Introduction

Storytelling is important in organisations. For Hannah Arendt, storytelling captures the process by which we reconfigure our inner thoughts, emotions and opinions for public appearance. Through storytelling, we express who we are as opposed to what we are (Arendt, 1998). At a deeper level, storytelling confirms that we are agents who matter in the communities in which we work. This agency is enacted simply when we reconfigure a series of events into a story and insert ourselves into history (Young-Bruehl, 1977). Through this process, we become grounded in a continued history. Second, we weave together a durable reality from an otherwise multiple, ambiguous and continuously changing and chaotic world. Furthermore, through sharing stories it becomes possible to create a common horizon from multiple worldviews.

In academia, storytelling is important for professional identities, the continuation of academic values and virtues as well as for creating academic communities (Jackson, 2013). We create stories through, for example, reading, writing and thinking, and through engaging in dialogue and communication. Through storytelling we inscribe ourselves in the history of a particular research field, and participate in renegotiating and changing its traditions so that it can meet the challenges of the present. The university is in this way an important space of appearance where we can legitimately share our stories – including stories of knowledge. Classes, seminars, conferences, publications and all the informal meetings and channels established among academics are collective spaces where we have different possibilities of participating and sharing our stories. Our professional identities rely on the affordances that the university offers. For example, the simple fact of having an institutional affiliation and having access to resources are important conditions for the stories we can create. For Arendt and for Walter Benjamin (1999), stories belong to and move among the people, in this case researchers, teachers, students and administrative staff.

But there is a dark side of storytelling, an appropriation of the dearest of human possessions for purposes that may sometimes even go against its very same role, function and existence. Such dark storytelling is clearly expressed in the corporate academic capitalism of today and appears in different variations associated with strategic storytelling.