Antenarrative Theory
Seven Prospective Story Processes · True Storytelling · Tamaraland of the AI Industry
The living story material that exists before it crystallizes into coherent retrospective narrative
Originated by David Michael Boje in 1991, antenarrative theory identifies seven prospective B-processes — Before, Beneath, Bets, Being, Becoming, Between, Beyond — operating in every organization before any official story takes hold. The newest work connects these B-processes to True Storytelling principles (Larsen, Boje & Bruun) and applies both to Tamaraland analysis of the AI industry's thirteen major actors.
Core Theory — Boje (1991–2026)
What is Antenarrative?
Antenarratives are the speculative, fragmented, non-linear pre-stories that exist before they crystallize into coherent retrospective narratives. They are the bets, hunches, whispers, and emerging possibilities circulating in organizations — the living story material that traditional narrative analysis, arriving after the fact, always misses. The term was coined by Boje (2001) to mark the difference between a story-in-progress and the retrospective narrative that arrives later to make sense of it. The prefix ante- means before and also forward-bet (as in poker's ante): antenarrative is simultaneously a temporal claim (this exists before narrative) and a prospective one (this stakes a bet on the future).
The Seven B-processes were not discovered all at once. They developed over a quarter century of theoretical work, each new B responding to a gap in what the previous ones could name. Most early antenarrative scholarship — including the bulk of the 79 publications — works with the first two Bs, either explicitly or implicitly. The full seven-B instrument is the work of the most recent decade.
The First 2 Bs — Before & Bets (2001)
Introduced in Boje's 2001 Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research (Sage), these two processes named the temporal and prospective dimensions of antenarrative. Before names the multiple, contested starting points that precede any official story — not one Beginning, but many, held by different actors, none authoritative. Bets names the forward-looking wagers different actors place on how events will unfold — prospective sensemaking, the ante-up before any outcome is known. Together, Before and Bets constituted antenarrative as a dual-sided concept: looking backward (before the story fixed itself) and forward (betting on what comes next). The foundational 1991 Administrative Science Quarterly study can be read through these two Bs alone.
4 Bs — Adding Beneath & Between (~2007)
By the mid-2000s, the two prospective Bs were insufficient to name what antenarrative analysis was actually uncovering. Beneath named the hidden, suppressed, or tacit story-layer operating below official accounts — the fore-structure of interests, contracts, and commitments that must be in place for an official story to be speakable at all. What the organization cannot name in public is still operating, and Beneath gives it an analytical address. Between introduced Bakhtinian dialogism: the heteroglossic, interpenetrating story-field where multiple voices coexist without resolution, each answering the other without any achieving dominance. With four Bs, antenarrative became a tool for both temporal analysis (Before, Bets) and critical-dialogic analysis (Beneath, Between).
6 Bs — Adding Becoming & Beyond (~2011–2014)
Becoming named the processual, emergent dimension: the antenarrative of transformation, always future-tense, always not-yet-arrived. "We are becoming responsible" is a Becoming antenarrative — it defers accountability into a future that is always arriving and never quite here. Beyond introduced the ethical dimension: the obligations, communities, and consequences that exceed the organization's own frame. The ecosystems, futures, and peoples affected by organizational decisions whose story never enters the official room live in the Beyond of those decisions. Boje's 2014 Storytelling Organizational Practices (Routledge) consolidated the six-B framework as a coherent analytical instrument.
The 7th B — Being (~2025)
Being required the longest gestation — more than a decade of engagement with Heidegger's Being and Time before Boje felt confident enough to commit the term to print. Being-in-the-world is not simply another layer of the pre-story; it is the ontological ground from which all the other Bs emerge — the absorbed, ready-to-hand condition of living the story without stepping outside it, the present-moment reality of those whose experience official narratives never enter. Being was developed primarily in Boje & Saylors (2024), The Management Thought of Louis Ralph Pondy: Reclaiming the Enthinkment Path (Information Age Publishing), through Pondy's concept of enthinkment — thinking-in-action that precedes and exceeds theorization. In the AI industry context, Being names the actual lived conditions of communities adjacent to data centers, workers navigating AI displacement, and democratic institutions under epistemic pressure — the present tense that official AI storytelling perpetually defers to the next announcement.
