Digital Organizational Storytelling on YouTube: Constructing Plausibility Through Network Protocols of Amateurism,Affinity,and Authenticity

Abstract

In this article, we focus on “digital organizational storytelling” as a communicative practice that relies on technologies enabled by the Internet. The article explores the dialogical potential of digital organizational storytelling and considers how this affects the relationship between online storytellers and audiences. We highlight the importance of network protocols in shaping how stories are understood. Our analysis is based on a case study of an organization, which produces online animated videos critical of corporate practices that negatively affect society. It highlights the network protocols of amateurism, affinity, and authenticity on which the plausibility of digital organizational storytelling relies. Through demonstrating what happens when network protocols are breached, the article contributes toward understanding digital organizational storytelling as a dialogical practice that opens up spaces for oppositional meaning making and can be used to challenge the power of corporations.

Keywords

communication networks technology organizational storytelling Internet social media

Introduction

Organizational storytelling is a powerful vehicle for constructing meaning that relies on conventions of plot and characterization, combined with the narrative skill of the storyteller, to “entertain, persuade, and win over” (Gabriel, 2000, p. 22). Research enabled by the narrative turn in organizational studies (Czarniawska, 2004) has demonstrated the importance of storytelling as a “central part of organizational life” (James & Minnis, 2004, p. 23). This has led to exploration of the role of organizational storytelling in shaping emotions, imagination, and experiences and informing moral judgments (Brown, Gabriel, & Gherardi, 2009; Gabriel, 2000; Gabriel & Connell, 2010; Rosile, Boje, Carlon, Downs, & Saylors, 2013). Storytelling creates and sustains organizational identity (Boje, 2011; Czarniawska, 1998), is used to make sense of power relations (Smith & Keyton, 2001), and helps to generate organizational community through shared memories (Boje, 1991). However, much organizational storytelling research continues to focus on spoken or written communication (Rhodes & Pullen, 2009), despite the dramatic transformations in communication enabled by developments in digital technologies (Castells, 1996; Thrift, 2005). As a consequence, limited attention has been paid to investigating whether, and how, organizational storytelling practices enabled by the Internet differ from other types of organizational storytelling.

The growth of Internet-enabled technologically mediated communication opens up important issues for organizational storytelling researchers. The Internet acts as a “socialized communication realm” (Castells, 2009, p. 53) constructed around local–global networks. This enables individuals, as well as organizations, to distribute and exchange self-generated, multimodal content, comprising visual images as well as words, and interact with one another across geographical, spatial, and temporal borders. Castells (2009) argues that this has led to a shift from mass communication to “mass self-communication,” where “the production of the message is self-generated, the definition of the potential receiver(s) is self-directed, and the retrieval of specific messages or content from the World Wide Web and electronic communication networks is self-selected” (p. 55). This has resulted in more “participatory” (Jenkins, 2006) or “vernacular” cultures (Burgess & Green, 2009) that change the relationship between message producers and audiences as distinctions between these two categories become increasingly fluid (Burgess & Green, 2009; Jenkins, 2006). The notion of the “creative audience” implies that message senders and recipients are “collectively the same subject” (Castells, 2009, p. 130), with the capacity to form their own communicative codes and participate interactively in the construction of meaning. These communicative structures have implications for message production, including the types of narratives that are told and the voices represented within them. The primary purpose of this article is therefore to explore the dialogical potential of Internet communication technologies in enabling the inclusion of more diverse voices, styles, logics, cultural influences and spatio-temporalities than in traditional organizational storytelling (Boje, 2008).

A further aim is to analyze the effects of these communicative network structures on the relationship between organizational storytellers and storytelling audiences. As consciously created, goal-directed networks have come to replace formal, vertically integrated organizations as the primary institutional form in Western societies (Castells, 1996), networks have emerged not only as a primary basis for communication, but also as a source of power (Castells, 2009). Networks made up of interconnecting nodes are comprised of “consciously created groups of three or more autonomous but interdependent organizations that strive to achieve a common goal and jointly produce an output” (Raab & Kenis, 2009, p. 198). These socialized forms of communication rely on shared protocols of communication that govern relationships between actors in the network and regulate the flow of messages. This communicative structure has the potential to lead to new forms of conflict, as networked social actors compete to reach their target audiences and shape discourses that frame human action: “power in the network society is communication power” (Castells, 2009, p. 53). We suggest that communicative network power has important implications for organizational storytelling, including for corporate actors who seek to represent brands through the stories that they tell (Mumby, 2016), as well as for individuals and social movements who tell stories that challenge the inevitability and orientation of corporate globalization (Castells, 2009).

In this article, we present the notion of “digital organizational storytelling,” defined as an organizational storytelling practice that relies on communication technologies enabled by the Internet. We highlight the importance of digital storytelling conventions, or “network protocols” (Castells, 2009), in shaping how a story is understood. To identify and illustrate the importance of these protocols, we focus on what happens when digital organizational storytellers with divergent power interests come into conflict. Our analysis of the dialogical potential of digital organizational storytelling focuses on the video uploading and sharing website, YouTube. We draw on a case study of a U.S. based organization, Free Range Studios (FRS), which produces online animated videos that focus on the impacts of corporate practice on societies. In addition to media sharing platforms such as YouTube, FRS make use of social media applications like Facebook and Twitter to disseminate stories to diverse, global audiences. The key research question that the article addresses is:

How does the dialogical potential of digital organizational storytelling affect the relationship between online storytellers and audiences?

