Mgt 685 Storytelling Research & Consulting to Organizations Seminar

Syllabus

Mgt 685 Description: We apply various qualitative storytelling research methods (plot analysis, script analysis, life history, and restorying) to 'intervention research' projects. Students will conduct storytelling diagnosis and negotiate storytelling interventions with a local consenting organization. They will write it up for possible publication.

Sustainability-Focused Class. Our storytelling consulting class is focused on sustainability, on consulting to organizations in ways that improve sustainability. We consult to university, business, non-profit, and government organizations, who want to enhance sustainability in every way possible.

Class meets 2:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Wednesdays, Business Complex Building Room 247 , beginning Aug 29, 2012 and finishing on Dec. 14, 2012

INSTRUCTOR: Professor David M. Boje (575) 532-1693 call between 9 AM and 8 PM; Office BC 318; or email: anytime

OFFICE HOURS: Mondays 12:15 PM to 1:30 PM - Frenger Food Court (by Dynasty, at a table); of call 532-1693 for appointment

Open to all Ph.D. students; and to any Masters student (by permission of instructor). Students from Education, English, Sociology, Anthropology, Education, Communication Studies, Rhetoric, and several other disciplines besides Business have expressed interest in a course that is about storytelling research as well as about how to use it in organizational change and development work. All are all welcome! Contact David Boje for more information. Please post flyer.

CLASS FORMAT

Each week there are two or three readings which you are expected to discuss and relate to your own project (which can relate to your own graduate interests) and/or to the class project we create together. We will obtain the needed IRB for both, if we intend to publish them. Last year, we worked as a class to bring about change in 'sustainability' at NMSU by interviewing leaders on campus, attending meetings of Sustainability Council, submitting our proposals to the President, Provost, and VP of Research, and submitted our work for publication. In previous terms we did an Arts Convention for Las Cruces. As we get going we will discuss our collective interests, and find a project that suits us all. As the term proceeds you will collect storytelling using 'ontological' protocols' (asking 'how' questions about the future), 'retrospective protocols (asking 'what' happened questions about the past), and doing some 'conversation analysis' and 'action analysis' of in situ real spacetimemattering storytelling. Restorying is a method for diagnosing the constraining 'dominant narrative' of an organization, and developing 'little wow moments' of exception that can be assembled into a 'new story' a new antenarrative pathway to a different future than the organization was on in its environment.

Class Storytelling Model - There are two kinds of dominant narratives in management practice: what I will call the 'intellectualist' and the 'empirical' narratives, after Merleau-Ponty (1962). He does not develop a narrative perspective. This is something we as a class will take up as a semester project. I have integrated some Heidegger (1962) framing of epistemic-ontic-ontological with it, but understand the classifications have their differences. These are in antenarrative transformative relationship to the ontological 'living story' (Boje, 2001, 2011). An antenarrative is about what is 'before' and the 'bet of transformation' between our dominant narratives and living story ontology. For Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, what I am calling living story ontology is primordial, antecedes the subject-object duality of intellectualist/epistemic and empiricist/ontic.

We will be looking a materiality-narratives, and try to develop an epistemic-ontological understanding that Strand (2011, 2012) calls 'material storytelling' something deeply rooted in Barad-Bohr-Boje-Bergson.

My own interpretation of what I call 'quantum storytelling' is rooted more in Heisenberg, rather than Bohr, or so I am told when reading Strand's (2012) dissertation. And much of what I want to sort out this term will get us ready for the 2nd Annual Quantum Storytelling Conference to be held at Inn of the Arts, Las Cruces New Mexico, December 16-18 2012. Please submit something.

Figure 1 - The Antenarrative Bridging among Two Dominant Narratives and Ontological Living Story (drawing by D. M. Boje, August 23, 2012).

