Drawing on Foucault’s writings on power, neoliberalism, and the dispositive, this article analyses the identity politics that is immanent in a new collaborative practice between the public and private sector called public-private innovation (PPI). We argue that PPI is an element in actualizing a neoliberal market dispositive through inclining subjects to work on themselves in order to actualize their entrepreneurial self, thereby disconnecting them from their public service identity. The construction of two narratives supports the constitution of the political space of PPI: the fiery soul narrative and the need narrative. An important part of this identity politics is the construction of the narrative of the individual entrepreneur. Rather than expressing new public governance in the public sector, PPI actualizes a dispositive that marketizes public services as part of a neoliberal agenda. The narrative of PPI distracts from the marketization of public sector and leaves no other space for public-sector employees than to constitute themselves within contradictory feelings of enthusiasm and anxiety, determination and self-blame, responsibility and inadequacy, and bustle and confusion.

The dream of workers prospering without bosses has long intrigued academics, practitioners, and politicians, particularly on the political left. Anarchists have always believed that it’s not just the state but all forms of authority that are coercive and pernicious, and that a libertarian alterna- tive would free workers and create a fundamentally better form of society. Although we can trace the origins of such leaderless forms of existence back to both ancient Chinese and Greek philosophers, they are more usually related to the works of William Godwin, Max Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Makhno, and the like. In terms of practice, their presence is less obvious, but they were important influencers on the 1871 Paris Commune, the mutiny at Kronstadt in 1921, and of course, in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). But our understanding of how we could organize work without managers is rather less colored by such events and often colored by other forms of romantic nostalgia.

So, while the theoretical attempt to distance organizational forms from the moral and ethical dilemmas of conventional hierarchies have continued over time, there are few substantive and scholarly accounts of what these forms might be—or why they might not prove viable. This collection is an attempt to address this lacuna and to establish whether peer-based alternatives to leader–follower hierarchies can work—the first part of the collection; or why they might or might not—the second part; or why they won’t work—the third part. A final chapter considers looking beyond all these debates.

The dream of workers prospering without bosses has long intrigued academics, practitioners, and politicians, particularly on the political left. Anarchists have always believed that it’s not just the state but all forms of authority that are coercive and pernicious, and that a libertarian alterna- tive would free workers and create a fundamentally better form of society. Although we can trace the origins of such leaderless forms of existence back to both ancient Chinese and Greek philosophers, they are more usually related to the works of William Godwin, Max Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Makhno, and the like. In terms of practice, their presence is less obvious, but they were important influencers on the 1871 Paris Commune, the mutiny at Kronstadt in 1921, and of course, in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). But our understanding of how we could organize work without managers is rather less colored by such events and often colored by other forms of romantic nostalgia.

So, while the theoretical attempt to distance organizational forms from the moral and ethical dilemmas of conventional hierarchies have continued over time, there are few substantive and scholarly accounts of what these forms might be—or why they might not prove viable. This collection is an attempt to address this lacuna and to establish whether peer-based alternatives to leader–follower hierarchies can work—the first part of the collection; or why they might or might not—the second part; or why they won’t work—the third part. A final chapter considers looking beyond all these debates.

This chapter is inspired by Latour’s suggestion that Gaia has taken centre stage in politics. Universities are therefore submitted to a climatic regime which demands responsibility. Inspired by Arendt, this chapter suggests a storytelling framework for teaching sustainability in management education. Storytelling is seen as a means for ‘emplacing’ people in the terrestrial conditions of Gaia. Seven storytelling principles of a terrestrial management education are discussed: Self-formation addresses the need of management becoming a matter of ethical development of the self; problem-oriented learning emphasizes that learning is to be organized around practical problems; multispecies storytelling implies organizing management education with an explicit focus on the biosphere goals; gaiagraphy implies using methods to map relations between nature, society, and organizations; governance implies organizing management as an intersectional practice across different professions; truth-telling is to train management students to appear and speak with frankness and honesty; finally, storytelling requires deep reflexive practices. 

