Story Escaping Narrative Prison - NMSU College of Business



STORYTELLING ORGANIZATION

© London: Sage, for release Jan 2007

David M. Boje

Dec 25, 2005; Revised May June 1 2006

INTRODUCTION

STORY ESCAPING NARRATIVE PRISON

Over two millennia, Aristotelian narrative has been prison to emergent story. It’s cages so maniacal that researchers relying on narratology or folkloristics do not know much about emergent story, and much less about the dynamic complexity of Storytelling Organization. Terms like ‘retrospective sensemaking narrative’ are used without precision. What if there is not one but at least five types of sensemaking interacting the Storytelling Organization to constitute dynamic complexity? The purpose of this book is to look at the interactivity of emergent story and four control narratives.

Figure I.1: Types of Narrative and Story Sensemaking

What are the prison bars? We are deprived of mystery when emergent story is confined to Aristotle’s (350 BCE) poetic control narrative cage of nine bars wedged in concrete:

• Bar 1: Since Aristotle control narrative reduces emergent story to linear developmental chronology of beginning, middle, and ending. In real life emergent story is partially (tersely) told, more out of control.

• Bar 2: Control Narrative lust of wholeness sensemaking is easily appropriated as a managerial tool to stamp out emergent story.

• Bar 3: Control narrativists denude emergent story complexity into simplistic control narrative plot-frameworks (romantic, tragic, satiric, & comedic).

• Bar 4: Control narrative requires emergent story to be coherent. Life, however, is mysterious, with incoherence.

• Bar 5: Control narrative privileges oral story over written (& visual), making oral originary in Western metaphysics. Bakhtin overturns this with dialogism, and Derrida with deconstructive supplementarity.

• Bar 6: Control narrative fixates on one stage, is diametrically opposed to nonlinear, fragmented distributed collective emergent story across simultaneous stages, where actors and spectators become Boalian spect-actors.

• Bar 7: Control narrative is obsessed with wholeness, whereas emergent story is unfinished, unmerged, and never-ending mystery.

• Bar 8: Control narrative is elite. ‘Story’ is what ‘folk’ do. Point of fact, people story wildly emergently more than highbrow narrative prissiness.

• Bar 9: Control narrativists treat emergent story as object, to interrogate some abstracted reification, such as culture, or the newest rage, tacit-knowledge asset.

My thesis is each discipline in organization studies has caged the dynamics of emergent story in its particular narrative prison bars. Complexity is the in-between. The thesis of this book is emergent story is imprisoned by lust for control narrative in the dynamic complexity of the Storytelling Organization.

TYPES OF SENSEMAKING

“In organizations, storytelling is the preferred sense-making currency of human relationships among internal and external stakeholders” (Boje, 1991: 106). In the “Storytelling Organization,” emergent story is shaped, challenged, revised and reinterpreted by fragmented or whole narratives. People unfold dynamic complexity in conversations, in the stylistics of annual reports, ads, and architecture, and so on.

How does story/narrative complexity work? Four kinds of narrative control sensemaking interanimate, imprisoning a fifth, the sensemaking of emergent story. Storytelling Organization Complexity is defined as the interplay of these five ways of telling.

Figure I.1 introduces this new dynamic complexity theory of four-sensemaking ways narrative controls a fifth, emergent story. S( is here-and-now. Emergent storying and restorying rarely breaks out of narrative prison. S1 and S2 are retrospective. S3 and S4 are reflexivity antecedent to retrospection. Do not read as 2 by 2. The five interact, and can be in any order or combination. The important interaction is in-between. Collective narrating is a dynamic process of incremental narrative control and refinement of emergent stories of events. The story complexity model is five ways of sensemaking (retrospective and reflexivity, part and whole) that control emergence.

There is ontology of narrative control and story. There is on-going emergent storying and restorying of more socially accepted, reified, narrative accretions. Emergent story nothingness is in-between-the-lines of narrative lines’ beingness. And vice versa. Sometimes story is nothingness of the lie or misplaced coherence of narrative. One is background to the other.

Narrative and story is defined quite differently across the Social Sciences. I summarize definition differences in Figure I.2 based upon sources located at the end of this introduction (Table I.1). It’s time to get explicit about the play of differences of retrospective sensemaking control narratives, antecedent (unitymaking) frames, antecedent (a priori) dialogic manner of narrative varietymaking, and what is being and nothing of story emergence.

What follows is a content analysis of five classes of definitions of control narrative and emergent story. These introduce my general theory of dynamic complexity of finalized (whole) and unfinalized (part/fragment) control narrative interpenetrating emergent story.

Figure I.2: Summary Definitions of Emergent Story and Control Narratives

Rather than emergent story versus control (ante) narrative, my contributive idea is they are co-present and hybrid, mutually opposing forces of organizing, S( to S4.

S(EMERGENT STORY SENSEMAKING

In the moment, a landscape unfolds, here-and-now in the many ways of telling that are very telling. S( is antecedent an a priori emergent story intuition. S( is a middle ground in between other ways of narrative control sensemaking. Emergence, in the moment, is exemplified in Gertrude Stein’s (1931, 1935, 1998) distrust of developmental narrative, Jean Paul Sartre’s (1943/1956) being in relation to nothing, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1968, 1973, 1981, 1984) dialogic manner of story.

