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Tentativeness.com


See Anete Strand (2012) references

What is Tentativeness?
Tentativeness is from the Latin tentare ("to attempt). The original meaning emphasized something experimental, provisional, and courageous acts of doing trial and error, while not knowing the final outcome in advance. Tentativeness was something not fully worked out in advance, and is therefore an antenarrative process. Tentativeness has that ante-up quality of bets on the future. Tentativeness can be on the tipe of the tongue, not yet storyable, perhaps while learning a new skill or practice.
       All of a sudden the old definition of Tentativeness faded away, what was left lacked courage or humility.  Indeed Tentativeness become cowardly, uncourageageous, not acting with courage, not able to experiment or do much of anything.
       The way Duncan Pelly and David Boje use Tentativeness brings back the old school meaning for our current condition.

Tentativeness is about embodied-reflexive courageous acts of trial and error, making new connections, stepping humbly out of our own stuckness of our cognitive-reflective habits and beliefs about things.It is making new, untried pathways for things that do not yet exist. Our version of Tentativeness requires asking questions not yet asked, and new ways of Enthinkment, not just Enactment of sensemaking, without thinking.Tentativeness is opening up to new ways of thinking about things that need questioning.


What is the Enthinkment Circle? 

David Boje and Duncan Pelly are among the co-founders of Enthinkment Circle. We meet weekly on ZOOM 1PM-2:30PM MOUNTAIN TIME ZONE Tuesdays. We rescue Enthinkment from obsurity and give it life agian.

Zoom Link https://us06web.zoom.us/j/8950795007?pwd=b1BnMVVXT3V6UDRZUVFmMkU2NzQydz09

  Meeting ID: 895 079 5007
                              Passcode: Boje



What is Enthinkment?

Enthinkment is a word spoken only once by Louis Ralph Pondy around 1978, then ridiculed by the Enactment sensemaking community. Therefore it is an act of tentativeness.

Download my new book for free, until published: How I learned to think from my mentor Professor Louis Ralph Pondy.


For more see Enthinkment.com




 Boje's Professional Vita

                                       David Boje PhD
What is the Tentativeness of Antenarrating?

Tentativeness happens in our antenarrating in how retrospective- and prospective-sensemaking processes of awareness are entangled, so we ante-up a bet without knowing the outcome, what the future will be. Half the fun of our storytelling is getting there. Tentativeness is not a formula. It is experimenting, using creative practice, persevering when the results expected are not happening.

So many unanswered questions. As you begin to Enthink it, the window of opportunity in a Storytelling Circle begins to close. The Circle moves on to some other topic.  Your Living Story no longer seems appropriate, but two other Living Stories vibrate somewhere in your body at a cellular level. They call out to you. You are at choice-point. Perhaps the one to tell is one never told before, an antenarrative fragment, a glimpse of something, and you don't even know where its going. 


1. Am I ready to tell that event here-and-now?
2. Is this the time-and-place let the Living Story loose on this audience?
3. Do I have the necessary courage?
4. Why does this Living Story seek audience, even to myself, in this time-and-place?

You are doing Living Story-Making, but not just any sort, because Living-Story-Making:
1. Living-Story-Making is NOT a narrative plot with beginning-middle-end linear thinking.
2. Living-Story-Making is NOT all planned-out-in-advance.
3. Living-Story-Making is NOT a bunch of jargon terms.
4. Living-Story-Making is NOT imitation (mimetic).
5. Living-Story-Making is NOT rehearsed?
6. Living-Story-Making is NOT a recipe.
7. Living-Story-Making is NOT metaphoric.
8. Living-Story-Making is NOT Cognitive-Reflexivity.
9. Living-Story-Making IS Humble Tentativeness at a Cellular Level of Intuitive Embodied-Reflexivity.

What is the Relation of Tentativeness to Living-Story-Making?

