Summary
An antenarrative is a story before it has become one: the fragments, hunches and half-formed speculations in circulation before anyone settles on a beginning, middle and end. The organisational storytelling scholar David Boje coined the word in 2001. ‘Ante’ carries two senses, before and bet. These fragments come before narrative, and each is a wager on what the eventual narrative will be. Boje calls them “the bets, hunches, whispers, and emerging possibilities circulating in organizations”.
His point is about timing. A finished narrative looks back. Boje wants attention on “the living story material that traditional narrative analysis, arriving after the fact, always misses”.
Rationale
Boje looks before the story in time; we look beneath it. Part 1 found ‘deep narrative’ “slightly misleading” because what it points to is “more like an orientation than a story”. Antenarratives are still stories.