Co-creating stories: collaborative experiments in storytelling

This article reports on an experiment in collaborative storytelling inspired by the Japanese art of ‘renga’. A renga consists of several stanzas, each composed by a different poet, each seeking to find his/her own voice within a text that is jointly created and jointly owned. The chemist Djerassi has argued that by co-creating a prose version of the renga, a community of practitioners can explore dilemmas and views that would be unacceptable otherwise. He refers to this genre as ‘science-in-fiction’—one in which fiction offers licence to address potentially embarrassing, dangerous or taboo topics. Following Djerassi’s approach, the authors coordinated two rengas composed by groups of scholars interested in using stories to research social reality. The article analyses these two rengas, linking them to the genre of fictionalized ethnography pioneered in organizational studies by Watson and Czarniawska. It also discusses the pedagogic potential of such stories as vehicles of management learning.