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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.

I am a bike-sharing activist at New Mexico State University (NMSU) and am using quantum storytelling, as well as ethnographic, methods to study its bike-sharing implementation process. Moreover, quantum storytelling is, by its very nature, an intervention into the process it observes and, in this case, utilized as a means to encourage the university-governing entities to support and fund a bike-sharing program. Quantum storytelling is formally defined as “the interplay of quantum understandings with storytelling processes,” including their counternarratives (Boje, 2014, p. 100). It is not human dramatic action simply put into text or context. Rather, it is establishing a pattern of assemblages of actants – human, nonhuman (animals, plants, etc.), and material (in this case, bikes, paths, and so on) – and providing a storytelling that accounts for their inseparable spacetimemattering (Boje, 2014; Boje & Henderson, 2014). Additionally, quantum storytelling helps make explicit what Heidegger (1962) calls fore-having, fore-structuring, fore-conception, fore-telling, and fore-caring (as developed Boje, Svane, & Gergerich, in review). It allows for antenarrative preview of the way to operationalize bike-sharing through visual media, including pictures, documents, five-year plans, campus maps, bikes, and the riders themselves. Through this presentation, I will show embodied practices stemming from quantum storytelling, and do so using both a Barthean S/Z and Bojean antenarrative analysis of the bikeshare implementation process.

This paper aims to offer an analysis of the British Petroleum (BP) Prudhoe Bay environmental disaster. The primary purpose is to elucidate the fivefold of antenarrative in sensemaking environmental accidents. The analytic framework enables organization to envision futures where they want to be, and work to get there as more socially responsible companies.

The authors conducted an intertextual analysis of texts by ascribing voice and affiliation to each antenarrative. The multiple voices and antenarratives quoted within the texts were compared and coded and theme analysis was conducted over time to understand dynamics and see if organizational learning was occurring.

The antenarrative method generated several findings: BP is faulty beneath in how they conceive of safety, lacking foresight. BP executives leave out elements of safety, a fore having that does not include what needs to be prepared for. BP foretells that it is socially responsible, yet the reality of events seems contradictory. Within fore structure, some of BP’s leaders deny or ignore claims of critics through intertextual connections of events. By fore caring, BP mediates the problem in response to the disaster and critics. Their sensemaking in this case is more retrospective and reactive than prospective.

Organizations can avoid environmental disasters and negative backlash by adopting practices that provide more transparent discourse and greater accountability. The fivefold of antenarrative serves as a storytelling framework to promote care by using trial and error problem solving on future bets.

To date, few intertextual analyses have been performed to study organizations. By applying a fivefold antenarrative storytelling framework, which reflects new advances in storytelling theory, the authors offer an original perspective on environmental accident sensemaking.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new model for depicting organizational processes: the episodic spiral model (ESM).

On the basis of a strong process view as the orienting paradigm, the authors demonstrate the need for the ESM by discussing the shortcomings of two specific spiral types in the organizational literature – the knowledge creation spiral and the efficacy spiral.

A review of each spiral type through the lens of nonlinear assumptions reveals the treatment to date of organizational spirals as uni-directional and insufficient for understanding organizations. The authors propose that managers must undertake a paradigm shift in order to gain a greater awareness of both the environment in which they operate, as well as their process actions. To facilitate this shift, the ESM depicts choice points, chosen and rejected trajectories, and upward and downward environmental drafts, as well as a multi-dimensional environment, as a way of re-conceptualizing approaches to space, time, and change in organization studies.

The authors propose that the model provides a way for scholars to enhance the study of organizations by understanding that organizations exist in a more dynamic environment than previously studied; recognizing that the organization has a wider range of choices available, and acknowledging the long-lasting ramifications of both choices made and choices discarded; and obtaining a more comprehensive look at the way the organization moves through space and time at any given moment. Taken together, the authors hope that these contributions allow organizational scholars a new approach to theorizing, exploring, and writing about the organizations they study.

Calls for dialectical learning process model development in learning organizations have largely gone unheeded, thereby limiting conceptual understanding and application in the field. This paper aims to unify learning organization theory with a new understanding of Hegelian dialectics to trace the development of the storytelling learning organization. The “storytelling learning organization” is a conceptual framework presented along with criteria to evaluate different kinds of dialectical development claims in “storytelling learning organization” work that are bona fide instances of one or another dialectical ontology ranging from Marxian, to Hegelian, to Brierian, to Žižekian.

Ontological evaluation and critique of a variety of “storytelling learning organization” practices posit different dialectical ontology and consequences for theory and practice. Through a case example of business process reengineering (BPR) in a “public research university (PRU)”, the storytelling of “schooling” versus “education” ideas and practices, in a place, in a period and in material ways of mattering, never achieves synthesis. The dialectical development of resistance to implementation evolves toward transcendence into irreducible oppositions of ontological incompleteness – the essence of a learning organization.

This ontological analysis focuses on the use of ideas and practices by opposing storytelling agents and actants to uncover a learning organization’s dialectical development in its own storytelling, its narrative and counter-narrative enactments, and its attempts to unpack contradictions. The PRU under study has gone through a series of financial crises, and its learning organization responses were downsizing staff and faculty positions and implementing BPR in ways that worsened the situation. The process resulted in staff and faculty leaving even before the reorganization was completed and enrollment dropped dramatically, in great part due to the negative press and the excessive standardization of the curriculum that accompanies “schooling” displacing acts of “education” practices and ideations. Meanwhile, the administrators are still trying to manage the narrative and control it so as to forestall additional attrition.

The theory of “storytelling learning organization” is original. The question answered here has practical value because institutions have choices to make concerning the kind of dialectical narrative and counter-narrative development that is cultivated, and there are options for transforming or moving to an alternative narrative and counter-narrative development process. The analysis of the case also illustrates a pattern of intervention that is, on the one hand, unsuccessful in developing “higher” education and, on the other hand, successful in shutting down the efficacy of a PRU by centrist use of reengineering to accomplish more schooling, more downsizing and more installation of “academic capitalism” ideas and practices.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the ideological impasses between educationally minded faculty and neoliberal oriented university administrators. To bridge and benefit from these two perspectives, Follettian integration is introduced. Specifically, the ensemble learning theory (ELT) and entrepreneurship centers are illustrated as Follettian interventions and their reasons for success are discussed.

This paper is theoretical, but provides ethnographic anecdotes of the problems occurring during the rise of neoliberalism and academic capitalism in the public university. The successful use of the ELT and entrepreneurship centers is likewise explored anecdotally.

This paper illustrates the benefits of utilizing the ELT and entrepreneurship centers in two different university settings.

While the sample sizes of this paper are small, the anecdotal examples provide the basis for reasoning by analogy.

This work illustrates two possible Follettian interventions that serve as a guide to assist university administrators and faculty to find common ground and better serve students and university communities.

The rise of academic capitalism and neoliberalism has devalued education and resulted in poorer educational outcomes and a modern generation with less intellectual capital. This is one of the first papers to utilize Mary Parker Follett’s theories of education and apply them to the impending identity crisis of the public university. The result is a win-win for both neoliberal administrators and faculty in the face of an impending identity crisis for the public university.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the new journal and outline the rationale and aims and objectives of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal (QROM).

The paper considers why there is a necessity for a journal like QROM, outlines the scope of the new journal, and introduces the articles in the first issue. An invitation for further contributions to the journal is also given.

There is still a need for an outlet that both provides a showcase for the diverse range of qualitative techniques in use and promotes high quality qualitative research.

This paper is of use to those new readers of the journal, and those who wish to submit to the journal, in that it clearly outlines editorial policy and processes.