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Storytelling in Organizations, Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies

Book in Administrative Science Quarterly · January 2000

DOI: 10.2307/3094897

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 PREFACE

"Once upon a time, a cat drank a bottle of green ink. At once, the cat turned green. ..." Thus is a story
announced. Thus does it command attention, no less firmly than the opening bars of a Beethoven
piano sonata or the first sight of a new mountain peak. Thus does each story hold a promise, a
promise which as every storyteller knows will be tested. An audience which has swallowed the
possibility of cats turning green, does not easily forgive a poor story.

'Story' shares a common etymology with 'history' -- they both derive from a Greek group of words
which include 'histos' meaning 'web', 'histanai' meaning 'to stand' and 'eidenai' meaning 'to know well'.
Storytelling is an art of weaving, of constructing, the product of intimate knowledge. It is a delicate
process, a process which can easily break down, failing to live up to its promise, disintegrating into
mere text. This is why good storytellers and raconteurs have commanded power and esteem. Good
stories are valuable; they can hardly be mass produced. Teachers, orators and demagogues have
long recognised their value -- good stories entertain, explain, inspire, educate and convince. Bad
stories do not merely disappoint; they insult the intelligence of the audience, they undermine
communication and can challenge the very possibility of sensical discourse.

This book is the product of a life-long love of stories and storytelling. Some of my earliest childhood
memories are those of stories, drawn from the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen, Aesop's
fables, Greek myths, legends and folklore. The characters of these stories are as vivid to me today as
when I first encountered them, their plots endlessly fascinating. Much later, I discovered the pleasure
of telling some of those same stories to my children and re-experienced the strong bond that unites
storyteller and audience. Storytelling might not have become part of my academic work, however, had
it not been for three experiences of stories in institutional settings. At fifteen, I traveled to Brazil as an
apprentice aboard a cargo ship. I heard numerous lively stories about life at sea and escapades at
port, as valuable for passing long stretches of time as cigarettes and coffee. Later, as a conscript in
the Greek Navy, I was exposed to constant stories about the sadistic pranks played by different
officers on new recruits. I also witnessed the birth of stories, where different more or less infantile
schemes were put to practice for the main purpose of spawning new stories. Most importantly,
however, it was my research into the catering industry in the 1980s which triggered my fascination
with organizational stories. What I found remarkable were two things. First, on several occasions,
different workers and managers related to me the same story, as though they had agreed to do so
before talking to me. These stories acted as symbolic landmarks in the cultural life of organizations.
Second, that several years after the end of my research, when the names and faces of the people I
interviewed had faded from my memory, what remained were the stories, their plots and the faces of
their characters.
This book is a study of storytelling in organizations. It argues that stories open valuable windows into
the emotional, political and symbolic lives of organizations, offering researchers a powerful instrument
for carrying out research. By collecting stories in different organizations, by listening and comparing
different accounts, by investigating how narratives are constructed around specific events, by
examining which events in an organization's history generate stories and which ones fail to do so, we
gain access to deeper organizational realities, closely linked to their members' experiences. In this
way, stories enable us to study organizational politics, culture and change in uniquely illuminating
ways, revealing how wider organizational issues are viewed, commented upon and worked upon by
their members. The main questions addressed by the book are:

1. How can we study organizations through the stories which are told in them and about them?

2. What do stories tell us about the nature of organizations as distinct forms of human collectivity?

3. What do stories encountered in organizations tell us about the nature and functions of storytelling?

As a lover of stories and storytelling, I have some misgivings about the increasing popularity of stories
in academic research. While I am pleased with the recognition of the value of stories, I am concerned
about the increasing tendency to view every sign, every snippet of conversation, every image and
every cliché as either being a story or telling a story. At times, the concept of story is stretched to
encompass virtually everything that is not a fact. The book is therefore also an attempt to vindicate
stories as a valuable but precarious artifacts and storytelling as an important narrative craft.

Stories and academic research

The relationship between academic research and storytelling has been ambiguous. In many ways,
science has stood as the opposite of storytelling, seeking to replace the lore of 'old wives tales' with
provable generalizations. History itself since Thucidides sought to distinguish its own domain, the
domain of ascertainable facts, of causes and effects, from the mere hearsay, fiction and story which
had fascinated his predecessor, Herodotus. Gradually history and storytelling moved into distinct and
antagonistic terrains. As de Certeau has argued:

Western historiography struggles against fiction. The internecine strife between history and
storytelling is very old. Like an old family quarrel, positions and opinions are often fixed. In the
struggle against genealogical storytelling, the myths and legends of the collective memory, and the
meanderings of the oral tradition, historiography establishes a certain distance between itself and
common assertion and belief; it locates itself in this difference and gives it the accreditation of
erudition because it is separated from ordinary discourse (de Certeau, 1986, p. 200).
For a period in the nineteenth century, storytelling, as the object of inquiry, was of interest only to
folklorists, themselves a marginal group of the scientific community, the majority of whom preferred to
focus on facts rather than stories. In the twentieth century, however, an ever increasing range of
scientific disciplines started to take an interest in stories. Cultural anthropology turned to the stories of
preliterate societies as a vital feature of their cultures and meaning systems. Psychoanalysis found in
the stories told by its patients a route into the world of the unconscious almost as valuable as that
offered by dreams. Even history, the declared adversary of fiction, came to acknowledge oral history,
composed of personal narratives, reminiscences and stories, as part of its remit.

By the end of the century, stories had made a spectacular comeback; far from being marginalized by
their declared enemies, theories, information and facts, stories suffused most popular culture and art,
mass media, advertising and journalism. Curiously enough, science itself has become popularized by
being turned into stories -- stories of intrigue, triumph, betrayal, deception, success against the odds
and so on. Gradually academic research in every field of the human sciences would turn its attention
to stories. In one of his last appearances, 'man' emerged as a storytelling animal, an animal whose
main preoccupation is not truth or power or even pleasure, but meaning. "The human being alone
among creatures on the earth is a storytelling animal: sees the present rising out of a past, heading
into a future; perceives reality in narrative form." (Novak, 1975, pp. 175-6)) Stories emerged as the
great factories of meaning, creating it, transforming it, testing it, sustaining it, fashioning it and
refashioning it. And storytelling, far from being the preserve of old grand-mothers during those long
Nordic winter nights, became ubiquitous -- the craft and trade of artists and advertisers, the stuff of
television talk shows, the preoccupation of lawyers and managers, the unending project of all people
trying to make sense of their daily lives and experiences.

The interest of organizational studies in stories is as belated as it is enthusiastic. Although this interest
is undoubtedly connected with the more general interest in narrative processes in organizations, it
cannot be reduced to that. Organizational stories are currently studied in different ways, for example
as elements of organizational symbolism and culture, as expressions of unconscious wishes and
fantasies, as vehicles for organizational communication and learning, as expressions of political
domination and opposition, as dramatic performances, as occasions for emotional discharge, as
narrative structures and so forth.

