David M BojeNew Mexico State University | NMSU · Department of Management
David M Boje
Ph.D.
About
250
Publications
137,358
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11,211
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
June 1996 - present
Position
- Professor (Full)
Description
- I research, teach, and write about storytelling.
Publications
Publications (250)
This article combines Bourdieusian practice with narrative sociomaterial theory to investigate what story of higher education and its purpose is being conveyed to students. Our case study revolves around a Danish university. We conduct a sociomaterial analysis of three university sites: an information day for prospective students, a video of a camp...
This chapter will provide a general conceptual overview of a sustainability-driven business modeling (SBM) strategy from a "storytelling science" perspective. Storytelling science uses C.S. Peirce's abduction-induction-deduction (AID) approach in a self-correcting series of cycles in order to get closer to what is true for the ecology as a whole, a...
This opening article for the first issue of Volume 40 of the Organization Development Journal introduces the topic of the special issue. Focused on OD and its applications on working in, with, and through the grand challenges and hard problems in society, the editors introduce the special issues by briefly discussing organization development's hist...
Creative leadership has been studied in different collaborative contexts that can be summarized as facilitating employees' creativity, directing the realization of the creative vision of a leader, and integrating different and diverse creative contributions. In this paper, we present the findings from a qualitative meta-analysis of literature-based...
My purpose is to put Brier’s cybernetics in a more integrative relation to my own theory of storytelling. The main argument I want to make is that it is time to integrate storytelling into cybersemiotics. On the one hand, cybersemiotics integrates cybernetics of von Foerster, Maturana, Varela and especially Luhmann with Peirce’s semiotics. In cyber...
This study explains how participatory action research has been used to create a new intersubjective awareness of the phenomenon of organizational culture. The question of creating voluntary democratic participation has been crucial for all stakeholders in this case. Through this two-and-a-half-year study including more than 30 workshops, in a marin...
The chapter argues for a storytelling framework for sustainable problem-based learning (PBL). An important aspect of PBL is to learn how to be responsible and answerable. Such competences can only be learnt if students interact with the world. This ethical purpose is, however, often forgotten in PBL rhetoric. We propose to address this. The 17 UN d...
Purpose: To develop a transdisciplinary approach called eco-business modelling.
Design Methodology Approach: The first step is an analysis of the ways triple bottom line and circular economy emplotments have colonized and co-opted the United Nations and European Union Agenda 2030 initiatives by privileging business-as-usual scenarios. The second...
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has successfully combated modern-day slavery by transforming the ways that over a dozen major brands, including Taco Bell, Subway, and Wal-Mart, manage their supply chains. The CIW’s efforts over more than 20 years have effectively stopped enslavement practices, including abuses such as wage theft and peonag...
This essay is about methods of interpretation of conversational storytelling. By doing what Donna Haraway calls ‘multispecies storytelling’ research involving humans, dogs, and various animal organisations, we use storytelling to study what we call ‘pet capitalism’. We address the problems of interpreting story fragments in multispecies storytellin...
This paper uses observations from empirical articles and personal experiences of the authors to explore issues associated with the rise of neoliberalism and academic capitalism in the contemporary public university. It frames these issues as stemming from conflicting ontologies between academicians who adhere to the differentiated individual ontolo...
Purpose
This paper aims to offer an analysis of the British Petroleum (BP) Prudhoe Bay environmental disaster. The primary purpose is to elucidate the fivefold of antenarrative in sensemaking environmental accidents. The analytic framework enables organization to envision futures where they want to be, and work to get there as more socially respons...
Accounts of the creative process tend to be retrospective and implicitly ground the creative act within the person, the mind, the moment, the idea; in doing so, they often miss the larger sociomaterial qualities that can provide us with important insights about the social relationality and playfulness of the creative process. In this article, we ex...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the ideological impasses between educationally minded faculty and neoliberal oriented university administrators. To bridge and benefit from these two perspectives, Follettian integration is introduced. Specifically, the ensemble learning theory (ELT) and entrepreneurship centers are illustrated as...
Storytelling organization is transforming. Epic stories of lived experience are no longer communicable in corporation, schools, or government; it is only discourse that matters. It has taken a long time. Slowly, the invention of the printing press gave birth to the novel and the newspaper, which convey discourse as text with hardly any epic story w...
