Dreams of time,times of dreams: Stories of creation from roleplaying game sessions

“Space – The Final Frontier” Star Trek

Roleplaying games (RPGs) are an activity in which a group of people (called the players) creates and roleplays characters in a world devised by one other participant, called the Game Master, who describes the results of their actions as well as the actions themselves of everything and everybody else in this created world. The malleability of this world, coupled with the RPGs’ social aspect, parallels the socially constructed reality which usually surrounds us. In this paper I collect a series of impressions from a few roleplaying sessions during which different groups of players attempted to construct new realities. In this sense, I examine the shared creation of reality out of empty space, exploring the potential inherent in roleplaying as a metaphor for organizing. I look for non-standard view-points on organizing which emerge from these sessions, and examine the process itself, not trying to pinpoint any regularities, but rather seeking the unusual and the sublime.

In the beginning, there was Wolf

And then there was Pig

And Wolf was a natural enemy of Pig

And it was good

And so our story begins

Mucky Pup “Little Pigs”     

The Anthropology of Empty Spaces

We would like to tell an anthropologic story about how we see reality and how we feel about it, with no intention to generalize our reflections. Our version of anthropology is intentionally self-reflexive and self-reflective. This text is a narrative study of the feelings of anthropologists out in the field. The anthropologic frame of mind is a certain openness of the mind of the researcher/observer of social reality (Czarniawska-Joerges 1992). On the one hand, it means the openness to new realities and meanings, and on the other, a constant need to problematize, a refusal to take anything for granted, to treat things as obvious and familiar. The researcher makes use of her or his curiosity, the ability to be surprised by what she or he observes, even if it is just the everyday world. Our explorations concern an experience of space. It aims at investigating the space not belonging to anyone. While anthropologically moving around different organizations, we suddenly realized that we were part of stories of the space we were moving in. Areas of poetic emptiness can be experienced, often in the physical sense, on the boundaries and inside of organizations.     

The Speed of Experience: The Co‐narrative Method in Experience Economy Education

This paper proposes a management learning technique called the co‐narrative method. This approach is seen as a useful means of capturing the subtler nuances of experience economy interactions, as well as learning ethics and corporate social responsibility, by nurturing empathy and compassion. A method is presented based on the example of the idea of slow as fast side of organizational and festival experiences, which is explored through autoethnographic studies of participation in experience economy events. It builds upon insights into improving management education through the use of the humanistic approach. The so‐called co‐narrative method is based on a syzygic mode uniting the two oppositions (while preserving their inherent contradictions). It encourages its users to exercise understanding of the experience of the Other, while teaching about concrete cases and events.