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Storytelling helps clarify the concealed or less visible elements of reality in its authentic context. Story analysis read between the lines of written or oral narratives to obtain richer understanding of an event. However, storytelling practice is a double-edge sword. Skilled storytellers may employ the power of storytelling to reframe an event in a favorable or undesirable way.

In contemporary business world, corporations broadly employ expert authors who proficiently apply storytelling practices in corporate public documents. Accordingly, corporate public documents declare desirable corporate image and promising reflection of business activities hence the corporate attracts more stockholders and obtains extra resources.

In current business world, corporates that do not appropriately employ storytelling would fail to take the opportunity to brainwash stockholders, hence suffer from competitive disadvantage.

This case study analyses Sears Holdings Corporation public report to explore how its business activities are revealed to public stakeholders. This study also proposes hypotheses of the consequences of ineffective storytelling.

This chapter describes why safe spaces are needed in education settings for full inclusion of gendered identities as they intersect with categories such as race/ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and ability. This discussion briefly addresses varying and intersecting levels and domains of privilege or marginalization such as identity, inter-/intraaction, organization, society, and knowledge, and how safe spaces in education can support learning as it is entwined with gender, gendered biases, and power dynamics and structures.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to articulate a framework for different conceptions of accounting’s performativity. Second, it aims to advance a Baradian posthumanist understanding of accounting’s performativity.

The paper traces different foundational conceptions of performativity and then articulates and substantiates different conceptions of accounting’s performativity. It advances one of these conceptions by producing a Baradian posthumanist understanding of accounting’s performativity.

Seven conceptions of performative accountings are articulated: accounting as a (counter)performative illocution; accounting as a performative perlocution; accounting as a self-fulfilling prophecy; accounting as an overflowing frame; accounting as a controlled relational agency; accounting as a mediator; and accounting as an exclusionary practice. It is argued how a posthumanist understanding of accounting as an exclusionary practice turns accounting from a world-knowing practice into a world-making practice. As such, it should be called to account.

Posthumanist qualitative accounting research that conceives of accounting as an exclusionary practice focuses on how accounting is a material-discursive practice that intra-acts with other practices, and on how there is a power-performativity in the intra-actions that locally and temporarily (re)produces meaningful positions for subjects and objects and the boundaries between them.

A posthumanist understanding teaches practitioners to be attentive to and accountable for the exclusions that come with accounting or, more generally, with measurement. Accounting raises ethical concerns.

This paper articulates different conceptions of accounting’s performativity and makes the case for empirical non-anthropocentric examinations of accounting as an exclusionary practice.

The focus of this chapter is quantum dialectical storytelling and its contribution to generate anticipatory knowledge of the future through the intra-play between the ante-narrative and the anti-narrative. The theoretical framework on quantum dialectical storytelling is based upon Boje’s triad storytelling framework interfused with Hegelian dialectics and Baradian diffraction. Through the inspiration of Judith Butler’s performative theory, Riach, Rumens, and Tyler (2016) introduce the concept of the anti-narrative as a critical reflexive methodology. By drawing on Hegel’s work on the dialectical phenomenology of critical reflexive self-consciousness, a dialectical pre-reflexive and reflexive framework emerges as intra-weaving modes of being-in-the-world toward future.

South African scholars, like most scholars in the developing world, have sold the idea that social constructivism is the gold standard of qualitative management research. In this chapter, we caution against this subordination to unquestioned conventions and offer a process relational ontology as an alternative to social constructivism that is often punted by most qualitative research programmes and textbooks. We also debunk the idea that ‘grounded theory’ exists by delving into epistemology and showing how science is ‘self-correcting’ rather than ‘tabula rasa’. Instead of boxing business ethics knowledge, as has been done by the case study gurus, we encourage business and organisational ethicists to own their indigenous heritage through storytelling science based on the self-correcting method underpinned by Popperian and Peircian epistemological thought. This chapter encourages business management researchers to move towards more profound ethical knowledge by refuting and falsifying false assumptions in each phase of the study, in a sequence of self-correcting storytelling phases. This is what Karl Popper called trial and error, and what C.S. Peirce called self-correcting by the triadic of Abduction–Induction–Deduction. We offer a novel method for accomplishing this aim that we call ‘Conversational Interviews’ that are based on antenarrative storytelling sciences. Our chapter aims to evoking the transformative power of indigenous ontological antenarratives in authentic conversation in order to solve immediate local problems ad fill the many institutional voids that plague the South(ern)-/African context.

This chapter puts “new” material feminist theory to work to re-think curriculum practices in undergraduate higher education. Drawing on the work of Karen Barad and her elaboration of agential realism, the chapter explores the following questions: how can thinking with new material feminism help develop and support new modes of curriculum design? How does new material feminism facilitate the development of innovative teaching and learning practices? And how does new material feminism expand the means by which knowledge is produced? The chapter utilizes Barad’s notion of diffraction to illuminate how curriculum-making can be done via a patterned activity of creative interference. Empirically grounded in a module on an undergraduate BA Education Studies degree, the discussion employs practical examples of how new material feminist thinking and doing activates different ways of thinking about the body, materiality, affect, space, places, and objects in the undergraduate curriculum. More broadly, the chapter speaks into long-standing concerns about how feminist theory might support innovative teaching and learning, and how it might promote new modes of relation between our students and us as educationalists. The chapter is written from the point of view of the tutor’s reflexive insights on the module as a novel curriculum instantiation of material feminist practice.

This chapter describes the theoretical contributions of Fractal Change Management (FCM) in relation to Quantum Storytelling theory and practice. Building on the application of complexity theory in the hard sciences as well as social contexts, this chapter considers the areas of overlap and difference between FCM and its theoretical fellows, summarizing selected concepts from FCM, considering the strengths and weaknesses of the method in various contexts, as well as its development over time. Prior studies in the yoga and nonprofit communities are briefly discussed along with ongoing work with software developers. Areas for further study are examined in detail, as a way to establish an antenarrative for this line of inquiry that honors its lineage as well as its contributions to the body of knowledge.