In addressing this issue, we begin by identifying the features of digital storytelling that distinguish it from other kinds of organizational storytelling practice. By analyzing what happens when digital organizational storytellers with divergent power interests come into conflict, we show that digital organizational storytelling relies on particular conventions, or network protocols, that storytelling audiences apply as the basis for determining plausibility. We conclude by discussing how digital organizational storytelling affects the ability of organizations to make and control meaning.

The Dialogical Potential of Digital Organizational Storytelling

Organizational research suggests stories offer a means of disseminating a vision or message (Gabriel, 2000; Shamir & Eilam, 2005), encouraging critical reflection on management (Gherardi & Poggio, 2007; Watson, 2007), and sharing knowledge and sensemaking (Gabriel & Connell, 2010). In addition to stories told in organizations, stories are frequently told about organizations—including how they affect society—through narratives in popular culture. This includes novels (De Cock & Land, 2006), television (Buzzanell & D’Enbeau, 2014; Rhodes, 2001), and films (Buchanan & Huczynski, 2004; Hassard & Holliday, 1998). These fictional stories about organizations have the potential to reach global audiences (Parker, 2002). They enable the expression of emotional as well as intellectual aspects of organizational life, including humorous, violent, or sexualized dynamics that are generally hidden from view (Bell, 2008). Popular cultural narratives can provide a “safe” way of learning about organizations in different historical and cultural contexts (Czarniawska-Joerges & Guillet de Monthoux, 1994). The success of these cultural narratives depends on whether they are plausible to an audience (Czarniawska, 1999; Phillips, 1995), through resonating with their everyday lived experience of the phenomenon explored (Buzzanell & D’Enbeau, 2014). Although fictional organizational stories do not correspond directly to the “real” world (Czarniawska, 1999), they are inherently theory-laden, encoding “pattern and explanation, suggesting hypotheses and establishing causality” (Buchanan & Huczynski, 2004, p. 709). Through this, they offer a mythic structure through which we can achieve insights into our condition and place in the world (Panayiotou, 2010). Popular culture also shapes how organizations are understood in society by providing a critical commentary on collective anxieties and concerns about the negative effects of organizations on society (Parker, 2002). However, existing organizational storytelling research tends to focus on highly monological storytelling forms that offer a linear, one-way method of communication, where a storyteller communicates experience, ideas, and emotions to an audience (Boje, 2001).

The purpose of this article is to explore digital organizational storytelling, which we suggest is inherently more dialogical. The type of digital organizational story on which we focus involves short, online videos distributed via the video uploading and sharing platform, YouTube. Since 2005, YouTube has been consistently placed in the top ten most visited websites globally and is argued to be the largest mass communication medium in the world. It is suggested to be a potentially “revolutionary” form of mass self-communication, bringing individuals and organizations, including corporations, together to “defend their interests, and to assert their values” (Castells, 2009, p. 57). However, social media sites like YouTube have also given rise to new sources of potential organizational domination, including from global multimedia business networks that seek to recommodify Internet communication. These sites constitute a key location within which to observe unfolding power relations between digital organizational storytellers and storytelling audiences.

Digital organizational storytelling shares similarities with other popular cultural storytelling forms, while also manifesting important differences. Like other types of filmmaking (Goodman, 2004), the power of digital organizational storytelling arises from the ability to create a rich multimedia experience. Sites such as YouTube provide a platform for multimodal storytelling, using film, graphics, photographs, and audio recording in combination. Each of these communicative modes can be used to realize a different communicative purpose, but together, they constitute an integrated whole (Meyer, Höllerer, Jancsary, & Van Leeuwen, 2013). In contrast to monological mass media organizational storytelling, digital organizational storytelling involves stories being co-created by multiple participants. Stories may be created simultaneously and in different variants, as people interact and add new elements to the narrative. Digital storytelling can therefore be understood as more dialogical because it involves more diverse voices, styles, logics, cultural influences, and spatio-temporalities than traditional storytelling. Boje (2008) refers to dialogical stories as “polypi” (p. 2), to denote the dynamic, complex nature of their construction.

Like other types of organizational story, digital organizational storytelling relies on the construction of “regimes of verisimilitude” (Neale, 2000), a system of expectations accepted by audiences that form the basis for determining what they consider to be truthful or real. The concept of affordances (Hutchby, 2001) is important in drawing attention to the constraining and enabling potential of social technologies, and the interrelationship between technological artifacts and the social contexts of their use. The particular affordances of the Internet mean that digital stories are inherently unstable and plausibility is continually under threat from counter-stories, online “comments,” and “play” (Beer & Burrows, 2013, p. 51), as storytellers generate and create new narratives. Yet the success of alternative stories is also constrained by the ability to conform to the network protocols on which plausibility relies. We suggest, therefore, that the continual changeability of meaning making afforded through digital storytelling challenges both traditional, monological understandings of organizational storytelling and storyteller–audience relationships. Digital organizational stories can therefore be understood as more “writerly” texts (Barthes, 1977) than other kinds of organizational storytelling, particularly those produced for mass consumption by large audiences such as feature films. In contrast to “readerly” texts, which encourage audiences to remain passive in accepting the meaning and the message the storyteller intended (Barthes, 1977), digital organizational storytelling encourages writerly texts, which invite a more active, dynamic engagement with the story, and are open to continual (re)construction and (re)interpretation (Boje, 2008; Shirky, 2008).

