By David M. Boje, Jan 20 2007
Critical Postmodern Story Consulting calls into question mythmaking, by tracing the genecology of intergroup collective memory in relation the the fabrication of official historical memory and countermemeory of the Storytelling Organization. The purpose of this approach to story consulting is to help organizations understand how endemic mythmaking is, where they are in the mythmaking cycle, and what to do about it.
"Myth making is an adaptive mechanism whereby groups in an organization maintain logic frameworks within which to attribute meaning to activities and events... A myth-making system is evident to some degree in every organization" (Boje, Fedor & Rowland, 1982: 17).
Story consulting is somewhere between using behavioral science to dymothologize and being a shaman or magician using mythmaking to effect change. We argued that mythmaking is most obvious in organizations where standards of desirability and cause and effect relationships are in dispute or unknown. That is pretty much all of them.
Table 1: Typology of Organization Myths (adapted from Boje, Fedor, & Rowland, 1982) |
Myths construct standards of desirability: 1. Myths that create, maintain, and legitimize past, present, or future actions and consequences 2. Myths that maintain and conceal political interests and value systems |
Myths construct cause and effect relationships: 3. Myths that help explain and create cause and effect relationships under conditions of incomplete knowledge. 4. Myths that rationalize the complexity and turbulence of activities and events that allow for predictable action taking. |
Myths of progress and emancipation give the story consultant legitimacy in gaining a consulting contract. Clients are eager to adopt more myths of progress and emancipation, to reconstruct standards of desirability, to lay out cause and effect under conditions of turbulence. Mythmaking gives an organization future, its strategy story, more concrete reality, makes it appear less ephemeral.
"Myths are inexorably interwined in an organization's power structure" (Boje, Fedor, & Rowland, 1982: ~ p. 19-20). Thus myth conceal political interests of powerful stakeholders. Retrofitting your strategic story to what mythmaking is going in this year's legislature is the work of administrators of any state university or agency that wants to increase or hold onto its resource allocation.
Story consulting is all about figuring out the dominant myth, the most powerful mythmakers. Groups have their individuated collective memories (Halbwachs, 1950/1980). Groups of women sustain myths about women to keep them in certain occupations, at certain levels in the hierarchy, at certain rates of pay. Corporations contracting to sweatshops are prone to sustain myths of the docile nature of Asian women, the dexterity of their fingers, their tolerance for monotony and repetition, their subservience to male authority.
Myths help simplify complexity, to make it appear ethical codes of conduct have changed the nature of sweatshop production, in a myth of progress popular since Marx (1867) exposed the myth of sweatshop progress, in his chapter (10) on The Working Day, how it is stretched. The myth of progress would have us believe that the devices of stretching the working day, higgling over lunch and rest breaks, increasing the quota, etc. has some how vanished because of the instillation of a code of ethics.
Transcendental
How many believe in transcendental forces? What are transcendental forces? The belief that beyond the empiric senses of perception (seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, & tasting) that there are other senses, more transcendental senses that Immanuel Kant (1781/1900), for example, wrote about in Critique of Pure Reason. Kant posited that a priori to sensemaking there is transcendental thoughts in spatial and temporal frameworks. His critique was that metaphysics could be more rigorous. Beyond the five senses there was a sixth sense. In metaphysics the universe is not random, its telos is worked out by the forces of good and evil. There are gods, goddesses, angels, devils --- that intrude upon the randomness of being, imposing patters upon the social ways of animal and human beings. For SMith there was an invisible hand (spirit of capitalism), for Hegel an invisible spirit that was dialectic to material forces of humans. The popularity of Star Wars, and the Matrix is the belief by the masses in the Force that is behind the patterns of the universe. The construction of myth is indispensable to scientific thought though science is always in a state of denial, its faith is in the force of Mother Nature (Bauer, 1999: 85). "Enlightenment must turn to myth in order to fulfill science's ultimate goal, the explanation and justification of all phenomenon" (Bauer, 1999: 45).
Mythmaking and System Thinking
Mythmaking is endemic to system thinking. There is the illusion that we work in systems that are whole, with parts that are merged. I prefer 'systemicity' to system thinking. I prefer to think of systems as un-whole, unmerged, unfinalized, not really there yet, or ever. Whenever I hear someone use the word 'system' I am suspiciously looking for the myth. the myth of system thinking is an excuse for not examining the forces of complexity. It is a way to gloss over the complexity of systemicity and replace it with the myth of whole-part thinking.
