Dairy Farming is Big Business in New Zealand. The New Zealand Dairy Industry contributes significantly to the manufacture, trade, and consumption of dairy products the world over. This industry is deeply implicated in the intensifying trajectory of globalization, a form of order euphemistically referred to as ‘global development’. Critics attribute significant social and environmental degradation to this trajectory. Stories about corporate responsibility are attractive to those business students willing to include ethical standpoints in their considerations. Through a [re]telling of the influence of dairy-farming on the wellbeing of New Zealanders we suggest that such stories may be better read as channels of influence that perpetuate elite interests. Our analysis is generated from our schooling in Critical Management Studies. From this orientation, dominant stories are often presented as almost totally closed and hegemonic. But they can never be fully so. Paradox and contradictions can always be located within and across such stories. Our essay is a story about dairying that illuminates such paradox and contradiction. It is written to draw our gaze to the dangerous degradations of systemic outcomes on the quality of life for diverse stakeholders. We call for change. Our professional realms of influence include the spheres of management education. It is here we are placing our focus. We invite the telling of more diverse stories that may engender more generative futures than the seemingly entrenched trajectory that intensifies systemic benefits to an elite at the expense to others and exacerbates environmental degradation to the detriment of all. We invite engagement with stories that might place a different bet on the future (Boje, 2014).

Storytelling is important for understanding business plans, risk taking, and venture capital. Narratives can limit the entrepreneur’s ability to dynamically change. Friendship is when entrepreneurs can focus on antenarratives and living stories instead of static narratives. Friendship happens in the future before it becomes a narrative past. In this article we outline fore-having, fore-telling, fore-structure, and fore-conception. These relate to four antenarratives before, bet, beneath, and between. We do this is so that we can answer the questions "how can we understand entrepreneurial storytelling processes in moments of friendship?" and "How can entrepreneurial storytelling overcome narrative degradation of living story?" At its core, the answer is is that in the entrepreneurial storytelling moments of friendship can allow living story interactions by creating new fraternity.

The theme of friendship flows throughout the paper via a field study into friendship in the rural and remote island communities of the Zadar archipelago. The author explores Derrida’s spirit of friendship and asks: What form of friendship exists? How does it manifest itself? What is its importance to the island’s survival? The study reveals how friendship, in the form of communal friendship, emerges as a fundamental trait amongst the members of these communities and becomes the choice of their survival. As such, it is useful in gaining a better understanding of what drives a sustainable island development. Communal friendship is explored through the ethnography and storytelling. The study emphasises the usefulness of ethnography to a Critical Theory and argues that storytelling and ethnography co-exist, in order to gain an invaluable insight into the intangible aspects of a communal friendship. The author proposes to call this approach ‘an ethnographic storytelling’.

This article explores Jacques Derrida’s notion of friendship and extends towards a quantum understanding of friendship derived from an ethics of mattering (Barad, 2007). It inscribes itself into an uncommon vocabulary in the organization and management literature. Yet we believe that the notion of friendship is a crucial dimension of organizations but none-theless is often not recognized here.

While professional identities (like all identities) are largely discursively accomplished, the specific contextualized components which constitute “sounding professional” are often poorly understood, or indeed recognized more often in their absence. This presents an interesting challenge to those tasked with learning these ways of talking in securing a job, for example graduate students in a professionally-oriented MA program in sociolinguistics. This paper considers the linguistic process of presenting a professional identity, with particular focus on the resume as a very carefully constructed storyworld in which every linguistic choice (i.e. referring expression) contributes to positionings that construct and convey identity. Just as with any story, through the choices that we make in highlighting one aspect of a job over another “our identities as social beings emerge as we construct our own individual experiences as a way to position ourselves in relation to social and cultural expectations” (Schiffrin 1996).

This article analyzes the construction of leadership identities through stories found in four narrative interviews from a qualitative study and leadership development project based on social constructionism and action learning. We argue that leadership development and the construction of leadership identities in a postmodern paradigm are based on the negotiation and co-construction of meanings, relationships, and stories. The following questions are investigated: What happens when a group of leaders from different organizations construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct their identity as leaders through narrative interviews about their challenges as leaders? In addition, how do these discursive constructions restrict or enable new perspectives, other voices, and the possibilities for learning and change? Our analysis identified traces of both modern and postmodern leadership discourses. We suggest that the concept of coauthoring is useful in developing leadership and leadership identities through reflexive dialogs and emerging stories.