Of the 79 antenarrative publications, the majority engage the concept at the foundational level: antenarrative as the story-material that exists before it gets fixed — before Beginning-Middle-End, before characters are selected, before retrospective sensemaking imposes coherence. Without requiring the full Bs apparatus, these publications pursue three main theoretical aims:
X — Prospective Sensemaking and Temporality
The first wave of antenarrative scholarship used the concept primarily to critique Weick's retrospective sensemaking and to theorize how organizations orient toward futures through fragmented, speculative story-fragments. The question: how do actors make sense of what has not yet happened? Antenarrative named the prospective, future-bet dimension that retrospective narrative theory could not see. Key works in this vein include Agar (2005) on telling-it-like-you-think-it-might-be; Dalcher & Drevin (2004) on project antenarratives; and Boje's own early qualitative empirical studies of the 3M and Nike storytelling organizations. Fatemi et al.'s (forthcoming) Cluster 3 — Narratives in Strategic Leadership — represents the field's sensemaking heartland, mapping directly onto Before and Bets.
Y — Legitimation and Organizational Identity Construction
A significant cluster uses antenarrative to analyze how organizations construct legitimacy before any single official story solidifies. Before the CSR report is published, before the press release is drafted, there is a contested legitimacy-field where multiple versions of corporate identity coexist. Fenton & Langley (2011, Organization Studies) — the most-cited application of antenarrative in strategy research — use it precisely here: as the polyphonic infrastructure of competing story-fragments underlying strategy formulation before any "strategy narrative" takes hold. The question: whose story of who-we-are will survive the legitimation process? Fatemi et al.'s Cluster 1 (Legitimacy, Reputation & Strategic Persuasion) maps this tradition, showing the outward turn in how the field deployed antenarrative for external legitimacy work from ~2018 onward.
Z — Counter-Narrative and Organizational Resistance
A third strand uses antenarrative as a methodological tool for surfacing suppressed voices, contested histories, and resistance to dominant organizational accounts. Here antenarrative is not just a theoretical concept but a research practice — attending to the stories told in corridors, break rooms, and off-record conversations before management's official version arrives. The question: whose story is being systematically excluded from the official account, and how does it persist in the organizational underground? Works by Hazen (1993), Gabriel (2000), and Boje & Rosile (2002) operate here; this vein maps onto Fatemi et al.'s Cluster 4 (Rhetoric & Discourse), which the bibliometric analysis places in the same historical period as the foundational inward tradition (~2016).
Each of these three uses treats antenarrative as a single unified concept — the not-yet-story. The Seven Bs differentiate this concept into a precise instrument with seven distinct analytical handles. The limitation of X, Y, and Z is not that they are wrong, but that they cannot specify which kind of not-yet-story they have found: Before vs. Beneath vs. Between vs. Being are not the same analytical claim.
A smaller but growing set of publications deploy two or more Bs simultaneously as a combinatorial diagnostic — specifying exactly which dimension of the pre-story is operating in a given case, and showing that the dimensions are analytically distinct:
Massoud, El-Said & Boje (2019) — 5 Bs Applied to BP Prudhoe Bay
International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 27(5). The first major peer-reviewed application of the multi-B framework to an organizational crisis. Massoud et al. demonstrate that the BP Prudhoe Bay environmental disaster cannot be understood through Before or Bets alone: the Beneath (hidden infrastructure commitments made before the crisis), Between (interpenetrating narratives of regulators, workers, and corporation), and Becoming (the "we are becoming safer" deflection) are simultaneously active and analytically distinct. This is the proof-of-concept for the Bs as a multi-dimensional instrument rather than a single concept.
Boje & Saylors (2024) — Being as the 7th B, via Pondy and Heidegger
The Management Thought of Louis Ralph Pondy: Reclaiming the Enthinkment Path (Information Age Publishing). Develops Being as the ontological seventh B through Heidegger's analysis of ready-to-hand absorbed practice and Pondy's enthinkment concept. Being is not simply another layer of the pre-story but the ground condition from which all seven processes emerge — the lived present tense of organizational experience that official narratives systematically defer or ignore. The book positions Being as what the digital storytelling turn (Fatemi's Cluster 2) misses: it counts shares and impressions without attending to the Being of those whose lives the story is actually about.
