Storytelling,space and power: An Arendtian account of subjectivity in organizations

Abstract

Drawing on Arendt’s work, this article develops a storytelling account of subjectivity and politics in organizations. Storytelling is understood as the process through which actors reconstruct their experiences and appear in a collective space. Storytelling is thus enacted within and from spaces and is a means for political action. Three theoretical consequences are drawn. First, storytelling implies the ever-present possibility of a ‘space of appearance’ in which the subject is an originator of action. Second, the notion of storytelling as a spatial practice implies focusing on how stories are shaped through interactions and collective engagements, or ‘emplacement’. Third, a material and embodied reconfiguration of Arendt’s notion of action shows how material relations offer important affordances to change organizations. Because storytelling is both a process of engaging with ourselves and the power relations that we are part of, Arendt’s notion of storytelling is helpful for understanding how and in what circumstances we can act politically in organizations. In particular, the article argues that Arendt’s account is useful for framing an interventionist third stream of critical management studies, or ‘critical performativity’.

Introduction

The relations between storytelling and power are central to understanding subjectivity in organizations. Specifically, storytelling is said to express the narratives that people attach reflexively to themselves within power relations (Brown and Coupland, 2015; Huber and Brown, 2017; Humphreys and Brown, 2002). Embedded in these theorizations of the relations between storytelling and power is the idea that organizational space is alienating and constraining (Arnaud and Vidaillet, 2018). In critical management studies (CMS), storytelling is often presented as an individual coping mechanism within these relations of power (Gabriel, 1995). However, this overlooks an important quality of storytelling: its capacity to open up space and to change the practices in organizations (Tassinari et al., 2017).

This performative understanding of storytelling, I argue, can be understood through Hannah Arendt’s work. For Arendt, storytelling is inherently political. We possess the unique quality to put a sequence of events into a story, reflect on them, rework and change their meaning and insert ourselves into the world. Storytelling, according to Arendt, has to be enacted in the space between people (Young-Bruehl, 1977: 184). This space constrains, but it is also a space that makes it possible to act and create something new. For Arendt (1998), there is no alternative to action – such an impulse to act politically within and through collective spaces is a human condition. We become subjects through participation in politics and by being agents in our own life (Jackson, 2013: 31). Because storytelling is both a process of engaging with ourselves and a process of engaging with the power relations that we are part of, Arendt’s notion of storytelling is helpful for understanding how and in what circumstances we can act politically in organizations.

Drawing on Arendt’s work, this article develops a storytelling account of political subjectivity. This account is important for understanding how different spaces distribute and afford possibilities of acting politically in organizations. Arendt’s account is useful for framing an interventionist third stream of CMS, or ‘critical performativity’ (CP) (Cabantous et al., 2016; Spicer et al., 2009, 2016). Storytelling is an intervention that always takes place within other agencies and is conditioned on these agencies, which means that Arendt’s account of storytelling can shed light on how collective action can be mobilized for change. This article addresses the following research question: how does Arendt’s account of the relations between storytelling and space changes our perception of the possibilities of intervening in organizational practices?

In answer to this research question, three theoretical consequences are drawn. First, storytelling implies the ever-present possibility of what Arendt calls a ‘space of appearance’ in which the subject is an originator of action. Second, her notion of storytelling as a spatial practice focuses on how stories are shaped through interactions and collective engagements, or ‘emplacement’. Third, a material and embodied reconfiguration of Arendt’s notion of action shows how material relations offer important affordances to change organizations. Four examples of storytelling are used to illustrate Arendt’s argument: (1) precarious storytelling, (2) storytelling as a private experience, (3) storytelling and power as entangled dynamics and (4) storytelling as antenarrative politics. This allows, ultimately, to outline an approach to CP based on action. This approach is discussed with reference to ‘progressive management’ and ‘agencement’. The article is structured as follows. Arendt’s framework in relation to storytelling, space and power is introduced in the following sections. I then delve into how subjectivity has been interpreted in CMS, with a particular focus on Foucauldian organization studies, before discussing the relations between storytelling and space and drawing out the theoretical contribution. Finally, I examine how Arendt’s notions of storytelling and space extend our understanding of stories in organizations and supplement an interventionist third stream of CMS.

