In this first series on Rock, Paper, Scissors, I will post a serialization of my first comprehensive examination paper, completed in November 2025. Each week I will post a 500–1000 word segment of the serialized draft, as well as an accompanying ontogenetic reflection. The ontogenetic reflection marks present Ian dialoguing with past Ian and stretching the temporality of the comprehensive exam to not only provide meta-commentary on the many common struggles of the compression of time for graduate students immersed in the comprehensive exam process, but also to model a form of reflexivity that I term open thinking.

In Applied Linguistics there is a growing movement for open access publishing and open scholarship. As an extension to open scholarship, I also advocate for open thinking — to make record of our contributions not only in the polished gems that constitute peer research articles, but to also embrace the vulnerability of being a researcher-in-becoming. We, as scholars, negotiate each other’s positions through a plane of consistency — a living story of layers sedimented through history yet always emerging through glimmers of imminence. Consider this series my first attempt to model my own plane of imminence as I think through and make sense of this wild (inter)disciplinary universe called Applied Linguistics.

1. Introduction and Roadmap

1.1. overview and roadmap

Anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1987, p. 1) opens his monograph Society Against the State, by asking, “Can serious questions regarding power be asked?” In this paper, I turn this question to story and narrative – specifically story and narrative as discussed within (1) science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, (2) narrative inquiry in applied linguistics, and (3) antenarrative approaches within postmodern organizational studies. As the following storying with the literature demonstrates, some ask the question of story more seriously than others. I argue that bringing these three disciplinary communities into dialogue can form generative conversations around what constitutes narratives and stories and unmask how narrative and story define what is accepted as valid knowledge within STEM and humanities disciplines.

As a conceptual metaphor, I name these three bodies of literature Rock, Paper, and Scissors. STEM is Rock. STEM scholars are concerned with stable observations of the natural world, and in general resist the phantasmatic social constructivist accounts of reality offered by many applied linguistics or postmodern organization studies. Yet as indigenous scholars would argue (see Section 4.3), rocks have stories too. Section 2 therefore discusses STEM scholars’ engagement with story and narratives and the tensions engendered through such engagement.

Applied linguistics is Paper. Obsessed with the text, applied linguists seek to unmask the discursive apparatuses that underwrite social life. This reference to paper is therefore both literal due to applied linguistics’ language learning origins and commitment to textual analysis, and figurative due to the performative, discursive layering that applied linguistics often attribute to social interaction with the natural world. The conceptual commitments and common methodological approaches to narrative inquiry (as well as linguists who have studied scientists and their communicative practices) form Section 3.

Postmodern organizational studies constitute Scissors. Of these three legendary objects, Scissors is the only tool. This marks the centrality of human labor within organization studies. Furthermore, antenarratives (an influential term in postmodern organization studies) are cutting conceptual tools, slicing through stratified narratives and reacting with living stories to produce multiplicities out of surface-level homogenous grand narratives (Lyotard, 1984). Antenarrative is defined and operationalized in Section 4 alongside a discussion of two key influences on antenarrative theorist David Boje’s thinking: John Krizanc’s postmodern play Tamara (Section 4.1), Karl Weick’s paradigm of sensemaking (Section 4.2) and Indigenous scholarship about story and storytelling (Section 4.3).

Finally, we bring Rock, Paper, and Scissors back together in Section 5. First, I summarize and expand upon the definitions of narrative and story, both explicitly and implicitly, within each respective discipline. Second, I discuss potential implications and future-looking research possibilities if we theorize Rock, Paper, Scissors not as an agonistic, balanced game of attrition, but rather as a cooperative game of generativity.

Due to the breadth of this topic, I am not exhaustive in my analysis of these respective wells of knowledge. Rather, I encourage the reader to story with me as I story these literatures, pointing out debates and dilemmas that will not settle serious questions of story, but rather will unsettle the often uncritiqued interchangeability of such terms. This is not a literature review. This is proof of concept that such serious questions of story are worth asking. But before diving in, let’s begin with a formative thinker for all three disciplines: Jerome Bruner.

Ontogenetic Reflection

As I listen to this opening section again, I think about two things.

Number one, I find rock, paper, scissors to be a very unclean conceptual metaphor. The way that I try to strictly territorialize STEM into rock, applied linguistics into paper, and postmodern organizational studies into scissors felt very intuitive at the time that I was writing this exam. But I will say that in the present day, I see the overlaps of these disciplines a little bit more fuzzily than I did at the time. And yet I am also enamored with the metaphor — not as an explanatory mechanism, but rather as a device of thought transit. There’s a lot of indexicalities that rock, paper, scissors can conjure up as I continue to try and think through this relationship between narrative, storytelling, and knowledge.

For one, rock, paper, scissors constitutes a triad, which already gestures to post-qualitative inquiry’s consistent assertion — often by citing Deleuze — that encourages scholars to think beyond binaries. A triad, in other words, already rejects binaries by bringing in a triangulating mediator.

Second, rock, paper, scissors constitutes an agonistic game in which no one component asserts domination over the other two. This is surprisingly consistent with Pierre Clastres’s argument in Society Against the State that many Indigenous societies in the Americas utilized warfare as a form of counterpower against the establishment of enduring states of domination. But I also think it’s a bit pretentious to start this off with a quote, particularly of an anarchist anthropologist. I personally am not sure if applied linguistics is ready to embrace anarchist imaginaries, but based on a seminar that I took last semester, I’m very taken by alternative ways of thinking through questions and problems of power. And while I think that prominent Western scholars like Marx and Foucault take critical theorizing of power very, very far, we have to ask ourselves what other new paths might be available to us as we continue to critique existing systems of domination.

And so, as this comprehensive exam unfolds, I encourage you — as I said — not to see this as a finished product, but rather to think with me. Because I don’t bring myself forth as an expert, but just as a sensemaking being. Just as we all are sensemaking, storied, storying beings. And I appreciate you sticking with me on this first step, and I hope that you join me on the next one.

Until then, cheers!