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.

Standing Conference for Management and Organization Inquiry (sc’Moi) is coming undone, in the process of ending its 25-year conference run, and being dismembered, its members leaving for other conferences. The purpose of my talk is to develop a Hegel and Žižek understanding of the dialectic of storytelling of sc’MOI. Žižek claims that Hegelian dialectics is making a comeback because it is uniquely suited to our time. Unlike the usual erroneous oversimplified formula reading of Hegel (thesis-antithesis- synthesis), I will assert there is no synthesis, Marx rejection of ‘Spirit’ and Adorno’s turning dialectic into a pursuit of objectivity, leaves us with a shallow dialectics. By reclaiming the ‘Spirit’ in relation to system and science as well as materiality in Hegelian dialect, we have a new way to understand sc’MOI. Spirit is not about religion, but rather it is the experience of Reason in action and Being. Spirit stands in dialectic relation to the system principles (abstract, schemata), and to system that becomes science. In addition, Spirit’s relation to system is worked out in space, in time, in mattering, or what Karen Barad calls spacetimemattering. Looking at the history of sc’MOI, I will claim sc’MOI never was a whole system, but rather a systemicity of unmerged and unfinalized parts in search of a whole. sc’MOI is was part of the umbrella conference (International Academy of Business Disciplines) until Boje was beheaded as IABD conference president, and three divisions of IABD jumped ship to start sc’MOI in 2004, and held its first conference in 2005. From 1993 till 2004, that means sc’MOI was only a potentiality, a shadowy outline of a conference, not actually coordinating its own location, audiovisuals, meals, coffee, setting its own schedule and business meeting, etc. Even after 2005, sc’MOI did not get its legs, did not merge its processes, did not sustain economically or socially as a robust alternative to the Academy of Management (AOM) conference, ever its nemesis. As sc’MOI prepares to dismember its membership and re member its past, sc’MOI is without beginning, middle, and end. Its Spirit lives on, as do its materials: proceedings, paper presentations, receipts for room rentals and airline seats. sc’MOI is a movement, an opposition to modernity in its critical postmodernism, to corporate university, to TQM, reengineering, AACSB, to war, to globalization, to humanism in its posthumanism, and to unsustainability. Best to dismember before all of sc’MOI is unsustainable, its systemicity unraveling, its unfulfilled science, and only the sc’MOI Spirit actually can live on.

We consider the construction of leadership influence involving manipulation and from narrative standpoint. We use the career of Adolf Hitler as an empirical example - as a case - illustrating the huge, and potentially destructive, power of story-telling. Hitler is used as an illustrative case for how storytelling is involved in constructing great leadership influence – and with a view to making sense of such a leader’s story. We have applied both conceptual and narrative analysis in our empirical case. In terms of the narrative analysis, we follow Polkinghorne’s definition on narrative inquiry. Despite the significant attention given to storytelling in the contemporary management literature, less research has been devoted to understanding its connection to destructive leadership. As a result of the case we have constructed a rich description of evolving process of destructive leadership. Leaders all over the world can get practical guidance and support for their aims to be better leader and to resist bad leadership.

While the nature, character and function of stories are variously theorized in organizational storytelling literature, little research has tried to unpack how organizational narrative domain may transform over time. Attending to the contextual transformation of organizational story space can reveal how popular stories at one epoch could be reformulated, ignored, or forgotten all together during another epoch. Drawing on ethnographic data of a children’s charity in UK, which experienced a stage of rapid professionalization, specialization, and bureaucratization, I examine the influence of this restructuring initiative on the organizational narrative domain. It was shown that the professionalization of the charity starved the old stories of the oxygen of relevance. The memories of the old pioneers, from the days of stress and violence, became less welcome as the organization turned increasingly managerial in character. The notion of ‘irrelevancy’ is further developed drawing on the work of Maurice Halbwachs, and its implications are elaborated building on storytelling research.

