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The dynamics of narrative andantenarrative and their relationto story
Maurice Yolles
 Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK 
Abstract
Purpose
– The nature of narrative is important, and with the development of awareness of knowledge processes, it becoming more important. In particular its notions can be enhanced byexamining it in terms of antenarrative. Ultimately the paper aims to explore the relationship betweennarrative and antenarrative.
Design/methodology/approach
– The objectives of the paper are achieved by seating the notionsof narrative and antenarrative into the models of knowledge cybernetics (in particular social viablesystems – SVS and social cybernetics) to enable an exploration of the consequences of theirinteraction. If narrative and antenarrative are seen as together forming an autonomous system, thentheir relationship may be explored in terms of SVS. This is effectively a social geometry that enablescomplex conceptual relationships to be explored graphically.
Findings
– While normally one might think that narrative and antenarrative are incommensurable,the theory explains how through enantiomer dynamics, patterns of narrative can be related toun-patterned arbitrary antenarratives. Under the right circumstances narrative and antenarrative canform a joint alliance that enables the two forms to merge into a story. This means that a story is told ina way that enables narrative structures to be intermingled with antenarrative thereby forming athematic story event that has potential to engage more dynamically with the listener.
Research limitations/implications
– The paper is fundamentally theoretical, and a usefuldevelopment would be to apply this to real case scenarios, thereby exploring quantitively theinterconnection between narrative and antenarrative, and some of its implications.
Practicalimplications
– It must be realised that there is a tacit knowledge dimension that connectsthe narrative/antenarrative situation with a story acquirer. The ability of the acquirer to recognisewhether a situation has narrative or antenarrative is a function of that acquirer’s own pattern of knowledge, and this embodies subjectivity. This is bound up within the notion of third cybernetics.The interconnectedness of narrative and antenarrative is relevant to actual processes of socialcommunication, and demonstrates a parallel coexistence of modernist and postmodernist paradigms.
Originality/value
– The paper applies a new theory, that of knowledge cybernetics, to a difficultconceptual area of study. While this results in the need to understand the conceptual basis of knowledge cybernetics, it does provide a frame of reference that enables relatively simple approachesin knowledge and knowledge processes to be graphically represented, thereby providing the potentialfor new insights. The value of the paper is that these graphical techniques are illustrated, and theywould likely be useful to those who work in the knowledge or knowledge management field.
Keywords
Narratives, Knowledge management, Knowledge processes, Cybernetics,Communication processes, Storytelling
Paper type
Conceptual paper
1. Introduction
Story is defined as an account or recital of an event or a series of events or incidentsthat is either true or fictitious. For Boje (2000) it can be seen as plot comprising causally
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0953-4814.htm
 JOCM20,1
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Received December 2005Revised March 2006Accepted March 2006
 Journal of Organizational ChangeManagementVol. 20 No. 1, 2007pp. 74-94
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Emerald Group Publishing Limited0953-4814DOI 10.1108/09534810710715298
 
related episodes that culminate in a solution to a problem. It was written or imaginedperspectivistically, from the viewpoint of a theoretical or participant observer, and itincorporates a coherence that is constructed from a chair of particulars. It isresponsible for the creation of knowledge generation forming a powerfulself-reinforcing feedback loop that motivates and directs (Baskin, 2004).In contrast to story, an anti-story (Boje, 2000) is another story that arises inopposition to the earlier one. Thus, a story that has a significant impact in a group ororganization will give rise to related stories as well as anti-stories. Anti-stories aim atundermining the original story that can arise to negate of counter stories of officialgoodness, or to undermine the original story. The relationship between story andanti-story constitute an internal dynamic the output of which, nevertheless, emergessystemically as story.When stories move to enter the culture of a social collective like an organisation,they can become dismantled into what Boje (2005b) calls a living-story. Here stories arefragmented and its shreds are collected together with those from other stories, perhapsdisparately, arbitrarily and spontaneously over time by uncoordinated individuals inthe collective. These shards can become dynamically transformed indirectly throughmetaphor[1], or directly as local patterns of knowledge or myth (whether or not falseknowledge), both of which can underpin new perceptions in the social collective. AsBaskin (2004) tells us, mythic knowledge tends to be the deepest most powerful form of knowledge. It is the paradigms that are bedded on such re-assembled shards thatdefine the social trajectories, can reinforce perception and misperception, and forgeunderstandings and misunderstandings. Indeed, explicated messages have a socialimpact