CHAPTER 2: Why Storytelling Dialogism Yields Emergence?
David M. Boje
January 17, 2006; revised Jan 25 2007
Storytelling Organization (London: Sage, for release Jan 2007)
This chapter is about emerging dialogic story. Emergence is defined as as absolute novelty, spontaneity, and improvisation, without past/future. Dialogism is defined as different voices, styles, and ideas expressing a plurality of logics in different ways, but not always in same place and time.[1] Story emergence is getting lost. The reason is that dialogism is not being understood. Bakhtin taught me there are ‘dialogic stories’ which means they are social, imprinted with many voices and logics that are ‘dialogic’ to one another, and entirely unfinished, unfinalized, not whole like narrativists say they are. Pondy taught me that stories are socially defined. Latour taught me that every aspect of our life has a narrative expectation of our role and what will be the sequence of events. Emerging story can break us out of that prison. From Stein I learned that between the lines of story is the stuff we fill in, are expected to fill in, but we do so in our own way. From Benjamin I learned that over the last decades, our organizations have lost important competencies to be able interpret living stories, redefine narrative expectation, understand many voices, and read between the lines of story.
A five-act play, but first the playbill.
Playbill: What is Emergent Story?
Emergent story can be defined as absolute novelty, spontaneity, and improvisation, without past/future. Emergent Stories are conceived in the Here-and-Now co-presence of social communicative intercourse of narrative-memory prisons ready to capture and translate emergence. For Foucault (1977b: 148-149) emergence is the “moment of arising … always produced through a particular stage of forces … or against adverse circumstances.” It will also help to define qualities of emergent stories. I theorize at least four: Authenticity, contagion, institutional support, entertainment value, and cultural force. Most emergent stories lack the quality of authenticity, where they are believable beyond those present. Most emergent stories lack the quality of contagion, where gossip jumps to outsiders to become rumor (Lang & Lang, 1961). Most emergent stories lack the quality institutional support, to where they become legend. A few have entertainment value.
BRINGING EMERGING STORY BACK IN!
ACT 1: ENTER PONDY!
I was in graduate school when Lou Pondy asked me in 1977 to co-author a paper, “Bringing Mind Back In” (Pondy & Boje, 1980). Treating story as object is what Pondy and I call “in-place metering device” science. Ours was a clever narrative of paradigm wars between organization sociology, organization behavior, and organizational phenomenology. We gave them sexier labels. Sociology we derided as social factist. Social behavior, in particular leadership, we derided as social behaviorism. Sensemaking and phenomenology we called social definition, in deference to Silverman & Weick’s emerging viewpoints.
· Social Factism sociology caged “mind” of the storyteller into factist frameworks, where survey was easy to apply, and ethnographic roots could be forgotten.
· Social Behaviorism imprisoned “mind” by removing it from free interplay between stimulus and response, making it a black box that facilitated lab and survey studies, instead of behavioral observation in situations of “real” life.
· Social Definitionism was a new candidate for paradigm of the year. Philosophically it’s rooted in Husserl, and Shutz’s social phenomenology. We could sense it was migrating into organization studies. Weick’s enactment sensemaking we saw as ways to ‘Bring Mind Back In’ to the two paradigms that had excommunicated them.
We just wanted parity. Our efforts to do more anthropological and phenomenological story study were opposed by leader-behaviorists, and sociologists doing lab and survey method. People in our department like Jerry Salancik, Greg Oldham, Michael Mock, Jean Bartuneck, Manuel London, David Whetton, and others were suspicious. We needed the Social Definitionism Manifesto to compete with the superpowers Social Factism and Social Behaviorism.
Of course you know the story. Fill in the blanks. The “Bringing Mind Back In” paper was popular in its day, circulating in the underground, for those who did not buy into the two by two cage narrative of Burrell and Morgan (1979). The four-cell prison become widely popular on Broadway, while our three-cell narrative, played in the underground, Off-Broadway. Now, social phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, discourse, and intertextual analysis of poststructuralism are no longer fledging disciplines. Not containable in Social Definitionism of in the Burrell and Morgan cells Our cells and theirs are narrative constructions, to contain the “mind” of living emergent story behind the seven bars.
Act II: ENTER LATOUR!
