California State University San Marcos Clockwatchers Film Discussion Paper

Paris is Burning, Black Panthers Vanguard of the Revolution

Delores, The Circle,Clock-watchers, Gulabi Gang, Hidden Figures

These angles are 1) Action, Motivation and Moral outcome; 2) Sequence and Locale, 3) Character and Identity; 4) Interest and Memory; 5) Aesthetics/Beauty of Narratives in the Workplace; and 6) Complexity and Control.

So, this means, in each film, you must draw from BOTH books. (i.e., for the 2 films, you must combine both texts as sources for concepts you use for EACH film analysis.

Here is an example:

Film 1: Clockwatchers:  Analysis will use:

Browning & Morris: Chapter 5: Character and Identity

AND

Frandsen et al, Chapter 1, Kuhn:  the notion of Female Temps as “Distinctive Bodies in the Agencement”.

Film 2:  Delores: Analysis will use:

Browning and Morris: Chapter 4 Sequence and Locale

AND

2, Frandsen et al Chapter 3 (author Johansen: the concepts in the section on “Organizational Identity in Flux”

In the above examples, after having selected and introduced the particular type of narrative angle I found running through a film, and having given evidence by using concepts to describe key moments in specific examples from the films,

So next, I would take the next step–This means moving from description  and “matching” to deeper analysis.

The analysis should try to draw some connections between the two films and commonalities between them thematically, established through a “meta-analysis” (ideas about ideas).

For example, I could link “character and identity” at the individual level (book 1) with the notion of “organizational identity in flux” at the organizational level (book 2). I could do this by showing a common thread in the conflicts, victories and losses experienced in the two above films. One is about a particular woman who helped establish the United Farm Workers, and the shifting identity of that organization intertwined with her individual own life story.  The other depicts the character and identity of one of the temps revealed over time as “a group” of friends is formed and falls apart.  What do these films have in common?

I might link them, for example, through comments made in the films about the distinctive “bodies” of female temps and of farm workers. I could show the importance of “sequence and locale” in both films and show how those bodies in those spaces/times reflect the importance and function of particular narratives (including counter narratives) in their respective organizations.

You should introduce your topics, then complete each film analysis using the focal concepts.  Then, offer meta-analysis in which you draw some insights and conclusions across the films as a pair and what has been gained by using the conceptual lenses you selected to demonstrate your ability to locate and analyze organizational narratives using multiple concepts  (make sure to note what is the larger value of your analysis, what does reflect about what you have learned and understood?).

HEADERS:

Please use headers in your paper to structure your analysis.  Check for page-long paragraphs and run-on sentences, and make sure you know how to do in-text citations correctly in APA style.  I have seen a lot of these, despite pointing them out repeatedly and suggesting/requesting corrections.  Spell check your work.  Please use proper citation including in text-citations  (part of APA style).

LENGTH:

Over -length by a paragraph or a full-page is ok, if the quality of the writing does not indicate edits could be made for repetition, generality, or other elements of loose/draft quality composition. It should not be abusively over-long.  No need to summarize the full plot of the films, assume the reader is familiar with the stories.  Focus on demonstrating your command of course concepts and the significance of those concepts.  This is a 6-8 page paper, with reference page not counted in the 8 pages.

Example of a sentence shortened with good editing. Meaning, clarity, key detail  is preserved; needless repetition is omitted:

:“While I thought that I had lost my hat, it turned out that the hat that I thought I lost was underneath a piece of furniture, a bench, where I found it.”(word count 32)

(revised):

“I thought I lost my hat, but I found it beneath a bench”(word count 12)