The argument here against entrepreneurship discourse is that it is used for transforming environmental and social problems into new market opportunities and to deregulate and cut back on support for people in precarious positions. We argue that these transformations destroy or promote unjust modes of entrepreneurship. Furthermore, entrepreneurship is an important weapon for capitalism to outsource and deny responsibility for the consequences of its actions. We show how this tendency operates through two stories about entrepreneurship. The first story is from a discourse concerning plastic pollution. In this story, entrepreneurship is presented as the solution to the problem concerning plastic pollution. The second story is about immigrants where exposed citizens are expected to find their entrepreneurial spirit and become self-sufficient within a hostile institutional system.

The chapter argues for a storytelling framework for sustainable problem-based learning (PBL). An important aspect of PBL is to learn how to be responsible and answerable. Such competences can only be learnt if students interact with the world. This ethical purpose is, however, often forgotten in PBL rhetoric. We propose to address this. The 17 UN development goals are seen as a political materialization of the highest principle of all being, which is identified as the eternal recurrence and hence natality. This ethical principle is radical and implies multi-species storytelling, that is, a politics of the earth instead of the human all-to-human dominance that has caused the Sixth Extinction event that we are currently living through. The challenge of PBL in regard to sustainability is to work out new institutional, economic and material practices in which the UN goals can be enacted. We propose a terra-political framework, which implies regrouping and prioritizing the UN development goals. Terra-politics is a multi-species storytelling, which can be organized as concrete problems of the earth, which are always inherent and entangled with the problems that students identify through self-directed collaborative learning processes. A terra-politics is in this sense at the heart of almost any problem that students are dealing with. We suggest that a model of true storytelling can be extended to a multi-species storytelling that we describe in four phases and seven principles. True storytelling becomes a model that can bridge strategies, communities, spaces, geographies, nature and people. Stories are seen as collective, relational and material and require the community of a Terrapolis in which being-togetherness in time-space is a guiding principle for shaping a sustainable future.

Purpose In accordance with Latour, this paper aims to respond to the call for a "down-to-earth" post-learning organization approach to sustainability, which is critical of Senge's conception of learning organization (LO). Design/methodology/approach "Gaia storytelling" is used to define a LO that is "down to earth." Findings Gaia is understood through the notion of a critical zone, which foregrounds the local and differentiated terrestrial conditions in which life on Earth is embedded. Practical implications Gaia storytelling implies perceiving LO as a network of storytelling practices enacted and told by unique creative citizens. Such an organization sustains and grows through several entangled storytelling cycles that allow Gaia to shape learning. Social implications The article distinguishes five different storytelling cycles as a way to explore how the Gaia theater cycle connects to other cycles. The four other cycles are called Gaia thinking, explorative, creative and Gaia truth-telling. Originality/value A Gaian LO is a new beginning for LO.

The purpose of this chapter is to review the field of organizational learning. This is done by discussing a case of organizational learning to see how this discipline works in practice. Afterward, I identify and discuss three significant contributions to organizational learning: Argyris and Schön’s systems approach, Senge’s learning organization, and Wenger Communities of practice approach. I discuss organizational learning as a means for human resource development. 

This chapter proposes a material-performative storytelling approach to authentic leadership based on Hannah Arendt's notion of action as storytelling and Butler's rework of Arendt's notion as an embodied and material performance. The author argues that stories are expressions of authenticity to the extent that they disclose who people are and create what Arendt called a ‘space of appearance’. He conjectures that authenticity is enacted when people have the ability and commitment to create stories and inscribe themselves in history. Jørgensen concludes that authenticity implies new leadership practices enacted in the spaces between institutions and organisations to deal with societal challenges and suggests that innovative new models are necessary to address these challenges.

