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Abstract

Storytelling can be considered good professional practice for organizational communication as it resonates with stakeholder audiences and contributes to the process of sensemaking. This paper challenges two key assumptions that underpin storytelling in an organizational context. The first assumption is that clarity is the goal of storytelling and therefore linear modes of organizational storytelling should be used to reduce complexity to achieve clarity of understanding of organizational messages. The second assumption is that organizational storytelling consists only of the stories an organization tells about itself, and multiple understandings or ‘mixed messages’ are ‘noise’. This paper will argue that the storytelling concept antenarrative – or narrative fragments that can form emergent storytelling episodes – will expand the parameters of sensemaking in organizational storytelling. Furthermore, listening to emergent storytelling episodes can provide insights into prospective sensemaking, which has implications for organizational storytelling practices in our digital age. Putting antenarrative alongside concepts such as ‘listening’ and ‘engagement’ helps to improve organizational storytelling to work toward more effective organizational communication practice and respond to the challenges of complexity in storytelling, entanglements of the porous organization, and digital disruption.

Keywords

Antenarrative digital disruption multivocality narrative fragments sensemaking

Introduction

Stories are powerful and storytelling is a necessary consideration for the media and communication fields as it is a key sensemaking process. Organizational storytelling is just one of many types of storytelling and is distinct from the long tradition of First Nations and folk or kin-based storytelling, practices of journalism and more recent digitally-inspired transmedia or multiplatform storytelling, although they may share common ground. Stories are important as they can transfer Indigenous wisdom across millennia (Page and Memmott, 2021) or create an enduring connection with an audience for a lifetime (Kent, 2015). The rise of organizational storytelling coincides with digital disruption and changing professional norms for communication practitioners, and follows the ‘narrative turn’ in social science research in the 1980s (McAllum et al., 2019) and the rise of executive coaching and consulting in the 1990s which advocate the power of stories for effective communication (Denning, 2006; Gabriel, 2005). From an organization’s perspective, organizational storytelling is more likely to be viewed as strategic self-storying with a top-down approach, rather than collectively constituted through multiple stories (Johansen, 2012) – this has implications for how stakeholders are taken into account as passive or active storytellers. Organizational stories usually require a linear structure and narrative elements to be considered effective. Boje (2014: xx) calls this type of story with “a beginning, a middle, and an end” a BME narrative. The terms story and storytelling and narrative are used interchangeably in this paper as is frequently the case across organizational and communication research (Boje, 2008; Johansen, 2014). This paper explores whether narrative approaches to communication, such as organizational storytelling, support communication professionals to contend with complexity, entanglements and disruption. This paper will argue that the storytelling concept antenarrative (Boje, 2001, 2014) – or simply, narrative fragments that can form emergent storytelling episodes – is an overlooked variable in professional communication practice. Yet emergent storytelling episodes provide a more nuanced understanding of stories that are part of sensemaking in organizational communication, which is non-linear and more likely to be networked and distributed in our digital age.

The normative ideal of organizational storytelling is to control ‘the narrative’ or sensemaking processes for an organization to avoid multiple understandings of the organization or its initiatives. A single-story approach is valorized as a way to achieve control. A founding story is an example of a single official story that is a “conscious attempt to produce, promote or change a story” (Norlyk et al., 2014: 106). Through selective choices, an official story can convey a preferred version of what the organization wishes to communicate and control meaning (Atarama-Rojas et al., 2022). A strategy is another example of an official story that seeks to motivate people through a “shared narrative” of an organization’s vision and goals (Stjerne et al., 2022: 147). There is extensive communication research on how to tap into the power of storytelling and a common theme for effective stories is a narrative structure (Barker and Gower, 2010; Gill, 2015; Kent, 2015; Lane, 2023). The use of narrative structures such as plot and character transforms information into “compelling messages” (Kent, 2015: 481), conveys authenticity and even changes audience behavior or assumptions (Lane, 2023). Research in this area supports the idea that storytelling is an effective mode of communication for organizations seeking to help their employees make sense of change (Spear and Roper, 2016; Vaara et al., 2016) and to improve stakeholder engagement (Lane, 2023). Storytelling aligns with other integrated approaches to coordinating communication “which allows the organization to tell a univocal self-story” (Johansen, 2012: 242). Storytelling is valued for its simplicity as a single story and BME narrative provides a framework for influencing the sensemaking process in organizations.

