4. Narrative and Storytelling in Critical Organizational Studies

In this section, we introduce self-identified critical postmodern organization studies scholar David Boje and his framework of antenarrative. Section 4.1 first sets the stage for an understanding of antenarrative through the stageplay Tamara – a core metaphor for over 30 years of Boje’s research. Section 4.2 then introduces antenarrative including (1) sensemaking as its fore founding concept (Weick, 1995), (2) antenarrative’s coexistence with narrative and story within storytelling organizations (Boje, 2008) and (3) common methods Boje attributes to antenarrative research. Finally, Section 4.3 addresses the deep influence of indigenous scholarship on Boje’s paradigm – a fact that marks a significant departure to theorizations of story and narrative within STEM and applied linguistics yet also generates complex ethical tensions when adopting antenarrative within my own research program.

4.1. Tamara – “The story you experience from room to room”

To make sense of Boje’s work, we first must make sense of the play Tamara – Boje’s guiding metaphor from the 1990s to the present and the title of his co-founded journal: Tamara: Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry[1]. Tamara is a 1981 play by Canadian writer John Krizanc based on a historical meeting between nationalist Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio and Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka at D’Annuzio’s villa in 1927 fascist Italy. Within the story, characters oscillate between themes of freedom and oppression and their complicated relationship to the state as a young Communist agitator tries in vain to convince the retired poet to lead a group of exiles against the rising Mussolini (Richards, 1990).

Unlike a typical stageplay involving a single space of rotating settings and characters, Tamara is blocked and choreographed through an 11-room villa. Characters therefore interact in concurrent scenes within different rooms of the house and move between rooms to form mushrooming permutations of spatial assemblages. Within the villa, audience members also move between rooms as the play unfolds, yet also only understand a fraction of unfolding action due to the concurrence of multiple scenes throughout the staged setting. Audience members therefore assume a very active role in Tamara compared to the passive consumption associated with mono-stage productions – a role that approaches the agency of authorship. Such agentive audience questions include:

1. As characters leave and separate from a room, which will you follow?

2. Or will you wait and see who shows up in one or several rooms?

3. Will you follow the same character all the time, or switch characters as the play progresses?

4. Will you stay with a friend, or will you each adopt different strategies?

5. How will you respond when an actor gives you instructions (e.g., to follow them, or wait in the room)[2]?

For audience members, Tamara invites not only diverse readings, but also diverse and ultimately partial perspectives. Such perspectives are not only based on the lived experiences and values audience-participants hold, but also through their activity. Activities require audience orientation to either (1) characters, (2) rooms, or (3) storylines – orientations and loyalties liable to change as the action unfolds. The fourth wall even breaks at times, such as in (5) when actors give instructions to audience members – instructions that audience members can consider but are not obliged to follow. In this way, the public become the storytellers – the builder of scenes and storylines. Krizanc merely provides the material (Manguel in Krizanc, 1989).

More importantly, such choices are not independent of audience-participants’ backgrounds or identities, as Boje (2006, p. 77) shares in an interview with Krizanc.

“David [Boje]: Now when I went to the play in Los Angeles, I followed the servants, because I’m from a working-class background I just went right to the basement, you know.

John [Krizanc]: Yeah. Well, I always do too. When it first ran in Toronto, I, I used to go every night to see this one scene, just before intermission in the kitchen.”

Boje’s comment is striking, as it parallels Krizanc’s inspiration to write Tamara in the first place. In a Foreword to the print edition of Tamara, Manguel (in Krizanc, 1989) notes that Krizanc, when reading Checkov plays with his schoolmates, was most drawn to the servants – “the sullen maids and butlers who drop a line here and there and then disappear into the kitchen…They were the one’s Krizanc wanted to follow.” Such a drive to follow became Krizanc’s call to action to audiences of Tamara — an unbridled freedom juxtaposed against characters’ struggle to negotiate the stultifying force of fascism.

