This is a chapter on 4th wave grounded theory from my new book for the seminar. I am hoping you all can use it in your CABRINI assignment -- David

Organizational Research Methods:Storytelling In Action

David M. Boje

March 30, 2017; Revised July 24, 2017Book is due March 2018 to Routledge Publishers

Chapter 1 – 4th Wave Grounded TheoryThere is no ‘ground’ and no ‘theory’ in Grounded Theory (GT)! Most every

dissertation or qualitative study I review claims to do GT, but does not notice that

GT has changed radically over the years. Now I ask, what GT wave are you doing?

Each of the first three GT waves has it’s own epistemic fallacy.

First wave GT (1967-1993) commits induction fallacy by doing qualitative method to generate theory propositions out of practice that go untested and ignore historical context (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). It fails Karl Popper's critique of inductive logic for failing to do falsification or verification of inductive propositions. Glaser and Strauss (1967: pp. 2-3) say “the discovery of theory from data systematically obtained from social research” is an idea they picked up from Merton, for whom the meaning of ground is non-theoretical social practice, out of which theory can be generated.

Second wave GT (1994-2009) adds deductive fallacy of logical positivism reductionism. It applies existing theory frameworks, and then uses positivistic coding to fit in interview and observation content into abstract schemata. Strauss and Corbin (1994: 21) gave GT a hermeneutic facelift Theory and practice are said to build in a reciprocal relationship with one another. This ‘reciprocal theory/practice’ approach was short lived.

Third wave GT (2010-2017) tries to rescue 1st and 2nd waves (still unfurling) with ‘social constructivism’ epistemology. Mills et al. (2008:

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27-8) prefer a social constructivist turn in GT, and accuse Strauss and Corbin (1990, 1998) of never addressing which paradigm (i.e. positivism, interpretivism, hermeneutics, etc.) underpins their thought. Annells (1996) noticed early on how GT’s postmodern (social constructivist) turn had begun to break with symbolic interactionism and other sociological theories. 3rd wave GT keeps the positivistic coding dogma, which it continues to dualize from its subjective interpretivism, then fails to do falsification or verification.

These first GT waves are disembodied ‘ways of knowing’, not grounded in

‘Being-in-the-world’ spatially, temporally, and materially, the inseparability of

‘spacetimemattering’ in the field of Being. In the first three waves of GT,

organization research has sacrificed the body, the living story of embodied existence

in order to generate so-called ‘GT’ that is a positivistic ontology to objectify

inductive inquiry. The marriage of positivism to first three GT waves, results in a

dualism between (inter) subjectivity and objectivity.

I submit that GT is disembodied organization research, too quick to construct

inductive typologies into abstract category schemata, render storytelling inquiry too

desevered from embodiment. To construct theory using inductive method and

positivistic analytic coding procedures is the objectification of intersubjectivity. In

this book I propose a 4th wave GT, as an embodied ontology and a dialectic approach.

We want to make an ‘ontological turn’ to GT we are calling ‘Fourth wave.’ I am an

ontologist.

The main contribution of the book is a dialectics approach we are calling ‘Fourth Wave Grounded Theory.’

Fourth wave GT takes the turn to ‘ontology’, putting context on center stage, exploring embodiment and sociomateriality (Boje, Saylors, Svane, & Hillon, in review). We propose several ontological foundations to 4th wave. They share an intersubjectivity inquiry in which there is verification of propositions, and in some cases falsification. Gephart has many such breakthroughs, pointing out the political importance of friendships, for example by referring to one person as “closest friend…” and others as “not regarded by him as friends…” (1978: 561). He also presages the intersubjectivist paradigm that drives 4th wave GT by seeking to “minimize the possibly one-sided nature of descriptive accounts” (p. 562). The differences are in how to approach dialectics. Here again there are several contenders; (Follett, Heidegger, Žižek,

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Brier, and Bhaskar respectively have different revisions of Hegelian dialectics).

In sum, we find that much of existing research that claims to use GT is without

ontologic substantive ‘ground’ in its method, and thus lacks the substance needed to

develop formal ‘theory’.

‘Storytelling In Action’ is 4th wave ontological and dialectical inquiry, in,

around, and between organizations. It is ontological, the meaning of Being-in-the-

world, in context, in situation. It is dialectic between institutional narratives, a

person’s living story, and the body. It is dynamic because there is always more than

one story, always a counternarrative to every master or dominant narrative an

organization tries to hide behind. ‘Storytelling in Action’ has dynamical processes

that define and shape other organization processes. ‘Storytelling in Action’

interpenetrates across embodiment, sociomateriality, socioeconomics, to globality,

because of multifractality and storytelling dialectics, all the way to world making.

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Figure 3: Storytelling In Action

Grounded Theory and Action Research methods have ignored ‘Storytelling-Action’, including its processes, dialectics, multifractality.

‘Storytelling in Action’ is situated, Being-in-the-world. Storytelling-scale is

ways to move forward in relation to other scales. Another notion of storytelling-

scaling is called fractal that is always in relation to a moving multifractal (scales

within scales of self-sameness and differentiation). Here is my Storytelling-scale-in-

Action Manifesto:

1. There is no ‘ground’ and no ‘theory’ in Grounded Theory because (multi) fractal-scale is the ground of storytelling, and is being ignored.