Indeed sensemaking is a key function of organizational storytelling, but organizational research indicates that not all sensemaking fits into the single-story framework (Boje, 2001). As discussed more fully below, organizational scholar David Boje was influenced by postmodern narratology research to explore how narrative practices often involve partial or fragmented narratives from multiple perspectives and involving multiple voices (Boje, 2007). In research drawing on analysis of transcriptions of everyday conversations from organizational settings (Boje, 1991) and video and audio recordings in archives (Boje, 1995), Boje argues that a new concept, antenarrative, is needed to explain narrative fragments “where plots are not possible, or are at least contested and speculative” (Boje, 2007: 223). David Boje uses narratology theories common in literature to reframe the problematics of storytelling in organizational contexts (Vaara et al., 2016). Antenarrative is defined as “the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-narrative speculation, a bet ... a wager that a proper narrative can be constituted” (Boje, 2001: 1). Discussed in more detail in the rest of this paper are the ways the contested and speculative dimensions of sensemaking (Jørgensen and Boje, 2009) are in a productive tension with the normative ideals of a single story in organizational communication.

To expand storytelling approaches in the communication discipline, the question guiding this paper is: Why are theories of narrative fragments important for communication professionals to conceive of storytelling? Or put another way, if the BME narrative model is the dominant trope for organizational storytelling, how can antenarrative help communication professionals explore the limits of their current approaches and consider alternative perspectives to supplement these practices? The goal of this paper is not to offer an extended literature review of storytelling, but rather to offer an antenarrative perspective for an understanding of current theories and empirical research of narrative fragments. First, this paper explores the rise of storytelling and its importance for communication. Second, normative storytelling with its recognizable BME structure and its compatibility with traditional models of communication is examined. Third, this paper outlines the broader conceptual currents in literature to identify approaches to storytelling that embrace narrative fragments, which this paper argues can enrich contemporary communication research and practices. Fourth, the limitations of BME narrative are addressed to spark broader discussions in the field about emergent storytelling episodes – particularly the concept of antenarrative (Boje, 2007). Finally, the practical implications for communication professionals to conceive of storytelling as comprising both BME narrative and antenarrative are examined.

An interdisciplinary approach has been taken for this conceptual essay. Since the mid-1990s there has been an interest in storytelling across disciplines in the media and communication fields, which themselves have emerged from a wide range of disciplinary sites and embrace interdisciplinarity (O'Malley, 2002; Tench and Bridge, 2022). There has been a greater research focus on stories and storytelling in the past decade.¹ Many types of storytelling have been examined, ranging from documentary-style storytelling to digital storytelling and transmedia storytelling. In recent research, a frequently discussed form of storytelling was digital storytelling. As a communication medium, digital storytelling allows ethnographic insiders to share their autobiographical stories and expand knowledge of lived experiences including serving in wars, living in small towns and gender diversity (McWilliam and Bickle, 2017; Potter, 2017; Vivienne, 2018). Digital storytelling was developed in the early 1990s (McWilliam and Bickle, 2017) and relied on narrative structures and required particular skill sets for self-documenting. More recent technologically mediated forms of digital storytelling and digital literacy have expanded opportunities for, and receptivity to, user-generated content. With the rise of Web 2.0 and social media there was hope for marginalized voices to be heard on a public scale and influence social change (Dreher, 2012; Poletti, 2011). In a digital age anyone can create content and join online collaborations where storytelling is emergent and lacks “definite beginnings and endings” (Ashton, 2015; Frankham, 2015: 123; Sweet et al., 2013; Vivienne, 2018). With digital communication technologies there are more voices and stories being shared in new ways and put into circulation, however, ‘informal storytelling' has always been a feature of organizational life (Coopman and Meidlinger, 2000) as have the narrative fragments that are evident in everyday conversations and texts (Boje and Rosile, 2019). Narrative fragments that can form emergent storytelling episodes is an important category of storying the organization and is part of a broader sensemaking process which is non-linear and more complex than an organization’s story about itself (Sandham and Fuller, 2020). The focus of this paper is the antenarrative dimension of storytelling for an organizational or institutional context.