In this way, Tamara “becomes the exact antithesis of fascism, because it condemns the audience to the unbearable freedom of a concerned and active witness” (Manguel in Krizanc, 1989). This open-ended yet perspectivally constrained flow of storylines coupled with Tamara’s juxtaposition of freedom and oppression come to define Boje’s (2001a) concept of antenarrative – particularly because akin to the power imbalances that drive the grand narratives of companies and organizations, Tamara’s characters’ freedom is curtailed by an omnipresent state and therefore exclusively express their freedom in words.

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[1] https://repozytorium.kozminski.edu.pl/entities/journal/648ce774-05ae-47f3-8a1b-62524c23badd/static/editorial-board

[2] I draw this list from a Wikipedia article on Tamara. Unfortunately, the list is without citation. Yet it also succinctly captures the complexity of choices faced by audience-participants in a Tamara production.

Ontogenetic Reflection

I enjoy listening to this read back again. I first found Boje’s work by happenstance. I had previously listened to an episode of the ProfG Pod, a podcast by NYU Business Professor Scott Galloway, who talked about storytelling as one of the most essential, transferable, and enduring skills in our contemporary working climate. And in the age of AI, I stand by that. As OpenAI, Anthropic, and others release more and more advanced models of LLMs with faster and faster turnaround times, my hopes of working in academia begin to dim. I start to feel concerned of whether I can truly stand out among the massively oversaturated market of PhDs, particularly within humanities-adjacent disciplines like applied linguistics.

However, when I think about the skill of storytelling, I feel more hope to find work, if not in academia, then elsewhere. The ability to tell a story is the ability to use language to connect, to move, to feel something, to make legible one’s experience across not only similarities but also differences. The difference is, today, we can generate and regenerate stories ad nauseam with more ease than before. In some ways, we can appreciate this. As one of the Tamara rooms that we see when it comes to AI is that of second-language English speakers who use AI to level the playing field that was once drastically slanted against them.

The stories I’ve heard about second-language English-speaking academics who have had their manuscripts rejected, or even worse, sold expensive English editing services — AI has now allowed academics with diverse and anomalous linguistic repertoires to express themselves across scholars’ diverse linguistic and semiotic repertoires. Yet another side of the Tamara room that I often worry about is how the use of AI homogenizes what we consider to be good writing. I read never-ending LinkedIn posts that either complain that academic writing has become too homogeneous or celebrate that AI has made writing more clear, concise, and consistent across manuscripts with remarkable efficiency.

I see this as a qualitative-quantitative divide. A famous op-ed published in Qualitative Inquiry takes a very clear stance on the role of AI in qualitative research, namely extreme, if not total, skepticism. As they write, qualitative inquiry — the study of human experience through language and symbols — is not well served by the cultural bias that English- and Western-text-dominant large language models produce. Yet on the other hand, in another Tamara room, we see quantitative researchers who view language not as a multivalent, polysemous, context-dependent use of language, but rather as a transparent medium of communicating information.

To quantitative researchers, it seems that finding a perfectly overlapping nomenclature would be ideal so that researchers can separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of novel, significant, and publishable research findings. Qualitative researchers, on the other hand, seem to embrace a lot more leeway and creativity, and therefore also ambiguity in the use of language. Martin Heidegger distinguished these two types of language as traditional language and technological language. To quantitative researchers, I see technological language as the norm and the expectation. Writing is meant to communicate one’s findings.

While for qualitative researchers, I see more of a turn towards the poetic and towards the ambiguous use of language for authors to creatively express themselves — not only to communicate findings in a linear fashion, but to play with and test the limits of scientific communication itself. One aspect of my readings that I don’t know much about these days is where mixed-methods researchers might stand on this issue. My bet is the quantitative exerts an asymmetric gravitational pressure onto the qualitative side of expression, thereby rendering a dominance of technological language.

I see technological language as already taking over avenues of expression and the cognitive metaphors through which we talk about reading, writing, and thinking. My question is: can AI supplant the spontaneity of human creative expression, or is AI doing humanity a service by challenging, blending, and ultimately disposing of the problematic colonial construction of the human? I would argue that unequal access to AI also leads to unequal disruptions of this conceptualization of the human, but time will tell if AI will ultimately render the concept of the human as illegible in future generations.