Arendt on power and storytelling

Arendt defines storytelling as the process by which the experiences of the subject are transformed to make them fit for public appearance. ‘Public’ has two meanings here: first, it means something that appears that can be seen and heard by everybody; and second, it signifies something that we have in common and is distinguished from our private place (Arendt, 1998: 50–51). Arendt argues that storytelling is about political action. This is linked to what Arendt believes is a basic human condition – the desire to create, to shape and to leave a trace behind (Arendt, 1958, 1998). Storytelling requires a space of freedom (Arendt, 1998: 180). The classical Greek polis is Arendt’s inspiration here. This space is not tied to an actual location but the organization of the people that arises from people living together (Arendt, 1998: 198). The purest of such spaces is what she calls the space of appearance: ‘the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly’ (Arendt, 1998: 198–199). This ‘true’ space lies between people no matter where they are and can emerge anywhere when people are together. Arendt (1998: 55), however, argues that what signifies modern living is the loss of that public space with a subsequent sense of worldlessness. Modern (wo)men have been reduced to labourers. Symptomatically, the slave, the foreigner, the labourer, the jobholder or the businessman does not live in a space of appearance (Arendt, 1998: 199).

This touches upon the important problem of how power relations frame, regulate and shape organizational spaces. Arendt puts the spotlight on the normalizing and totalizing aspects of power relations and on how they affect storytelling. Her perception of stories mirrors the perception in organization studies that stories are creative redescriptions of events that emphasize temporality, plurality, reflexivity and subjectivity (Rhodes and Brown, 2005: 167, 177). We become active producers and ‘poets’ of our own affairs through stories (Corbett-Etchevers and Mounoud, 2011: 167). However, for Arendt, genuine storytelling implies appearing before others and making ourselves seen and heard in a public space. This public realm is a space of ‘inter-est’ (Arendt, 1998: 182) where a plurality of people work together to create a shared world (Jackson, 2013: 31). In that space we are at once ‘actors’, who act, and sufferers, who are subjected to the actions of others. With the loss of the public space, we have lost the feelings of being part of a community, history and tradition. We have instead been submitted to a modern rationalization project and have been reduced to labourers instead of being actors.

Arendt’s argument concerning the relations between storytelling and power belongs to a larger understanding of the human condition in which the terms ‘conditions’, ‘activities’ and ‘spaces’ are constants (Young-Bruehl, 2004: 318–20). Conditions are life itself. We are born into a specific world and its conditions. Natality and the plurality of people, animals and species, nature’s life cycles, earth itself and, ultimately, death are conditions of life we cannot escape. Arendt divides activities into labour, work and action. Labour is the activity that corresponds to the biological processes of the human body and which is bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process (Arendt, 1998: 7). Work corresponds to the fabrication of objects and artefacts. It provides an artificial human world, which is separate from nature and bestows a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of life (Arendt, 1998: 7–8). Action corresponds to the human condition of plurality. Arendt (1998: 7–8) notes that all activities are somehow related to action and, hence, politics, but plurality is the condition of all political life.

Labour, work and action are constants but have been organized and valued differently in societies over time. Young-Bruehl (2004: 320) explains that action, according to Arendt, was valued highest for the ancient Greeks. The creation and the preservation of the public space – ‘the agora’ – is a materialization of the emphasis on action. Work was valued higher in the Christian medieval world. In both cases, labour was at the bottom of the hierarchy. The modern world has, however, turned the hierarchy upside down and values labour above work and action. As a consequence, human artefacts have been turned into consumables and the public space, which Arendt regarded as being decisive for action to take place, has evaporated to the extent that storytelling has been reduced to a strictly ‘individual experience’ (Young-Bruehl, 2004: 320). Thus, in the modern world, Arendt sees a fundamental split between the ‘inner’ world of the subject and the possibilities for making such experiences public. The loss of a space common to us all is tied to the rise of the modern organization, which began with the emergence of the modern factory and bureaucracy and which has turned people into cogs in the machineries of the nation state and of the corporation (Arendt, 2003).

Arendt paints a broad picture of the relations between space and subjectivity. The problematic relationship between how power relations structure our lives and the possibilities for storytelling is at the heart of her theorizing. She takes over Benjamin’s (1999) diagnosis of the modern crisis of storytelling, which he perceives as being caused by a fundamental tension between a modern rationalization project and people’s lived experiences. Boje and colleagues call this a tension between abstract and linear Western narratives and ‘grounded’ living stories (Boje, 2008; Jørgensen and Boje, 2010). Benjamin contends that stories are increasingly being replaced by rational, impersonal and standardized knowledge, which is considered to be superior to other ways of knowing and telling. The rise and sophistication of rational knowledge, governance and managerial technologies in societies (Deleuze, 1992; Foucault, 1977) that are inflicted on human bodies and shape and restrict their human agencies are also at the heart of the critical inquiries of Foucauldian organization studies. I will turn to these studies next to position Arendt’s notion of subjectivity in relation to Foucault’s influential theorizing with regard to the complex interplay between the power and the subject.