There is a rich tradition of studying narratives in the fields of communication and language at work. Our purpose is to review two approaches to narrative-counter-narrative dynamics. The first is ‘storytelling organization theory’ (SOT), which interplays western retrospective-narrative ways of knowing with more indigenous ways of knowing called ‘li...
‘Organizational research methods’ (ORM) are making an ontological turn by studying the nature of Being, becoming, and the meaning of existence in the world. For example, without ontology, there is no ‘ground’ and no ‘theory’ in Grounded Theory (GT). This book explores ten ways to develop fourth wave GT that is grounded and theory. 1st wave GT commi...
Walter Benjamin (Chicago Review, 16(1), 80–101, 1963) believed that storytelling was dying because its replacement (narrative and information) was no longer grounded in a living or material world of crafts and practicality. In this chapter, we attempt to bring storytelling to the living material world. We tie storytelling to a wide range of discipl...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a new model for depicting organizational processes: the episodic spiral model (ESM).
Design/methodology/approach
On the basis of a strong process view as the orienting paradigm, the authors demonstrate the need for the ESM by discussing the shortcomings of two specific spiral types in the organizatio...
Purpose
Calls for dialectical learning process model development in learning organizations have largely gone unheeded, thereby limiting conceptual understanding and application in the field. This paper aims to unify learning organization theory with a new understanding of Hegelian dialectics to trace the development of the storytelling learning or...
This paper brings to light stories of Heather Höpfl. Its purpose is to show how Heather was and is present for us. We also illustrate Professor Dr Heather Höpfl’s contribution to organization theory, specifically her discourse of the maternal organization.
The importance of work–life balance has increased dramatically in recent years. Hyperconnected employees are struggling to balance the “spillover” between internal work and external life demands. We questioned whether there was a difference in organizationally supported work–life balance at Fortune Magazine’s “Best Places to Work For” versus Wall S...
In this narrative review we go beyond other organizational creativity research attempting to find a comprehensive narrative structure of creative conditions and look instead through an antenarrative lens at more dynamic interplay of embodied practices that can bring about new discoveries. Through theorizing, contextualised in the haute cuisine indu...
The purpose of this paper is to introduce the theory and application of Embodied Restorying
Practices (ERPs), an intervention designed to promote military family reintegration. ERPs are a
form of family storytelling that takes on a sociomaterial, translational approach. ERPs are geared
toward individuals and families who have experienced stress,...
We offer an “ensemble” theory of leadership that emerges from contemporary indigenous scholarship and also from the archeology of the prehispanic southwest. We see ensemble leadership theory as starting from a different origin: the indigenous world-view. It provides an emphasis in the leadership context, which is largely missing in traditional lead...
Purpose
– Professor Slawomir Magala is a full professor of Cross-Management at the Department of Organization and Personnel Management in Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University (RSM, 2015). His education stems from Poland, Germany and the USA, and has taught and conducted research in China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Croatia, Estonia, the...
This research extends our understanding of organizational sensemaking through storytelling to highlight complex processes of organizational change in space, time and strategic context. We focus on the concept of antenarratives, how managers’ and other stakeholders’ fragmented speculations regarding futures may legitimate or resist organizational ch...
Although narrative analysis has made significant advances in organization and management studies, scholars have not yet unleashed its full potential. This review provides an understanding of key issues in organizational narrative analysis with a focus on the role of narratives in organizational stability and change. We start by elaborating on the c...
We developed a theory of an antenarrative practices in relation to the interplay of dominant cultural narratives and counternarratives of resistance. Antenarrative is defined here as the field of forces Before, Between, Beneath, Bets and Becoming that occurs in the reduction of diverse living stories of Self to hegemonic narratives and counternarra...
Within organizations, there are occasions where a contract negotiation is recognizable, e.g. a job offer. However, that situation is already embedded in other structures and negotiations. This article explores the nature of such embeddedness. We extend negotiation theory by adding an analysis of the multiplicity of contexts that inform the process...