The mileage that scholars of organizations are currently getting from the concept of stories (and other
currently fashionable concepts) ought to alert us to certain risks. Are we being seduced by the idea of
'stories' just as that famous sultan who found himself addicted to the yarns spun by Sheherezade?
And if stories are proving such a serviceable concept, could it be that they offer a smoke-screen
against awkward questions that we prefer to avoid? Postmodernism has invited us to mistrust many of
the revered categories of the human sciences, including 'self', 'body', 'society', 'family', 'organization',
and, above all, 'fact', revealing them to be linguistic mirages or constructs of convenience, indeed
'stories'. Is it not time that we sought to deconstruct the concept of a 'story' itself?
It is now widely agreed that stories are part of a sensemaking process which can be researched in
situ, without that burdensome requirement of social science research -- the need to establish the
validity of claims, the facts behind allegations, the truth behind the tales. For as it has been widely
argued, the truth of a story does not lie in the facts, but in the meaning. If people believe a story, if the
story grips them, whether events actually happened or not is irrelevant. It is for the pedant or the
unreconstructed positivist to question poetic license, seeking to convert storytelling into testimony.

Any analysis of the concept of story must be constantly aware of its juxtaposition to fact. If traditional
positivist research privileged facts over narratives, steering stories in the direction of facts, the current
tendency is increasingly that of privileging narrative over fact. Some research under postmodernism is
happy to go about as though facts do not exist, or as if they do not matter, even if they do exist. What
matters are narratives. Even when 'facts' do crop up in the text ("I saw him with my own eyes, ..."),
they are sometimes seen as narrative constructions, amplifying or elaborating a story. Once
narratives were freed from their enslavement to facts, an immense new landscape for organizational
research opened -- a landscape dominated by linguistic structures and rhetorical tropes, in which a
wide variety of entities previously thought of as solid facts, like 'organization', 'culture', 'commodities',
'the body', meekly surrendered to being treated as texts.

The arguments presented in this book will offer a different way of theorizing stories. In contrast to
current trends of seeing stories everywhere, this book will argue that stories are not the only things
that generate and sustain meaning, nor indeed do all stories generate and sustain meaning -- some
stories may actually undermine and destroy meaning. I shall argue that not all narratives are stories;
in particular, factual or descriptive accounts of events which aspire at objectivity rather than emotional
effect must not be treated as stories. i Stories in organizations are relatively special narrative
phenomena competing with other types of discourse, including theories, clichés, statistics and reports.
The importance, quantity, quality and character of folklore differs across organizations. Not all stories
are good stories, nor are all individuals effective storytellers. Stories, it will be argued, should not be
seen as automatically dissolving 'facts'. Instead, narratives and experience must be treated as having
a material basis, even if this material basis is opaque or inaccessible. The relationship between facts
and story is plastic -- stories interpret events, infusing them with meaning through distortions,
omissions, embellishments and other devices, without, however, obliterating the facts. Finally, the
book will seek to draw a line between stories and myths. Organizational stories rarely achieve the
depth and complexity of myths and should not be treated as part of a mythology. Instead, they may be
profitably treated as folkloric elements which become embedded in organizational culture.

It will be noted that several of these points may be seen as matters of definition. Why should we not
treat every text as a story? Why indeed not treat every object, including a gleaming motor-car, a tattoo
or a building as a story? I shall argue that by obliterating distinctions between stories and other types
of texts and narratives, stories lose precisely the power which they are meant to possess, namely the
power to generate and sustain meanings. They then disintegrate into chic clichés into which meaning
disappears. Restricting the concept of stories to those narrative phenomena which can rightly claim to
be stories is not an act of semantic policing but an attempt to preserve that which makes stories
unique both as social phenomena and as instruments of social research.
PART 1: TOWARDS A THEORY OF ORGANIZATIONAL
STORYTELLING
 1. SAME OLD STORY OR CHANGING STORIES? FOLKLORIC,
MODERN AND POSTMODERN MUTATIONS

Storytelling has always been an art of the people, of 'ordinary folk'. In the early 19th century, a folkloric
revival was signalled by the publication of the Grimm brothers' stories (in 1812 and 1835), collected
by the two brothers with the assiduous zeal of archaeologists. As with other archaeological finds, the
admiration and interest which the stories aroused at the time coincided with their transformation into
museum pieces. For all the Grimm brothers' good intentions of recording the stories intact and
preserving the dialect and nuance of their delivery, their work marked an ossification of storytelling
from a folk art into written texts. To be sure, this ossification did not kill the stories' symbolic
resonances but it drastically altered their meanings. It also obscured what folklorists insist is the most
important function of stories, namely entertainment, which can only be grasped when stories are
experienced in situ, as performances. (Dorson, 1969; Georges, 1969; Georges, 1980; Georges, 1981;
Newall, 1980). Of course, stories have carried other functions, besides entertainment. They stimulate
the imagination and offer re-assurance (Bettelheim, 1976), they provide moral education (MacIntyre,
1981), they justify and explain (Kemper, 1984; Lévi-Strauss, 1976/1958; Lévi-Strauss, 1978), they
inform, advise and warn (Van Dijk, 1975), but folklorists are adamant that, when seen in the practice
of storytelling, stories were above all else recreational. As no less an authority than Campbell has
argued:

The folk tale, in contrast to the myth, is a form of entertainment. The story teller fails or succeeds in
proportion to the amusement he affords. His motifs may be plucked from the tree of the
mythological order. His productions have to be judged, at last, not as science, sociology, psychology,
or metaphysics, but as art. (Campbell, 1975, p. 862)

Entertainment distinguishes stories from other narratives. In moral tales or fables, for example, the
didactic function eclipses the recreational. Legends, on the other hand, are often said to have a
historical grounding, though this is enhanced by supernatural accretions from myths or fairy tales.
Myths, for their part, carry grand sacral meanings which are alien to stories; they seek to explain,
justify and console. They may exist in many variants, but they are not liable to the embellishments
and elaborations which are part of the storyteller's craft. The folklorists' insistence on the
entertainment value of stories accords with the storyteller's willingness to do virtually anything that will
please his/her audience, unencumbered by considerations of morality, factual accuracy or even
decorum. ii Aristotle was keenly aware that storytelling is a poetic activity involving the symbolic
elaboration of narrative material. iii Poetic license is the sacrifice of everything for effect:
The fantastic quality is a source of pleasure, as appears from the fact that we all tend to embellish a
story, in the belief that we are pleasing our listener. Homer more than anyone else has taught us how
to tell lies in the right way. ... [In stories] a likely impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing
possibility. (Poetics 1460a)

And this relates to the second much noticed quality of folk stories, their plasticity. Vladimir Propp, the
Russian folklorist known for his morphological analysis of wonder tales, has argued:

"[Folk] performers do not repeat their texts word for word but introduce changes into them. Even if
these changes are insignificant (but they can be very great), even if the changes that take place in
folklore texts are sometimes as slow as geological processes, what is important is the fact of
changeability of folklore compared with stability of literature. (Propp, 1984, p. 8)

Folklorists have noted that the plasticity of stories is compounded by the nature of their dissemination.
Unlike film or theatrical audiences, the audiences of stories are potential storytellers or disseminators
of the story; thus do stories travel from mouth to ear and from ear to mouth, undergoing
embellishments and elaborations along the way, mutating, disappearing for long periods of time and
then resurfacing in new variants. Indeed the quality of the story lies in its delivery as much as in its
plot. The storyteller is understood by the audience to be inventing as a true 'poet' rather than merely
recounting. Mark Twain has expressed this admirably by saying that

If you wish to lower yourself in a person's favor, one good way is to tell his story over again, the way
you heard it. (Flesch, 1959, p. 124)

The fact that storytelling aims to entertain does not preclude unpleasant, sad or terrifying twists in the
plot. Such twists can be quite important in establishing a happy end, following a crisis or a cathartic
conclusion. They also accentuate the oppositions between good and evil, young and old, success and
failure, which lie at their heart.

