Storytelling Organization

2006-06-22T23:34:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Storytelling Organization

I'm David Boje. I have been studying story and narrative in organizations for over 25 years. I want to create a place where we can discuss research and practice of living emergent stories and control narratives in organizations. I look at how emergent stories are in the moment, are for awhile, then become taken over by several types of control narratives.

DIALOG - that is monological pretending to be dialog. These are the kinds of whole narrative retrospections with the coherence of beginning, middle, and end that Aristotle (350 BCE) said must be the proper structure.

DEBATE - We enter the narrative retro control of locality, where one tells in awareness of the rivalry of distributed power groups. The power groups effect local control over what we tell, don't tell, and how we tell. Unlike dialog that is monological hegemony, we enter the realm of polyphonic dialogism (but just this single dialogims) and not the multiple ones below. We are still very much in retrospective, but it's fragmented, distrubuted. It is here I write about antenarratives (fragments of telling that are pre-story, and bets some wholeness could happen).

DIALECTIC = We enter the realm of the psychoanalytic, such as the 'I-We' dialectic that George Herbert Mead (1934) talked about. Here we have the internalized "We's" those persona of our parents, siblings, bosses, etc that rattle about in our head. The "We's" we internalize in socialization are forms of narrative control over what we tell. Immanuel Kant's dialectic of transcendental logic, and his transcendental aesthetic are other forms of reflexivity that are a priori to retrospection.

DIALOGIC - We enter the level of complexity of inter-discourse, and intertextuality. We leave the world of singlular discourse, and enter the world of multi-dialogisms, which I call the "Polypi of Dialogisms." The Polypi is more than just the usual polyphonic dialogism. At this level of complexity, there is also the interteractivity of stylistic dialogism (of multiple stylistics ways of telling in orality and in multiple ways of writing utterances), chronotopic dialogism (the many diverse ways of spatiality and temporality in our tellings that interact), and the architectonic dialogism (the interanimation of cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical discourses, ofter at the societal level).

EMERGENT STORIES - The above four kinds of control narratives surrounder and appropriate emergent stories. Gertude Stein (1934) in her University of Chicago lectures on narrative, talks about the oppression of story that becomes developmental narratives with thos Aristotelian beginning, middle, end structures. She is concerned about the continuous presence, with the improvisation of emergence in the here-and-now. I like her focus on how the many ways of telling are very telling. Her work on landscapes of multiple, simultaneous emergent telling, is for me, a way to step outside of control narrative, if only for a moment.

I have a new book that tells all about the relation of emergent story to control narratives, particularly in what I call Storytelling Organization. Every organization is a Storytelling Organization, but some handle the interplay of emergent story and their ways of control narrative better than others. To me the cutting edge is to figure out how stylistic and other dialogisms are in interplay in ways they practice strategy and change, while coping with multiple forces of systemicity complexity. I use the term systemicity to connote how unfinalized and unmerged organizations are in practice. This is way beyond (level 4) 'open system' thinking. We are in what Kenneth Boulding (1956) called the higher order levels of complexity systemicity, where (level 6) image, (level 7) symbol, (level 8) network, and the (level 9) transcendental rein. Yet our theories of organizations and much of the research is trapped at level 1 (frameworks), level 2 (mechanistic), and level 3 (1st cybernetic control). There is some theory at level 4 (2nd cybernetic open), and attempts at level 5 (organic environmental) but mostly practice is left to struggle with the systemicity complexity of the dialogisms operative at level 6 to level 9 without relevant theory of heteroglossic variety.

So to learn more, send a comment. You can also go on line to http://storytellingorganization.com for more info and charts from the book I am writing about.

Thanks David Boje