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This chapter argues that story holds a central place in culture and in management. Storytelling is discussed as a way of representing action in the.
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by COURTNEY STUART HANNABUSS MA MEd MLitt FLA ACIS The Robert Gordon Institute of Technology
Volume 2 of 2
Institute for Computer Based Learning Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh 1992
(Consecutive pagination through two volumes)
Part 1 Introduction 1
Part 2 Meaning in Management
Chapter 1 Knowledge and management (^23)
Chapter 2 Managerial effectiveness and negotiation of meaning 48
Chapter 3 From ideology to discourse 65
Chapter 4 Thinking and learning in management (^96)
Part 3 (^) The Meaning of Effectiveness
Chapter 5 (^) Being effective as a library and information manager 115
Chapter 6: Section A Analysing managers : an exploration of concepts and attitudes on 'goodness' (^195)
Part 6 Appendices,^ Bibliography,^ and^ Index
Appendices
I Kinds of knowledge^667 II Knowledge paradigms and change^676 III Knowledge representation and conceptualising in management 682 IV Analects about effectiveness 693 V The concept of performance : a semantic review 696 VI Survey of managerial competences 707 VII An exercise on being 'young' and 'good' 712 VIII Scalogram analysis of concept change in learners 715 IX A Bayesian approach to library work 721 X A decision matrix approach to decision making In libraries 726 XI Collaborating over meanings in management Drucker looks at effectiveness 738 XII (^) Personality and management thinking 745
Bibliography 754
Index 945
PART 4 CHAPTER 11 ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that story holds a central place in culture and in management. Storytelling is discussed as a way of representing action in the context of time. Annalistic and scriptal aspects of storytelling are considered. It is argued that scripts can be developed into stories and that such stories are composed not only of major substantive elements but also of many ancillary ones, in particular the storyteller's own commentary. A model is developed for managerial storytelling in which what managers regard as plausible, and what actually happens to them, form the basis of one of a number of important dimensions to storytelling, the EXPERIENTIAL dimension. It is suggested that managers use storytelling as a way of trying to understand experiential successes and failures, and draw 'lessons' from the process. This 'lessoning' role of stories is associated with the value such storytelling appears to have. This is called the AXIOLOGICAL dimension to storytelling because of its basis in values and beliefs. Many acts of storytelling treat experience and lessons retrospectively, and in relation to what they think should happen or should have happened. This forms the third dimension of storytelling, the DEONTIC dimension. All three dimensions operate on and within stories. Storying as an activity incorporates not only storytelling but evaluation, decision making and reflection. There is also an element of 'provisionality' in storytelling, associated with what Vaihinger called 'as if'. The EXPERIENTIAL-AXIOLOGICAL-DEONTIC (EAD) model is developed and applied with reference to various kinds of manager. Reference is made to organisational and personal approaches, and axiomatic and impressionistic knowledge. These are discussed with reference to lungian ideas about styles of thinking introduced earlier in the thesis (in chapter 4). The model is applied to craftsman and gamesman managers, and suggests that such managers perform differently in terms of rigidity and adaptiveness. These ideas are set in the context of organisational culture. Means and ends, and truth in storytelling are discussed. It is suggested that TELEOLOGY forms the basis of the fourth dimension of storytelling, on the ground that things bring about certain goals, and understanding actions this way makes them intelligible.