The online environment offers a different and wider range of resources for organizational storytelling. This includes greater ease and facility of production, increased flexibility in choice and use of semiotic resources, and enhanced audience visibility (Domingo et al., 2014). Digital storytelling is an inexpensive yet powerful way of sharing stories about individual lives and personal experiences via social networks across the globe (Lambert, 2013; Robin, 2008), a “bottom-up” activity whereby people of all social backgrounds are able to represent themselves (Lundby, 2008). Digital storytelling also has democratic potential by giving voice to people and subjects that are conventionally overlooked or silenced. These practices rely on an ethos of “prosumption”—a combination of production and consumption that conforms to the democratic ideals of citizen participation and sharing that are central to the use of contemporary digital media (Lupton, 2015). Interaction often relies on intertextuality, as users draw on popular culture, including mainstream media texts and commercial films, appropriating them and re-circulating them in the co-construction of a new story (Jenkins, 2006). Digital organizational storytelling audiences can comment positively or negatively on content, suggest ideas, post clips, or engage in “redaction” (Hartley, 2009): engaging in the production of new material by editing existing content.

Digital organizational storytelling thus forms part of a new and more complex circuit of communication (Hall, 1980) involving the storyteller, the story and the audience, who may interpret the story or edit the text in a way that can diverge from the original storyteller’s intended meaning. Although this dialogism can also arise in other types of organizational storytelling, the greater plasticity of digital organizational stories means that the distinction between audience and storyteller is more blurred, and the ability of audiences to communicate their rejection of a story is intensified. An example that illustrates this dialogical potential concerns car manufacturer, Chevrolet, which used YouTube to invite audiences to use animated clips of a new sports utility vehicle to create their own commercial. YouTube users deliberately parodied the vehicle’s design features to tell astory about its negative environmental impact;¹ This was an oppositional reading (Hall, 1980) to the storytelling message the organization intended to communicate.

However, not all digital organizational storytellers have equal status within the cultural circuits of capital (Thrift, 2005) enabled by Internet communication. Internet sites like YouTube are characterized by tensions between content generated by amateurs, including non-profit and community organizations, and professionals driven by institutional and commercial interests (Consalvo, 2003; Kim, 2012). Digital organizational storytelling takes place in a context where amateur, grassroots, and corporate storytellers “converge” and intersect (Jenkins, 2006). Yet some scholars are cautious of “celebratory” (Fuchs, 2014, p. 65) accounts that position Internet audiences as democratically engaged and continually resisting (Dean, 2009), as these tend to overlook the importance of capitalist interests that rely on the creation of shareholder value through exploitation (Fuchs, 2014; Terranova, 2000).

In addition to these characteristics, we argue that digital organizational storytelling can be distinguished from other types of organizational story through its reliance on particular communicative codes, or “network protocols” (Castells, 2009), that make shared meaning possible. The first of these we term amateurism. Stories on YouTube that have a homemade or unprofessional character are more highly valued than those that display professional, corporate characteristics (Burgess & Green, 2009). This arises from YouTube’s reputation as a place for displaying and sharing images that represent mundane experiences of ordinary people (Kim, 2012). A further protocol that characterizes digital storytelling and connects storytellers to others in the network is the value of affinity, which involves “feelings of membership in a social network, and feelings of attraction to people, things or ideas” (Lange, 2009, p. 71). The construction of affinity relies on establishment of communicative connections between people and can involve large organizational networks operating alongside smaller, personal ones. Establishing and maintaining affinity require continuous attention to ensure that connections and relationships are captured and kept. This is achieved by encouraging “viewers to whom the video is addressed” to respond to “maintain a field of connection between creator and viewer” (Lange, 2009, p. 73).

The third protocol that determines participation in the digital organizational storytelling network is authenticity. This involves evaluation of the “reality” and sincerity of the story, as well as the intentions of the storyteller. However, the authenticity of a digital organizational story can be extremely difficult to ascertain. The creative affordances associated with digital Internet communication result in frequent contestation of authenticity (Kaare & Lundby, 2008). In a hybrid physical–virtual space such as YouTube, it can be difficult to ascertain the verisimilitude of user-generated content. Violations of authenticity may arise from the ease with which digital identities and images can be manipulated. Trying to establish whether content is authentic, including whether it is produced “bottom up” by amateurs or “top down” by corporate interests, has therefore become part of the participatory cultural repertoire of “YouTubers” (Burgess & Green, 2009). Authenticity can be demonstrated through individual self-expression, such as by using the technique of “vlogging,” delivering an autobiographical video diary straight-to-camera. Concerns about inauthentic digital organizational storytelling can arise when corporations engage in digital organizational storytelling in a way that obscures their identity as storytellers. This is referred to as “astroturfing” and involves the production of “fake grassroots media content . . . by commercial media companies and special interest groups,” which is “passed off as coming from individual amateurs” (Jenkins, 2009, p. 122). A prominent example of this involves the YouTube video “Al Gore’s Penguin Army,”² a satirical parody of the popular documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which features former Democratic Vice President of the United States, Al Gore, talking about the effects of climate change³. Originally thought to be the work of an amateur, Al Gore’s Penguin Army was posted on YouTube in June 2006 and to date has generated more than 600,000 views. The video was later exposed as having been produced by public relations and lobbying firm the DCI Group whose clients include ExxonMobil and General Motors,⁴ thereby undermining the authenticity of both the storyteller and the story. Establishing authenticity thus relies on assessment of the social authority of the storyteller, including whether or not he or she understands and observes the protocols that determine inclusion in the network.

On the basis of this review, we suggest that although other forms of organizational storytelling are potentially dialogical, the affordances of digital communication heighten this in interesting and important ways. This results in stories where meaning is more pluralistic, in terms of the voices that are heard, and more open to questionin terms of the claims that are made. Yet, as we have argued, participation in digital organizational storytelling relies on observing and respecting the network protocols that determine a social actor’s ability to influence the decisions of other social actors in the network in ways that favor their own interests and values. This raises questions about the nature of organizational power relations, the patterns of social interaction between storytellers and audiences, and the conventions that successful digital organizational storytellers co-construct. In the section that follows, we introduce our empirical case before interpreting the data to show how digital organizational storytelling affects the ability of corporations to make and control meaning.

