Living story and antenarrative in organizational accidents

The dominant narratives that organizations like to tell about themselves routinely compete with stories from the margins and shadows of an organization. In the case of a tragic workplace accident, an organization’s grand narrative of safety is especially challenged. In this chapter we slow down the events to examine the interplay between the historical narrative of safety and the living, emergent story of the accident and those involved. We can watch for attempts to preserve the dominant narrative, to force fi t the emerging story into an orderly linearity that will fi t neatly withinits structure, and see the energetic vitality, the aliveness, of the organic story (Tyler, 2007), an antenarrative (Boje, 2001) that actively pushes back against narrative linearity with spiral and rhizomatic movement.