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Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen

I am a storyteller from Vendsyssel in Denmark. Vendsyssel is the island separated by the Limfjord from the rest of Jutland. It is the Northern most part of Denmark and has some of the most beautiful places in Denmark, for example Skagen, Lønstrup and Klitmøller. Vendsyssel has its own rough history where people lived from the land or the sea. My mother comes from Brønderslev and people on her side of the family have a history of farming. The relationship to the land was one of hard work. Today almost all of the small farms have been sold and incorporated into industrial farming where the relationship between land, animals and people is abstract and driven by profit, capital and exploitation. Gaia storytelling is for me a rediscovery of the ancient wisdom of place.

I was born in 1969, 3 years before the Club of Rome published its report “The Limits to Growth” in which they states that the world would run out of resources within approximately 100 years. Since then the climate problems have just increased. The World Wildlife Foundation stated recently that in the last 40 years, 36% of life in oceans has disappeared and 90% of all commercial fish are subject to overfishing. This catastrophe has happened in the very short period that I have been living on this earth. We need to change and we need change fast. Gaia storytelling our humble contribution that we hope can help people and organisations believe and make the change.

I believe that the concrete ways in which we can rework our relations between Gaia, places and people are our practical experiences, which are rooted in the places we were born, i.e. traditions, stories and practices. such experiences have had a hard time in the history of management. My fields, philosophy of management and organisational ethics, are tools for rediscovering something we have lost. It is like the so-called enlightenment period has cast a shadow of what really matters: land, water, air, hills, fields, forests, lakes, meadows, flowers, plants and life in all its variations. I am employed in at Malmö University where I am responsible for a new leadership education program that focuses on societal challenges. I work with developing a terrestrial ethics in which story making is central. Story making is inspired from combining the old Greek terms “praxis” (action) and “poiesis” (making). Story making is thus a political as well as creative process.

Publications on storytelling and sustainability (selected)

https://vbn.aau.dk/da/persons/106284

  • Jørgensen, K. M. (2020). Storytelling, space and power: An Arendtian account of subjectivity in organizations. Organization, available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1350508420928522

  • Jørgensen, K. M. and Boje, D. M. (Forthcoming). Storytelling sustainability in problem-based learning. Forthcoming In Turcan, R. V. and Reilly, J. P. (Eds), Populism in Higher Education Curriculum Development — Problem-based Learning as a Mitigating Response. Palgrave MacMillan.

  • Boje, D. M. and Jørgensen, K. M. (Forthcoming). A storytelling science approach making the eco-business modelling turn. Forthcoming in the Journal of Business Models.

  • Jørgensen, K. M. (2018). Spaces of Performance in Higher Education: A Storytelling Approach. Accepted for publication in The Learning Organization, vol. 25, no. 6, 410-421.

  • Jørgensen, K. M. (2017). Vibrant Power, Vibrant Subjectivities – A Storytelling Approach to the Study of Power in Education. Educacao Unisinos, 21(1), 21-30.

  • Jørgensen, K. M. & C. Largarcha-Martinez (Eds.) (2014). Critical Narrative Inquiry –Storytelling, Sustainability and Power. Nova Science Publishers.

  • Jorgensen, K., Strand, A. Boje, D. (2013). Towards a postcolonial storytelling theory of management and organization, Journal of Management Philosophy, 12(1) pp. 43-66.

  • Jørgensen, K. M. & D. M. Boje (2010). Resituating narrative and story in business ethics, Business Ethics - A European Review, 19(3), pp. 251-262.

Books in pipeline

Jørgensen, K.M. (2021). The Ethics of Sustainability in Management: Storymaking in Organizations. London: Routledge.

Jørgensen, K. M. (2021). Business Storytelling and Sustainability. New York: World Scientific Publishing. A volume in the book series Business Storytelling, edited by David M. Boje.

Favourite books

  • Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition.

  • Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. The Philosophy of the Act.

  • Karen Barad. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning and Matter

  • Walter Benjamin. Illuminations.

  • Judith Butler. Notes towards a performative theory of assembly.

  • Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prision

  • Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea.

  • Primo Levy. The Drowned and the Saved.

  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A Hundred Years of Solitude

  • Toni Morrison. Beloved.