Narrative Methods for Organizational and

Communication Research

Introduction to Narrative Methods

David M. Boje

April 19, 2000, Revised May 1, 2000

Overview

Traditionally story has been viewed as less than narrative.

Narrative requires plot, as well as coherence. To narrative theory,
story is folksy, without emplotment, a simple telling of
chronology. I propose "antenarrative." Antenarrative is the
fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-
narrative speculation, a bet. To traditional narrative methods
antenarrative is an improper storytelling, a wager that a proper
narrative can be constituted. Narrative tries to stand as elite, to be
above story. The crisis of narrative method in modernity is what
to do with non-linear, almost living storytelling that is
fragmented, polyphonic (many voiced) and collectively produced.
My response is to stretch traditional approach by including what I
call "antenarrative" methods. The focus is on the analysis of
stories that are too unconstructed and fragmented to be analyzed
in traditional approaches. The postmodern and chaotic soup of
storytelling is somewhat difficult to analyze. Stories in
organization are self-deconstructing, flowing, emerging, and
networking not at all static. The purpose of this book is to set out
eight antenarrative analysis options that can deal with prevalence
of fragmented and polyphonic storytelling in complex
organizations and to provide teaching examples of these methods
that are applicable to organization studies. The analyses to be
given an antenarrative reading include deconstruction, grand
narrative analysis, microstoria analysis, story networking,
 intertextuality, causality, plot, and theme analysis. Narrative
analysis combined with antenarrative analysis can help this field
be a more multi-voiced methodology that focuses on non-linear,
unplotted storytelling.

The fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, and unplotted, and

improper storytelling, is what I mean by the term "antenarrative."

What is Antenarrative? I give "antenarrative" a double meaning. First,

as being before and second as a bet. First, story is "ante" to narrative; it is
"antenarrative." A "narrative" is something that is narrated, i.e. "story." Story
is an account of incidents or events, but narrative comes after and ads, "plot"
and "coherence" to the story line. Story is therefore "ante" to story and
narrative is post-story. Story is an "ante" state of affairs existing previously to
narrative; it is in advance of narrative. Used as an adverb, "ante" combined with
"narrative" or "antenarrative" means earlier than narrative.

Ante is also a bet, something to do with gambling and speculation. The

noun "ante" has an etymology dating to 1838 that is defined as "a poker stake
usually put up before the deal to build the pot <the dealer called for a dollar
ante>" (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). In horse racing, "ante-post" is a wager
made on a horse before that day of the race. As a verb, it is anteing.

Since story, narrative, and antenarrative are used throughout the book,
some introduction is important. Story resists narrative; Story is antenarrative
and on occasion even anti-narrative (a refusal to be coherent). The folk of
organizations inhabit storytelling spaces outside plot, not tidy and rationalized
narrative spaces. Narrative analysts replace folk stories with less messy
academic narrative emplotments and create an account of organizations that is
fictively rational, free of tangled contingency, and against story.
 I would therefore disagree with Czarniawska (1997: 78) when she says
"a story consists of a plot comprising causally related episodes that culminate
in a solution to a problem." To me this is the definition of a narrative, not a
story. I rely more on Ricoeur's (1984: 150) definition of story, as he endorses
Gallie's (1968: 22) approach:

A story describes a sequence of actions and experiences done or

undergone by a certain number of people, whether real or
imaginary. These people are presented either in situations that
change or as reacting to such change. In turn, these changes reveal
hidden aspects of the situation and the people involved, and
engender a new predicament which calls for thought, action, or
both. This response to the new situation leads the story toward its
conclusion.

Even this definition of story has for me, to much closure, but the concept of the
followability of story allows us to look at antenarration before the emplotment
of story, and search for preunderstanding before the story becomes followable.

Elsewhere Czarniawska (1999) defines narrative in a way I agree with,

"For them to become a narrative, they require a plot, that is, some way to bring
them into a meaningful whole." I prefer to think of narratives as the theory that
organization and other theorists put onto stories, to see how narratives and
prenarratives are acts of "commodification, exchange, and consumption" (Clair,
Chapman, & Kunkel, 1996: 255). "They are narratives dressed as theory"
(Clair, 1998: 20).

To translate story into narrative is to impose counterfeit coherence and

order on otherwise fragmented and multi-layered experiences of desire. As
Weick (1995: 128) puts it "When people punctuate their own living into stories,
they impose a formal coherence on what is otherwise a flowing soup." White
(1981:251) also observes that narrative theory is a finalization that "transforms
events into historical facts by demonstrating their ability to function as
elements of completed stories." Antenarrative is never final; they are improper.
 Stories are "antenarrative," when told without the proper plot sequence
and mediated coherence preferred in narrative theory. These are stories that are
too unconstructed and too fragmented to be captured by retrospective sense
making. "The important point" says Weick (1995: 27) "is that retrospective
sensemaking is an activity in which many possible meanings may need to be
synthesized, because many different projects [stories] are under way at the time
reflection takes place" (additions, mine). There is an implicit bet that such
retrospective form may emerge, but it does not always take place. More
sensemaking keeps displacing closure.

