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The field of interorganizational studies is not currently known for applying qualitative methodologies with the same enthusiasm as statistically‐based survey techniques. A review of recent developments in qualitative methodologies reveals several techniques which can be fruitfully applied to the study of interorganizational (IO) networks. This paper extends the meaning‐based social definitionist perspective to the study of IO networks, by drawing upon the relevant theoretical aspects of social phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology. The social definitionist perspective is concerned with theories and methodologies relevant to the social definition and construction of meaning in multiple actor settings. Such a meaning‐based perspective would facilitate the application of qualitative methodologies to IO networks, in parallel with similar developments in organizational behavior. The paper identifies four specific types of qualitative analyses for IO studies: phenomenological typification, domain analysis, componential analysis, and conversational analysis.

This intervention study outlines the continuing journey of a university towards its sustainability potentiality. We introduce the importance of sustainable development and link it to our intervention study of potentiality for sustainability from a Heideggerian phenomenological perspective. Through a case study of sustainability at New Mexico State University, we provide an insight into the development of a new dimension of university sustainability interface. This interface exists in terms of a dialogic of sustainability, as it relates to the balancing of competing needs, such as efficiency, heart, and brand identity. An important aspect of this interface is intervention, highlighting new possibilities for the top administrators regarding the university's goals and environmentalities. A qualitative and interpretive approach using ontological storytelling inquiry is employed. Data for the study were collected through in-depth interviews with university members from all hierarchical levels. This article raises interesting ontological issues for sustainability researchers, and has implications for strategy as practice.

This paper aims to offer an analysis of the British Petroleum (BP) Prudhoe Bay environmental disaster. The primary purpose is to elucidate the fivefold of antenarrative in sensemaking environmental accidents. The analytic framework enables organization to envision futures where they want to be, and work to get there as more socially responsible companies.

The authors conducted an intertextual analysis of texts by ascribing voice and affiliation to each antenarrative. The multiple voices and antenarratives quoted within the texts were compared and coded and theme analysis was conducted over time to understand dynamics and see if organizational learning was occurring.

The antenarrative method generated several findings: BP is faulty beneath in how they conceive of safety, lacking foresight. BP executives leave out elements of safety, a fore having that does not include what needs to be prepared for. BP foretells that it is socially responsible, yet the reality of events seems contradictory. Within fore structure, some of BP’s leaders deny or ignore claims of critics through intertextual connections of events. By fore caring, BP mediates the problem in response to the disaster and critics. Their sensemaking in this case is more retrospective and reactive than prospective.

Organizations can avoid environmental disasters and negative backlash by adopting practices that provide more transparent discourse and greater accountability. The fivefold of antenarrative serves as a storytelling framework to promote care by using trial and error problem solving on future bets.

To date, few intertextual analyses have been performed to study organizations. By applying a fivefold antenarrative storytelling framework, which reflects new advances in storytelling theory, the authors offer an original perspective on environmental accident sensemaking.

Performance programs, games, rituals and story telling are looked at as part of the performance of organization. Some leaders in these methods are gifted performers, and they are able to pass on the plots of these themes to succeeding generations of employees.

Provides a postmodern view of consultants′ experiences with diversity. Calls into question the relationship between what becomes a “diversity category” and the other differences that remain background. Looks at the political and economic system that sustains the categories of diversity in public housing consulting. Advocates a postmodern approach which includes the authors′ voices and the voices of the residents in the writing of organizational change.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new model for depicting organizational processes: the episodic spiral model (ESM).

On the basis of a strong process view as the orienting paradigm, the authors demonstrate the need for the ESM by discussing the shortcomings of two specific spiral types in the organizational literature – the knowledge creation spiral and the efficacy spiral.

A review of each spiral type through the lens of nonlinear assumptions reveals the treatment to date of organizational spirals as uni-directional and insufficient for understanding organizations. The authors propose that managers must undertake a paradigm shift in order to gain a greater awareness of both the environment in which they operate, as well as their process actions. To facilitate this shift, the ESM depicts choice points, chosen and rejected trajectories, and upward and downward environmental drafts, as well as a multi-dimensional environment, as a way of re-conceptualizing approaches to space, time, and change in organization studies.

The authors propose that the model provides a way for scholars to enhance the study of organizations by understanding that organizations exist in a more dynamic environment than previously studied; recognizing that the organization has a wider range of choices available, and acknowledging the long-lasting ramifications of both choices made and choices discarded; and obtaining a more comprehensive look at the way the organization moves through space and time at any given moment. Taken together, the authors hope that these contributions allow organizational scholars a new approach to theorizing, exploring, and writing about the organizations they study.

This paper seeks to address the question: what happened to postmodern?

Three trends are reviewed: postmodern fragmentation, late modern appropriations of postmodern moves; and emergent awareness of the dark‐side of postmodern.

On the way to postmodern theory the revolution to reform modern capitalism fragmented into rhetoric‐strands, while practice became ineffective.

The paper concludes with possibilities for participatory research in ways that enact more postmodern forms of capitalist praxis.

It is suggested that qualitative studies of postmodern praxis can be conducted; such as postmodern organizations that enact the dark‐side of biotechnology; consumer organizations, such as Blackspot and No Sweat that contract to non‐sweatshop factories; and autoethnographic examples of how building a Harley‐Davidson chopper is post‐production and post‐consumption.

The paper shows that in the fragmentation of moderns and postmoderns, there is a relentless appropriation of postmodern moves by late modernism. This is one contributing factor to the “dark side of postmodern.” Other contributing factors are naive brands of postmodern (e.g. chaos theory, complexity, new age spirituality) which, sometimes only see the positive potentialities, and blind one to the dark side. What is original is the call for a combination of critical theory and postmodern theory (critical postmodern) that looks at the relation between various ideas of modern and postmodern and how they can be studied in their dialogicality.

The purpose of this article is to explore the similarities and differences in the socio‐economic approach to management (SEAM) method and postmodern approaches to theatre. Neither metaphorical nor managerialist, SEAM's perspective allows that the organization is theatre. Introduces the terms “metascript” and “metatheatre” to describe how SEAM's approach accomodates the multiple perspectives and simultaneous multiple stages populated by the “spect‐actors” (Boal, A., Theatre of the Oppressed, translated by Charles A. and Maria‐Odillia Leal McBride, Theatre Communications Group, New York, NY, 1979, originally published in Spanish as Teatro de Oprimido, Ediciones de la Flor, Buenos Aires, 1974) of the Tamara‐esque postmodern organization theatre.

A participant‐observation study of consulting in a large office supply firm of how consultants and organisational stakeholders perform stories to make sense of events and to enact change during their conversations is presented. A theory of organisation as a collective storytelling system in which precedent and future‐directed stories are shared, revised and interpreted to account for and to affect unfolding organisational changes is extended. It is illustrated how very terse stories, told in everyday conversations, require the listener silently to fill in major portions of the story line and story implications. Storytelling and story interpretation is a critical part of the consulting work done in complex organisations.

This article introduces the contributions made by a leading management scholar (Lou Pondy) and discusses ways he responded as a mentor to the questionings of his many students.