A story consultant can help convene a Socratic inquiry into the mythmaking logic of system thinking. Story consultants can investigate the manifestation of system in mythic accounts of organization origins, development and telos. As Bauer (1999) puts it:
"Systems interpret and portray the world as a rationally ordered and controllable phenomenon and situate themselves within the prevailing structures of power" (Bauer, 1999: 90).
"Systems, as part of every aspect of life, enforce conformity and act as unifying totalitarian forces in metaphysics and philosophy as well as in administration and material production: (Bauer, 1999: 91).
The story consultant who takes on system thinking is taking on mythmaking of the storytelling organization.
Mythmaking is societal, as well as organizational. Mythmaking is pressed into the service of power, to enforce conformity, to portray an administration as rationally ordered, as in pursuit of progress and even the liberation or emancipation of members.
Bauer's thesis is the the Enlightenment 7 emancipation and 7 through the application of system thinking and science, but keeps reverting to its mythmaking. Not seeing that rationality has its limits. System thinking promises an identity of each subject in the system, but delivers only more fragmentation, more subjugation.
Story consulting sees this mythmaking in the BME constructions of evermore "linear narratives pressing definite beginnings and ends" (Bauer, 1999: 217). Story consultants get too enamored by the power of founding story, the heroic adventurous exploits of CEOs, the promise of concrete future by staying the course. Halbwachs reminds us that there is no definite founding origin, that each duration of time is an artificial pronouncement of a beginning and end, just one more BME.
Table 2 The Mythmaking Life Cycle |
||
Myth Stage |
Organization Situation |
Myth Development |
| I. Development | Rapid growth, high profitability, bright future outlook: no real competition | Myth is successfully guiding decision making and organizational strategy - "Developing Myth" |
| II. Maturation | company's growth slowing, but still recognized as solid leader. some competition which is inconsequential. | Myth and company identity completely intertwined. Myth strength is high. "Solid Myth" |
| III. Decline | Competition has become substantial. Profitability slipping. Mission is a hindrance to action. | Most organizational units looking for ways to bolster myth, but some groups beginning to develop competing myths for renewal. "Myth Split" |
| IV. Reformulation | company's situation has deteriorated to the point that precipitates a change in leadership. | Myth redefined to include new quality range for products. "Myth Shift" |
Since Philip Selznick, strategists have posited that the organization in relation to its competitive environment calls for different kinds of leaders, in leader coalitions that represent the currents of thoughts or ideas most necessary to the stage of the organization and environment's life cycle. In Table 2 Boje, Fedor & Rowland (1982) posited that with each life cycle stage there would be the bedrock of myth development cycle: developing, solid, split, and shift (where upon the cycle would repeat in certain situations). The model dovetails with the ideas of Halbwachs hat an organization (or society) has multiple collective memories, negotiating in the social. It dovetails with Bauer's idea of the dialectic (even a negative one) of mythmaking and enlightenment. The difference is that it looks at the interplay between the official mythmaking of the dominant coalition in relation not only to the constellation of collective memories, but there relationship to the situated environment. The model became the basis for Michael Kayes (1996) story consulting book on myth-making and story-tellers. Kaye, working out of Australia (with his wife) would diagnosis the stage an organization-environment was in its life-cycle, to explain the kinds of mythmaking developments that might be going on. He also picked up on the idea of storytelling organization (Boje 1991) and worked that into his model, assessing what kinds of stories told or were not telling to profile the diagnosis for intervention. He applied four mythmaking interventions from Boje, Fedor & rowland (1982):
In a rapidly changing or turbulent environment, the mythmaking development can enter a state of future shock.
Story Consulting, in more critical postmodern versions, flesh out counterstories to BME mythic linear narrative, points out a variety of founding stories, each different in content and scope than the official one. This would be interventions of Myth Balancing, and Myth Enrichment (or restorying). CPSC rescues managerialist collective memory by pointing out each group in the organization, each stakeholder, has its own collective memory. Mythmaking can be a play of differences (Derrida), a play of heteroglossia (Bakhtin), or a play among diverse collective memories (Halbwachs).
Its not that people are unaware of the mythmaking of system thinking. They may sense intuitively that the mythmaking is a cover up for unmergedness, unfinalizability, and unfinishedness. For if you look even casually, the story consultant can observe all the unfinished system promises, all the unmerged streams of thought, all the unfinalized plans that substitute for implementation. In short where system thinkers see wholeness, parts within parts, complexity thinkers see only systemicity (the antenarrative that a system could someday come into Being, but is now mostly nothingness).