Tentativeness Disrupting in Story-Making.  A group of us are Tentatively Disrupting in a different sort of Story-Making (Jørgensen, K. M., Boje, D. M., Svane, M. S., Bager, A. S., & Larsen, J. (2022a, 2022b; Jørgensen, 2020; Jørgensen, 2021). We argue that a story maker is grounded in concrete socio-material relations. It is a kind of reflexive resistance corresponds to action and refers to the activism that emerges when come together for a cause larger than itself. This kind of story making transcends institutional, organizational and regional boundaries and mobilizes affordances across fixed time lines and spaces.
Tentativeness involves  story-making, but not in the linguistic ways of  making coherent and meaningful stories of past events of one's life, speaking about emotional topics, or promoting healthy benefits (Graybeal, Sexton, & Pennebaker, 2002: 571).
Others, such as Johansson (2004) treat story-making as a metaphoric process (treating one thing as another thing) in so much of management consulting stories are selected and rehearsed to persuade or convince using 'strong story' plot lines with coherence, clarity, and closure. That to us is not Tentativeness of antenarrating, not the sort of story-making involving embodied-reflexivity. Metaphoric is so un-physical, so abstract, so un-real.
Taking a new line, Haggège and Vernay (2020) treat story-making as a method for business modelling, using intuitive, creative entrepreneurial thinking, that fosters empathy. Here we find tentativeness in story-making, designs of business models not yet explored.  Story-making using Tentativeness, ventures from known areas into unknown areas. As Rice and Mundel (2018) put it story-making can disrupt dominant stories through social media. We have an example of CIW protesting migrant-worker-enslavement by Wendy's corporation, and how multi-media is given a non-metaphoric twist, and use of material storytelling using everyday materials.

To us, tentativeness is metonymic, not merely metaphoric in the old linguistic turns. Rather, it is a sort of tentativeness of story-making that can involve material and multi-media storytelling (Strand, 2012), before there are words or language congeals  to tell one's story on coherent, cohesive, and closure ways demanded by cultural or grand narratives in society.


What is Tentativeness at a Cellular Level?

       We are 37.2 trillion living cells interacting with our environment, cells in an cells out.

When millions of cells in heart or gut speak out, we feel the call, and maybe our mind kicks in to ask questions. Why is the hairs on back of my neck standing up? Why do I feel a ache in my gut? 


What is Antenarrating?

Antenarrating appeals to embodied-reflexivity, to make-sense of fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-narrative speculations. And cognitive-writing that invites audiences to join in making reflexive connections, while tracing any overarching grand narrative that imposes ‘author-itarian’ closure, clarity, and coherence.

Short Answer: Antenarrative is a word I invented in the 2001 book, Narrative Methods for Organizational & Communication Research to get at process dynamics of organizational storytelling. First, ANTE(is short for antecedent, what comes BEFORE). Second, ANTE means a BET. It in the 2001 book as 'BEFORE-narrative' and a 'BET on the future.' Now there are 7 B's I will introduce to you.


"Antenarrative is defined as ‘the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-narrative speculation, a bet, a proper narrative can be constituted’" (Boje, 2001: 1).



Antenarrative is defined as the already there processes that are pre-constitutive of 'narrative' and 'living story':  Beneath, Before, Bets, Being, Becoming, Between, and Beyond.
LOOK INSIDE:Read Introduction to this book then you will know the complete answer!

More, please visit Antenarrative.com

What is the Relation of Tentativeness to 'Living Story'? 

        A living story, as Kaylynn TwoTrees (1997) tells it, has a time, a place, and a mind all its own. what we call 'aliveness.'  A living story lives in your body.  Living story is embodiment, not headiness. Your body is 37.2 trillion living cells, and when a few million of those cells begins to vibrate together, a living story is announcing itself to you, at a cellular level.  It can become a tingling sensation in your knee, a hair stand up on the back of your head, or you feel one heel of a food tense up. The pulse rate of your blood flow changes, your breathing changes rhythm, slower or faster. Time stands still.
Example:
  Wendy'a sought a way to tell its fresh, never frozen beef story to a growing generation of consumers wary of advertising.
See EDGES for kind of Tentativeness Boje and Pelly are developing for story-making. Remember the password 'disrupting' to enter here.