Stories of Life
in the
Workplace
An Open Architecture for
Organizational Narratology
Larry Browning and G. H. Morris
STORIES OF LIFE IN THE WORKPLACE
Addressing both renowned theories and standard applications, Stories of Life in the
Workplace explains how stories affect human practices and organizational life. Authors
Larry Browning and G. H. Morris explore how we experience, interpret, and personalize narrative stories in our everyday lives, and how these communicative acts
impact our social aims and interactions. In pushing the boundaries of how we perceive narrative and organization, the authors include stories that are broadly
applicable across all concepts and experiences.
With a perception of narrative and its organizational application, chapters focus
on areas such as pedagogy, therapy, project management, strategic planning, public
communication, and organizational culture. Readers will learn to:
 differentiate and gain an in-depth understanding of perspectives from varying
narrators;
 recognize how stories are constructed and used in organizations, and modify the
stories they tell;
 view stories as a means to promote an open exchange of creativity.
By integrating a range of theories and practices, Browning and Morris write for an
audience of narrative novices and scholars alike.
With a distinctive approach and original insight, Stories of Life in the Workplace
shows how individuality, developing culture, and the psychology of the self are
constructed with language—and how the acceptance of one’s self is accomplished
by reaffirming and rearranging one’s story.
Larry Browning is a Professor at the College of Communication, University of
Texas at Austin and adjunct Professor of Management, Bodø Graduate School
of Business at the University of Nordland, Norway. His studies include structures in
organizations as evidenced by lists and stories, information-communication technology and narratives, cooperation and competition in organizations, and grounded
theory as a research strategy.
G. H. Morris is a Professor at California State University San Marcos. He is a
conversation analyst and communication theorist interested in how people align
with each other in everyday talk, organizational discourse, and psychotherapy.
Praise for Stories of Life in the Workplace
“Browning and Morris have crafted a timely and captivating book that
integrates narrative theory with naturalistic organizational studies. Peppered
with rich and evocative stories, the authors embrace multiple perspectives
for exploring the key features, premises, and functions of workplace narratives. The book makes its mark in situating communication and rhetorical
processes as pivotal to the ways we experience and interpret organizational
stories.”
—Linda L. Putnam, Professor and Chair,
Department of Communication, University of California,
Santa Barbara
“In a penetrating and systematic analysis of the uses of narrative, Browning
and Morris make clear that not only is a life without stories not worth living,
but that scholars can understand the critical components of effective narrative
in a way that allows us to appreciate, study, and teach about effective storytelling.
This book is an important contribution to our understanding of narrative in
organizational life.”
—Sim Sitkin, Professor of Management, Faculty Director,
Center on Leadership and Ethics, Duke University:
The Fuqua School of Business
“Storytelling replaced corporate culture as the fashionable management tool,
and is by many considered the main mode of communication in contemporary societies, as it has been in pre-modern ones. There are a great
many books about storytelling but this book is unique, as it offers insights to
both critics and apologists of this phenomenon. Management practitioners
will learn how to construct such stories well, their subordinates will learn
how to evaluate the stories coming to them, and management researchers will
be helped to understand which stories work, and why.”
—Barbara Czarniawska, Professor of Management Studies,
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
“For the past 30 years, organizational scholars have shown that storytelling
and narrativity constitute essential features of organizational life. In their
wonderful book, Larry Browning and G. H. Morris go one step further by
helping us develop a deeper appreciation of the narratives that pervade organizations. Analyzing multiple stories they recorded over the years, they
encourage us to adopt an eclectic approach to narrativity, borrowing from the
work of key scholars like Algirdas Julien Greimas, Paul Ricœur, and William
Labov. It is a must-read for anyone interested in learning how people
organize their world by narrating it.”
—François Cooren, Director, Department of
Communication, University of Montreal, Canada
Routledge Communication Series
Jennings Bryant/Dolf Zillmann, Series Editors
Selected titles in Organizational Communication (Linda L. Putnam,