Boje (2026) — All Seven Bs in the AI Industry
AI Trust Paradox (Tamaraland Publishing, free at storying.site). The most comprehensive application of the seven-B framework: thirteen cases of AI corporate leadership (Zuckerberg, Amodei, Altman, Nadella, Musk, Hassabis, Ellison, Wenfeng, Jassy, Huang, Mensch, China, Australia) each analyzed through all seven Bs simultaneously, mapped onto True Storytelling principles (Larsen, Boje & Bruun) and Tamaraland's six simultaneous rooms. The full instrument reveals the structural AI Trust Paradox — maximum storytelling visibility, minimum answerability — that no single-B analysis could name.
Fatemi et al. (forthcoming) — Bibliometric Map Identifying the Gap the Full Instrument Fills
International Journal of Organizational Analysis (MS ID: IJOA-07-2026-7610). A bibliometric mapping of the antenarrative and strategic storytelling field across 1968–2024 — 221 documents, 622 authors, 437 sources. Not an application of the Bs directly, but an authoritative identification of the field's four thematic clusters and the structural gap between them: no integrative framework connects the outward and inward traditions, the sensemaking and the legitimation clusters, the digital and the rhetorical streams. The full Seven-B instrument is positioned to fill precisely this gap, providing a single analytical vocabulary that spans all four of Fatemi et al.'s clusters.
The distinction between antenarrative-as-concept and antenarrative-as-instrument is a distinction in analytical precision, not in theoretical legitimacy.
Publications using antenarrative as concept (X, Y, Z above) can say: there is a story here that is not yet fixed, and it matters that we attend to it before the official version arrives. This is a powerful claim. It has generated three decades of organizational research and been cited across management, communication, strategy, and social movements scholarship.
Publications using the Seven Bs can say: there are seven distinct processes operating here simultaneously, each analytically separable — and the Before operating in this case is not the same as the Beneath, which is not the same as the Between, which is not the same as Being — and distinguishing them changes what we see and what intervention is possible.
The practical difference is sharpest in applied contexts. When a community is contesting an AI data center siting decision, "there are antenarratives circulating that the official story ignores" is true but analytically underpowered. Specifying that the Before (what the corporation had already committed before the public hearing) differs from the Beneath (what signed water contracts already reveal), the Between (how corporate, regulatory, and community stories interpenetrate without any actor coordinating the whole), the Beyond (whose ecological future is unaccounted for in any room), and the Being (whose lived reality is excluded from the official story entirely) — this specificity is what makes the analysis actionable.
The Seven Bs do not replace the concept; they articulate it into a precision instrument. Antenarrative still lives before the story gets fixed — the Bs name the seven ways it does so, each one a different analytical handle on the living story-field that precedes every official narrative.
Core Framework — Boje (1991–2026)
The Seven Antenarrative B's: Definitions and Examples
Boje (1991 ASQ, 2001, 2014) | Boje & Rosile (2016)
| Antenarrative B | Definition | Example (Boje / Rosile) |
|---|---|---|
| Befores | Multiple, contested starting points — not one Beginning, but many, held by different actors. | Workers’ story of the office supply crisis began before management even noticed. (Boje 1991 ASQ) |
| Being | Ready-to-hand — absorbed in practice, living the story without stepping outside it. | Shop floor workers living the daily story; no arc, no resolution visible from inside. (Boje 1991 ASQ) |
| Becoming | Present-at-hand — the moment a situation surfaces as a story, noticed and named. | Union resistance made the supply crisis suddenly visible — management now saw it AS a story. (Boje 1991) |
| Bets | Different actors hold different expected endings — competing bets on the future. | CEO bets on acquisition; workers bet on layoffs; investors bet on growth. (Boje 1991 ASQ) |
| Beneath | Tacit, hidden, suppressed — what official stories bury or refuse to name. | Labor conditions and supplier exploitation concealed beneath the efficiency narrative. (Boje 2001) |
| Beyond | Ethical, transcendental obligations that exceed the organization’s own purposes. | Environmental obligations and community duties not written into the company story. (Boje 2014) |
| Between | Dialogic polyphony — multiple simultaneous perspectives in active, ongoing dialogue. | Corporate-Who, Workers-Who, Social-Who, Ecological-Who each narrating differently. (Boje & Rosile 2016) |
New in 2026 — AI Trust Paradox
The Interface: True Storytelling × Antenarrative × AI Industry
The newest work in antenarrative theory creates a structured interface between the Seven B-processes and the seven principles of True Storytelling (Larsen, Boje & Bruun). Applied to Tamaraland analysis of the AI industry, the interface reveals a systemic pattern: every major AI corporation performs True Storytelling principles in its public rooms while its antenarratives — the Before, Beneath, and Bets operating below the surface — tell a different story.