Intellectualist Narratives: Within this overall field of storytelling, there are many historical kinds of narratives. For example, intellectualist narrative includes Weick's (1995) retrospective sensemaking narrative, the tacit knowledge narrative (Polanyi, 1966), much older structuralist approaches, Russian formalism (in several forms), as well as new poststructuralist narrative work, the classical Aristotelian Poetics (Aristotle, 350 BCE) six elements (plot, characters, theme, dialog, rhythm, & spectacle), Kantian transcendental narrative, and its more recent Burkean reformulation into the pentad (act, actor, purpose, action, & scene) where action combines dialog and rhythm.

Empiricist Narratives: The empiricist narratives tend to spatialize time and to objectify living stories into an abstract space, one where the body is objectified. Instead of embodied living story, through measurement and calculation there is a presumption that an objectified world is being narrated. This spatialized time is itself a loss of spacetime. Linear-antenarratives such as, PERT (Programmed Evaluation & Review Technique) and various Cyclic-antenarratives, such as product life cycle, organizational life cycle are among the most popular managerial practices.

Figure 2 - PERT (Programmed Evaluation & Review Technique), a common linear-antenarrative popular in management practice

Above is a PERT diagram, of the times to complete the task activities connecting A to C. One calculates a critical path as the longest duration, which is A-B-E-C, which totals to 7 units, whereas the alternative paths total 5 units each. This is the intellectualist (rationalist & geometrical) linear narrative of beginning, middle, to end (BME narrative), that is commonplace in strategy narratives.

There are many linear-antenarratives that transform between a geometric narrative (intellectualist) and a mathematical calculation narrative (empiricist). The elevator pitch is a simple example, what Steve Denning calls 'springboard' [narrative.] It is told in under two minutes, the time of an elevator ride, and has the plot of a beginning, middle, and end. It is what Tom Peters once called the stump speech (an elevator pitch the CEO could tell as a tersely-told narrative in 90 seconds).

These linear sorts of narratives are typical within empiricist-narratives; some are called material-, mechanistic-, and explicit-knowledge-narratives, and are used to conform behavior (behaviorist-narrative).

Linear-antenarratives and rhizomatic-antnearratives is something important to understand. There are four kinds of lines in Deleuze and Guattari (1987: pp. 222-3, 505) 1. Supple Line of interlaced codes and territories is a social space constituted by territorial and linear segmentation 2. Rigid Line of empire, reterritorializing, such as in rigid concentric circles, making spaces into territories by an overcoded geometrical space where some abstract machine operates 3. Lines of Flight -  marked by quanta and decoding and deterritorialization of war machine. 4. Rhizome - the complexes of lines, of nomadic multiplicities or transformational multiplicities. In my approach to storytelling linear-antenarratives and rhizomatic-antenarratives make different transformative bridging (linear between the two narratives, and rhizomatic between empiricist-narrative and ontological living story) - see figure 1.

One can add that the materiality-narratives (such as Marxian historical materialism) and Newtonian materialism are a loss of spacetimemattering. In order to develop what Strand calls 'material storytelling' fashioned on a Bergsonian reading of Boje, plus a Bohr privileged reading of quantum, Heisenberg is turned into an epistemic narratologist. I will be looking closely at Heisenberg, to reclaim his more ontological standpoint, as the basis for what I call 'quantum storytelling' which is probable best thought of as at the very center of the model in Figure 1, and not reducible to empiricist or intellectualist narrative, nor to living story ontology. Quantum storytelling, for me, is something that includes antenarrative intra-activity among the entire storytelling field.

 

 

Figure 3- Cyclic-Antenarrative, common in management practice

Equally popular are various cyclical-antenarratives transforming the relationship between intellectualist and empiricist narratives. Examples include product life cycle, organizational life cycle, market life cycle, leadership strategy cycle, etc. Each is a stage by stage sequence, and the antenarrative transformative connection is how the past is expected to recur in these exact same stages into the present and the future. The organizational life cycle for example begins with concepts like birth, then goes to growth, maturation, decline, revitalization, and back to (re)birth. The problem with cyclic-antenarratives that would bridge the intellectualist and empiricist narratives is that the subject-object split is not able to get beyond its duality to look at pre-subjective, and pro-objective living story ontology. They merely bridge the two dominant narratives (intellectualist & empiricist).

