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Explore how storytelling shapes organizational dynamics. Learn how language constructs reality and interactions, with examples and insights from scholars like Hannah Arendt and David Boje.
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The linguistic turn in social science Language, language games: Language as a toolbox for the construction of reality Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition, 1998, pp. 178-179), Storytelling – co-constructive storytelling because it happens in dialogue and interaction with other actors. To speak a language = Actor: “…the action that he begins is humanly disclosed by the word, and though his deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word in which he identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to do” (Arendt 1998, pp. 178-179).
Organizationsareco-constructedthroughcollectivestorytelling David Boje: storytelling is the preferred sense-making currency of human relationships. In organizations, people engage in dynamic interpretations and reinterpretations of storylines through which organizational and institutional artifacts, words, concepts, past stories, strategies and other symbols are given meaning.
Example 1 • “KMJ: How is the relationship with the IT-Company? • HQ: Major chapter. It is clearly an important cooperative partner for us... (but)... this cooperation is replete with problems. You may have to talk to some of the politicians about this. In my view, the problems are that the IT-Company - the union we have - designs standard solutions, which fit the average bank. Then there are some banks that require greater functionality because they are bigger. They have more products. During the times that I can remember, we tried to reach an agreement that the IT-Company designs the basic part. In return they work with an open structure, which allows us - by means of different tools, for example our data-warehouse tools - to ensure that the latter become an integrated part of the basic system. I don’t know what goes wrong. Maybe I do know - now you tape it and that doesn’t matter. In reality, it is probably about political power. Can you stay in business longer if you use the IT-Company? Can you get agreement that the IT-Company provides standard solutions all the way through? Maybe the smaller and medium sized companies can see an advantage here... I don’t know. But politically the IT-Company has had an advantage in maintaining total control of all IT. I think we can feel that in our daily work. We are being harassed; and it is daily stuff. Suddenly we are cut off from using these tools and these development facilities. So, politically we need an agenda that states that the IT-Company designs standard systems and works, in return, with an open interface where we can work with the tailored part. Sometimes this is more characteristic of politics than it is of cooperation.”
Example 2 • “KMJ: Why are there so many documents? • BW: I don’t know. That’s because our system is so bad. Now I mentioned car loans before OK. Technically, it is like that I have to go into one system to enter a loan. I have to enter the persons’ social security number. Afterwards the customer pops us, provided that he is in there (in the system) in advance. OK. Then I enter all the information – that is everything that will happen with this loan. There will be security and things like that. Then I have to write a security?? Then I need to enter his name again. Then I have to write a declaration of pledge. Once more I need to enter his name. Then I have to make the property mortgage deed on this car. And believe me I need to enter his name again. And on the three documents that I mentioned before, I need to enter the type of car. At the end I need to go into our security registration system and enter the same car and the same information that was just entered three times before. That’s when I think the system is so bad. It should be like.... when I have entered the man, he is in there - he appears on all five documents. When I have entered the car, it will be on all four documents where it is needed. That’s really heavy today. But I think that probably none of the documents can be spared. They go to different institutions within The Bank - right. But it is sick to enter the same data in so many different places… and to have to spend an hour... instead of entering it once, then I push a button - then of course it takes some time to print it. That’s what it is. Then you at least…then it doesn’t matter that you are disrupted. Then the data are in there. I think that’s the biggest problem.
Example 2 continued • KMJ: That’s your IT-system? • BW: Yes, that’s too bad? Then we need to go to a fifth place to make an authorisation. We have to describe why we have done it. Typically we will write how big the loan was, what the price was, and what it was for. We also have to write what his engagement looks like after the loan is authorized. And it is data, which may be found in other places. Then we write it once more. I think that’s too bad. It should be able to find it, itself. What is his engagement now....? It was for buying a car. I have chosen the category car loan. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that it was because he buys a car. So that it finds the information itself. Further, I should not write the interest rates. It should be able to find that information. I have already entered it once. The systems are not communicating. We work in too many systems....”
Conclusions • Reality construction is placed in the world • Traditions, practices, conventions, institutions etc. • Placed in a historical and geographical context • Reality construction is concerned with the activitities in which you participate – and the greater context in which these activities are placed • This context is always social. It is placed in interaction with other actors and technologies – Actors understand themselves in relation to the social world.
