Living in a Box, or a Genie in a Bottle?

Corporate storytelling can be an instrument for evidence-based management. This requires that the prevailing stories are built upon verifiable facts. Archival records are perhaps the best source for identifying these. A sound culture for storytelling should be built upon good archives actively used to verify and develop narratives about the company. As an example this article presents a short analysis of multimodal texts from the Norwegian oil company Statoil based on common theories of texts and narratives. We found that archival records from Statoil¡¯s first years of activity give evidence that the company has been living up to its value statements. The company¡¯s current values; open, courageous, hands-on & caring, thus seem to be well founded in the corporate history. The value statements therefore may be regarded as suitable guiding concepts for robust corporate storytelling.