Storytelling as a linear process

When communication professionals approach the strategic role of storytelling as a linear process based on the concept of narrative, this process takes a narrow view of audiences. There is an emphasis on controlling and shaping the story to reflect the organization’s preferred perspective and to make it appealing to audiences. This then requires communication professionals to minimize variables such as voices and maximize structures such as plots or storylines to leverage the power of storytelling for the organization. This view aligns with a broader managerial preference for univocal or unidirectional communication practices (Andersson et al., 2023). Christensen and Cornelissen (2011: 391) explore the limitations of corporate communication with its univocal focus including “a strongly sender-biased view on communication that ignores or at least downplays the interpretative propensities and capabilities of the alleged receiver.” Macnamara (2012) analyzed public relations textbooks and reference books and found that audiences were primarily understood as passive recipients of transmitted information. Such textbooks continue to emphasize systems theory including linear models of communication such as Shannon and Weaver’s transmission model from the 1940s (Macnamara, 2012). The transmission model has strongly influenced how professionals and researchers frame an organization’s public communication, which tends to be one-way information transmission or “speaking-oriented” such as ‘informing’, ‘disseminating’, ‘telling’ and ‘distributing’ (Macnamara, 2018: 10-11). There is recognition in the communication field that organizational storytelling as a unidirectional and linear mode of communication is an oversimplification of storytelling in practice (Kent, 2015). Similarly, transactional interaction models of communication have challenged one-way transmission of messages however two-way concepts such as voice, dialogue, engagement and listening are according to Macnamara (2019: 5183) “implicit or described in sketchy terms” in communication studies. There is an ongoing preference for single story approaches, such as BME narrative, which rely on narrative elements and a linear process for telling the organization’s story.

Traditional narrative approaches to crisis communication focus on the organization’s self-storying or presenting the crisis from the organization’s perspective rather than paying attention to the multiple narratives circulating (Gilpin, 2008), a practice which continues in our digital age (Eriksson, 2018). A univocal approach has now been identified as having limitations, however, as the risk of sticking to a single story fails to account for the sophistication of audiences who “edited, accepted, and rejected” the story (Johansen, 2012: 241). Furthermore, social media has changed the way audiences are understood as “online media provides an opportunity for those voices to be heard” and control of the narrative is elusive (Chewning, 2015: 72). Audiences may pay attention to official channels of organizations but are also sourcing information in the media (Chewning, 2015) and through informal networks (Heide and Simonsson, 2015). Crisis communication professionals must now respond to an ever-changing media landscape including the shifting status of audiences and impact of social media. Johansen (2017b: 109) examined consulting firms that specialize in crisis communication, as these firms are managing crises regularly, to understand how communication professionals contend with these changes. In practice, there was a mix of traditional and contemporary approaches although “the consultants recognized that crises had become more complex and impossible to control, and this points in the direction of a more emergent approach to crisis management” to account for the multiple voices that interact during a crisis (Johansen, 2017b: 118). Crisis communication research is providing insights for practice by attending to the perceptions of audiences and their diverse interpretations of a crisis (Marsen, 2020). The intent of such understandings is not for consensus seeking, rather for an expanded understanding of audiences as dynamic in an expanded public sphere (Dawson and Brunner, 2020).

There is a growing expectation that crisis communication pays attention to multiple voices as active sense makers, while also providing clarity and mitigating anxiety. Frandsen and Johansen (2018) argue the theories underpinning crisis communication have begun to contend with complexity through the development of multivocal approaches. There is an acceptance that many more people are considered stakeholders and their sensemaking matters before and during a crisis. Selective choices need to be made about the stakeholders an organization values and the inclusion of some perspectives which will likely include alternative and even critical views (Ihlen and Levenshus, 2017). Multivocality and multiple interpretations of crisis communication is noteworthy because it requires a “greater appreciation of sense making and the enacting aspects of communication” (Heide and Simonsson, 2015: 245). Thus paying attention or tuning in to discursive struggles recognizes that social media is “empower[ing] individual agency and provid[ing] new spaces for collective actions and participatory cultures” (Andersen and Johansen, 2024: 142). There has been a shift in research from functional transmission of crisis messages and a single story approach, to the importance of interpretation and sensemaking including informal storytelling in times of crisis. Multivocal approaches are responsive to contemporary understandings of crisis communication and one way of contending with the complexity of audiences and the new media landscape.