Seven Principles × Seven B-Processes × AI Industry Analysis
The table below shows the interface as developed in AI Trust Paradox — thirteen cases of AI corporate leadership (Zuckerberg, Amodei, Altman, Nadella, Musk, Hassabis, Ellison, Liang Wenfeng, Jassy, Huang, Mensch, China, Australia) read through both lenses simultaneously. Read across each row to see how the True Storytelling principle, the B-process, and the AI industry instance lock together — and what the paradox reveals.
| True Storytelling Principle Larsen, Boje & Bruun |
Antenarrative B-Process Boje (2001–2026) |
AI Industry Instance From AI Trust Paradox (2026) |
The Paradox What gets performed vs. what the antenarrative reveals |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🔍 Truth-Telling | Before Fore-having: the prior room-trail each actor enters with |
What each AI CEO already knows and has wagered before any public announcement — prior contracts, competitive assessments, regulatory bets already placed | Truth-telling is claimed; the fore-having that pre-structures what can be said publicly remains unnamed in every press room |
| 💚 Care | Beneath Fore-structure: hidden drivers operating below the surface |
Water aquifer contracts, energy agreements, community displacement — the infrastructure beneath every data center announcement. What must be true for the announcement to be possible, but is never named in it | Care language fills every corporate ESG page; beneath it, the aquifer is being drawn down, the community is excluded from the room |
| ⚡ Courage | Bets Fore-sight: competing future-wagers staked on what will arrive |
AGI timelines, regulatory-capture bets, competitive position wagers placed in public (AGI by 2030) and rarely answered for when the timeline passes. The bet shapes investment and policy while remaining epistemically unverifiable | Courageous-sounding wagers are placed; answerability for those wagers when they fail is systematically deferred to the next cycle of bets |
| 🧠 Wisdom | Being Being-in-the-world: authentic present-moment conditions |
What is actually happening now — for communities beside data centers, for aquifer levels, for workers, for democratic institutions — as distinct from what is performed in congressional testimony or earnings calls | Expert wisdom is claimed by AI leaders; the lived wisdom of those whose being is most affected is absent from every official room |
| ⚖️ Justice | Becoming Fore-conception: transformation from current to desired state |
"We are becoming more responsible, more aligned, more beneficial" — the AI industry's permanent future-tense promise. Becoming forecloses present accountability by projecting justice into a future that perpetually defers | Justice is always Becoming — always arriving. In the present room, the distribution of costs and benefits remains unchanged, unjust, and unnamed as such |
| 🌿 Sustainability | Between Inter-penetration: how story-fragments across actors interpenetrate |
How Altman's AGI narrative, Musk's doom narrative, Hassabis's research narrative, and Huang's infrastructure narrative feed each other without explicit coordination — creating a shared story-field that no single actor controls or is accountable for | Sustainability language appears in every room; the between-space where these stories interpenetrate is precisely where sustainability is never enacted |
| 🌍 Responsibility | Beyond Fore-caring: long-term ethical consequences and ripple effects |
Ecological, democratic, epistemic, and social consequences that AI industry stories systematically project beyond any frame of present accountability — always "later," when the technology matures, when regulation arrives, when the benefits reach everyone | Responsibility claims are maximum and sincere-sounding; answerability for what is happening right now, in communities and ecosystems, is perpetually Beyond |
The Seven B-Processes in the AI Industry
Each B-process names a different layer of the living story that circulates in and around the AI industry before any official account takes hold. The wheel below shows how they surround the central paradox.