Antenarrative is not the same as "anti" narrative. In anti-narrative, the

person can not narrate plot or closure, but is in the present moment. The telling
of a personal experience story, for example Nancy whose mother has
Alzheimer's:

And if I'm trying to get dinner ready and I'm already feeling bad,
she's in front of the refrigerator. Then she goes to put her hand on
the stove and I got the fire on. And then she's in front of the
microwave and then she's in front of the silverware drawer. And -
and if I send her out she gets mad at me. And then it's awful.
That's when I have a really, a really bad time (Charmaz, 1991:
173 as cited in Frank, 1995: 99).

The nominal glue of Alzheimer's binds the story fragments together in a

Baldessari-like anti-narrative. "One can conceive of "anti-narratives" whose
storytelling purpose is precisely not only to deny any overall meaning or plot
(as telos or process) but to display fragmentation, discontinuities, partial and
temporary understandings, and the lack of fixed meanings while equally
claiming to mimic or evoke the nature of the past world as experienced"
(Pluciennik, Boado, Manfredini, & Peacock (1999: 653). Anti-narrative and
antenarrative do share this in common, both are beyond the closure required
narrative theory. Next, I would like to introduce some defining definitions of
antenarrative.
 Five Dimensions of Antenarrative

First, antenarrating is both before whatever narratology as a method and

theory supplements, frames and imposes onto story. This is oftentimes the
requriement for a beginning, middle, and end, complete with a moral and an
agreed plot. There is a double sense of "ante" as "being before" narrative and
as still a "speculation" that I think returns something important to storytelling,
or what I will call "antenarrating." There are still many meanings to sort out
before plot and coherence descend to close off the need for further
sensemaking.

Second, antenarrative gives attention to the speculative, the ambiguity of

sensemaking and guessing as to what is happening in the flow of experience. It
answers the question "what is going on here?" Antenarrative is constituted out
of the flow of lived experience, narrative method is more meta; it is about the
storytelling that came before. Narrative is post, a retrospective explanation of
storytelling's speculative appreciations. Narrative is a form of memory of the
story, but I think none that omits the antenarrative speculation, about what
Shutz calls "coming-to-be" (See Weick, 1995: 25). It is the speculative that
gets lost in narrative method focus on taxonomy, plot, and coherence; the sense
made becomes too bounded and it overdetermines.

Third, antenarrative directs our analytic attention to the flow of

storytelling, as a sensemaking to living experience before narrative requires
beginnings, middles, or endings. Narrative theory is an experience of the after
effects of storytelling once coherence is rendered, while antenarrative is an
experiencing of the storytelling life with abbreviated and interrupted story
performances that yield plurivocality (Boje, 1995). And that life has its rules.
"There are implicit rules in storytelling (who can tell it, to whom, and where)"
(Boje, 1991a: 124). Clair (1998: 74) ads the rule of how, "organizational
members tell their stories. How organizational members frame their
experiences and accounts may severely impact the kind and amount of
exposure the story will receive."

Fourth, antenarrative is about the Tamara of storytelling (Boje, 1995). In

Tamara, Los Angeles' longest-running play, a dozen characters unfold their
stories before a walking, sometimes running, audience. They are trying to find
out "who done it?" Instead of remaining stationary, viewing a single stage, the
audience fragments into small groups that chase characters from one room to
the next, from one floor to the next, even going into bedrooms, kitchens, and
other chambers to chase and co-create the stories that interest them the most. If
there are a dozen stages and a dozen storytellers, the number of story lines an
audience could trace as it chases the wandering discourses of Tamara is 12
factorial (479,001,600).

To me Tamara is a way to describe how storytelling as antenarrative

occurs in complex organizations. It is before narrative closure; it is speculative,
and it is in the flow of experience. The Tamara ante narrative speculation
highlights the plurivocal interpretation of organizational stories in a distributed
and historically contextualized meaning network -- that is, the meaning of
events depends upon the locality, the prior sequence of stories, and the
transformation of characters in the wandering discourses.

Tamara is also the basis of an antenarrative theory of storytelling

organizations. In storytelling organizations as seen in Tamara, a wandering
linguistic framework in which stories are the medium of interpretative
exchange. Storytelling organizations are antenarrative, existing to tell their
collective stories, to live out their collective stories, to be in constant struggle
over getting the stories of insiders and outsiders straight. It is a sensemaking
that is coming into being, but not finished or concluded, in narrative
retrospection.

