Storying organizational identity and strategy: an antenarrative analysis

The different temporal focus of strategy and of organizational identity (OI) raises questions about how the temporal discrepancies between the two can be overcome. Antenarratives are useful for making sense of complexity in organization studies, making them particularly suitable for understanding temporality in organizational becoming. We present, as our main theoretical contribution, four mutually constitutive temporal discursive strategies that are based on antenarrative and deal with coherence and incoherence between strategy and OI over time. We label these practices as reiterating the past, projecting the past, reinforcing the past, and adapting to the future. Our study tracks the storying over a period of 20 years to explore how a family-owned firm searched for novel solutions in their past and future in a manner that enabled strategy and OI to flow together. We show how the firm's incremental change emerged when they engaged 'before' and 'beneath' antenarratives. However, 'between' antenarratives made more radical change plausible.