Each year hundreds of dissertations are written claiming to do Grounded Theory (GT), Ethnographic interviewing, life story (or life history)

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interviewing, focus group interviewing, phenomenal interviewing, semi-structured interviewing, narrative interviewing, or some related interview practice that are actually just pretty terrible interviewing habits that do not live up to the claimed ‘ethical’ or ‘rigor’ ideals of their apologists. GT was created as a practical method to build substantive theory from the ‘interpretative’ analysis of qualitative made into ‘data’. GT has had three waves, all turned toward logical positivism. In its first wave Inductive Positivism (1965 – 1989), GT is indicative of inductive-storytelling-pragmatism, and not intended to be theory. Rather GT is a means of constructing theory out of data using careful coding logical positivistic analyst procedures. Second wave Reciprocal Theory/Practice (1990-2009) turns more positivistic, casting about the published theory for concept themes and codes to use on collected storytelling. Third wave Social Constructivism (2010-now), GT turns toward social constructivism, yet is still mired in positivism, a line-by-line open coding of subjects’ storytelling, without any kind of critical context analysis, such as the classic sort of social construction (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) which was decidedly dialectical and sociological. In this book, I join my colleagues (Saylors, Svane, & Cai-Hillon, in review) in proposing a Fourth wave GT, one we call ontological storytelling. There are many ontologies. Here I mean the sociomateriality, and embodied storytelling, which is dialectical and dialogical (Boje, 2008, 2014).

2. There is no Action and no Theory in Action Research, not anymore, because storytelling-scale-in-‘Action’ is being ignored.

I believe the early days of Action Research (AR), rooted in Paulo Freire is still somewhat to be found ‘participative AR’ had both action and theory. However, do a critical read of the AR handbooks and journals, and you will be hard pressed to find either action, theory, and for that matter, systematic research. It is a shallow approach, overrun these days by social constructivism, the sensemaking by analyst’s of other people’s storytelling, often collected in a static interviewing situation, with the organizational researcher, attempting to be non-existent. AR has married Appreciative Inquiry (AI), where one collects five positive stories to any worker’s negative story. It serves the authors of the master narratives of any complex organization, but leaves too many untold stories out of the inquiry. I cannot recommend it as an organization research method. Of course AR exists as a myriad of modes, and I prefer Freire, where the expert researchers, actually let the peasantariat and the farmworker, the factory wage slave all participate as more that in-place metering devices for analyst’s social constructions.

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3. Qualitative storytelling is losing ground to Quantitative narratology because qualitative storytelling is ignoring its advantage, its ways of assessing and enacting scalabilities.

It is a fact that organizational researchers are trained in more hours of statistics and (post) positivistic topic seminars than they are in qualitative inquiry. The result is the student is exposed to so few hours of qualitative storytelling we call interpretivism, that a shallow understanding of social constructivism, is all there is time for. In can tell you that in past 21 years, in our organizational Ph.D. program, the number of statistics required courses increased to five, and the number of quantitatively design and topic seminars to five, leaving me to teach two courses in qualitative arts. That is 10 to 2. Even while I teach qualitative storytelling, I find the students ensconced in statistics, such as structural equation modeling, advanced regression equations, multivariate analysis of variance, etc. are so stressed, so overtaken by quantitative logical positivist propaganda, they can barely focus on a counter-approach. They hear, again and again, “If you cannot measure it, it does not exist” and “You cannot publish qualitative work, best to learn your equation modeling, so you will get a ‘real’ job”. I usually start with Robert Gephart’s (1988) Ethnostatistics, since most of the students in the seminars I teach, have already opted out of any qualitative future in their career, and are signed to the quantification, positivistic, and deductive life. Most top-tier universities with organization research doctoral seminars have not one philosophy of science course, and not one qualitative research seminar. Is it any wonder most of the journal reviewers, have no clue what to do with Fourth wave ontological storytelling, except to put it in the reject pile.

4. There is Storytelling in Action that is more than Case Analysis because storytelling-is-scaling, in a scaling-context that is beyond the prison of case study.

The (post) positivist method folks reduce qualitative work to case analysis. There is some respect for doing comparative case analysis to build a justification to quantify all the derived themes, and do something rigorous, like structural equation modeling. Since we are told in method courses, you cannot generalize from a case, its better to skip case work, and just have 100 undergraduates pretend to be executives, as they fill out a survey, that can then be analyzed using structural equations. To me, that is a shallow use of quantitative storytelling, and a marginalization of some amazing interpretative storytelling work. If it’s not case method, then what is it? Think about physics, they don’t use surveys, and there is a good deal of qualitative inquiry, interpretations of what is happening, along with a good deal of math. No sane physicist would say, ‘we need to conduct a survey, and do a regression’. One way out of the case study dead end is ‘storytelling scalability.’ Storytelling has scale: size, extent, landscape, encompassment,

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interconnectedness, entwinement, and other scalar relationships. Storytelling, be it master narrative, living story, or antenarrative --- has scaling relations among events, persons, actions, and institutions.

5. Storytelling lives in the scaling-action, not in the mindless surveys, nor in the semi-structured interviews that are blind to scalability.

