Questions About Organizational Storytelling, Linguistic Sensemaking, Antenarrative?

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Click for access to recent article applying storytelling to leadership (with Carl Rhodes).	Boje's focus is on study of ethics, critical theory ethics, feminism, and power of language, discourse, and storytelling and antenarratives in organizations (see Caling All Storytellers). His reputation corporate social responsibility ethics in academia and industry is widely known and respected in the United States and internationally. Professor Boje is described by his peers as an international scholar in the areas of narrative, storytelling, postmodern theory & critical storytelling ethics. He has published 17 books and 124 articles in journals, including the top-tier journals such as Management Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal , Academy of Management Review, Leadership Quarterly, and the international Journal of Organization Studies.
Painting by Virginia Maria Romero appears on back cover of the STORYTELLING ORGANIZATIONS book	David - Published Fall 2009 BY Charlotte Tallman in Las Cruces Magazine PHOTOGRAPHY Bill Faulkner We could all learn a few things from Dr. David e, including the results from years of research that taught David how to take a narrative which is negative, distorted or unfair and find a more truthful and affirmative alternative. What David discovered has impacted businesses, entrepreneurs, students and public administration in an increasingly positive way. “As a university leader, I am provocative, and try to stand up for the underdog,” says David, who holds an Endowed Bank of America Professorship within the College of Business at New Mexico State University. “I do what is called critical storytelling, where I seek to balance the official narratives of power with the living stories of the little people – often left out of history.” David’s research and work is vast, creative and utilized around the world and his reputation in academia and industry is widely known throughout the United States and internationally. As an international scholar in the areas of narrative, storytelling, postmodern theory and critical ethics of answerability, David has published nearly 100 articles in journals, including Management Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review and the International Journal of Organization Studies. David has also been awarded prestigious titles, including an Arthur Owens Professorship in Business Administration in the Management Department at NMSU, University and College Teacher of the Year four times at Loyola Marymount and a Creative Scholar Award at NMSU in 2008. “My greatest honor is riding my horse, Silverado, and staying in the saddle,” David says. When he is not riding, he is researching, learning and teaching with the same wit and humor that motivates his students and colleagues. David created an ‘antenarrative’, or a bet on what is shaping the future before it becomes one more fossilized narrative. “An ante is a bet and it’s a before,” David explains. “My focus is storytelling, how it shapes the past and future in business, public administration and arts entrepreneurship.” David got involved in his profession when he noticed in his quantitative research there was a need for stories to make sense of the data, and to make an interesting write-up. “As I started treating storytelling as a methodology of inquiry I discovered it is really applicable to qualitative and quantitative. You need storytelling to put facts and metaphors, or models, together into a theory.” David’s recent book, Storytelling Organizations, explores the stories people tell themselves and others at work. Instead of focusing on understanding stories about what happened “once upon a time, a long time ago” within an organization, David takes a different approach by seeing what people are telling themselves about the future. His interest focuses on how stories interplay with needs to stay within ethical and emotional comfort zones, and how multiple narratives emerge and evolve in rapidly changing situations. “At age 61, I notice I spend more time helping other faculty and students around the world develop their storytelling methods, theory and research projects,” David says. “My biggest influence was to look at how storytelling is a telling between the lines, where the reader is expected to fill in the blanks. Instead of once upon a time telling, looking at the complex collective dynamics of many storytellers has been my main contribution.” To David, a company’s motto, architecture of corporate headquarters and even the business strategy all become part of the organizational story. Studying the story then becomes a new and fertile way into understanding strategy. Once a story is understood, David looks at ‘restorying’ or a way to take a narrative which is negative, distorted or unfair and find a more truthful and affirmative alternative. This simple but effective technique can be used by businesses and organizations to change the future of their story. David is actively involved in Talking Stick, a project three years in the works that shows collective storytelling processes are being used to improve the creative economy of the arts and culture organizations in Southern New Mexico. David also actively worked on a What’s Art? Exploring the Creative Economy of Southern New Mexico Conference held October 2nd and 3rd, 2009 at Alma de Arte Charter School and the Pioneer Women’s Park in Las Cruces. David, who met Professor Grace Ann Rosile at a conference, applied to NMSU so the two could pursue their careers and raise their Arabian horses. Currently, David is working on a new book, Storytelling the Future of Organization: Antenarrative Handbook. “It’s an amazing challenge to theorize and study ‘storytelling the future’. Most narrative work has been about the past, and using that to extrapolate what the future might be. But such linear projections are not very accurate. We are looking at some alternative ways to story tell the future,” David says.