Fifth, antenarrative is collective memory before it becomes reified into

the story, the consensual narrative. It is before the plots have been agreed to; it
is still in a state of coming-to-be; still in flux. As Weick (1995: 26) puts it
"actions are known only when they have been completed." And narratives are
known after they have been completely analyzed. I am more interested in
antenarrative, where people are still chasing stories, and many different logics
for plotting an ongoing event are still being investigated. Gephart (1992: 119-
121) for example did a study of a serious accident, and noted how the logic of
top-management differed from that of the operators. And because people in
organizations typically are chasing multiple story lines, and are aware that
overdetermining the story is risky, the collective memory is always being
reworked and worked out, but never completed. It is reflection that is
underway, not as Weick (1995: 27) says "because it makes no sense at all, but
because it makes many different kinds of sense." In collective memory, some
story sensing contradict others, and working it out is the stuff of antenarrative.

Postmodern Antenarratives - The postmodern condition is one of

fragmentation, the storytelling in which coherence is lacking and fragments are
everywhere. Indeed in postmodern antenarrative there is no whole story, only
fragments, and in the act of retrospective sense making in which we put a plot
to story fragments is in process. In this Tamara of collective sensemaking,
people are still tracing stories, still inventing bits and pieces to glue it all
together. In the radical postmodern antenarrative, organization characters
collide rather than interact, as to come in and out of one another's theatrical
stages. And there is for each person a Tamara of stages, happening
simultaneously, and we do not get to participate in all the performances. Rather
than reified plots, there are fragments of stories, bits and pieces told here and
there, to varying audiences, so that no one knows a whole story and there are
no whole stories anyway. And pockets of some agreement come undone. There
are coherent plots here and there, but everywhere else just jagged edges and
bottomless pits of chaos to tip toe around. In such Tamara, the demand to
narrate the whole is met by long periods of silence.

In the personal experience narration, the storyteller and narrator are one.
In all other narratives, someone else tells the story and makes it into a formal
narrative, one with mediated coherence and plot. But, in the Tamara of many
story involvements with so many story fragments, coherence and plot are hard
to come by. In formal narration, there is a (linear) plot and a mediated
coherence provided by the narrator. To narrative theory, story is folksy, without
emplotment, a simple telling of chronology. But people live in the
antenarrative. Narrative adds the plot, and tries to stand as elite above story as
antenarrative. The crisis of narrative in modernity is what to do with non-linear
storytelling, with fragmented stories, polyphonic (many voiced) and the
Tamara of collective story production, and the everyday storyteller immersed in
fragmentation. Stories are antenarrative and are everywhere in organizations,
and I think somewhat difficult to analyze. People are always in the middle of
living and tracing their storied lives.

According to TwoTrees (1997), stories have three properties: time,

place, and mind. We believe that many narratologies currently being applied in
the field of organizational analysis and the social sciences more broadly
marginalize these three properties. In effect, narratology marginalizes story. In
what follows, we will critically review common narratologies and suggest some
ways in which the idea of story can be returned to analysis.

Stories, TwoTrees suggests, have:

1. A time, �You tell story at a certain time of the year, a season, or

time of the day. There are Fall and Spring stories.�

2. A place, �You recount stories at this place, and places have their
own story.�

3. A mind, �Every creation, even a story, has a life of its own. We

create a story and it has a life. The stories have origins. You must tell
a story with permission.�

For TwoTrees, stories must be re-contextualized back to their time,

place, and mind. The stories live and there are penalties for getting a story
wrong or telling it without permission. �What is the Lakota penalty for
changing a story, telling a story wrong or without permission?� David Boje
asked at a presentation by TwoTrees. �It is death,� she replied (TwoTrees,
1997). Why death? �Because, the story in an oral culture is the entire living
history of the community�
 The purpose of this book is to set out eight antenarrative analysis options
that can deal with prevalence of fragmented and polyphonic storytelling in
complex organizations. Our order of alternative narrative analyses is:

1. Deconstruction

2. Grand Narrative

3. Microstoria

4. Story Network

5. Intertextuality

6. Causality

7. Plot

8. Theme

On the duality of narratives and stories - Reviewing the structuralist

traditions of Russian Formalists (Propp & Shklovsky) American structuralism
(James, Lubbock, Booth, & Chatman), and French Structuralists (Barthes,
Todorov, Bremond, Greimas, Pavel, & Prince) Jonathan Culler (1981: 169)
identifies a duality of narrative over story. Culler (1981: 169) notes: �if these
theorists agree on anything it is this: that the theory of narrative requires a
distinction between what I shall call 'story� � a sequence of actions or
events, conceived as independent of their manifestation in discourse � and
what I shall call �discourse,� the discursive presentation or narration of
events.�

There can be several narrators to a story. Someone who lived through an

experience can offer his or her "personal experience narrative." They tell their
own story. Ricoeur (1984: 150) summarizes Gallie's (1968: 22) story definition
as follows:
 A story describes a sequence of actions and experiences done or
undergone by a certain number of people, whether real or
imaginary. These people are presented either in situations that
change or as reacting to such change. In turn, these changes reveal
hidden aspects of the situation and the people involved, and
engender a new predicament which calls for thought, action, or
both. This response to the new situation leads the story toward its
conclusion.

