A “Terrestrial Ethics” of Storymaking for Sustainable Enterprise

Based on Hannah Arendt’s understanding of stories as political action and Latour’s notion of the Terrestrial, this chapter constructs a “terrestrial ethics” of “story making.” This ethics is rooted ontologically in Arendt’s notion of natality — rebirth, renewal, and new beginnings. Arendt frames natality in the context of living a happy life, which lies in a memory of a “past that never was.” This is a memory of being born from the world in all its multiple variations and diverse species that we all depend on. Action is ultimately tied to this encounter with the happy life and to natality. Arendt’s original notion of storytelling is retheorized into “storymaking” to underline the embodied and material character of storytelling. We adopt Arendt’s terms labor, work, and action to reflect upon sustainable business storymaking, which we argue is emergent, situated, and creates spaces for multiplicities instead of being stuck in institutionalized, monologic, and petrified linear narratives. Arendt is concerned with creating what we call “antenarrative processes” constitutive of “storymaking,” with grounding in terrestrial conditions and communities. Sustainable storymaking pursues a thirdness captured by Arendt’s notion of amor mundi — the love that unities self and others, revitalizing history in the present and future, and is embedded in the eternal recurrence of all biological processes, social life, and communities. We contribute four storymaker precepts: abstracting, grounding, rehistoricizing, and futuring.