Abstract
This article examines the extent to which the storying lens provides useful purchase in understanding the sensemaking processes that occur in the hegemonic struggle over collective identities during contested change. Our interest is in how stories are shaped within the context of workplace change; the limitations of existing story types for making sense of the data; temporality as it relates to change processes and story types; and the use of stories to legitimate identity in the power-political dynamics of change. The empirical material draws on a study of miners’ storied responses to the introduction of a performance appraisal system for underground workers at an Australian colliery.
The interpretative lens of storying is used to examine empirical material from a longitudinal study on the introduction of a performance appraisal system in an Australian colliery. Stories in various forms were present in the data as miners sought to make sense and give sense to the change being imposed on them by management and relegitimate their threatened identities of what it means to be a miner. Their many stories were reflexive, subjective, sometimes partial, incomplete and prospective, sometimes providing after-the-event retrospective narratives with characters, plots and endings. The conflict and contestation in the exchange of narratives between miners and those imposing a new appraisal system highlight the place of stories not only as sensemaking devices but also as political levers within and across groups in the exercise of power relations. Storytelling processes were used by miners to invert and subvert the effects of appraisals, which in this case, were being used by managers who sought to reconstitute miners in a prescribed way. Our main focus is on achieving a meaningful understanding of the way miners made and gave sense to their experiences of change and the way in which through stories and the storying process they sought to resist and counter the managerial frame embedded in the new performance appraisal system.
In taking a storying turn we examine: the place of stories in the context of contested workplace change; the usefulness of existing story types for making sense of the data; temporality as it relates to causal explanations embedded in retrospective stories and the more fluid lived experiences (ongoing stories) of nonlinear change; and the interrelationship of sensemaking and sensegiving in stories and the storying process. Our main focus is on stories that emerge, develop and are called upon to reinforce, challenge, or reconstitute the place of the individual and group during times of change. Management hegemony and forms of employee resistance draw attention to the political arena of change and power-relations (Buchanan & Badham, 2008, p. 48; Hardy, 1996), and the way that stories may be variously heard, silenced, enforced and re-storied over time in trying to present a particular view of the “way-it-is” or the “way-it-should-be” (Dawson & Buchanan, 2012). We aim to show how these stories enable employees to make sense and given sense to their experiences of change (Reissner, 2008). The miners’ stories typically reinforced traditional divisions between “us” (the workers) and “them” (management), while managers tended to downplay any persuasive appeal of the miners’ tales in asserting their own managerial prerogative.
We use some of our data to identify and categorize a number of stories following Gabriel’s (2000) taxonomy, which we find both revealing and limiting. This in turn sends us in search of a framework for explaining the dynamic processes that are occurring in the storying and restorying of miners’ experiences (in terms of terse fragments, unfinalized accounts, verbal shorthand, and actions at the coalface) that are bound up with their own sense of self-worth and collective identity that, following change, are no longer taken for granted. Our essential argument is that the actions and reactions of miners are not only conveyed in constructed narratives with plots, characters, and sequences of events but also in what Gabriel (2004) and Brown (2006) call story fragments and what Boje (2001) calls antenarratives (a bet on the future). We contend that while Gabriel’s (2000) approach enables retrospective sensemaking in clearly delineating the components of a story that requires coherence with a clear beginning, middle and end, Boje’s (2008) perspective accommodates the more fragmentary, unfinalized, plurivocality of stories. The persuasive power of stories as prospective sensegiving devices that seek to affect others in the promotion of a preferred outcome is a further element that we contend requires accommodation. We therefore argue for a broader conceptualization of story that is able to accommodate the more conventional narrative framework while also embracing future-oriented and the present ongoing elements of sensemaking and sensegiving that are part of the storying process during times of change.
The article is structured as follows: The next section highlights key contributions to the literature with respect to the “storying turn” drawing particular attention to conceptions of linear/nonlinear, cohesive/fragmentary stories that contain rich layers of contextual and intertextual features. We then develop a model for understanding story tensions between retrospective, present and prospective storying and use this interpretive lens to make sense of data from a longitudinal study of coal miners’ responses, in discursive storytelling, to being performance appraised. In discussing our findings, we suggest wider implications of our proposed model for understanding the storying process and contested workplace change.
Stories, Storytellers, and Storying
There is an extensive body of literature on the narrative turn in the social sciences (see for example, Butler, 1997; Czarniawska & Gagliardi, 2003; Fraser, 2004; Pentland, 1999; Sims, 2003). Drawing on the work of MacIntyre (1981), Fisher (1984) advocates that people are essentially storytellers and that the world is full of stories from which individuals and groups choose stories that hang together, often aligning with stories that cohere with their own values and beliefs (with the stories already held by them). These stories are not just ways of communicating about the world but of interpreting and making sense of our own actions and the behaviors of others (Fisher, 1984). In his concept of a narrative paradigm, history and context are central as are notions of narrative fidelity, that is, soundness of reasoning and whether stories accord with our own beliefs and experiences, and narrative probability, that is, whether stories cohere and are free from contradiction (Fisher, 1985, pp. 349-350). For Fisher (1985, p. 364) compelling stories provide a rationale for making decisions and engaging in actions and by so doing, they both determine and constrain behavior.
The use of storytelling and narrative analysis has also become increasingly popular within the field of management (Baruch, 2009; Berry, 2001; Hansen, Barry, & Hatch, 2007) and organization studies (see Phillips, 1995; Rhodes & Brown, 2005; Tsoukas & Hatch, 2001). This growing interest in storytelling approaches to the study of organizations is reflected in the work of Boje (2001), Brown (1998, 2006), Cunliffe and Coupland (2012), Czarniawska (1999) and Gabriel (2000). However with this growth of interest has also arisen controversy and debate around, for example, the importance of plot in the distinction between narrative and story (Baruch, 2009, p. 16), the value of narratives over stories (Czarniawska, 1998), the need for completeness with a beginning, middle, and end (Gabriel, 2000) and the usefulness of analyzing, what Boje (2008, p. 13) refers to as antenarratives—stories that are too unfinished, fragmented, ambiguous and unresolved to be analyzed by conventional approaches.
Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2006) use a conventional definition of stories that have a plot line and a set of characters and Czarniawska (1998) notes that narrative plots rely on human intentionality and context, and are based on a chronology of events. Barry and Elmes (1997) in using the terms narrative and story synonymously also refer to thematic, sequenced accounts. In this narrative/story form there is a linear conception of time that links antecedent(s) with agency (a sequence of actions or events) that lead to outcomes (a consequent state of affairs). The narrative provides causal links that offer an explanation (this happened because we did this which resulted in this) and as such, these types of stories can be viewed as theory-laden (see, Czarniawska’s (1998) concept of petrified stories). They provide meaning and a sense of coherence to complex sets of events in enabling temporal connection and in reducing what Brown and Kreps (1993, p. 48) refer to as the “equivocality (complexity, ambiguity, and unpredictability) of organizational life.” The narrative form can be used as a way to explain complex events and enable sensemaking (MacIntyre, 1981) and organizational stories can help to make sense of organizations (Weick, 2001). In a similar way, research narratives in describing the sequence of change events in presenting the relationship between characters, the motives, tensions and conflicts between people and groups, and in the linking of antecedents to consequences over time, may inadvertently construct a linear account of change that underplays the fluid, multivoiced, unfolding dynamic of change (Cunliffe, Luhman, & Boje, 2004).
Other forms of stories that are forward rather than backward looking, that may be incomplete and open to change, that often come to the fore in multiple competing forms during times of transition have been seen to characterize change as a multistory process (Buchanan & Dawson, 2007). These types of stories are often less linear and more dynamic in drawing on time as experienced and lived rather than as considered in retrospect long after the event has occurred (Hall, 1983, p. 13). While Boje’s (2008, p. 13) antenarratives challenge conventional linear approaches to time, Cunliffe and colleagues (2004, pp. 274-276) argue that narrative researchers often fail to recognize the influence of now and the future on negotiated polyphony and meaning making by interpreting stories out of time and context. Rather than the backward glance, these ongoing stories draw on prospective sensemaking and often involve attempts to construct meaning of current experience through bringing a sense of the past and the future together—what Wiebe (2010) refers to as “temporal sensemaking.” As such, there are stories as retrospective sensemaking, stories as prospective sensemaking, and stories as way of making meaning of the events as they occur in reinterpreting the past and assessing possible future trajectories in attempting to construct compelling stories that provide a rational for making decisions and engaging in action (see Figure 1).
Stories and the storying process in changing organizations.
These different conceptions and variation in the use of the term story have clear links to issues of temporality and sensemaking, and whether the focus is on the backward glance (retrospective sensemaking), on the here-and-now, or on future-oriented ways of making sense (prospective sensemaking). Weick’s (1995) work highlights the importance of sensemaking, especially in times when organizations face uncertain or ambiguous situations. Sensemaking is viewed as an ongoing social activity in which plausible stories (the concern is not with accuracy) help people make sense of experiences and enact the environment they face (Weick, 1995). Context and identity serve to shape the way people interpret events and enable them to extract cues in deciding what explanations or stories they align with (not unlike Fisher’s concepts of narrative fidelity and narrative probability). Thus uncertainties associated with the context of contested change bring identity and sensemaking issues to the fore. In the context of changing organizations, it is not uncommon for an upsurge in storytelling and storying that supports sensemaking and sensegiving processes (Gioia & Thomas, 1996). For example, Gioia & Chittipeddi (1991) show how people seek to steer the sensemaking of others through giving sense to events and situations. They define sensegiving as a “process of attempting to influence sensemaking and meaning construction of others toward a preferred redefinition of organizational reality” (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991, p. 442). As such, they are interested not only in how collective sensemaking occurs, but also in how individuals and groups give sense to their goal-directed activities and shape how others view the world. During disruptive change, identity-oriented stories often emerge that provide and give sense to ambiguous situations, especially when pre-existing identities may be threatened and challenged. As Humphreys and Brown (2002, p. 142) argue, stories are used to buttress a sense of “what is central, distinctive, and enduring about them as a group.” Ongoing dialogue and discursive polyphony highlights the way that collective identity is not a single monolithic enduring entity but is part of a continuously changing reconstituted process with elements of agreement (shared consensus) and disagreement (contradictions and dissensus) exhibiting continuity and change as certain features endure and others are displaced. Central to these ongoing processes of reconstituted collective identities is context and history that forms an integral part of the sensemaking and sensegiving that occurs (Reissner, 2008).
There is a powerful relationship between stories and identity within particular contexts especially those characterized by strong enduring historical features and cultures that shape sensemaking processes. On this count, Weick (2010, p. 544) reflects on his earlier work into enacted sensemaking in the Bhopal disaster, arguing for a more contextual analysis in which to “represent the situation that is present at moments of sensemaking.” The physical context or “place” may be a powerful discursive resource in the narrative shaping of collective identities (Larson & Pearson, 2012). In the context of our colliery, identity-relevant stories extended beyond the narrative (in situ story performances, informal conversations and documented texts) to the material context of working in a coal mine. These visible conditions of work that may not be directly evident in the performance of a story or the words used in recounting events nevertheless permeate the meaning making that occurs in the stories that are told and made sense of in the workplace. In other words, the sensemaking of stories also develops from the social relations that emerge within the material conditions of work. In our empirical investigation of stories we address these issues by examining the relational interplay of temporal, contextual and sensemaking processes as miners seek to reaffirm their sense of collective identity in resisting the values and behavioral expectations embedded within the new performance appraisal system imposed by management at Glenrothes colliery.
Research Strategy and Methodology
A longitudinal qualitative research study was made of a mining community that we henceforth refer to as Glenrothes Colliery (a pseudonym for a coalmine in Australia). Data collection was spread over a 6-year period that commenced just after the introduction of a performance appraisal scheme for underground miners. The research, in the form of an extended case study (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007), listened to the actual “voices” of miners in order to gain a meaningful understanding of employee experiences during this managerially imposed change initiative. The study provided plenty of opportunities for employees to share their stories of the appraisal process. What emerged were sensemaking and sensegiving accounts where miners’ identities were clearly perceived to be under threat. The way miners made sense of performance appraisal identity violation and how they responded to pressures for change in workplace performance is the focus of our analysis.
