Written through the lens of the practitioner-scholar, this paper integrates first-hand experience with theory to explore the tension between positive scholarship and the Metamorphosis Model proposed by Boje (2005) in the context of the emerging workplace practice of systematically applying story/telling. In particular it examines the importance of shadow stories, potent stories from the liminal spaces of the organization, and their implication for organizational practitioners who are latching on to the emerging trend to formally or systematically integrate story/telling into their practice. It draws on the practical experience blended with the qualitative research of the author on the systematic use of stories in for-profit organizations. It does not problematize systematic, performer storytelling as a strategic process, but for the purposes of this paper accepts it as a popular contemporary trend. A preliminary set of reflective questions for practitioners who have chosen to participate in systematic storytelling are included with the intent of challenging practitioners to widen the angle of their listening lens and deepen their practice through an understanding and inclusion of liminal stories.

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 themes of organization as dreamscape, the psychodynamics of everyday organizational performance and organizational rituals and the enactment of death and desire in the context of a longitudinal case study of an academic institution. This case study focuses on the various ways in which the organization has developed and continues to develop neurotic and dysfunctional tendencies. It looks at the ways in which those tendencies are expressed in the culture and structure of the organization and the ways in which the various constituencies of the college are complicit in the enactment of the neurosis of its leadership, as reflected in various dependent and counterdependent dynamics and performances. Of specific interest in this paper are the changes in neurotic patterns over time and the ways in which these changes relate to the changes in leadership. Using Kets de Vries' concepts related to organizational neurosis, we will discuss how the college moved from a compulsive organization to a dramatic organization.

Recent theories of technology have argued that in order to take constructivism seriously we need to understand technologies as organizational texts, replacing the study of technological artefacts with an appreciation of the ways in which these ‘texts’ are read, or interpreted, in specific situations. Whilst such approaches offer an effective critique of determinism in explanations of technological change, they also raise some interesting questions around the nature of the human subject which have been given a less comprehensive treatment in the literature. This paper contributes to the development of a thoroughgoing antiessentialism in theories of technology and organization by considering Deleuze and Guattari’s radical constructionist critique of the subject. Placing the technocentric metaphor of ‘the machine’ at the heart of subjectivization, Deleuze and Guattari’s decentring of the human subject offers a fully symmetrical anti-essentialism, capable of accounting for the non-human forces at work in the constitution of human subjectivity.

This article is based on a framework for assessing and working with mental models and utilizing the exploration of ‘dominant’ worldviews to increase individual and organizational competency to identify, assess and shift worldviews to foster social change. The author describes her methodology and results during the data collection, data analysis, data feedback, and intervention phases of a consultation with a client. She reviews literature on white privilege, mental models, power, and cultural competency. The author reflects on implications of the engagement for the client, herself and the discourse on the role of OD as a catalyst for social change.

This article studies how a political organization begins to experiment with its identity. By use of an empirical case of the Danish Ministry of Education, I examine how a political organization supplements its identity of a legislating power with identities of a supervisor, beacon and facilitator of reflection processes. I analyse how the Danish Ministry of Education observes that its initial attempts to strengthen evaluation in the Danish public schools did not have the wanted effects because the values and professional norms of public school teachers constitute a resistance towards interference from outside the educational system. The Ministry thus faces a dilemma: the more it tries to control evaluation in the public school, the less likely it is to produce a desired effect. This paradox contains destructive potential but also causes the Ministry to reflect upon its own role in the development of evaluation in public schools. Out of a paralysis emerge new innovative strategies of governing, aimed at the schools’ self-governing capacity. The identity of the political system thus emerges as oscillations between different roles of a legislating power and a supervising coach. The case study suggests that a society of experimentalism is emerging. Thus, the relevant object of study is no longer organizational identity, but the experiments with different identities that modern organizations are performing.

This article presents the idea of mapping organizational learning as a way of doing organizational ethnography. It suggests that organizational learning is a (re)assemblage of human and non-human and material and immaterial forces that reverberate in networks of lived stories. Mapping is suggested as a process of collecting and writing about lived stories as they emerge in different historical, geographical and material conditions. It is seen as a way of capturing a dynamic, changing and unfolding network of stories that are tied together, but are still disparate from one another. The article ties the idea of mapping to regional development projects concerned with the actualization of the bio-economy.

Contemporary organizations feature absence of boundaries and are increasingly defined by loose couplings, pluri-vocality and network configurations. What Foucault (1995) addressed as a former society of discipline is transformed and replaced into what Deleuze (1995) refines as a society of control that incorporates its subjects into new and ever changing lines of subjectification. This transformation of dispositifs (Deleuze, 1992; Foucault, 1980) and authoritative discourses (Bakhtin, 1982) that compose (and is composed of) a contemporary way of living induces in other words new types of embodied organizational knowledge and ways of organizing, which have consequences for how subject positions are (re)configured in everyday corporate lives. Such identity work is rarely studied in local discursive practices of today’s modern and emergent corporations. The aspiration in the present article is to scrutinize local practices in a dialogue based leadership development forum in university settings. This provides insights into the lived lives and identity work in Aalborg University representing a temporary, polyphonic and cross-disciplinary research project in a modern corporation. The project was an example of a loose-coupled and temporary arrangement/organization that invited a diverse group of participants to engage in the co-production of knowledge in/on leadership communicative practices. The participants were professional leaders from diverse organizations in the North of Jutland together with researchers and candidate students from the study programs of communication and philosophy at Aalborg University.

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.