Brewing the Perfect Story: Rearticulating the Rhetoric in Sri Lankan Tea Tale

This paper analyses Sri Lankan tea industry in context to organizational storytelling. It focuses on the organizational narrative, conveyed through advertisements, annual reports and product packaging. While this story is easily accessible to society, there exists another set of ‘unheard’ stories arising from the workers of estates who supply tea to the island’s tea auction. These marginalized voices hoard vital stories necessary for the creation of a comprehensive industrial narration to society. The study encompassed a qualitative research methodology incorporating the method of ‘story- deconstruction’, which enabled the creation of a ‘restory’. Devoid of any form of dualities and hierarchies, the ‘restory’ avoided the centering on the rather ‘optimistic’ narration of Titanarum1 or the ‘pessimistic’ story as put forth by the tea pickers. Aforesaid decentering facilitated the re-articulation of marginalized female worker story as a part of a collective narration instead of a story told in isolation.