Stein (1931, 1935, 1938) was first to break with Aristotelian narrative prison, in looking at here-and-now, and the unfolding present, at diverse landscape of telling. Stein’s work rejects development sequence retrospection and obsession with coherence. Her focus in 1935 series of three lectures against narrative given at University of Chicago on ways of telling in the moment, anticipates antenarrative and dialogic work in S4, but is somehow different. Story emergence is opening a space in time to be aware of the continuous present. She locates story in-between teller and listener. In emergent story, the hearer fills in blanks in-between-the-lines, the pauses and silences, with story line, context, and implication. Stein argues, “Anybody can stop listening to any telling of anything” (Stein, Narration, Lecture 3, 1998: 340). Many ways of telling and listening to someone or something are telling (Stein, 1998: 342). And, “There are many ways to tell what we tell” (Stein, 1998: 340). She asks, “What is the use of telling a story since there are so many and everybody knows and tells so many… So naturally what I wanted to do in my plays was what everybody did not always know or always tell” (Stein, 1931: 40). Stein wrote over 70 plays developed her move away from what she called lust for cohesion (Ryan, 1984).

Others are getting at the interplay of story emergence and narrative control. White and Epston’s (1990) pioneering work in narrative family therapy looks at ways a dominant narrative is renarrated in relation to am emergent way of telling a new story. The new story is composed of narrative fragments, un-cohered in dominant narrative. Collective renarrating is a dynamic process of incremental refinement of emergent story of suddenlys and the on-going reinterpretation of more sacred control narratives.

Sartre (1943/1956) does not use the terms story or narrative. Yet his philosophy of Being and Nothingness is about emergent storying and restorying, and control narratives. Emergent storying brings out what ‘is’ in-between-the-lines of received narrative lines. Control narrative is a prison with four cells for emergent story.

S1 RETRO WHOLE NARRATIVE SENSEMAKING

The first grouping of definitions follows Aristotle (350 BCE) imposing coherent narratives over what constitutes ‘proper’ story. The retro-narrative definitions come closest to recalling Aristotle (350 BCE) work on Poetics.

Narrative requires "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" (Aristotle, 350 BCE: 1450b: 25, p. 233). It’s the ancient definition of coherent narrative whole.

Most scholars have misread Karl Weick’s (1995) seminal work on retrospective sensemaking theory as being about story variety-making complexity. In fact it is about using inductive narrative control coherence over emergent story. The general misreading of sensemaking is somewhat understandable as Weick uses the terms story and narrative interchangeably. He has other ways of sensemaking (such as enactment, S3), in other writings, more about improvisational sensemaking. However, Weick’s (1995) specific definitions about retrospective sensemaking narrative are always rooted in control, not story-emergence. Weick’s chapter is not about what I call narrative “varietymaking” (S2 & S4).

Weick’s definition fragments are about Aristotelian-coherence of whole narrative in acts of retrospective control sensemaking (Weick, 1995: 127-129). Weick is no managerialist. Yet his approach is widely used in managerial consulting. Managerialist uses coherence for monologic-narrative control over socially constructed emergent stories. Managerialist story consultants as we will review in Part III, frequently cite Weick (1995), but not his more emergent theory of enactment (1967). The point is retro whole narrative sensemaking control dominates management and organization studies, and blinds theory and practice to other ways of telling.

As this is an important claim, lets pause for a more detailed reading. As Weick (1995: 127) put it “people think narratively rather than argumentatively or paradigmatically” and “organizational realties are based on narration.” Sensemaking retrospection is control. It serves to “impose a formal coherence on what is otherwise a flowing soup”; “the experience is filtered” by “hindsight” (p. 128). Retrospective narrative coherence for Weick (1995: 128) is “typically searching for a causal chain.” It is therefore an explicitly Aristotelian formulation of narrative-coherence. Weick’s specifies “the plot follows – either the sequence beginning-middle-end or the sequence situation-transformation-situation. But sequence is the source of sense” (p. 128). Weick’s (1995: 129) narrative retrospective-sensemaking-coherence is where “sequencing is a powerful heuristic for sensemaking” knowledge.

While the entire sensemaking book is not about control, the section on narrative sensemaking is precisely that. Weick is writing about Perrow’s (1986) third-order managerial control, i.e., retrospectively shared values and meanings. Weick’s retrospective narration is the “propensity for inductive generalization [of] noteworthy experiences” that becomes an “empirical basis” where “people try to make the unexpectable, hence manageable” (p. 127, bracketed addition mine).

Emergent stories persists an instant or so, then narrative linear form of beginning, middle, and end, imprison them. Weick cites Orr’s (1990) research on stories exchange among Xerox service people, my work on (Boje, 1991) stories for sensemaking among office supply people, and Wilkins’ (1983) story-control piece (which I will argue is about narrative-control not story). My own research in 1991 is about terse retro narrating without the coherence of beginning, middle, and end, and how emergent story moments are retrofitted with some one else’s narrative expectation. Wilkin’s did not study story in situ. He filled out survey scales as he did interviews or retellings. Orr’s study looked at how worker knowledge got appropriated.