🔥 Latest Developments — Antenarrative Research & Practice
📖 AI Trust Paradox (2026)
Tamaraland Publishing · Free Download · July 2026
The newest application of antenarrative theory: thirteen cases of AI corporate leadership — Zuckerberg, Amodei, Altman, Musk, and nine more — read through the Seven B-processes, True Storytelling principles, SEAM hidden-cost analysis, and Tamaraland. Free until print publication. storying.site →
🎯 True Storytelling Interface
2025–2026 — Active Theoretical Development
The interface between the Seven Bs and True Storytelling principles (Larsen, Boje & Bruun) is now fully operationalized in the AI industry context. Each B-process is paired with a TS principle and applied to a concrete AI industry instance, creating a seven-layer diagnostic for corporate storytelling accountability.
🌱 Tamaraland of the AI Industry
Evolving Since 2001 — Newest Application 2026
Tamaraland — route-dependent, polyphonic room architecture originating in David Boje's 1995 AMJ study — is now applied to the AI industry's six simultaneously-operating room-types: corporate announcements, research publications, regulatory hearings, community impact, investment markets, and data center infrastructure.
Applied Framework — AI Trust Paradox (2026)
Seven Bs in the AI Industry — Definitions and Diagnostic
The Seven B-processes operate simultaneously in every organizational storytelling context. The definitions below are grounded in the AI industry analysis developed in AI Trust Paradox (2026) — the most comprehensive application of the full seven-B framework to date. Each definition includes the True Storytelling principle it engages and a concrete AI industry instance showing how the process operates in the most prominent storytelling arena of the current moment.
The Seven B-processes name the prospective antenarrative layers operating in every organization before any official story takes hold. The definitions below replace earlier ERP-focused framings with definitions grounded in the AI industry analysis developed in AI Trust Paradox (2026). Each definition includes the True Storytelling principle it engages and an AI industry instance.
🟠 Before — Fore-having
The prior room-trail that each actor carries into every public statement: what they already know, have already wagered, and have already committed to before any announcement is made. In the AI industry, the Before is the ante that precedes every press release. Before Zuckerberg announces Meta's AI strategy, there is already a bet staked on AGI-as-advertising-infrastructure that pre-structures everything he can say in any public room.
True Storytelling principle engaged: Truth-telling — what are you bringing with you that you are not naming?
🔵 Beneath — Fore-structure
The hidden architecture of interests, contracts, and commitments operating below the surface of official AI narratives — the infrastructure that makes the announcement possible but is never named in the announcement. In every one of the thirteen cases in AI Trust Paradox, a Beneath is present that the official story cannot enter: water aquifer contracts signed before community consultation, energy agreements preceding sustainability pledges, regulatory relationships preceding independence claims.
True Storytelling principle engaged: Care — what must be true for this story to be speakable at all?
🟡 Bets — Fore-sight
The forward-looking wagers AI leaders are placing — on AGI timelines, regulatory outcomes, competitive positions — and being rarely held answerable for. The AGI-by-2030 bet is not a prediction; it is a bet that shapes investment flows, policy decisions, and public trust while remaining epistemically unverifiable. When the timeline passes without the promised arrival, the bet is quietly reset rather than answered for.
True Storytelling principle engaged: Courage — are you prepared to answer for this wager when the timeline passes?
🟢 Being — Being-in-the-world
Authentic present-moment conditions — what is actually happening right now for communities adjacent to data centers, for aquifer levels, for workers managing AI-displaced roles, for democratic institutions navigating AI-accelerated disinformation — as distinct from what is performed in congressional testimony or earnings calls. Being is the present tense that official AI storytelling perpetually defers to the next announcement.
True Storytelling principle engaged: Wisdom — whose being counts in your story?