Data collection occurred at Glenrothes Colliery from 2001 to 2007, with the main body of data being collected in the first three years by one of the authors as part of their PhD research. Observational fieldwork through attendance at management and union meetings, and also by extensive periods of time spent in and around the muster room at shift change-over time, provided rich sources of data on the power relations between miners and managers, and the language in use between the two groups. These periods of extensive observation enabled contextual analyses of employee experiences (Glover & Noon, 2005) and involved some 60 hours of attendance at mine management and union meetings, plus underground mine visits and two consecutive eighteen hour days spent at the colliery. During these visits one of the authors was able to observe naturally occurring conversations and events as they unfolded in the workplace settings, unrehearsed and unscripted, free from respondent bias. Field notes based on these spontaneous in situ conversations and observations were recorded and provided rich contextual data that supported other materials during data analysis.
Data were also collected through a series of interviews with a range of individuals and groups. Fifty-eight interviews were conducted with miners, miners’ wives, managers, union officials, and other stakeholders at Glenrothes Colliery. Interviews with coal miners began with two individuals who union officials said would be keen to talk about their experiences. Thereafter, by a snowball effect, interviewees recommended others that the researcher “should talk to,” or others contacted the researcher directly once they heard from already-interviewed miners that the researcher was not a consultant working on behalf of management. Most of the interviews took place aboveground at the mine site, either in a vacant office, or in the training room, typically outside of normal work hours. Interviews during shift operations necessitated a return trip from the coalface plus interview time, which could disrupt team operations for up to four hours. Two interviews were conducted in the local pub and two in miners’ homes, where partners also shared insights on the effects of contested change on extended family members. All interviewees consented to the interviews being recorded, and all face-to-face interviewees willingly signed ethics forms granting consent for the interviews. Forty-seven of these interviews were conducted with a single interviewee, while eleven were conducted with two or more at the one time, the largest group consisting of five miners who were interviewed together. In all of the interviews a “big ear” approach advocated by Glaser (2001, p. 175) was adopted. The focus was on understanding employees’ experiences of the appraisal process, through their stories describing significant incidents and experiences connected to the implementation of the appraisal regime. Interviews lasted between 40 min and 120 min, averaging around 90 min. As interview tapes were transcribed themes began to emerge (Charmaz, 2003) that were explored in greater depth in further interviews with miners after each round of performance review.
Face-to-face interviews were also conducted with key corporate, divisional and operational managers at critical moments in the mine’s implementation of successive rounds of the performance appraisal process. The 28 managerial interviews were typically much shorter, more “factual” and focused on business outcomes. The same “big ear” approach was employed and interviews were largely unstructured, seeking understanding of managerial perspectives on the performance management implementation process, while also exploring what outcomes managers expected from the appraisal meetings. A secondary reason for these interviews was to maintain goodwill and to vouchsafe continuing access to the miners.
Fieldwork observations and interviews were further supplemented with a nine question survey which the 120 miners at Glenrothes Colliery were invited to complete (see Appendix). Of these, 55 completed surveys were deemed suitable for analytical purposes. Most of the miners who completed the survey took the time and effort to make written responses in the open sections of the questionnaire. Miners’ responses on the survey were cross-referenced with themes emerging from interviews. Company records were also made available, as were minutes of various mine review meetings (some of which one of the researchers attended) where the impact of the appraisal process was evaluated by mine managers, functional coordinators, undermanagers, deputies, and union representatives. The company kept meticulous records of the statistics of the review processes, especially documenting the percentage of miners who scored As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Es, broken down by mine site and functional areas. These statistics became key benchmarks and drivers of the scoring calibration process in subsequent reviews.
Analysis of fieldwork observations enabled the researcher to contextualize the meaning making associated with nonverbal signals and terse comments in the fragmented dialogues that occurred between miners. They also proved invaluable in providing a rich contextual landscape in which analysis of the recorded material was carried out, enabling the researcher to situate the data (for example, to make sense of background noise such as the siren which goes off five minutes before the miner transport train departs underground). Data were deconstructed then rebuilt forming links and relationships across the research material. Key themes were identified in an iterative reading of the observation notes and transcribed texts and “multiple layers of meanings” emerged (Charmaz, 1995, p. 35). As themes began to emerge, these were explored in greater detail and disassembled into further subthemes before being reassembled into explanatory frames for making sense of the lived experiences of miners. A guiding focus was on “achieving a meaningful understanding of the actors’ frame of reference” through attention to discourse as constructive of social reality (Heracleous, 2004, p. 175) in identifying the discursive resources miners used as part of their ongoing identity work. In particular, miners’ discursive defensive strategies were examined through the language they used and the stories they told of the appraisal process.
Stories and the Storying Process: Contested Change at Glenrothes Colliery
The decision to institute an appraisal system was initiated by the chief executive officer of a large multinational mining company who decided, without consultation with locally situated stakeholders, that a performance management system would be introduced for underground coal miners and gave directions to middle managers to implement this initiative. A senior HR manager at one of the collieries was co-opted to direct the implementation of the project throughout the division and was given the title of Performance Management Superintendent. He canvassed the views of mine managers on the topic and then conducted a search in other industries for a performance management system which he could appropriate for service at the coal mines within his jurisdiction. An appraisal system in use in a steel works in another city became the template for use at Glenrothes Colliery.
Management was completely unprepared for the vehement resistance from coal miners that occurred even before the first round of appraisals. Miners refused to participate in the appraisal process until forced to do so by the Industrial Relations Commission, which ruled that performance appraisal was a legitimate managerial prerogative. Miners then insisted on their right to have a union official accompany them during their performance review meetings. Management responded by insisting that a senior HR manager accompany the reviewer at these meetings. Review meetings averaged over two hours in length as miners argued over their scores on each of the performance criteria. There were massive resource implications in pursuing this change initiative that caused disruptions to shift crews and a lowering of productivity through having four men tied up in every single review. The introduction of comparative performance ratings was followed by shock waves after the first round of performance reviews. Workforce morale plummeted and performance slumped. Relationships among all of the parties involved in the appraisal process were severely strained and there was an upsurge in storytelling among miners as they sought to make sense of the change and reaffirm their sense of collective identity. As McCarthy (2008, p. 185) has illustrated elsewhere, “storytelling helps bind communities together through the active inculcation of shared values.” The stories of miners (see Figure 1) reflected on the past and prospective futures in making sense of the present and were used to re-establish and reaffirm the common values that they shared and in so doing, bolstered their sense of collective identity that had been shaken by this managerially imposed change.