The place of story in culture
Storytellers hold a special place in the history of mankind. We know this from the heroic age, from Homer to Beowulf, where tales of warriors and monsters and gigantic struggles were celebrated in oral and then written tradition. Such storytelling was not only for entertainment: it was a way of passing on knowledge and wisdom, perpetuating traditions and ethnic identity, values and religious attitudes. For &trio Vargas Llosa's (Llosa, 1989) South American aboriginal natives, the storytellers or 'habladores' played this role:
'-. Messengers who went from one settlement to another in the vast territory over which the Machiguengas were dispersed, relating to some what the others were doing, keeping them informed of the happenings, the fortunes and misfortunes of the brothers whom they saw very rarely or not at all. Their name defined them. They spoke. Their mouths were the connecting links of this society that the fight for survival had forced to split up and scatter to the four winds.- [The hablador] not only brings current news but also speaks of the past. He is probably also the memory of the community.-
.- I was deeply moved by the thought of that being, those beings.- bringing stories from one group of Machiguengas to another and taking away others, reminding each member of the tribe that the others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes and joys : the fleeting, perhaps legendary figures of those habladores who - by occupation, out of necessity, to satisfy a human whim - using the simplest, most time-hallowed of expedients, the telling of stories, were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society, a people of interconnected and interdependent beings.'
Important here is the way in which stories are accepted as a natural way of representing human knowledge. More than that, they are seen as a natural way of representing values and attitudes as well as knowledge. Together they might be seen as wisdom. Further, storying Cie representing fact and fiction in story forms) is seen as a way of representing the wisdom of a group, here a tribe dispersed geographically, an idea easy for transfer to ethnic or cultural or professional groups elsewhere and at other times. There is a suggestion that the coherence of the group is dependent on the coherence of its wisdom.
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Knowledge systems are legitimated within a culture by a complex pattern of social, economic, political, and psychological factors. For instance, bourgeois values in Britain have (Inglis, 1985) had a profound effect on the educational system (eg its emphasis on the development of the individual, its respect for hard work and self-discipline). When values are structured this way, we may extend the term 'paradigm', which is knowledge-based, to the term 'ideology', which incoporates both values and attitudes as well as knowledge and information. (Chapter 3 looks at ideologies more fully).
Certainly, ideologies structure values, taking in class structures, political preferences, and ideals about freedom and justice. Implicit here, too, is the notion of what is 'true', made complex by its valuational context and so often rendered as 'fair' or 'good'. For both paradigms and ideologies, the epistemic is an important part of their working and our response to and interpretation of It.
It is easy to move from here to suggest that both paradigms and ideologies, however else they can be represented and used, can take the form of stories. When stories are told by palaeontologists about how wings evolved through geological time, or by managers about what appropriate measures should be taken under the Health and Safety at Work Act, paradigmatic knowledge is being utilised, and implicitly substantive and procedural parameters are being imposed on the discourse to make it clear and give it authority.
Similarly, when stories are told by social workers about the fair treatment of young children whose parents are accused of satanic abuse, or by managers about the fair treatment of a member of staff suffering from stress, ideological wisdom is being utilised, and substantive and procedural parameters are being imposed for identical reasons.
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These are stories that we tell ourselves, as Geertz (Geertz, 1983) states, for we are not merely creators and tellers of the stories, but we form our own audience. This is true in two senses: first, storytellers tell stories to others (known as audience or interlocutors), and second, storytellers are their own audience, since all storytellers listen to their own stories and reveal two personae (teller and told) when doing so. We form characters in our own stories, just as much as we form the tellers and hearers for the stories.
Storytelling, then, is an activity which a group carries out self-consciously, reinforcing the importance of the phenomenological approach to narrative and the notion that reality is a socially constructed meaning.
Important here is the meaning of key sociological concepts, ' key' in the sense that scholars at work (say, in fields like sociology, economics and history) may use them widely and argue about and extend their meaning (see Hannabuss, 1988a, on collaborative meanings) both on their 'surface' level and on deeper 'archaeological' levels: the work of Foucault (Foucault, 1966; Hannabuss, 1990) and others (Outhwaite, 1983; DiRenzo, 1966), as discussed in Chapter 8.
It is then possible to suggest that culture might be regarded as a collection of discourses, since culture is so often embodied in discourse (Petrey, 1990). Major forms of discourse are conversation and story. Here we shall consider story, although conversation (about and using story) has been the major ethnographic procedure by which research information has been elicited.
