms widens, modernity comes into conflict with its banishment of transcendental and reflexivity discourse that is outside of dead forms of narrative. Enlightenment seeks once again to exorcise transcendental from secular ways of telling capitalism, but cannot resist using and exploiting what transcendental can mean to sales and image managment.

Next, I differentiate dialogism from some synonyms, dialogue, debate and dialectic.

DIALOGISM NOT THE SAME AS DIALOGUE, DEBATE, & DIALECTIC

Dialogue, debate, dialectic, and dialogism are types of deliberation in Storytelling Organizations.

Figure 3 – Model of Deliberation Types

Each deliberation mode balances the relationship of narrative to story quite differently. Dialogue privileges the supremacy of consensus-rationality, during every dialogue into a set of monologues. Debate let’s rationalities enter into context. Dialectics has its teleology. Dialogism is especially favorable to the generativity of living story.

DIALOGUE: Dialogue is a type of deliberation most common in organizations, particularly corporate ones. Dialogue in hierarchical organizations is often quite monologic, a single unitary logic, a top-down narration, a let’s do consensus, and all agree to sign up for the winning logic. The dialogue is a pretense. The bureaucratic and managerialist dialogue easily becomes a monologue, reducing and controlling difference into monologic-consensus, or just going along with some powerful official logocentrism, or some form of groupthink. A plethora of points of view that could emerge is reduced to a narrative line. Narrative control is strongest in what passes for dialogue in the administratively ordered world. In the administered world, narrative-control works top-down while story-liberation is kept from working bottom-up. That is why we need to look at the interplay of narrative and story in dialogue. Narrative, as a form of control, regulates and legislates sensory input, with mental models petrified by a build up of many encounters where one learns it is better to conform to narrative expectancy of one’s boss, to pretend dialogue, and just ape the monologue expected. The plus side is that narrative expectancy allows one to predict the acts and intention of others’ speech acts (Bruner, 1986: 49). Dialogues in most corporate circumstances cannot satisfied the dialogic conditions of “multi-voiced polyphony” (Bakhtin, 1973: 293).

DEBATE: Debates are two logics, each with grounds, warrants, and claims; each trying to subdue or out do the other one. Debates are staged and facilitated, more accurately described as a battle of monologues. The parties are expected to give grounds, warrants and claims, to make narrative truth-claims entirely explicit. Walter Fisher’s (1984, 1985a, b, 1989) Narrative Paradigm Theory (NPT) is a kind debate-deliberation, to conform story into a narrative search for veracity, an obsession with falsification. For Fisher, there are two tests of ‘narrative rationality’: probability and fidelity of stories that gird decisions about to be made, or already made.

• Probability is defined as people’s inherent storylistening skill or competence in evaluating stories and storytellers for fidelity. Is this story probable or some kind of lie or fantasy?

• Fidelity is defined as storylisteners comparing and evaluating what they hear in someone else’s story against their own similar experiences and belief systems in a search for coherence.

Gertrude Stein (1935) made the point that as people listen to stories, they also tell stories of themselves to themselves. But the research question is, do the storylisteners, telling as they are listening, just wander in their reflexivity and imagination or are they doing narrative-fidelity (seeking coherence of probability & fidelity)? Reducing story animals’ living story to narrative-rationality, fails to investigate that question. We who study narrative in relation to story need to look at how reflexivity-transcendental is accomplished by story and narrative animals. For example Bruner (1986: 5) asks, “Do all readers assign multiple meanings to stories” or ask “what kinds of category systems” they fit into to become narratives? Are stories imprisoned in what Bruner calls “an instantiation of [narrative] models we carry in our minds” (p. 7, bracketed addition, mine). If readers are placing story into one or more alternate narratives models then it is an act of story control, a domestication of the storytelling animal. Narrative then becomes a powerful tool for organization story control, to regulate sensemaking, to shape social reality along official lines.

NPT is a mental representation narrative-mirror-model that is reductionistic of storytelling. Fisher argues that people as ‘storytelling animals’ attempt to tell a ‘credible,’ ‘comprehendible,’ and ‘coherent’ stories [more accurately narratives] in a ‘storytelling world’ that is overrides storylistening with narrative-formulae-evaluation competencies. To me, there is a double move by NPT, first to impose narrative-form-coherence onto story stuff, and second to reduce reflexivity to model seeking. According to NPT people (storytelling animals) tell stories by giving them narrative-mental-situation-models of people, objects, actions (events), and places (locations).

To me, Fisher’s NPT is incommensurate with Walter Benjamin’s (1936) theory of the death of story competences. Benjamin theorizes that such competencies as subjunctivizing, being able to fill in the blanks, have eroded significantly due to the over-expository explicitness of narrative in the novel and in the rise of information processing. Storytelling for Benjamin in a craft, one that grew up in the pre-capitalist craft world of people sitting around telling and listening to stories while they did their sewing, weaving, or sea-faring crafts. When late modern capitalism imposed workers silence and division of labor as ways to enhance performativity of production, the arena for workers practicing the ancient arts and secrets of storytelling, especially generativity, was destroyed.

