Chapter 1 – What does John Dewey Contribute to 4th Wave Grounded Theory?

David M. Boje
November 23, 2017

Abstract There is no ‘ground’ and no ‘theory’ in Grounded Theory (GT)! Most every dissertation or qualitative study article 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? GT has come under widespread criticism in every top-tier journal of management and organization research.  Each of the first three GT waves have an epistemic fallacy. Here, I would like to show how John Dewey’s pragmatism philosophy offers a way forward to GT.  I will briefly review how GT has developed in three waves (or paradigm shifts) and propose a 4th wave that is ontological, rather than merely epistemological as is 1st wave GT, or positivistic coding as is 2nd wave GT, or merely social constructivist as is 3rd wave GT. In 4th wave GT, Dewey is among several scholars who bring an ontological grounding and a theory combined with praxis (Heidegger, Bhaskar, Deleuze, Žižek, Barad, to name a few).

What would John Dewey say about Grounded Theory? 

In this book (due March 2018) I propose a 4th wave GT, as an embodied ontology and a dialectic approach. We want to make an relational process ‘ontological turn’ to GT. I am an ontologist focused on the Fourth Whorl.

I believe he would say that it is not grounded in Nature or in the paradigm shift from Cartesian duality and Newtonian mechanistic physics, and that its manner of reflexivity separates theory from praxis. Dewey (1925, Experience & Nature) grounds pragmatism in material nature. Dewey (1929, Quest for Certainty) grounds pragmatism in what he calls a new Copernican Revolution that Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy brings to Cartesian dualism and to Newtonian mechanistic physics. Rorty (2010: 152) says, "Philosophers working after 'the linguistic turn' (no matter how it is defined) still have great deal to learn about experience and language from Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead.”  “Dewey was constantly criticized, from the Platonist right, for being reductionistic and scientistic, inattentive to our needs for ‘objective values’ (Rorty, 2010: 166, The Rorty Reader).  Rorty points out that Dewey (1925 Experience and Nature) was critical of Plato being “a spectator of all times and eternity” (Rorty, 2010: 73). Rather, Dewey used pragmatist philosophy as an instrument for social change by focusing on what is observation in his naturalism.

Let me put our 4th wave challenge to GT in a wider context. I am writing a new book on Ontological Research Methods that I believe go beyond the first three waves of GT. I will introduce 10 exemplars of these 4th wave approaches to GT, then return to what would Dewey say about GT.