🟣 Becoming — Fore-conception
The transformation narrative: "We are becoming more responsible, more aligned, more beneficial." In the AI industry, Becoming functions as a permanent future-tense promise that forecloses present accountability. Every critique can be deflected by pointing to what the company is becoming — a structure that is available regardless of what is actually happening in Being. True Becoming, by contrast, names what would have to stop today for the transformation to be real.
True Storytelling principle engaged: Justice — what would you need to stop doing, today, for this Becoming to be real?
🟤 Between — Inter-penetration
The space where story-fragments from different actors interpenetrate without explicit coordination — creating a shared story-field that no single actor controls or is accountable for. In the AI industry, Altman's AGI narrative, Musk's doom narrative, Hassabis's research framing, and Huang's infrastructure narrative feed each other, producing an AI story-field larger than any of them. The Between is where the AI Trust Paradox lives as a structural condition rather than an individual failure.
True Storytelling principle engaged: Sustainability — which voices are absent from the interpenetration, and what would the story be if they were present?
🌊 Beyond — Fore-caring
The long-term ethical consequences — ecological, social, epistemic, democratic — that AI industry stories systematically project beyond the frame of any present accountability. The Beyond is always "later": when the technology matures, when regulation catches up, when the benefits reach everyone. Meanwhile, communities in New Mexico, Memphis, and data-center corridors worldwide are living in the Beyond of decisions that were made without them.
True Storytelling principle engaged: Responsibility — who is living in your Beyond right now?
- Tamaraland & the AI Industry: Multi-perspectival storytelling in the simultaneous rooms of AI corporations — how corporate announcements, research publications, regulatory hearings, community impacts, and investment markets operate simultaneously with no master narrator
- True Storytelling Interface: The interface of True Storytelling principles (Larsen, Boje & Bruun) with the Seven B-processes — applied to AI corporate leadership accountability analysis
- SEAM Hidden-Cost Analysis: Socioeconomic Assessment of Management (Savall & Zardet) applied to AI data center infrastructure — uncovering hidden costs in water, energy, community displacement, and labor
- Quantum Storytelling: Integrating quantum physics concepts with narrative theory to understand organizational entanglement and observer effects in AI development
- Microstorying & Community Resistance: Antenarrative methods for community resistance to AI data center siting — New Mexico, Tennessee, and global case studies
- Holographic Organizational Theory: How the AI industry's self-similar structures replicate across scales — from data center to corporation to national AI strategy
For AI Industry Analysts & Researchers:
Apply the Seven B-processes to any AI corporate leader's public statements to surface what is Before (prior commitments), Beneath (hidden contracts and costs), Bets (unanswered wagers), Being (actual present conditions), Becoming (deferred promises), Between (interpenetrating story-field), and Beyond (unaccounted consequences). This is not hostile analysis — it is rigorous accountability reading.
For Organizational Leaders:
Use the Seven Bs to surface the living story material in your own organization before it crystallizes into official narrative. What Bets are people implicitly placing? What is Beneath the stated strategy? What Becoming are people expecting that is not being named?
For Change Leaders:
Change fails when we manage only the official narrative. Use antenarrative listening to attend to the Before and Beneath — the assumptions and hidden drivers that resist change before any official intervention begins.
For Community Organizers:
Apply microstorying methodologies for conflict transformation. The Seven Bs give communities a diagnostic language for naming what AI corporations' official stories are not saying: whose Being is excluded, whose Beyond is unaccounted for.
Core Framework
Tamaraland of the AI Industry: Six Simultaneous Rooms
Tamaraland takes its name from John Krizanc's 1981 play: thirteen rooms of a Hungarian mansion unfold simultaneously, the audience fractures, each group arriving at the ending with different knowledge. David Boje developed Tamaraland as organizational theory in his 1995 Academy of Management Journal study of The Walt Disney Company — organizations, like the play, are structurally polyphonic, with no master narrator who has walked all the rooms.
Applied to the AI industry, Tamaraland names a specific structural condition: six rooms operate simultaneously, each telling the AI story in a different register, with no single actor accountable for what the full set of rooms produces. The diagram below shows the six rooms and their connections. You can enter from any room. What you know depends entirely on which rooms you walked through.