My detailed reading of Weickian sensemaking as narration control finds that inductive retrospection leaves open the important possibility that there is a second form of knowledge that is deductive and non-retrospective (i.e. reflective S3 & S4). Weick is no David Hume empiricist. Hume insists that all knowledge arises from the five senses, retrospectively constructing experience into finalized causal chains. What if there is inductive and antecedent reflective-knowledge in acts of thinking, in thoughts that arise from an internal sense of apprehending and apperception, not just perceiving that is unfinalized? I will argue that the two modes of knowledge (retrospective & reflexivity) are interactive.

Weick is not alone in walking in Aristotle’s shadow. I have this ongoing debate with two organization folklore narrativists: Yannis Gabriel and Barbara Czarniawska. For my colleague Gabriel (2000) a ‘proper’ story must have Aristotelian narrative coherence: beginning, middle, and end. As well for my colleague Czarniawska’s early work (1997, 1998), narratives must have a casual sequence, a plot. Plot is grasped in retrospective sensemaking. Joanne Martin et al (1982: 255; Martin, Feldman, Hatch & Sitkin, 1983: 439) is similar. Their focus is on finalized imitatives of action, with wholeness of beginning, middle and end.

I owe Gabriel a debt. He got me thinking about the ontology of story. When is story not story, just a boring narrative? More important, when is story nothingness? Gabriel (2000: 19-21) says my tersely told “you know the story” is a “narrative deskilling,” not a “proper” story, with plot. As folklorist, Gabriel works in tradition of assembling full collections of whole stories, as they are in his version of “organization folklore.” I say “his version” because, I too study story from “organization folklore.” Instead of story collecting, I observe emergent story existentialism in situ, in the moment of becoming and being. Gabriel (2000:20) charges that I lost something in my terse-telling inquiry into Storytelling Organization:

One suspects that Boje is driven to this conclusion because his commitment to viewing organizations as storytelling systems does not square with the anaemic quality of the stories he collected. Yet, in taking this extreme position (and the strength of Boje’s argument lies in its extremism), Boje loses the very qualities that he cherishes in stories, performativity, memorableness, ingenuity, and symbolism.

He refers to Boje (1991), an eight-month ethnography of tersely-coded, fragmented, and emergent co-constructed, variety of ways of telling in an office supply organization.

Let’s move beyond he’s right, I’m wrong argumentation (or vice versa). Gabriel is correct, not every narrative is story. I decided to treat fragmented, collectively distributed, terse-telling as its own manner of control narrative sensemaking (S2).

Like Gabriel, Czarniawska initially privileged the folkloric and narratology position, setting narrative-plot-cohesion over story: “A story consists of a plot comprising causally related episodes that culminate in a solution to a problem” (Czarniawska, 1997: 78). Elsewhere, “For them to become a narrative, they require a plot, that is, some way to bring them into a meaningful whole” (1998: 2). In 2004, she decided there was a place in narrative theory for my terse-telling (S2).

This first narrative cage imprisons story demanding story be coherent, be an Aristotelian whole with beginning, middle, and end. Story must be developmental, linear. Story must be monovocal, told by one teller, in one text. Story must be very neat and tidy. There are other ways of narrative and story sensemaking that interact with this way.

S2 RETRO PARTS NARRATIVE SENSEMAKING

S2 is the struggle of official retrospective narratives of managerial control with counter-narrative fragments and sometimes, emergent story, distributed throughout most organizations. In S2 sensemaking, whole narrative by retrospective sensemaking coherence is illusion, since emergent story is unfinished, partially told or written. Terse narrative resides in the nothingness between teller and listener. It’s between the co-telling collectively, and contextual hermeneutic spiral of sensemaking. Whole and part narratives interplay with emergent, marginalized counterstories to constitute the complexity of the Storytelling Organization. Narrative sequencing of retrospective sensemaking is interrupted by renarration in fragments and unfinalizability of narrative-varietymaking. S2 is also its own form of localized control. One seeks the approval of localized power centers, of one’s ways of telling. S2 can be highly terse, fragmented, varietymaking (deviation-amplifying) retrospection. Yet, it is sensemaking with control.

The hallways and offices pulsate with a story life of here-and-now richer and more vibrant than the organization’s narratively retrospected turbulent environment. Even in stable environments, narrative is highly variable, told in different versions, in fragments and code to different stakeholders. I told a terse retrospective version of “the couch story”, more accurately, a swirl of ‘retro narrative fragments’ (Boje, 1991: 106-107):

Only the chief executive officer (CEO) and a few executives may be told that the sales manager was fired for drunken indiscretions with a saleswoman on the CEO's couch; vendors only hear that the manager did not get on with the CEO; customers learn that Fred resigned; middle management suspects an affair with Mildred.

Those in the know, would just say, “Couch story!” The ontological being of the retro narrative fragment implied what ‘those in the know’ knew to be in-between-the-lines. There was no whole story. Fred did not exactly resign. He was given the option of being fired. Executives hoped vendors and customers would not learn more sorted details. They did.