A common way that communication practitioners conceive of storytelling is as a planned communication practice that creates engaging content, which suggests that the content generates a positive response from the audience or meets an organization’s strategic communication objectives in some way (Sandham, 2024). This is a narrow view of ‘engagement’ which is two-fold. First, communication is conceived as a conduit for one-way messaging. In practice, two-way interaction, when it does occur, is performed as a top-down process of consultation or listening for organizational benefit (Macnamara, 2016b). Second, effectiveness is measured in terms of audience response to the messaging. With social media, connectivity is 24/7 and audience responses can be measured in platform-based gestures such as likes and shares, which have shifted the focus of engagement toward data extraction and analytics (McCosker, 2017). A broader view of engagement as a relational concept can be found in public relations research (Johnston and Lane, 2021; Lane, 2023). A relational definition of engagement has been embraced as part of a discipline-led shift which is more inclusive of stakeholder perspectives and voices (Waymer and Logan, 2021), including through narrative approaches to communication. Lane (2023) distinguishes storytelling from other organizational communication practices through the concept of engagement. Engagement is valued for generating behavioral outcomes that align with strategic objectives including connection and participation (Johnston and Lane, 2021). Indeed, an engagement perspective is a promising avenue for further research on BME narrative in a management context. Lane (2023) proposes a model of organizational storytelling and a framework for crafting storytelling in organizations as a distinct type of organizational communication. In particular, to be ‘good’ organizational storytelling this practice would deliver elements of engagement that are cognitive, affective, and behavioral.

Clearly, there is something about good organizational storytelling that has an impact beyond that of other communication forms. Organizational storytelling works because storytelling works. And storytelling works because it is engaging. Therefore, good organizational storytelling is engaging too. (Lane, 2023: 6)

A narrow view of storytelling such as ‘corporate storytelling’ would simply consider “the stories that companies tell their stakeholders” (Atarama-Rojas et al., 2022: 3), while Lane’s organizational storytelling includes the stories that stakeholders tell to the organization either directly or through communication professionals or channels. Importantly, from an engagement perspective, stakeholder storytelling is oriented in a pro-social way toward the organization with the organization also reciprocating through listening and being responsive. The distinction being made by Lane here is that audiences are sophisticated as “formal organizational stories are shared, embellished, revised, and refined by audiences among themselves” (Lane, 2023: 5). However, informal storytelling between stakeholders rather than to the organization is outside of the parameters of organizational storytelling. Put simply, informal storytelling is “beyond managerial control” (Norlyk et al., 2014: 2; Boje, 2001; Atarama-Rojas et al., 2022) and so these diverse audience perspectives are still considered problematic. A broader approach to sensemaking, this paper argues, would include informal storytelling between stakeholders, and include the exchange of narrative fragments not yet developed into an overarching story, as a valuable and necessary consideration for organizational storytelling.

Broader approaches to the way audiences are co-constitutive of organizational sensemaking are harnessed in professional fields adjacent to organizational communication. In grassroots activism and social movements, storytelling approaches explicitly and implicitly recognize the participatory logic or multivocality that underpins storytelling. Political communications scholar Ariadne Vromen has explored how storytelling is employed as a tactic to deliver a strategic goal, where it is explicitly understood that the audience will generate the next iterations of the organization’s social movement story. Vromen analyzed how the Australian online activist organization GetUp! created “online campaign stories” as the master narrative for a campaign on social issues ranging from LGBTQI rights to climate change to generate commitment toward the issue (Vromen and Coleman, 2013: 76). Vromen (2016: 226) found the purposeful use of storytelling “can successfully elicit an affective response among members and targets, helping them to feel connected with a campaign and a movement.” The intent of GetUp!’s storytelling is to invite contestation and identification from participatory audiences who get to create the end of the story (Vromen, 2016). In the context of social change, storytelling is emergent and supports the formation of identification with social issues and mobilization as part of a social movement.