I hear it said that at a state university, every year someone moves the cheese (hate that phrase). But it speaks to how administrations think of sytems, but every year the legislature and the regents change the rules, so their system is always out of step. System is just one more narrative construction, one more linear hierarchical framework, one more BME.
The Enlightenment was supposed to cure modernity of its mythmaking, its belief in metaphysics, its idea that the universe is a force with a telos. It was supposed to use rationality and science and logic to do this.
The counternarratives is how the organization chose to support a specific ideology of system thinking, and be their fortune on it. Mythmaking ideology advances certain social definitions, without tending too rigorously to seeing that they are narrative constructions, or more accurately antenarrative constructions (bets about transformation by prestory of some systemicity). There remains counterstory residue not subsumed by the mythmaking plot, or its managerialist bid to captivate collective memory, and collective future.
Mythmaking is "universal context of delusion" that "conformity replaces consciousness" (Bauer, 1999: 220). Halbwachs (1950/1980) points out that instead of a singular collective memory, each group has its own, that when we are in multiple groups we are simultaneous in several collective memories.
Take for example Linda Musacchio Adorisio's (2007) work on Wells Fargo banks. Norwest bank purchased the collective history of Wells Fargo banks, bought the entire stage coach, Wild West heritage, and now affixes it to each community bank it purchases. If this is not organizational mythmaking I do not know what is. Norwest further has a 'store' conception of what banking is all about, where instead of 'banks' they are 'stores,' instead of 'bankers' they are 'managers,' and instead of 'depositors' they are 'customers.' So now you have two lines of thought (stagecoach & store). Are they in merger or acquisition. Actually, trailing along on Linda's interviews, it seems to me there is a mythic hybrid. Each newly acquired community bank purges its own collective memory, and adopts the hybrid myth of stagecoach/store. The context of the mythmaking is all the wild west folklore, the historical memory of those of us living in the West.
Historical memory is a product of mythmaking and is not at all the same thing as collective memory. Historians reduce, distort, repartition, invent, marginalize or just omit currents of thought, feelings, and images to produce highly selective narratives. Their work becomes popular imagination, since we have to memorize much of their chronology, the exploits of generals, presidents, governors, and business tycoons --- in school.
"We are not dealing in this case with a simple retrospective illusion" (Halbwachs, 1950/1980: 71).
Historical memories can be commissioned by the powerful, history can be rehistoricized by those in offices of power.
Mythmaking offers each clean simple pathways of coherence that assemble fragments together and fix identity. It is what we have talked about as story control.
Story consulting, done critically, helps people look for traces of counterstories, frameworks, even mythic ones that are out of favor with powerholders. "these traces did exist therefore, but they were marked [more] in others' memory than our own" (Halbwachs, 1950/1980: 76, bracketed addition mine).
The problem of story consulting in managerialist collective memory is the gap between historical and collective memory of people in power, and the rest of the groups (or departments, units, socioeconomic classes, rates, gender, etc) in the storytelling organization. They multitude of groups do not support and may covertly or overtly resist the official mythmaking, and be well aware of its gross delusion. At the same time, those in managerial agency, see everyone else as mythmaking. That is why mythmaking is not a simple retrospective illusion.
Mythmaking slants the interpretation of official historical memory to the collective memory of the administrative elite (or core).
I say those are mythmaking frameworks, the ones that are carried along in and intertwined with historical memory. Halbwachs (1950/1980: 78) believes each group in an organizations has its "own original collective memory." That is why the worst kind of story consulting there is totalizes, or averages, or in some other way creates a substitute historical memory.
I am not convinced that historical memory is myth-ridden, while collective memory of each group in and around an organization is myth-free. Perhaps its more accurate to theorize each groups is mythmaking, and defining their myths with the limits of rational logic, seeing themselves as on some sort of Enlightenment quest (falling once again into mythmaking).
That aside, there is an important connection to be made between mythmaking, collective memory (managerialism, multilineal, etc), and the embedded preferences for collective deliberation (i.e. dialog, debate, dialectic, or dialogism).