Organizational storytelling has been taught for many years in many different places as part of organizational development, organizational change, organizational learning, and business ethics. There has not been any comprehensive framework that addresses sustainability in organizations and so this book develops a new ethics of sustainability for management and organizations. A terrestrial ethics of storymaking is proposed, which responds to Latour’s claim that the Terrestrial has become a new decisive political actor in politics. The Terrestrial is born from Gaia, a metaphor for a new look on life on Earth. Gaia situates life in the thin layer of matter that is the surface of the Earth. It entails the view that nature is a process that humans are part of. Storymaking is constructed from Arendt’s political philosophy, which is rooted ontologically in the principle of natality: rebirth of life. The term ‘storymaking’ is developed from Arendt’s understanding of storytelling as political action to emphasize not only that stories are spatial, embodied and material practices that are tied to a specific time and space but also that technology is an important dimension in making stories. Stories are thus human practices that apart from meaning making and politics involve the use and manipulation of material and objects, and which are crucial for how a human world is shaped. This human world is furthermore shaped by the rhythms of life embedded in the complex landscapes that humans move through. Storymaking is developed through rethinking the links between the central categories of labor, work, action, and thinking in Arendt’s writings. Implications for business ethics are drawn out and a comprehensive ethics framework is constructed that connects the biological and physical with the social, economic, and political regarding how organizations work. Finally, a storymaking philosophy of management is constructed, making this book especially relevant to researchers, academics, managers, and students in the fields of business ethics, management studies, leadership, organizational studies, and international business. 

This paper addresses calls for developing eco-centric approaches to sustainable management learning that challenge the anthropocentric technocratic foci of established models. A growing concern is that despite declarations of climate emergencies, programs making a sustainable turn perpetuate rather than challenge the status-quo. A key issue is that they rely on an ontology of separateness which further detaches humans from nature. To propose an alternative approach that re-embeds human in nature through an ontology of relatedness, we develop the concept Gaia storytelling. It combines Arendt's notion of storytelling with Latour's notion of Gaia. Gaia storytelling dissolves the anthropocentric culture-nature binary that dominates current thinking by attuning itself to the politics of relations and how this politics performs the world through complex entanglements that involve multiple agencies. Storytelling for Gaia is seen as a way to give purpose and direction in life when this life is seen as interdependent on and created from multiple tangling agencies. Two stories that emerged from management learning exercises are discussed for developing Gaia storytelling: an auto-ethnography of a supermarket allows attuning to how our stories are affectively enacted into being through constant story selling; a storytelling workshop of regional sustainable development is used to discuss the possibilities for creating spaces of appearances that can work for Gaia. Finally, we discuss Gaia storytelling with reference to three principles: (1) natureculture, (2) common space, and (3) performativity.

This chapter discusses why identity is important in relation to human resource development. We develop our notion of identity through discussing the concepts narrative and living story in relation to a theory of reality construction. This theory of reality construction consists of facts, logic, values and communication. We argue that balancing narrative forces and living stories are crucial for integrating the dimensions into a consistent reality that works for people. We draw the implications in relation to managing HRD and organisational change in general.

Leadership education has become a billion-dollar business and is a popular field among researchers and students in universities. Multiple debates about what leadership is and how to perform it flourish. In a recent debate book, Anders Örtenblad (2018) has collected contributions that debate whether leadership should be a profession. Jørgensen and Svane (2018) argue that the answer is no to this question from the premises that leadership education would then be defined by the powerful and because it would entail an instrumentalization and standardization of leadership. Hertel and Fast (2018) suggest that leadership is connected to a certain way of being in a context. Therefore, they argue, that it is impossible to define universal principles of leadership. These arguments against turning leadership into a profession are grounded in the idea that leadership is a situated, relational and collective practice rather than a personal and a technical practice. Turning leadership into a profession implies the assumption that leadership emerges from the actions of superior individuals. These debates connect to our position regarding the central theme of the book, which is that we are for leaderless management. Using Hannah Arendt’s (1998) distinction between action and work, we develop a position within leaderless management, which we call leaderless leadership. This position is founded upon action and involves specifying the critical dimension of democratic participation in decisions that concern the whole organization. Arendt argues that action is where people become political among other people. It presumes the perception of a common space among them. Action is thus where people assume responsibility for a world they have in common with others (Arendt 1998, pp. 50–55). Action is etymologically associated with leading and is not only a natural part of the human condition, but also an obligation because it implies taking responsibility for the complex matters of the world.