The plots of folk tales are relatively uniform, in spite of an enormous invention in matters of detail and
embellishment. They can delight by coming up with new variants on old themes, and new twists to old
plots, in short, through a creative blend of the totally familiar and the totally unexpected. Their
characters are also quite one-dimensional. They may go through tremendous adventures, face
moments of crisis or decision and display great virtues and vices, but their action is essentially non-
psychological, they experience little inner conflict, and non-sociological, they are not the products of
social conflicts and contradictions. iv They are driven by the plot, instead of driving the plot. A villain
behaves in villain-like ways, just as a princess behaves in princess-like ways. Consider the following
story retold by MacIntyre:
"In the saga account of the battle of Clontarf in 1014, where Brian Boru defeated a Viking army, one
of the norsemen, Thorstein, did not flee when the rest of his army broke and ran, but remained where
he was, tying his shoestring. An Irish leader, Kerthialfad, asked him why he was not running. 'I
couldn't get home tonight,' said Thorstein. 'I live in Iceland.' Because of the joke, Kerthialfad spared
his life." (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 123)

In this story, a classic plot is presented, that of a person extricating him/herself from an awkward
situation through wit. The effect is compounded by the hero's apparent absence of fear (courage) and
the dry qualities, attributed to Nordic people to this day. In this way, characters in stories manage to
find new and strange ways of behaving true to form.

Characters of stories grow and mature, they experience powerful emotions, they learn or fail to learn
from their adventures and mistakes. Yet, the changes they undergo are themselves specific to the
plots and to the characters themselves (immature characters will mature, arrogant characters will be
humbled, cunning characters will disentangle themselves against the odds) rather than psychological
development. One may ponder at length on the motivation of a Hamlet or a Raskolnikov, though not
of an Iron Hans or a Snowhite. (See Propp (1968, p. 27) and Benjamin (1968a, p. 91).) Unlike the
heroes of novels or plays, the characters of tales do not pose many psychological puzzles. The
puzzle which they pose is whether they can find unpredictable ways of behaving predictably, a puzzle
which mirrors the challenge facing the storyteller, that of telling an old story in a novel way, so as to
entertain his/her audience. The storyteller buys his/her audience's suspension of disbelief at the cost
of delivering a good story -- the unbelievable must be made believable. The story is a dare, which
he/she must pull off. The more outrageous or unusual the beginning of the story the greater the
narrative feats that must be performed to redeem it. Failed stories may actually feed a good story, that
of a pretentious person failing to deliver his promise. Alternatively, however, aborted stories and
stories that are not understood may lead to a collapse of meaning, just like a text or a joke in a foreign
language which leaves us suspecting that there is meant to be meaning somewhere though the
meaning eludes us.

While the characters of stories remain entirely fixed by the plot (it is inconceivable, for instance, that a
villain will display compassion even on a single occasion or that the pronouncement of a wise woman
will fail to come true), unexpected elements are introduced by super-natural occurrences and
especially magic. Magic, not only introduces legitimate though temporary aberrations in the behaviour
of the characters, but also allows for sudden shifts in the balance of power among the characters. A
few magic words can budge the mighty rock that no amount of physical effort could move. Other
features that enable the plot to move forward are coincidences, accidents and misunderstandings.

To summarize then, within the folkloric universe storytelling is a process whose primary aim is to
entertain audiences. This is achieved through a creative blend of the unfamiliar with the familiar, the
natural and the supernatural, the reassuring oppositions between primary forces and the storyteller's
performing craft. Stories travel easily, mutating along the way, resurfacing in unexpected places in
unexpected shapes. Good stories represent a successfully met challenge, whereas poor stories may
either be seen as personal failures on the part of the storytellers or as instances where meaning is
drained out of discourse.

MODERNISM AND STORIES -- STORIES AS NON-FACTS, STORIES AS SYMPTOMS

It is hard to imagine reading the folkloric discourse without the prism of modernist discourses -- even
committed folklorists doubt that it is possible to capture the storyteller's craft, as applied to audiences
unacquainted with electric light, mass entertainment and scientific theories (Colum, 1975). The very
word 'folklore', coined by W. J. Thoms in 1846, is itself an invention of the age of reason, denoting, at
least initially, the customs, superstitions and stories of the folk, a euphemism for the rural poor, the
'uncultured or backward classes in civilized nations'. Over the 19th century, the cultured classes of
Europe appropriated elements of folklorism in their civilized discourses (as did Gustav Mahler in his
song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn), though folklore retained its connotation of rustic
unsophistication. Stories, as part of their folkloric discourse, were redefined by modernism, primarily
through their opposition to fact, losing much of their connection with entertainment or communication.
Myths were more amenable to modernism than stories, whether as supports for massive projects of
social transformation or as buffers against older pre-modernist myths. In fact, socialism, fascism as
well as liberal democracy all emerged with their own myths whose larger sacral meanings are part
and parcel of the grand narratives of modernism. In contrast to these grand narratives, the small and
parochial narratives of stories and storytelling occupied a very secondary position in the modernist
pantheon -- far inferior to scientific theories, vast novels and painstakingly detailed historical texts. In
their on-going opposition to fact, stories have remained firmly subordinate, being part of the realm of
fantasy and uncontrol rather than the world of science and control. While casting occasional nostalgic
glances at this realm, modernism moved forward confidently with its large visions and projects.

In this way, modernism invented what the eminent American folklorist Alan Dundes has called 'folklore
without folk'. Folklore scholarship, for its part, has come to be characterized by progressive de-
humanization, a collection, comparison and analysis of texts without regard for the fact that they were
once used to entertain people or that they may have acted as media of communication in a universe
without mass media. Modernist scholarship, especially as embodied in Propp's morphological studies,
Lévi-Strauss structuralism, as well as the more conventional historical and comparative approaches,
is summed up by Dundes as the 'folkless study of folklore'. (Dundes, 1980, pp. 33ff)

By the 1930s it was not rare to regard storytelling as virtually moribund, folk tales themselves being a
part of the folkloric past and to be studied as such. Writing an entry on folklore for the Encyclopaedia
of the Social Sciences in 1931, cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote that "folklore has not
survived as a living trait in modern civilization" and "thus in a strict sense folklore is a dead trait in the
modern world" (Benedict, 1931, p. 288). Writing about the work of the Russian novelist Nicolai Leskov
in 1936, Walter Benjamin laments the passing of the storyteller's art.

Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a
present force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even
more distant. ... The art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter
people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all
around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us,
the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.
(Benjamin, 1968b, p. 83)

In Benjamin's argument two factors have conspired to bring about the demise of storytelling. The first
factor, widely recognised by diverse scholars, relates to technical and social changes which have
caused the audiences of storytellers to disappear or turn elsewhere for entertainment -- electricity has
eliminated the long periods of winter darkness opening up huge opportunities of mass entertainment,
urban living with its cultural abundance and privatized living has marginalized storytelling, and the
mass media have delivered the finishing blow. The second factor is one that Benjamin terms
intriguingly the 'decline of the value of experience' in modern times. Interestingly, the point he makes
here is not that traditional know-how and lore accumulated through experience is supplanted by
scientific knowledge. Instead, he remarks that

with the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then.
Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent -- not
richer, but poorer in communicable experience? (Benjamin, 1968b, p. 84)

In Benjamin's imagery, the unanswerable brutality of modernity makes people silent -- their
experience eclipsed by information, storytelling silenced by facts, hard facts in every sense. In sharp
contrast to the glib expression "stories for the trenches", Benjamin argues with some justification that
the trenches spawned few stories among those who experienced them first-hand. (They did, of
course, generate a new genre of poetry far removed from the heroic poetry of earlier wars.) In one
way, Benjamin furthers the argument that modernity marginalizes stories as non-facts; interestingly,
however, he shifts the meaning of stories away from narratives about characters towards narratives
about the self. This is why he views the travelling artisan as the storyteller par excellence, the person
who collects stories in his/her travels, but whose travels are stories in themselves. If the folklorist
views the story as the product of invention and elaboration on traditional materials, Benjamin views
the story as the product of personal experience -- it is this personal experience which modernity
devalues, debases and ultimately obliterates.

Benjamin's argument contains in embryo the modernist treatment of stories: that stories grow out of
subjective experience, that the social and technical conditions of modernity undermine the art of the
storyteller, that modernity devalues subjective experience in favour of information (an argument
further developed by Lévi-Strauss, who casts science in the crucial part of supplanting experience
(1978, p. 6)), in all that modernity does away with the art and craft of storytelling just as it deskills and
destroys other old crafts. This is what I shall call 'narrative deskilling'. Mass entertainment is then to
storytelling what Fordism is to artisan craft. Narrative silence is the equivalent of the lost skills of
traditional artisans.

Interpretivism

Yet, modernism spawned another discursive line on stories. This line, like Benjamin's, views them as
products of experience shaped by conflict, domination and resistance, control and uncontrol. Instead
of lamenting the passing of stories, however, this line has seen them as marginalised but present in
various nooks and crannies of modernity, from the psychoanalyst's couch to the impersonal spaces of
organizations, from the private spaces of parents reading to their children at bedtime to the public
areas of shopping malls. This approach is broadly interpretivist, seeking to unmask the hidden
symbolism of stories, reading them as depositories of meaning and expressions of deeper psychic,
interpersonal and social realities. Exponents of this approach include Geertz, Douglas and Devereux
among cultural anthropologists, Dundes among folklorists, Bettelheim, Ferenczi and Freud among
psychoanalysts, Studs Terkel among urban ethnographers. This approach draws from Marxism and
phenomenology, literary criticism, ethnography and psychoanalysis, but its ideological root lies
undoubtedly in romanticism. It seeks to restore a kind of modern folk, a set of ways which people
discover for behaving outside the large modernist structures and institutions, evading controls,
laughing at the absurdities of impersonal systems and rediscovering their humanity in their ability to
mould reality to their wishes and fantasies through storytelling.

In contrast to the rationalist tradition within modernism, interpretivist approaches have tended to
emphasize emotion and desire as well as their repression. Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams
stands as an almost paradigmatic work in this tradition -- dreams, far from being anomalies, are seen
as compromise formations resulting from conflicting mental forces, whose interpretation opens up the
royal road to the unconscious. The approach pioneered by this work, which treats texts as distorted
expressions of unconscious wishes and desires, has found a bewildering array of applications in
neurotic symptoms, works of art and literature, slips of the tongue or the pen, political ideas, material
artifacts, jokes and, of course, stories and folkloric creations. Dream interpretations come closest to
interpretations of folkloric materials in respect of symbolism:

"This symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, but is characteristic of unconscious ideation, in particular
among the people, and it is to be found in folklore, and in popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms,
proverbial wisdom and current jokes, to a more complete extent than in dreams." (Freud, 1900a, p.
468)
Interpretivism found an awkward place in modernism, generating much hostility, and often being
defended by its advocates erroneously as scientific. Yet, in truth what interpretivism achieved was to
offer a model of explanation different from that of positive causality, which enjoyed a modicum of
respectability, at least in the human sciences. When applied to stories, interpretivism, unlike the
rationalist tradition, did not much concern itself with their opposition to facts but rather with their
attachment to meanings. Unlike rationalism, interpretivism located stories at the symbolic margin of
reality, one that gives clues about social and psychological reality, but not a pre-eminent component
of reality. If folklorists (with some notable exceptions, like Dundes) have generally shied away from
interpreting the symbolism of stories, believing that interpretation usually kills a story, interpretivists
have been keen to unlock the symbolic riddles of stories, seeking to uncover different meanings. In
his work The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim
argued that stories are vital in children's development. They help children make sense of a
threatening and seemingly cruel reality, reassuring them, stimulating them and entertaining them. This
work did to fairy-tales what Freud's Interpretation did to dreams -- it opened up their symbolism, while
honouring the multiple meanings that fairy-tales have for different audiences. v

POSTMODERNISM AND STORIES -- SENSE AS STORIES

Interpretivism, while offering a different type of explanation from rationalism, remains firmly within the
modernist tradition. It preserves distinctions between fact and story, story and other narratives, plot
and embellishment, story and interpretation, strong and weak interpretations. Postmodernism has
tended to blur such distinctions, along with many others. If modernism questioned the survival of
stories, postmodernism sees stories [Link] Postmodernism has reinvented stories beyond the
dreams of the most ardent folklorists. If narratives are favoured objects of postmodern discourses,
stories are favoured among narratives. Virtually any piece of text, any sign, any object that has drawn
a gaze unto itself, tells a story; indeed the failure to tell a story is a story in its own right.
Advertisements, material objects (including all commodities, branded and unbranded), images of all
sorts, human bodies (especially as pierced, tattooed and surgically modified), consultants' reports and
performance appraisals, official documents and works of art, legal arguments and scientific 'theories',
do not merely furnish the material for stories, but, in as much as they make sense, are stories.

Organization and management studies no less than consumer studies, cultural studies, media and
communication studies, oral history, as well as substantial segments of legal studies, accounting and
studies of the professions and science have enthusiastically adopted the idea that in creating a
meaningful universe, people resort to stories. The proliferation of information in late capitalism does
not lead to a 'decline of the value of experience' as Benjamin and the modernists imagined, but rather
to a massive process of turning information into experience, of signifiers into signifieds, through the
medium of stories. The more "people are buried in a mind-numbing avalanche of information" (Boje &
Dennehy, 1993, p. 155) the greater the importance of stories: "stories make experience meaningful;
stories connect us with one another; stories make the characters come alive; stories provide an
opportunity for a renewed sense of organizational community." (Boje & Dennehy, 1993, p. 156) vii

Stories and experience are linked in postmodern discourses like Siamese twins -- not only do stories
transform into experience, but experience turns into stories: "If we listen carefully to the talk around, it
is not difficult to think that storytelling goes on almost non-stop. People transform their lives and their
experiences into stories with practised ease". (Mangham & Overington, 1987, p. 193) Narrative
emerges as the privileged form of sensemaking, as "the primary form by which human experience is
made meaningful." (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 1) If organizations are par excellence jungles of
information, stories come to the rescue of meaning. Stories re-enchant the disenchanted, introducing
wit and invention, laughter and tears into the information iron cage.