since they are collected and transformed through the worldviews of theacquirers that Churchman (1979) calls Weltanschaung. These personal worldviews arethemselves built on the tacit knowledge that come from individual experience, andsometimes through the knowledge and myth that accumulates through theinterpretation or misinterpretation of other forms of explicit knowledge that havenot been integrated with experience.Story is related to narrative. The term narrative derives from Latin, but came to theEnglish language through the French[2]. Its original conception was as or part of aspoken story, however, as is the want in science the term narrative has more recentlybeen generalised to take on a meaning that distinguishes it from story. Thisgeneralisation has provided us with a capacity to project the concept of narrative abouta particular subject onto even inanimate objects. As such today narrative provides thevehicle for story, so that narratology provide for the study by which thinking processescan be structured to permit stories to emerge. Narratives may occur through textually,in which a narrative agent tells a story (Bal, 1997, p. 18). Narratives have clear formaldefinitions and create causal connections between events that the deliver as story.Hence, they may be seen as coherent, bounded and self-contained, creating a unity of space-time-action. Obversely they may be distributed (Walker, 2004) acrossspace-time-action into fragmentation, suggesting an intimate connection betweendistributed narrative and living-story.The idea of distributed narrative is different from notion of the term antenarretive.Ante is a prefix that derives from the Latin word exante meaning “beforehand” andwhen related to value refers to expectation[3]. While narrative provides a vehicle forstory, for Boje it also comes after and ads “plot” and “coherence” to the story line.
The dynamics of narrative andantenarrative
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Hence, used as an adverb, antenarrative is prior to narrative. The other implication of antenarrative by Boje relates to expectation or betting in terms of card game or pokerbet, something to do with gambling and speculation. Hence, for Boje (2001)antenarrative is a speculation that is fragmented, nonlinear, incoherent, collective,non-deterministic, and pre-narrative. Further, according to Boje (2005a)“antenarratives are (or can be) collective co-construction of multiple participants,each with a fragment, none with the overarching conception of the story that isbecoming, ravelling and unravelling, picking up contextual elements in some quarters,dropping some in performances in other areas. It is the picking up and dropping of context, that makes the
in situ
performances of antenarrative trajectoriestransformative, as well as giving them their endemic role in complexity”.Antenarrative is what Boje calls improper storytelling, a wager from which a propernarrative can be constituted. Narrative can be seen as a modern concept that isconstituted deterministically rather like story, while at the same time standing aboveor beyond beyond, as metastory. The introduction of the notion of antenarrative byBoje is a way of dealing with the perceived crisis of narrative method, since it isconstituted as a nonlinear, almost living-storytelling that is fragmented, polyphonic(many voiced) and collectively produced. The focus of antenarrative methods is on theanalysis of stories that are too unconstructed and fragmented to be analysed intraditional approaches.Boje (2005a) is also interested in the “improper” aspects to story, as Gabriel (2000,pp. 20-5) posits them. Gabriel maintains the notion that proper stories are coherent,which for Boje creates a narrative-prison – a way to avoid studying stories narrativetheory says are improper. It is the improper stories that are caught up in complexitydynamics of organizations. Boje continues by referring to Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, inwhich there are two opposing storying forces. One is centrifugal operating with anoutward directed force of story delivery (e.g. antenarration or improper storying) andthe other is centripetal with an inward directed force of story delivery (properstorying). These can be related, according to Boje (2005a) to Maruyama’s (1968) workin second cybernetics concerned with “observing systems” and their subjectivity, andin particular which discusses processes of deviation and amplification by mutualcausality.There is another way of describing the connection between narrative andantenarrative. Narrative may be seen as a deterministically constituted structuredexpression of a thematic story about an event or set of connected events. If antenarrative is pre-narrative, then it may develop into narrative through the use of patterning processes given that a set of events can be conceptualised and related. Inthis case the patterning process is concerned with the creation of relationships andconnections between conceived entities that constitute patterns. A development on thisidea comes from Dubois’s constructivist notion third cybernetics (Yolles and Dubois,2001) that come from the notion that the observed system and the observing systemstogether form another system from which a new relativistic interactive worldviewarises that is arises from self-observing viewers that have self-observed worldviews. Itis this idea of third cybernetics that will be used to formulate a deeper connectionbetween narrative and antenarrative in due course and that will become a central tenetin this paper.
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