Quantum Organizational World-Making through Material Emobided Storytelling Practices

In recent years, the social construction approach to strategy, organization, culture, management and learning has increasingly been criticized for ignoring the active role of the materiality of the social world (Barad 2007, Ingold 2012, Nicolini 2012, Taguchi 2009). Thus in the aftermath of the lin-guistic, discursive, and narrative turn, the quantum, material turn has emerged as one of the most recent research approaches to the study of organizational life. However, the quantum approach to organizational studies still needs scholarly discussions of the active agential role of body and of materiality in world-making phenomena.
In this article, organizational development and change are viewed as world-making phenomena that emerge from material, embodied, storytelling practices and are dissipated in the organization through the living story web in fractal, rhizomatic organizing processes. Diffractively reading pri-marily Boje, Barad, Ingold, Heidegger, Bakhtin, and Deleuze and Guattari through each other, a quantum storytelling framework is proposed for better understanding organizing processes towards the future. Special attention is paid to the prospective, sense-shaping role of agential rhizomatic antenarratives in these processes (Boje 2011b, Boje 2014a).
The practical contribution of the article is to heighten the awareness of practitioners towards the tensed interplay between centripetal, narrative stories of organized practices “in place”, the dynam-ics of living stories of lifeworlds “in movement”, and the sense-shaping, organizing antenarratives of an “unsettling” world in its becoming. The theoretical contribution is to further enrich our con-ceptual understanding of the entanglement between lifeworld living stories and agential materiality in world-making phenomena, as we move from inter-action to intra-action (Barad 2007, Barad 2003). The implication is to view organizational development and change from within-the-phenomena.