Storytellers own the rights to narrate, and sorting these story rights is a constant
occupation of organizational participants. But, when someone else tells a story
they did not inhabit, it is a different type of narrating. Researchers, even
ethnographers, who live in the field, narrate differently than those who live
their story. Some say story is mere chronology while narration is what the
sociologists, historians, anthropologists and other social scientists do. Yet, as
Lyotard (1984) made abundantly clear, scientists tell stories about their data
and use story to sell their theory. Gephart's (1986) ethnostatistics is proof
enough that narrating and rhetoric goes on in the statistical work of social
science. A statistical formula and the explanation of a table of equations can be
considered forms of narrative. McCloskey (1998) is convinced that
economists narrate and use rhetoric that do not want to answer to.

What is the hegemony of narrative? Some people are not ready to

narrate their story. They are approached by social scientists and invited, even
required to narrate. As someone narrates an experience for the first time, there
is a retrospective sense making can occur as chaotic experience is given
narrative order. But sense making is not all there is. Since some experiences
lack that linear sequence and are just hard to tell as a "coherent" story. Telling
stories that lack coherence is contrary to modernity. Yet in the postmodern
condition, stories are harder to tell because experience itself is so fragmented
and so full of chaos that fixed meaning or imagining coherence is fictive. Other
stories are hard to tell because whatever meaning there may be has not been
reflected upon, and there is a lack of distance and perspective. Death, divorce,
and disease stories are hard to narrate. One can only trace the edges of the
wounds (Frank, 1995: 98). There are experiences that are just too shattering to
put into words, too fantastic to narrate. "Lived chaos makes reflection, and
consequently storytelling, impossible" (p. 98).

We are said to be homo fabulans, humans telling and interpreting

narratives. But there is always more to a good story. For Polkinghorne (1988)
narrative analysis is defined by a very pragmatic insight, all inquiry as a
process of narrative negotiations. In the narrative negotiations between
qualitative researchers and the folk, the folk are not doing to well, their
phenomenal experience is reduced to readable and "proper" narrative. The
purpose of the book is to provide counter examples of dominant paradigms of
narrative interpretation and analysis so that fewer stories will get reduced to
narrative models. I seek to improve the narrative of organizations by recovering
its polyphonic qualities of its storytellers. I long for a different storytelling, a
collective storytelling that is antenarrative and undoes the linear time frames of
modernity; I bet on the incoherent and the unplotted tellings.

Multi-story In the dominant paradigms of (monological) narrative

analysis in organization studies, multi-story is defined as noise or a sequential
or simplistic chronological case study that needs analysis to make it narrate.
Story is viewed as antenarrative (just chronicle). The game in academia is to
crate a narrative from so many stories, and retell the narrative not the stories in
academic circles. My narrative negotiation is subversive. I seek to negotiate a
new relation between narrative and story (antenarrative). Narrative knowing
must include those ways of antenarrative analysis of stories told in
organizational communities in which the telling of stories is the currency of
knowledge making and knowledge negotiation.

All chapter titles are not new, but the older topic labels are rendered with
new slants as you enter each chapter. My bet is that by making these alternative
narrative analyses of stories more accessible with short chapters, will invite
others to conduct these methods and soon "microstoria, intertextuality, and
narrative causality will be as popular as the Harvard Case study. Or better yet
cases will be rewritten into more poly vocal tapestries.

Narrated Cases - I read one study that said narrative analysis is just
about the same thing as Harvard Case study. To me this is a ridiculous
assertion, justification to write a one-voiced and homogeneous way of narrating
where the omniscient narrator hides behind every line. Oftentimes, someone
else's story is what gets analyzed and that can be a more coherent and ordered
plot than the teller imagined. And how do these cases read? In the classroom,
unlike the unprocessed "story" the formal case study reconstructs and replaces
"stories" of the flux of experience with a "narrative" plot and a "moral" to be
comprehended as a sequential whole. Narrative then has a closer correlation
with coherent structure and the emplotment of causal explanation than does the
less elegant "story." Yet the case study is an account pre-narrated to trap
students into obvious endings.

To go beyond the overused case approaches, be they comparative,

functionalist, or structuralist raises an important challenge. Cases, dare I say are
"elitist" protocols that disparage and ridicule the ill-formed and fragmented
non-retrospective story. I have collected together eight alternative narrative
analyses that I contend are equally applicable to organization studies of "story,"
but not so widely used as case approaches. Avoiding these alternative narrative
ways of telling and interpreting stories I would argue posits characters, events,
plots, and accounts that are not merely a chronicle or a even a collection of
stories to which an analysis can be applied. A universal analysis of major and
minor factors and voices. What else can a progressive and romantic narrative
unfold? Enter discourse analysis with its non-method deconstructions. If
students get beyond complex intellectual models with bizarre language, it is a
great way to teach students to think critically. Yet the deconstruction of
romantic cases into themes of tragedy and hegemony, with a prolonged stare
into the abyss, are not so popular in the classroom.