This book offers a fresh perspective on organizational development and change theory and practice. Building on their recent work in quantum storytelling theory and complexity theory, Henderson and Boje consider the implications of fractal patterns in human behavior with a view toward ethics in organization development for the modern world. Building...
The Problem
How can leaders learn to use power in ways that minimize oppression and resistance, and instead are more liberating? As perceived oppression leads to resistance, leaders who are untrained in these power dynamics may enact oppressive behaviors and trigger resistance without awareness or intention to do so.
The Solution
This article desc...
This publication is forthcoming. This research extends our understanding of organizational sensemaking through storytelling to highlight complex processes of organizational change in space, time and strategic context. We focus on the concept of antenarratives, how managers’ and other stakeholders’ fragmented speculations regarding futures may legit...
In a recent study of more than 2500 organizations in more than 90 countries it was found that organizations worldwide are struggling to engage 21st century employees. We contend that using yesterday’s organizational outlook of ‘whole systems’ is harming organizations in today’s hyper-connectivity and fractal organization. We contribute a systemicit...
Internationalization deals with expansion across space and time. Researchers have framed internationalization as market growth and expansion through foreign direct investment (FDI). We use narrative theory to frame a bigger, richer picture. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s typology of nine space–time conceptions and directed observations of McDonald’s Corpo...
Once upon a time the practice of storytelling was about collecting interesting stories about the past, and converting them into soundbite pitches. Now it is more about foretelling the ways the future is approaching the present, prompting a re-storying of the past. Storytelling has progressed and is about a diversity of voices, not just one teller o...
The purpose of this chapter is to bring the reader from the present state of storytelling research to the cutting edge of process theory in storytelling. Most importantly, this brings to the surface quantum storytelling. We do this by outlining a three part model of the quantum storytelling process: Empiric Stories, Epistemic Narratives, and Ontolo...
Many companies have implemented international strategies in order to increase profits and reduce costs (Landrum, 2012). International strategies include mergers, acquisitions, direct foreign investment, exports, licensing and joint ventures. International strategies “allow companies to exploit market imperfections through factor inputs (such as lab...
Mixed methods of Latent Semantic Analysis and Boje storytelling analysis of Iranian political leaders.
In the two decades since storytelling was called the “sensemaking currency of organizations,” storytelling scholarship has employed a wide variety of research methods. The storytelling diamond model introduced here offers a map of this paradigmatic terrain based on wider social science ontological, epistemological, and methodological (both quantita...
The chapter summarizes existing conceptualizations of emotional regulation and extends existing organizational behavior literature that focuses on emotional labor by the introduction of two processes new to the literature: emotional contagion exchange (ECX) and emotional restorying of labor. More specifically, emotional restorying may allow employe...
The purpose of this paper is to consider a tetranormalization application into the accounting standards convergence process of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) in light of recent convergence issues. Rather than continue to debate whose antecedent rules or principles have more me...
The paradigm shift to quantum physics will mean new approaches to change management and storytelling. Because what we thought we knew about space, time and matter has changed, our storytelling of the history, present and future will be different. My purpose is to reflect on the way changes in what I call the ‘quantum physics of storytelling’ prompt...
This intervention study outlines the continuing journey of a university towards its sustainability potentiality. We introduce the importance of sustainable development and link it to our intervention study of potentiality for sustainability from a Heideggerian phenomenological perspective. Through a case study of sustainability at New Mexico State...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to propose a typology of enchantment approaches that are related to storytelling practices in organizations: enchantment by design and enchantment by emergence.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors explore this enchantment framework in a storytelling drawing on examples of living storied spaces and narrative...
Questions
Questions (3)
This puts spiraling of an organization into an ontological spacetime(mattering). The spiraling fractal antenarrative assemblage and its storytelling properties is something you can find in these references.
There is a difference between embodied attunement (Heidegger, 1962) to the situation, such as fear of something known, anxiety of something unknown, and turbulent forces (such as economic crisis after crisis) --- and --- the emotional roller coaster people are on. In spiral antenarratives there is forecaring in advance, the preparations to be in a spiraling assemablage organizing for prospective sensemaking, by acts of forehaving, foreconception, forestructuring, and foresight.