Foucault’s account of the subject

In CMS, Foucauldian-inspired writings constitute a fundamental element in attaining reflexivity concerning the ways in which power relations shape knowledge and subjectivities in organizations (Alvesson et al., 2009; Knights, 2009). The different perceptions of the subject that emerged in these writings belong to what has been identified as a genealogical phase and an ethical phase in Foucault’s work (Burrell, 1988; Välikangas and Seeck, 2011). The genealogical phase provided most inspiration in the early phase of applying Foucault’s writings. One of the radical implications is that power is no longer seen as something acquired, seized or shared (Hardy and Leiba-O’Sullyvan, 1998). Instead, power is seen as collective, relational and distributed among practices, institutions and agencies (Knights, 2009; Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2011). This notion of power breaks with the idea of a sovereign and rational individual (Caldwell, 2007). Subjectivity is instead considered to be produced as a complex and shifting experience through power relations (Knights and Willmott, 1989; Newton, 1998; Wray-Bliss, 2002).

The space for an active subject is limited in this account. The aim of genealogical studies is to produce awareness so that subjects can question how they are products of power relations (Bardon and Josserand, 2011). Recent genealogical studies have followed two other directions. Cummings et al. (2017) and Wilson (2016) have subjected the history of leadership and management discourse to historical scrutiny with the purpose of fostering rethinking of this discourse. Others have explored the dispositive (Foucault, 1980), which is another concept from Foucault’s later writings. The dispositive is an important intermediary between Foucault’s different concepts and connects his interests during his different periods: knowledge, power and the subject. The dispositive suggests a more indeterminate relationship between power and subjectivity in that focus is placed on the presence of social dispositions and inclinations and on how organizational arrangements affect social interaction. The dispositive is thus seen as a tool for overcoming dichotomies between power and freedom, outside and inside organizations, and between the individual and the collective (Raffnsøe et al., 2016: 274). Thus, the dispositive is critical for a more dynamic understanding of the relations between the power and the subject. I will return to the dispositive later in the discussion.

The recognition of the necessity of an active subject became clearer in Foucault’s later ethical phase. Foucault makes an important distinction here between subjectification and subjectivation. The former pertains to the ways in which one is objectified as a subject through the exercise of power/knowledge (Milchman and Rosenberg, 2009: 64). The latter term, subjectivation, pertains to the relations of the person to herself or himself (Milchman and Rosenberg, 2009: 66). This account of the subject implies a clearer demarcation between the self and the power relations. Practices of the self play an important part in creating ‘free’ subjects (Foucault, 1997). Foucault constructed this as an aesthetic enterprise where the goal is to create oneself as a work of art (Starkey and Hatchuel, 2002). This self-work was envisioned on the basis of practices of the self that he discovered in ancient Greece. He was more critical in relation to the Christian practices of the self, which later became central (Bell and Taylor, 2003; Townley, 1995).

Foucault’s ethical writings are important for analysing the tensions concerning power and the subject, which result from the application of modern human resource management and leadership development technologies (Gabriel, 1999; Ibarra-Colado et al., 2006; Painter-Morland et al., 2019). Such technologies have been criticized for opening the self to scrutiny and moderation and for internalizing power. For Foucault (2005) and for Townley (1995), the decisive point is whether such technologies are applied for the sake of the subject’s self-formation (Greek practices) or for the sake of the subject’s obedience to pastoral power (Christian practices).

The ethics of freedom constitutes a radical break with Foucault’s earlier work (Starkey and Hatchuel, 2002). The critique of social relations offered by Foucault remains genealogical, but it serves a new theme in giving impetus to another kind of work, which is freedom. Practices of the self are seen as important means through which individuals can create new ways of being (Starkey and Hatchuel, 2002). Practices of the self are thus seen as important for reclaiming agency and subjectivity (Clarke and Knights, 2015). Barratt (2008: 523) notes that Foucault still recognized that power relations restrict the extent to which the human subject can be an author of their own life. For Barratt, Foucault’s later writings can instead be understood as an attempt to encourage openness in how power relations are configured. Here, acting and thinking individuals are considered to be the surest defence of freedom.

Through the ethics of freedom, Foucault pictures a space for an autonomous subject. However, such an account has limitations. Practices of self-care have as their aim the binding of the self to oneself. The subject of the care of the self is a subject of ‘sound’ action in which the logos of the self are on the constant lookout for one’s self (Foucault, 2005: 498). This personal choice of living is aimed at creating continuity in our lives. This continuity relies on practices of listening, writing and memorizing through which theoretical discourses are internalized and ready at hand in times of crisis (Foucault, 2005: 498–500; Painter-Morland et al., 2019). Subjectivation, however, comes about through practices of the self in which the subject is subsequently withdrawn from being together with other people. The active modes of subjectivity, which are embedded in the daily interactions of everyday life where people are together, are not captured by this mode of subjectivation. Arendt’s work is useful here in creating an alternative account of a subject. Arendt distinguishes between thinking and action (Arendt, 2003). Thinking is a deep inner dialogue that a person has with themself. It is a process by which a person dissociates themself and becomes different and unique (Arendt, 2003: 19). It is an important armour against ‘the banality of evil’ (Arendt, 2006; Segarra and Prasad, 2018)