In this interconnection of embodied being and environing world, what happens in the interface is what’s important. At least that is the way a phenomenological perspective takes shape. Ihde, 2002, p. 8

We are embodied beings. Our flesh, our manner of being in the world as an intertwining of perceiver and perceived is a notion that makes it possible for us to articulate the human body with respect to its ontological dimensionality and the claim it has within the lived world. This claiming is our being-in-the-world and it is situated in the understanding of the Self. This fleshly schema called the body is a “opening and clearing, in the multidimensional field of Being, for it articulates the embodiment-character of our responsiveness and elicits its potential for development on the basis of our initial, most primordial sense of Being-in-the-world.” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 62). As such, our everyday life takes place within this opening and clearing of personal space and personal movement. In this Being in the World, through history, humans have told oral then written stories to solidify culture and share knowledge for the future. Our Being-in-the-world comes through story. A different part of Being also intertwines with technology. When story and technology meet, digital stories are born. This theoretical reflection aims to connect the philosophy of technology and new media theory to clarify the role of digital processes in the storytelling, and explore the notion of techne. A variety of perspectives work to shed light on the phenomenological notion called Beingin-the-world-with-technology. Latour (2005) Giltrow (2002) Ihde (2002) and Orlikowski (2001) contribute to unpacking the interaction and relationship between humans and technology to identify the materials artifacts, characteristics of human agents, and context. This reflection aims to flesh out new media perspectives about digital storytelling through the phenomenological work of Gadamer, Heidegger, Ihde, Leder, Merleau Ponty, with concepts of mediation, mediatization, embodiment, motility, praxis, context, and aesthetic stance toward techne.

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.

I work with the concept of apparatuses of material storytelling as a way to study the enactment of ‘the future school’. The article analyses a project at a school that involved students, teachers and leaders building models for learning spaces to inspire the architect who were to design a new building for grades 4-6. The analysis is theoretically informed by ‘new materialist thinking’. The analysis show how the project, while producing differentiated learning spaces and ideas about the learning student, configures and reconfigures the organization known as ‘a school’ in ways that highlight contemporary problems concerning authority, management and the constitution of ‘the student’, in an education system which is increasingly focused on learning-centred educational management on the students desire and motivation for learning.

The purpose of this paper is to improve our understanding of how discursive practices are related to the sense of reality and materiality. It does not present ways of filling absences in storied fragmented and polyphonic lives, but rather offers a methodology of listening to what people say and do not say. It suggests the use of a multilayered theoretical framework only to listen to what is supposedly lived and experienced in discursive practices. The work produced by the researcher relies partly on what people do not say, and the researchers’ interpretative criteria of discursive practices in the material realm involve challenging normality and hegemonic discourses. There are implications for organizational storytelling. The paper suggests that the reader can become aware of material contextual structures in storytelling by taking consideration of the influences of the sense of reality of material discursive practices in the theory of storytelling, as well as the perceived value and risks in its use.

This special issue of TAMARA focuses on a new emerging field of storytelling informed among others by recent theoretical instigations in science studies (Barad, 2007) that matter matters.

As such, the double special issue highlights in various ways on the manner by which matter comes to matter in organizational story processes. Taking storytelling and discursive practices into the material realm raises the question of the agency of matter to the extent that matter is placed as an agential-force equivalent to that of human agency. This constitutes a profound conceptual shift well worth exploring in greater depth.

Drawing on various aspects of the new material feministic turn, the turn to affect, to space and to ontology the shift is not so much a turning ‘away from’, as a ‘turn towards’ the working of a different difference. A difference of meaning- mattering and material-discursiveness. A difference therefore of reworking previously constituted binaries. In short - a difference, constituted by a reorientation (Shotter, 2011) more than any specific theorizing.

Inquiring into this reorientation, this special issue of TAMARA specifically aims at throwing light on the relationship of organizational discursive practices and material (artifactual, bodily, spatial) practices in relation to understanding and dealing with processes of organizational development, learning and change, and organizational inquiry.

This article contributes to the on-going debate among scholars of organizational identity on collective and polyphonic identity formation processes. The article explores the interplay between individual and organizational storytelling by conceptualizing organizational identity construction processes as a web of storytelling practices, a memory system evoking a sense of coherence and nostalgia among organizational members. By drawing on the results of a narrative and ethnographic case study of a consultancy, the article aims to unfold the web of stories and storytelling practices in a single case organization. The analysis explores how members of this organization, through their everyday storytelling practices, created shared understandings of being members of a fantastic company while simultaneously telling critical counterstories. The analysis shows how organizational members learned to shape not only their stories of success but also their counterstories in ways that made them harmonize with the storytelling traditions of the organization. Furthermore, the concept of personal polyphony is suggested to describe how everyday work stories are antenarrative in the sense that the construction of self, work and the organization is never finished; it is an ongoing process of negotiating and handling many potential and sometimes contradictory storylines simultaneously.

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.