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Situated in scholarship on narrative and antenarrative, the purpose of this paper is to develop central assumptions of an (ante)narrative approach to collective identity research and to reflexively address the methodological questions such an approach raises for producing and analysing (ante)stories. (Ante)stories include proper stories with chronology and plot as well as antestories which are fragmented and incomplete.

Based on a concrete research project exploring collective identity as narratively constructed in negotiation between organizational insiders and outsiders, emphasis is placed on elements related to the production and analysis of (ante)stories. Challenges of the applied (ante)narrative methodology are addressed focusing on three central questions: where do (ante)stories come from? Whose (ante)stories are told? And whose storied constructions of collective identity are explored?

The (ante)narrative methodology allows for a broad approach to producing and analysing (ante)stories. Consequently, it provides a rich understanding of the narrative practice of constructing collective identity. However, it also raises questions relating to the role of the researcher in the analytic process.

Implications include the necessity of developing analytic methods that take the fragmented, incoherent and dynamic nature of storytelling into account as well as reflect the researcher as a co-teller. Moreover, it is suggested that there is a need for developing a set of alternative evaluation criteria to accompany such methods.

To present and reflexively discuss (ante)narrative as a research methodology within collective identity research.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between embodiment and the experience of self, body, and work as mutual organisational relationships by focusing on the author's bodily experiences as a nurse, mother, educator and researcher living with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). The use of an autoethnographic framework contributes to work on embodiment and experience supporting the development of a self‐reflexive praxis of human action. It specially focuses on life experiences that become my stories as autoethnographic representations depicting the difficulties and challenges of living and working with chronic illness. It proposes the use of stories, specifically ante‐narratives, to highlight how making the invisible aspects of chronic illness visible; and contributes to work on organisational learning whereby knowledge drawn from the body can serve as a prospective sense‐making activity to help answer: Where is all this change and complexity heading? The paper aims to expand the domain of narrative paradigm that is normally found in the literature relevant to sociology, ethnography, and critical management studies, by gently extending the boundaries of understanding how to learn and respond as ways of inquiry.

The paper uses Ellis's research approach of autoethnography as a means to enhance the representational uniqueness and reflexivity in qualitative research. A personal story capturing lived experiences of living and working with chronic illness is used to illustrate how stories, specifically ante‐narrative, can provide access to bodily knowledge and glimpses into what Van Maanen calls the ethnographer's own taken‐for‐granted understandings of social world under scrutiny. My stories become the data that are the autoethnographic accounts, which include rigorous critical reflection and review through an autoethnographic lens, and, importantly reflexively shape the author's analysis of social and cultural practices of my being and becoming in the world.

The paper provides insights about how personal change is brought about as result of a confirmed diagnosis of MS. It suggests that storytelling contributes to the transformational process to learning about new routines in the management of MS, outlining how and why the development of leadership is important throughout the story‐telling process.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to seek further ways of developing the methodological art of how to tell good stories.

The paper includes implications for the development of organisational learning activities, whereby qualitative researchers, particularly those undertaking autoethnographic studies, can seek to enhance the reflexivity of their own work, and for managing the dynamic balance between stability and change as being central to individual wellness.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study the benefits of living life as inquiry, as methodological process can enable and help clarify important issues about human development, growth and potential, both personally and for the caring professions. The value of this autoethnographic inquiry is that it provides an ongoing continual process of original inquiry, reflection, and action learning.

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.

Although the process of fieldwork is often characterised by disorder, the requirement to adhere to a tightly defined methodology and produce timely research outputs often leads the authors to present the findings as though the research has been the product of a linear process. The purpose of this paper is to unmask this paradox, by documenting the disorder and development of a research project 15 years (so far) in duration.

The approach used in this paper is one of auto-ethnographic reflection, drawing on aspects of Boje’s living story approach, incorporating not only the “linear” narrative of the research process, but also fragments of ante-narrative, themes running above and below the dominant. Within the study, the authors are reflecting on, a range of qualitative methods, including interview, focus groups, memory-work, and living story (ante-narrative) methods, which are employed within a critical management research methodology.

The authors’ experiences show that although “messiness” may be an inherent part of qualitative research, it is this very disorder, and the consequent opportunities for time and space, that allows the research, and the researcher, “time to breathe”. This reflexivity allows for methodological development and refinement, and ultimately rigorous and participative research, which also honours the participants. The authors argue that although this approach may not align with the current need for prolific (and rapid) publication, in allowing the disorder to “be” in the research, and allowing the time to reassess theoretical and methodological lenses, the resultant stories may be more authentic – both the stories gathered from participants and the stories of research.

The paper highlights the intertwining of stories of participants and stories from research, which is a significant addition to understandings of the “messiness” of qualitative research. This paper adds to the growing call for the inclusion of “chaos” and authenticity in qualitative research, acknowledging and valuing the humanity of the researcher, and giving voice to the paradox between the time to methodologically develop, and the requirement for timely research.

Communities of work are a phenomenon closely associated with government social and industrial policy, and can be tracked in contemporary examples globally alongside industrial development. The purpose of this paper is to explore community identity within a town which was previously single industry, but has since experienced workforce reduction and to a large degree, industry withdrawal.

