Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 10:45, 2 November 2012

Antenarrative is the process by which retrospective narrative is linked to Living Story. While aspects this process has been studied by other disciplines under other names for centuries, the term "Antenarrative",coined by David Boje in 2001, has four primary uses. The first two uses of antenarrative are as the before(ante)-narrative, existing as story is turned to narrative, and a bet (ante) narrative, placed in hopes that something will become a retrospective narrative. As Karl Weick has said:

To talk about antenarrative as a bet is also to invoke an important structure in sense- making; namely, the presumption of logic (Meyer, 1956). ‘Without faith in the purpose- fulness of, and rationality of art, listeners would abandon their attempts to understand, to reconcile deviants to what has gone before or to look for their raison d’être in what is still to come’ (1956: 75). Antenarratives set up a similar dynamic. The transition from story to narrative is fostered by the belief that the fragments will have made sense although at the moment that is little more than a promise. Sensemaking, storytelling, and organizing become linked, in a Treasury inquiry or a recounting of one’s life story, when actors say to themselves and others, I will have moved on with these unplotted fragments because they promise to amount to something eventually. .

The other two uses are spiral and rhizome antenarratives. Other scholars that have utilized antenarrative include Barge 2004; Collins & Rainwater, 2005; Durant, Gardner & Taylor, 2006; Vickers, 2005; Yolles, 2007; Grow 2009.

Pre/Bet Antenarratives

Research in the top journal, Org. Sci., has recently found a number of nationally oriented antenarratives that are utilized in cross boarder mergers and acquisitions.

Spiral

Of the spiral antenarrative, David Boje says:

The spiral-antenarrative causality is not linear, not cyclic, and conforms to dialectic of deviation-amplification with deviation-counteraction, in what Bakhtin (1981) calls heteroglossia forces of language and discourse, of which this antenarrative is very much a participant. This is a connection between more immediate-emergence-sensemaking and a prospective-sensemaking that anticipated a possible future by enacting particular sorts of actions of caring and in-Being involved, for a while, iteratively. Giles Deleuze (1994: 21) says, “Spirals whose principle is a variable curve and the trajectory of which has dissymmetrical aspects as though it had a right and a left.”

Rhizomeatic assemblage

Of the Rhizomeatic assemblage antenarrative, Boje says:

Assemblage antenarrative is also called a rhizome. The linear has become non-linear with a variable sequence, an assemblage Deleuze & Guattari (1987) call a rhizome. The assemblage antenarrative has some linear, but these become nonlinear, and it is this that is most important to study. I, for example, am a blacksmith artist. And my linear antenarrative has become an assemblage antenarrative. My blacksmith iron-leaves, and railroad spikes I make into knives, and 1075 steel I forge into Kung Fu swords and the little wire heart of compassionate-caring swords constitute an emerging assemblage rhizome-antenarrative, an eventual product line for my blacksmith art small business. A rhizome in plant life is those tubers and the runners above ground (like strawberry patches) or the roots growing new ones (as in potato patches). In storytelling standpoint method, an assemblage (rhizome) has visible runners and invisible roots that connect agents (usually people, but also animals, and the fire of the forge) with actants (usually material things, such as the iron, the carbon, the subatomic stuff). Agents and actants, people and things, are networked together by their runners and rooting connectivity. The term ‘rhizome’ is used by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to define social and material assemblages. Bruno Latour (1999, 2005) calls assemblage of actors and ‘actants’ by the name of ‘actornetwork-theory’ (ACT).

See also

• Storytelling
• Narrative Therapy
• Augmented Cognition or Intelligence Amplification
• Organizational Storytelling
• David Boje
• Narrative
• Story

References

1. Boje, D. M. (2001). Narrative methods for organizational & communication research. Sage Publications Limited.
2. Weick, K. E. (2012). Organized sensemaking: A commentary on processes of interpretive work. Human Relations, 65(1), 141-153.
3. Barge, J.K. (2004) Antenarrative and managerial practice. Communication Studies 55(1): 106-27.
4. Collins, D. & Rainwater, K. (2005). Managing change at Sears: a sideways look at a tale of corporate transformation. Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 18, No. 1: 16-30.
5. Durant, R.; Gardner, K.; & Taylor, K. (2006). Indexical antenarratives as invitational rhetoric. Tamara Journal of Critical Organization Inquiry, Vol. 5 (3/4): 17-182.
6. Vickers, M. H. (2005). Illness, work and organization: Postmodern perspectives, antenarratives and chaos narratives for the reinstatement of voice. Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science, 3(2), pp. 1-15.
7. Yolles, M. (2007). The dynamics of narrative and antenarrative and their relation to story. Journal of Organizational Change Management. Vol. 20, No. 1: 74 – 94
8. and Grow, J.M. (2009), The gender of branding: Antenarrative resistance in early Nike women’s advertising. Women’s Studies in Communication, 31/3, 310-343.
9. Vaara, E., & Tienari, J. (2011). On the narrative construction of multinational corporations: An antenarrative analysis of legitimation and resistance in a cross-border merger. Organization Science, 22(2), 370-390.
10. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/655/anteriority_and_antenarrative_spiral.html
11. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/448/The%20Quantum%20Physics%20of%20Storytelling%20in%20book%20format%20Jan%202011%20Boje.pdf

This article has not been added to any content categories. Please help out by adding categories to it so that it can be listed with similar articles. (November 2012)

• Uncategorized from November 2012