I was awakened by Bruno Latour’s 1993 performance that the plenary session of EGOS conference in Paris. He sat on the stage in a chair, violating the narrative-expectations of the several hundred academics in audience. One expectation is to stand behind the podium and narrate. Latour did more of a nightclub comedy act. There were further violations of narrative expectations of every academic discipline of organization study. I remember him saying that each social situation has its story. Now I know it also has its narrative control. More accurately, it’s an implicit narrative script. We know intuitively by socialization how to improvise to fulfill our narrative roles in some emergent storytelling. It’s not all that spontaneous. Latour explained the hermeneutics of pre-story (what I came to call antenarrative), with story emplotment, and the understanding it takes to interpret retrospectively, narrative plot.
Latour said, in passing, it was his first presentation in Paris. Suddenly, Latour’s performance was interrupted, never to resume. How ironic it was. An international conference invited him to speak, when no Paris University had ever done so. French professors leapt out of their seats, and began shouting and pointing, arguing in that way only the French know how to do. Some shouted agreement. Others were affronted. Such a discounting of a distinguished French academic in Paris was impossible, unthinkable. The moderator had to breakup the ruckus. I wrote about the incident in Management Learning Journal (Boje, 1994). I believe Latour was breaking out of a French academic narrative prison, breaking the bars to bring emergent story back in.
Act III: ENTER BAKHTIN!
I began keeping notebooks, conversing with Mikhail Bakhtin, several years ago. What Bakhtin (1973, 1981) calls dialogized heteroglossia is, for me, the “mind” and “life” of story that continues to ignored in organization studies in general (with few exceptions), and in particular in system, strategy, leadership theory, as well as in narrative inquiry, and in general by organization empirical studies, as well as the practice of story consulting, which is more accurate to call “narrative consulting” since story dialogicality or varietymaking is banished. Dialog is not the same as dialogism. In practice no dialogism is beyond what passes as “dialog” consulting.
Act IV: ENTER STEIN!
It is just recently I read Gertrude Stein. Ever notice that when we escape narrative security, the ways of emergent story are very different, and quite telling? Stein (1935) first noticed this in leaving developmental narrative linearity and sequencing behind. She stayed in the moment of telling, before narrative retrospective or reflexivity sensemaking takes over. I began to recall my challenge from Pondy, the episodes in our department, the performance of Latour, and how I imagined Bakhtin and Stein performed.
Act V: ENETER BENJAMIN
Reading Walter Benjamin’s (1936) classic piece, The Storyteller happened only this year. The amazing essay argues that ways of storytelling are dying, being replaced by information processing, BME ways of writing novels, and its all due to changes in the regime of capitalism. Storytelling for Benjamin in a craft, one that grew up in the pre-capitalist craft world of people sitting around telling and listening to stories while they did their sewing, weaving, or sea-faring crafts. When late modern capitalism imposed workers silence and division of labor as ways to enhance performativity of production, the arena for workers practicing the ancient arts and secrets of storytelling was destroyed. It is a wildly fantastic hypothesis. It roots orality skills in ways of craftspeople telling stories, ways journey-persons traveled from town to town carrying tales, ways those who did not travel had deeply reflexive ways of listening, and memories to recount a retrospective tale in great detail, all while not dropping a stitch. Like Ivan Illich (1993) and Walter Ong (1982), Walter Benjamin though that orality storytelling was being corrupted by ways of textuality, ways that written narrative imposes a BME prison onto oral telling. In oral telling lie the secrets of Polypi.
SECRETS OF POLYPI DIALOGISM
Polypi Dialogism comes from work I did on Wilda stories (Boje, 2005e, 2005g, an inquiry into the intertextuality of Bakhtin's four dialogisms (polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, & architectonic). As Bakhtin (1981: 156) tells it, “regardless of whether they corroborate one another, mutually supplement one another, or, on the contrary contradict one another or have any other sort of dialogical relationship.” In the Polypi manner of story, the dialogic plurality can degenerate into mere polyphony or stylistic plasticity, or polemic speech, or what Bakhtin (1981: 181) terms “abstract allegoricalness” or “dialogical disassociation: (p. 186). As such, polypi is heteroglossic, the struggle of centripetal (story control) with centrifugal (counterstory amplification).
This produces the highest order of dialogism that Boulding imagined, which he called “transcendental”, a move that Pondy dared not make. Polypi resists the move of modernity to excommunicate what Boulding (1956) calls transcendental (relation of unknowable to knowable) from all social and physical science, as well as from all societal discourse. What else is the Enlightenment project, if not an excommunication of transcendental?