Two other antenarratives are increasingly popular in management practice, because the assumed cyclical rarely works out in management practice: cycles keep accumulating differences, becoming spirals, and the linear paths, keep accumulating multiplicities until they are more accurately recognized as rhizome-antenarrative.

Minahen's (1992) book provides the best definitions of spiral and vortice. The vortex is turbulence, and the spiral is more stable, and there is movement in between them. He defines spiral as "a continuous curve traced by a point moving round a fie xed point in the same plane while steadily increasing (or diminishing_ its distance from this" (p. 149). There is an Archimedian spiral, such as a coil of rope, or whorl of tomato plant, or threads on a bolt, where the distance interval between one whorl and the next is the same. There is a more logarithmic spiral where whorl to whorl differences accumulate (amplifying or contracting). Finally there are more irregular spirals, such as spiral galaxies (barred spirals with trailing arms). There are two-dimensional (flat) spirals, and three-dimensional spiral, such as the helix of increasing or decreasing circular movement between center and circumference (p. 156). The vortex is all about turbulence, defined "by one source as 'randomly distributed vorticity' " (p. 157). I am exploring the double vortice, with an upper centrifugal ascent and a lower centripetal descent, connecting this to Heidegger's drafts (see Quantum Storytelling film).

Rhizome comes from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and is an interplay between two kinds of space (smooth & striated), and the lines of flight and transformation trajectories between them in practices of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization (see pp. 505-6).

In particular, the spiral-antenarrative which bridges intellectual narrative and living story ontology, and the rhizomatic-antenarrative which bridges the empiricist narrative and living story ontology.

But what is environment? What is spiraling?

Figure 4: Q-Spiral with upward (Gold) and downward (Blue) spiraling, at a choice point (+) between paths (dotted Red lines), as updrafts and downdrafts (Silver) buffet spiral-whorls, in an Environment defined by three dimensions: Performance (aka Materialscape), Timescape, and Landscape (drawing by D. M. Boje, July 18, 2012).

Our focusing question this semester: How to change the relationships between Organizational-Storytelling, -Spiraling, and -Spacetimemattering in its Environment?

