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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.

The stories told in organizations offer researchers and organizational development practitioners a natural entry point to understanding and intervening in the culture(s) of an organization. Informed by perspectives of social constructivism, organizational symbolism, and critical theory, examines key studies of organizational story and storytelling, identifies multidisciplinary foundations, and presents challenges to the application of story work in organizations.

In accordance with Latour, this paper aims to respond to the call for a “down-to-earth” post-learning organization approach to sustainability, which is critical of Senge’s conception of learning organization (LO).

“Gaia storytelling” is used to define a LO that is “down-to-earth”.

Gaia is understood through the notion of a critical zone, which foregrounds the local and differentiated terrestrial conditions in which life on Earth is embedded.

Gaia storytelling implies perceiving LO as a network of storytelling practices enacted and told by unique creative citizens. Such an organization sustains and grows through several entangled storytelling cycles that allow Gaia to shape learning.

The article distinguishes five different storytelling cycles as a way to explore how the Gaia theater cycle connects to other cycles. The four other cycles are: Gaia thinking, explorative, creative and Gaia truth-telling.

A Gaian LO is a new beginning for LO.

Tonya and Anete are new players at sc’MOI, but this theme emerges at the tail end of sc’MOI so they are best to explicate it. This chapter describes the theoretical contributions of quantum storytelling theory (QST) and practice. Building on the application of complexity theory in the hard sciences as well as social contexts and theory on multimodal constituency, this chapter considers the areas of overlap and difference between quantum storytelling and its theoretical fellows, with special attention given to sociomateriality, storytelling, feminism, fractal, and complexity theory.

I write about an entrepreneurial teaching experiment that created tolerance for critical thinking. I find that the entrepreneurial storytelling method of teaching made more money for the clients of a small business consulting class. The entrepreneurial-storytelling method leads students into a three-step conversation. During each step, they talk to each other in small groups, taking notes from each other. During the first step, the students talk about what they learned from the reading. During the second step, the students criticize the ideas that they read. During the final step, the students find a way to use what they learned despite their criticisms. During this time, the professor works between steps to help the groups talk to each other between steps. The professor also helps small groups while they are talking to each other. This makes it normal to disagree while learning, creates moments where students feel like they control what they know, and leads to tolerance for critical thinking. I discuss the implications this may have for group innovation and stoking social entrepreneurial intentions.

This paper aims to describe the critical literacies of high school students engaged in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project focused on a roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons, in a queer-led afterschool space. The paper illustrates how youth critique and resist unjust societal norms while simultaneously envisioning queer utopian futures. Using a queer theory framework, the authors consider how youth performed disidentifications and queer futurity.

This study is a discourse analysis of approximately 85 hours of audio collected over one year.

Youth engaged in deconstructive critique, disidentifications and queer futurity in powerful enactments of critical literacies that involved simultaneous resistance, subversion, imagination and hope as youth envisioned queer utopian world-building through their fantasy storytelling. Youth acknowledged the injustice of the present while radically envisioning a utopian future.

This study offers an empirical grounding for critical literacies centered in queer theory and explores how youth engage with critical literacies in collaboratively co-authored texts. The authors argue that queering critical literacies potentially moves beyond deconstructive critique while simultaneously opening spaces for resistance, imagination and utopian world-making through linguistic and narrative-based tools.

The paper seeks to illustrate the impact, a narrative based approach to learning in practice could have in relation to management education, where reflexive critiques may provide a platform for integrating more closely the appreciation/analysis of the nature of management development with the experiences of practice.

Collaborative ethnography seeks to connect the self with others and the social with context; it is a method which embraces the opportunity to understand/appreciate lived experience in moments of learning.

The use of storytelling as a method to aid reflexive dialogue forces the student to move away from their pre-existing assumptions and practices and provide them with the power and conviction to seek out and recognise new meaning and differing alternatives of practice. The implication of this position in terms of an educational agenda involves challenging the “self-conceptions” of what it means to be a “practitioner” (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992; Martin, 1992; Zubizarreta, 2004).

The authors argue that focus must be placed on methods through which learning resides in action. Recognising action in learning allows for the development of management education which re-directs thinking and conceptualising towards understanding the social tensions, complex relations and connections in the co-construction of knowing.

The article has sought to exemplify how storytelling can contribute to professional and personal development in new and more enriched ways. This reflexive-style paper presented a perspective from which the writers' values and beliefs are informed, as opposed to making a claim for authenticity and authority in regards to the subject area.

The paper highlights the need to explore imaginative modes of management education practices (Hjorth et al., 2018). Teaching students to simply tell stories is not the goal; rather, it is about sensitising students to the aesthetics of organising and the potential of approaching learning from sensuous and experimental perspectives.

This chapter proposes a material-performative storytelling approach to authentic leadership based on Hannah Arendt's notion of action as storytelling and Butler's rework of Arendt's notion as an embodied and material performance. The author argues that stories are expressions of authenticity to the extent that they disclose who people are and create what Arendt called a ‘space of appearance’. He conjectures that authenticity is enacted when people have the ability and commitment to create stories and inscribe themselves in history. Jørgensen concludes that authenticity implies new leadership practices enacted in the spaces between institutions and organisations to deal with societal challenges and suggests that innovative new models are necessary to address these challenges.

This research aims to explore how textual literacy and computational literacy can support each other and combine to create literacies with new critical possibilities. It describes the development of a Web application for interactive storytelling and analyzes how its use in a high-school classroom supported new rhetorical techniques and critical analysis of gender and race.

Three iterations of design-based research were used to develop a Web application for interactive storytelling, which combines writing with programming. A two-week study in a high-school sociology class was conducted to analyze how the Web application's textual and computational affordances support rhetorical strategies, which in turn support identity authorship and critical possibilities.

The results include a Web application for interactive storytelling and an analytical framework for analyzing how affordances of digital media can support literacy practices with unique critical possibilities. The final study showed how interactive stories can function as critical discourse models, simulations of social realities which support analysis of phenomena such as social positioning and the use of power.

Previous work has insufficiently spanned the fields of learning sciences and literacies, respectively emphasizing the mechanisms and the content of literacy practices. In focusing a design-based approach on critical awareness of identity, power and privilege, this research develops tools and theory for supporting critical computational literacies. This research envisions a literacy-based approach to K-12 computer science which could contribute to liberatory education.