Harre continues by suggesting that the neatness of the published scientific paper disguises the empirical disorder and 'going back and forth' of actual scientific research: '-. apart from its empirical falsity as a description of events, is that it is a "smiling face" presentation.. .To achieve the story line, events as experienced within the framework of common sense must be edited'. Epistemic assessments of truth and falsity are included, for instance, when writers allege that the results of other writers may be accepted only with caution. In this way, valuational or ideological factors work pervasively in such scientific 'stories'. Respectively, McCloskey and Jackson (Nash, 1990) argue persuasively about economics and law having similar qualities.
If we can detect storying in forms of intellectual discourse of many kinds, it suggests that storying is an activity, a way of representing knowledge, to which many people turn even when not consciously setting out to tell stories in any literary or narrative sense. Interesting questions follow from this. One of these is the extent to which action and any account of action are connected. This issue lies at the heart of what Harre said about scientific research and the way in which scientific papers represent it.
It also lies at the heart of writing history. Seen in the largest sense, writing history is not exclusively an activity of historians (eg Anglo-Saxon Britain, the Franco-Prussian War, Africa and Imperialism), but a general process of trying to make sense of events as they happen and happened. It is a method of explanation and inference.
It is possible to characterise explanation as a process in which people try to find reasons or causes for things. Nagel (Nagel, 1961), using a scientific nonothetic-deductive (or law-centred) model, stresses deduction, probability, and teleology (that things bring about certain goals, and that understanding
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actions this way makes them intelligible). He wants to establish epistemic and logical connections, but acknowledges that theories have a cognitive status also 'in which credence is given and loyalties shown to different intellectual traditions and to ways in which language is assigned to accommodate the facts'. The teleological approach will be examined further below when goal-based stories are discussed. Here it is useful to emphasise that explanation cannot fulfil all our needs in finding a connection between narrative and action. What is missing is 'understanding'.
Understanding concentrates on what justifies actions, in general or in the eyes of an agent. Traditionally, historians work at understanding the causes of, say, revolutions or social change (eg Hobsbawm, 1962). Such understanding subsumes explanation and, with its emphasis on interpretation and evaluation, reveals reflecting and reflexive elements in attempts to connect narrative with action. Such understanding combines paradigmatic and ideological knowledge. Elton (Elton, 1967) rightly suggests that narrative is used by historians (a) to describe a situation, (b) to analyse a historical, process,, and (c) to tell a story.
Xany of the forms used and examined , by historians are stories in their own , right - chronicles, annals, diaries, sagas, novels, journalism - partly by reason of their describing events that happened, revealing how people felt living through them, and partly because many acknowledge a chronological or temporal sequencing effect, which uses simple or complex causalities for their narrative texture and as a way of underlining logical and epistemic validity.
White (White in Kitchell, 1981, 1-23), talking about narrative, suggests that a crucial skill for both historian and reader is 'the capacity to envision a set of events belonging to the same order of meaning'. This is termed a
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believes that narrative structure is the organising principle of our experiences and actions 'and of the self who experiences and acts'. When we know someone's life-story, we think that we know them. At death, we have an experiential whole. In autobiography, we try to impose coherence on our own life, in biography, on that of others.
Carr cites Dilthey's view that this is 'a cognitive endeavour associated with coherence', containing value, purpose, and meaning. Working within time, the storyteller uses narrative coherence 'to give a sense of ending'. With and within our sense of story, we can make sense of the many actions and events, and fit them with our plans and expectations.
Carr emphasises the temporal character of everyday experiences, saying that this is what makes it look like narrative. Within the temporal frame, 'that field of occurrence', the present stands out, and we are there trying to make sense of our 'horizon of consciousness'. We perceive duration when it is organised, and the organisation is more than a causal linkage : it is an Intentional linkage. We know that past, present and future determine each other as parts of the whole, yet our knowledge consists of more : we know that our intentionalities have affected and will affect things, and we know that we are working to understand (not just explain) the entailments.