Storytelling in action means the storytelling has its own generativity, its own aliveness, in the sociomaterial and socioeconomic, and sociopolitical practices of an organization. Storytelling is definable as ‘scale-using processes that are ideological and situated in space, in time, and in materiality (or mattering).’ All storytelling processes are ideological and situated in scaling. Scaling-action speaks louder than words. Too much storytelling work is about words, not enough about embodied action storytelling-scalability. I think Argyris tried to differentiate an Action Science from an Action Research. You have heard of the difference between ‘espoused theory’ and ‘theory in use.’ The ‘in use’ is the storytelling-scaling in action. An espoused master narrative, may try to pass for a-perspectival, a one-scale told that fits all situations, and is universal. To get at storytelling-scaling-action, means observation, participant observation is even better, and being able to interpret the action landscape to contextualize scaling indexicality and scaling experiencing, and the recurring fractality, and unique storytelling scaling-actions.

6. There is always a Counternarrative to every Master Narrative at some multifractal context.

There is a need to bring together storytelling in action with ideology. There are storytelling scales within scales, fractals within multifractals. A master narrative constructs a scaling model of real-time interaction, contextualizes experiences, places actors and listeners in a narrow or wide scale of experience. Master narratives (mainly top down scales) are rampant in organizations, but so are the counternarratives (often seeking to become bottom-up or inside-out counter-master narratives). Hegemony is about ideology, and there are counter-hegemonic ideologies that engage and enact scaling. Master-narratives and -counternarratives place experience in scaling contexts, in socially, and oftentimes economically positioned situatedness. Master narratives have their own gaze, portending to be the gaze form nowhere, or the gaze from some scaling perspectivity, which is of course, an ‘authoring ideology’, and an ‘authorizing ideology’ that claims to posit its point of view in scaling inclusiveness and exclusiveness. That raises a question, is there a difference between master narratives scaling (& counternarratives) and the scaling of hegemonic and counterhegemonic ideologies? Are master narratives hegemonic in scaling? Yes, but not always.

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There are some differences, and differences do matter in inter-scaling between ideologies and narratives.

7. The Untold Stories exist beyond the hegemonic and counterhegemonic master narratives and counternarratives in scalabilities of Tamara-land.

Untold stories have yet to be told, sometimes are not allowed to be told, or too dangerous for the teller to be told. (Izak, Hitchin, & Anderson, 2015; Hichin, 2015; Izak & Hitchin, 2014). Linda Hitchin (2015) addends to untold story in research methods and organization storytelling practice. Untold stories are “boundless magnitude and scale” in organization relations. She draws on David Boje’s (1995, 2011, 2012) work in Tamara-land storytelling organization theory, antenarrative theory, and quantum storytelling theory. In Tamara-land theory, each new teller edits the original performed story others are telling by inserting their own scale-making, scale-trope, scale-metaphor, scale-characterization, and/or scale-emplotment. This indifference to the in situ story-scale performance, privileges a quieten a passive non-telling of untold stories because institutional storytelling often pretends to be a-perspectival (without scale, or a one scale fits all). Tamara-land theory situates story-scaling work enactment in the political, by embedding buildings, rooms, and landscape of the spatial and temporal shifting material (mattering) contexts of organizations. In organizations, bigger than the one room schoolhouse, participants in ongoing storytelling are not all in the same room, at once. Rather people in organizations, as in a Tamara play, are not one audience, in one room, witnessing story performances, in one scale. In the real ‘spacetimemattering’ of organizations, some people are in particular room, while others are in their own rooms, or in corridors, parking places, etc. distributed spatially and temporally in multifractal (multi-embedded scales that interact). People in Tamara-land, must decide which room or hallway to be in, whom to follow, to trace the shifting meaning of stories told in one room and another room, and that means they are scale-tracers, scale sensemakers, multifractal enactors. You cannot as an individual be in all the storytelling rooms, or all scales, at once. Some storytelling-scale choice is involved.

Storytelling in Action is the dynamic interplay between antenarratives,

narratives and counternarratives, and webs of living story enacted in, around, and

between organizations. Storytelling is a three-fold, or triadic phenomena with three

domains. The first domain of storytelling is Narrative, the second is living story

webs, and the third is the antenarrative processes allowing living stories to be

reduced into narratives and living stories to persist beyond narrative reduction.

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Figure 4: Triadic Storytelling in Three Aspects (original drawing by D. M. Boje, used by permission for this book)

Let’s start with the main culprit: Shallow Interviewing Schemes The

classical semi-structured interviewing pedagogy of organization studies, in the

main, has yet to understand the change in interviewing methods, that the

Hawthorne Studies initiated when in July of 1929, after 1600 interviews, they halted

the project. The Hawthorne Studies interviewers changed their interviewing

method from semi-structured and structured interviews they called the ‘direct

approach to questioning’ to the ‘indirect approach’ in which people told their

accounts and stories, without interruption, without trying to herd the interviewee

back so some a priori topics and sub-topics (p. 203). It is this ‘direct approach’ that

might unlock the vista of multifractal storytelling-scaling. In the indirect approach

to interviewing, participants were invited to talk spontaneously on topics that

interested them, rather than be limited to a pre-determined list of structured

questions, or semi-structured topics.