Each performance is never the completed or whole story of beginning, middle, and end. Storytelling keeps raveling and unraveling process of confirming and discounting emergent story. There’s always another interpretation, becoming woven into the narrative control fabric. Its narrative weave is unweaving as fast as it is being woven. There’s always more to be told. Another interpretation becomes folded into institutional memory, and collective forgetting.

I view my early work (Boje, 1991, 1995) as more about S2 than S1. It’s what Bakhtin (1981) refers to as polyphonic dialogicality. Throughout the book I abbreviate dialogicality to dialogism. According to Holquist (1990: 15), “dialogism” is a word Bakhtin never used. Bakhtin did talk about the “polyphonic manner of the story” (Bakhtin, 1981: 60). My theory is it’s a dialogic relation of emergent story to received part or whole control narratives. The relation of story to narrative is ‘heteroglossia.’ It’s the play of centripetal to centrifugal, that’s thoroughly “dialogized” (Bakhtin, 1981: 14, 273).

We can also interpret the interplay of whole and partial retrospection with pre-narrative (or pre-story) as a hermeneutic spiral. For Ricoeur (1984: 150), the grasp of plot comes out of pre-narrative shared definitions of symbols and language, to make such emplotment intelligible. The hermeneutic spiral is sensemaking that extends from (1st mimesis) of pre-narrative (or pre-story) definitions to (2nd mimesis) emplotment (grasping together characters and a chain of events) into a coherent-narrative, and a (3rd mimesis) post-narrative sharing of plot interpretation that becomes the social ground of the next round of pre-narration (see Boje, 2001, Plot chapter).

Czarniawska, Barry and Elmes (1997: 431), and myself (Boje, 1991: 111), following Ricoeur’s hermeneutic, have a less finalized, less whole definition that is more about the hermeneutics of retro sensemaking.

Czarniawska (2004: 38) acknowledges my early study (Boje, 1991) as reason to change from her earlier S1 definitions of narrative to S2. She looks at the kinds of interrupted and unfinalized acts of narration that are ubiquitous in complex organizations. She says, Boje found “storytelling in contemporary organizations hardly follows the traditional pattern of a narrator telling a story from the beginning to end in front of an enchanted and attentive audience” (Czarniawska, 2004: 38). I thank her for that. Czarniawska’s (2004 38) developed the idea of “petrified story,” in reaction to an accusation that my colleagues and I made. I call it (S1) control narrative whole. We apparently said narrative researchers were apt to treat stories as found artifacts. She put it this way “… every narrative becomes new with each retelling, and the ‘petrification’ of stories is not the result of the myopia of the researcher but of intense stabilizing work by the narrators” in organizations.” I agree. A few emergent stories narratively petrify.

Barry and Elmes (1997) look at monophonic narratives of strategy schools, and suggest a more polyphonic narrative direction. In part II of the book, I will devote several chapters to unfolding the implications of the interplay of narrative control and emergent story for the field of strategy. For now, the point is that polyphony is a form of local control over the ‘proper.’

S3 REFLEXIVE WHOLE NARRATIVE SENSEMAKING

S3 narrative sensemaking is antecedent, or a priori to S1 or S2 retro five-sense empiric sensemaking. S3 is sensemaking for control over socially constructed definitions of the situation, arising before retrospection. S3 is unifying transcendental holistic cognition and intuition that is a priori to retro sensemaking. S3 can be social control or varietymaking of individual reflexivity. S3 narratives are about cognitive maps, symbolic constellations, archetypes, and metaphorizations.

Keep in mind ways of sensemaking are co-present. Reflexivity interplays with retrospection. In hermeneutics, S3 is what is necessary for language and shared meaning, for retrospection into emplotment to occur. S3 can interact with some kind of retrospection, but not always. S3 may be thought of as spiritual, as just ways of reflecting on ideas, or as what gets distilled from experience, into cognitive frames applied to next round of experiences.

Immanuel Kant’s (1781/1900) ‘transcendental dialectic and George Herbert Mead’s (1932, 1934, 1936, 1938) ‘I-me’ dialectic inform what I mean by S3 reflecting-reflection.

Kant’s (1781/1900: 4, 15, 466) transcendental approach is the first to break with the developmental narrative of retrospective sensemaking. Kant’s (1781/1990: 4) move is to define acts of pure transcendental logic reasoning that are a priori to perceptions of the five senses. It is transcendental and antecedent to retrospective sensemaking knowledge. It’s a “supersensible sphere, where experience affords us neither instruction nor guidance” (p. 4). Second Kant develops a transcendental aesthetics in which conceptions of space and time are a priori to sensemaking in ways that are unitymaking. Transcendental (aesthetic) conceptions of space and time are not derived directly from retrospective reflections upon outward experiences.Instead of a timeline, we are able to set past, present, and future side-by-side. Instead of spatial continuity, we are able to set local and global side-by-side. This is not mere empiric sensory aesthetic retrospection. And there is a relation to story. Kant (1781/1900: 67) explicitly theorizes what I call S3 mode of knowledge as a priori deductive apperception in story: the “unity of the theme in a play, an oration, or a story.” Kant (1781/1900: 27) illustrates: we do not know hell by sight (sensations of color), hearing (sounds of thee screams), reeling (sensations of heat), smelling (the rotting flesh), or tasting (the flames). Hell is unknown to us by our sense experience. Time, as well for Kant (p. 28) “is not an empirical conception” and there are a multiplicity of temporal conceptions beyond the kind of retro sequencing or linear-succession by the five senses that Weick (1995: 128-129) frames.