We look backward, and we look forward (a process called protentlon, (^) le our openness to future events). With the wisdom of hindsight, we can narrate events after the event easily, because by then we have been able to make sense of them. By that token, much storytelling is RETROSPECTIVE (Weick, 1969).
Even when we feel that experience and narrative are separate, we know that narrative has a sense-of-the-whole-making or configurational role to play, and
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we know that we are narrating the story itself. Storytelling itself does not step outside the temporality which it describes and confirms. The configurational effect of storytelling enables us to make sense of actions, sub- actions, and states, and 'provide them with a closure'.
Xoreover, stories are told TO and BY : there is a storyteller and an audience, and we can be BOTH. When we are, we reveal the key skills of the reflexive practitioner. Such storying can be exteriorised, either by ourselves or by researchers, with the effect of revealing the sense of coherence we have of the events and states. In this way, we can represent the knowledge (paradigmatic and ideological) which people have, or think they have,
lanagerial storying: annalistic features
Xanagement is an activity or a process regarded as done rather than thought about. But in fact the thinking about doing, beforehand (protentively, in Carr's word) and afterwards (drawing on Weick's retrospective hindsight), is very important. So is the continual inter-penetration of praxis and theoria in management, by which practitioner action and managerial theory are regarded by many as important mutual complements. These two factors, of thinking and acting, and theory and practice, lead us in the direction of thinking that in management thinking is essential. As other chapters have stressed, the meaning of management is the management of meaning, and effective management depends upon effective knowledge about the thinking and learning which take place in management.
events: for instance, evidence that T was responsible versus evidence that Z was responsible.
ihmagerial storying : scriptal features
The argument so far has emphasised how people look for coherence in stories and use stories to look for coherence in reality. It has also suggested that the writing of history resembles storying when it provides both explanation and understanding. Intermediate forms like annals and chronicles, which for managers resemble the heterogeneous 'texts' of activities and reflection in the workplace, only become 'stories' when there is a deliberative narrative shaping and an interpretation of the complexity and ambiguity of experience.
This implies that stories 'evolve', a position suggested by the referential hierarchy back in Chapter 4, which argued that concepts are subsumed by propositions, which are subsumed by scripts which are subsumed by stories themselves. Typical SCRIPTS deriving from investigators like Schank emphasise how, for any number of events (say, visiting the doctor or going to a restaurant) there are actions and states common to them all. These actions and states may be said to form a general script: eg for all visits to the doctor there is a time when the doctor asks the patient questions. People may have specific scripts (eg some people may be afraid of the doctor), but it may fairly be said that there are many so-called 'superordinate' scripts (Greene, 1986).
In organisations, scripts are common. Employees use scripts to understand the events in which they participate and which affect their lives. Scripts also
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provide guidance to suitable behaviour, like the operation of a machine or dealing with a customer. It appears that many employees in an organisation may hold scripts in common, probably because environmentally and in terms of organisational culture, their experiences and expectations have been similarly conditioned. This can be seen in the similarities between people when meetings take place, appraisal schemes are introduced, and issues like leadership and fair play are discussed.
events or behaviors (or sequences of events or behaviors) appropriate for a
how to act appropriately because they have a working knowledge of their organizational world. They enact the "right" behaviors most of the time in part because they retain a cognitive repertoire of scripts fitting a lost of organizational settings' (Gioia & Poole, 1984, Schank & Abelson, 1977).
In organisations there are many predictable and recurring events and behaviours, not least of all because there are paradigmatically and ideologically approved and accustomed ways of doing things and responding to them. For familiar situations, scripts are performed automatically, while for novel situations they can be used heuristically as knowledge structures which help to 'reduce the cognitive complexity of decision making' (Gioia & Poole, 1984). Selection and appraisal interviews typify situations where familiar and novel events may occur, with corresponding script-based and script-free responses. Gioia and Poole rightly point out that much of the research in this area has been directed towards stories and text rather than to the use of scripts in ongoing behaviour in pragmatically realised settings.