By October 1929, a second change in interviewing was initiated. Instead of

taking notes on the positive or negative statements made regarding the a priori

topics of supervision, working conditions, and company (and their sub-themes), the

interviewer made verbatim notes on all topics that the participant brought up, using

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what we now call, ‘’non-specific questioning’ technique (see work by Henri Savall in

the Socioeconomic interviewing chapter summarized below).

What was different about the answerable interviewing approaches in this

book? Many begin with indirect, or ‘non-specific questioning’ approaches in order to

put the interviewee in a conversation with the interviewer, rather than asking a list

fo structured or semi-structured interview questions, which is the common

[interrogation] interviewing practice, for studying organizations.

In this book, the role of the interviewer is reimagined, from interrogator to

answerability in a dialogical and a dialectical process involving storytelling-scaling.

The interrogator in semi-structured interviewing is actually forcing a topic-by-topic

structured interviewing into an agenda that is not suited for organization studies of

multifractality. In dialogical and in dialectical interviewing, there is co-inquiry, a

non-specific questioning about scaling that is at the same time non-directive.

The Hawthorne Studies were pioneering in making the first wave of ‘non-

directive’ (indirect questioning) changes in interviewing practices, but

unfortunately those practices have not survived as interviewing pedagogy in leading

interview training books for organization studies doctoral students and

organization faculty.

The result of this oversight is the old pre-1929 forms of directive

[interrogative] interviewing practices are now the habit and status quo for doing

qualitative methods in studying complex organizations, even when researchers

make claims to Grounded Theory, Life History, or Action Research assumptions.

The post-1929 approach inspired by changes in the Hawthorne Studies, is

nowadays sometimes called ‘interpretative’ or ‘phenomenal’ interviewing, other

times more therapeutic (psychoanalytic borrowings), but there is a definite lack of

available texts that teach the actual Hawthorne practices.

The problem this book addresses is there is no available comprehensive text

that teaches the indirect questioning method, nor additional interviewing methods,

my colleagues and I have been pioneering (see chapter list below). One either has to

turn to all but unreadable works of philosophy, or gain the knowledge by

apprenticing to a master interviewing. Trial-and-error learning of non-specific

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questioning (or indirect approach) is not going to work because the fundamental

practices are counter-intuitive. The new doctoral students, follows common sense,

and engages in interrogation interviewing.

What is non-specific questioning? The Hawthorne Studies research team

began to draw upon psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, as well as anthropology,

in order to come up with a new interviewing approach. The new interviewing rules

were summarized as follows (Roethlisberger, Dickson, & Wright: 1939: 272, 279-

285, note III & IV are italics in original):

I. “The interviewer should treat what is said in an interview as an item in a context.a.The interviewer should not pay exclusive attention to the manifest

content of the intercourse.b. The interviewer should not treat everything that is said as either

fact or error. c.The interviewer should not treat everything that is said as being at

the same psychological levelII. The interviewer should listen not only to what a person wants to say

but also for what he does not want to say or cannot say without help.III. The interviewer should treat the mental contexts described in the

preceding rule as indices and seek through them the personal reference that is being revealed.

IV. The interviewer should keep the personal reference in its social context. a.The interviewer should remember that the interview is itself a social

situation and that therefore the social relation existing between the interviewer and the interviewee is in part determining what is said.

i. The interviewer should see to it that the speaker’s sentiments do not act on his own.”

The results of the new interviewing ground rules and practices, was the

interviewer began to actively listen to the speaker in a friendly, yet intelligent and

critical manner, without giving advice, moralizing, or controlling the topic. Rather

the interviewer could help the participant to talk, take a more therapeutic role to

relieve fears and anxieties about their relation to the interviewer, to support

reporting accurate thoughts and feelings, and to discuss implicit assumptions being

made by the person. The Hawthorne Studies, after changing interviewing

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techniques to the indirect approach, were able to bring to light several economic

fallacies concerning ways the social group norms were acting to restrict individual

output.

What was going on at a deeper socioeconomic level was rooted more in the

social than in the economic domain. A number of fallacies were explored using the

new interviewing ground rules. There was an untested assumption that the worker

could effectively control the actions of management, but in reality works did not

have control over hours of work, piece rates, number of people employed, and so on.

Or, workers blamed supervisors, but they too had little control. From these new

interviewing methods it was concluded that the ideology expressed by workers was

“not based upon a logical appraisal of their situation and that they were not acting

strictly in accordance with their economic interests” (Roethlisberger, Dickson, &

Wright: 1939: 534).

Narrative interviewing is a complex conversation that carries many ethical

responsibilities. The ethics of interviewing, particularly narrative interviewing,

cannot be left to the Institutional Review Board of any university, and their panoptic

surveillance of human subject and interviewer relations. Rather, the ethics of

interviewing is the professional responsibility of the interviewer, and cannot be

delegated to any social body.

A story is not an ontological story, if its ripped out of context, branded and

reduced into a narrative, with all kinds of story content left on the editing floor, but

the story of how this happened can be very much a story, and that is why I study the

transformative movement and dialectical complicity of antenarrative.