In managerialist collective memory construction, story control is rampant in the dialog (actually its more of a monologue), the dismissal of debate as illegitimate (see Appreciative Inquiry and any dialog consulting by Peter Senge), and the absolute rejection of dialectic or dialogism from the playing field of deliberation. The symptomology of managerialism is evidence of "processes of subjugation, resistance, and defensive transformation" but people unable to speak out in dialogue (Bauer, 1999: 69). Managerialism is a nihilistic ideology, the will to power, the use of trickery and cunning as valid strategies. Beware of hierarchy! The preestablished hierarchical order is everywhere in system thinking. It is the "transference of hatred" into duality thinking, and the "false projection onto others" of more hatred (Bauer, 1999: 90).
If there is a constellation of collective memories, then a more multilineal collective memory seems to be more the case, but a managerialist regime can stall its collective deliberation, limit dialog to only discussions of what management wants, how management scores things, how management lays out founding markers, and stories strategy for future. In a dialectic governance structure, there are warrants and claims, times set aside to Scripture each other's points of view, each others renditions of history and future.
What of the dialectic? For me and for Bauer, the key is that mythmaking about progress or emancipation is interwined with enlightenment.
"The dialectic of enlightenment and myth cancels out any progression: enlightenment reverts to myth" (Bauer, 1999: 13).
What about dialogic? It differs from monologue masquerading as dialogue, by outlawing debate. It differs as well form dialectic. In dialectic there is a teleos, and guiding invisible hand, possibly if you are a closet Hegelian, a guiding spiritual hand that sets out destiny of a path, that supports a progress myth, that out of theses and antithesis opposition will come a mighty synthesis. Thoeodor Adorno (of Critical Theory) rejected the Hegelian dialectic, just opposition was all there is. Bakhtin took this a different direction. In terms we developed in this chapter, if there are multiple collective memories in a storytelling organizations, each with its own mythmaking frames of (standards of desirability & cause and effect relationships under turbulence), then we would expect to see dialogic imagination at work. That is, we would expect a multitude of logics, points of view, voices to meet and not to dialogue, perhaps debate, but not let some dialectic synthesis guide their fate. Dialogism is defined as fully embodied voices and logics, that meet in spaces like castle rooms or salons. Bakhtin developed his ideas before chat rooms and virtual spaces on the internet or before teleconferencing. In any event was that deliberation occur in the once-occurent moment of Being, not in the mind of some manager, executive, or administrator, trying to think through all the stakeholder viewpoints.
If we are to demythologize, as the only action research intervention, that only serves to disenchant nature even more. Many people believe in their metaphysics, the supernatural, all the transcendental forces. Metaphysics is quite seductive that way. It posits BME grand narratives:
This is the crucial point where Bakhtin veers away form Halbwachs. That is, the dialogism that matters for Bakhtin, is an answerability in once-occurent Being, but for Halbwachs collective memory can mean you tell a story, and do so with a clear appreciation of your membership in various groups, who may hear of your story. That aside, there are many points of convergence. Both have a respect of multiple currents of thought that negotiate collective memory, and I would add that they negotiate mythmaking, the transformations of past into demarcated partitions of time, and the designation of personages to be heroes and villains. Both share with Adorno, the idea that "the whole is false" (Bauer, 1999: 89), that instead of system whole, one can think of systemicity complexity, multiplicity of collective memory.
Storytelling organizations declare one myth of themselves to be bankrupt, only to adopt some more socially acceptable, more instrumentally valuable myth.
In sum, mythmaking is "sensing through data of the senses to the [transcendental] forces behind them: (Bauer, 1999: 66, additions brackets mine). The point is not always to demythologize, but to exchange, balance, or enrich mythmaking to enable the Storytelling Organization to achieve a better fit with its environments. The past is always being reconstituted with the light of the present, but that process of mythmaking and rehistorization, or if you prefer, restorying, can get derailed. Storytelling Organizations rely upon mythmaking frameworks to define the metaphysical order of things that lies beyond empirical sensemaking. Mythmaking reconstructs historical memory, in light of shifts ad negotiations of multiple collective memories in the intergroup of an organize and its environments. Out of mythmaking arises plot of progress and emancipation that allocate resources for strategy. Storytelling Organizations are pressured by action research, to apply behavioral science principles to demythologize, to achieve progress by "demystification and disenchantment of nature" (Bauer, 1999: 67). Perhaps its time to reenchant organizations, to do better mythmaking where a moral wisdom for living in sustainable relationship to environment is what occurs in the heroic human acton adventure, is the shade of meaning that shines in the rendition of founding story.