Foucault’s conception of power • It is not a theory of power • It is an analytics of power. • Method for organizing historical material • Writing the history of the present • To show how power works in practice • Genealogy = power analysis
Characteristics of genealogy • Systematic suspicion to any truth and morality claim. • Statements are results of relations of power • Actors • Positions • Interests • Intentions • Surveillance and representation • Nietzsches critical history: Critical history is characterized by dragging the past “before the court of justice”; investigate it meticulously and finally condemn it (Nietzsche 1997)
Characteristics of genealogy • Expose embedded truth and morality claims to mockery and laughter • Narratives which represent history in a specific way – as a linear and coherent structure with a clear beginning, middle and end. • Antenarrative inquiry: Something unfinished, fragmented and unresolved. • rationality was born in an altogether reasonable fashion – from chance (Foucault, 1984a, p. 78). • it is to discover that truth and being do not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.” (Foucault, 1984a, p. 81). • ”…historical beginnings are lowly: not in the sense of modest or discreet steps of a dove, but derisive and ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation” (Foucault, 1984a, p. 79).
Writing the history of the present • ”I would like to write the history of this prison, with all the political investments of the body that it gathers together in closed architecture. Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No - if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes - if one means writing the history of the present.” (Foucault, 1979, p. 31).
Power • “…that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; …” • …as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses them; …” • ”…as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; …” • “…and lastly as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies” (Foucault, 1993, pp. 333-334).
Positive power • “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: It includes, it represses, it censors, it abstracts, it masks, it conceals. In fact power produces; it produces reality, it produces domains and objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (Foucault, 1979, p. 194).
Power as unspoken warfare • Foucault describes power by means of a reversal of Clausewitz’ claim that “…war is politics continued by other means…” to “power is war, a war continued by other means” (Foucault, 1980, p. 90; see also Foucault, 1993, p. 334). • ”The role of political power, on this hypothesis, is perpetually to reinscribe this relation to a form of unspoken warfare; to reinscribe it in social institutions, in economic inequalities, in language, in the bodies themselves of each and everyone of us” (Foucault, 1980, p. 90).
Power analysis • The purpose of power analysis is to create a more reflexive relationship to the world. • Genealogical analysis: Creating an alternative memory of past that may create different possibilities in the future • ”This is because knowledge is not made for understanding: it is made for cutting” (Foucault, 1984, p. 88).
Power analysis • Method to show us how reality is socially constructed (sacrificial use of history) – to see how events are created by actors in specific positions, with specific intentions and interests. • Parodic use of history: Detailed historical analysis may lead us to see more clearly the actual events leading up to the emergence of specific events, instead of being seduced by myths, stories and narratives of the present. • Dissociative use of history: where the intention is to produce a more varied picture of who actors are, where they come from and why they think and act the way in which they think and act
Historical analysis • ”Genealogy records the history of interpretations” (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982). • “Whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous “meaning” and “purpose” are necessarily obscured or even obliterated” (Nietzsche, 1992b, p. 513).
Methodological guidelines • Approach statements and actions in their exact specificity of their occurrence. Simple questions: • Who is speaking and acting? • What concepts and methods do actors use and how do they use them? • What are the conditions of speech and actions?
Methodological guidelines • Bottom up analysis • Chronology: • Reconstruction of history from beginning to end. • Openness: Understand the events as they occur in their own time and space – not in terms of the present. • Conduct an ascending analysis of power – let the larger patterns emerge from below.
Power as a network of relations • Power is embedded in a network of relations and alliances. It cannot be localized (”we need to cut off the head of the king”) • We are the subjects of power and the instruments of its exercise • Power is productive • Power can only be understood where it works. It is impossible to deduce its essential characteristics • Don’t ask what power is: Ask how it works. It is not a definition of power that we seek. We need to understand how it works in order to understand power
Power in organizations • Historical analysis. Actors speech and actions are conditioned on what came before. Thus, there is a historical context for speech and actions. • Actors have specific conditions in this context from which they speak. Representation and surveillance. • Organizations are shaped, transformed and changed continuously during these games. This proces never ends and the story therefore always depends on what comes next. • Power analysis is about gaining a sense of the forces in play when organizations work and change
Foucaults conception of power • Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society (Foucault, 1993, p. 334). • “Of course, a historian of technology ought to work back towards that origin and replace it with groups, interests, intentions, events, opinions.” (Latour, 1996, p. 18).
Historical analysis • “Justice and young engineers with no memory are hard on projects that fail.” (Latour, 1996, p. 35). • “Is this process of translation “false,” “misleading,” “rhetorical,” or “illogical”? Does Aramis really meet a need? We don’t yet know. It all depends. On what? On what happens next, and on how much you trust the spokespersons of those needs and interests.” (Latour, 1996, p. 42).