SCHEDULE

Date	Topic	Readings Due data listed
Aug 29	Overview of storytelling and restorying; Today watch Quantum Storytelling Video; Storytelling about past class projects: The Arts Scene; Sustainability at NMSU; Start thinking of ideas for our own class project and your individual project. Receive handout on the sustainability project from last year's class.	Spirals are in a spacetimemattering of updrafts and downdrafts. Spirals have directionality. See Boje (2012a, b) for 11 D questions you can ask. See Deleuze & Guattari (1987: 113-114) on the Hopi spirals, how the spiral overcomes entropy, by blossoming or replenishing; and vortical motion (p.371) For definitions of vortice and spiral see Minahen (1992) appendix
Sep 5	Discuss last year's sustainability project, and the Benjamin & Arendt handouts in order to define 'storytelling' as 'speech' and live 'action' of things and people. Storytelling, SpaceTimeMattering, and Spirals is our theme this semester. It seems Deleuze & Guattari's types of space advances the field by developing space in several contexts	Choose 3 to read: Merleau-Ponty (1962) chapter on Space Deleuze & Guattari (1987) chapter 14 on two kinds of space, 'Smooth and Striated.' Boje (2008) Intro Boje (2012a) Preface & Chap 1 Boje (2012b) Preface & Chap 1 Heidegger Chap 1 Tosoukas (1999) article on Shell & Greenpeace
Sep 12	Class will discuss our collective and individual ideas for potential projects. How can we study the relationship between Storytelling, Spirals, and Environment: defined as Landscapes, Timescapes, and Materialscapes? It is Merleau-Ponty's chapter on temporality that makes a mega contribution to our understanding because he takes us beyond Ricoeur's (1984) Time and Narrative, the interplay of Aristotle Poetics with Saint Augustine's three-fold present time, and into Heidegger, a critique of Bergson duration, and beyond into an integration of lived space, lived body, with what I will call lived time of living story that antecedes the two narratives (Intellectualist & Empiricist).	Choose 3 to read: Merleau-Ponty (1962) chapter on temporality Deleuze & Guattari's (1987: 483-4) defense of Bergson's 'duration' time Boje (2008a) find 2 consulting chapters Boje (2008b) Ch 2 Boje (2012a) Ch 6 Life path Boje, D. M. 1991. "The storytelling organization: A study of storytelling performance in an office supply firm." Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 36: pp.106-126.
Sep 19	Bruno Latour's Actor-Network-Theory. Agree as a class on what class project we will do, break down roles, and develop an antenarrative of its future. Apply for IRB. What is 'material storytelling' of Spirals in Environments of materialscape, timescape, and landscape?	Choose 3 to read: Boje (2012b) Ch 3 Read book 1 of the Strand dissertation for today for 'material storytelling.' Books 1 and 2 are online. Heidegger Chap 2
Sep 26	Decide who to interview, where to observe, and where to make storytelling changes for our class project.	Boje (2012b) Ch 4 Book 2 of the Strand dissertation for today. Books 1 and 2 are online. Heidegger Chap 3
Oct 3	Submit outline of your individual 'storytelling intervention project' (this can be modified to suit your dissertation or masters research). Should include outline of research question, contribution intended to your discipline of study, storytelling method (retro, ontological, conversation analysis, etc.), how your findings will look, references you intend to use).	Boje (2012b) Ch 5 Boje (2011) introduction Merleau-Ponty - Chap on Sense Experience
Oct 10	Conduct individual and class storytelling intervention project; discuss results	From here we choose selections from the purchased books, and what we need to accomplish the class and individual projects.
Oct 17	Conduct individual and class storytelling intervention project; discuss results
Oct 24	Conduct individual and class storytelling intervention project; discuss results
Oct 31	Conduct individual and class storytelling intervention project; discuss results
Nov 7	Conduct individual and class storytelling intervention project; discuss results
Nov 14	Conduct individual and class storytelling intervention project; discuss results
Nov 21	Thanks giving holiday
Nov 28	Finalize the findings of the intervention done in class project
Dec 5	Last Week - present your results of individual projects
Dec 12	Exam Week - Final presentations of class project; Final Report on class project and your individual project paper is due

 

REQUIRED BOOKS

Boje, D. M. (2008). Storytelling Organizations. London: Sage.

Boje, D. M. (2011). Storytelling and the Future of Organizations: An Antenarrative Handbook(London: Routledge Studies in Management, Organizations and Society) [Hardcover]; Authors & Table of Contents

Boje, D. M. (2012a). Quantum Storytelling. Free book on line.

Boje, D. M. (2012b) Quantum Spirals for Business Consulting. Free book on line.

Deleuze, G.; Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London/Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Translated from the French by Colin Smith. NY/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Of these required books, I will be revising my online 2012 books, as I work my way through Merleau-Ponty. We did Heidegger in last term's seminar, and before that we did the recommended books (Aristotle, Bakhtin, Barad, Latour, Morson, etc.), except for Arendt and Mead, which I worked with this summer, and will bring into the seminar as needed.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS

Arendt, Hannah. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.

Aristotle (written 350 BCE). English (1954) translation Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics. Introduction by Friedrich Solmsen; Rhetoric translated by W. Rhys Roberts; Poetics translated by Ingram Bywater. NY: The Modern Library (Random House). Poetics was written 350 BCE.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Translation and Notes by Vadim Liapunov. Edited by Michael Holquist & Vadim Liapunov. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. From Bakhtin's early 1920s notebooks. 1993 is First English printing.

Barad, Karen. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

Bennett, Jane. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

Berger, Peter L. & Luckmann, Thomas. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. NY: Anchor Books, A Division of Random House.