Every room is visible from every other room — but you can only enter one at a time, and you carry your prior rooms with you. No single actor holds all six simultaneously.
An Antenarrative Critique of TPC
Featured Research & Publications
Four works that mark key moments in antenarrative scholarship: the most recent application of the full seven-B instrument; a bibliometric mapping of the field's 56-year history; the first multi-B application to a crisis case; and the foundational use of antenarrative as polyphonic infrastructure in strategy research.
📖 Boje (2026) — AI Trust Paradox
Tamaraland Publishing · Free download · All Seven Bs
The most comprehensive application of the seven-B framework: thirteen AI corporate leaders (Zuckerberg, Amodei, Altman, Nadella, Musk, and eight more) analyzed simultaneously through all seven B-processes, True Storytelling principles (Larsen, Boje & Bruun), SEAM hidden-cost analysis, and Tamaraland's six simultaneous rooms. Reveals the structural AI Trust Paradox: maximum storytelling visibility, minimum answerability.
Download free at storying.site →📊 Fatemi et al. (forthcoming) — The Outward Turn in Strategic Storytelling
International Journal of Organizational Analysis · MS ID: IJOA-07-2026-7610 · Bibliometric mapping
A bibliometric analysis of 221 documents and 622 authors across the strategic storytelling and antenarrative field from 1968 to 2024. Identifies four thematic clusters and an "outward turn" from inward sensemaking toward external legitimacy and digital contestation. Boje (1991) ranks among the 11 most locally cited foundational works. Identifies the gap — no integrative cross-cluster framework — that the full Seven-B instrument is positioned to fill.
See publications archive →🔬 Massoud, El-Said & Boje (2019) — Five Bs Applied to BP Prudhoe Bay
International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 27(5) · Multi-B crisis analysis
The first major peer-reviewed study to deploy five B-processes simultaneously as a combinatorial analytical instrument on a single organizational crisis. Demonstrates that the BP Prudhoe Bay environmental disaster requires Before, Beneath, Bets, Between, and Becoming operating in concert — no single-concept antenarrative reading could have named the structural complexity the five Bs together reveal. Proof-of-concept for the Bs as a precision instrument rather than a single concept.
See publications archive →📋 Fenton & Langley (2011) — Antenarrative as Polyphonic Infrastructure
Organization Studies, 32(9) · Strategy-as-practice · Antenarrative as concept
The most widely cited application of antenarrative in strategy research — and the source of the phrase "polyphonic infrastructure" used to describe antenarrative's role in strategy-as-practice. Fenton & Langley use antenarrative in the foundational sense (before BME, before strategy solidifies into official narrative) without engaging the Bs as a system. This makes it the canonical instance of antenarrative-as-concept (Level 1), and the baseline against which the seven-B instrument's added analytical precision can be measured.
See publications archive →Engage with Antenarrative Research & Practice
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About David Michael Boje
Dr. David Michael Boje is Professor Emeritus of Organizational Theory at New Mexico State University (h-index 60), Visiting Professor at Fisk University, and originator of antenarrative theory, Tamaraland, and quantum storytelling frameworks. He coined the term "antenarrative" in 2001 after his foundational 1991 article in Administrative Science Quarterly and his 1995 AMJ study of The Walt Disney Company.
His most recent work, AI Trust Paradox (Tamaraland Publishing, 2026), co-authored with Vivara (Claude, an AI built by Anthropic), applies the full antenarrative instrument — Seven B-processes, True Storytelling principles (with Larsen & Bruun), SEAM hidden-cost analysis (with Savall & Zardet), Bakhtinian architectonics, and Tamaraland — to thirteen cases of AI corporate leadership and national AI strategy.
He jogs the horse trail beside Lake Caballo in Sierra County, New Mexico most mornings, using those jogs as a phenomenological method — what he calls jog downloads — that feeds directly into his writing.
Recognition: Lifetime Achievement Award for International Organizational Development; ranked among top scholars globally in social sciences; h-index 60.