How does a field that centers on profoundly narrative, case study

knowing resituate itself as an academic knowledge-making enterprise amid
other postmodern storytelling that is fairly antenarrative in
epistemological stance? Harvard cases are just the surface issue in narrating
organizations differently. I decided to focus on alternative analyses since so
much of what passes for academic narrative analysis in organization studies
seems to rely upon sequential, single-voiced, stories. In short, an excessive
reliance on the hypothetical-deductive approach. I do a fair share of narrative
reviews for journals and I see, I think, too many manuscripts that did some one
shot interviews, did the content analysis and taxonomy, but are shallow as an
empty swimming pool. In narrative analyses we need to do more than treat
stories as "in-place metering" devices to measure more important constructs
like culture, tacit knowledge or knowledge work. Beyond sequential and
single-voiced case study and one-sided interviews, we can conceive of non-
linear and even antenarrative accounts of experience and disputations of
collective memory. This would then accomplish my goal, to improve the
narrative of organizations.

How to tell Organization Stories differently? Narrative analysis

combined with antenarrative analysis can be a field that is about multi-voiced
ways of telling stories, even antenarrative and non-linear ones whose linear and
plot sequence is missing and no one seems to mind. To tell organization stories
differently will, I think, require this more dialectic approach. But narrating
what? Other ways to story "Others" who refuse to narrate? I call to enact
alternative narrative analyses that will story "Others" and the author. This can
yield new narratives in organization studies, ones that are multi-voices, rich
with fragmentation, and lacking in linearity. Even antenarrative in the sense
that the reader is free to put the fragments together or just leave the narrative
wreckage where it lies.

Qualitative researchers have discussed the implications of using plots in

research reports that map and embed specific epistemological, political,
methodological, or other affiliations (e.g., Geertz,1983, 1988; Herndl, 1991;
Van Maanen, 1988).

The alternative ways I assembled focus on multi-stranded stories of

experiences that lack collective consensus. I seek alternatives to the fiat of the
single-voiced, single authored narrative dictating organization memory. For
example, we will look at intertextuality as a way to explore multi-stranded
stories and microstoria to examine stories of the "little people" telling many
histories that were omitted from the conquering hero or even the bourgeoisie
CEO's account. Intertextual and microstoria analyses are contrary to grand
narratives of great heroes or grand projects. Each chapter will consist of these
different analyses and present applications including examples of stories and
analysis.
 The book is intended for researchers wanting to do narrative analysis
differently. It is a book that can be used in graduate seminars in several
disciplines to supplement "standard" methods of narrative analysis. Narrative
analysis spans organization research in business, sociology, ecology, and
communication disciplines. Yet, if the narrative analysis is only a search for
coherent, linear, and ordered tales, as told by narrative authorities, then the
stories written about organizations are too shallow, too superficial, and cover
more than they tell. Van Maanen (1988) calls them "realist" tales of the field.
Beginning graduate students who want to know how to conduct specific types
of qualitative story analysis can use this book. But, they may want to start with
a more standard text if they are searching for "realist" tales. And yet, some of
the narrative analyses I seek to explore and make accessible to students are
about the "materiality" of narrative.

There are many other viable analyses that did not make my list. I value
greatly for example the life history work of George Roth, but George has
skillfully rendered this already. There is also the ethnostatistics narrative work
of Robert Gephart Jr. Here again, he has masterfully presented the approach
elsewhere. I also did not put in work on narrative ethnography. That training is
available in Anthropology seminars and in English and Communication too.
The alternatives I present are very much a part of these broader discourses.

My focus is on rendering approaches that are as yet not accessible to the

qualitative methods classroom or to the journals of organization studies. The
book begins and ends with approaches that are not new, but what is new is that
alternative (antenarrative) reading given to each. Table One provides an
overview of the antenarrative stance of each chapter. This is followed by a brief
introduction to each one.

Antenarrative Approaches

The fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, and unplotted, and improper storytelling, is what I mean
by the term "antenarrative."
1. Deconstruction It is antenarrative in action, in ongoing acts of narrative self-deconstruction.
The narrative is not fixed, but moves and flows with networks of embedded
meaning. The analyst joins in the antenarrative by becoming part of the
ongoing textual deconstruction of interpenetrating processes and weaves of
reconstructing, unraveling and constructing stories.
2. Grand Narrative It is antenarrative in how one story can be told in ways that erase a prior way
of telling the story. The ambition is to shatter grand narrative into many small
stories and to problematize any linear mono-voiced grand narrative of the past
by replacing it with an open polysemous (many-meanings) and multivocal
(many-voiced) web of little stories. Not everyone wants Grand narratives
banished, which gives the tension between dominant or Grand narrative, and
the ante-narrating of little stories.
3. Microstoria Antenarrative because they are quite against the narrating in deconstruction,
postmodern, grounded theory, and macrohistory. They prefer to situate their
"little" story approach in Peircean "abduction" (abduction stands between
induction and deduction). They prefer local antenarrative knowledge, the
"little people's" histories and seem to just ignore the macro narrative "great
man" accounts that are so fashionable in organization studies. Finally they
resist interpreting "little" people's stories of times long past into contemporary
modern or postmodern narrative fashion.
4. Story Network Stories can become nodes or links in a narrative network analysis, mere
architectural display. By contrast, in antenarrative analysis the analyst traces
the storytelling behavior in the organizing situation. The organization is seen
as a storytelling system in which stories are the medium of exchange.
Antenarrative focuses on the ground that moves not on the map and analytic
portrayal.