Action is nonetheless Arendt’s primary concern in The Human Condition (Arendt, 1998). She attempts to resituate the hegemonic relationship that, in her opinion, has existed between contemplation and action, where the former has had the upper hand (Arendt, 1998: 14–15). Her notion of action is, among other things, based on another conceptualization concerning the relations between power and freedom. Freedom cannot be understood independently of politics because freedom is experienced between people. Her account of freedom is based on the premise that one of the essential conditions of being human is the reciprocal interdependence of people. Thus, Arendt locates the possibilities of action and freedom in the spaces between people. Arendt (1961: 191) claims that to act and to be free are the same. For Arendt, therefore, it is impossible to talk about subjectivity outside the sphere of politics. Freedom is granted, or taken away, in these spaces. Storytelling and space are important here. Next, I turn to a deeper discussion of these notions.

Storytelling and the space of appearance

As previously noted, stories are where we make our appearances before others. In this space, we are simultaneously acting and subjected to the actions of others. We re-story our experiences in these spaces. Subjectivities are thus never fixed but are always negotiated, reconciled and changed in the spaces we create together with others (Jackson, 2013). Judith Butler (2005: 8) notes that ‘the I has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation’. Storytelling is furthermore linked to some sense of agency in that we need to believe that our words and actions matter (Jackson, 2013). Without some possibilities of telling and making our stories according to our own intentions, we are crippled as human beings. Arendt is, as noted, critical with regard to the modern condition of storytelling. This does not, however, imply the end of storytelling. Her notion of storytelling is inspired by Benjamin (1999). She takes over his method of ‘pearl diving into the past’ for recovering ‘thought fragments’. She describes this method as follows in her Benjamin essay:

Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring to light but to pry loose the rich and strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past ‒ but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea change’ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living. (Arendt, 1999: 54–55)

What Arendt recovers from the past is how storytelling as ‘a pure praxis’ shaped the public space in ancient Greece (Villa, 2007: 985). Even if storytelling conditions are unfavourable, storytelling still exists as a part of the human condition and as a potential, which is always present and which is also expressed, even when stories are twisted, scrambled, distorted, repressed and disguised due to the work of power. Wars, catastrophes and biopolitics (Benjamin, 1999) have not changed the fact that the Greek polis, according to Arendt, will continue to exist at the bottom of our political existence as long as we use the term politics (Arendt, 1999: 53; Villa, 2007: 985). Storytelling as an expression of freedom lies beyond and is at the same time the condition for the existence of disciplinary power (Foucault, 1977), evaluation, assessment systems and surveillance systems (Deleuze, 1992), subtle and cunning technologies for racial and gender discrimination, rising inequalities and the precarization of life (Butler, 2006).

Storytelling is never independent of power relations (Humphreys and Brown, 2002), but it does entail an indeterminacy between power relations’ prescriptions of actions and the actions themselves. Power has important implications for which and whose stories that can materialize and be recognized. Power relations inflict themselves in the spaces between people and thereby condition the subjects’ appearances. This means that spaces discriminate on the basis of gender, race, social class or other characteristics. Nonetheless the possibility that a space of appearance can emerge is always there wherever people are together. This leads to the first theoretical implication of Arendt’s work.

Storytelling and agency

Storytelling is to reconfigure our experiences and is, as noted previously, tied to an existential imperative of agency. Jackson (2013: 33) limits himself to what he calls a sense of agency without answering the question as to whether something called ‘free agency’ actually exists. On the other hand, it is dangerous not to grant people some kind of agency because if we don’t, we deny people a voice and the possibility of change. Thus, strictly speaking, we deny people the possibility of living. Stories express unique qualities of the subject. Stories are relational and conditioned by space and thus framed within power relations (e.g. Louis and Diochon, 2018). However, the space that emerges between people cannot however be reduced to a mere effect of power. Then we would underestimate what De Certeau (1884) calls the ‘clandestine and make-shift creativity of groups and individuals’ (p. xiv). The meaning of stories is beyond representation and power. Stories say ‘exactly what they do’ and ‘constitute an act which they intend to mean’ (De Certeau, 1984: 80).

