Organizational Small Storymaking and Change: Identity Work as Coming into Being in Narrative-small-story Dynamics

The chapter conceptualizes a discourse- and dissensus-based dialogic approach to organizational identity work in a change communication perspective. Here organizational or professional identities are seen as co-creative accomplishments and as socially negotiated phenomena that come into being in the complex and subtle discursive storymaking processes that are continuously (re)constituting organizational practice. From this view organizations are perceived as fascinating, subtle and everchanging storymaking ecologies that are constantly (re)communicated or story-made into being in complex interplay between various entangled storymaking layers, that is: 1) situated small stories, 2) organizational narratives, and 3) societal narratives. The former small stories emerge and circulate in diverse situated organizational practices and the latter two narrative levels can be seen as the results of small story efforts that have crystallized over time through retrospective sense-making processes (Bager & Lundholt, 2021; Bager & McClellan, in press; Bager & McClellan, accepted). From an organizational small storymaking (OSS) approach organizational identities are seen as continuously and collectively worked up in local situations through ongoing positioning activities invoking and engendering these three entangled storymaking layers. Hence, an OSS perspective allows us to reflect how organizational identity work unfold in the schism between local social interaction and the macro social processes in which it is embedded.