Oral storyelling, once upon a time, was not the same as written narrative retrospective or reflexive “systematic-monological Weitaschauung” (Bakhtin, 1973: 64). The more centripetal “centralizing tendencies in the life of language have ignored this dialogized heteroglossia” in the social sciences (Bakhtin, 1981: 273). For Bakhtin, “the image of the idea” becomes dialogic to the preceding ways of sign-representation narratives (frame, machine, cell, plant, etc), those “foreign ideas” (Bakhtin, 1973: 71) organizations are so fond of in system thinking. Image is not the same as sign, so popular in simple BME narratives. Dialogism is not the Hegelian, Marxian, or Mead dialectic of evolution and revolution teleology.
Figure 2.1 – Model of Polypi Systemicity Complexity of Dialogisms
Polypi, is my term for the dialogism of dialogisms. The word Polypi comes from Hans Christen Andersen's (1976) adult fairytale: "The Little Mermaid" and is literally a colony of hydra, and for me a metaphor for understanding the interanimation of the four dialogisms (polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, & architectonic). Polypi, at the time of Andersen’s writing, was thought to be both vegetative and animal. Polypi is a manner of story with “jolly relativity” (Bakhtin, 1981: 102).
My purpose is to “Bring Story Back In” to organization studies, all has been taken over by BME narrative prisons. Each narrative prison cell is unique manner of emergent story control and discipline. I explore the Polypi Theory of dialogisms, polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, and architectonic, as the interplay of emergent story and narrative control. My contribution is to theorize five types of dialogism interplaying in the Storytelling Organization: polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, architectonic, and the Polypi (dialogism of these dialogisms at more complex systemicity complexity than each individually). Polypi dialogism is defined as the dialogism of dialogisms of systemicity complexity (Boje, 2005 b, e, g). I develop each of the dialogisms in relation to Storytelling Organization.
Polypi is a manner of story at an order of complexity above the separate dialogisms. In polypi there is dialogic interplay between official master-narratives (sign-representation monologisms) and the more dialogic intercourse among respective dialogisms. Polypi, then, is a plurality of dialogisms, in struggle with modernity. The polypi manner of the story forces a Socratic interrogation of modernity. It’s problematic questions of unknowable, unfinalizedness, unmergedness, indeterminacy of systemicity combine with the most problematic question of all the transcendental. At any moment the plurality of dialogic story can degenerate, be reduce to mere plasticity of individual dialogism or just narrative monophonic.
In Hans Christian Andersen’s (1974) adult tale of The Little Mermaid, the transcendental question is raised, as the crude underworld of the sea, comes into an encounter with the human world. The purgatory of sea-foam, and the world of here-after. In my Wilda storytelling, I pick up on what I see as a further problematic, how late (post) modern capitalism tells stories of its own spirituality and religiosity. Wilda, is my grandmother’s name, and my sister and I believe she too was an enchantress, wou lived in the wildness. In Andersen’s tale, the enchantress is protected by the Polypi (hydra colony), where she lives and works, selling her mystic potions for a dear price.
“Dialogism” is a term never used by Bakhtin (Holquist, 1990: 15). Bakhtin (1981) preferred the term ‘dialogicality.’ Here I use dialogism. Dialogism predates Derrida’s (`978) play of difference and differance and de-centered discourse. Writing in the late 1930s Bakhtin (1981: 284) said, “Discourse, lives as it were, on the boundary between its own control and another alien context.” Dialogism overcomes binary opposition of signifier/signified, text/context, self/other, etc, in order to look at Einsteinian relativity. In terms of emerging story, the implication is that each story is socially in motion, relative to sensemaking between bodies (physical, political, social, bodies of ideas, etc.), and to another way of telling (para Holquist, 1990: 20-21). Each dialogism is a systemicity complexity property that is “unfinalizedness [in] its open-endedness and indeterminacy” (Bakhtin, 1973: 43).
Bakhtin (1981: 139) says “capitalism brings together people and ideas just as the ‘pander’ Socrates had once done on the market square of Athens.” To me, Wilda brings capitalism onto the market square, where an interrogation can take place. I intend an interrogation of the relation of multiple spiritualities and religiosities to the storytelling of capitalists and their enterprises; how the transcendental is brought into business. Globalization, for example, is quite the evangelical project.