Stories and the storying process in changing organizations
The framework for locating the range and variety of stories that emerged from our research is outlined in Figure 1. Empirically, we identify stories that are retrospective coherent stories, with plots and characters (Gabriel, 2000) stories that are partial, future-oriented and unfinalized (Boje, 2008); and stories of the “here-and-now” that may seek to establish some form of continuity and/or challenge conventional ways of doing things (present stories that are change or continuity oriented). This framework draws attention to the way that stories and storying during times of change variously draw on elements from the past, present and anticipated future in seeking to make sense of what is occurring, and how stories are purposefully used to give sense to others in attempts to steer change and shape the process they may be describing (Buchanan & Dawson, 2007). This storying process occurs in contexts in which prior relations and existing power dynamics may determine which voices get heard and who are silenced in the politics of change (Dawson & Buchanan, 2012).
In presenting a temporal framework of stories and the storying process the intention is not to simply extend existing categories of story types, but to provide a frame to orient researchers in the study and analysis of stories as they exist, develop, and emerge in changing organizations. Context, history and process are central in providing a temporal understanding of stories and storying, and in recognition of the dynamic nonlinear nature of organizational change (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). The temporality of stories and the storying process links to the sensemaking and sensegiving that occurs in multiple spaces and times, whereby our understanding of the past influences our present experiences as does our expectations for the future (Cunliffe et al., 2004). The intention is not to elevate nonlinear time over linear time in analyzing the place of stories in changing organizations, but to recognize that both are present in the stories that already form part of organizational folklore and those that are emerging and unfinalized. Although a separation could be proposed between retrospective coherent stories and prospective future-oriented story fragments, we prefer to see an intertwining of linear and nonlinear time in which the search for a clear dividing line is inappropriate. In other words, rather than being two ends of a continuum there is an ongoing relational dynamic in which even the more established and stabilized stories exhibit temporal dynamics and can over time be open to further change, revision, and restorying.
We also emphasize the importance of context and political process in the dynamics of storying and story performance, especially in the way that the storyteller actively engages audiences in their use of words, movement, images and sounds that accord with audience beliefs and experiences (narrative fidelity) in constructing compelling stories free from contradiction (narrative probability) that seeks to influence the sensemaking of others (Fisher, 1985; Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991). Multiple narratives coexist (Czarniawska, 1998), enable sensemaking (Weick, 1995) and sensegiving (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991), are open to revision over time and may be heard and silenced (Pentland, 1999) during the power-political positioning of key stakeholders (Buchanan, 2007) as they seek to use stories to legitimate particular interests and actions (Currie & Brown, 2003) or to reaffirm their sense of identity (Gioia, Schultz, & Corley, 2000). Furthermore, collective sensemaking through story construction is not a one-way process but also includes the active involvement of audiences in the way that listeners may become co-tellers and the way that story tellers may become co-listeners. Polyvocality, reflexivity, and incompleteness are all part of the dynamic context within which individual accounts (plausible stories) may be co-constructed into collective sensemaking. In our case example, we would argue that the contextual, political, and temporal dimensions of stories and the storying process enabled miners to not only give and make sense of their experiences, but also to resist challenges to their collective identity during this period of contested change.
Retrospective stories and prospective storying
At the outset, we used the work of Gabriel (2000) to identify types of organizational stories at Glenrothes Colliery. This enabled the identification and classification of romantic and epic stories, comic and tragic tales and disparaging story fragments (see Table 1). However, some of the ongoing and emerging stories around change did not fit easily into this categorization, with even some of the stories linked to particular types exhibiting additional elements that questioned the appropriateness (for our purposes) of the typology. For example, stories were recounted within the rough-and-tumble masculine environment of coal mines that revealed unexpected emotional tones and tenderness of feelings that linked to Gabriel’s (2000, p. 80) characterization of romantic stories.
Types of Organizational Stories at Glenrothes Colliery.
Source: Adapted from Gabriel (2000, p. 84).
In a number of stories, some of the older miners talked wistfully about the good old days and how many aspects of the mateship and camaraderie were being eroded by modern performance imperatives. There was a palpable sense of loss and nostalgia for a bygone era of mining. One miner while recounting how mateship was being undermined got so emotionally caught up with his story that it built up to a point where the interview had to be temporarily suspended. Such emotional behavior by a miner is highly unusual. After regaining his composure, the miner continued his story by describing how much “teamship [sic], friendship and morale” there used to be in the mines, and how much they worked together in dangerous conditions to “watch each other’s back.” He reflected on how they used to play cards together in the crib more than they do now and how there does not seem to be as much humor in the pit as there used to be. He nostalgically remembered a past which, in his view, has been expunged by the appraisal system:
It is not as united as it used to be, that is for sure. I think there seems to be a lot more pressure on the blokes—the hours are getting longer. . . . Well, there doesn’t seem to be the humour that there used to be—you know, that has gone out of it. Mate! And it is coming from the top. It is so serious now. Everything is so serious! You know what I mean? As I say, there used to be a little bit of a chuckle and that doesn’t seem to happen anymore. The characters just seem to be . . . you know? Probably even myself! I used to be always sort of funny and now I’m sort of a bit too serious myself. But now I know Jimmy [his performance rater] is going to be turning around trying to nitpick [through this appraisal process]. [Interview 37, panel development miner 4]
Some of the limitations of Gabriel’s approach are illustrated in this miner’s story where he nostalgically remembers a past that has been superseded by a present and bemoans an anticipated future in which the humor and camaraderie associated with the mateship of mining work is/will be diminishing. There is an interplay in making sense of the present in relation to the past and to future anticipated events. In this we start to get a broader feel of process, of current experience reflected through a nostalgic scripting of past practices mixed with future expectations (prospective sensemaking of what is likely to happen given current trajectories). As such, we identified the concept of time as an important and yet problematic issue that was beginning to emerge both in relation to stories and storying, and in relation to sensemaking and sensegiving processes (see also, Wiebe, 2010).