advisory editor) include:
Canary/McPhee: Communication and Organizational Knowledge:
Contemporary Issues for Theory and Practice
Putnam/Nicotera: Building Theories of Organization: The Constitutive Role of
Communication
Taylor/van Every: The Situational Organization: Case Studies in the Pragmatics
of Communication Research
Lutgen-Sandvik/Sypher: Destructive Organizational Communication: Processes,
Consequences, and Constructive Ways of Organizing
For additional information on these and other Routledge titles, visit
www.routledge.com
STORIES OF LIFE IN THE
WORKPLACE
An Open Architecture for
Organizational Narratology
Larry Browning and G. H. Morris
First published 2012
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2012 Taylor & Francis
The right of Larry Browning and G. H. Morris to be identified as authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Browning, Larry D.
Stories of life in the workplace : an open architecture for organizational
narratology / Larry Browning, G.H. Morris.
p. cm.
1. Discourse analysis, Narrative. 2. Storytelling–Social aspects. 3. Narration
(Rhetoric)–Social aspects. I. Morris, G. H. II. Title.
P302.7.B76 2012
4010 .41–dc23
2011035935
ISBN13 978-0-8058-5890-7 (hbk)
ISBN13 978-0-415-53999-9 (pbk)
ISBN13 978-0-203-14763-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
CONTENTS
Preface
ix
1
Narrative Appreciation
1
2
An Open Architecture for Organizational Narratology
19
3
Action, Motivation, and Moral Outcome
35
4
Sequence and Locale
57
5
Character and Identity
77
6
Interest and Memory
97
7
The Beauty of Narratives in the Workplace
115
8
Complexity and Control
133
9
Representing Narrative Realities
153
Notes
References
Subject Index
Author Index
169
171
183
191
PREFACE
Stories of Life in the Workplace:
An Open Architecture for Organizational
Narratology
It is irresistible to begin this book on what we call organizational narratology with a
story: the artist, Robert Irwin, was invited in 1980 to create an art installation in a
building that had housed his studio many years before. Believing we take our
environment for granted as truth and being quite a trickster, he found a way, by
altering just a single element of a scene, to call attention to how we perceive,
recognize, and navigate through space. According to his biographer:
He cleaned out the large rectangular room, adjusted the skylights, painted the
walls an even white, and then knocked out the wall facing the street, replacing it
with a sheer, semi-transparent white [fabric] scrim. The room seemed to
change its aspect with the passing day: people came and sat on the opposite
curb, watching, sometimes for hours at a time. The piece was up for two
weeks in one of the more derelict beachfront neighborhoods of Los Angeles:
no one so much as laid a hand on it.
(Weschler 1982, cover notes)
In essence, Irwin caused passersby to do a double take and perhaps be perplexed,
when they realized that a solid wall was not really solid at all, but was actually fragile,
permeable, transparent, and almost not there. Because the scrim was backlit by the
skylights, people who saw it during the day could literally see through the wall at a
constantly changing interior. Years later, the same artist designed the equally captivating
central garden at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California.
When we learn of a story like that, it fills us with something like the curiosity
Irwin’s audience found and also with wonder. We want to know more about how
he did it, and why. What would it have been like to stumble upon this scene, just like
the passersby, with no warning it was an art installation? What was he trying to
x Preface
teach his audience? Would it have worked as well elsewhere than Venice, California in
1980? What does his art installation say about him and the arc of his artistic career?
Why was it memorable? Was it beautiful? How would a different narrator than
biographer Weschler have told it? Was he true to what really happened, and is our
version faithful to his?
The book you are about to read encourages you to ask those same questions, and
many more, about the stories you see, hear, and tell in organizations. The hoped-for
result is that you will obtain a deeper appreciation of the narratives that are everywhere around you and that you will be better able to recognize and perhaps modify the
stories you tell, especially the stories you tell about your own organizational lives.
Robert Irwin is supposed to have referred to his design for the Getty’s central
garden as “a sculpture in the form of a garden aspiring to be art.” Although our book is
no work of art and we are not so notable as Robert Irwin, it might be useful to see
our project as similar to his. We are “sculpting” the existing body of work on narratology into a “garden” that offers a number of viewpoints on narrative scholarship, an