I studied folklore, nothing much else to do when I worked at the Anderson

School at UCLA, than to hang out in the Folklore department, squeezed and hidden

behind the Management library. There I studied the migration of the story in

geogrpaphic space, and the many kinds of mythemes, so many you could type tale

into a thousand categories, and still have more to do. I read through a number of

genres so prolific them become discourses unto themselves.

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Each “story” (and each occurrence of the word “story,” (of itself), each story in the story) is part of the other, makes the other part (of itself), is at once larger and smaller than itself, includes itself without including (or comprehending) itself, identifies itself with itself even as it remains utterly different from its homonym. (Derrida, 1979: 99-100).

“… The question-of-narrative covers with a certain modesty a demand for narrative, a violent putting-to-the-question an instrument of torture working to wring the narrative out of one as if it were a terrible secret in ways that can go from the most archaic police methods to refinements for making (and even letting) one talk that are unsurpassed in neutrality and politeness, that are most respectfully medical, psychiatric, and even psychoanalytic” (Derrida, 1979: 94).

However, this is just one of many philosophical pragmatic roots of story (and

narrative) Antenarrative was initially defined as a double meaning: ante as before

narrative coheres into a plot with beginning, middle, and end; and ante as various

bets on the future Boje, 2001). Since then antenarrative has taken on additional

meanings. Antenarrative Theory (Boje, 2001, 2008, 2011, 2014) and work by

Marita Svane makes connections between Heidegger and antenarrative types.

Figure 5: Drawing of Antenarrative relations by Marita Svane (see Boje, Svane, Henderson & Streval, in press; Svane & Boje, 2014; Svane & Boje, 2015; Svane, Boje &

Gergerich (2015); Enang & Boje, 2017; Enang, Boje, Rosile & Sminia, 2017).

The opportunity here is to develop an antenarrative interviewing approach.

Antenarrative processes are ontological, and this approach will locate antenarrative

in Heideggerian ontology. Antenarrative is the before-narrative coheres, the 'bets'

being made on the arriving future, the beneath (fore-conception), the between

(fore-structure), and becoming of care (fore-care). 

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For example, a Swainson’s Hawk pair decided to make its reproductive

nesting site, the New Mexico State University campus. n the fore-having kind of

antenarrative the End is contingent and purposively related to an other. In this case

fore-having of NMSU grounds operations Human doing nest destruction action, has

its fore-having, as does the Hawk have its fore-having of nest site location, building

nest, hatching fledgling and training them to fly.

From first to last section Heidegger (1962) is countering Hegel’s approach. If

instinct of Reason (Hegel, 1807), the sensemaking/perception stays observing they

can explore what is hidden from what at first is observed, and only shows itself in

the End by the necessity in what takes place when the two fore-having

antenarratives are revealed to have been there from the very beginning, and the

action of Human nest-destruction worker destroying nest sites, and Hawk pair

building nest sites, has nothing else that issues froth from the action of other kinds

of antenarrative, such as fore-structuring (between) or fore-conception (beneath)

because only what fore-having is already there in its actions of its End for what is

first (before) is the outcome of the antenarrative action of fore-having that returns

to itself.

Both fore-having antenarratives immediately are, both are independent, and

both fore-havings are mutually indifferent to one and other. The essence of their

relation and the action of Human and Hawk respective meaning are different from

each other. Both these fore-havings are different from the casual observer engaged

in sense-making, either student walking to and from parking lot where nesting sites

are located, where nests are being constructed, where nests are being destroyed,

and so on. The sense-making-perception Hegel describes, at first finds the action of

the Humans de-nesting worker and the Hark action of nest builder, have something

hidden.

Not only is the End, the prius of fore-having antenarrative different, but the

antenarratives of fore-conception (Angry Bird signs at NMSU and naming the

Cornell Hawk pair Big Red and Ezra, Momma Red Tail and Poppa Red Tail, adds a

dimension of observer effect to the Science and university Systems. The fore-

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structuring (between) Hawk and Human of an actual Science Law of Ornithology is

quite different than the non-science practice of dismantling nests, bfore they are

active (defined as an egg or fledgling in the nest) at the NMSU main campus.

At Cornell University there is not only fore-having as the essence of "as it is in

itself" but the instinct of Reason, has fore-conception (beneath) and fore-structuring

(between) antenarrative actions that arise out of the role of observer, and observer

effects (as they are known in quantum storytelling).

A whole circle of contingent ethical answerabilities opens up in the actual

existence of the interviewer’s volition, will, and purpose enters the first moment of

sensemaking retrospection of participant’s experiences. There is a dialectical

opposition between retrospective sensemaking narrative interviewing and the

content of living stories and antenarratives that are unessential to narrative

constructions by the interviewer for his or her own purposes.

Retrospective narrative interviewing is dialectical to the other kinds of

interviewing that are more focused on living story spaces and times, and the

mattering of the harmony between Nature in all is complexity and the moral

consciousness (and ethics) of the interviewing situation as a whole.

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Figure 6: Dialectics of Narrative Interviewing (original drawing by D. M. Boje, used by permission for this book).

Narrative interviewing is most often done in a deductive manner by fitting

the participants’ text into one of several formal categories of emplotment: romantic

adventure, tragedy, comedy, or irony. Of course, the difficulty and the ethical

situation, is that the interviewer may be reducing living stories to a formal category

of plot type.