Table 1: WHAT ARE 10 'ONTOLOGICAL-ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH METHODS' O-ORM) CHALLENGES TO GROUNDED THEORY (GT)?
	10 EXEMPLARS of STREAMS	ONTOLOGIC METHOD	Their Major Challenge to Grounded Theory (GT)
1	DEWEY (American Pragmatism)	+ MULTIPLICITY	Dewey pragmatism would challenge all 3 GT waves are 'quest for certainty' that is locked in the 'sensorium' and is lacking double move of induction with deduction to be reflective method suited to quantum mechanics
2	SØREN BRIER (<-Peirce + Luhmann)	+ MULTIPLICITY	Peirce's pragmatism would challenge ways 3rd wave GT purports to use abductive logic
3	GILLES DELEUZE (<-Nietzsche & Freud)	+/- MULTIPLICITY	Deleuze would challenge lack of depth in 1st & 2nd wave GT, not going below surface denotation & signification effects, and 3rd wave's lack of rhizomotic multiplicity 'manifestation' exploration
4	MARTIN HEIDEGGER (<-Hegel & Nietzsche)	+ DIALECTIC	Heidegger would challenge the positifivistic (ontic) confinement of 2nd & 3rd wave GT, how they miss ontologic Being-in-the-world disclosability
5	KAREN BARAD (<-Bruno Latour & Neils Bohr)	+ MULTIPLCITY	Barad would challenge all 3 GT waves for not being posthumanist, not addressing intra-activity of materiality with discourse, and particularly 3rd wave GT for being stuck in linguistic turn of social constructivism
6	SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK (<-Hegel & Lacan)	- DIALECTIC	Žižek would challenge all 3 waves of GT, and invoke Hegel and Lacan, pointing out how GT is stuck in sensory constructivism and denying the virtual reality of late capitalism
7	HENRI SAVALL (<-Hegel & Plato)	+ TRILECTIC	Savall would challenge all 3 waves with trilectic approach to socially responsible capitalism in a scientific method, and demand GT do experimentation, specify hypotheses, and include not just qualitative, but quantiative & financial data to verify its theory
8	MARY PARKER FOLLETT (<-Hegel & Whitehead)	+ DIALECTIC	Follett would challenge 1st & 2nd wave GT by taking an open system approach and use Hegelian dialectic to and address conflicts of management & labor, and unify differences in a democratic organization of teams
9	ROY BHASKAR (<-Hegel & Heidegger)	+ DIALECTIC	Bhaskar would challenge all 3 GT waves by pointing out the inductive fallacy in 1st wave, the ontic fallacy in 2nd & 3rd waves, and move GT into a scalar & stratified open system dialectical ontology
10	DAVID BOJE, JENS LARSEN, LENA BRUUN (<-Plato, Ole Kirkeby, & Walter Benjamin)	+ DIALECTIC/ + MULTIPLICITY	Boje, Larsen, & Bruun would challenge all 3 GT waves with a Benjamin (storytelling) and Kirkeby (protreptic) approach in dialectic challenge to 1st wave, and multiplicities challenge to 2nd and 3rd wave GT

I want to turn now to what are the key problems with Grounded Theory (GT) and how Dewey would likely address them.

What would Dewey say about GT?

Deweyan naturalism was shoved aside by the dogmatism of logical empiricism’s ‘quest for certainty’ as Dewey called it (which decades later, also infected 2nd and 3rd wave GT).

1st wave GT (1967-1993) commits 'inductive 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.  1st wave GT adopted inductive logic mixed with “Descartes’ spectatorial account of knowledge”, and introspective psychology, resulting in an epistemology of sensemaking (Rorty, 2010: 74). Dewey rejected the sensorium of perception (i.e. sensemaking perception) as the final inductive methodological step. (Dewey, 1929 Quest for Certainty), puts his objection to what we now call Weickian sensemaking this way:
“In traditional empiricism the test is found in sensory impressions.  For objective idealism, reflective inquiry is valid only as it reproduces the work previously effected by constitutive thought.  The goal of human thinking is approximation to the reality already instituted by absolute reason.”  

Dewey (1910: 86) defines “Scientific induction” as “all the processes by which the observing and amassing of data are regulated with a view to facilitating the formation of explanatory conceptions and theories.” Dewey (1910: 99) makes this challenge to induction that it needs to continue into deduction:

“The isolation of deduction is seen, at the other end, isolation of wherever there is failure to clinch and test the results of the general reasoning processes by application to concrete cases. The final point of the deductive devices lies in their use in assimilating and comprehending individual cases.”

Dewey (1910: 88-89) cautions that even in doing the inductive method of infeence, there needs to be continued collection of like cases.
“So prominent, indeed, is this aspect of inductive method that it is frequently treated as the whole of induction. It is supposed that all inductive inference is based upon collecting and comparing a number of like cases. But in fact such comparison and collection is a secondary development within the process of securing a correct conclusion in some single case.

The fallacy of induction, is the black swan, you can keep collecting cases, assuming a generalization is valid (all swans are white), and then someone in Australia finds the black swan.