Boje, D. M. (2001). Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research. London: Sage. If not in bookstore, Order from Amazon Has basic analyses such as deconstruction, theme analysis, grand narrative, plot, story network, etc. and introduces concept of antenarrative.

Boje, David M., Bernard Bernes, and John Hassard. (2012). The Routledge Companion to Organization Change. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415556453/

Latour, Bruno. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford/NY: Oxford University Press.

Mead, G. H. (1932/1980). The Philosophy of the Present. Edited by Arthur E. Murphy with Prefatory Remarks by John Dewey. London/Chicago: University of Chicago Press. First Phoenix Printing, 1980.

Minahen, C. D. (1992). Vortex/t: The Poetics of Turbulence. University Park, PN: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Morson, Gary Saul. (1994). Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.

Rosile, G.A. and Boje. D. M. (2002). Restorying and Postmodern Organization Theater: Consultation to the Storytelling Organization. Chapter published in Ronald Sim’s (ed) book: Changing the Way We Change,  published by Quorum Books, pp. 271-291.

Savall, Henri, Zardet, Veronique, & Bonnet, Marc. (2008). Releasing the Untapped Potential of Enterprises Through Socio-Economic Management. ISBN 978-2-917078-12-9 2nd Revised edition, 2008 London: International Labor Organization and Socio Economic Institute of Firms and Organizations.

Savall, Henri. (2010). Work and People: An Economic Evaluation of Job-Enrichment. Translated from the French by M. A. Woodhall. A volume in Research in Management consulting. Series Editor: Anthony F. Bruno Charlotte, NC: Information Age Press.

White and Epston (1990).  Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends.  New York: Norton and Company.

WHAT IS STORYTELLING?

Storytelling is constituted by three interactive facets: (1) narratives of the past, (2) living stories unfolding in the Present, & (3) antenarrative trajectories that relate narrative to living stories in quite different ways to the future. For background, please see Ontological Storytelling? What is Living Story? and What is Antenarrative?

A current Storytelling definition (Boje, Jørgensen, & Strand, expected 2013: 3):

"Storytelling, here, is defined more broadly, as something agential such as the iterative intra-active-material-storytelling domains of "living stories‟ and "antenarratives‟ in the theatre of action, which go beyond the classical narrative focus on structuralist and representationalist elements and retrospection (Boje, 2001, 2008a)."

Boje, D. M.; Jørgensen, Kenneth Mølbjerg; & Strand, Anete M. Camille. (expected 2013) Towards a postcolonialist Storytelling Theory of management and organization," accepted 9/27/2011 for publication in Journal of Management Philosophy. Click here for pre-press PDF.

In other words storytelling is the says antenarratives inter-connect retrospective-narratives with living stories in the theatre of action. Narratives often focus on epistemic (knowing), living stories (on Being-in-the-world) and the antenarrative connect them together quite differently. Organizations undergo transformations.

Storytelling and Transformations

"The most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling and generally in artistic transpositing of individual experiences" (Hannah Arendt, 1958: 50).

Consultants and change agents use storytelling to effect transformations.

Great Storytellers?

"All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience as on a ladder. A ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds is the image for a collective experience to which even the deepest shock of every individual experience, death, constitutes no impediment or barrier" (Walter Benjamin, 1936: 83).

3 TYPES OF STORYTELLING

1. 'Material Storytelling': This is the work of Anete Camille Strand (2011, 2012) from Denmark.

   • Strand, Anete Mikkala Camille. (2011). Presentation on ‘material storytelling’ to 20th anniversary meeting of sc’MOI, meeting in Philadelphia, April.

   • Strand, Anete Mikkala Camille. (2012). Enacting The Between: On Dis/continuous intra-active Becoming of/through an Apparatus of Material Storytelling. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Aalborg University, Denmark. Books 1 and 2 are online

2. ' Ontological Storytelling': This is my own work applying Heidegger, Bakhtin, Mead, Deleuze and others.
3. 'Quantum Storytelling': See the film, read the books.