Butler has been important in CMS for producing an account of the subject where this subject is not seen as the originator of action but is constituted by language (Cabantous et al., 2016; Learmonth et al., 2016). From Butler’s work, Riach et al. (2016) proposes an anti-narrative methodology for reflexively undoing the subject. Arendt’s work allows us to reconsider this account. Without agency, ‘there is no new thing under the sun’ (Arendt, 1998: 204). Rather, we use language to express ourselves within socially constructed norms and also to make sense of who we are, what we want and what we can possibly achieve. For Arendt, we are never outside of communities, societies, discourses, language and material conditions. Identities, beliefs and values are born from conditions of entanglement and interdependence (Arendt, 1961). However, the ontological constants of labour, work and action also exist along with conditions and spaces before particular societies and discourses take hold of human bodies. Storytelling expresses the commitment to freedom in action and is what allows subjects to break away from the normative limits of power. This freedom is, however, always relative to the social and material conditions in which agency has to take place.

The relations between power and storytelling are, as previously noted, problematic for Arendt because we have lost the public space that gathers people together and relates them to each other. Her argument, however, is informed by the historical context of totalitarianism and the rise of bureaucracy in the mid-twentieth century, the time at which she was writing The Human Condition. Today, society and organizations are more ambiguous, unstable, shifting and dynamic (Chan and Garrick, 2002) and therefore allow for many variations of storytelling. In the discussion of a politics of storytelling, I will argue that the relations between power and storytelling are still problematic but for different reasons. For now, the conclusion is that spatial conditions are important and affect storytelling. In the following section, I turn to the next theoretical implication, which is how the understanding of stories as political actions changes our perception and focus in storytelling.

Storytelling as a spatial practice: ‘emplacement’

Arendt’s account of storytelling as a spatial practice has important implications for storytelling research. Storytelling is often seen as important for organizing our private experiences according to a plot. This creates stability and maintenance (Peirano-Vejo and Stablein, 2009). For Arendt, stories require an audience because telling stories is to make ourselves seen and heard before others. Stories take place, relate to and are organized around what lies in between people, the ‘inter-est’ (Arendt, 1998: 182). She suggests that we can never be the sole authors of our own life stories. Actions fall within an already existing web of relationships with their innumerable conflicting wills and intentions (Arendt, 1998: 184). This means that stories are rarely organized around a clear plot but are fragmented, spontaneous and plural (e.g. Arendt, 1998: 191–92). Several readings of events, plots, characters and moral advice are simultaneously present in stories (e.g. Beech et al., 2009).

Arendt’s notion of story resembles what Boje calls a living story. He defines it as the disrupted, interrupted and socially distributed network-like communication that occurs in the here and now (Boje, 2008: 1). A living story implies a deep, ontologically felt sense of uniqueness that emerges from being in a specific time and place and in relations with other people. The fragmented, multifaceted, differentiated and discontinuous web of living stories confirms the aliveness of stories, while breaking with reductionist, unified, abstract and linear narrative accounts of organizational life (Brown et al., 2009; Jørgensen and Boje, 2010). Stories are historically contingent and relational (Murgia and Poggio, 2009). They happen through interactions, which influence how people appear before each other (Whittle et al., 2009). Understood as political action, storytelling is an attempt to frame the future for ourselves and for others. Stories are thus ‘antenarrative’ (Boje, 2001a) because they contain several possible and competing ‘bets’ on the future (Boje et al., 2016; Vaara and Tienari, 2011). Two implications can be drawn out. The first one is the point that there is more at stake in storytelling for the subject than just meaning-making and interpretation, which are qualities normally attributed to storytelling (Adorisio, 2014; Dawson and Sykes, 2019; Rowlinson et al., 2014). Stories enact realities. This follows from Arendt’s observation that to act is to take an initiative, to begin (Arendt, 1998: 177). For Arendt, this commitment arises simply from being alive. It is linked to the existential imperative of agency that I discussed before.

The intimate connection between space and storytelling has however another implication. Storytelling has often been analysed according to, or in relation to, a temporal model of emplotment (Jørgensen and Boje, 2010). By contrast, an account of storytelling as a spatial practice is less concerned with plot simply because the focus is upon how we re-story our experiences according to the people and the circumstances we encounter. According to Jackson (2013), emplotment is less useful when we focus on the re-storying that takes place when we journey through places and create spaces interactively. He suggests instead (Jackson, 2013: 48) that what is at stake in stories is ‘emplacement’. This notion highlights the importance of time, place and relationships, which are integral to the notion of living stories. Furthermore, these notions are tied to critical questions concerning belonging or not belonging to space, inclusion in or exclusion from space and ultimately whether, and under what circumstances, we can be political actors in organizations.

To ‘emplace’ is to confirm or to restore belonging to a group, community, organization and natural or material landscapes. It implies what Jackson (2013: 32) calls ‘rootedness’. Being rooted is linked to a person’s participation in communities and the life of particular groups within particular circumstances. To belong is to connect oneself to a wider field, which involves that one’s own life being connected to others, and that we are part of a history that takes place in particular places and in natural surroundings. In other words, ‘emplacement’ connects the subject’s stories and position to the social and material configuration of a location. This leads to the third theoretical consequence.

