ABSTRACT
In Jo Tyler’s Chapter 7, the organization she studies makes escalators. She points out that the dominant narratives that organizations like to tell about themselves routinely compete with living stories webs of relationships from the margins and shadows of an organization. In the case of a tragic workplace accident, an organization’s grand narrative of safety is especially challenged. Tyler’s analysis of antenarrative explores the intra-play between dominant historical narratives the company puts out, and the living, emergent, unfolding stories of the accidents and those intimately and tragically involved. As Tyler puts it, “These living stories may reveal actual practices in the organization that are challenging, sad, and that are out of alignment with the espoused organizational texts in the dominant narrative.” In writing the storytelling, Tyler cautions us to watch how the authors of dominant narratives try to force fit a plot structure that cuts off the energetic vitality of the living (organic) stories, and pushes back an antenarrative that is more the spiral and rhizome-assemblage than any play it forward dominant narrative attempts to script a linear future. The antenarrating is a process with a trajectory. The organization participants fuel the antenarrating with desire for more, both for conforming linear futures and for those futures that spiral in non-linear more unpredictable timespace.