5. Intertextuality It posits its own antenarrative network, a dialogic conversation among writers
and readers of texts. Intertextuality gets at the process issues that narrative
network analysis seems to miss. Intertext is a plurality, the polyphony of
voices, a veritable textual system that is stereographic and almost living to use
Barthes images.
6. Causality The antenarrative alternative is to study situated acts of storytelling that
retrospectively erect and re-erect causality attributions. The causal field is
messy and often unfathomable and acts of narration camouflage the
antenarrative fabric. To study the non-linear antenarrative pathways of story
reconstruction before retrospective sensemaking is an alternative to causal
map methodology.
7. Plot Plot analysis is based in Ricoeur's theory of emplotment, which allows for
conditions of antenarrative, such as when there is not sufficient pre-
understanding or coherence to grasp together a plot. Relevant to organization
studies is questions of who gets to author the narrative in emplotments of
complex organizations and what other emplotments are feasible?
8. Theme An antenarrative approach to theme is opposed to taxonomic classification.
 Taxonomy cells are little narrative cells to trap stories. Antenarrative can not
be caged in taxonomy or the hierarchy of classification. Antenarrative
highlights the storytelling moves and flows beyond such limits. Theme
analysis would divest story of time, place, plurality, and connectivity. Theme
and taxonomy from an antenarrative view is a terrorist discourse, an analysis
reduced to stereotypes, and a foreclosure on storytelling polysemy and a
degradation of living exchange. It is the excess and in-between of theme
analysis that concerns us here. Beyond the logic of theme the cells of
taxonomy is the messy plenitude. Antenarrative theme analysis steps outside
containment to engage fragmentation, becoming, and undoing.

The Chapters

1. Deconstruction is not new. There have been several good ones in

organization studies. Beginning with deconstruction allows us to immediately
challenge ideas of telos, linearity, sequence, voice, and plot. I shall approach
deconstruction as something that is happening in the ongoing acts of self-
deconstruction in the systemic of narratives, in whole differences are embedded
in the text, and always unraveling textual networks of thought. My
deconstruction view is antenarrative, since texts are self-deconstructing without
the help of the analyst. And the role of the analyst is always part of the
antenarrative experience and joins into the deconstruction. What is new here is
to look at differences between outright destruction and what I read as
deconstruction, and the call to resituate the dualities and hierarchies that get
unpacked.

2. Grand narrative, made so (in) famous by Lyotard (1984) is also not

new, but is certainly antenarrative. It is antenarrative in how one story can be
told in ways that erase a prior way of telling the story. The ambition is to
shatter grand narrative and to problematize any linear mono-voiced grand
narrative of the past by replacing it with an open polysemous (many-meanings)
and multivocal (many-voiced) web of little stories. Modernist organizational
science is presented-as a linear grand narrative, where postmodern science
stresses the nonlinear, multi-vocality and impressionistic fragmentation of
knowledge. While not new, grand narrative studies are still rare in organization
studies. Lyotard is incredulous to grand narrative that we know. But saying it
does not make it so. And to reject all grand narrative, I shall argue, does not
seem to be too wise. The alternative that is offered in this book is to look at the
interplay of grand and local narration. The grand narratives of modernity, the
McDonalds and the Marketeers are everywhere; yet not everyone wants grand
narratives banished.

3. Microstoria is to me a unique antenarrative alternative to the

narrative analyses done so abundantly in organization studies. It is also quite a
contrast to grand narrative or the universality of macro history. And this is why
I situate the Microstorian approach here. Microstorians I have read are quite
against deconstruction, postmodern, grounded theory, and prefer to situate their
approach in Peircean "abduction" (abduction stands between induction and
deduction). Microstorians are not postmodern since they do not see texts as
free-floating webs of signifiers or as schizophrenic narratives. They do not
surrender notions of textual materiality, nor do they abandon class and are not
so eager to dismiss all grand narrative. They are antenarrative because they
look to "little" acts of resistance to dominant narratives. They also reject
conditioning or framing narratives of the past by contemporary theories of the
present. Microstorians do prefer local knowledge, the "little people's" histories
and seem to just ignore the "great man" accounts that are so fashionable in
organization studies. Microstoria relies on archival records and these analysts
are at times quite material and empirical in ways that textual deconstruction is
not. They claim not too aligned with grounded theory or with the genealogy of
Foucault. Rather, they aspire to the adduction middle ground between
deductive and inductive analysis.