Using an inductive approach, the researchers interviewed 32 participants who had resided (past or present) within the instrumental case study town. A thematic analytical framework, drawing on the work of Boje (2007) was employed.

A significant theme to emerge from the participants was the public assertion of social cohesion and belonging. However, what was interesting, was that beneath this unified exterior, lay accounts of multiple forms of demarcation. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s (1983) notion of the imagined community, and Bauman’s (2001) identity in globalisation, this contradiction is conceptualised as boundary-making moments of identification and disidentification.

This research is specific to the New Zealand context, although holds many points of interest for the wider international audience. The research provides a broad example of the layering of the collective and individual levels of identity.

This research provides a voice to the wider individual, community and societal implications of managerial practices entwined with political decisions. This research encourages managers and educators in our business schools to seek to understand the relationship between the political, corporate, community and individual realms.

This research makes a significant contribution to understandings of the interconnectedness of social policy, industry, and the lived experiences of individuals. Moreover, it contributes to the broader single industry town literature, which previously has focussed on stories of decline from a North American context.

The nature of narrative is important, and with the development of awareness of knowledge processes, it becoming more important. In particular its notions can be enhanced by examining it in terms of antenarrative. Ultimately the paper aims to explore the relationship between narrative and antenarrative.

The objectives of the paper are achieved by seating the notions of narrative and antenarrative into the models of knowledge cybernetics (in particular social viable systems – SVS and social cybernetics) to enable an exploration of the consequences of their interaction. If narrative and antenarrative are seen as together forming an autonomous system, then their relationship may be explored in terms of SVS. This is effectively a social geometry that enables complex conceptual relationships to be explored graphically.

While normally one might think that narrative and antenarrative are incommensurable, the theory explains how through enantiomer dynamics, patterns of narrative can be related to un‐patterned arbitrary antenarratives. Under the right circumstances narrative and antenarrative can form a joint alliance that enables the two forms to merge into a story. This means that a story is told in a way that enables narrative structures to be intermingled with antenarrative thereby forming a thematic story event that has potential to engage more dynamically with the listener.

The paper is fundamentally theoretical, and a useful development would be to apply this to real case scenarios, thereby exploring quantitively the interconnection between narrative and antenarrative, and some of its implications.

It must be realised that there is a tacit knowledge dimension that connects the narrative/antenarrative situation with a story acquirer. The ability of the acquirer to recognise whether a situation has narrative or antenarrative is a function of that acquirer's own pattern of knowledge, and this embodies subjectivity. This is bound up within the notion of third cybernetics. The interconnectedness of narrative and antenarrative is relevant to actual processes of social communication, and demonstrates a parallel coexistence of modernist and postmodernist paradigms.

The paper applies a new theory, that of knowledge cybernetics, to a difficult conceptual area of study. While this results in the need to understand the conceptual basis of knowledge cybernetics, it does provide a frame of reference that enables relatively simple approaches in knowledge and knowledge processes to be graphically represented, thereby providing the potential for new insights. The value of the paper is that these graphical techniques are illustrated, and they would likely be useful to those who work in the knowledge or knowledge management field.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the practice paradigm of pragmatic constructivism.

Pragmatic constructivism emphasizes the role of the actors in the construction of organized reality. For such construct to function successfully, four dimensions of reality must be integrated in the actor-world relations.

This includes an examination of pragmatic constructivist theory as an alternative to traditional realism and critical theories of organizational reality. The papers of the special issue include methodological, conceptual and empirical studies to expand the understanding of management accounting in relation to the actors’ construction of functioning organizational practices.

As pragmatic constructivism is a relatively new paradigm, there is a need for further methodological and conceptual development and empirical studies of functioning practices.

In a discipline such as management accounting that can be theoretically polarized between the “realist” scientific mainstream and social constructivist criticism, pragmatic constructivism offers a mediating model in which realism is retained as the pragmatic criteria of success of the organizational actors’ construction.

This paper aims to develop a methodology of business knowledge creation based on a synthesis between the perspective of reality informed by pragmatic constructionism (PC) and critical approaches to narrative analysis informed by antenarrative concepts.

The paper identifies commonalities and contrasts between narrative and PC. Interpreting an original case study of a hotel by deploying both methodologies, the paper shows how a synthesis of the two approaches can help to construct management control knowledge.

PC and narrative have many overlaps and complementarities. Practitioners like stories both to make sense of their own roles and to develop personal strategic agendas. Antenarrative concepts demonstrate the potentially generative properties of organizational storytelling. The PC approach also constructs corporate narratives but, additionally, provides a set of criteria against which we can evaluate the stories of practitioners on the basis of “does it work?”.

More interpretive field study processes are called for as a way of testing the robustness of the research design developed in the paper.

A successful management control topos has to be business-specific and co-authored with contributions from participants both inside and outside the organization. Narrative and PC research methodologies both encourage reflexivity, in which the researchers explicitly explore not just the positions of their interviewees, but also their own position and reactions. The creation of business knowledge is seen as a co-production between the researchers and the researched, as they share concepts and reflections during the fieldwork process.

The paper compares and contrasts two interpretive research methodologies, narrative and a pragmatic constructivist perspective. Especially when the concept of antenarrative is deployed, the two methodologies offer fruitful possibilities for dialogical conversation, as they espouse slightly different views on the nature of actor reality.

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.