Studying a Digital Storytelling Organization

FRS is a U.S. based branding and design company that, since 2003, has specialized in digital organizational storytelling by producing online animated videos on behalf of non-profit third-sector organizations and small to medium-sized businesses. Many of the organizational campaigns for which online videos are produced relate to environmental and social or political issues, from the protection of endangered species to American health care reform. Table 1 provides a summary of two popular animated online video series produced by FRS. The organization describes its mission as being “to sell revolutionary ideas and products that build a more just and sustainable world” and positions itself in contrast to traditional creative branding or marketing agencies that “just work to sell stuff” [Source: FRS website, 2011]. Storytelling is seen by organization members as crucial in enabling effective communication of complex issues in a context characterized by excessive noise and information overload (Sachs, 2012). FRS has received national media attention in response to its activities, from TV networks Fox News and CNN and newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times. In 2008, FRS co-founder and CEO, Jonah Sachs, was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the 50 people who might save the planet, and in 2010, a video produced by FRS was nominated for a National Design Award by the Smithsonian Institution. FRS videos are also widely used as an educational resource in schools and universities, including business schools (Heaton, 2010).

Table 1.

Digital Organizational Stories.

Title	Release date and duration	Sequels and related titles⁶	Commissioning client	Focus of story	Audience reception
The Meatrix	2003, 3.46 min	Meatrix 2 (2006) and Meatrix 2.5 (2006); Grocery Store Wars (2005)	Global Resource Centre for the Environment (GRACE Communications Foundation)	Factory farming; animal cruelty; unethical employment practices; pollution; poor food safety	Over 25 million views; translated into over 40 languages
The Story of Stuff	2007, 20 min	The Story of Bottled Water (2010); The Story of Electronics (2010); The Story of Cosmetics (2010); The Story of Broke (2011); The Story of Citizens United v. FEC⁷ (2011); The Story of Change (2012)	The Story of Stuff Project, Tides Foundation, Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption	Commodity culture, the materials economy; hyper-consumption; global supply chains; corporations	Over 15 million views for The Story of Stuff; follow-up in the form of a New York Times bestselling book (Leonard, 2010); 200,000 Facebook fans; shown in 1,500 classrooms; distributed across over 220 countries and territories; 2 million views for The Story of Bottled Water; reached number seven in the viral video chart http://viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com/ in March 2010

Our rationale for the focus on this case was instrumental (Stake, 2005), to examine a well-known and successful digital storytelling organization and understand the dynamics of its practice. It was also intrinsic (Stake, 2005), driven by a desire to understand digital organizational storytelling theoretically through close engagement and rich description. Access to the organization was negotiated via email and telephone, building on a successful collaboration with a senior member of the organization to run a workshop at an academic conference in 2010. Our data set comprises semi-structured, one hour long interviews with five senior members of the 24-member organization and two key informants from a client organization.

The interviews were conducted using Skype. Online interviewing represents a new “methodological frontier” (Deakin & Wakefield, 2014, p. 605) enabling interviews to be conducted over large geographical distances without travel, and in a way that accommodates busy schedules and different time zones (Hanna, 2012). This was a naturalistic method for respondents who were already comfortable using Skype and other digital platforms in their working lives. Questions focused on the communication strategies used to engage with audiences and the networked relationships between FRS, commissioning clients, and digital storytelling audiences. Interviews were carried out over a nine month period and were recorded and professionally transcribed verbatim.⁵

A second data source involved downloading and watching all FRS videos, and making detailed notes on the narratives, semiotic resources, and emergent themes. A third aspect of the data set comprised “user-generated data” (Hardey, 2011) in the form of online posts and comments in response to the videos that we collected by regularly visiting organizational websites, Facebook pages, blogs, and Twitter feeds. As Amit (2000) argues, the vastness of online space means that the fieldwork site must be ‘constructed rather than ‘discovered’ and our overall research design reflected this. We visited the online platforms once a month for nine months to monitor form (design) and content (changing narratives). This data was multimodal, including words (captions, headings, paragraphs), images (icons, videos, photographs), and customized web platform resources. Our dialogical interest in multiple voices and styles meant that we approached the data not as static textual artifacts, but as cultural resources that bloggers shape (Domingo et al., 2014). The construction of this innovative data set enabled investigation into online cultures of organizational storytelling that have tended to be overlooked by social science researchers (Beer & Burrows, 2007). Finally, we engaged in qualitative textual analysis of two single-authored books (Leonard, 2010; Sachs, 2012) and a co-authored book chapter (Sachs & Finkelpearl, 2010) written by founding members of the organization. This generated additional insights into how digital organizational storytellers present their activities to external audiences.

Rather than focusing solely on the content of the stories, our interest extends to the processes and practices of digital organizational storytelling and the relations between storytellers and audiences that enable story production and circulation. We therefore analyzed the accounts of storytellers, including how they made sense of storytelling activities and the cultural context in which stories were told. This enabled us to explore the affordances of YouTube as a site of meaning, and to understand how certain stories come to be seen as plausible in this context, while also considering the process through which other stories are perceived as lacking in verisimilitude. We began by reading all the transcripts carefully and identifying recurrent terms in the interview accounts. As interpretive, qualitative researchers (Yanow & Schwartz-Shea, 2012), we looked for accounts of specific incidents and descriptions of relationships between members of the organization, their clients, and audiences, focusing particularly on the language used. We then engaged in iterative cycles of analysis and discussion, looking at the structure, content, and context of the participants’ narratives (Mishler, 1986), searching for patterns in the interview, social media, and documentary data, which formed the basis for development of analytical themes. These activities were informed by our research objectives: to explore the dialogical potential of digital organizational storytelling and consider how this affects the relationship between online storytellers and audiences; to analyze what happens when digital organizational storytellers with divergent power interests come into conflict; and to elucidate the network protocols that determine how a story is understood. In the following section, we discuss how FRS conceptualize and use digital storytelling before exploring the responses that their stories provoked.