area to which we aspire to contribute. We refer to the viewpoints as “angles,” and
we selected them because they afford a good chance for readers to better appreciate
narratives. We are marking off a territory, giving it the name “organizational
narratology,” and calling readers’ attention to what is within it. What is there is
diverse and remarkable.
We imagine that most people share our love of stories and that people working
in many academic disciplines will benefit from a deeper appreciation of what narratologists have said about how stories are constructed and used in organizations.
Storytelling is wonderful entertainment, but that is not all; stories can teach moral
lessons, but there is much more they can do. With Ricœur, we believe narratives
are ways of knowing and achieving personal meaning. Following Polster, we believe
humans who know how to locate themselves as characters in a story and how to rework
the story are at an advantage. We subscribe to Bruner’s conception that we experience
and know most things through narrative, and that our actual cognitions apprehend
possible combinations of worlds. We agree with writers on narrative research
methods that stories have the advantage of the focus on experience. When we do
research on narratives, we claim we are reflecting some person’s life experience.
We are drawn to the believability of narrative because we readily cast our own
experiences in terms of narrative. We judge a story more favorably and believe it
more when it reflects our own experience.
In this book, we argue strenuously for an “open architecture” for organizational
narratology. We pass through a number of the different camps in which narratologists
place themselves, but we refrain from throwing in our lot with any of them.
We think there is plenty of room in this territory for authors to define narratives
differently, draw distinctions among narratives, and dispute how they work.
Nevertheless, readers will find some strong commitments in our views.
To rehearse just a few of the issues we will touch upon: we advocate a conception of narrative broad enough to spark lively exchange and open enough to
Preface xi
promote creativity. We insist that stories of all kinds deserve to be listened to.
Sometimes the best stories are incomplete, because the incompleteness is the hook
that draws the listener in. We view stories as communicative acts, which means that
they are told and can be co-told by people in social interaction, for identifiable
purposes, in various ways, with various results. We understand stories to be rhetorical
because they cannot help being seductive. We think stories are devices people are
drawn into and which make up their understandings of reality. For organizational
actors’ sensemaking purposes, the process of connecting the sequence of events into
a plot intersection, including several possible and interacting influences, and capturing
the meanings, especially for things that have already happened, is vital. But, because
everyone can have stories, it is wrong to claim privilege about stories—that mine
counts more than yours.
Also in keeping with the theme of open architecture, not only do we accept a
broad spectrum of what counts as a narrative in this book, we are equally as open
about what counts as organizational. In one story, we relate the autobiographical tale
of a young woman with a summer job at a day camp who comes to work and
without warning is tossed the responsibility for keeping an entire group of grade
school age children entertained for an entire day. She not only makes it through the
day, she realizes that she has managing talent that she did not know she had. In all
the stories in this book, there is a structure lurking in the background or one
operating directly in the person’s existence. We push out the boundaries of what
counts as organizational such that the stories are broadly applicable across experience.
Thus, open architecture refers to both what counts as organization and what counts
as a narrative.
One of the effects of our appreciation of narratives and our eclectic, open architecture for understanding them is to lament the paucity of stories in the literature in
proportion to their worldly importance. We incorporate dozens of stories we
encountered during the time we were writing this book and we are constantly
in search of more. We hope readers are encouraged to accumulate and revere
corresponding stories of their own.
And then there is the story of how this book came into being and all the people
who helped. In May, 2009, we took a road trip from San Diego, California to
Austin, Texas, and then on to Crestone, Colorado. Larry’s plans and drafts of the book
were revised as we drove along, through Palm Springs, Globe, Geronimo, Lordsburg,
Las Cruces, El Paso, Ft. Stockton, Junction, San Antonio, and many more places on
the way to the mountains. Our conversations were digitally recorded, reviewed, and