In spirals fractals there is an assemblage making quicker course corrections as a flock/school/etc. than can be done by empirics of sensemaking (5 senses). Something beyond and beneath is allowing the assemblage to change directions, without bumping into each other, to move into centrifugal and centripetal outward and closeness of the whorls, and to move up and down the spiral vortex.
This is occurring in fractality of selfsameness across multiple levels or magnifications of scalability, in reality, in acts of coordinated recurrence.
References
Boje, D. M. (2014). Storytelling organizational practices: Managing in the quantum age. Routledge.
Boje, D. M. and Henderson, T. (Eds.) 2014) Being Quantum: Ontological Storytelling in the Age of Antenarrative. UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Boje, David M. (2016). Organizational Change and Global Standardization: Solutions to the Standards and Norms Overwhelming Organizations. London/NY: Routledge.
Henderson, Tonya; Boje, David M. (2016). Organizational Development and Change Theory: Managing Fractal Organizing Processes. London/NY: Routledge.
Rosile, G. A., M Boje, D., & Nez, C. M. (2016). Ensemble leadership theory: Collectivist, relational, and heterarchical roots from indigenous contexts. Leadership, 1742715016652933.
Websites
Boje - Double Spiral images https://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/448/double_spiral_for_final.html
Boje – Quantum Energy Works http://davidboje.com/shamanic/quantum_world.htm
Boje – Fractal study guide for Henderson and Boje (2016) and Boje (2016) http://davidboje.com/fractal/ and https://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/690/What_is_Fractal_Storytelling.htm
How is storytelling relational process of organizations and their participants?
In last several books we have take a 'quantum' storytelling relational process standpoint. This means we are working on the dynamic complexity patterns of storytelling, especially what we are calling 'quantum storytelling.'
3 books on the topic
Being Quantum: Ontological Storytelling in the Age of Antenarrative 2014 BOOK edited by David M. Boje and Tonya Wakefield Available from Amazon or Cambridge Scholars Publishing Ltd is registered in England. Reg. No: 4333775; VAT No: 108280727
Organizational Change and Global Standardization: Solutions to Standards and Norms Overwhelming Organizations (Routledge Studies in Organizational Change & Development)Hardcover - Available on 31 Jul 2015
by David M. Boje (Editor)
Organizational Development and Change Theory: Managing Fractal Organizing ProcessesAvailable August 1st 2015
by Tonya Henderson (Author),David M. Boje (Author) - available Routledge
I would like to share strategy with you. The statistics are alarming
49,933 veterans are homeless each night
1 in 4 homeless are veterans
22 veterans a day commit suicide, 8030 a year, and in 7 years more than we lost in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
19,500 homeless died waiting for a medical appointment with the VA
We decided to do something about it and created VETERANS' THEATER group, a network of university, formerly homless veterans, business, media, nonprofits, and theaters.
I am Vietnam Veteran and storytelling Professor. I am directing formerly homeless veterans in a Forum Theater production of 'Anyone in America is Three Paychecks from Homeless!' In USA, 22 veterans a day become a suicide statistic.
When a formerly homeless veteran has a dream, creating their own entrepreneurship, then they don't become a statistic. Our dream is to get paying customers to see our plays.
Currently $132 has been collected for sets and costumes we can use to put on several theatre productions at university, schools, and local community theaters. Our goal is to raise $3,000. We are now in rehearsal. Help if you can. Every little bit helps.
See http://peaceaware.com for more info.
See YouTube about these amazing veterans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcsPh-5QbdE
Projects
Projects (3)
To study IS failures and successes (outcomes) - using a variety of approaches including narrative methods
I am preparing an article for submission about Karl Popper's critique of inductive inference and logical positivism. The first thee waves of Grounded Theory (GT) (reviewed in Boje, 2014) have been accused widely of being positivist and often as logical positive, especially in the management and organization studies journals. The reason for this is that inductive logic is used to transform sense-makers statements collected by GT practitioners into 'protocol statements' using the formulaic coding and commenting procedures of GT. My contribution is to propose ways that GT can be retheorized using Brier's Peircean pragmaticist realism, Zizek's dialectic amendments to Baradian agential realism, Bhaskar's dialectical critical realism, and my own work in Heideggerian ontologic approaches (Boje, 2014, 2016).