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The aim is to analyse managerial behaviour using narrative analysis to identify stories that are often ignored, silenced or missed by the hegemonic managerialist narrative.

An ethnographic narrative based on an 18 month period of participant observation where the author was a manager in a business unit acquired by another company for $1 billion.

Strategy can be diverted or altered by managers lower down the organization in a counter strategy process. This is consistent with Dalton where managers lower down the organization adapt and change strategy to make it work in practice.

Participant observation and ethnomethodological narrative analysis have the potential to go beyond the hegemonic managerialist literature and identify a much more complex picture. However, such research is always open to criticism as being from the author's “own perspective” and appearing to claim “omnipresence.” Other stories have been given voice but it is never possible to say that all stories have been recovered from the silencing processes of the organization.

A clearer understanding of how management operates counter strategies within an organization in practice. This enables organizations to reconsider how they engage managers beyond the hegemonic narrative.

This paper aims to provide an insight into management behaviour beyond the usual treatment of managers as an amorphous mass as is common in most of the hegemonic managerialist narrative. When managers are told the narratives in this paper they can recount their own similar stories yet these are rarely told.

To show how the stories told by people in organisations need to be reckoned with in order to give change a chance.

The paper's approach is a case study and analytical approach to storytelling.

Stories are told from different perspectives, related to what needs to be achieved by the audience.

The scope of the paper is framed by the analytical approach to storytelling which in this case is related to learning modes.

Organisations that are open for change need to give room to individual voice/stories in order to live up to the possibilities of change.

Stories do not always address an audience that is supposed to hear the story; they can get out of control.

A description of the managerial impact on change processes during a takeover with middle management in the telecom industry.

The approach is to use storytelling as a form of analysis of different positions within an organization, as described in a case study.

By not including the voice of the middle managers, higher management runs into problems in the implementation of change processes.

By using narratives as a source for analysis, the paper does not try to gain objective insights into change processes.

Resistance to change can prove a safeguard against too optimistic change.

The paper shows that several layers of change that interact with one another as proof of the confrontation between grand narratives and ante‐narratives.

To show the reader that storytelling can be seen as a form of seduction based on emotional response and thereby preventing a change process within the organisation.

Case study in relation to a psychoanalytic approach to text as a place for emotional control.

Storytelling without psychodynamic analysis becomes easily storyselling.

Text is seen as carrier of emotions that can be corrected through psychodynamics which implies that there remains hope for enlightment by the text.

Every form of storytelling is a form of addressing an audience that needs to be made aware of the psychodynamics of the text as part of the author.

The worst stories that are sold are those we sell best to ourselves.

The aim of this paper is to give an account of a self‐evaluation process in a change programme within the US Coast Guard.

This is an autoethnographical account as form of reflection on a leadership in position facilitating change within the organization.

Adaptive organizational change is a human endeavor, not a scientific application of techniques and skills.

The authoethnography points mainly only to a change process of the writer and is therefore hardly an abstract model for others.

Meaningful organizational transformation does not occur without a corresponding self‐transformation, most importantly of the individual leading the change.

Changing oneself by managing change process as a leader, one has to become the change process in order to be successful.

The aim is to discuss how storytelling can be used in different ways to enlighten change processes occurring within and after a takeover situation.

Case study reseach based on in‐depth interviews critically examined as forms of narratives.

Storytelling gives the organisation the possibility to change its goals.

Through storytelling analysis contradictions and limitations are provoked within the takeover process.

Storytelling is always about various stories, which one needs to read into practice.

The paper illustrates the value of aquisitions as seen through the eyes of the key players.

This paper aims to problematize the idea that organizations can be understood as written text. Most of the work done in narrative analysis for organizational studies (OS) relies on an interpretation of narrative which is anchored to the formalist/structuralist tradition. The aim is to review the exiting literature and propose an alternative understanding of the phenomena. In particular, the paper will argue that text analysis should be complemented with analysis of the experience of the people involved in the studied processes. The reductionist character of structural analysis cannot fit the complexity and uniqueness of the everyday life in organizations.

The approach is ethnographic research methodology. Data were collected during long unstructured interviews and daily informal conversations. Brochures, newsletter publications from the bank and archival information were also analyzed.

Storytelling in the bank studied shows a constant movement between two poles: the stabilizing forms of social determinacy and the destabilizing forms of experience.

To incorporate the dimension of experience into narrative research for OS and bringing the phenomenological sensitivity of the studies of everyday life into the management field.