How are material storytelling, ontological storytelling, and quantum storytelling related? The old material ontologies have been giving ground to quantum storytelling.

Four Antenarrative Trajectories

Antenarrative is a bet and a pre-story that can aspire to be very transformative.

Antenarrative is a bridge between living story and narrative by four pathways: linear-antenarrative, cyclical-antenarrative, spiral-antenarrative, and rhizomatic-antenarrative. Two pathways between living story and narrative, the linear- and cyclic-antenarratives are from past predicted to recur in the future. This is known as conventional and ordinary retrospective sensemaking. The other two pathways are from the future to the past, and this is quite radical. The spiral- and rhizomatic-antenarratives are future-->present and future-->past destining, directionalities futurals, drafts (up or down, in & out, left or right quantum directions), and disclosabilites of quantum materiality in a vitalistic sense of living story. This term we are focusing on Q-spiraling.

Action vs. Intervention Research

There is an important difference between Action Research and Intervention Research. Its our job to sort it out. AR is a bit linear and cyclical, whereas IR is more about researching and intervening in the spiraling and rhizomatic processes of change.

RESTORYING

Our seminar will include methodologies for story research (deconstruction, theme analysis, grand narrative, plot analysis, etc.); will also include story intervention approaches such as “restorying” (defined as collecting the dominant (oppressive) stories of the organization that set up its posture and power, and then intervening to constitute a new story that has liberatory potential (White & Epston, 1990). Here is how Mike Bonifer and I are developing the restorying intervention:

1. CHARACTERIZE the dominant narrative as the problem, not the people as problem. Narrative empties out living stories, in-order-to focus on linear and cyclic-antenarrative recurrence.  
2. EXTERNALIZE  the problem, viewed as separate character from any individual, as an external entity? Mr. Spiral is a strange character in organizations, because we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or smell spirals, and yet we can use tools and instruments to sense their shape and path-directions.
3. SYMPATHIZE   What benefits does the organization derive from the problem? The benefits of spirals that cannot be accessed by sensemaking is that retrospective narrative is useless.
4. REVISE Disadvantages of the problem, benefits foregone, reasons to change. The negative consequences is one relies on instruments and tools to observe a spiral, even though direct sensemaking can not see, hear, touch, taste, or smell one.
5. STRATEGIZE  Find a “unique outcome” from the past, even a potential, which allowed the organization to defeat the problem in the past; those little wow moments, concealed by the dominant narrative. One little wow moment, for me, is that I have tactile sensing of spiral energy flows. Another is that I can see the instrument measuring spiraling energy currents. I have a storytelling awareness of spiraling even though my own five senses are not always picking up cues.
6. RE-HISTORICIZE   Make the “unique outcome” the rule (instead of the exception) in a 'new' living story of freedom from the dominant-problem-narrative. There are times when I have spiral-awareness of updraft and downdraft environmental flows that cause the spiral to move or at least shutter.
7. PUBLICIZE    Enlist support for the new living story.  Use letters, ceremony, etc. with friends to reinforce 'new' living story web.  What is the evidence of support and interest in the new Q-spiral-antenarrative and environmental-draft? I find some evidence in Heidegger (PLT, 1971, 130) for drafts: "orbit of the whole draft" turns and "parting against the pure draft" (ibid, p. 125). This gets at what I call 'inner ♥-space' of our Being-in-the-world ontological-existence, which in Heidegger (PLT" 130) is "the true interior of the heart's space." I find some evidence in Merleau-Ponty (1962: 244) for the "top and bottom, right and left, near and far" that is not from sensemaking by the five senses. I find some evidence from Deleuze (1994: 21) who says, "Spirals whose principle is a variable curve and the trajectory of which has dissymmetrical aspects as though it had a right and a left."

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton from French, 1968 text, Difference et Repetition (Presses Universitaires de France). NY: Columbia University Press.