While Monsanto emplots their organization history as an adventure in

creating sustainable food options for a world population, out of control (will be 11

billion by 2100), there are counter narratives, that see the tragedy of Monsanto’s

long history of involvement of ways of killing people: DDT, then agent orange, then

bovine growth hormones, and terminator seeds, for which farmers pay a premium,

even if they blew into the famers fields from some other farm. This is an example of

narrative and counter-narrative. For every narrative it is possible to locate,

deductively or inductively a counter narrative.

It is possible to do inductive ‘narrative interviewing.’ In this case, the

participant is invited to tell many living stories, and to help the interviewer decide

which are emic (ground up) from the participant’s own view, one or another plot

time, or perhaps a mix of many kinds of plots, as turns of their life path. Again,

counter-narratives are possible, especially within organizations, where a leader, for

example, views themselves on a heroic adventure of expanding market share, but

internally, workers and managers point out the counter-experiences, the episodes of

comedic (emperor has no clothes) or tragic (the layoff from downsizing to finance

an acquisition), and so on.

The abductive interview situation, is more about the future arriving into the

present, and being noticed, all-of-a-sudden, and an educated guess is made about

emplotment. There is choice involved, since the person, may hasten a plot to form

that has not yet cohered (inductively or deductively), or just notice an advantage

coming on the horizon and plot accordingly. The abductive narrative emplotment

can be a particular turning point, a sudden revelation that something is almost

possible.

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The interviewing situation here and now projects into a future of the

participant and the ethical answerabilities of the interviewer to not reduce the

participant’s life stories into lifeless, dead narrative forms.

There is a conflict of wills of the interviewer who intentionally or not,

interrogates the life spacetime and mattering of the participant, and the

participant’s own situation in social, economic, political, and moral circumstances.

While interrogation ought not to interest us in interviewing methods, there is a

moral consciousness of the situation that has its own sanctity (Hegel, 1807: # 603).

As being-for-self is dialectic within itself, and with the opposition of being-

for-an-other, the purpose of the world becomes actual organic content does appear

in-itself and for-itself. This is regardless of the reduction of the spacetimemattering

situation by the narrative constructions and reconstrutions, edits and editing out of

content and implication by the interviewr, to achieve their own will and purpose.

Retrospective sensemaking narrative interviewing embeds the here-and-

now telling of the interview situation with the bringing out by questioning of the

complexity of the life space of the participant, which includes the complex ethics

associated with the interviewer’s interest and will to create narrative coherence, in

being-for-self of the interviewer’s own concerns. Or being-for-others, such as a

dissertation committee, answering the studies and projects of other interviewers

and writers about topics outside the scope of participants.

The Notion of doing retrospective narrative interviewing implies a complex

actuality of socioeconomic and material situation and the accompanying ethical

relations to that situation, as it unfolds, into many possible futures, that collapse into

being in the mediations between one consciousness and another.

The interviewer’s narrative interviewing, is an interrogation of an-other’s

experiences, done in a process of retrospective sensemaking. There are many untold

stories here. There are ecologies of untold stories (Izak, Hitchin, & Anderson, 2015;

Hichin, 2015; Izak & Hitchin, 2014). Linda Hitchin (2015) writes eloquently of

‘untold story’ in research methods and organization storytelling practice. Untold

stories are “boundless magnitude and scale” in organization relations.

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The untold stories in Middle World prompt my intention question today, that

I ask to Source. There is a tear in my eye, a tear for the ‘intermediate assistants’ who

are having their workload doubled for same pay, and for those who are leaving,

some retiring early, others just finding better employment. They have had very few

raises, and the university keeps trying to bust their union. For example, they hired a

union buster attorney at great expense to break the union in 2008, and about that

time HR reclassified all the administrative assistances, taking away their step pay

grades, and collapsing them. Now at the top is the Senior administrative assistant

(ones who work for Chancellor, Provost, VPs, or for Deans of Colleges0, the

Interpedeiate Administrative Assistant is nex, then the Associate Aministative

Assistant, and lowest on the totem pole is the General Administrative Assistant.

8. Antenarratives are fore-caring for scalabilities underlying what Narratives and Counternarratives, Living Stories, and Untold Stories are made of.

My colleagues and I, use the Notion of ‘fore-caring’ to get at several kinds of antenarrative that are definitely about scalabilities. Antenarrative gets at fractal recursivity, incorporating some fractal into multifractal recursivity, . Antenarrative is a way of bundling fractal qualities into multifractal sets that contextualize and position both storyteller and storytelling participants in levels of inclusiveness, and exclusivity, in self-similar, and differences of fractal differentiation. Fore-caring has four antenarrative-scaling dimensions: fore-having something that is not yet arrived (like caring for a baby not yet born by baby-proofing the house to set scale in motion); fore-structuring what is between this and that practice in action to relate one scale to another; fore-concepting some language to be able to talk about scale, what you are doing in advance in scaling of a future in scale-arrival; fore-sight (or fore-telling) some bet on the future (which means picking one bet on scale happening over other bets of scale less likely, and laying in a path of action to make one less likely scale become the manifest scale.

