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.

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.

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.

Organization and functional differentiation are considered key principles of modern societies. Yet, within organizational studies little research has been conducted on the interplay of function systems, organizations, and society. The few existing studies suppose trends to more functional polyphony. The cases presented in this article, however, support the idea that organizational multifunctionality is the standard case rather than a special case of organization. It is furthermore shown that organizations can change their function system preference and that the translation between function systems can be an organization’s main function. A Google Ngram view on functional differentiation finally furthers the idea that changes of function system preferences are not only a matter of individual organizations, but also a matter of entire societies.

This short essay will be an attempt to analyze the exchange of money and commodities in terms of framework offered by phenomenology. Marx’s Capital is an utterly phenomenological work in the Hegelian sense of this notion. Marx conceptualizes henomenology as a method of exposing the real-world phenomena that is prior to abstract philosophical inquiry. In the first volume of Capital Marx introduces explanatory categories of the German Idealism to “purely” economical and social issues. This sense his analysis is close to the one found in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. Foucault, who is mainly preoccupied with understanding the establishment of certain subject (in this context the modern economic subject), deals here with the notion of wealth and elaborates changing relations between money and prices between 15th and late 17th century, as well as such issues as mercantilism, utility and creation of value. There are significant differences between Marx’s and Foucault’s approach. Whereas Foucault’s analysis is oriented towards the hermeneutics and deconstruction of the notion of exchange as a constitutive activity of the subject, Marx is mainly preoccupied with the description of the activity of exchanging and its consequences. However, even though conclusions of Capital and The Order of Things differ significantly, the method of analysis reveals many similarities. Thus, both texts operate with a structure of deeper understanding of exchange as a multi-layer process of signification, accumulation, and transformation. The essay is an attempt to briefly analyze all of these functions of the exchange process as well as to indicate a new interpretation that arises from the framework offered by both authors.

This paper sets out to analyse the concept of a broad multi-paradigmatic approach, combining different cognitive perspectives, drawn from the social sciences and the humanities. It presents various issues of organizational culture: critics of functionalism in organizational culture concepts, interpretativist approach to organizational culture, critical perspective of organizational culture, organizational culture management methods (comparison of fundamentalism, pluralism, eclecticism, and methodological anarchy). The theory of culture in management and the attempt at presenting ways of studying its changes presented in this paper indicate that there are multiple diverse concepts. The complexity of the theory is a derivative of the problems related to the notion of culture. The multiplicity of concepts results from the fact that researchers assume different paradigms.

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.

Defining the phenomenon of leadership is a procedure causing difficulties, so they are stereotypically analysed in the biographical context (the key role is then played by the leader) or through the prism of historicism (a leader as an element in the historical processes). Less and less involvement of the social groups and units into political activities and deideologisation of life popularise the thesis about the crisis of the political leadership as the aspect of power, form of influence, personification of the idea of governance. It can be assumed that the existence of the phenomenon of political leadership is a phenomenon bordering on politics, sociology and psychology, showing clear analogies with the religious leadership, that is the institutional one.

Theories of leadership undergo modernisation, changes included the theory of outstanding individuals and behaviours, situational theories, cultural concepts of leadership, models of charismatic leadership, transformational, phenomena replacing the leadership. From many forms of leadership, the political leadership has potentially the largest possibility to modify the behaviour of other people.Political leadership, and in particular state leadership, is a significant value belonging to the socio-political sphere. Being a leader today is a special value on the market of politics, but it is also a great responsibility.

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.