Mead’s theory is a different dialectic. In acts of reflection on internalized Others is a form of social control. People reflect on Generalized Others, who they imagine gaze their communicative interactions. Those Others, Mead calls the ‘Me’ in relation to the ‘I.” Mead presents use with a model of reflexivity, a classic dialectic of ‘I’ and ‘Me.’ There is an internalization of many Generalized Others (‘Me’s’), such as boss, unit, organization, community, environment, society, global, etc.

We can apply Mead’s theory to narrative. Narrating is social. One cannot just narrate anything. One narrates inside the prison of internalized others. In communicative interaction, storytellers are self-conscious and sometimes unconscious about the social “Me” they internalize narrative control. Reflexivity is always embedded in emotion, in feelings, in fantasy, and in imagination.

There are several narrative definitions that seem to follow what Kant and Mead propose as reflexivity. Selznick’s (1957: 151) approach to strategy narrative, seems to take a more conservative position. He anticipates Polkinghorne’s (1988: 36) definition of narrative as parts and wholes. S3 can also be Weickian enactment frames or Ricoeurian reflexivity of narrative-hermeneutics. Weick’s (1969) looks at enactment sensemaking, such as frames of meaning that are a priori. Boyce (1997: 107) defines story in a way that accentuates the antecedent inter-symbolic relationships.

Finally, Kant’s transcendental cognizing is not the same as what is taken to be transcendental in more New Age conceptions, such as Wilber’s (1996) four-quadrant framework. Kant’s apperception is a way to make metaphysics more rigorous. Landrum and Gardner (2005) strike a middle ground in positing that corporate strategy is increasingly looking for transcendental logics that incorporate deliberation on Wilber’s four quadrants.

S4 REFLEXIVE PARTS NARRATIVE SENSEMAKING

S4 in Bakhtin’s work is all about the dialogisms beyond just (S3) polyphonic dialogism. S4 is about parts, about unfinalizedness and unmergedness. In dialogism there is a move beyond “systematic monological philosophical finalizedness” (1973: 26). S4 is the varietymaking of storying and restorying. Yet, here too is a form of social control. Bakhtin’s “Dialogic manner of the story” (1981: 60) is backgrounded by control narrative. “Narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid an unshakable monological framework” (1973: 13).

I originated antenarrative theory (Boje, 2001: 4). In antenarrative theory, collective antenarrating is an interaction of pre-story with a bet that transformation will occur from a fledgling. Antenarrative is a form of varietymaking that is counterposed by narrative forces of coherence (variety-reduction). Antenarratives are unmerged parts and unfinalized, maybe never to be wholes in dynamic multi-level dialogic plurality. Bruno Latour (1996: 118) argues there is a difference between the linear narrative diffusion model (narratives that erupt fully formed & whole in the mind of Zeus) and the non-linear whirlwind model of what I call antenarrative.

Studies applying antenarrative definitions include Boje, Rosile, Durant, and Luhman (2004), Collins and Rainwater (2005), and Boje and Rosile (2003a), Boje, Enríquez, González & Macías (2005) architectonic dialogism analysis of McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, Boje and Rhodes’ (2005a, b) dialogism analysis of virtualized leadership, and Boje and Rosile (2006) analysis of ghosts of Sam, haunting Wal-Mart.

Collins and Rainbow (2005) use antenarrative theory to explicitly make a move away from S1 definitions of retro narrative wholes. Collins and Rainbow (2005: 11) observe, “… Gabriel’s analysis suggests that Boje’s terse fragments of ‘antenarrative; sensemaking are better understood in terms other than those reserved for storytelling… Disputing Boje’s reservations regarding plots and direction, therefore, Gabriel insists that (properly so-called) stories build on ‘poetic’ qualities, and so, depend upon plots, embroidery and embellishment.” I agree Gabriel that story is something other than narrative. I propose that story emergence is opposed by the lust for control narrative.

Bakhtin’s (1973: 4) “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness and the genuine polyphony of full-valued voices… plurality of equal consciousness and their world” is one of several dialogisms.

Bakhtin goes beyond Kant, Mead, and Ricoeur in developing the dialogic manner of story interplay with narrative that is beyond S1 or S2 retrospective sensemaking. These interanimate with S3.

Bakhtin went beyond Kant’s cognitive architectonics (S3) to look at the interanimation of cognitive with ethic and aesthetic discourses. Bakhtin moves beyond Kant by positing an architectonics that is not just cognitive logic, but sets this in plurality with aesthetic and ethic discourses. Answerability is a Bakhtinian concept, at the heart of architectonic dialogism. Answerability is defined as the intertextual process of storying and narrating answers to questions raised in past critiques of an organization, or critiques anticipated in critiques telling emergent stories, yet to be written.