On average, Professor Boje's articles and books are cited 586 times by other scholars, with an average of 21.7 cites per item. By last count, David Boje had garnered 3565 total citations to his research (Citation analysis conducted on February 18, 2010 on Google Scholar). His most cited work (routinely cited on average by scholars 690 times) is: Boje, D. M. 1991. "The storytelling organization: A study of storytelling performance in an office supply firm." Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 36: pp.106-126. His 1995 Academy of Management Journal article on Disney is cited 515 times, and his Narrative Methods book (2001) 576 times. Click here for Google Scholar listings

Citations index from ISIS Web of Knowledge 1989 to Feb 2008

Most recent ISIS Cites for Boje is 586 cites, average of 21.7 cites per item

Dec 28 2012 results:

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David’s total number of citations (3565 times) exceeds the average number of citations for the Organization Behavior/Management faculty at the top-ranked US school: a study of total citations at 51 major public and private business schools whose faculty had PhDs and as ranked in BusinessWeek, US News and World Report, and the Financial Times, showed that the University of California-Berkeley topped the list of most-cited faculty with its OB/Management faculty having 1499 life-time citations on average by over50%.

His international research reputation in storytelling stands upon several major contributions. His 1991 Administrative Science Quarterly article empirical study introduced stories how stories as the chief sensemaking device of organizations, showed how they are rarely told with beginning, middle, and end, and instead are dispersed across conversation in tersely told fragments. His 1995 Academy of Management Journal article is an empirical study of Disney showed the relationship of official storytelling to workers’ counterstories, and that this is going on simultaneously across multiple sites where the meaning derived depends upon the network of story rooms one has participated in.

As a measure of his influence, David’s articles have been cited consistently longer than a decade since their publication. Indeed, his 1991 ASQ article, “Organizations as Storytelling Networks”, garnered over 690 citations; and his 1995 AMJ article, “Stories of the Storytelling Organization”, received over 515 citations. The citing half-life for the journal is the median age of the articles the journal cited in the current year. Half of the citations in the journal are to articles published within the citing half- life. A citation analysis reveals that for both ASQ and AMJ, the cited half-life of articles in the journal is less than 10 years. David’s articles in these top journals have been cited over twice as long a period as the average article in these journals. As an indicator of his abiding influence on storytelling and narrative, these two articles continue to be cited till today.

He is past division-chair of the Research Methods Division of the Academy of Management, and incoming President of the Board of Governors of the Standing Conference for Management and Organization Inquiry (http://sc-moi.ning.com/).

David is founding editor of Tamara Journal of Critical Organizaiton Studies (http://TamaraJournal.com). He is associate editor, and past editor (1989-2003) of the Journal of Organizational Change Management, associate editor (2003-2009).

Professor Boje served simultaneously on 17 editorial boards, some for as long as 20 years. On Dec 17th he turned 61, decided balance is important, and on January 22nd he stepped off of all editorial boards to focus on his writing and editing the Tamara Journal. He was an associate editor for International Journal of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management (2005-2009). He served on Journal of Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management, Management Digest, Management Decision Journal, Journal of Management Inquiry, M@n@gement, Organization Studies (UK), Employee Responsibilities and Rights Jounal (ERRJ), EJ-Radical Organization Theory, Emergence: Complexity & Organization Journal and Management (http://emergence.org/), Management Spirituality & Religion (http://www.jmsr.com/board.html), Journal of Business and Society, Management Science Review (France), Open Management Journal (Bentham Publishers),Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management (QRAM), Meaning (in) Organizations Quarterly and is also on the international advisory board for the journal Critical Discourse Studies (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17405904.asp), and Journal of Management Studies & Research –IJMSR. David is also a member of the Scientific Committee of RSDG (Revue Sciences de Gestion), a Management Science journal published quarterly in English, French and Spanish) and Editorial Board of the Sage Encyclopedia of Case Study Research. In the past, Boje served on editorial boards of Academy of Management Review, & Organization (1997-2009), as well as editorial board member of special projects such as, Handbook of Organizational Research Methods David Buchanan and Alan Bryman (Editors), Sage Publications, 2008.