2nd wave GT (1994-2004) adds logical positivism fallacy reductionism. It applies existing theory frameworks, and then uses positivistic coding to fit in interview and observation content into abstract schemata, claiming it accomplishes deduction to cure the inductive fallacy. 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. 2nd wave GT attempted to shore up Cartesian spectatorial sensemaking and over-reliance on induction without deduction, with demonstrations of logical positivist content coding of subject’s accounts in an empirical metaphysics that abandoned the situational context and meaning of experience in search of generalized universalization and appeals to published authorities.  Suddaby (2006) argues that since its inception in 1967 (Glaser & Strauss), GT has taken a turn toward positivism. Ironically, Strauss and Corbin (1990) claim GT is a kind of pragmatism, rooted variously in Dewey, Mead, and Peirce, a way to “construct” theory from stories told by participants (Age, 2011: 1601, but in a way of theorizing (Locke, 2001, Suddaby 2006 calls, post-positivism). Again, the problem that Dewey (1910: 94 How we Think) would likely point out is that 2nd wave GT is ignoring the role of deduction n the elaboration of meaning:

"The control of the origin and development of hypotheses by deduction does not cease, however, with locating the problem. Ideas as they first present themselves are inchoate and incomplete. Deduction is their elaboration into fullness and completeness of meaning”

3rd wave GT (2005-2017) tries to rescue 1st and 2nd whorls (still unfurling) with ‘social constructivism’ epistemology of perspectival relativism. Clark (2005), Charmaz (2008), and Mills et al. (2008: 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 social constructivism became combined with an appeal to grounding induction in quotes for authorities. Dewey (1910: 25, What is Thinking) cautioned against over reliance on authority in developing theory: “I shall take notice of, and which keeps in ignorance or error more people than all the others together, is the giving up our assent to the common received opinions, either of our friends or party, neighborhood or country."  3rd Wave GT grounded inductive observations in published work of authorities, rather than pursue falsification.

Dewey (1910: 98-99 How we Think) points out the error in starting with deduction grounded in authority citations.

“Beginning with definitions, rules, general principles, classifications, and the like, is a common form of the first error. … the mistake is, logically, due to the attempt to introduce deductive considerations without first making acquaintance with the particular facts that create a need for the generalizing rational devices.”

My colleagues Rohny Saylors, Yue Cai-Hillon, Marita Svane and I have a piece in review (cross your fingers). There are three classic whorls of Grounded Theory (GT). Our thesis is the first three spiraling-whorls of GT are without ground, and without theory. We point out examples of articles that use the term grounded theory, but instead simply use case examples, try to fit data to existing theory, or ignore historical context. In doing so, we find that much of existing research that claims to use GT is without theoretically substantive ‘ground’ and thus lacks the substance needed to develop formal ‘theory’. The first three spiral-whorls of GT happening in our field, and sometimes what people say they are doing is not what they are doing in theory, method, or practice.

• First Whorl of GT (1967-1993) commits 'inductive 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 Whorl of GT (1994-2004) adds logical positivism fallacy reductionism. It applies existing theory frameworks, and then uses positivistic coding to fit in interview and observation content into abstract schemata, caliming it accomplishes deduction to cure the inductive fallacy. 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 Whorl of GT (2005-2017) tries to rescue 1st and 2nd whorls (still unfurling) with ‘social constructivism’ epistemology of perspectival relativism. Clark (2005), Charmaz (2008), and Mills et al. (2008: 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 whorl GT keeps the positivistic coding dogma, which it continues to dualize from its subjective interpretivism, then fails to do falsification or verification.
• Fourth Whorl of GT takes the turn to relational process ‘ontology’, putting context on center stage, exploring embodiment and sociomateriality (Boje, Saylors, Svane, & Hillon, in review).  We propose several ontological foundations to 4th whorl. 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 whorl 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, Brier, and Bhaskar respectively have different revisions of Hegelian dialectics).

            The first GT whorls 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 whorls 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 whorls, 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, then added positivistic coding to the epistemic fallacy, and then added social constructivism fallacy, and these three whorls renderd storytelling inquiry too desevered from embodiment. To construct theory using inductive method and positivistic analytic coding procedures is the objectification of intersubjectivity. To enter social constructivism carries the linguistic turn of the spiral too far.

 

What is 4th wave Deweyan ontological method?
        

