Material Storytelling - Resituating Language and Matter in Organizational Storytelling

This chapter highlights the manner by which matter came to matter in an organizational restorying process. It reports on the important findings of an actionresearch project using and developing an organizational-reworking apparatus coined as Material Storytelling (Strand, 2010). Within the contemporary management literature, the low-practical aspects of organizational life, development, and change are commonly disregarded as unimportant. In return, this chapter highlights how matter matters as part of the field of possibility for action. More specifically, this chapter is the story about how I, together with 10 participants at a Danish care institution, the 'Youth-home' at the Deafblindness Centre in Aalborg (DBC hereafter), came to acknowledge the importance of the arrangement of our physical surroundings in our workplaces in regard to the practices that are actually being conducted (and not). These surroundings do not so much (passively) mirror what is important and not important. Rather, they co-constitute, on a daily basis, which material-discursive practices (and voices) are allowed to matter, and which, in effect, are excluded from mattering through the congealed agency of these materialized physical surroundings. It became evident that if you want to rid the everyday work-practices from certain habitual patterns of behavior - and, in effect, change these priorities or hegemonies - you must be willing to change some vital physical and material conditions of the workplace. However, the rebuild in itself was not the solution. Rather, it was an important aspect of reworking the complex relationality of people, practices, and surroundings and in accomplishing a more balanced relationship between the discursive and the material in reworking the organization. The chapter proposes, through concrete examples, an Apparatus of Material Storytelling as the methodology through which imbalances can be resituated; a manner of 'enacting the between' that suggests a different take on the relationality of power, discourse, and materiality, which includes a discussion about respons(dis)ability just as much as responsibility, due to silenced, excluded, or impaired voices.