"In organizations, storytelling is the preferred sensemaking currency of human relationships among
internal and external stakeholders" claims Boje ((1991, p. 106) with characteristic aplomb, a point
which can be found in endless variants. Stories appear to sweep all other sensemaking, explanatory
or indeed narrative devices aside. A few examples will illustrate the extent to which sensemaking in
different contexts has become dominated by stories:

Members of organizations: "Telling and listening to stories ... is fundamental to human processes of
making sense of the world. But storytelling, which might take the form in the broader management
context of biographies of famous managers like Lee Iacocca, Michael Edwardes or John Harvey Jones,
or be manifested in the corporate tales and legends retold by Peters and Waterman, does not just
give us moral anchors and pragmatic guidelines to help us through life. The stories we engage with
also provide the languages or 'discourses' which ... influence the very way we talk about the world
and hence, the way we interpret and act towards it." (Watson, 1994, p. 113)

Management consultants: "[Management] consultants successfully satisfy and retain their customers
by telling stories." (Clark & Salaman, 1996, p. 167)

Material objects: "Ours is a world in which it is our products that tell our stories for us." (Davidson,
1992, p. 15)

Social workers: "The theoretical vacuum existing in the 'social' professions has been largely filled by a
model of explanation we term 'narrative'." (Harris & Timms, 1993, p. 53)

To generalize, postmodernist discourses have privileged stories and storytelling as sensemaking

devices; in so doing, many have lost sight of the qualities of storytelling as entertainment and
challenge, and have blurred the boundaries between stories and other types of narratives, including
interpretations, theories, and arguments. From a postmodern angle, this current text is itself a form of
storytelling, a story about stories, at once reflexive and self-referential.

ORGANIZATIONAL STORYTELLING -- TERSE NARRATIONS OR NARRATIVE DESKILLING?

This storytelling perspective now permeates a large part of organizational studies, generating quite a
formidable bibliography. viii Yet, one searches in vain for massive volumes of organizational stories to
match the painstaking labours of folklorists. A few collections of organizational stories have been
published, mostly for their pedagogic rather than their research value (Boje & Dennehy, 1993;
Fineman & Gabriel, 1996; Sims, Fineman, & Gabriel, 1993). A few research texts report several
stories (Kunda, 1992; Watson, 1994), many include the odd 'story' or two, though several papers
explicitly devoted to organizational storytelling, fail to quote a single story.

A few research pieces have studied organizational storytelling in situ (e.g. Boyce (1995)). This is the
great virtue of a justly acclaimed piece of research by David Boje, who collected or rather extricated
stories from some 100 hours of taped material in an office supply firm. Boje views organizational
storytelling as the 'institutional memory system of the organization' (Boje, 1991, p. 106). It is reflexive,
in the sense of continuously recreating the past according to the present, interpretations becoming
stories in their own right. It is interactive in the sense that most stories are multi-authored, with
organizational members alternating in the roles of teller and listener, adding 'factual' cues or
interpretive twists as a story unravels. It is dialogical, in that the truth of the story lies not in any one
variant as in the process through which the text emerges. ix Thus, stories hardly ever feature as
integrated pieces of narrative with a full plot and a complete cast of characters; instead, they exist in a
state of continuous flux, fragments, allusions, as people contribute bits, often talking together. Boje's
key finding is that

"people told their stories in bits and pieces, with excessive interruptions of story parts, with people
talking over each other to share story fragments, and many aborted storytelling attempts." (Boje,
1991, pp. 112-3)

Boje describes the stories he collected as 'terse' and acknowledges that in all his transcripts hardly a
single story bears repetition outside its home territory as a 'good story'. He offers only one story with a
plot:

"Doug [the recently appointed CEO], in almost his first meeting with the executives, uprooted a
'reserved for the CEO' (one was also reserved for each of the VPs) parking sign and threw it on the
executive meeting table, demanding to know 'who put up this sign'? This is not the kind of leadership
I will have around here.' The offending executive, for this and other good reasons, was fired by the
week's end." (Boje, 1991, p. 119)
Boje collected this in several variants, apparently without substantive differences; in his view "a year
from now this might be tersely referred to as the parking-sign story." (ibid.) Thus organizational stories
have the tendency to shrink into coded signifiers devoid of narrative. Observers who are not familiar
with such taken-for-granted information may miss the point or the catch or may not be aware that a
story is actually being alluded to or performed at all. Boje asks the logical question of "just how
abbreviated can a story be and still be classified as a story?" (1991, p. 115) and gives the extreme
answer that the mere exclamation "You know the story!" constitutes a story. A single word may thus
be seen as encompassing an entire story. 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 which he cherishes in stories,
perfomativity, memorableness, ingenuity and symbolism. His terse stories amount to little more than
delicate fragments of sense, communicating metonymically, as if they were product brands. Why do
such stories shrivel over time? One suspects precisely that meaning drains out of them, so that the
effort is hardly worth making to narrate them. Again, this is a quality shared with product brands,
which in spite of advertisers attempts to turn them into signifiers of difference, are lost in a
meaningless cacophony of freely floating signifiers (Baudrillard, 1983a; Baudrillard, 1983b; Gabriel &
Lang, 1995). Doug's parking sign heroic may end up reduced to something barely meaningful, yet
another CEO pulling off another tantrum in order to appear different from his predecessor. In a similar
way, many 'official' organizational stories reported by researchers may amount to little else than
slogans, virtually drained of meaning and unable to generate emotion. This view would lead to the
conclusion that organizational storytelling is victim of the narrative deskilling noted by the modernists,
which itself results from increasingly fragile nature of experience when choked by information.
Members of organizations, overwhelmed by data, are neither storytellers nor story listeners, but
information handlers. All that remains is relics of stories, coded left-overs from impoverished
narratives, uncrafted and unappreciated. Storytelling would then be silenced (as per Benjamin) by the
semiotic cacophony of flying signifiers (as per Baudrillard).

It is, however, possible to retain the concept of a story for proper narratives, with beginnings and
ends, held together by action, entertaining for audiences and challenging for tellers, while
acknowledging that other narrative devices are used to sustain or negotiate meaning. These include
three devices noted by Czarniawska-Joerges and Joerges (1990), namely clichés, platitudes
(including traditional proverbs) and labels (and Boje's terse stories can aptly be described as labels of
stories rather than stories). They also included many other sense-seeking and sense-saving devices,
often used in combination, though not amounting to stories -- arguments and explanations, theories
and opinions, slogans and soundbites, lists (especially acronymic ones or featuring in overhead
transparencies) and numbers (occasionally acting as labels, e.g. the "£67 million fiasco"), logos and
images, opinions and stereotypes, metaphors and metonymies (especially in the form of slogans, like
'quality', 'service' etc.), symbols and signs of all types, fragments of information, puns and jeux de
mots, fantasies and day-dreams, gestures, body language and other displays of emotion. x