Storytelling-scale-in-Action is all about subscales and superscales, scales

within scale patterns, or what is known as multifractal processes. Storytelling-scale-

in-Action entwines scaling techniques of sensemaking that are both (1) retrospective

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sensemaking about what scales are unfolding from past to present, and (2)

prospective sensemaking about what scales are in arrival from the future into the

present. Storytelling-scale-in-Action is therefore a focus on scaling techniques of

sensemaking, the positioning of teller and characters, and events into some scaling

held as a-perspectival in hegemonic-master narratives or as multi-perspectival in

the encompassment of living stories and untold stories. In multi-perspectival

storytelling-scale-in-Action the living story and untold story are in dialectic relation

to institutional scaling (recursive fractal patterns within encompassment of

multifractal differentiation). This is why, limiting storytelling analysis to a case cuts

off the encompassing positioning of the storytelling in wider and deeper ideological

and spacetimemattering projects. One storytelling is juxtaposing claims and

indexicals to institutionalized master narratives, to untold stories, to socioeconomic

struggles of living stories still unfolding without beginning or ending.

Organizational research into Storytelling-scale-in-Action is in its early stages.

Organization storytelling-scalar practices, projects, and effects are researchable.

There is an institutionalization of storytelling-scalar practices, projects, and effects.

There is emergence of new storytelling-scaling-logics of fractal recursivity that

storytelling fieldwork, storytelling ethnography can investigate.

A Loan Shark Example

4th wave intersubjectivity

4th wave intersubjectivity maintains inquiry into oppression, including

historically subjugated ontological categories of Self and Other. This raises critical

questions about relationships and processes, including our answerability for others.

Setting up ontological hierarchies (male/female; master/slave; citizen/immigrant,

rich/poor, and so on). The problem for 4th wave inquiry is how ontological

assumptions about hierarchies’ function in sociomaterial features of Beings (e.g.

skin color, blackness, whiteness, blood quantum, and so on).

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For example while most relational process ontologies reject the essentialist

traits, or dualism of subject/object of Substantialist ontology, there are

contradictions actives in the construction of Being in organizations, and historical

context, such as the normative hierarchies in modern-day slavery, human

trafficking, wage theft, legalized loan sharks (e.g. in New Mexico PayDay loan and

title shops can charge whatever predatory interest the can get away with, which is

often 350%. This loan sharking includes non-bank money orders, non-bank check

cashing, non-bank remittances, payday loans, pawn shop loans, rent-to-own loans,

and refund anticipation loans.

“It’s Shark Week again and the loan sharks are circling. With a bully shark in the White House, all kinds of financial predators are heading inland to Washington, D.C. And a feeding frenzy might be just around the corner.

These inland sharks are far more dangerous that the sea-bound variety. Big bank sharks like Wells Fargo got caught opening fraudulent accounts without their customers’ knowledge. Payday sharks strip *billions* of dollars out of vulnerable families' pockets every year. And then there’s the gang of Wall Street sharks that want to go back to the bad old days of tricks and traps that could sink the entire economy and take our families down with it.

These sharks smell blood in the water. They want to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), our financial lifeguard. They’re lobbying hard to take the CFPB off the beach and put it out of commission through dangerous bills like the CHOICE Act.”1

Efforts to put a cap on the interest, to 175% (still outrageous) is rested, because the

loan industry hires 60 lawyer-lobbyists to defeat any positive legislation by

threatening every legislator supporting caps with defeat at the next election.

Thus a normative hierarchy of loan sharks preying upon the poor is

sustained in New Mexico. This is a dualism of meaning and being, poor/rich in the

logic of legalized predatory loan sharking. It i also an “ontological othering”

(Borgerson, 2001: 177) of the poor reinforced by lobbyist tactics. Twenty loan shark

store fronts operate in Las Cruces, New Mexico, embodingy a subjgation of the poor

carrying out exploitation using ontological hierarchies, and ethical dualism (middle

and upper class get bank and credit union loans with responsible interest caps, but

1 People’s Action email 2”54Pm 24 July 2017

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poor get no protection at all). Privileging rich over poor, sharks over the most

vulnerable, there is a lack of caring response by the legislature of New Mexico.

“New Mexico eliminated interest rate caps on small loans in the 1980s but amended the Small Loan Act in 2007 to add requirements for payday loans. However, many payday lenders switched their business model to providing small installment loans and currently operate without rate caps”2

The oppressed (in sexism, racism, classism, modern-day slavery) learn to

resist their oppressed status and work to increase agency (self-empowerment) in a

subjugated world where modern day slave is a construction banished from the

realm of Being to the realm of the untold story that remains outside the norms of

storytelling. There is an interdependence between the ontological realms of

storyable and unstoyable that sustains modern-day slavery dualism. The migrant

work becomes a not-Self, non-possibility (the opposite of infinite possiblity). CIW

creates situaitons in the present (worker educaiton, boycotss of brands, etc.) that

create potential liberation situations in the future. Meanwhile most of the

agriculture industry continues to forget the history of slavery to sustain economic

superiority, operating in ‘bad faith.’

4th wave ethical ontology of ‘storytelling in action’ maintains a concern for

“historically subjugated ontological categories” (Borgerson, 2001: 184).

