Abstract
David M. Boje holds a Wells Fargo Professorship and is a distinguished professor and Bill Daniels Ethics Fellow in the management department at New Mexico State University. He also holds an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University. His specialty is organizational storytelling using qualitative methods ranging from traditional narrative to living story emergence, to new work utilizing Shifts-Patterns-Uniqueness-Discrepancies-Self-Assumptions in doing the Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association field note methods. He is best known for his groundbreaking work in storytelling, including antenarrative and quantum storytelling theory, as well as his key role in the creation of multiple organizations fostering postmodern, critical, and spiritually informed approaches to scholarly dialogue. Each phase of Boje’s four-decade career (so far) has served to more firmly situate him, and the field of organization development as a whole, on the path toward more inclusive and ontologically sound ways of knowing, Being, and influencing the world.
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Further Reading
To suggest that a student “read Boje,” is to offer up a lifetime of possibilities, for his books, articles, chapters, films and speeches are extensive, and he tends to create new material faster than the most avid reader can digest it. To that end, here we recommend an article considered to be a major turning point in his career, the author’s all-time favorite, and two of Boje’s personal favorite “Boje books” as an entrée to understanding some key elements of the work.
Boje’s Administrative Science Quarterly article about storytelling at an office supply company was groundbreaking. It ushered in a line of inquiry that replaced dominant organizational narrative as put forth by management, with a clearer picture of what is going on—one tied to the voices heard around the water cooler and elsewhere (Boje, 1991).
His 2008 book Storytelling Organizations is a noteworthy addition, as it expands the learning to explore archetypal organizational narratives complete with examples from the likes of McDonald’s and Nike (Boje, 2008). Here, Boje’s explorations of organizational attempts to harness and shape public perceptions are highly critical of the manipulation of story for marketing purposes (Also see: Boje et al., 2005a).
Boje has named Being Quantum: Ontological Storytelling in the Age of Antenarrative and Storytelling Organizational Practices: Managing in the Quantum Age as two of his personal favorites (Boje & Henderson, 2015b; Boje, 2015). The first is an edited collection of essays contributed to by participants in the annual Quantum Storytelling Conference. It explored OD through a lens of timespacemattering, a term which denotes the inseparability of time, space, and matter in the dynamic unfolding of organizational reality, and spirituality, building on the works of Barad (2007) and others. The second of these books, which appeals to Boje most as an author, addressed the practical aspects of storytelling in organizations. This is where he found his most complete expression, shining a light on sustainability through storytelling, spirit and simplicity. Boje’s current understanding is deeply spiritual; here, he openly shared the experience of bringing his authentic self to the writing to help make sense of the day-to-day storytelling of our organizations. These two works captured the essence of an emergent stream of theory and reflected the generosity with which Boje shared the spotlight with his students and colleagues to contribute to the unfolding body of knowledge as a living story web in its own right.
Krizanc, J., & Boje, D. (2013). Tamara Journal interview with John Krizanc. Tamara: Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry, 5(3), 70–77.
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Henderson, T.L. (2021). Boje, David M.: A Storyteller for the Post-Newtonian Era. In: Szabla, D.B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49820-1_67-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49820-1_67-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49820-1_67-1