Storytelling as a non-linear sensemaking process

As sensemaking of the organization’s story about itself is not predetermined, an understanding of emergent storytelling is important for organizations. Emergence was a broader conceptual current and focus of research in organizational studies before our digital era. A key proponent was American scholar David Boje who coined the term antenarrative in 2001 to describe narrative fragments and how these fragments challenge traditional storytelling approaches. Boje’s early work in the 1990s argued for the key role of stories in sensemaking and human relationships, and his prolific work since then on antenarrative has been cited extensively across disciplines from human relations to change management and organizational studies. Bringing a critical postmodern perspective, Boje identified that there are no “single-story interpretations of organization” (Boje, 1995: 1001) and expanded our understanding of what constitutes storytelling. Boje identified the important role not just of tellers but also of participants who, rather than passive recipients, were co-producers of the “storytelling episodes” (Boje, 1991: 107). Boje (1991: 113) also identified that in these episodes of storytelling, not all stories were ‘distinguishable’ because they were “story fragments”, however, these fragments formed part of the collective storytelling performance. Furthermore Boje’s work demonstrated how stories that are fragmented are subverting the “managed harmony of the official story” (Boje, 1995: 1020). Through this research he identified the non-linear nature of storytelling and the plurivocal (or multivocal) interpretation of organizational stories which he plots on a continuum: at one end is the organization’s attempts to “oppress by subordinating everyone and collapsing everything” to a single story and at the other end an organization is “a pluralistic construction of a multiplicity of stories, storytellers, and story performance events” (Boje, 1995: 1000). Boje proposed antenarrative as, first, before-story, and second, due to the speculative dimension of language with its expressive characteristics, as a bet on the future or “a wager that a proper narrative can be constituted” (Boje, 2001: 1). Thus antenarrative has a double meaning of pre-story as well as “a gambler’s bet that a before-story (pre-story) can take flight and disrupt and transform narrative practice” (Boje, 2007: 223). Organizational narrative in this context emerges from an entangled complexity of production and reception rather than being something (pre)determined or projected. Boje challenged the privileging or elite status given to stories with BME narrative structures and highlighted the need for theories and methods for “the analysis of stories that are too unconstructed and fragmented to be analyzed in traditional approaches” (Boje, 2001: 1). Boje’s research asserts that antenarrative should not be ignored or seen as less important than traditional narrative forms of sensemaking.

Communication scholar Trine Susanne Johansen has used antenarrative theory to explore how fragments, not just narratives, can help a communication professional answer the perennial question for their organization of how “to navigate amongst the different stories that seek to define it” (Johansen, 2012: 243). Johansen (2014: 334) uses an antenarrative research method to explore collective identity which is constituted in BME narrative as well as “story aspirations” or antenarrative. Johansen uses (ante)stories to signify that both BME narrative and “antestories which are fragmented and incomplete” serve a function for organizations and are complementary (Johansen, 2014: 332). Johansen’s study of dairy multinational Arla Foods is an exemplar case study as the company’s “self-storying” or organizational storytelling has been challenged by story fragments (Johansen, 2014: 336). Similar to Boje, Johansen examined ‘in situ’ storytelling at customer tours of dairies which serve as visitor centers and also incorporated consumer communication from “weblogs, email correspondence, telephone conversations and letters” (Johansen, 2014: 336). Furthermore, Johansen (2012: 233) delineates the limits of strategic self-storying as a practice and asserts instead that “organizational storytelling is ambiguous, collaborative and emergent.” Johansen’s call to organizations is to widen their perspective from univocal self-storying and allow outside voices to be reflected in stories and other interpretations of the organization. A key feature of antenarrative inquiry for Johansen is “not looking for clearly delimited stories with beginnings, middles and ends, but rather focusing on storytelling episodes” (Johansen, 2014: 337). Or put another way, storytelling episodes provide a window to story performances, where specific versions of stories are told and retold. While plot and chronology provide structure for BME narrative, antenarrative takes a performative and emergent view of storytelling which is more helpful for understanding alternative interpretations of organizational communication.

Limits of BME narrative

There are three key challenges for linear approaches to sensemaking such as BME narrative, which are favored by management and communication professionals. The first is related to the complexity and messiness of storytelling. Practices of professional communication are premised on linear transmission models of communication where complexity and messiness, if they are discussed, are encouraged to be suppressed. A corporate strategy is an example of a communication practice using top-down modes of address such as a rehearsed official story to communicate to employees and other stakeholders. Yet employees are organizational storytellers too and their ‘unofficial stories’ can subvert official storytelling (Spear and Roper, 2016). Rather than viewing these unofficial stories as noise that is disrupting the message being sent, these subversive voices and stories can reveal hegemony and discrepancies which can advance important social issues such as diversity (Syed and Boje, 2007). For communication professionals the complexity of storytelling can provide important insights. First, rather than assuming that your official story will be uncontested, it is important to consider that your story is more likely to prompt different and even polarizing views (Johansen and Andersen, 2012; Johansen, 2012). In fact, an official story during times of change is often the impetus for unofficial or informal storytelling (Landau et al., 2014). Second, stories that don’t generate support for your organizational objectives can deepen understandings of complexity or support an iterative or even collaborative approach to organizational storytelling (Boje, 1995; Johansen, 2012; Spear and Roper, 2016). Or put another way, informal storytelling may reveal new knowledge that may change the narrative if an organization is willing to listen. An orientation to listening, such as to employee stories, will depend on whether employees are viewed as passive recipients of communication or active storytellers and co-constructors of meaning (Heide and Simonsson, 2011; Johansen, 2017a). Furthermore, an organization may not like what it hears as “listening requires negotiation of silence, questions and argumentation, dealing with difference, and acceptance of the risk of one’s own views being challenged or even proved wrong” (Macnamara, 2013: 167). While BME narrative doesn’t emphasize narrative fragments (Boje, 2001; Boje, 2008; Boje and Rosile, 2008; Johansen, 2014), listening to the informal storytelling of employees and other stakeholders is one way to embrace the complexity of organizational storytelling.

