Storytelling

Nonlinear

Storytelling can be highly nonlinear: A telling can begin in the middle, leave out the beginning or the ending, or start at the ending, leaving listeners to reconstruct the beginning and find the middle in their own imagination and experience. Discussions of this can be seen in the recent work of Barbara Czarniawska.

Fragmented

Storytelling, in contrast to narrative, can be highly terse and fragmented among social participants. This is illustrated by a 1991 ethnographic study of storytelling in organizations by David Boje. Each teller told a fragment of a story, and the wholeness of that [Page 1455]story had yet to be realized or articulated by any solitary narrator. A rather shallow reductionism takes place when fragmentation is ignored. In terms of research, it is common for narrative interviewers to demand that tellers recite a coherent narrative, hence prompting storytellers to collapse enough fragments together to satisfy the interrogator's desire for coherence. Such practice clearly forces distortions in the way that stories naturally occur. Naturally occurring stories can thus be located in the situated complexity dynamics of storytelling's fragmented being.

Distributed

Storytelling can be highly distributed across simultaneous times and places. Whereas narrative interrogation demands an account constructed (concocted) in the artifice of the interview situation, storytelling studied ethnographically in situ finds them to be socially distributed, fragmented across many sites and temporalities. A 1995 study by Boje examined simultaneous storytelling performances in Disney film archives. This study approached storytelling as a distributive and noncoherent framework of fragments. While the management of Disney tried to shape a “proper” whole narrative of its executive's storytelling, the study showed that this was but one part of the overall network of story fragments. This shows how the nonlinear processes dominated the organization's storytelling system as the countertellers and audience fragmented and enacted multiple counterstories. Organizationally, this meant that storytelling was distributed across a storytelling landscape where official storytelling was countered by dynamics of the simultaneous, distributed, ongoing tellings being networked.

Collective

Storytelling can be regarded as nonlinear, fragmented, and socially distributed. It constitutes the collective systemicity of what can be defined as the “storytelling organizations.” As defined by Boje, a storytelling organization is a collective system in which the performance of stories is a key part of members' sensemaking and a means to allow them to supplement individual memories with institutional memory. Such an approach is also reflected in the work of Bob Gephart and Mary Boyce, who study distributed sensemaking in storytelling organizations.

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