Our attempts to codify and categorize stories within finalized forms is therefore useful only up to a point, beyond which we need to look at concepts and frames of analysis that can accommodate nonlinear stories in the unfolding and dynamic process of storytelling and sensemaking during times of change. There is a need to identify ways of conceptualizing storying as a process in which the temporal interconnectedness is not simply about a story told and retold that captures some moral message, engages and entertains, but of a story that reflects the dynamism of working in organizations as experienced by people as-it-happens. This takes us beyond the conventional analysis of coherent, enduring stories with event sequences, recognized plots and characters to the stories that are in the process of becoming and that emerge over time. In this, Boje is very useful in highlighting the limitations of examining only finalized narratives, calling for a broader analysis of what he calls “unfinalised story varietymaking” (Boje, 2006, p. 3). He recognizes the plurality and co-construction of different stories that may be performed by different storytellers in different spaces and places (Boje, 2008), presenting a rather different definition noting that: “stories do not require beginnings, middles, or endings, as they do in more formal and restrictive definitions (Bruner, 1990, pp. 43-59). Stories are referenced with a nod of the head, or a brief ‘You know the full story’” (Boje, 1995, p. 1000).
These types of stories are evidenced in our data where abbreviated comments were used to refer to previous events that had occurred within the mine. The full story did not need to be retold, quicker ways of referring to stories were often used to reinforce a sense of collective belonging and/or in sustaining the notion of “us” (miners) and “them” (management). In many cases, words and expressions were used as shorthand accounts for “you know the full story” in which coherent storylines with plots and actors, and a beginning, middle and end were absent. For example, miners frequently used humorous nicknames to lampoon managers. Names such as “rattle head” (because there’s only a pea-sized brain inside), “wombat” (for a manager who was short, thick and dense), “singlet” (because he was never off their backs), and “mirror” (because he was always going to “look into something”) were a common form of mirth at managers’ expense. Miners also made reference to funny incidents during informal conversations. They got great pleasure out of poking fun at managers. One account worth citing refers to a group of managers who flew to America to buy an expensive piece of mining equipment. When it arrived at the mine, it was found to be too wide for the underground tunnels and yet the miners were told to take it underground and make it work. Miners had to cut bits off the machine to get it through the tunnels—a job made much more difficult because they had to do the cutting in situ underground because the managers would not wait for the machine to be modified on the surface. So the mine ended up with a machine that could not do what it was supposed to do because the important bits had been chopped off to get it through the tunnels.
Our data highlights both retrospective narratives with a beginning, middle, and end (Gabriel, 2000) as well as terse fragments that carry fuller stories (Boje, 2008) but beyond this, the emerging stories around change exhibit more than a weighty tale or a bet on the future. They are also constructed as sensegiving devices to shape the change processes they are interpreting in seeking to influence the views and actions of others. In the case of Glenrothes Colliery, miners used stories to resist the imposition of new behavioral expectations and to shore up the collective sense of identity of what it means to be a miner. These storying processes relayed a wide variety of tales including: those of the present that spoke to the past and were more continuity-oriented; present accounts that were more change-oriented in trying to move change in certain preferred directions; and stories that mixed elements of the here-and-now with the backward glance and prospective sensemaking.
Temporal sensemaking and change: It’s “us” against “them.”
Our data brings to the fore a different orientation in the temporal sensemaking of managers and miners. The stories of management were typically more change-oriented offering general support on the need for a new performance system, while miners drew on the past in making sense of the present in questioning the appropriateness of the imposed change. The present change-oriented stories of managers set out to challenge the status quo in requiring miners to undergo regular performance reviews and to change their behavior accordingly. Miners, on the other hand, sought to reassert their position in constructing more present continuity-oriented stories looking to the history of established work practices in reconstituting their ongoing sense of collective identity. Thus, there is a mismatch between the views and expectations of managers and miners that imposes pressure on workplace relations as managers seek to enforce their right to manage and miners seek to resist the enforced change. Within this contested terrain, miners positioned themselves as a unified category as evidenced, for example, in a miner’s comment, “We’re miners. We work hard.” They also frequently talked about “management” as a united entity in this respect too. This longstanding division between manager and worker is captured by one miner who recounts the following:
A boss who has been here five minutes will come down and ask you something. You will tell them, but they take absolutely no notice, walk away and do whatever they want to do anyway, even though we have been working on the job for 20 years. [Interview 8, longwall miner 3]
The temporality of the story uses the past in relation to the present and the prospective future in giving sense to the strained relations between a boss with little respect for miners or their longstanding experience through years of working at the mine. The story positions the miner as being insulted by an ill-informed manager who fails to listen to well-intentioned advice which is based on a wealth of on-the-job experience. The standing of the manager is undermined in the story relayed by the miner who uses this account as another example of management arrogance (of “us” and “them”) as managers fail to respect the knowledge and experience of miners gained from years of working at the coalface. In such a circumstance, the miner is now justified in not listening to the appraisal “voice” of his manager. His identity has been bolstered by virtue of the fact that the incident defines a manager as one who will not listen. It follows that the manager’s performance ratings will be poorly informed.