The reflexive praxis is the scientific reasoning of developing a working hypothesis to guide investigation, moving to “inductive discovery’ and testing conclusions by “deductive proof” (Dewey, 1910 How we Think: 81). It is what Dewey (1910: 79, How we Think) calls a “double movement” of induction and deduction:

"There is thus a double movement in all reflection: a movement from the given partial and confused data to a suggested comprehensive (or inclusive) entire situation; and back from this suggested whole—which as suggested is a meaning, an idea—to the particular facts, so as to connect these with one another and with additional facts to which the suggestion has directed attention. Roughly speaking, the first of these movements is inductive; the second deductive. A complete act of thought involves both—it involves, that is, a fruitful interaction of observed (or recollected) particular considerations and of inclusive and far-reaching (general) meanings” (Dewey, 1910: 79-80).

Deweyan 4th wave GT is ‘reflective thinking’ while continuing to do exploration and testing, “searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur” (Dewey, 1910: 13):

“Reflective thinking is always more or less troublesome because it involves overcoming the inertia that inclines one to accept suggestions at their face value; it involves willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and disturbance. Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; and suspense is likely to be somewhat painful” (Dewey, 1910: 13).

Dewey (1925 Experience and Nature) rejected Platonic and Hegelian dialectic historicism as well as turning away form the sensorium (sensemaking) approach to experience towards an ontological understanding of the human meaning of experience in nature, after the Copernican revolution in quantum physics. It’s all about the ontological meaning of Being. “Without meaning, things are nothing but blind stimuli or chance sources of pleasure and pain; and since meanings are not themselves tangible things, they must be anchored by attachment to some physical existence” (Dewey, 1910: 171 How we Think)

Dewey had renounced Platonic and Hegelian transcendental accounts of experience, as well as the sensorium of empiricist metaphysics. Rorty observes that Dewey (1929: 309, Quest for Certainty) parallels Heidegger’s (1962) criticism of metaphysics  (Rorty, 2010: 75 footnote #9).  Dewey’s (1925, Experience and Nature) own view of nature, was that psychology reduced the totality of experience to the sensorium (sensemaking). Dewey offers a bold positive program in rejecting dialectical method, to pursue the emergence of complex experience underrate in naturalistic ontology. “To say, as Dewey wants to, that to gain knowledge is to solve problems, one does not need to find ‘continuities’ between nervous systems and people, or between ‘experience’ and ‘nature’” (Rorty, 2010: 79).
Dewey wanted to be naturalistic and ontological, but not in the method dialectical materialism historicist. Dewey (1925: 258-259 Experience & Nature) sought to solve the mind-body problem “by avoiding both the crudity and paradox of materialism and the ‘unscientific’ theorizing offered by traditional dualisms” (Rorty, 2010: 80).

“Feelings make sense; as immediate meanings of events or objects, they are sensations, or more properly, sense. Without language, the qualities of organic action that are feelings are pains, pleasures, doors, noises, tones, only potentially and proleptically. With language, they are discriminated and identified. They re then ‘objectified’; that are immediate trait s of things. This ‘objectification’ is not a miraculous ejection from the organism or soul into external things, nor an illusory attribution of psychical entities to physical things. The qualities never were ‘in’ the organism; they always were qualities of interactions in which both extra-organic things and organisms partake” (Dewey 1925: 258-259 Experience & Nature).

Has Dewey solved the mind-body problem, “the relation between the empirical self and the material world” (Rorty, 2010: 80)? Dewey broke with Human empiricism, recognizing no experience is ever ‘raw’ ‘given in experience’ but was as Rorty (2010: 81) puts it, “sheer potentiality, ready to be transformed in a situation.” Rorty rejects this notion, in favor of the linguistic turn, to language providing concepts of Lockean sensulization in a spectator model of knowledge. But it is exactly the spectator model of knowledge that Dewey (1929 Quest for Certainty) rejects, along with the “ontology of the sensible manifold” (Rorty, 2010: 82). Rorty concludes, “Dewey’s mistake” was not being Hegelian (IBID.).