ORGANIZATIONAL STORIES

This book will not study any of these (or other) types of sensemaking devices; instead, drawing from
the folklorists, it will focus on stories and storytelling in the narrow sense of narratives with simple but
resonant plots and characters, involving narrative skill, entailing risk and aiming to entertain, persuade
and win over. The arguments presented here try to vindicate the insights of folklorists, while also
accepting some vital lessons from modernism and post-modernism. Organizational stories develop
their characters and plots not from the folkloric universe of enchanted forests and crystal mountains,
but, as the modernists argued, from the personal experiences of individuals in organizations. And as
the post-modernists have recognized, storytelling comes to the rescue of meaning in an epoch
saturated by information in which meaning is constantly displaced and crowded by noise. The
argument which will emerge through the pages of this book is that storytelling is not dead in most
organizations. Organizations do possess a living folklore, though this is not equally dense or equally
vibrant in all of them. This folklore, its vitality, breadth and character, can give us valuable insights into
the nature of organizations, the power relations within them and the experiences of their members.
My argument is based on a large database of stories which I have accumulated over the years. One
source of stories was piece of fieldwork in 5 organizations -- a hospital, a public utility and a large
manufacturing company, a consumer organization and a consultancy firm. A second source of stories
has been my students who report on their placement experiences, analysing and interpreting stories
which they heard as members of organizations. I have also collected numerous ad hoc stories from
friends and acquaintances, some of which I shall present in this book. In nearly all of these instances,
I represented an audience interested in hearing good stories. This contrasts with that of other
research on stories, whose 'fly-on-the-wall' approaches undermine the storyteller's challenge and
pleasure. xi

It was clear to me that the majority of people I interviewed had a very clear sense of what I meant by
'story'. A few individuals instantly responded with some story, others suggested I talked to a specific
person known for their storytelling ability, some held back answering until they had a clearer sense of
what types of stories I was interested in and some indicated that they knew what I meant but
commented that "Nothing interesting ever happens here" or "People only ever talk about work in this
place". This is in itself a significant finding -- respondents made sense of the category 'story' and
clearly differentiated it from other types of talk or narrative. Some of them regarded their organizations
as story-free spaces but the majority did not. Their willingness and ability to relate stories varied
widely. Many failed to relate a single story, while a few related numerous stories. Some individuals
were able to convert the flimsiest material into interesting narratives, whereas others seemed unable
to convert into meaningful stories what seemed like rich symbolic, emotional and narrative raw
material. xii Like Boje, I found few stories which would be highly rated by folklorists. Yet, there were
several stories which were good enough to bear repetition. Here is one as narrated by a clerk of a
utility:

There was a chap driving a lorry and he hit a cat so he got out of the lorry and saw
this cat on the side of the road and thought I'd better finish it off ... smashed it over
the head, got back in and drove off. A lady or a chap phoned the police and said I've
just seen a Board lorry driver get out and kill my cat. So they chased after the van
and found it and asked the driver whether he had killed the cat so he said he had ran
over it and couldn't leave it like that ... it's cruel so I finished it off. So they said can we
examine your van and he said yes by all means so they examined the van and found
a dead cat under the wheel arch. So it was the wrong cat [he had killed] sleeping at
the side of the road.

A narrative like this meets most folkloric criteria of storytelling; it is entertaining, it is well timed, its plot
is a road-story involving a protagonist and other characters, its story-line contains typical elements
like accident, coincidence, mistaken identity (of the cat) and misdirected motives. It certainly invites
repetition and further embellishment. It does not invite factual verification (Did he really kill the cat?
Did the police record the incident? etc.) Looking at such a narrative as a myth would be wrong. xiii A
myth about the deaths of two cats does not bear comparison with the great myths of humanity; it
would lead to the conclusion that organizational mythology is trite. Looking at it as folklore, on the
other hand, highlights its vitality and invention. Slang, jokes and idiosyncrasies which are so alien to
myth, all lie at the very heart of folklore (Dundes, 1965; Dundes, 1980; Dundes, 1989). It is perfectly
possible and meaningful to talk of Xerox or Internet lore or the folklore of computers or, indeed, the
folklore of lorry-drivers and net-surfers without debasing the concept of folklore. The story of the driver
who killed two cats is a fine example of lorry-driver folklore, capable of yielding telling and fruitful
interpretations. It illustrates that, contrary to modernist ideas, storytelling is still alive and storytellers
can be found in organizations. It also illustrates that, contrary to postmodernist tendencies, some
organizational narratives are proper stories and can be seen as part of an organizational folklore. This
is an idea that briefly appeared to be gaining currency in the 1980s, during the excitement generated
by the re-discovery of culture by organizational theorists. Yet, in spite of notable contributions (Jones,
1984; Jones, 1985; Jones, 1990; Jones, 1991; Turner, 1983; Turner, 1986), the concept of
organizational folklore has not found great currency among scholars. We shall refer to organizational
folklore as a range of cultural practices and texts which fulfil three conditions: first, they are richly
symbolic; second, they are not manufactured or legislated, but emerge spontaneously through
informal interactions among participants; and third, they are not one-offs, but become part of
traditions, emulated, reproduced and re-enacted (Jones, 1991, p. 201). Stories, proverbs,
generalizations, nicknames, puns, jokes, rituals, slang, graffiti, cartoons, material objects of use or
display, codes, gestures, uses of physical space, body-language are among the many ingredients of
organizational folklore.
Here is a piece of car-park folklore, resulting from the visit of one of the company's own engineers to
fix a problem at regional headquarters. It is a 'proper' story and is reported exactly as told by a senior
clerk.

Lakeside is [our regional] head office; our engineer went out there, he thought it was
an emergency call. The area is murder to park, he couldn't park anywhere and as far
as he knew it's an emergency job he's got to get there; he goes round the back of the
building and there is the company's own car park, so he sees a vacant place and puts
his van there. Goes into the main building, it wasn't an emergency job, just that they
wanted priority treatment if you like, run of the mill job, he comes back out again and
one of the senior managers had blocked him in with his car. And he wouldn't let him
out ... and that was one of the top cats in personnel department and he said to the car
park attendant and he told him his name and he virtually refused to come down and
shift his car. That's senior management and he just lost his rag because it is costing
him money ..... and he threatened to smash his car with a hammer or get the police to
tow it away for causing an obstruction, the engineer this was he was raving and that's
what they think of senior management. But by the same token that's what they think
of them .... You, you peasant you dare park there and blocks him in. There was a lot
of sympathy for him here.

This story, like the previous one, can rightly be seen as a piece of workplace folklore, whose analysis
can yield substantial insights on the nature of the organization, its power relations and its culture. Like
the previous story, it describes events second-hand, the narrator being neither a character in the
story, nor a direct eye-witness. His narration is replete with passionate commitment, anger interfering
with the narrative's grammar, yet amplifying its poetic effect. Most of the good stories I collected refer
to events in which the teller is the central hero or which were witnessed first hand.

OPINIONS, PROTO-STORIES AND REPORTS

In later chapters, I will describe different ways of classifying, interpreting and analysing such stories.
What I wish to do here is to introduce three particular types of narratives which must be distinguished
from proper stories, even if they are not unrelated to them. The first are opinions, often strongly held,
often containing some factual or symbolic material, but lacking plot, characters and action. In the
following example the opinion expressed by a clerk is that repetitive work causes mistakes:

Certain tasks are repetitive and tedious, we've got a particular task on the computer
screen, it is called work reading ... It is very repetitive, the screen is not pleasant to
look at ... it is not an easy thing to do and you need a lot of knowledge to do that ...
some people do it for 8 hours a day and that is a boring job, being stuck in front of the
computer for that time. Mistakes happen not because they don't know what they are
doing but because of the tedium of it.
Opinions, like this, seem to announce a story, which never materializes. They receive support from
generalized assertions, without singling out a particular incident around which to construct a story.
The listener may then encourage a story by prompting "Can you think of any such cases?" though, in
my experience, such prompting rarely generated high quality stories. Opinions may not be stories,
though they are part of an organization's sensemaking apparatus.