4. Story networks analysis is slotted here since the Microstorians do

name searches in their archival research to fashion name-networks. Story
networks are becoming all the narrative rage with aggregated causal mapping
and latticed taxonomic architecture among story bits. But they are not being
done with the kind of attention to context that is the stock and trade of the
microstorians. The alternative I offer is more of an embedded antenarrative
process focus to network analysis. I point out the dangers more than celebrate
the accomplishments of story networks. The weakness of story network
analysis is its over determination of structure, as opposed to processes of
collective memory and social dynamics. What is the antenarrative alternative?
Microstorians use story network analysis in an antenarrative sense by tracing
the names of "little people" and their social relations (family and economic) to
other people. In story network analysis, one collects layers of embedded storied
relationships. Or, one collects stories and traces their relationship (person) links
in the in situ and contextualized processes. Stories can become nodes or links in
a narrative network analysis, but in antenarrative analysis the analyst traces the
storytelling behavior in the organizing situation. What the analyst narrates are
the deductively derived taxonomies that show the associations among story
types (nodes). Still I have seen these studies presented to journal review as
grounded theory.

5. Intertextuality is not new, but where are the organization studies? It

is rarely, if ever applied in organization research and yet each day organizations
add more texts to an intertextual world. Intertextuality gets at the process issues
that narrative network analysis seems to miss. So this is why I situate it exactly
here, 5th in the lineup. Intertextuality posits its own antenarrative network, a
dialogic conversation among writers and readers of texts. Intertextuality is all
the dialoging that goes on between and within narratives. Intertextuality is
explored quite fruitfully in Fairclough's work, but ignored is the element that
was so important to Kristeva, the carnival. When modernity freed itself of
monologic and single-voiced author, the carnivalesque was released with the
force of the polyphonic novel. And this polyphonic narrating and intertextuality
continues to excite postmodern sensibility. In intertextual analysis we look for a
crowd of authors, actors and readers engaged in carnivalesque scenes of
dynamic textual production, distribution, and consumption.

6. Causality analysis begins with Nietzsche's theory of causality. I put

the chapter here since the next deals with plot, which has as its element,
causality. By definition a narrative explains the 'why': what caused a series of
event or phenomenon to happen, unfold, and end the way they did? The
standard narrative causality analysis is to inventory narrative for causal
assertions in texts and then erect a taxonomy or a set of abstracted and
aggregated causal maps. But as Nietzsche reminds "causality alludes us" and is
no more than an "invention" a way of plotting events. In this sense, the
causality analysis I propose is an antenarrative one. I am interested in
recovering an antenarrative causality, the acts of storytelling that construct and
reconstruct causality. Calling the causal narration of organizing into question is
an antenarrative analysis. The causal field is messy and often unfathomable and
acts of narration destroy the antenarrative fabric. In the postmodern world of
organizations linear causality is a convenient fiction, an over-simplified
narrative of complex antenarrative dynamics in which non-linearity (and that
too is a fiction) reigns.

7. Plot analysis is older than Aristotle is. The antenarrative analysis

alternative I present builds upon Ricoeur's work on the mimetics of
emplotment. Relevant to organization studies is questions of who gets to author
the narrative in emplotments of complex organizations and what other
emplotments are feasible? There are also questions of how to bring the writers
and readers of plot into intertextual dialogue. Ricoeur argues that readers can
not follow a story plot through its twists, turns, contingencies, coincidences,
and dead ends to a foregone narrative conclusion without lots of
preunderstanding and that followability can be analyzed in a structural model
interrelating time and narrative coherence.

8. Finally, we reach narrative theme analysis and the end of our journey.
Theme analysis is old, but the inductive ones are much rarer than the deductive
taxonomies. While theme analysis has been done before, what is at issue is the
relationship between deductive, inductive, and antenarrative analysis. Do we
impose etic (outsider) taxonomies of narratives or do we engage in etic
(insider) dialogue to become aware of how people experience narratives. In
either case, the narrative analysis can be limiting when the relationships
between the cells and the excess beyond the taxonomy are not explored. This
exploration for me takes place with antenarrative. And this chapter is placed
last because theme analysis is common to almost every qualitative work, and to
change it in anyway is a daunting task.
 In this last chapter we take several etic categories of narrative themes:
bureaucratic, quest, chaos, and postmodern as our starting point. We then look
at the etic fabrication and the emic experience of each one, as well as the
antenarrative ebb and flow of stories outside and between these types. Then I
resituate the etic/emic duality by showing how one bleeds into the other. This is
not new, I have seen it done before. I show, for example, how we learn our etic
frames in school and how analysts trip over emic frames and then after writing
them out, erase all the emic authors of the narrative. But this is not the
contribution I seek to make.