Moral Stories of Organizational Change

Storytelling as a medium was held in high regard by FRS, seen by members as a key resource that can be used “to change social behaviour . . . [and] drive a new set of values that would lead to the lifestyles and political changes necessary to confront today’s ecological crises” (Sachs & Finkelpearl, 2010, p. 151). This apparent potential was viewed as arising from the ability of stories to reach audiences at an emotional level. According to FRS, facts and information alone are insufficient as a basis for stimulating social change, because “humans tend not to be rational actors” (Sachs & Finkelpearl, 2010, p. 154). Hence, the purpose is not simply to entertain audiences, but to pose a challenge to their current viewpoints and practices by encouraging emotional investment in the characters and the story itself.

In spite of the contemporary nature of the digital technological medium used to tell their stories, members of FRS describe their storytelling approach as reliant on “ancient mythological formula,” which has “persisted in the human consciousness, across the world for millennia” (Sachs, 2012, p. 4). A dominant plot is that of the “hero’s journey,” where a character in pursuit of “higher-level values” meets a mentor who gives him or her courage to enter an unfamiliar world to pursue a goal and eventually leave with the “treasure” that will “heal her broken world” (Sachs, 2012, p. 163). This mode of storytelling typically ends with communication of a moral purpose (Gabriel, 2000). A key feature of these stories is their intertextuality: the use of iconic visual images from popular mainstream media, which are appropriated in vernacular style. This can be seen in one of FRS’s earliest digital stories, The Meatrix (2003), released pre-YouTube⁸. The Meatrix draws on the cult science fiction film The Matrix (1999)⁹, which in turn refers intertextually to earlier mythological narratives, including the Judeo–Christian Messiah myth and Homerian epics to depict a battle between machines and humans (Jenkins, 2006). These intertextual references form the basis of a parody, which entertains audiences through critique (Kenny, 2009). The Meatrix is an epic story that involves a struggle for victory involving a heroic but naive character, “Leo the pig,” who is advised by a wise cow called “Moopheus,” who educates the former and encourages him to exercise agency in facing adversity and maintaining the values he promotes by exposing the evils of factory farming and liberating its victims. The poetic trope of attribution of motive is used to construct the corporation as an evil villain, symbolically represented by men in black suits, a common visual metonym used to represent corporate interests (Bell, 2008), whereas the animals destined for slaughter are portrayed as defenseless victims. The story also contains a strongly moral dimension through this juxtaposition of good and evil (Gabriel, 2000).

The moral dimension of FRS’s approach to, and use of, digital organizational storytelling is also evident in The Story of Stuff (TSOS). This video series features a single narrator, TSOS Project founder Annie Leonard, who speaks directly to the camera and is supported by simple black-and-white line drawn cartoon drawings to represent key protagonists. The mode of storytelling conforms to the documentary genre, through claiming to present factual information about the world beyond the story, and using visual aids to communicate evidence in support of an argument (Bell, 2008). The narrators’ argument is that “most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we have today . . . long-term solutions must seek transformative change” (Leonard, 2010, p. xxi) and that therefore “business as usual is unsustainable” (Heaton, 2010, p. 554). The story conforms to the rhetorical documentary form, by addressing the audience directly and “trying to move them towards a particular intellectual position, emotional attitude, and/or action” that will affect their everyday life (Bell, 2008, pp. 189-190). The images act as fixed signifiers of corporations, government, employees, and consumers. They also rely on juxtaposition of opposites, through which the qualities of each become exaggerated. The stories rely on attribution of unity, constructing corporations as an undifferentiated entity that is responsible for causing significant negative impact on society and the natural environment. This enables clear attribution of blame and credit, giving the storyteller, Annie, “a means of determining right and wrong and assigning them to appropriate agents” (Gabriel, 2000, p. 38). The poetic tropes associated with traditional organizational storytelling are thus enhanced through the use of visual symbolism, which enables the clear attribution of agency, turning passive, inanimate, or conceptual categories (such as animals reared for human consumption or corporations) into purposeful, conscious, and characterful beings (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Modes and Tropes of Digital Organizational Storytelling.

Title	Key protagonists	Mode	Poetic tropes	Symbolic tropes and intertextual references
The Meatrix	Naive apprentice (Leo the pig); wise hero (Moopheus the cow); evil villain (Agri-Corp and agents of The Meatrix); hapless victims (the animals)	Epic story of a heroic character who exposes the illusion of family farming and seeks to “liberate minds” so they know where their food comes from. Fights evil villain and saves animal victims from impending death.	Attribution of motive: The factory farming industry as responsible culprit Attribution of emotion to central characters: Evil deeds committed by men in suits	Corporation represented by Agri-Corp a multi-limbed robot and agents of The Meatrix—Men in black suits Release coincides with the final film in The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003); human enslavement to machines translated into animal enslavement to machines. A related narrative of good vs. evil forces is used in Grocery Store Wars which draws on the Star Wars film franchise
The Story of Stuff	Narrator (Annie Leonard); evil villain (greedy, out-of-control corporations); other protagonists (the government; the Third World; factories; Big Box Mart; employees; consumers)	Documentary story (rhetorical form), a narrator tells the story simply but passionately and builds a persuasive argument. Story ends by proposing a solution to the issues raised.	Attribution of motive: Corporation as responsible for unethical and destructive social, environmental and health effects; government responsible related to failure to control the corporation Attribution of causal connections: Multiple incidents in narrative linked together in cause/effect relationship Attribution of unity and fixed qualities: Corporation as an undifferentiated, unified category signified as having fixed characteristics (e.g., inherently greedy)	Hand-drawn, black and white stick figures denote childlike simplicity; Narrator, Annie Leonard, dressed plainly in shirt and slacks, is represented in front of a whiteboard, as though teaching; Inflated stick figure with dollar sign on body and top hat to represent the corporation; Pictorial arrows and flows used to indicate causality and attribute responsibility

