Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics or embellishment. Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation or instilling moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot, characters and narrative point of view. The term "storytelling" can refer specifically to oral storytelling but also broadly to techniques used in other media to unfold or disclose the narrative of a story.
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative—narration—is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. This is a somewhat distinct usage from narration in the narrower sense of a commentary used to convey a story. Many additional narrative techniques, particularly literary ones, are used to build and enhance any given story.
Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot: the series of events. Narration is a required element of all written stories, presenting the story in its entirety. It is optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other means, like dialogue between characters or visual action.
Autoethnography is a form of ethnographic research in which a researcher connects personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. It is considered a form of qualitative and/or arts-based research.
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1980 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the second and final volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While the first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1972), was a critique of contemporary uses of psychoanalysis and Marxism, A Thousand Plateaus was developed as an experimental work of philosophy covering a far wider range of topics, serving as a "positive exercise" in what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as rhizomatic thought.
Narrative inquiry or narrative analysis emerged as a discipline from within the broader field of qualitative research in the early 20th century, as evidence exists that this method was used in psychology and sociology. Narrative inquiry uses field texts, such as stories, autobiography, journals, field notes, letters, conversations, interviews, family stories, photos, and life experience, as the units of analysis to research and understand the way people create meaning in their lives as narratives.
Narrative paradigm is a communication theory conceptualized by 20th-century communication scholar Walter Fisher. The paradigm claims that all meaningful communication occurs via storytelling or reporting of events. Humans participate as storytellers and observers of narratives. This theory further claims that stories are more persuasive than arguments. Essentially the narrative paradigm helps us to explain how humans are able to understand complex information through narrative.
Organizational storytelling is a concept in management and organization studies. It recognises the special place of narration in human communication, making narration "the foundation of discursive thought and the possibility of acting in common." This follows the narrative paradigm, a view of human communication based on the conception of persons as homo narrans.
Tamara is a 1981 play by John Krizanc about the painter Tamara de Lempicka. The play is based on the historical meeting of Gabriele d'Annunzio and Lempicka, who was hoping to be commissioned by d'Annunzio to paint his portrait. He had invited her to his villa at Gardone Riviera, on the southwest shore of Lake Garda, a villa now known as Il Vittoriale degli Italiani.
David M. Boje is Professor and Bill Daniels Ethics Fellow, a past endowed Bank of America professor of management at New Mexico State University (NMSU) in Las Cruces. He has published over 120 journal articles, seventeen books, including Narrative Methods for Organization and Communication Research ; Storytelling Organizations, 2008; Critical Theory Ethics in Business and Public Administration, 2008. His newest books are: Dancing to the Music of Story, and The Future of Storytelling and Organization: An Antenarrative Handbook.
A rhizome is a concept in post-structuralism describing a nonlinear network. It appears in the work of French theorists Deleuze and Guattari, who used the term in their book A Thousand Plateaus to refer to networks that establish "connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles" with no apparent order or coherency. A rhizome is purely a network of multiplicities that are not arborescent with properties similar to lattices. Deleuze referred to it as extending from his concept of an "image of thought" that he had previously discussed in Difference and Repetition.
Karl Edward Weick is an American organizational theorist who introduced the concepts of "loose coupling", "mindfulness", and "sensemaking" into organizational studies. He is the Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
Sensemaking or sense-making is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. It has been defined as "the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing". The concept was introduced to organizational studies by Karl E. Weick in the late 1960's and has affected both theory and practice. Weick intended to encourage a shift away from the traditional focus of organization theorists on decision-making and towards the processes that constitute the meaning of the decisions that are enacted in behavior.
The communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) perspective is broadly characterized by the claim that communication is not something that happens within organizations or between organizational members; instead, communication is the process whereby organizations are constituted. Specifically, this view contends: “organization is an effect of communication not its predecessor." This perspective is part of a broader constitutive view of communication arguing, "elements of communication, rather than being fixed in advance, are reflexively constituted within the act of communication itself".
Organizational Information Theory (OIT) is a communication theory, developed by Karl Weick, offering systemic insight into the processing and exchange of information within organizations and among its members. Unlike the past structure-centered theory, OIT focuses on the process of organizing in dynamic, information-rich environments. Given that, it contends that the main activity of organizations is the process of making sense of equivocal information. Organizational members are instrumental to reduce equivocality and achieve sensemaking through some strategies — enactment, selection, and retention of information. With a framework that is interdisciplinary in nature, organizational information theory's desire to eliminate both ambiguity and complexity from workplace messaging builds upon earlier findings from general systems theory and phenomenology.
Text and conversation is a theory in the field of organizational communication illustrating how communication makes up an organization. In the theory's simplest explanation, an organization is created and defined by communication. Communication "is" the organization and the organization exists because communication takes place. The theory is built on the notion, an organization is not seen as a physical unit holding communication. Text and conversation theory puts communication processes at the heart of organizational communication and postulates, an organization doesn't contain communication as a "causal influence", but is formed by the communication within. This theory is not intended for direct application, but rather to explain how communication exists. The theory provides a framework for better understanding organizational communication.
For oral tradition, when stories lead to a restorying of the past narrative, or the future antenarrative, they become living stories. For example, David Boje says “living story has many authors and as a collective force has a life of its own. We live in living stories.” In the work of Native scholar Twotrees, living stories have a mind, a time, and a place. For Gregory Cajete and lived stories are the “life and process of the natural world becoming vehicles for the transmission of culture".
A cosmology episode is a sudden loss of meaning, followed eventually by a transformative pivot, which creates the conditions for revised meaning.
Behavioral strategy refers to the application of insights from psychology and behavioral economics to the research and practice of strategic management. In one definition of the field, "Behavioral strategy merges cognitive and social psychology with strategic management theory and practice. Behavioral strategy aims to bring realistic assumptions about human cognition, emotions, and social behavior to the strategic management of organizations and, thereby, to enrich strategy theory, empirical research, and real-world practice".
The OSTO System Model is based on the OSTO System Theory, which comprehends complex systems and organizations as living systems and maps these by means of the OSTO System Model. The model is cybernetic in nature and is deduced from the theory of closed loops. The basics of this theory have been formulated by David P. Hanna in the 1980s and have been published initially in 1988. The model assumes that several central transformation processes take place on the inside of a complex organization. These are deeply influenced by mutual reactions between the inner life of the organization and the outside (environment). In terms of closed loop theory, the OSTO System Model depicts the essential elements of such a living system in its interconnectedness, dependencies, and reciprocal reactions. Thinking in network structures is, thus, a crucial part of the OSTO System Theory.