Click for --> Story-Making as Methodology: Disrupting Dominant Stories Through Multimedia Storytelling

It also relates to Charles Sanders Peirce's abduction.  

For more on relation of Abduction to reflexivity see, this book.




             We will explain the concept of tentativeness-reflexivity, manifested through the Tamara play (Boje, 1995) and embodied in the concept of antenarrative (pre-narrative, pre-plotted, as yet lacking closure, coherence, clarity of Lyotardian grand narrative).

What is the difference between Metaphoric and Metonymic?
            We learned the difference reading Lakoff and Johnson (2008: 36), metaphor is a way of conceiving one thing in terms of another thing. whereas in metonymic rhetoric, the part stands for the whole (synecdoche).

Example:
  

https://www.vmlyr.com/en-us/united-states/work/super-wendys-world
 Wendy's little pig-tailed red hair girls is a metaphoric brand label that stands for the entire corporation, or its it metonymic a brand-part-image standing for the entire corporation launching a new food product to a generatation wary of slick fast food advertising. 


However, we can beting to understand a more Jakobson approach in which, metaphoric and metonymic , are in relationality, as ways of storytelling, but are not the same.
"In normal verbal behavior both processes are continually operative, but careful observation will reveal that under the influence of a cultural pattern, personality, and verbal style, preference is given to one of the two processes
over the other" (Jakobson, 2018). Most important here:"Romanticism is closely linked with metaphor, whereas the equally intimate ties of Realism with metonymy usually remain unnoticed" (IBID. p. 112).

"Reflection might lead to insight about something not noticed in time, pinpointing perhaps when the detail was missed. Reflexivity is finding strategies to question our own attitudes, thought processes, values, assumptions, prejudices and habitual actions, to strive to understand our complex roles in relation to others" (Bolton chapter 1)



See Mesa-Bains, Amalia. “‘Domesticana’: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache.” In Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader, edited by Gabriela F. Arredondo (references)

Below the more metaphoric glowing storytelling of workers treated with dignity by corporationswho joined the Fair Food Program. 
 
Corporations tell the good side of the story of that they do (above)

The metaphoric storytelling corporate brands mask the enslavement-by-gun metonymic/material storytelling (see Anete Strand, 2012 references).


Workers telling the Enslavement side of work in global economy of corporate supply chains:
 
For example, just released indictments from Georgia (click for more).

… A transnational criminal organization (the “Patricio TCO”), whose members and associates engaged in mail fraud, international forced labor trafficking, and money laundering, among other crimes, within the Southern District of Georgia, Middle District of Georgia, Northern District of Georgia, Middle District of Florida, Southern District of Texas, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and elsewhere.

…The Patricio TCO fraudulently used the H-2A visa program to smuggle foreign nationals from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras into the United States under the pretext of being an agriculture worker. The Patricio TCO further sought to make money by exploiting these foreign workers and then laundering the illegal proceeds…

… In an effort to exploit foreign workers and cheat the system for financial gain, from at least 2015 and continuing through the return date of this Indictment

… ff. In or around April 2021 and May 2021, Defendant Enrique Duque Tovar, Defendant Jose Carmen Duque Tovar, aided and abetted by Defendant Maria Leticia Patricio, and others, unlawfully charged Victims 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, and 50 fees they could not afford, confiscated their identification documents to prevent them from leaving, put them to work in the fields harvesting crops, forced them to live in cramped, single room trailers with little or no food and limited plumbing, forced them to sleep in the same cramped trailer with a worker contagious with measles, and threatened them with violence and deportation.

… gg. In or around April 2021, Defendant Gumara Canela, aided and abetted by Defendant Maria Leticia Patricio, and others, unlawfully charged Victims 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, and 63 fees they could not afford, confiscated their identification documents to prevent them from leaving, put them to work in the fields harvesting crops, forced them to live in cramped, dirty trailers with raw sewage leaking into the trailers, threatened them with deportation, and detained them in a work camp surrounded by an electric fence.

hh. On or about April 19, 2021, Victims 15 and 16 escaped from Defendant Gumara Canela’s work camp with an electric fence. After their escape, Victims 15 and 16 hid in the woods and were rescued by federal agents.