In sum, Organizational Storytelling Scaling Manifesto includes eight aspects

of doing organization research to get at scaling and rescaling:

1. There is no ‘ground’ and no ‘theory’ in Grounded Theory because scale is the ground of storytelling, and is being ignored

2 CONSUMER LENDING PRACTICES IN NEW MEXICO Report of Findings and Recommendations Pursuant to House Memorial 131 from the 2015 Regular Session of the New Mexico Legislature Sponsored by New Mexico Representative Patricia A. Lundstrom (District 9) Submitted by Legislative Finance Committee September 2015 https://www.nmlegis.gov/Entity/LFC/Documents/General_Government/Consumer%20Lending%20Practices%20in%20New%20Mexico.pdf

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2. There is no Action and no Theory in Action Research, not anymore, because storytelling-scale-in-‘Action’ is being ignored 3. Qualitative storytelling is losing ground to Quantitative narratology because qualitative storytelling is ignoring its advantage, its ways of assessing and enacting scalabilities 4. There is Storytelling in Action that is more than Case Analysis because storytelling-is-scaling, in a scaling-context that is beyond the prison of case study 5. Storytelling lives in the scaling-action, not in the mindless surveys, nor in the semi-structured interviews that are blind to scalability 7. The Untold Stories exist beyond the hegemonic and counterhegemonic master narratives and counternarratives in scalabilities of Tamara-land 8. Antenarratives are fore-caring for scalabilities underlying what Narratives and Counternarratives, Living Stories, and Untold Stories are made of. Table 1: Students and Faculty Trends at New Mexico State University

We as researchers are ethically answerable not just to Institutional Review

Boards (IRBs), but more importantly to what Mikhail Bakhtin (1993) calls

answerability, being that one person communicating with another person, in the

situation event of once-occurrent Being, our interviewing. We are answerable for

the storytelling-scaling, the non-, -mono, and multi-fractality we interpret and

instigate. For example, if we ignore a racist or sexist master narrative, and ignore its

mono-fractal, or even its multifractal dimensions, how racism and sexism are

insinuated, embedded, intertwined in multifractal systems, and simple smooth out

the write-up, this lacks ethical answerability for our research. By rejecting the

scaling of sexism, racism, and other dominations of power we truncate the

multifractal spectrum of organization storytelling in action.

To accomplish this level of advanced storytelling organization research that

is centered on ethics of multifractal-answerability requires a more sophisticated

storytelling inquiry than is currently available in the research methods marketplace.

The niche for this book is teaching doctoral students and research faculty how to

conduct answerable ethics storytelling organization multifractal system inquiry.

Rationale: I believe that new and rediscovered ’Answerable Organizational

Research’ methods must be developed that get at the ‘taken-for-granted’ organizing

activities of everyday life in organizations, and at the ethical answerability for the

interviewing processes within research and within organizations that distort or just

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ignore storytelling-scaling and rescaling processes that are in situ, Being-in-the-

world of organizations, in its spacetimemattering.

Over the past ten years a group of increasing size has been developing new

‘answerable’ ethical approaches to storytelling-scalability study of organizations

and their ethical processes of racist, sexist, bullying mono-fractality. I supervised or

was member of their dissertation committee, helped mentor their organization

storytelling methods. Our work together has generated articles with other faculty

members that have initiated new storytelling organization methods for studying

and exploring complex organizations (in publications such as Human Relations,

Organization Research Methods, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of

Organizational Change Management, Organization Studies, Academy of Management

Annals, to name a few). But, the multifractal systems work is mainly in books, and, as

yet not in the mainstream journals.

Storytelling-scale-in-Action is not ephemeral, nor epistemic, rather it is quite

positional embedded in the organization ontology, Being-in-the-world (Heidegger,

1962), in “spacetimemattering” as Barad (2007) terms it. Scale is ontological, and is

a scale phenomena, embedded in organizing systems, institutionalized in

organizational norms and actions, in powerful bureaucracies, and in adaptive

‘ensemble’ assemblages, in a vast array of socioeconomic relationships. Here, I make

a distinction between geometric diagrams of fractal spaces, and the

spacetimemattering of Storytelling-Organizational-scale-in-Action practices. There

can be fractal or multifractal models analyst use and there are abductive practices of

Storytelling-scale-in-Action, commonsense, taken-for-granted organizational-fractal

logic-in-use. This is not just storytelling in talk. Rather, my concern is storytelling-in-

action, in situ, scaling and rescaling, spatializing-temporalizing-mattering

inseparability of spacetimemattering scaling. Storytelling is therefore a scaling and a

rescaling process inextricably complicit with multifractal recursivity.

What is multifractal system? A multifractal system occurs when a single

fractal dimension is not enough to describe organizational system dynamics (Hart,

2001; Karperian, 2002). Multifractal system research attempts to detect scaling

using techniques such as bod counting grid, network topography, zooming-in or

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zooming-out to assess self-sameness patterns. Storytelling can exaggerate and

distort the underlying and embedded multifractal pattern. A multifractal scan of the

storytelling is a way to assess such distortion. Our write-ups can ben enlightening or

distorting.

The research question: Is the non-fractal, monofractal, and or multifractality

happening in the organization storytelling? When we write up or multifractal

storytelling results, there is interpreting by the author(s) of manuscripts, a way of

authoring fractal and multifractal dimensions.

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