NPT purports to be an alternative to [monological] rationality of Critical Thinking models. NPT elements are called ‘good reasons’ storytellers give for actions and decisions. These are not the same as grounds, claims and warrants. Fisher’s theory is nevertheless one of ‘narrative rationality.’ NPT does not distinguish between (1) storyable and unstoryable events, such as trauma, or (2) the differences, and possible retrogression of storytelling and storylistening competencies, or (3) the implications of polyphony on a world of stories and storytelling animals that have been somewhat domesticated by narrative-control in late modern capitalism.

In sum, while debate uses grounds, warrants, and claims to be narrative order, story, in my view, is richer, has more variety, and generative power because it escapes or ignores knowledge versions of a world presumed to be over-coded in deep structure.

DIALECTIC: Hegelian dialectic is teleology, seeking a logico-rational, or some universal God’s hand in the world order, and ideal type of time categorization, into the linearization of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. For Volosinov (1929/1973: 106) it’s a “dialectical generative process” as multiple contexts come into tension with one another. However, Bakhtin, I believe moved away from dialectic, and preferred a more dialogic conception of deliberation. Ricoeur (1992) takes a different approach to dialectic, proposing that an identity of sameness is dialectic to an identity of difference.

DIALOGIC: Dialogic is fully embodied multi-perspectivity, a generative possibility that some unknown, as yet unannounced direction will emerge, and yet it is not as volatile a deliberation as debate. In the various dialogisms, there is a “zone of dialogical contact” and “intersecting planes” and a “fullness of heteroglossia” (Bakhtin, 1981: 45, 48, 60). It’s about finding arbitrariness in the social order, a plurivocality, and multi-perspectivity. It is something that Kafka, Dostoevsky, and sometimes Pirandello, Cervantes, Dante, and Shakespeare could manage. Dialogism refuses coherence, consistency, conciliation, consensus, conformity, compliance, commonality, command, and control. Story is dialogical, a living, human heat fullness.

In sum, the deliberation opportunities of social interaction are different for dialogue, debate, dialectic, and dialogisms.

Collective memory occurs in stylistic dialogism, in textuality, orality, and visuality. It’s the topic of chapter 3.

-----------------------

[1] Bakhtin (1973: 34) used the term, dialogicality, and never used the word ‘dialogism,’ a word invented by Holquist (1990: 15). I use dialogism and dialogic interchangeably to mean dialogicality. Holquist’s (1990) reading is ‘dialogism’ describes Bakhtin’s anti-Hegelian dislike for Absolute Spirit dialectic. Bakhtin preferred neo-Kantianism more “speculative epistemology” Holquist, p. 17), a move from Newtonian to Einsteinian worldview (i.e. relativity of time/space).

[2] See STORI http:

[3] BBC News Online 2003

[4] Go to McDonald’s France website, click “Entrez”, then “Tout Sur McDo” menu, for “McStyle” page;

[5] Bakhtin (1981) says there are infinite types of chronotopes (he stops cataloguing in his review of 20th century novels, so more work is left to be done). The first nine are the major types of chronotopes. What I include as the 10th is an example of the minor type.

[6] McLibel

[7] They are often called ‘story consultants,’ but they more accurately should be called ‘narrative consultants’ since they are paid to enact narrative control, not to unleash dialogic story processes.

[8] See my web site at

[9] See

[10] See McDonaldland in Wikipedia Encyclopedia

[11] See McSupper image at or at

[12] The Everyday chronotope is of meeting in travel adventure, is different from the 10th chronotope of meeting in salon or gothic castle that is more knitted into expectations about domination, plastic setting, etc. that loom over the kinds of conversation in 10th, as opposed to meeting in travel; the two chronotopes are dialogic to each other.

[13] See images/store/LICO/chapters/784.pdf and

-----------------------

POLYPHONIC DIALOGISM

STYLISTIC DIALOGISM

POLYPI

DIALOGISM

CHRONOTOPIC DIALOGISM

ARCHITECTONIC DIALOGISM

-

+

Ritzer

1993

Kroc

1977

Boas & Chain

1976

Love

1986

Leidner

1993

Witzel

1994

Ritzer

2002

Westman 1980

Schlosser

2001

Reiter 1991 Leidner

1993

Kincheloe

2002

Watson 1997

Alfino, Caputo &Wynyard, 1998

Talwar

2002

I. Rationalist

Grotesque

II. Post-Rationalist

Critical

III. Rationalist/Critical

IV. Post-Rationalist

Grotesque

+

1976 1993 2004

DIALOGUE (that becomes monologic rational consensus)

DEBATE (working out grounds, warrants & claims)

DELIBERATION TYPES:

DIALECTICS (thesis-antithesis-synthesis teleology)

DIALOGISMS (generativity)

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download