The second challenge for BME narrative is a reliance on linear temporality to provide a sense of control and predictability over the future. BME narrative simplifies the future with its causal logic and plotted progression of cause and effect that is inevitable. With BME narrative there is a lingering connection with information transmission approaches and efforts to reduce noise so that the message sent is the message received. A desire for certainty and an uncontested future, fails to account for stakeholder speculations about the future. Lane (2023) seeks to extend organizational storytelling from BME narrative to include stakeholder storytelling. That is, communication professionals can help organizations identify emergent future-making through constructing and presenting “stakeholder points of view” or “future stories” (Lane, 2023: 8). This is promising for BME narrative as it challenges the assumption that the causal logic of the organization’s self-storying is the only plausible explanation of the future and that stakeholder stories are noise. As Boje found in his examination of sensemaking in organizations, narrative fragments are antenarrative bets on the future. Antenarrative introduces the idea of co-narration and with it the probability that there are other possible futures that may unfold. Analyzing antenarrative is a productive way to explore the multiple perspectives that are circulating. As one example, in recent antenarrative research on tech giant Google, the company’s pro-diversity strategy envisaging a future with more female software engineers, encountered competing discourses and contestations from stakeholders including employees that “plot multiple futures for Google and the tech industry at large” and challenged Google’s self-storying (Sandham and Fuller, 2020: 435). Rather than a diverse workforce as a linear and inevitable outcome of Google’s diversity strategy, or vice versa, there are multiple stakeholder speculations about the future. Antenarrative is “pre-constitutive” of those future narratives (Boje, 2020: 68). That these narrative fragments are in circulation and can be mobilized in ways that are beyond the control of the organization’s story is a necessary consideration for communication professionals. Sensemaking as a non-linear process demonstrates that the future is uncertain and the narrative fragments that are circulating (about the future) can have an impact on the organization’s story (in the present) including creating uncertainty about the future.

The third challenge for BME approaches to storytelling is the change and disruption that technological innovation has enabled, particularly the uptake of social media. Digital communication technologies have removed the ‘middleman’ and disintermediation has blurred boundaries. Boje found that organizational discourse spilled out from the confines of the organization in a pre-digital era (Boje, 1991, 1995), now there has been an intensification of this process. For example, communication professionals are contending with ‘spillages’ and multiple stories in circulation with “the proliferation of narratives about organizations outside of the focal organization, such as on the internet and in social media networks” (Vaara et al., 2016: 528). Employees are a new locus for narrative fragments with the sharing of alternative stories via social media (Dawson and Bencherki, 2022) and real-time interactions across time and space (Dawson and Brunner, 2020) as examples of porous boundaries. In their research on employees of the National Park Service (NPS) in America, Dawson and Bencherki (2022: 2094) found NPS employees engaged in social media resistance through their posts on X (formerly Twitter) which “expand beyond clear organizational demarcations” and display a level of organizationality ‘outside’ the organization including conveying authority. Employees are not ‘contained’ within organizations and are part of social media communities and social movements. These communities and publics share narrative fragments that can disrupt the organization’s story, as meaning is in flux and not yet formed or changed. To examine this state of flux, Louis and Mielly (2023) explore identity formation during the early stages of a social movement through analysis of social media posts such as tweets on the digital platform X. Their study found antenarrative theory effective for examining narrative fragments and “their potential for disrupting the dominant stories” (109) in the context of social movements. In this research, the authors synthesize antenarrative fragments – or “digital (ante)narratives” that co-constitute online collective identity formation (90) – into antenarrative themes and make the point that the temporality of the narrative fragments are different to BME narrative in terms of how people connect through the fragments. Of note is the lack of linear temporality in online contexts as “the sheer accumulation, simultaneity, and speed of digital communication entangles and jumbles the temporal bearings—and perhaps the meanings—of such narratives” (Louis and Mielly, 2023: 91). Beyond disruption, narrative fragments help participants in social movements to mobilize in ways that BME narrative does not.