Holquist’s (1990) reading is that dialogism describes Bakhtin anti-Hegelian dislike for Absolute Spirit dialectic. Bakhtin preferred neo-Kantianism more “speculative epistemology” (Holquist, 1990: 17). Dialogism overcomes binary opposition of signifier/signified, text/context, self/other, etc, in order to look at an Einsteinian version of relativity. Bakhtin’s work in heteroglossia and the interanimation of multiple dialogisms anticipates Derrida’s play of differences. Dialogism predates Derrida’s difference and de-centered discourse. In Lyotard (1979/1984), as well as Foucault (1977a, b), S4 is the multiplicity of interacting discourses. And these intersecting gazes are their own form of control.

If we speak in complexity terms, S3 is polyphonic dialogism, but when we look to other dialogisms, such as stylistics, chronotopes, and architectonics, another property of complexity is realized. It is what I call Polypi, defined as the dialogism of dialogisms. And this level of narrative complexity is its own form of control. It is an intertextual control that sets one dialogism in relation to the others. Again, we cannot just narrate anyway we wish. Narrating is a social act.

SITUTATING CONTRIBUTIONS

When is story not a narrative? Often story and narrative are the same. This book is about when they are different.

Emergent story is not-yet in what I call the Narrative Prison! Once in control narrative prison, story and narrative are inseparable, identical. Emergent story is defined as sensemaking outside, in-between, and interactive with control narratives. Control narrative was once upon a time, emergent story. This book is about ways emergent story interplays with and becomes control (ante) narrative. Control narrative is defined as either retrospective or reflexivity, whole or part sensemaking.

Emergent story interplays with the complexity properties among four control narratives. This book contributes a new way to look at emergence and complexity in what I call the Storytelling Organization. I first defined “Storytelling Organization” as "collective storytelling system in which the performance of stories is a key part of members' sense-making and a means to allow them to supplement individual memories with institutional memory" (Boje, 1991a: 106). I contribute an amendment. I redefine “system” in the Storytelling Organization definition, as systemicity.

Systemicity is defined as unmergedness and unfinalizability of storytelling organizations, their incompleteness, multiplicity, dialogism, and heteroglossic dynamism.[1] Systemicity is an improvement upon closed, open, and organic system theory writing with its monologic, monovocality, and mono-languagedness assumptions.

In Part II, this book addresses how Systemicity is precisely the upper levels of Kenneth Boulding’s (1956) complexity properties, where all five ways of sensemaking in Figure I.1 and I.2 interpenetrate. I was Lou Pondy’s student when he wrote his 1976 manifesto for organization studies to go beyond Level 4 open system theory. I contribute a Systemicity Complexity Model (SCM) the interplay of nine systemicity properties in the interplay of control narratives and the emergent story. The lower ones are framework, mechanistic, control, open, and organic are simple control narratives. The more dynamic narrative control is image, symbol, network, and transcendental more directly interplay with story emergence.

An important point must be emphasized. Systemicity Complexity Model (SCM) differentiates complexity properties of systemicity of control narrative varietymaking and convergence from emergent story. I think one errs in saying complexity is emergence. I will say complexity dynamics are among control narratives, be they parts pretending wholeness, or reflexive or retrospective. It is there composite dynamics that is the context of emergent story. This fits well with Ralph Stacey’s (1996, 2006) work on emergence as produced in local, produced and produced by global patterns of interacting agents behavior.

I make a contribution to strategy in Part II. Henry Mintzberg et al (1999, 2003) identify ten schools of strategy. Graham Astley (1984) identifies four schools of strategy. Barry and Elmes (1997) looked at how several of the schools use narrative strategy. SMC contributes to strategy by theorizing that the schools are dialogic and cumulative rather than one displacing others. Related, to unravel strategy school narrative dialogism, I must reform the Strategy Schools. In reading the exemplar-writers, I find they are often incorrectly assigned to the wrong schools. And I find that many strategy narrative practices by corporations are not addressed at all by traditional Strategy Schools paradigm. Boulding’s more dynamic orders of complexity (image, symbol, network, & transcendental) are missing altogether in the field of strategy, as well as in narrative strategy theory.

I make a contribution to change in Part III. Organization change has been studied as story and narrative. Story consulting is a billion dollar industry that has not been researched very rigorously. The result is story practice is invaded by gurus and well-intended professional storytellers, offering solutions, without basis in research. For 13 years I was editor of Journal of Organizational Change Management. I led the way in providing a space for theory and research on story change and consulting. My contribution here is to theorize the interplay of narrative control and story emergence. I call it the 5 D’s Model. Demonstrative story emergence is imprisoned in four narrative control consulting practices: Dialogs of positivity, Debates among rivals, Dialectics of ‘I-we’, and Dialogisms of the Polypi. Springboard story, more accurately Springboard narrative, Appreciative Inquiry’s positive-only narratives, and Peter Senge’s positive-only dialogs dominates the field. Second in popularity is emergent fragments of narrative debate that is controlled in for example, Emery Search Conferences, and Saul Alinsky’s community organizing. Not far behind is the Dialectic approaches of Chris Argyris double loop learning, moving the unconscious to the conscious expression. There is not much Polypi multi-Dialogism consulting. I try to show how the Henri Savall approach to ethnographic consulting in metascripts (mixed up script fragments) can be reformulated. Many practices claim to be about story emergence, but do narrative control in one of the four ways in Figures I.1 and I.2 Sensemaking Model. I theorize the 5 D Model to be a derivative of the Systemicity Complexity Model, and the Five Ways of Sensemaking Model.