For FRS, this digital medium enables simple yet strongly moral stories about organizational change to be disseminated to global audiences. The storytellers’ aim is to achieve a behavioral change in audiences through moral critique of corporate practices that have a negative impact on societies. However, as the next section argues, successful digital organizational storytelling also relies on following and negotiating specific network protocols on which these practices rely.

Network Protocols of Affinity, Authenticity, and Amateurism

A key feature that distinguishes digital organizational storytelling is the reliance on electronic networks that enable collaboration and co-construction between storytellers and audiences across geographical boundaries, on a scale and at a speed greater than that enabled by traditional storytelling methods. As we discussed above, this relies on building a network of followers that shares an affinity. Networks of affinity enable rapid, purposeful distribution of digital organizational stories in a way that does not rely on paid advertising or direct access to mass broadcasting (Wolfe, 2009). Techniques used by FRS to cultivate communities of affinity include multiple, related online activities (e.g., message boards and listservs, blogs, email, Facebook, and Twitter), and longer established offline technologies (video screenings, radio, and journalistic features). These are used in combination to encourage audiences to respond to stories and participate in conversation with storytellers and with each other, as this respondent explained:

We have a very engaged audience. I mean we call them typically a community instead of an audience because they really do . . . You know, it was really interesting with this last Story of Citizens United film that we did. We had folks complete some survey questions for us and we had them watch a series of videos both for and against the decision and then give us some feedback around what messages were coming through . . . to try and get a sense from them in terms of like what information would be useful as we tried to tell the story. It’s [also] a very diverse audience . . . it’s very popular with Catholic nuns in the Mid-West and here in Oakland there’s like a youth group of colour that has adopted Story of Stuff into like a hip-hop poetry dance . . .

Community building takes place offline as well as online, for example by encouraging network members to meet face to face, or “throw house parties,” following the launch of a new online video:

It was a way to publicise . . . people like to be given very clear things to do and ways to participate. So they said they were going to have a screening party on the launch date and we gave them directions to download the movie and gave like a discussion guide and then I created this Google form so that after people had had their parties they could give us information and it’s actually geo-tagged which means it integrates with Google maps . . . So they could drop a little pin where they put their party, how many people attended and, you know, was there some funny story they wanted to share?

FRS cultivates a multiplicity and diversity of voices to interact with their stories. This encourages a blurring of the boundaries between storytellers and audiences by inviting audiences to actively participate in digital organizational storytelling. As a consequence, the origin of meaning migrates from the storyteller and the story to the audience who themselves become storytellers, rather than passive audiences to whom stories are told. Through this, the story not only becomes polyphonic, but is dialogized with multi-stylistic expressions, diverse configurations of time and space, and multiple interplays with varied social and cultural discourses (Boje, 2008). Although Boje (2008, p. 3) describes such stories as “a rare and endangered species” in organizations, we suggest that in the context of digital organizational storytelling, they are relatively common. This arises as a result of the power that resides in networks, as communicative structures that rely on protocols of communication to process flows of messages (Castells, 2009).

A second protocol on which successful digital organizational storytelling depends is the evaluation of authenticity. Interviewees drew repeatedly on discourses of authenticity to describe their storytelling practices. When asked to explain further, one respondent associated authenticity with the moral purpose of storytelling in enabling distinction between right and wrong in evaluation of corporate social responsibility:

Authenticity to me means it’s not just greenwashing. So you’re not just slapping a sticker on something to make it appear as if it were more environmentally or people friendly, you know, as if it’s more sustainable . . . if you’re just slapping a sticker on a product or if you’re just glossing over the yukky stuff and pulling out a few highlights that are good, then that’s not authentic in my mind. Authentic is sincerely trying to have a product or a cause that is good for people, planet and profits . . . As more and more companies want to reach into this kind of authentic sustainability world space, then we have to decide whether or not we’re going to be willing to work for them and there’s a wide range of opinions about Free Range about who you work for and how authentic they have to be . . . It’s really a slippery slope of authenticity.

The importance of evaluations of authenticity also encompasses audiences who are described as “agents of authenticity” (Sachs, 2012) through their engagement with the impact of corporate practices on society. This includes participating in conversations about the authenticity of digital stories, as illustrated by these user-generated comments on the FRS website:

The truth about the consumption system!

This is great! I believe in this message!

This is a great video that was homework in my financial literacy class. It is so true!!!!!!! People should really watch this video!!!!