There were a number of miner stories that referred to the injustice and psychic injury caused from performance reviews where managers criticized miners for being lazy. For miners this represented a grievous breach of their identity that positioned them as hard workers. For example, a mining electrician who had spent the majority of his working life underground keeping conveyor belts running to take the coal to the surface, was highly offended by what he considered to be an unjust and misinformed performance review on working practice:
You know, I felt like a school kid! I was so pissed off! I’ll tell you, I went in and I said to him, “You know, Ivan,” I said. “It’s wrong that you treat people this way.” I said, “I work hard.” I said, “I don’t have to tell you, I don’t even have to write stuff down.” That was one of the criticisms, the fact that I don’t write enough. “I don’t have time to write, I’ve got work to do, you know!” I was that pissed off! I said, “If half the blokes in this place worked as hard as I do, you’d sack the other half, mate.” I said, “You wouldn’t need half of them.” And he [Ivan] never said nothing, you know. I just wanted my two bob’s worth, and then I walked out! [Interview 24, longwall electrician 2]
In the above story the electrician constructs himself as victim of grievous errors in his performance ratings. His story captures the continuity of hard work that is an integral part of his commitment to working at the mine and his identity as a miner. The present is reinforced by a long enduring record of hard work which is now being “unreasonably” called into question by a misinformed review. He (wisely in his own eyes) chooses not to write down a lot of “stuff” because he constructs himself as a responsible worker who knows his priorities (better than Ivan does). He keeps the belts running. If the belts stop, the men on the longwall cannot cut coal. But there’s a wider theme to this story that goes beyond the words of our interviewee. His story is embedded in the practices that he views as being valued, recognized and supported by others. This story does not need to be voiced or formally applauded yet it exists within the collective identify of what it means to be a miner—the camaraderie and solidarity—of knowing that what is not said is as important as what is said.
In the miner’s story, he works harder than half of the men in the pit, he understands the unvoiced recognition of significant others but he takes umbrage to “outsiders” questioning his view of the world. He is expecting praise, yet receives criticism. Even when he puts the record straight, his boss “never said nothing.” Praise is denied. His story is undermined and his identity compromised. This invokes anger and resentment. His story ends with a minivictory for employee “voice,” which is ultimately a hollow victory with the realization that all his effort has gone unrecognized. His voice is “silenced” from a broader managerial audience as he seeks to reassert his own identity in the face of powerful others. The miner had his say (reconstructed his identity as a hard worker, in spite of the errors of appraisal), and then affirmed his resistance by walking out—at a timing of his choosing, but his story fails to influence change or the views of management. The story provides a lens on how the miner makes sense of events, attempts to give sense and engage Ivan, as well as explaining the rationale behind the consequent actions that are taken as a result of the perceived frustration and sense of injustice. While residing in our frame, this story is more than can be captured in the classification of a single type of story or a terse fragment; it is multifaceted, evolving and contextual, grounded in the materiality of mining. A past history of hard work is alluded to as self-evident with a prospective humorous twist that “you wouldn’t need half of them” in the here-and-now story that gives sense to the ongoing anger and frustration of the miner.
Attribution of blame in making sense of performance
Performance ratings were supposed to be delivered in a meeting where the context was ostensibly about improving performance. As part of the dialogue in such meetings, miners asserted that lip service was given to listening to the concerns of workers, seeking their input on how their work could contribute to organizational effectiveness. A common theme was that aboveground managers failed to implement any of the processes they promised they would as part of the performance review process. By holding miners accountable for performance targets while failing to deliver on promises of training opportunities made during earlier review meetings, managers were seen as insulting the intelligence and the efforts of these underground workers. Particularly offensive was an apparent inability of raters to differentiate between system factors and personal factors in performance variance. Ratings based on factors outside of a miner’s individual control were deeply resented as unfair, unjust, subjective and wrong. Managers and miners also differed in their analysis of causes of performance variation. Managers consistently blamed miners for poor performance; miners consistently blamed poor performance (when it occurred) on factors beyond their control, including mismanagement of supplies and maintenance by aboveground staff. Miners thus felt that a low rating for poor performance was unjustified, wrong, and insulting:
If everything goes well, the guys will ‘have a go’ and most of them are hard workers . . . But a lot of things happen that are out of your control as a worker. We had a scenario there a few years ago, I forget his name. He came and just reduced all the stock out of the store, probably practising just-in-time . . . and all of a sudden, we’ve got no gear! We ring up [phone], “Where is the part for this, it’s not here?” Trying to save on capital! So then again that was stuff-up there . . . but they don’t want to admit it! [Interview 5, longwall miner 1]
The above story represents a recurrent theme in miner interviews. Embedded in each account was a sense of frustration at the injustice of being held accountable for outcomes which were beyond their control. Miners attributed blame to managers for the “stuff-ups” that occurred in the mine. They found it offensive to be “downgraded” by the very people who, in their view, were responsible for production delays. As one miner said, “it’s not grading, it’s degrading” [Interview 29, coal clearance electrician 1]. Stories of supply blockages illustrated the power of such accounts to simplify cause–effect relationships and defend the narrator’s identity in the face of perceived unwarranted and ill-informed attacks. Each counterstory was employed as a discursive device to restore the collective sense of self that existed before the identity breach, but the stories remain within the miners’ sensemaking domain and were unable to give sense, persuade or influence the views of management.
As these examples illustrate, many of the stories conveyed by miners were driven by a sense of anger and of injustice, and in a sense of frustration in not getting their views (stories) across to management. A failure by management to see or understand the “real” contribution of miners in their attempt to impose an inappropriate external set of criteria aggravated relations and yet, their stories were not able to steer change in certain preferred directions, nor were they able to give sense to managers in a way that made them rethink and reconsider their own position and assumptions. Audience interpretation of these stories reflected the history and culture of mining operations and the established divisions and authority relations within the broader temporal context of change. Thus, while miners felt resentment toward their appraisers and engaged in storying processes to decrease the effects their alleged failures had on their sense of worth, this did not bring about any substantive change to the system of performance appraisal used by management. The two collective independent voices of managers and miners engage in dyadic counterpoint producing storying polyphony around performance appraisal that plays on the underlying disharmony in terms of a perceived longstanding separation between the worlds of mangers and miners. Outright conflict in the contested terrain is barely evaded but the hegemonic power of management is not called into question through stories that are able to shift the meaning making of managers. Defiance is evident, but it remains largely a self-supporting process within the mining community with the system of appraisal reaffirming miners’ distrust of managers and reinforcing the pre-existing antagonistic relations in the mine.