In our digital age, the limits of a single-story approach, and continuing to deploy and reinforce univocal communication, are reached when contending with complexity, entanglements and disruption. The story an organization tells about itself is intended to transmit a pre-determined meaning (Johansen, 2012; Johansen, 2014). In contrast, “antenarrative derives its organizing force in emergent storytelling where plots are not possible, or are at least contested and speculative—rich in polyphony and polysemy” (Boje, 2007: 223). A single-story approach aligns with communication ideals of the linear transmission of messaging and control of meaning (Christensen and Cornelissen, 2011). The need for organizations to navigate the emergent storytelling of participatory publics is reinforced through the research of Andersen and Johansen (2024), who found that organizations which engage in brand activism – that is, align their brand with an important social issue – need to navigate emergence as well as broader sociopolitical contexts to stay relevant. Brand activism becomes an exercise in managing the complexity of multiple dialogues as “[t]he volatile narrative environment that exists online creates the need for brands to engage in multiple storylines at once” (Andersen and Johansen, 2024: 10). For organizations, their brand is evolving over time and they are in conversation with the fragmented, non-linear and incomplete storytelling that is circulating and simultaneously seeking to define the organization. As mentioned earlier, navigating the multiple stories that seek to define an organization is a perennial challenge for communication professionals.

Practical implications

The practical implications for communication professionals to conceive of storytelling as BME narrative and antenarrative may at first appear daunting with a definition of organizational storytelling that includes open-ended and multidirectional storytelling. However, advancements in organizational listening have shown that such an endeavor is possible. Both Boje and Johansen’s research and their research collaborations with other authors have provided evidence that antenarrative for organizations is expansive to the point of being ‘uncountable’. Nevertheless, analysis of antenarrative can provide a ‘snapshot’ of what would otherwise be “fleeting, changing and dynamic” (Johansen, 2014: 346). As mentioned earlier, Johansen (2014: 337) analyses “specific versions of a story that occur within storytelling episodes.” The telling and retelling of stories and how they change would be the focus for organizational listening. There has been resurgence in interest in organizational listening across communication fields including public relations (Macnamara, 2016a, 2016c; Place, 2023) and organizational communication (Barbour, 2017; Neill and Bowen, 2021). Macnamara (2018) advocates a strategic approach to listening that considers the reflexive circulation of public discourse. He challenges the reliance on information transmission approaches, encouraging communication professionals to “step beyond existing paradigms that are primarily focused on serving the interests of organizations, largely through one-way information and persuasion in media” such as during crises (Macnamara, 2021: 84).

Macnamara’s internationally recognized research on organizational listening is premised on how well organizations listen to publics and stakeholders. He found that evidence of public discontent is easily found in letters, emails and social media as well as surveys in advance of elections and referendums (Macnamara, 2018, 2020). Building on this approach, listening to episodes of antenarrative could be diagnostic (e.g. identify gaps or patterns) for the organization’s self-storying as well as collaborative (e.g. stakeholder storytelling) for embracing multivocality. In practice, an antenarrative method incorporates listening that requires communication professionals to “suspend widely held notions of proper storytelling and learn to listen in a different way” (Tye-Williams and Krone, 2015: 20) as not all stories are BME narratives. As a process, antenarrative is collectively produced through the fragmented telling and retellings of multiple stakeholders with different and conflicting stories (Johansen, 2014), which means listening would be different or scaled up compared to conventional listening exercises. As a result, antenarrative methods generate insights which may not have been revealed through conventional approaches (Johansen, 2012; Johansen, 2014; Rosile, 2011; Tye-Williams and Krone, 2015). As one example of listening to narrative fragments, Tye-Williams and Krone (2015) use Boje’s antenarrative approach to theme analysis. The researchers found stories that “lack narrative order and sequence” to be more common in their research on workplace bullying (Tye-Williams and Krone, 2015: 11). Expecting survivors of bullying to apply storytelling structures such as plot “may result in silencing those who might be unable to conform to the standards of good storytelling” as trauma experiences “often lacked an ending that nicely wrapped up the story” as they are ongoing (11). The researchers said an antenarrative analysis provided access to the sensemaking processes among employees and supported a more inclusive response to workplace bullying (Tye-Williams and Krone, 2015). Therefore, the key implication for communication professionals in incorporating the concept and method of antenarrative into their professional practice is that it enables them to listen to stories that do not have formal narrative structures. Paying attention to non-linear storytelling and the insights this offers is one way to listen for a more sophisticated understanding that can challenge the status quo. Expanding what could be included in organizational listening can generate new understandings of complex personal experiences, rather than serving functional goals such as obtaining feedback or tailoring messaging.