The second type of narrative I wish to distinguish from stories are 'proto-stories'. These are fragments
of stories, similar to Boje's terse stories, sometimes highly charged emotionally and symbolically. Yet,
their plot is very rudimentary. Under certain conditions of repetition, embellishment and cross-
fertilization, such narratives may yield fully-fledged stories. Here are two examples, the former from a
chemical company, the latter from a hospital:

There is the gentleman across the corridor, I notice him because he's always
working, he's such a nice gentleman, such a nice character, and I always say 'I just
met him on the first floor, I think he's madly in love with me', silly things like that. We
just laugh about them.

We have got a chap that lives on the streets, it is quite sad, he was a prisoner of war
and he hates to be confined, and he comes in lots, he sort of lives in the centre.
Occasionally he suffers from hypothermia and someone will call an ambulance and
he will come in; he is quite a character and can be quite aggressive sometimes.

Both of these narratives focus on a potentially interesting character who acts as a spur for fantasy, but
their plot is rudimentary; they have a beginning, but unlike true stories, they lack a proper end.
Distinctions between stories and proto-stories are not as clear-cut as those between opinions and
stories. A narrative may have different symbolic resonances with different listeners; one listener may
hear a story where another hears merely a proto-story, just as one listener may hear a weak story
where another hears a strong one. However, the essential quality of poetic incompleteness sets
proto-stories apart.

Unlike opinions and proto-stories, the third type of narrative I wish to distinguish from stories does
have a plot and characters. Yet, its attitude towards them is stubbornly 'factual', refusing to read any
meaning in the events described. A merger, a sacking, an accident are described just as facts devoid
of overt symbolism or emotion. Consider the following example:

Over the weekend one of our showrooms was broken into and it was burgled... they
actually broke in, the police went out and they got a firm to come out and replace the
glass panel in the bottom of the door. One of our keyholders went down late to check
... the burglars had been back broken the glass again -- twice in one night... He rang
the glass guy to see why he hadn't repaired the door and he said I did it about an
 hour ago.... no you haven't there is a big hole in the door. On the Monday, the
general manager went down to get some details for the police report -- while he was
there someone broke into his car and stole his stereo.

Such factual accounts were common in the research organization I studied, where members prized
the factual accuracy of their work and appeared generally reluctant to deviate from 'facts'. They can
be seen as historical accounts in which accuracy is valued above effect, narratives in which no poetic
licence is accorded to the narrator. This maintains the vital distinction, first noted by Aristotle, between
history and of poetry. Aristotle viewed stories as emotional-symbolic texts and used the term 'poetics'
to describe the type of work that is involved in transforming facts into stories. By contrast, he viewed
history as analytico-descriptive. While poetry is a discourse of meanings, history is a discourse of
facts, causes and effects. In contrast to stories, I shall refer to these as descriptions or reports; they
may lack the compelling narrative power of stories but are not outside the sensemaking apparatus of
organizations. A reporter, like the one above, acts like a historian or a forensic scientist, inviting a
causative rather than a symbolic explanation of events, concerned about damage and cost limitations
and preventative measures rather than about keeping listeners entertained. xiv

FACTS AND STORIES

This distinction between report and story seems problematic. Many would deny that it is possible to
give purely factual report of any event. The choice of facts to report, the choice of words used, the
omissions made, the framing of the narrative suggest that all narratives involve the narrator's active
engagement with his/her subject. Yet, I believe that it is necessary to distinguish between description
which deals with facts-as-information and stories which represent facts-as-experience for both tellers
and listeners (Benjamin, 1968b). The former is the craft of the journalist, the recorder, the chronicler,
the latter is the task of the raconteur, the entertainer, the yarn-spinner.

Now, as Habermas, following Danto, has argued, the chronicler who simply describes events is an
ideal fiction:

"Completely to describe an event is to locate it in all the right stories, and this we cannot do. We
cannot because we are temporarily provincial with regard to the future. ... The imposition of a
narrative involves us with an inexpungeable subjective factor." (1977, p. 349)

Yet, this ideal fiction is indispensable in distinguishing between two types of discourses, one whose
loyalty ultimately rests with the facts and another whose loyalty rests with the story. The chronicler is
committed to accuracy, the storyteller is committed to effect (Frye, 1969). The former treats his/her
material with the respect of an archaeologist, wishing to discover, preserve and display valuable
objects, his/her own pride lying in his/her claim not to have tampered with the material. The latter
treats his/her material in a far more cavalier manner; his/her skill lies precisely in turning plain material
into something valuable and meaningful. xv Of course, many archaeologists end up framing their
findings, they (including celebrities like Schliemann and Evans) tamper with their findings for effect,
they manage their discoveries as shows in front of television cameras. They, like many chroniclers
and their contemporary counterparts, journalists, can end up as storytellers. In a similar way,
experimental scientists may falsify the results of their experiment in order to use them in support of a
theory. Such 'distortions' differ fundamentally from the storyteller's distortions. No-one would accuse a
storyteller of distortion, although a storyteller may be accused of spoiling a good story. In fact, the
narrative test for a story is relatively straight forward: would a listener respond by challenging the
factual accuracy of the text. xvi By contrast, journalistic, experimental and archaeological practices are
factually challengeable and distortions constitute serious offences. It is essential, therefore, to
preserve the distinction between narratives which purport to represent facts (even if they fail to do so)
and narratives which make no secret of their purpose to use facts as poetic material, moulding them,
twisting them and embellishing them for effect. xvii

Only by treating stories as distinctive types of narrative, claiming special privileges and subject to
special constraints, can we use them as windows into organizational life. Only then can we study the
challenge that they represent for teller and listener alike, the meanings they carry or fail to carry, the
pleasure or pain they afford, and the power they accord or deny. If we insist on treating every
consultant's report, every cliché, every overhead transparency and every statistical table as 'telling a
story', we inevitably assist in making storytelling, as a meaning-bestowing activity, in its very ubiquity,
moribund. Even worse, we allow our fascination with discourse and narrative to act as a smoke-
screen obscuring the political, psychosocial and social issues in organizations.

i. In this I depart from Polkinghorne (1988, p. 14) who equates story and narrative, by adopting an
excessively broad conceptualization of the former. Polkinghorne's lead has been followed by most
organizational theorists who, as we shall see, stretch the concept of story to encompass any
meaning-giving text. I am happier with Barthes' view of narratives as ever-present and of almost
infinite variety; stories, according to this view, are but one type of narrative. "The narratives of the
world are without number. In the first place the word 'narrative' covers an enormous variety of genres
which are themselves divided up between different subjects, as if any material was suitable for the
composition of the narrative; the narrative may incorporate articulate language, spoken or written;
pictures, still and moving; gestures and the ordered arrangements of all the ingredients: it is present in
myth, legend, fable, short story, epic, history, tragedy, comedy, pantomime, painting ... stained glass
windows, cinema, comic strips, journalism, conversation. In addition, under the almost infinite number
of forms, the narrative is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; the history of narrative
begins with the history of mankind; there does not exist, and never has existed, a people without
narratives." (Barthes, 1966/1977, p. 79 -- this translation is from Polkinghorne, 1988p. 14).