Review and appeal: The power of stories to resist and steer change
Miners viewed themselves as being on the receiving end of wrongdoing, mostly as a result of managerial incompetence. “What were they thinking?” was a common miner refrain. In the tales told by miners, they rarely positioned themselves as guilty but rather saw themselves as being punished (“marked down”) for offences of which they were innocent. To miners, their ratings were a mistake. The raters had got it all wrong. For example, a union official recounted a story about one miner who refused to accept his rating in the first round of performance reviews. There appears to be poetic license taken in recounting the time distance between the point of reference (knowledge from the past) and the performance review of the present that combine with a recounting of the actual time taken to conduct the review. The perceived absurdity of the process is amply conveyed in the account by the miner:
We had one [performance review] take four shifts! Unbelievable! And it was just that the individual—they were focusing on, rather than saying, “Yeah, OK, you do that wrong but you could do it better,” and giving them a couple of instances where they could do it better—I really don’t believe, first time round, I don’t believe the person who was doing the feedback did their homework properly. Didn’t go right into it. They could have done it a lot better. They were coming into it saying, “This guy said you did that.” He did but it was four or five years ago! I mean, that’s bloody stupid! When they really nailed him down, he said, “I don’t really know. They just told me that you did it.” “Well, let’s get that bloke in here and find out what he’s talking about.” “Oh, yeah, well, he did it five years ago.” Well, to me, that’s bloody bullshit! You can’t do that! [Interview 10, longwall miner 3]
Such stories were used to resist the subjugating effects of imposed managerial ratings. There is a heroic twist in this tale; the individual arguing that the miner resisted being rated for ‘four shifts’ and that the manager was made to look ‘bloody stupid’. As the miner gets to the cause–effect connection, his language intensifies, “bloody stupid” and “bloody bullshit” indicating the process of storytelling being used as a vehicle for expression of emotional vexation. Another miner, who also acted as a workplace union official, also commented on the profound emotional turmoil which appraisal caused for some miners. He labeled the whole appeals system as unjust and “not worthwhile” with an escalation in emotional intensity evident in the change in language in the second paragraph:
They [miners] feel the appeal system is still not worthwhile. They feel like they don’t get justice out of it. The fact that even when you do go in to do your review, what is set in front of you is virtually set in concrete until you go through the appeals review. So you have to sit there and listen to judgment day expecting to be criticized and knowing that you can’t change any of those criticisms until you go through an appeals process. So they feel frustrated by that exercise in itself. They [miners] make an initial statement: “This is fucking bullshit!” And that will be it, until the next time comes around. “Oh, not these fucking things again! I’ve got to go in there and listen to this sort of shit!” [Interview 36, longwall miner 11]
The union official refers to the story of a miner being profoundly disturbed and angered by his review. The concrete metaphor aptly captures the sense of frustration at being utterly powerless to negotiate on “judgment day”—another interesting metaphor to describe the dominant power relations fostered by appraisal. There is a palpable sense of injustice at having been made to sit and listen to the judgment while reviewers refuse to listen in return. The resignation at knowing in advance that they will be judged and criticized hardly motivates performance improvement; rather, it sets the course for a protracted appeals process (according to miners’ stories, one miner’s appeal stretched over three years) and reactive disgruntlement at the way they are treated by management.
The telling and retelling of stories about appraisal injustices was a discursive device to garner support for the wounded against managerial perpetrators. The stories at Glenrothes had recurrent themes of continual mine mismanagement and intractable neglect in which the performance rating system was but the latest installment in a long history of managerial incompetence or at worse, managerial malevolence. Miners contested the appraisal discourse by refusing to accept the legitimacy of managers to assess accurately their work underground. Through a restatement of their narrative identities as competent, professional miners they, in effect, challenged the power relations assumed by the dominant coalition, refusing to be treated as objects of appraisal. In contrast, management referred to these types of miner accounts as the “war stories” that miners have always loved to tell [Interview 61, HR Manager 2]. Most of these war stories contained themes of perceived injustice with poetic tropes of attribution of unity toward miners and attribution of blame toward managers. The division that was evident at the Colliery between “us” (miners) and “them” (management) intensified as a result of performance appraisal and the protracted appeals process. Moreover, in using stories to resist the legitimization of a new performance appraisal system, miners used what some political scientists refer to as the “soft” power of persuasion (Nye, 2004). The plausibility and attractiveness of their stories were self-reinforcing, building collective cohesion but doing little to attract or influence the views and position of management. Thus despite the asymmetries of power in the employment relationship, storying spaces for resistances were found and used to support and sustain the collective identity of miners, even though they were unable to effectively change the views of management or the system of appraisal. Thus, the stories of miners and managers remained independent with the aboveground world of managers being a universe apart from the underground domain of coalface miners and yet, they are both integral to understanding the storying process that made and gave sense to these countervailing standpoints within the temporal context of change in the introduction of a performance review system at Glenrothes Colliery.
Discussion and Conclusion
There were a large number and range of stories uncovered and analyzed in the course of our research. Some of these align with the story types identified in the literature although others did not lend themselves to categorization under current schemas while providing important insights into the miners’ lived experiences of change. We contend that retrospective stories, stories of the present (the here-and-now of change), as well as the prospective storying that occurs among individuals and groups during times of change (forward looking unfinalized stories that draw on the past and the present) are all central to understanding change. Taken together these stories capture the important dimension of contextual and temporal interconnectedness of stories influenced not only by the present but also by retrospective and prospective sensemaking. This interconnectedness highlights the need for a more contextual perspective that combines these elements with a temporal framework which is able to engage with the storying process that occurs in the workplace during ongoing change. In the case of Glenrothes, the stories and the storying process enabled sensemaking and sensegiving to occur with the latter being constrained and shaped by existing power relations at the workplace. Stories acted as a powerful discursive resource for miners and managers (our focus has been on miners) in enabling miners to shore up their challenged identity and to share their experiences of people and events in the workplace. The tales told by miners enabled them to share frustrations and engage in collective sensemaking providing a source of unity with their mining comrades (portrayed as the victims) while the managers (portrayed as the villains) were seen as misinformed and more interested in profit than in the well-being of the workforce.