Even though antenarrative approaches are expansive and insightful, narrative fragments can be appropriated for purely functional organizational goals. There is nothing inherent to an antenarrative approach that makes it more inclusive or demarginalizing. Rather, it is the organization’s disposition toward the use of these narrative fragments. In Boje’s early research on the collapse of corporate giant Enron, he found Enron’s organizational leaders made predictions which were strategically fragmented. Boje and Rosile (2003: 88) found statements of organizational leaders to be “corporate and state stagecraft” intended to sedate their audience and reduce opportunities for change.

Antenarratives become part of Enron’s façade […] Enron made the antenarrative bluff that Washington politicians, business professors, and Wall Street analysts would not be able to distinguish between fiction and reality (Boje and Rosile, 2003: 118).

Boje (2007: 228) argues that Enron “seduced spectators and stakeholders into willingly suspending disbelief” that it was unsustainable practices that caused the collapse. In more recent research, Boje (2020) uses the example of a ‘business-as-usual’ future in sustainability strategies that has become part of an antenarrative ‘façade’ that organizations and governments use to justify continuing to do what they currently do rather than evolve to meet global sustainability targets. In a different but related way, communication scholars are debating the use of ‘aspirational talk’ as a strategy for corporate social responsibility as “it may be difficult for the audience to evaluate how talk and further action are related, if at all” (Christensen et al., 2021: 416). For example, energy companies are prolific communicators about climate change and they use their websites as a channel to describe organizational behavior toward renewable energy yet may “purposely choose to sweep their nuclear energy reliance under the rug” when communicating about the corporate strategy or actions (Weder et al., 2019: 382). Listening for discursive shifts in ‘strategic’ storytelling to appeal to particular audiences (Boje, 2006) is one way to identify the calculated use or misuse of antenarrative to confuse and distract. As narrative and antenarrative approaches can be used in ways that are reductive, disenfranchising and marginalizing (Boje, 2023), there is an even greater challenge for communication professionals as they balance the needs of their organization with their professional ethics.

Conclusion

Sensemaking in organizational storytelling extends along a spectrum of linear storytelling (BME narrative) to antenarrative or prospective sensemaking. BME narrative supports organizations to communicate more effectively and so there has been a focus and reliance on linear storytelling as a key site of sensemaking. In recent times, relational approaches to narrative have sought to expand what constitutes good BME narrative. Theorizing of organizational storytelling with engagement (Lane, 2023), for example, explores relationality through stakeholder storytelling to the organization. Antenarrative describes a broader concept and sensemaking process that is more prevalent than linear storytelling, yet it has been on the sidelines of communication research. This paper argues for a further expansion of the parameters of organizational storytelling to include multivocal non-linear sensemaking such as informal storytelling between stakeholders. It is not a case of either or, rather important context is missed through narrow conceptualizations. In our digital age, the multiple voices and stories that are circulating further highlights the limits of linear organizational storytelling as sensemaking processes spill out of (porous) organizational boundaries. As individuals and collectives mobilise in dynamic ways, sensemaking practices are non-linear and ‘messy’. A productive way to broaden the parameters of organisational storytelling is to explore antenarrative on social media beyond the organisation’s website and owned social media channels. This paper has identified antenarrative methods as a practical approach for communication professionals to understand the complexity, temporality and flux of sensemaking processes. In particular, this paper has demonstrated the value of listening to episodes of antenarrative, the possibilities for deeper and richer insights through antenarrative research that can benefit individuals and organizations, and the potential for misuse of narrative fragments. Antenarrative research provides a nuanced and comprehensive approach to examining narrative fragments that can form emergent storytelling episodes and is a promising avenue of further study for organizational storytelling.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical statement

ORCID iD

Sonya Sandham

Note

Author biography

Sonya Sandham is a communication strategist who works with corporations and government agencies and lectures in communication at the University of Canberra. She specializes in voice, engagement and strategic storytelling. Sonya is undertaking doctoral research in the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra to explore the multivocal context of organisational storytelling and the value of diverse voices from an organizational communication perspective. Her research interests include antenarrative, commentary and belonging in our digital era. Sonya started her career as a journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Sensemaking in organizational storytelling: From linear storytelling to antenarrative

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Storytelling as a linear process

Storytelling as a non-linear sensemaking process

Limits of BME narrative

Practical implications

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Ethical statement

ORCID iD

Note

Author biography

References