In Part IV, I call for research into differences in narrative ways of systemicity, strategy, and change. I do so conventionally in a methodology for studying living stories. I conclude with an autoethnography method. I present an emergent sotyr of my Aunt Dorothy. I study how various Storytelling Organizations, Coroner’s Office, Sheriff’s Department, State Archives, Catholic Church, and Funeral Home constitute a transorganizational network. They each posit control narratives about Aunt Dorothy’s death differently. I am crafting a philosophy of control narrative in relation to emergent story. I discover myself looking back at me in mirrors of retrospection and reflexivity. I discover that in-between-the-lines of my darling emergent story in control over me. I decide to close the book with a meeting of philosophers to discuss my existential crisis. I invite Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, and Jean Paul Sartre to my dialogic circle.

Table I.1: Contrasting Emergent Story with Narrative Control Definitions

|Sources |S( EMERGENT STORY SENSEMAKING - HERE & NOW |

|Stein, 1931: 33 |Asks “what is a story?” and replies, a story is “wild and while”, in the continuous present, with many|

| |ways of telling that are very telling (1931: 33) |

|Sources |S1 RETROSPECTION WHOLE SENSEMAKING NARRATIVE Definitions |

|Aristotle, 350 BCE 1450b: |Narrative requires story to be a proper "imitation of an action that is complete in itself, as a whole|

|25: 233 |of some magnitude... Now a whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end" the definition of |

| |coherent narrative (233).  |

|Czarniawska, 1997: 78, |“A story consists of a plot comprising causally related episodes that culminate in a solution to a |

|1998: vii, 2, 63 |problem” (1997: 78); “[Stories are] texts that present events developing in time according to |

| |(impersonal) causes or (human) intentions.” (1998: vii); “For them to become a narrative, they |

| |[stories] require a plot, that is, some way to bring them into a meaningful whole” (1998: 2, addition |

| |mine); “data that is merely chronologically ordered can be said to constitute… 'a story without a |

| |plot'” (1998: 63) |

|Gabriel, 2000: 5, 239, |“I shall argue not all narratives are stories; in particular, factual or descriptive accounts of |

|19-21 |events that aspire at objectivity rather than emotional effect must not be treated as stories” (5); |

| |“Stories are narratives with plots and characters, generating emotion in narrator and audience, |

| |through a poetic elaboration of symbolic material” (239, italics in original); Boje’s tersely told |

| |“you know the story” is a “narrative deskilling,” not a “proper” story, with plot, preventing full |

| |collections being built in management, as they are in his version of “organization folklore” (19-21) |

|Martin, 1982: 255; Martin, |[Organization] “Stories recount incidents that appear to be drawn accurately from an oral history of |

|Feldman, Hatch & Sitkin, |the organization’s past”; “An organizational story focuses on a single, unified sequence of events, |

|1983: 439 |apparently drawn from the institution’s history.” |

|Weick, 1995: 127-129 |“People think narratively rather than argumentatively or paradigmatically” and “organizational |

| |realties are based on narration”, “the experience is filtered” by “hindsight” (127); “typically |

| |searching for a causal chain”, “the plot follows – either the sequence beginning-middle-end or the |

| |sequence situation-transformation-situation. But sequence is the source of sense” (128); “sequencing |

| |is a powerful heuristic for sensemaking” (129) |

|Source |S2 RETRO PARTS SENSEMAKING NARATIVE definitions that are varietymaking |

|Barry & Elmes, 1997: 431 |“[Stories are] thematic, sequenced accounts that convey meaning from implied author to implied |

| |reader.” |

|Boje, 1991: 111; |“[A story is] an oral or written performance involving two or more people interpreting past or |

|Czarniawska, 2004: 38 |anticipated experience” (Boje, 111); |

| |“Boje” found “storytelling in contemporary organizations hardly follows the traditional pattern of a |

| |narrator telling a story from the beginning to end in front of an enchanted and attentive audience” |

| |(Czarniawska , 2004: 38) |

|Ricoeur, 1984: 150 |“A story describes a sequence of actions and experiences done or undergone by a certain number of |

| |people, whether real or imaginary. These people are presented either in situations that change or act |

| |as reacting to such change. In turn, these changes reveal hidden aspects of the situation and the |

| |people involved, and engender a new predicament which calls for thought, action, or both. This |

| |response to the new situation leads the story towards its conclusion.” |

|Sources |S3 RELEXIVIE WHOLE SENSEMAKING NARRATIVE definitions that are unitymaking |