Thought for food #ownmyidentity #authenticman #authenticearth

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8)

However, respondents were also aware of the writerly character of digital organizational storytelling and the consequent instability of stories. An illustration of how this was used to undermine authenticity involved online political activist Lee Doren who posted critiques of TSOS on his online channel HowTheWorldWorks,¹⁰ where he accused Annie Leonard of indoctrinating children through use of the TSOS videos in schools. The authenticity of her story was also undermined through parodies of TSOS videos, which include a mocking video of Leonard dressed a Nazi uniform accompanied by music from the German national anthem. Website comments were also used to refute authenticity:

This video is nothing but propaganda—full of so many lies and half truths I can’t even begin to address them all. Look past the cute little animations and the woman who speaks to you as if you were a kindergartener and it’s nothing but a plea to bury the government tick even further into your flesh. The drive to control you never stops . . . (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8, accessed 13 July 2016)

Thus, the fluidity of meaning associated with digital organizational storytelling can be used to undermine the storyteller’s attempts to control how the story is interpreted. However, conversely, writerly engagements that draw on communities of affinity can enhance the perceived authenticity of the storyteller and the story, as this interviewee noted:

One of the great things about the teenagers who are talking is that actually you can YouTube their response. I think it’s hysterical, smart . . . they got on and they said “Hi, we’re here to talk about The Story of Stuff. My name’s Annie,” and then they had people kind of pop out from the side that said “But Annie, what’s a toxin?” and “What about this?” and “What about this?” . . . [they asked some] tough questions and that kind of ability . . . [to] respond and ask those is a totally different dialogue than just Free Range broadcasting something out . . . all of a sudden you’re having one to many and many can come back to one, and many can go to each other and so it’s a whole new game, which I think it’s just really exciting from a creative standpoint.

A further protocol identified as crucial in maintaining authenticity in digital organizational storytelling is amateurism This is captured in this respondent’s explanation of the rationale for the TSOS videos:

Annie had been working on these issues for a long time, but she had always kind of communicated it in a bit kind of nerdier way. You know, talking about parts per billion and toxics in the materials flow and she did a year-long workshop with a bunch of other activists and leaders and they just gave her a lot of really authentic feedback about how she could make her kind of rap, so to speak, more accessible and she really took it to heart . . . she was super frustrated by her inability to communicate the information in a way that resonated with people, so almost as a joke, when she was giving her presentation she started putting up these stick figures and these little kind of line drawings to tell her story and it immediately became apparent that that was such a better way to tell the story and she started getting invited places to go and give her talk using the stick figure drawings and everyone kept saying to her like “You should make a film of this!”

The network protocols of affinity, authenticity, and amateurism are used by digital organizational storytellers to establish and maintain a successful storytelling tradition. The success of these digital organizational storytelling practices, and the importance of these protocols in maintaining them, is exposed by looking at what happens when these protocols are breached, as the following section illustrates.

Breaching the Protocols of Digital Organizational Storytelling

The Story of Bottled Water (2010)¹¹ traces the environmental and social impacts associated with drinking bottled rather than tap water. Within weeks of its release, the International Bottled Water Association in association with Bottled Water Matters (IBWA)¹² produced a response in the form of an online video titled Conflicted Consumer (2010)¹³ that highlighted the consumer health and safety benefits associated with drinking bottled water and promoted the industry’s commitment to sustainability (e.g., in bottle recycling). This online video tells the story of a day in the life of a bottled water consumer as she struggles with her devilish doubts about drinking bottled water and eventually sides with the angel on her shoulder in realizing its benefits. However, the story “boomeranged” (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1968), as its meaning was turned around by audiences who read it in a way that reversed the message intended by the storyteller, as illustrated by comments posted on YouTube in response to the video:

Wow . . . what an excellent video . . . It tells you exactly WHY you SHOULD NOT be drinking bottled water. How ironic that the angels is selfish—after having seen this, I too am going to continue polluting because my convenience is WAY more important than common good!!! (http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=eklg6j2G2pk, accessed 13 July 2016)

The meaning of the story was turned around by audiences who read it in a way that was contrary to the purpose of the initial storyteller. By “trying to speak the language of a subculture” that it did not belong to, the storyteller “set off the alarm bells of insincerity in the audience it most wanted to reach” (Sachs, 2012, p. 44). Members of FRS, TSOS, and their communities of affinity saw this as an indication of their success as storytellers:

You know a project is a success in the viral model, you know, if it starts being talked about and if it starts to create a bit of a [buzz] . . . if something initiates a debate or really sparks a conversation, you know, lots of good, heated conversation, we like that.

That was such a funny video that they made, my goodness. So with the Story of Bottled Water—kind of much as you would expect—we got some push-back from the industry and they actually attempted to make their own video to kind of counter ours and talk about the “real” story of bottled water and how bottled water’s so good for you and blah, blah, blah, but it was so tragically badly done that it really just made us look a lot better . . . On some level, you know, we can wear it as a badge of honour that our work is meaningful enough and powerful enough that . . . people are paying attention to it.

It was awful and it was hilariously bad . . . The production value was terrible. The message was so transparently bad. It was . . . it was grasping at straws and anyone with half a brain could see right through it . . . If we receive backlash on what we’ve done, then we’ve done our job.

The industry coalition’s failure to conform to the protocols of the digital storytelling network resulted in the story being deemed inauthentic. To emphasize this, for several weeksFRS included a link to Conflicted Consumer on its website. IBWA made several similar online videos,¹⁴ but their success never approached the Story of Bottled Water.¹⁵ Although the IBWA stories appeared to conform to the norms of digital organizational storytelling on YouTube, in that they cultivated a homemade appearance, involved cultural redaction,¹⁶ and contained an element of playful humor rather than critical–rational debate, they failed to do so convincingly. This suggests that corporations may be caught in a double-bind: if they reveal their storytelling identity, they risk transgressing the amateur identity of the culture and alienating its members. Alternatively, if they produce stories that claim to be vernacular, they risk being paradoxically and negatively positioned as inauthentic; and audiences may choose to read the story in ways that are oppositional to those intended by the storyteller (Hall, 1980).