Space as embodied and material

Storytelling is to transform inner experiences into a public appearance. Through this process, our bodies become exposed to other bodies and vice versa in particular material locations. Embodiment and materiality matter for storytelling (Cutcher et al., 2016; Humphries and Smith, 2014), which imply that stories are not only shaped through language, conversations and dialogues (e.g. Adorisio, 2014; Beech et al., 2009). Arendt (1998), however, does not consider action to be material and embodied but is inspired by a theory of the speech act (p. 176). Butler criticizes Arendt on this point and suggests instead an embodied performative understanding of action. Showing up, standing still, taking up space, breathing, moving, gesturing, gazing, making, moving, speaking and so forth are, according to Butler (2015), all expressive actions that are part of collective action even if this is concerted, coordinated or unpredictable (pp. 18–19).

Second, Butler emphasizes that collective actions are produced by material conditions and arrangements. In organizations, such material arrangements can be translated into technologies, architectural arrangements, offices, buildings, pens, computers, divisions of labour, distributions of authority, performance sheets and access to knowledge, people and money. People’s lives are thus seen as intertwined and entangled with the material configuration of places and spaces. De Certeau (1984: 117) makes a distinction between place and space. Place is the order of how elements are distributed in relationship to each other, that is, the positioning of things and objects. A place is an instantaneous configuration of positions and indicates stability. Space on the other hand is a practised place (De Certeau, 1984: 117). Place, for him, is transformed into a space by stories (De Certeau, 1984: 115). Stories ‘traverse and organize places; they select them and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them’ (De Certeau, 1984: 115). Place and space are two sorts of determination in stories, which constantly transform places into spaces and spaces into places (De Certeau, 1984: 118). The material configuration of places not only serves as an import for action but in many ways organizes these actions.

We are entangled with the world and its bodies, materials and discursive and geographical conditions (Jørgensen and Strand, 2014; Strand, 2012). Thus, the I embodies the others (Butler, 2006: 22) as well as non-human others (Barad, 2007). Butler believes that this material reorientation ties the possibility of a space of appearance more to location and place than in Arendt’s original work. For Butler (2015), the control, access and distribution of material resources reflect and deflect power relations and govern the conditions for being actors (pp. 72–73). However, this material reorientation of storytelling also ties storytelling less to grander discourses. Instead, we are pushed towards the ground for understanding storytelling, towards material conditions and relationships. De Certeau (1984: xv) argues that such nitty-gritty, petty and subtle interactions have their own dynamics and compose networks of an anti-discipline. The material reorientation of storytelling in other words implies the possibility that the destiny of the subject is as much decided in such micro-storied spaces even if they exist within narrative ecologies (Boje et al., 2016) and discourses. Butler (2015: 66) uses the phrase ‘the politics of the street’ for such unplanned and spontaneous assemblages, which always emerge because people have to come together. Such ‘street politics’ also exist in organization. They take the shape of informal gatherings, networks and communities, which can be remarkably untouched by dominant power relations.

After having identified three theoretical consequences, I now turn to a politics of storytelling in organizations.

Discussion: a politics of storytelling in organizations

Organizations are composed of living spaces, which afford different kinds of storytelling. The configuration of these iterative, shifting and dynamic spaces is important in regard to the possibilities they offer for belonging, rootedness and political action. Below I examine four variations of storytelling in organizations.

Precarious storytelling

Precarious storytelling is performed by people in precarious conditions and discloses their struggle to live a life in extreme conditions. Precarity is used to characterize people who live on the threshold of being part of organizations, who have little or no capital and perhaps have no political rights. Precarity describes the life of refugees, illegal immigrants, the temporarily employed or the underpaid and poor. Precarious stories are told by people whose lives do not matter as lives recognizable of living by the current regimes of thought (Butler, 2015). For Butler, the possibility of political participation is not a likely reality for people in precarious conditions.

The lived experiences of Victoria, a displaced and dispossessed undocumented immigrant woman from Mexico (Segarra and Prasad, 2020), constitute an example of precarious storytelling. Living in poverty, crime, violence and corruption, she has to accept deplorable working conditions. Such stories are stories of modern slavery that often disclose a barbarism so severe and painful that they are not easily displayed for the normalized and included parts of the population. She has, strictly speaking, no story because she has no place to make it public. She lives in hiding and can only appear before her peers beneath the level of public visibility or before people who can witness and tell her story. Such stories are desperate but also disclose a unique subject striving for living a liveable life.