|Boyce, 1995: 107 |“[S]torytelling (..) [is] a symbolic form by which groups and organizational members construct shared |

| |meaning and collectively centre on that meaning.” |

|Kant, 1781/1900: 4, 15, 466|Transcendental knowledge is a “supersensible sphere, where experience affords us neither instruction |

| |nor guidance” (p. 4); “Transcendental” as “all knowledge which is not so much occupied with objects as|

| |with the mode of our cognition of these objects, so far as this mode of cognition is a priori”(15); |

| |Kant limits architectonic to “Pure Reason”, defines “Architectonic” as “the art of constructing a |

| |system”, which he specifies as a “systematic unity of knowledge” (466) |

|Polkinghorne, 1988: 36 |“[A story] serves as lens through which the apparently independent and disconnected elements of |

| |existence are seen as related parts of a whole.” |

|Selznick, 1957: 151 |Institutional stories are about competences, “efforts to state, in the language of uplift and |

| |idealism, what is distinctive about the aims and methods of the enterprise.” |

|Sources |S4 REFLEXIVE PARTS SENSEMAKING NARRATIVE & ANTENARRATIVE definitions that are varietymaking |

|Bakhtin, 1981: 60; 1973: |“Dialogic manner of the story” (1981: 60); “Narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid an |

|13, 26, 4 |unshakable monological framework” (1973: 13); In dialogism there is a move beyond “systematic |

| |monological philosophical finalizedness” (1973: 26); The plurality of independent and unmerged voices |

| |and consciousness and the genuine polyphony of full-valued voices… plurality of equal consciousness |

| |and their world” (1973: 4). |

|Boje, 2001: 1-4 |“Antenarrative” is defined as “the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted and |

| |pre-narrative speculation, a bet” (1), a very improper story can be transformative (4). |

|Collins & Rainwater, 2005: |Takes a “sideways look” at antenarrative, the local and fragmented understandings of Sears’ |

|16-31 |transformation. Storytelling is not viewed as reflection of organizational reality, but as organic and|

| |vital constituents of organizing (p. 20). |

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

[1] Bakhtin (1981: 152) uses the term “systematicalness” to denote unmerged parts, and unfinalized wholeness of systems; I abbreviated this to “systemicity.”

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

WHOLE

REFLEXIVITY

S1 RETRO WHOLE SENSEMAKING: Control by five-sense retrospection. Story made “proper” narrative, set in control sequence, coherence of beginning, middle, and end. Managerialist Narrative Control of emergent story

S2 RETRO PARTS SENSEMAKING: Control by retrospective sensemaking “improper” parts. Tracing relations among terse narrative fragments. This polyphonic & polylogic localized Control interacts with S4 dialogisms

RETROSPECTIVE

PARTS

S(EMERGENT STORY SENSEMAKING: Here & Now Out-of-Control

Story Emergence

S4 PARTS REFLEXIVE SENSEMAKING: Control by partial, antenarrative dialogisms beyond S2 polyphony; Polypi of Bakhtin’s multiple intertext dialogisms of stylistics, chronotopicities, & architectonic. Derrida’s play of differences.

S3 WHOLE REFLEXIVE SENSEMAKING: Control by unifying frames, mental or symbolic maps, metaphorizations, & archetypes of Mead’s Social Others. Sensemaking is antecedent (a priori) enactment to retrospection S1 or S2

REFLEXIVITY

WHOLE

S( STORY EMERGENCE Here & Now

Stein,

1931

1935,

1998

S4 ANTECEDENT UNFINALIZED

S4 Definition: Control Antenarrative is unmerged parts & unfinalized wholes, in dynamic Polypi of multi-level dialogisms of local varietymaking plurality of storying and restorying.

Exemplars: Bakhtin, 1973, 1981, 1990; Boje, 1995, 2001; Boje, Enríquez, González & Macías, 2005; Boje & Rhodes, 2005a, b

Boje & Rosile, 2003a; Boje, Rosile, Durant, Luhman, 2004; Collins & Rainbow, 2005

ANTECEDENT FINALIZED S3

S3 Definition: Control Narrative Reflection-reflecting is finalized, holistic cognition that is a priori to retro sensemaking, and can be unitymaking.

Exemplars: Kant, 1781/1900; Mead, 1934; Boyce, 1997; Landrum & Gardner, 2005; Polkinghorne, 1988; Selznick, 1957; Weick, 1969

PARTS

S1 Definition: Control Narratives possess coherence sequence of beginning, middle, and end grasped in retrospective sensemaking.

Exemplars: Aristotle, 350 BCE; Czarniawska, 1997, 1998; Gabriel, 2000; Martin et al 1982, 1983; Weick, 1995

RETROSPECTIVE WHOLES S1

S2 Definition: Control Narrative sequencing of retrospective sensemaking is interrupted by renarration in fragments and unfinalizability of varietymaking.

Exemplars: Barry & Elmes, 1997;

Boje, 1991; Czarniawska, 2004; Ricoeur, 1984; White & Epston, 1990

S2 RETRO UNFINALIZED

RETROSPECTIVE

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