This chapter explores the politics of entrepreneurship in the bioeconomy. It explains how storytelling is used politically to promote certain kinds of entrepreneurship. The chapter questions the idea of the lone entrepreneur, who, armed with creativity, action, and risk-taking creates something new in spite of public bureaucratic structures. Instead, it shows how the bioeconomy is a step in governments’ attempts to encourage and conduct in a subtle way the transformation from an economy based on fossil fuels toward an economy based on sustainable energy sources — in this case, biogas. The chapter also discloses how farmers position themselves and enact their agendas when becoming entrepreneurs in this area. We discuss this case of business storytelling as an example of the relationship between power and entrepreneurship. The reason why biogas is particularly interesting is because of the powerful business interests in farming. Entrepreneurship is in this case used as a tool to revitalize existing power relations and their material interests rather than to create new beginnings.

This paper constructs an ethics of managing by reading Latour’s notion of Gaia with Arendt’s notion of storytelling. Gaia implies reframing the ethical foundation for making stories as well as it has ontological consequences for how we perceive stories. We suggest reframing storytelling into storymaking. This concept attunes to how storymaking is part of making life that becomes through, relies on, and is answerable to multiple other lives: human as well as nonhuman. Second, storymaking allows depicting managers’ imagination of themselves and what they do in the complex webs of relations that managers are part of. We put storymaking to work in discussing the processes of translation that occur when new managers transition from management education for sustainability to work life. Our re-storying of their stories attunes to their ethical compass and how they enact it into being. We attune to the tensions involved in building a stable foundation for their storymaking and the compromises they make in coping with fleeting and, at times, chaotic organizational realities. Attuning to how organizations make life and affect the conditions of caring for life is important for judging organizational action. Second, storymaking allows understanding of managing as a process that involves making stories about life spiritually and materially, thereby stabilizing life amid chaos. 

The tensions between academic capitalism and ethical subjectivation in universities are discussed in Chapter 5 through the contrast of two different types of stories about the university. The first is the university as a ‘moral concentration camp’, where research and education are part of biopolitical neoliberalism and its valuations of worthy/unworthy, beneficial/non-beneficial etc. The second is the university as ‘a public library’ where knowledge is shared and passed on for free to future generations. These stories express very different ideas of the ‘university’. The first uses what we call storyselling. It expresses the corporatisation of the self in the neoliberal academy and works through affective subjectivation. The second uses storytelling as an element in ethical self-formation. We argue that these two contradictory forces are simultaneously present in the work of the self on the self by which academics manage and organise their professional work lives. Resistance to academic capitalism is associated with storytelling. The problem as we see it is that storytelling resistance increasingly relies on the work of the self on the self while effective resistance requires the creation of more collective spaces where people can come together.

Purpose:

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how Dewey’s notions of experience, inquiry and reflection can increase managers’ capacity to cope with sustainability transitions.

Design/methodology/approach:

Problem-based learning is discussed as an approach for enabling sustainable management learning. Dewey’s concepts of experience, inquiry and reflection are used to conceptualize learning as an iterative “self-corrective” learning process toward sustainability. Two public managers’ experiences of a personal development module in a management education program are used to discuss how Dewey’s concepts work to integrate practice and theory.

Findings:

Dewey’s problem-based learning framework has the potential to increase managers’ capability to cope with complex and multifaceted challenges such as sustainability because of its focus on problem-solving.

Practical implications:

Management is a social practice. Management education can support management learning if management is perceived as a practice.

Originality/value:

Sustainable management learning is presented as an iterative and gradual learning process aimed toward settled inquiry that emerges when sustainable solutions work satisfactory in relation to the multiple and contradictory forces, which are in play in real-life situations.

The Emerald Handbook of Authentic Leadership is a ground-breaking interdisciplinary collection, opening the black box of leadership authenticity to advance understanding of theory and practice. It presents a wide-ranging, diverse source of new concepts, theories, insights, applications to advance thinking and practice in leadership and leadership authenticity.

The first publication of its kind, the contributors – leading scholars, researchers, business and NGO leaders, policy makers – explore differing, contrasting perspectives on the evolving, fluid subject of authentic leadership. The thematic sections examine ‘The Search for Authenticity from Theory to Practice’, ‘The Search for Authenticity from Practice to Theory’, and ‘Developing Authentic Leadership Values, Understanding and Practice’.

The Emerald Handbook of Authentic Leadership is a quest for interdisciplinary insights arising out of theory and practice. It is intended for a wide readership interested in leadership and leadership authenticity in the contemporary world.