Untold Stories in Organizations

Citation

Stefanie Reissner (2015), "Untold Stories in Organizations", Personnel Review, Vol. 44 No. 5, pp. 823-824. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-03-2015-0054

With this edited collection, Izak, Hitchin and Anderson break new ground. They tackle an (for obvious reasons) understudied aspect of narrative research: untold stories. Traditionally, scholars have examined stories in different realms of social and organisational life that had been brought into existence by being told, demonstrating how storytelling facilitates socialisation, cohesion, communication, sensemaking and learning. Untold stories, in contrast, are not widely available, so the question is how they can be identified, grasped and studied. Izak et al. explain that untold stories can be identified relatively easily because “the neglected, edited out, unintentionally omitted, or deliberately left silent stories provide blank spots – potential reference points on the map of organizational sensemaking” (p. 2). In that vein, they take the reader on a fascinating journey of storytelling at the frontiers of scholarly inquiry.

The book has three parts. Part I, consisting of Chapters 2-5, explores the “ecologies of the untold”. In Chapter 2, Sims reflects on storytellers’ choices when deciding which story to tell – choices that are informed by the storyteller’s motives and the audience’s perceived needs. He demonstrates that every time a storyteller decides to tell a story, s/he will decide automatically against telling many others. In Chapter 3, Rae powerfully illustrates the existence of dark and disturbing stories that, albeit hidden in the depth of an organisation’s cultural fabric, are widely recognised across organisations. He suggests that fictionalisation can offer an acceptable since less threatening way of telling such dark and disturbing stories that would otherwise remain untold. In Chapter 4, Lait uses fiction to reveal untold organisational stories “as an ever-present counterpoint” to told stories (p. 41). Her analysis of change in public-sector organisations demonstrates that suppressed meanings are not only manifested in employees’ reactions but also in the organisations’ canon of stories. In Chapter 5, Kociatkiewicz and Kostera explore untold stories of gender images in marketing discourse. They highlight how androgyny challenges the male/female divide and how the space between male and female can open up alternative options for storytelling. Each of these chapters, in its own way, examines the nature of untold stories – of choices, motives and possibilities.

Part II, consisting of Chapters 6-11, considers social and political agendas. In Chapter 6, Boland and Griffin demonstrate how the unemployed struggle to tell about the “nothingness” in their lives created by a lack of work. They identify a narrative silence in stories that, while being produced in text, fail to express what is really going on. In Chapter 7, Colon-Aguirre demonstrates the selective telling of stories. In some instances, stories remained untold because the presence of witnesses meant that they were already known to an audience, and in others, the research participants’ decision to remain silent was the outcome of a painful moral dilemma. She highlights that stories perceived to be negative to others were most likely to remain untold. In Chapter 8, Daskalaki, Saliba, Vogiatzis and Malamou report on the “caravan project”, “a visual ethnography […] that narrate[s] stories of people who despite the crisis [in Greece] continue to dream” (pp. 131-132). Their moving account of audience reactions highlights a narrative space that allows people to be inspired, to dream and to change. In Chapter 9, Garcia-Lorenzo, Sell-Trujillo and Donnelly explore necessity entrepreneurs’ stories of their decisions to become self-employed or set up their own business. Their analysis demonstrates how becoming an entrepreneur “is both a storytelling and a story-making process” (p. 161) that is tentative as individuals have to discover and sell themselves to multiple audiences. In Chapter 10, Roberts uses the aquifer metaphor to analyse an institutional review with a focus on how organisational stories are collected and how decisions are made about whether to tell them or not, also considering who had a voice in the process. The metaphor seeks to capture how multiple streams of stories are filtered through different views and agendas to provide a shared narrative for a public audience. In Chapter 11, Hopkinson traces stories about dairy bullocks in the UK across time, illustrating how early stories about veal production focused on animal welfare, which over time shifted to stories about market demand. She uses the metaphor of graffiti to capture how different storytellers (artists) through their contributions extended, shaped and changed the story (artwork) over time. Each of these chapters reflects scholars’ difficulties in grasping complex stories, resulting in the use of creative means to tell otherwise untold stories.

Part III, consisting of Chapters 12 and 13, reflects on the implications of untold stories on future research. In Chapter 12, Hitchin discusses methodological challenges for studying untold stories. She argues that future research should consider ethnographic methods and flexible metaphors to capture the fluid multiplicity of stories told and untold. Chapter 13 concludes this book by considering pertinent issues for future research. Hitchin, Izak and Anderson argue that storytelling research should: first, seek to provide a thick description that takes into account “both situations and specificities” (p. 241); second, consider political and social practices in creating, telling and retelling stories; and third, use fiction and other creative devices (such as metaphors) to elicit stories that often remain untold.

What struck me about the contributions in this book is the dual meaning of the term “untold stories”. On the one hand, there are stories that had not been told previously because they may not have had an obvious audience (such as those of the unemployed, Chapter 6, or of necessity entrepreneurs, Chapter 9). But by being included in this book, these stories have left the domain of the untold and are now accessible to a wider audience. So does it actually make sense to keep calling them “untold stories”? On the other hand, there are stories that remain hidden in the storytelling landscape of individuals, organisations and societies for a variety of reasons. While researchers may realise that such stories are missing (see Chapter 1), they may never be able to grasp and express what they are really like. In other words, while researchers may want to gain a full understanding of stories in a particular setting, we can never really know a story until it has actually been told.