Does 4th wave GT have to be Hegelian dialectic or one of its subsequent variants (Follett, Žižek, Heidegger, Savall, or Bhaskar, see Boje, 2018, forthcoming, for now see https://davidboje.com/655)?  Could Dewey be developing a multiplicity theory of contingencies rooted in naturalism and quantum physics?
Dewey (1925: 1a Experience & Nature) says the “dialectical argument” doe s not offer answers to a “theory of experience in naturalistic terms.”
“There is a long story between the primitive forms of this division of objects of experience and the dialectical imputation to the divine of omnipotence, omniscience, eternity and infinity, in contrast with the attribution to man and experienced nature of finitude, weakness, limitation, struggle and change.  But in the make-up of human psychology the later history is implicit in the early crude division. One realm is the home of assured appropriation and possession; the other of striving, transiency and frustration” (Dewey, 1925: 55).

Dewey’s (1925: 154) rejection of dialectics is quite definite:

“In comparison, most modern theories are an inconsistent mixture; dialectically the modernist is easy prey to the traditionalist; he carries so many of  the conceptions of the latter in his intellectual outfit that  he is readily confuted. It is his practice not his theory that gets him ahead. His professed logic is still largely that of antecedent truths, demonstration and certitude; his practice is doubting, forming hypotheses, conducting experiments.”

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’.  Dewey’s pragmatic ontology of naturalism grounds experience in the double movement of induction with deduction that can be the basis of 4th wave GT. 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’.

PART II: Storytelling In Action in Ontological-Organizational Research Methods (O-ORM)

‘Storytelling In Action’ is 4th whorl 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.

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) 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 whorls, all turned toward logical positivism. In its first whorl 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 whorl Reciprocal Theory/Practice (1990-2009) turns more positivistic, casting about the published theory for concept themes and codes to use on collected storytelling. Third whorl 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 whorl 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.

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 whorl 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, 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. 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.



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 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 whorl 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 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):

• “The interviewer should treat what is said in an interview as an item in a context.
• The interviewer should not pay exclusive attention to the manifest content of the intercourse.
• The interviewer should not treat everything that is said as either fact or error.
• The interviewer should not treat everything that is said as being at the same psychological level
• 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.
• 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.
• The interviewer should keep the personal reference in its social context.
• 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.
• 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 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.

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). 

            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-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. 



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.
            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.
            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 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 whorl intersubjectivity

            4th whorl 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 whorl inquiry is how ontological assumptions about hierarchies’ function in sociomaterial features of Beings (e.g. skin color, blackness, whiteness, blood quantum, and so on). 
            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.”

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 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”

            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 whorl 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. 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 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 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.

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

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

References
Dewey, John. (1910/1933). How we Think. Boston/NY/Chicago: D. C. Heath & Co., Publishers. 1910 original, 1933 new edition https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37423/37423-h/37423-h.htm
Dewey, John. (1925). Experience and Nature. Open Court, Chicago, 1925(Revised). London: George Allen & Unwin. Currently in print: New York: Dover, 1958. Also in: The Later Works, Volume 1, Carbondale, 1981, with an introduction by Sydney Hook. Page numbers here refer to the 1929 edition. https://archive.org/stream/experienceandnat029343mbp/experienceandnat029343mbp_djvu.txt
Dewey, John. (1929). The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the relation of knowledge and action. Gifford Lecturers. London: George Allen, Urwin Ltd. https://archive.org/stream/questforcertaint029410mbp/questforcertaint029410mbp_djvu.txt 
Dewey, John. (1932/1996). Theory of the Moral Life. NY: Irvington Publishers, original 1932, reprint, 1996.

Dewey, John. (1934). Art As Experience. NY: Capricorn Books.

Dewey, John. (1938/1963). Experience and Education. NY: [Collier] Macmillan. (Original work published 1938).

Rorty, R. (2010). The Rorty Reader. Wiley-Blackwell.