Storytelling Organizational Practices ─ Managing in the Quantum Age

Once upon a time the practice of storytelling was about collecting interesting stories about the past, and converting them into soundbite pitches. Now it is more about foretelling the ways the future is approaching the present, prompting a re-storying of the past. Storytelling has progressed and is about a diversity of voices, not just one teller of one past; it is how a group or organization of people negotiates the telling of history and the telling of what future is arriving in the present.

With the changes in storytelling practices and theory there is a growing need to look at new and different methodologies. Within this exciting new book, David M. Boje develops new ways to ask questions in interviews and make observations of practice that are about storytelling the future. This, after all, is where management practice concentrates its storytelling, while much of the theory and method work is all about how the past might recur in the future.

Storytelling Organizational Practices takes the reader on a journey: from looking at narratives of past experience through looking at living stories of emergence in the present to looking at how the future is arriving in ways that prompts a re-storying of the past.

David M. Boje has a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University, Denmark. Dr Boje is past Division-chair of the Research Methods Division of the Academy of Management and incoming President of the Board of Governors of the Standing Conference for Management and Organization Inquiry. He is Founding Editor of the Tamara Journal of Critical Organization Studies and Associate Editor (2003--2009) and formerly Editor (1989--2003) of the Journal of Organizational Change Management.