Discussion and Conclusion

This article has explored the dialogical potential of digital organizational storytelling by analysing the relationships between storytellers and storytelling audiences. It has focused on what happens when digital organizational storytellers with divergent power interests come into conflict. Based on case study analysis of an organization that produces online animated videos to tell moral stories about corporate practices that negatively affect society, the article has identified the network protocols of affinity, authenticity and amateurism that frame how a story is understood, and whether or not it is deemed plausible. Through this, the article has generated insight into the particular characteristics of digital organizational storytelling. Our analysis suggests that storytelling practices on the Internet are more dialogical than traditional linguistic, including oral and textual, forms of organizational storytelling. It further suggests that digital organizational storytelling opens up the possibility for oppositional practices of meaning makingwhich challenge the power of corporations. We conclude by summarizing the conceptual implications of our analysis for organizational storytelling researchers and indicating directions for further study.

Digital storytelling is both similar to, and different from, traditional forms of organizational storytelling. On the one hand, there are similarities in the ways that stories are initially told. As our analysis illustrates, FRS follows traditional storytelling conventions, relying on well-established mythological or folkloric formulae such as simplicity of plot and symbolic characters, to deliver a strong moral message (Gabriel, 2000). There are also similarities in the purposes that stories serve, both as a means of interpreting the world as it is, and as a way of articulating a desired future. As Küpers, Mantere, and Staler (2013) argue, the power of stories lies in their “capacity to encompass thinking and feeling about issues and thereby to compel people to take certain actions and avoid others” (p. 96). The practices analyzed here suggest that serving as a stimulus toward action is common to both digital organizational storytellers and storytellers in organizations. However, the plasticity of meaning making afforded through digital storytelling challenges both traditional understandings of organizational storytelling and the relationships between storytelling organizations and storytelling audiences. Development of online digital technologies that enable and encourage audiences to respond immediately and directly by communicating their acceptance or rejection of a story has led to storytelling practices being enacted in the context of distributed, networked power relations. Power in this context is less a pre-existing, stable, or reified quality, and more a fluid resource which is worked out through practice.

Digital organizational storytelling is also characterized by increased indeterminacy of meaning. Hence, rather than using stories for “the legitimization of dominant power relationships” (Küpers et al., 2013, p. 96), FRS and TSOS set out to deliberately encourage dialogism, by opening up stories to multiple narrators and interpretations. Where contestation emerged in online contexts, this took the form of increasing the plurality of voices, styles, and discourses. As a consequence, our analysis suggests that even if the plausibility of a digital organizational story is limited, the potential for co-creation, in the form of ongoing story development through wider distribution to digital storytelling audiences, is greater than in traditional oral and textual organizational storytelling contexts. This dialogical potential is also greater than with other popular cultural storytelling forms, including film and television, where communication is mainly one-way and top-down.

Digital organizational storytelling also makes it more difficult for organizations to control meaning making. There is increased unpredictability associated with digital stories and how they are interpreted, in comparison with the monological character of mass media forms of storytelling enabled by film and television. There is therefore greater opportunity for oppositional readings: that is, interpretations that run counter to the message that the storyteller intended (Hall, 1980). This poses difficulties for organizational storytellers who attempt to shape and control meaning in relation to the brand (Mumby, 2016). The protocols of amateurism, affinity, and authenticity define participation in digital storytelling networks. These protocols can also be invoked to undermine organizational meaning making. This generates spaces for critical, minority, grassroots, and individual voices that tend to be marginalized by corporate structures of communicative power (Mumby, 2016). Digital organizational storytelling thus enhances the possibility for “polypi,” or extreme dialogical stories, where meaning making remains fluid, thereby displacing narrative monologism.

As our analysis has highlighted, this opens up possibilities for digital organizational storytellers who are critical of corporate globalization to engage in oppositional meaning-making practices that challenge established power interests. Conflicts are fought between networked digital organizational storytellers and storytelling audiences who engage in dialogical meaning making to assert their values. Network power has thereby created opportunities for new organizational storytelling actors to construct meaning through digital storytelling in ways that challenge the power of corporations to control meaning in ways that promote and further their interests. We suggest therefore that there is a need to revisit the theoretical foundations of organizational storytelling in order to appreciate the significance of these communicative structures. Our analysis provides an exemplary illustration of the relational nature of power networks and the importance of network protocols in determining the success of stories. Further study of organizational storytelling in online contexts is needed to appreciate the potential of digital organizational storytelling, including those that rely on video diaries (Mason, 2012) and blogs (Schoneboom, 2009, 2011).

However, it is important not to overstate the potential for democratization and social change associated with new forms of organizational storytelling enabled by the Internet. The practice of digital organizational storytelling can be critiqued as a form of “slacktivism” or “clicktivism” that has little or no political or social impact on the offline world (Gladwell, 2010). According to Dean (2009), online speech, opinion, and participation can become fetishized, arising from the participant’s own belief that his or her contribution means something and matters, independently of whether it has any material or practical impact or efficacy. This gives rise to a neoliberal fantasy in which political struggles in local and institutional settings are displaced and “doing is reduced to talking” (Dean, 2009, p. 32); enduring political solidarity being replaced by momentary spectacle. The challenge for digital organizational storytellers is to find ways of leveraging the meaning-making potential associated with stories to bring about “real” world change by translating narratives into action. For organizational storytelling researchers, the task is to find ways of gaining access to these practices and to begin to explore digital organizational storytelling systematically as a dialogical practice that tacks between online and offline social worlds.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Free Range Studios and The Story of Stuff for their generosity of time in support of this research.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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