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The purpose of this paper is to propose a typology of enchantment approaches that are related to storytelling practices in organizations: enchantment by design and enchantment by emergence.

The authors explore this enchantment framework in a storytelling drawing on examples of living storied spaces and narratives from hospital studies.

This essay asserts three aspects about enchantment: that mainstream organizational narrative, rooted in classical structuralism and modernity, seems intent on disenchanting life within them. Second, despite such narratives, organizations, such as hospitals the authors studied, were never disenchanted because enchantment resides in many living storied spaces. Finally, many forms of “enchantment” and “disenchantment” are taking place in organization action and its storytelling.

The paper equips managers with a deeper understanding of how storytelling in organizations can encourage enchantment or disenchantment within the organization and in its relations with their environments (community, nature, humanity).

The value of the paper lies in its theoretical contributions, integrating enchantment‐disenchantment perspectives with a theory of storytelling.

Addressing the challenge of continuously strengthening our own leadership begins with considering our self-efficacy, our belief in our capacity to carry out desired actions, and its influence on our agency, our actual capacity to carry out desired actions. Our agency grows when “nudged” along by our self-efficacy. However, this requires insight into what is happening around us, achieved by looking to the following two leadership horizons:

Presence, how much we notice and attend to what is happening, with empathy, for all stakeholders.

Vision and values, why we do what we do, how we see ourselves, and who we aspire to be.

Beyond what these two leadership horizons offer separately, together they influence the stories we shape in our “storied space,” the place we each occupy in which the events of the past and the possibilities of the future converge in our ever-unfolding present. We constantly draw together emerging insights to keep making new meaning and ideating possibilities best matched to addressing emerging challenges. As our understanding sharpens, we narrow our options to the best fitting one, shape it into a prototype, and test it in action. Throughout this, we constantly monitor the resonance of our self-efficacy and agency to keep the actions we intend undertaking realistically sitting at the threshold of what we can nearly accomplish.

Rather than mapping a fixed blueprint, this design approach offers rigor and agility, enabling our agency to grow organically, culminating in leadership fit for purpose, including a sound capacity to strengthen our own leadership, by design.

In this chapter, I offer some insights into what I learned over the course of my inquiry into the living and learning that took place on the edges of community. I highlight the inconclusive nature of narrative inquiry as well as demonstrate my recognition that in any narrative inquiry we exit as we entered, in medias res, in the middle of things. Even though the inquiry ends, we continue to compose stories and to share those stories. Our understanding is only ever partial in the same way the stories we compose are incomplete, unfinished. In seeking a conclusion that is not a conclusion, then, I contend that experiences are complex and the stories we compose about those experiences are also complex. The insights and wonderings that emerged from the analysis of my own experiences as well as the experiences of my participants shaped themselves into the overlapping areas of identity-making, curriculum making, and community. In particular, I explored the stories people composed from the edges of community; those spaces conventionally described by the dominant narrative as marginalized. The participants discussed in this chapter demonstrated how profoundly they were each impacted by their positioning as marginalized. At the same time, their stories had a strong thread of self-definition that was insubordinate to that positioning. In varied ways, the participants refused to be defined by others or as other. Their experiences suggested that those spaces conventionally thought of as peripheral, the edges, were actually the defining features of communities.

The purpose of the paper is to explore the theory and approaches employed by a novice narrative researcher to open, work in, and close the narrative space. The paper reflects on this personal journey and aims to provide insight for other novices to successfully navigate the narrative space.

This paper draws on the experiences and emotions involved in undertaking narrative inquiry as a novice researcher. The paper focuses specifically on the challenges of opening, working in and closing the narrative space.

Through a critical and reflective discussion of approaches to narrative inquiry, the papers points to key theories, and approaches, which guide narrative research. In doing this, the diversity in interpretation and application of narrative research are noted as essential components of both its challenge and beauty.

The practical implications of this paper are linked to its utility in helping others reflect on their own practice and also providing insight and support to other novice researchers seeking to navigate the narrative space.

The paper provides a subjective interpretation and application of the theory underpinning narrative research and how it was used to guide the authors research into care leavers journeys into and through university.

The purpose of this paper is to explore time dilemmas in ethnographic research and develops a facilitating frame for thinking about temporality. Core concepts developed include: temporal awareness that refers to widening of the understanding and sensitivity to time issues; temporal practices which relate to how the researcher learns to deal with, for example, contradictory conceptions of time in the pragmatics of conducting fieldwork and in the analysis of competing data; and temporal merging which is used to refer to the interweaving of objective and subjective concepts of time, and to the way that the past and prospective futures shape human experience of the present.

An extended case study on workplace change is selectively drawn upon in discussing time and ethnographic research. Two closely related stories are used to illustrate aspects of temporality. These include a discussion of the way that stories in organizing, representing, simplifying and imposing structure (become theory-laden) often compressing the subjective experiences of lived time into a more formalized linear presentation that may inadvertently petrify temporal sensemaking; and an examination of how the polyphony of storying during times of change highlights temporal sensemaking and sensegiving through asynchronous features that emphasize volatility and non-linearity in explaining the way that people experience change.

The conundrum that competing concepts of time often present for the researcher is in the juxtapositions that generate loose ends that appear to require resolution. Temporal merging in being able to accommodate the intertwining of objective and subjective time, temporal practices in being able to use different concepts of time without trying to resolve them during the collection and analyses of data, and temporal awareness in being able to accept the paradox of time in the use of a relational-temporal perspective, all open up opportunities for greater insight and understanding in engaging in ethnographic studies on changing organizations.

There are a number of practical implications that arise from the paper in doing longitudinal research on workplace change. Four summarized here comprise: the significance of sustained fieldwork and not trying to shortcut time dimension to ethnographic research; the importance of developing temporal practices for dealing with objective and subjective time as well as the interweaving of temporal modes in data collection, analysis and write-up; the value of engaging with rather than resolving contradictions; chronological objective time is good for planning the research whilst subjective time is able to capture the non-linearity of lived time and the importance of context.

A new facilitating frame is developed for dealing with time tensions that are often downplayed in research through the concepts of temporal awareness, practices and merging. The frame provides temporal insight and promotes the use of a relational processual perspective. It is also shown how stories present in the data, in the writing up of material for different audiences, in chronologies and events, and in the sensemaking and sensegiving of individuals and groups as they describe and shape their lived experiences of change – are useful devices for dealing with the conundrum of time in ethnographic research.

Mondays in my classroom typically have time reserved for personal storytelling, but students are allowed to share whenever they feel so inclined during the week in class. At the beginning of the year, I am the major storyteller in class so that I can model appropriate aspects of delivery such as content appropriateness and time allotment, but as the students become familiar with me and with each other, they assume responsibility for the storytelling that occurs in class.