Read the full indictment here.

Homi Bhabha (2003). “As the globe revolves, its other side uncannily discloses a skull.” It’s on p. 450 of his chapter in the following book. He uses a similar skull metaphor on p 82 of this book:
 

Nearly 600 workers, allies come together on final day of March to Build a New World to celebrate decade of human rights progress, call on Wendy’s, Kroger, and Publix to do their part to help end modern-day slavery and other outrageous abuses in agricultural industry, here and abroad!

 


Here you see one globe with the two sides

See video




Practice a Little Tentativeness in your life
Example
 CIW's Fair Food Program and Wendy's 
 

Tentativeness of reflexivity is a delicate interplay of metaphor iand metonymic ways of storytelling. These examples from March 18, 2023  marches by Coalition of Imokalee Workers (CIW)

Workers use everyday available materials to tell their stories and communicate their conditions. This excellent example of using Material Storytelling (Strand, 2012) to develo[ a message that sizzles in a metonymic material mattering of 'real' working conditions of global slavery.

CIW workers doing rasquache. Have they read "

Rasquachismo is a theory developed by Chicano scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto to describe "an underdog perspective, a view from los de abajo" in working class Chicano communities which uses elements of "hybridization, juxtaposition, and integration" as a means of empowerment and resistance" (Wikipedia).

Example: Tentativeness of Tamara-land
 What is Tamara-Land? 

Tamara is Los Angeles’ longest running play by John Krizanc.  Taking place in Hollywood mansion, the audience is invited to actively participate in the plot of the story, and in their own meaning making.  The audience engages in a flanneur, or moseying style of wandering from room to room in a luxurious mansion set on January 10th, 1927.  In lieu of simply sitting in chairs and observing the play as a passive audience member, guests co-author by choosing which rooms and characters to observe. The audience fragments, wanders about, following actors of their choice from stage-to-stage.   Tamara is one of the most notable examples of how tentativeness relates to both cognitive- and embodied-reflexivity Gabriele d’Annunzio,  a war hero, poet, patriot, and womanizer, is under a virtual house arrest by Mussolini, who feels threatened by d’Annunzio’s fame and influence.  The Polish painter and spy, Tamara de Lempicka, is summoned to paint d’Annunzio’s portrait. 




Tamara-Land has gone digital. Six rooms above, have more that 6 factorial pathways, because people are connecting within the organization and to other organizations with cellphones and laptops.

References

Bhabha, Homi. (2003). “Postmodernism/Postcolonialism,” in Critical Terms for Art History. Eds. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 435-451, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bhabha, Homi. (2004). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

Boje, D. M. (1995). Stories of the Storytelling Organization: A Postmodern Analysis of Disney As “Tamara-Land”. Academy of Management Journal, 38(4), 997-1035. Click for online PDF of article.

Boje, D., Pelly, R. D. M., Saylors, R., Saylors, J., & Trafimow, S. (2022). Implications of Tamara-Land Consciousnesses Discourses for Organization Culture Studies. Discourses on Culture, 16(1), 101-123. Click for online PDF of article.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press.

Mesa-Bains, Amalia. “‘Domesticana’: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache.” In Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader, edited by Gabriela F. Arredondo, 298-316. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.


Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás. “Notes from Losaida: A Forward.” In Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities. Edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, xv-xviii. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor_and_metonymy.

Rice, C., & Mündel, I. (2018). Story‐making as methodology: Disrupting dominant stories through multimedia storytelling. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 55(2), 211-231.

Strand, Anete Mikkala.Camille. (2012). Enacting the Between: On dis/continuous intra-active becoming of/through an Apparatus of Material Storytelling. Book 1: Posing (an Apparatus of) Material Storytelling as discontinuous intra-active rework of organizational practices. Click for book 1

TwoTrees, Kaylynn Sulivan. (1997). Living Story,  Presentation at the International Academy of Business Disciplines conference at Case Western Reserve in Ohio.