Storytelling as a private experience

Storytelling as a private experience is a story of a repressed subject, whose labouring body is included in organizational spaces but otherwise is excluded from political participation. Such a story resembles a theme reflected in Benjamin’s writings and Arendt’s diagnosis of the loss of a shared public space. Benjamin (1999) mourns the decline of storytelling in the modern age, as it has been taken over by a rationalist discourse, in which impersonal information is cherished over the experiences that are passed on by word of mouth. He associates storytelling with local craftsmanship, weavers, artisans, blacksmiths and others who are considered whole beings. For Arendt, this tension between rational discourse and being creates world alienation (Arendt, 1998: 254).

While even the most totalitarian regimes may suppress freedom of speech and freedom of assembly (Arendt, 1961), they can never take hold of the freedom of thought. Storytelling as a private experience implies, however, that the subject cannot find a proper and legitimate space to make a public appearance as an actor with their own viewpoints and interests. Stories stay in the mind of organizational members or are only expressed ‘at the margins’ in non-official illegitimate spaces. In organizations, such stories pop up in the disguise of humour, cynicism and other emotional means by which the subject makes a detachment between themself and the symbolic world of the organization, while still reproducing dominant power relations (Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Huber and Brown, 2017).

Storytelling and power as entangled dynamics

Storytelling can be seen as reiterating established discourses. Such stories confirm a subject’s position and belonging to particular privileged groups, while she or he excludes particular others. Foucault’s concept of the dispositive is useful here. It is often used to describe how power relations become inscribed in space and govern the conditions of possibility for becoming subjects (Raffnsøe et al., 2016). The dispositive is a complex and dynamic heterogeneous network of relations established between, and enacted in, bodies of strategies, knowledge, techniques, measures, arrangements, technologies, routines, systems, procedures, laws, guidelines and so on (Foucault, 1980: 194–95). Stories are, according to this understanding, ingrained, embodied and entangled parts of power relations and are where power is ultimately enacted (Legg, 2011).

Prasad (2014), when examining his encounter with the occupied Palestinian territories, suggested that his sense of these encounters should be explored in the context of wider structures and discourses. He describes how his story of an unknown group in an unknown territory was shaped by latent prejudices where he framed the other from a privileged neo-colonial perspective in which powerful discourses maintain a particular perspective of the Palestinian male body. Ulus (2015) describes how emotions shape the lived experiences in postcolonial spaces of Othering. Power in both cases is enacted in encounters with others and serves to include and exclude those others. Such games of inclusion/exclusion are inscribed in gestures, in gazes, in communication, in bodies’ movements, in beliefs and myths and in material arrangements.

Storytelling as antenarrative politics

Spaces in organization can also inspire new beginnings and afford creative storytelling. Such storytelling occurs among artists, artisans, professionals, researchers, craftsmen and other creative people. Such people exploit the affordances of the ‘street’ (Butler, 2015) in organizations – that is, the hallways, architectures, technologies, systems and other people – to conduct their own politics (e.g. Boje, 2001b; Munro and Jordan, 2013) and to create their own communities. Such storytelling is living antenarrative politics. Antenarratives are not yet fully formed narratives but material and discursive fragments that help to construct identities and interests (Boje et al., 2016: 391). An antenarrative politics in or across organizations is always possible but are more likely in spaces in which friendships, communities and networks of acquaintances and relations flourish. Through such networks, people in organizations are confirmed as actors whose opinions and actions matter.

Such communities and networks may exist as parallel communities within organizations. The freedom that actors experience in such spaces is always relative to social rules and norms for engagement. Nonetheless this possibility of agency, along with the social and material conditions for its enactment, provides a potential for collective action. Such storytelling collects, reorganizes and reassembles organizational spaces and exploits the fact that organizations and communities are already spaces where people come together. Such storytelling also takes advantage of the idea that spaces are considerably more complex, ambiguous and multi-voiced than we usually think (Alacovska, 2018; Courpasson et al., 2017). Before narrative coherence and beneath grander narratives and living stories, the actor may begin something new and create another bet on the future (Boje et al., 2016: 399). Such storytelling mobilizes people who are established and recognized as part of organizations and communities but do not necessarily participate in official politics.

CP and Arendt

Arendt’s account storytelling is helpful for articulating an interventionist third stream of CMS. CP emerged as a counter-narrative to the perception that CMS is best characterized as anti- or non-performative (Spicer et al., 2009). For Arendt, political engagement and participation is an obligation. We are ethically committed to participate and to intervene in organizations and society unless in extreme situations (Arendt, 2003). Butler et al. (2018) draw the conclusion that CP agents often have to renegotiate and compromise on their values when interacting with practitioners due to both corporate and institutional pressures. Thus, we need to navigate the tensions and dilemmas that emerge from touching and allowing ourselves to be touched by practitioners. Below, I make two comments concerning two dominant perceptions of CP.