ii. This is one of the two reasons why Plato disapproved of story-telling which subordinates truth and
moral edification to pleasure. Plato was fully aware that the coarser, more fantastic stories are likely to
generate much more entertainment that those of a higher and finer quality. See Plato (1993, 397d):
"The mixed style does at least give pleasure, Adeimantus; and the one which gives by far the most
pleasure to children and their attendants, and the general run of people, is the one which is the
opposite of your choice.' 'Yes, that's because it is very enjoyable.' 'But perhaps you'd say that it isn't
compatible with our community's political system,' I went on.'" In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato
launches his well-known attack on poetry (even great poetry, like Homer's) for dealing with
appearances and indulging the emotions, which, in turn, prompted Aristotle's defence of poetry.

iii. 'Poetics' derives from the Greek 'poiesis' which signifies the creation of something distinctly new
from existing materials. Plato and Aristotle juxtapose 'poiesis' (making) to 'praxis' (doing), a motivated
deed which does not aim at transforming matter but at producing a result. Poiesis may apply equally
to a carpenter making a table or to a poet fashioning an epic rhapsody; artifacts are products of
poiesis. Praxis, on the other hand, may apply to a general leading an army or a tragic hero
confronting a predicament. Among literary critics, 'poetics' has come to signify generally a theory of
literature (Morson & Emerson, 1990); I shall be using the term in its original sense of purposeful,
creative transformation of material to form something distinct and new, something that may not be
reduced to the original constituents. This includes the type of transformation that is entailed in turning
opaque or inchoate facts into stories brimming with meanings.

iv. "In [authentic folklore] a character is great in his own right, not on some other account; he himself
is tall and strong, he alone is able to triumphantly repel enemy troops. … Folkloric man is the great
folk, great in his own right." (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 150)

v. In a similar way, Robert Bly's Iron John (1990) unlocks the multiplicity of meanings present in the
Grimm story "Iron Hans".

vi. I shall not enter the debate on defining postmodernism in its relation to modernism. I accept that
many features of postmodernism are rooted in modernism. One obvious instance of this is the
equation of story and interpretation whose origin is to be found clearly in Lévi-Strauss's discussion of
myth. According to Lévi-Strauss (1976/1958) a myth consists of all versions and all interpretations; no
single version is privileged as the right one.

vii. Giddens has argued that the very idea of personal identity "is not to be found in behaviour, nor --
important though it is -- in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative
going. The individual's biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day
world, cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world,
and sort them into the ongoing 'story' about the self." (Giddens, 1991, p. 54)
viii. See Boyce (1996), who has diligently assembled five pages of references.

ix. The concept of dialogical truth originates in Bakhtin's analysis of Dostoevsky's novel, the non-plus-
ultra of dialogical consciousness. A dialogic or polyphonic genre is characterized by the absence of a
unifying narrative consciousness which embodies all the consciousnesses of all the characters. There
is no higher level of narrative which incorporates the partial narratives offered by characters. "For the
author the hero is not 'he' and not 'I,' but a fully valued 'thou,' that is, another fully fledged 'I' ('Thou
art')." (Bakhtin, 1929/1973, p. 51)

x. For an eloquent discussion of the place of stories among sensemaking frames which include
ideology, third-order controls, paradigms, theories of action, and traditions, see Weick (1995).

xi. Details of my methodology will be presented in Chapter 6.

xii. This point is analysed clearly by Wallemacq and Sims (1998, p. 122).

xiii. There are numerous reasons why I am disinclined to see organizational stories as being part of a
'mythology'. The stories lack the sweeping grandeur, narrative complexity or overwhelming emotional
charge of ancient Greek, native American and other myths. Their characters can be interesting,
unusual or even brilliant but they lack the towering presence of true heroes. Bettelheim makes a very
similar point in contrasting myth and fairy tale. "Put simply, the dominant feeling in myth is: that is
absolutely unique; it could not have happened to any other person, or in any other setting; such
events are grandiose, awe-inspiring, and could not possibly happen to an ordinary mortal like you or
me. ... By contrast, although the events which occur in fairy tales are often unusual and most
improbable, they are always presented as ordinary, something that could happen to you or me or the
person next door when out on a walk in the woods." (Bettelheim, 1976, p. 37). The comic or
humorous qualities which feature in numerous stories undermine any mythical pretences; as
Campbell has noted, comedy and myth do not inhabit the same narrative or psychological space.
(Campbell, 1949/1988) The stories we encounter in organizations lack the sacral qualities of myths --
they rarely address the great universals of myths, good and evil, human and divine, wild and tame,
agency and fate, heroism and victimhood. Expressing a widely-held view, Barthes argues that "myth
is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things love the memory that they once
were made". (Barthes, 1973, p. 142) By contrast, organizational stories remain bound to the mundane
realities of everyday experience, the provincial, parochial concerns of life in most organizations; they
are tied to the concrete, the fact, the historical rather than the mythological past. Even a cursory
reading of serious mythological texts (Calasso, 1983; Campbell, 1949/1988; Campbell, 1976;
Douglas, 1967; Lévi-Strauss, 1963a; Lévi-Strauss, 1976/1958), enables one to understand the
impatience of anthropologists or ethnographers when management and organizational theorists use
the idea of myth to denote any symbolically-charged organizational narrative (Helmers, 1993).

xiv. The distinction between story and report is one which been extensively documented by narrative
 theorists, such as Labov and Waletzky (1967), Van Dijk (1975) and Robinson (1981). Van Dijk, for
example, compares two accounts which we may give of a bank robbery that we happen to witness,
one to the police and one to our friends. The former is likely to stick to the facts as a report, the latter
is likely to present a story. Labov and Waletzky build a strong argument that stories entail both
description and evaluation, whereas reports are limited to description.

xv. It is possible to map the two discourses against the two forms of human cognition, identified by
Bruner, the logico-scientific and the narrative. These are "two modes of cognitive functioning, two
modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of 'ordering experience, of constructing reality. The
two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another. ... Each of these ways of knowing,
moreover, has operating principles of its own and its own criteria of well-formedness. they differ
radically in their procedures for verification." (Bruner, 1986, p. 21)

xvi. Storytelling, like a child's play, involves a collusion on the part of the audience. Just as the adult
colludes with the child's illusion of a old box turned into a shop or a palace, so too the storyteller's
audience collude with the fantastic or unrealistic elements in the story. See Winnicott (1980). Thus
suspension of disbelief and poetic licence are acknowledged privileges of the storyteller but not of the
chronicler.

xvii. De Certeau has argued that the distinction between fact and fiction is the touchstone of a process
which privileges the univocality of science at the expense of the plurivocal, polysemic quality of
storytelling (de Certeau, 1986, pp. 199ff). Through this process, "fiction is deported to the land of the
unreal, but the discourse that is armed with the technical 'know-how' to discern errors is given the
supplementary privilege of representing something 'real.'" (de Certeau, 1986, p. 201)

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