Stories, actions and ethics in organizations

Based upon Hannah Arendt’s notion of action as storytelling and Butler’s rework of Arendt’s notion into an embodied and material performance, this paper proposes a material-performative organizational ethics. Stories, it is argued, are where people appear to one another as unique subjects with intentions, voices and opinions. They are lived and performed together with others in historical, geographical and material locations. More specifically stories emerge in what Arendt calls the space of appearance, which is the collective and relational space where people can appear as unique subjects, and which conditions the possibility of collective action. It is argued that storytelling, is where people transform the world and create something new. This “greatness” does not lie in motivation or aims but resides in performance itself. It resembles the kind of holistic living embodied in the artist, the artisan, craft-man or professional. Action and storytelling however rely on the space of appearance and hence the specific configuration of space and the affordances it offers. This implies both a distribution of resources and possibilities but also a distribution of rights and of power. Hence the implications in terms of ethics are twofold: on one hand focus is on the performance of work as an unfolding process of art, craftsmanship and/or creativity, second, focus is relocated to the configuration of space and the subsequent discursive and material affordances.