An antenarrative approach to theme is moves beyond theme and sub-

theme taxonomic classification. Taxonomy in narrative theme analysis traps
stories in little cells. Antenarrative does not destroy the cell house of theme
analysis, but opens up the hierarchy of classification to see what gets left out.
This is my contribution. Antenarrative highlights the storytelling moves and
flows beyond the limits of theme analysis. Antenarrative analysis combined
with theme analysis reconnects to stories of time, place, plurality, and
connectivity. In this way antenarrative is a way to resituate the duality between
narrative and story (See Culler, 1980: 169-187). It allows the excess and in-
between of theme analysis to move out of the margins. Beyond the tidy logic
of theme taxonomy is the messy plenitude of storytelling. This is a narrating
space where the economy runs on stories not analysis. Antenarrative reconnects
theme analysis to fragmentation, becoming, and the undoing of self-
deconstruction.

Why study narrative and Antenarrative? Narratologies are boundless

and wonderfully varying. Manning and Cullum-Swan (1996) provide a useful
review as do Czarniawska (1997), and Fairhurst and Putnam (1999) for the
interested reader. Such review is beyond the scope of our eight narrative
analysis chapters. But, reading these and other reviews suggests to me that this
is a contested domain. �Narratology is the theory and systematic study of
narrative� (Currie, 1998: 1) but it is also the clash of many disciplines. My
short list of narratologies ranges from realist to structuralist, social
constructionist, poststructuralist, critical theorist, and postmodernist. The
scientific study of narrative structure is in film, history, literature, advertising,
comics, and organization and family life.
Table Two: Narratologies

Narratology Ontology Epistemology Methodology

Living Story Stories live and possess time, Knowledge is the story performed Restory the relation
place, and mind. in time, place, and has a life of its between dominant
own (mind); Story can not be narrative and authors�
dualized from context without preferred story.
imbalance and other consequences.

Realist �Real� reality mirrored more or Dualist: real is real, narrative is Experimental
less imperfectly in narrative or subjective interpretative manipulation; interview
case. Narrative is a cultural knowledge; story is an object to with narrative as measures;
Peters & Waterman
artifact, and object; Social facts. know other objects (culture, etc.); narrate with rating scales;
(1982)
managerialist; strategic. biography of narrative
uniqueness.
Hammer &
Champy (1993); Harvard
cases

Formalist �Real� is unknowable, but Narrative is sign system separated Collect and contrast form
some forms are pragmatic or from knowledge of the signified; of the narrative and
possess fidelity and probability, or Narrative is rhetorical device; coherence of narrative
Barthes (early)
scenes, plots, act, agency, Contextualist epistemology of elements.
purpose. historical event unfolding in the
Ricoeur present.

Levi-Strauss

Propp Shklovsky

Fisher Frye

de Saussure

H. White
Pragmatist Assertion of the reality of general Ideas are not mere abstractions; History session by the
terms or laws. Meaning is they are essences--things are what actors. Learning from the
oriented toward the future. they are. Names are intended to past in view of future
Pierce & Pepper; show the nature of things. �Any action.
Microstoria sort of fact is easily real for a
contextualist� (Pepper, 1942: 143)
work e.g.
Ginzburg, Muir,
Levi.
Social Individual and socially Narrative is subjective account Explore relative
constructed realities reified as objective knowledge. differences in narrative
Constructionist Narratives are acts of sensemaking. social construction.

Burger & Luckmann

Geertz

Blumer/Mead

Denzin
 Weick

Gergen(s)
Poststructuralis There is no outside to inside text Narratives are intertextual to Deconstructive reading of
duality or originary narrative. knowledge of other narratives; narratives.
t narratives are ideological with
political consequence
Derrida

DeMan

Culler

Fairclough

Foucault (archaeology)

White & Epston

Critical Theorist Historical materialism (even Grand narratives dominate local Hegemonic reading of
dialectic teleology) shaped by knowledge. But there can be local narratives; ideology
class, ethnicity, gender, and resistance to grand knowledge readings of narratives.
Marx
socioeconomic values narratives.

Marcuse

Horkheimer

Ordono

Debord in situationist
Movement
Postmodernist Virtual and cultural hyperreal, Knowledge and power are Polyphonic and juxtaposed
skeptic critiques of late narratively fragmented; to readings and writing of a
capitalism, to affirmation of affirmative knowledge living chorus of narratives
Best & Kellner (on
spiritual world. cosmos.
Debord)

Baudrillard

Lyotard

Jameson

Deleuze & Guattari

For two decades poststructuralists and some postmodernists and critical

theorists have deployed deconstruction to declare the death of several other
narratology sciences, a move that realist, structuralist, and social constructionist
narratologies did not notice or elected to ignore. Social construction, for
example, is alleged to exclude politics, economics, ecology and ideology in its
narrative organization studies and narrative organization change projects.

In sum, the main change in narrative sciences has been to pay closer
attention to alternatives to narrative analysis. Organization study, in my view,
has rarely stepped outside the single-voiced, third-person narrative analysis to
gaze at the conditions of antenarrative. My goal is to embrace narrative
analysis alternatives that would tell organization stories differently, that would
resituate narrative analysis. This resituation to rebalance the hierarchical
domination of narrative over story. It is not to abandon narrative analysis, but
to look at how to analyze fragmented and almost living stories (TwoTrees,
1997), which are to me the currency of organizational communication.