Organizational Storytelling

Abstract

All organizations are learning organizations. Some are learning sites for a more exploitive capitalist pedagogy. The purpose of this paper is to explore three historical discourses, pre-modernism, modernism and postmodernism, to reveal the pedagogy and resistances in learning organizations. Its contribution is to theorize organizations as a struggle of fragmented, polyvocal (having multiple voices), polysemous (having multiple meanings) and polydiscursive learning struggles. In organizational learning and in the modern-versus-postmodern debate, pre-modern management issues get less theoretical attention than they deserve. To this day, universities, judiciaries and corporate boardrooms sustain many pre-modern traditions of social welfare, apprenticeship and collective governance. Organizations are also sites for the struggle of modernist and postmodernist organizational learning. Tamara, a play with wandering and fragmented audiences chasing wandering storytellers, is presented as a multi-discursive metaphor to explain this theory of a distributed, multifaceted network of struggling organizational learning pedagogies.