BEHAVIORAL OBJECTIVES

1) Students completing the course will have a mastery of several story research approaches to studying story behaviors. Choice of methods depends upon the field sites selected. Students will be able to collect storytelling fragments in ethnographic field work, in documents, and in the non-verbal and non-text expressivity of art and architecture as well as the gesture and rhythm of storytelling theatrics. Storytelling behavior research and consulting is not about doing interviews or making collections of organization folktales, or narrative archetypes. Students completing the course will be able to collect and analyze field notes and recordings of storytelling behaviors.

2) Students will conduct field research (&/or consulting) on a New Mexico, long-lived "storytelling organization" using applicable research methods. It gets at the more epic aspect of storytelling. Epic looks at the systemicity of story behaviors, in their emergent, on-going in situ processes. Managerialist story consulting, on the other hand, imposes a cohesive-narrative-beginning, middle, end-dogma onto story that I call BME (see Storytelling Organization book). For narrativists story must have coherence: beginning, middle & end (BME); be linear in its development, and be monophonic (told by one informant in the manner that management prescribes). Epic story consulting addresses the entire storytelling organization as a collective constellation, in all its dialogisms (polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, & architectonic), that is ever-changing and rearranging in emergent complexity.

3) We will work on some things as a class; Students will conduct an "storytelling organization" intervention consulting project on a long-lived New Mexico organization. Students may work in teams, but each person must write their own individual independent sections of a project. a different kind of project that does not involve a specific site: story consultant Gabriel Gargiulo has asked for students to operationalize his story model using metrics; and other projects students suggest.

4) Ph.D. students are expected to produce a publishable-quality journal article for submission to one of the journals that focuses upon story research and/or story consulting practice in their chosen discipline. They are expected to submit it first to some conference, such as http://scmoi.org, critical management studies in UK, Academy of Management, etc. Masters students are expected to produce a professional consultation report detailing story behaviors observed, and appending field notes and other documentation. Masters students are expected to do less reading than Ph.D. students.

5) Students learn the ethics of story consulting practice and research. This includes following New Mexico State University IRB Human Subjects procedures. Please have anyone doing interviews fill out the following consent form. Please review any material with the client that you intend to appear in any king of conference paper or publication. Click here for IRB Approved Consent Form (Feb 2007; renewed Jan 08; renewed Fall 2010). Please have interviewees complete a Confidentiality Form (copy to be stored in Boje's office, BC 318; give copy to interviewee)

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THIS UNIQUE SEMINAR EXPERIENCE -

Annotated Bibliography from 2009

Storytelling consulting to organizations is a blossoming field (about 50 books on it at Amazon.com). Most of these story consulting approaches are pretty naive, with advice like teach CEO to tell a stump speech story, and somehow that will change the organization (Boje, 2005f).

Service Learning/Civic Engagement Requirement

Each year there are free-to-the-public service learning 'consulting by storytelling' projects with different sectors of the economy. An example is facilitating 2008 1st Annual Arts Convention, organizing task forces with local public, private, and grassroots organizations to bring together leaders of city, town, university, and commerce to develop the arts economy. Results included actual interventions, such as museum scavenger hunt, Winterfest to vitalize downtown businesses, and other aggressive marketing of Arts and Culture of Las Cruces and Mesilla Valley. This is also civic engagement: doing storytelling consulting intervention that bring about more socioeconomic ethics of justice and equality by working with government, economic, education, and small business communities. Service Learning/Civic Engagement applies course content to your volunteerism, and includes your reflexive processing of experience in your notebooking and in your report and presentation assignments. The aim of your volunteerism is a collaboration with community members to effect interventions that add value to your education and to the socioeconomic situation of the community. We will do this together, and perhaps a joint paper will emerge. The other activity is to do some aspect of storytelling in relation to your own specialty, perhaps relating the method or theory to your thesis work.

The storytelling in New Mexico, for example, affects the distribution of arts and cultural resources that metropolitan cities and the rural communities receive.

CLICK FOR Annotated Bibliography on Storytelling and Consulting