Action and ‘progressive management’

Spicer et al. (2009) suggest an interventionist strategy called CP to encourage what they refer to as progressive forms of management. They note (Spicer et al., 2009: 538, 545) that such a strategy is characterized by active and subversive intervention into managerial discourses and practices. It involves an affirmative stance, an ethics of care, dialogue, the exploration of latent possibilities as well as the engagement in micro-emancipations. CP is for them accomplished through dialogues with the people engaged with management. Arendt’s notion of action entails instead suspending management and is useful in regard to the need identified by Cabantous et al. (2016) to create new ways of speaking and doing organizations. Rather than subverting discourse, Arendt’s account implies the attempt to create a ‘third space’, which go beyond the power/resistance binary.

A space of appearance is plural space where people meet as ‘equals’ for reworking stories through reflection, dialogue, conversation and collaboration. Such a space is based on neither the pre-political similarities nor the elimination of inequalities, as noted by Marquez (2012: 12). ‘Equality’ instead refers to a temporary suspension of the normal status and distinctions that regulate interactions in everyday life. Thus, a space of appearance resituates a hegemonic arrangement of voices in everyday life and provides space for alternative and suppressed voices for telling and reworking their stories.

Strand (2012) used an approach called ‘material storytelling’ to design alternative spaces for mobilizing professionals in a deafness-blindness centre to rework their stories and the spatial and material arrangements in which they worked. Tassinari et al. (2017) used storytelling to collect citizens, students, associations, local institutions, workers and neighbourhoods for collective action for social innovation in the city of Seraing in Belgium and in a suburban area of Milan in Italy. Small artefacts, sandbox, puppet theatre and plug social theatre were in these cases used as affordances for imagining and creating other bets of the future. In relation to CP, the space of appearance is a methodology for mobilizing plural stories including those, which are marginalized, alienated, forgotten or invisible in daily life.

Action and ‘agencement’

Cabantous et al. (2016) criticize Spicer et al.’s notion of performativity on the grounds that it presumes that a subject precedes language and because it confuses performance with performativity. Cabantous et al. (2016: 201) note that performance is a ‘willed act’ by a subject whereas performativity are repeated acts that reiterate norms. They thus argue that subjects in organizations are performed by power relations before they perform them. They instead emphasize (Cabantous et al., 2016: 203) the importance of ‘sociotechnical agencement’ to highlight how agency is constructed, or performed, through the systematic use of artefacts, devices and infrastructure. Thus, agencement resembles the perception of agency as an enactment of power relations embedded in the dispositive (see above).

Storytelling is for Arendt a means for acting politically and to begin something new. Action breaks with agencement. Arendt (1998: 178) argues that such actions often happen in the guise of a miracle, against the laws of probability, power structures and predictions. We fail to recognize an important creative dynamic in organization, if we reduce storytelling to repetitive action. Furthermore, we fail to recognize the potential of storytelling for initiating political interventions. Storytelling is important for creating a complex and varied pattern of action with many nuances, variations, voices and destinies. Arendt suggests a more moderate and pragmatic position that subjects act within and from conditions of discursive and material agencies. Willing, thinking and judging subjects partake in a complex bundle of agencies in organizations. Storytelling and the power to act are always tied to the agencies of others and are shaped within them. The rigid distinction whether individual subjects have power or not is thus meaningless. Thus, the idea of a lone CP agent, who is capable of creating emancipatory spaces, is unrealistic (Fleming and Banerjee, 2016).

Conclusion

Storytelling is a spatial practice in which people re-story experiences to make them fit for public appearance. Storytelling is an important means of political action that can be used to open up spaces and intervene in and change the practices of organizations. We are born from and live within material and discursive conditions, and our possibilities for action always rely on these conditions. What is at stake in storytelling are belonging, rootedness and having agency in the midst of social and material conditions. Furthermore, storytelling is both embodied and material. The storyteller that Arendt recovers from the past stands as a symbolic figure for reflecting, imagining and framing another life in organizations. This storytelling ability is alive in all of us and can be actualized even if we have different possibilities for action.

Arendt’s account of storytelling as political action is a third position for intervening politically in organizations. Her approach to transformation and change cannot be plotted within managerial discourses and activities. True political action only emerges in collective spaces where people ‘are with others and neither for nor against them – that is in sheer human togetherness’ (Arendt, 1998: 180). On the other hand, action is always possible whenever and wherever people come together. We have to work from within the collective conditions created by others. To enter into a space of appearance is daring and requires courage. A space of appearance requires furthermore that others, through listening, co-speaking and acting, validate our stories as worthwhile. We have a responsibility to give space to the others in our everyday engagements through which spaces are created and enacted. We also have a responsibility to widen the spaces to include those voices that are otherwise excluded.