Some of the stories which miners told, especially those highlighting managerial incompetence, provided powerful vehicles for resistance. Much of the rough talk and masculine humor observed during mine visits was at the expense of aboveground managers. Miners’ masculine humor was strategically employed against managers in the ongoing struggle over appraisal. As Mumby (2004, p. 244, emphasis in original) observes, “organizational storytelling is a discursive site par excellence for the critical analysis of the dialectic of control and resistance.” For miners, the new rating system was viewed as an attack on their collective identity. As such, appraisal reviews were sites of hegemonic struggles stimulating the storying and restorying of miners’ tales. These stories were mobilized as discursive resources to repair fractured identities and as a form of employee “voice” against the dominant discourse of pit managers. Organizational storytelling surrounding these appraisal events became a primary resource for identity defense. Indeed, the stories of Glenrothes miners under contested change highlight not only power relations at the colliery but also the power of stories to resist attempts by management to legitimate the new performance measures of work regulation and control (Cooney & Sewell, 2008).
Attempts by miners to get their “voice” heard and listened to by management proved unsuccessful as managers interpreted these accounts as the typical “war stories” of disgruntled miners. Thus, while miners’ stories of the appraisal process provide insights into their emotional states and the coping mechanisms they brought into service to defend their identities from unwelcome managerial interventions; the persuasive power of the stories remained with the miners and ultimately did not alter the views and opinions of managers. It is questionable whether miners were aware of the possibility of constructing stories to persuade and influence the views of managers or whether such an option would have been viable given existing power relations at the mine and the longstanding cultural divisions between managers and miners. Nevertheless, their stories enabled them to sustain a collective belief of what it means to be a miner and provided a way for miners to resist subjugation and voice their views on the inappropriateness of the new performance appraisal system to the work of miners. Stories were used not only to make sense of change, but also, and importantly for miners, to shape the change and to restory the broken and battered identities of miners.
Empirically, our understanding of stories in terms of sensemaking and identity—as experienced by our miners at the Glenrothes colliery—required us to examine not only coherent stories of the past, but also, the emergent, developing and partial future-oriented stories. We identified the importance of retrospective and prospective sensemaking in the way that miners in reflecting on the past and relaying stories of the present, projected forward into the future. Individual and collective stories, the relaying of stories to others and the ongoing activity of recreating, revising, developing, replacing and reconfiguring a story though reflection, lived experience and interaction with others, all form part of the storying process. Moreover, the way that the storying process interprets the ongoing present in configuring and reinterpreting the past and in accommodating projected future possibilities highlights the nonlinearity of time-as-experienced which contrasts with finalized stories that provide structure in explaining event sequences that present sequential interpretations of change that make rational sense (through the embedded causality within stories that promote certain explanations over others). Storying processes during change highlight this dynamic fluidity and nonlinearity while narratives of the past often project a linear causality of events (this happened, then this, leading to this). In this way established stories often simplify complex events into a coherent sequence of steps (linear time), in contrast to emerging stories of change that may variously compete, dominate, be replaced, silenced, revised, elaborated and/or rewritten and in the process, take on elements from the past while drawing on possible future scenarios in explaining the present (nonlinear time). We therefore argue that greater attention needs to be given to the differing temporal relationships that may be identified in examining stories in the context of changing organizations (see, Dawson, 2013).
Two broader implications arise from these findings. First with regard to temporality, we argue that there is an underlying tension in the tendency toward and against causal theorization in building a research narrative that explains stories that warrants further discussion and debate, as well as the associated issue around conceptions of time (for example, time as an objective sequence of events and time as experienced subjectively) and whether these are viewed as relational (intertwined) or as separate and distinct (with a clear dividing line). As indicated in our text, finalized stories provide meaning and a sense of coherence to complex sets of events in enabling temporal connection and in reducing the complexities and ambiguities of organizational life (Brown & Kreps, 1993). The plot of a story provides movement over time from “an original state of affairs, an action or an event, and the consequent state of affairs” (Czarniawska, 1998, p. 2). This narrative form can be used as a way to explain complex events and enable retrospective sensemaking (MacIntyre, 1981), but they do not convey the nonlinearity of experience—the more dynamic storying/restorying that we include in our wider framework—and the broader concept of temporal sensemaking (Weibe, 2010). In a similar way, research narratives in describing the sequence of change events in presenting the relationship between characters, the motives, tensions and conflicts between people and groups, and in the linking of antecedents to consequences over time, may inadvertently construct a linear account of change that underplays the dynamics of time and context in the unfolding of the storying process.
A second and related point centers on the problem of using coherent change stories (finalized accounts) as a knowledge base for identifying guidelines for practitioners. As already indicated, these coherent retrospective accounts are often post hoc rationalizations of what occurred, and why it occurred as it did. As a consequence, they generally fail to capture change experiences as-they-happen. It is perhaps not surprising that dominant retrospective accounts constructed by dominant stakeholders (for example, management) often downplay “problems” of change and present linear causal explanations of outcomes. Ironically, these accounts are often used as a body of knowledge in formulating “n-step” guidelines for managers on how best to manage change (Collins, 1998).
We conclude that the storying lens does provide greater insight into the dynamics of change by drawing attention to the way individuals and groups make sense and give sense to their experiences in context and over time. The temporal dimension to the storying process highlights the need to move beyond a backward glance, to an understanding of how people and groups story the ongoing present in relation to the past and future in different ways. These story constructs are configured and reconfigured not only to make sense of what is going on but also to give sense and to influence the behavior and understanding of others. Power political intent behind the storying process does not however guarantee change will move in the preferred direction or that intended audiences will listen or even consider the message within the story. Existing (hard) power relations and divisions (the context, history and authority relationships) may negate the (softer) power of stories to achieve change (Nye, 2004). Stories, while useful in gaining a deeper understanding of the feelings, behaviors and interpretations of people as they experience change, may also be used as a political device to steer change in certain preferred directions and yet, the persuasive power of stories is also enabled and constrained by existing authority structures and the position and standing of the storyteller/audience. Dominant stakeholders are more likely to get their version of reality voiced and accepted than those in less powerful positions within organizations. This does not undermine the power of stories but it does suggest that there are barriers that are more difficult to overcome for some rather than for others. In the case we report on, stories provided a powerful vehicle for miners to sustain a sense of collective worth that was able to resist and counteract the assumptions of “good performance” embedded in the contested appraisal system implemented by management at Glenrothes Colliery. The interpretive lens of storying provides rich insight into workers’ tales which they bring into play to make sense of, give sense to, and resist managerial interventions during times of contested change.
Footnotes
Appendix: Survey of Miners’ Views About Performance Appraisal
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.