The Enron collapse highlights the need to study how corporations implement strategy. How was Enron so successful in this age of free information? Our thesis is that Enron dramaturgically implemented strategy through associative delusion. Enron used theatre in three ways we term "Metatheatrical": (1) as a technology to persuade, or associate, (2) a fagade to deceive, or delude, and (3) a metaphor in the important sense of Shakespeare's Life is Theatre. Their use of theatrical tools has implications for agency and transaction cost theories in how organizations can reduce transaction and production costs. Our synthesis contributes to the understanding of organizational boundaries through the development of winning scripts.

This paper takes up the self-construction of the social roles of Polish IT professionals. We conducted an ethnographic study and observed that many of our interviewees defined their roles by negation and by invoking the internal and often hermetic aspects of their profession. Labeling this practice “holding up the shield,” we trace its archetypical roots. The recurrent use of this practice makes a change in agency in the process of constructing the role possible, to the benefit of the IT professionals.

The interest in societal forms of entrepreneurship has increased in recent decades, emphasizing different kinds of prefixed such as ―social‖ ―ecological‖, ―sustainable‖, ―regional‖. In this article societal and social is at stake. Taking a point of departure in the prefix stories of entrepreneurship we read a wish to break with the grand narrative of entrepreneurship as well as attempts to feed into and draw legitimacy from the grand narrative. In this article we take a point of departure in an initiative taken in Sweden to introduce and finance a program labeled ―Societal entrepreneurship‖. The purpose is to create knowledge about, as well as conditions for, initiatives aiming at improving what is missing or does not work in public structures, and finding new and innovative solutions in order to create an economically, socially and ecologically sustainable society. Applying Burke‘s pentad it is illustrated that the grand narrative of entrepreneurship consists of the heroic entrepreneur (agent) who creates a kingdom (act) by way of establishing a company (agency) on the market in order to make a profit and contribute to growth (purpose). Applying the concept of Tamara, introduced by Boje, it is further illustrated how the grand narrative of entrepreneurship emphasizes capitalism, rationality and hierarchy in line with the epoch of industrialization, whilst the antenarrative of societal entrepreneurship gives priority to both premodern and postmodern discourses. The importance of community, of non-economic values, artisan craftsmanship is stressed, but also of how societal structures must be changed. The story of societal entrepreneurship thus de-centers human agency seeking to create instability as well as openings for enactment.

This paper explores post-humanist assemblage and biomediation through ontological storytelling and antenarrative. It considers material agency via biomediation, examining the use of material devices to prolong and enhance human and animal life. The first ontological story presented is that of a woman and her biomediated dog (titanium knees), running in an urban setting with various material actants in assemblage supporting human health and psychological wellbeing. The second considers the use and efficacy of biomediation to prolong the lives of humans afflicted with renal disease and cancer. The work offers an experiential lens for contemplation of biomediation, assemblage, posthumanism and ethics. Its contribution is an authentic, contextual exploration of Heidegger’s (1962) Dasein and a related antenarrative fore-having of metanoia-derived strength. These illustrations support discussion of how material (ontic) and ontological (Being-there) aspects are overlooked or actively suppressed by social constructionism.

This paper responds to current interest in the ‘untold’ in organizational storytelling research. In particular the research presented here contributes to studies that consider storytelling in relational terms. In this context, untold is constructed as both a provocation and a pointer to multiplicity: innumerable relationships of story. To develop and illustrate the argument of the paper, the discussion adopts interference as a deliberate methodological device. To illustrate the significance of composition and fabrication in storytelling the study consider fragments from an extensive period of multi-site ethnographic fieldwork with a professional, established and award winning author involved in literary, television drama and other story projects. The developing field of relational storytelling studies is discussed and attention drawn to key research foci: specifically current concerns for intertextuality, heteroglossia, materiality and flux. A fieldwork vignette is used to examine and extend a relational sense of ‘untold stories’. Further vignettes and a selective focus on science and technology studies relational ethnographies extends this discussion by focusing on performance, fabrication and fiction. The paper concludes that a fabrication sensibility that notices and attends to story on the move necessitates a shift in both methodological and representational strategy. In terms of method the paper demonstrates the potential value of extended, multi locational and deep field ethnography. In terms of representation, if stories are innumerable than we require a number of monograph ethnographies that can reveal and attend to varieties of limitless material, mobile and heterogeneous stories. In other words, if stories are lived, we require methods that attend to social life as lived if we are to surface and reframe hitherto untold, unseen and unheard agency at work in organizations.

The following study will explore the stories which are not told – that is, it will scrutinize the process of intertextual emergence of an ultimately open story: one which has neither discernible authorship nor agenda and which remains in-the-making rather than strives to achieve closure. The paper will discuss the process in which multifaceted and multidirectional organizational stories are created, in which plots and characters exchange and ‘ending’ is defied. This lack of closure is perceived here as a breeding ground for networked meanings, which, if allowed to remain interdependent and plural, eschew the danger of a new organizational story becoming universal carrier of inflexibly established contents. Since the unifying semantic organizational frameworks (e.g. ‘success story’) may be construed as impostors attempting to ascribe both authorship and agency to a nonagentical and non-authored ‘untold story’, this study proposes one way in which multidirectedness and plurality of the story may be preserved.

This article is based on an empirical study of employees’ experience of downsizing at a US air carrier called Vimanas Airline (a pseudonym) and includes forty two semi-structured interviews with captains and co-pilots who worked at that airline. The product of a fruitful collaboration between an experienced researcher and former Vimanas co-pilot, the paper explores how a new regime of corporeal power and panoptic organizational discourses produced commercial pilots’ subjectivity by first creating loyal company employees who actively participated in their own acculturation. Later, after airline restructuring, pilots modified their thinking and behaviour in an effort to maintain some sense of power, dignity, agency, and identity, resisting managerial efforts at further colonization. It became clear that complex and partly competing reality construction processes were at play. Contrary to previous research finding employees to often be complicit rather than resistant to managerial control efforts, particularly during times of corporate crisis, this study reports airline employees both participated in, yet later resisted managerial control efforts. Prompted by one of our respondents we refer to this colonization process as ‘bodysnatching’ with reference to the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

This auto-fictitious narrative is an existential and political exploration of scholarly identity transformation of a teacher educator in academia. Set within a parallel, metaphorical kingdom, identity is examined through the author’s actions, interactions and experiences with others in a fictional setting. Narratives, in storytelling formats, establish agency of self and provide “voice” to be freely expressed, most notably for those who experience marginalization where their thoughts and ideas have been mitigated within traditional institutional environments and dialogues. Expressed in a humorous, somewhat deliberately mischievous manner, the polyphonic self in this story reflects on relational power and academic identity within the university environment. This descriptive piece adds discussion to existing organizational research through presentation of a fictional piece for examining how one may self-construct identity within a hegemonic work setting.