's recent books include Storytelling Organization (Sage, 2008, see http://storytellingorganization.com) Critical Theory for Business and Public Administration (2007, Information Age Press), The Passion of Organizing (with Brewis, Lindstead & O’Shea, Liber & Copenhagen Business School Press, 2006), and Darsø, L., Meisiek S. and Boje, D. (Eds.). Thin Book of ORGANISATIONAL THEATRE. Text and photo © 2007 Learning Lab Denmark, The Danish University of Education. Click here to download on line version of the Thin Book. His book, Narrative Research Methods for Communication Studies (Sage, 2001) is a widely used text in teaching qualitative methods to Ph.D. students. His books on postmodern theory of management and organization continue to be widely cited: Managing in the Postmodern World: America's Revolution Against Exploitation (1993, 2000 with Bob Dennehy) and Postmodern Management and Organizational Theory (1996 with Robert Gephart & Tojo Thatchenkery). Theatres of Capitalism is forthcoming (SF, CA: Hampton Press). Information online at http://business.nmsu.edu/%7EdBoje/theatrics/theatrics.htm). 

His 2001 Narrative Methods book (292 citations) invents the term, antenarrative, the double meaning of a pre-story and a bet that it can transform behavior. His 2005 co-authored article in Leadership Quarterly is a contribution of story to ways leaders in the fast food industry are socially fashioned. His 2008 co-authored article in Critical Discourse Studies is how stories of Sam Walton continue in annual reports, long after his death. In a series of articles Boje traces the shifts in story sensemaking and antenarrating of the Enron Corporation. His work on Nike’s storytelling of its labor practices is widely cited. In sum, his story research work is considered foundational in leadership, ethics, postmodern, poststructral, discourse, feminism, labor process, and communication studies. His reputation for storytelling contributions in academia and industry is widely known and respected in the United States and internationally. Professor Boje continues to have an active presence in international scholarship. He was keynote speaker at the Discourse as well as Storytelling conferences in the United Kingdom, and has been a visiting scholar/speaker at universities in the United States (e.g., Rhode Island, CA, CO), in Europe (Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Austria, and the United Kingdom) as well as down under (Australia, Tasmania, & New Zealand).

Boje and his wife Grace Ann Rosile, also an NMSU Management professor, to establish an exchange program for NMSU students with the Jean Moulin University of Lyon III and ISEOR Institute in Lyon France. This was the second year in which NMSU business students took some of their NMSU-required business courses in Lyon. NMSU business senior D’Anne Chapman said she enjoyed meeting other students from many countries in her Lyon classes this summer. She was taught by an international group of professors (who taught classes in English), and she was amazed at the quality of the restaurants in Lyon. Boje and Rosile are hoping other students will follow in their footsteps and experience study abroad. They are sure to return with new insights and lots of great stories to tell!

Twenty years have passed since Leavitt, Pondy and Boje’s seminal Readings in Managerial Psychology 4th edition (1988) put together a representative collection of articles on the subject and we believe that the time is ripe to attempt a current ‘take’ on managerial psychology. Handbook of Managerial Psychology (3 Volumes); Editor(s): Yochanan Altman (London Metropolitan University), Frank Bournois (Université Paris (Pantheon-Assas)) and David Boje (New Mexico State University); ISBN:  978-1-4129-4490-8; Publication date:  February, 2008; Publisher: SAGE Publications, London.

A current book project, Critical Theory for Business and Public Administration Ethics (expected publication in 2007), applies the critical theory work of Frankfurt scholars (Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Horkheimer, Marcuse) to ethics. The book calls for an ethics of answerability (a Bakhtinian critical theory perspective) to business and public administration, which currently has non-answerable ethics in business and public administration (i.e., ethics of conviction in its content and formal ethics approaches is unanswerable to changing the root causes of systemic ethical failures).

Professor Boje continues to have an active presence in international scholarship. He was keynote speaker at the Discourse as well as Storytelling conferences in the United Kingdom, and has been a visiting scholar/speaker at universities in the United States (e.g., Rhode Island), in Europe (Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Austria, and the United Kingdom) as well as down under (Australia & New Zealand).

The New Mexico State Univeristy Management Department has one of the most impressive tier one publication records of the university

Above figure represents # of articles published since being at New Mexico State (63 articles, with an average of 4.9 articles per year.

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