many were transcribed. They became the grist for three summers of work in Colorado
and a stint in San Diego, during which the book took its current state. One author told
the other, or co-told to each other, on that trip, many of the stories in these pages.
Many people helped us commence and complete this project. We are most
indebted to Larry’s wife, Victoria, and Bud’s wife, Pat, who were so generous in
letting us have the time in Colorado and San Diego to think and write. Bud, in
particular, has always dreamed of working in a remote writer’s cabin, so theirs is a
xii Preface
fabulous gift. Both also helped us to get the manuscript in shape. Linda Putnam
made important suggestions after reading our proposal and was an encouraging
voice for us with the publisher. George Cheney and two anonymous reviewers
gave us careful and eye-opening comments on drafts of the manuscript. Ellen
Morris alerted us to some pertinent literature on memory we had overlooked, and
also transcribed some of the stories for us. Chris Morris helped us deepen our
understanding of locale through his descriptions of scenic and architectural design.
Thierry Bodes and Judy Shetler contributed to the early-stage development of the
book and made significant contributions for what we think about stories. Our students
at the University of Texas at Austin and California State University San Marcos
contributed stories and lively discussion of them. Two of Larry’s graduate assistants,
Kate Blackburn and Naddy Sandlin, were helpful in showing how to make the
material more accessible to students. Kerk Kee assisted us by gathering and sorting
our collection of stories with accuracy and care. Dana LeBarr and John Trimble
helped us sharpen and edit the manuscript.
We wish to thank Linda Bathgate, our editor at Taylor and Francis, and her editorial
assistant, Katherine Ghezzi, for keeping us on track in the process of production.
Larry’s Norwegian braintrust, including Jan Sornes, Frank Lindburg, and their
graduate students, helped us by reminding us there was other work to be done and
helped set our sights on subsequent projects.
Others who are anonymous helped us without even knowing it. We encountered
interesting people all across the western United States whose names and stories we
wish we knew. For instance, between Johnson City and Ozona, Texas we shared
the highway with a woman whose entire apartment-worth of belongings, including
her dog, was stuffed inside her convertible Mustang. She embodied the American
dream of escape to the West. What was her story? We encountered a group of
Missourians who appeared to step out of the nineteenth century with a horse and
mule train, out hunting for elk antlers in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. We ate
alongside and were silently welcomed by a Mexican-American family in Globe,
Arizona, an otherwise forlorn-looking old mining town.
1
NARRATIVE APPRECIATION
So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any
report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematic
only in a culture in which it was absent.
—Hayden White
This book encourages appreciation of stories in and about workplaces. It is a guide
for more fully grasping the power of stories to enrich organization members’ lives,
affect activities, and enable better sensemaking. It will teach readers how better to
evaluate the stories they hear and how to construct such stories themselves. We draw
attention to everything from fully developed, dramatic narratives, such as biographies
of famous leaders or histories of organizations, to smaller-scale stories told around
the coffee pot common in daily work interaction, and much in between.
In line with Hayden White’s (1987, p. 1) statement above, we argue that coming
to know organizations and what goes on in them without focusing on narratives would
be unproductive. Further, efforts to treat narratives in organizations as trivial or
peripheral would be misguided. Stories abound in workplaces, and our lives would
be strange and bland without them. As we tune into the stories people tell, read about
workplaces and the lives that go on in and around them, take stories from the media
with us to work and tell co-workers about our experiences, we equip ourselves to
understand what is going on and, sometimes, to make better responses to the circumstances we face at work and in our lives beyond. Although few people, such as
comedians, make their living entirely with stories well told, others, such as ministers,
salespersons, and teachers, tell stories as a regular feature of their workdays. We all
listen to and tell stories. Sales presentations, briefings, reports, recruitment interviews,
press releases, consultations, carpools, team meetings, hallway conversations, lunch
breaks, and retirement ceremonies are all common sites for workplace storytelling.
2 Narrative Appreciation
Narrative Appreciation
Readers might have heard of music appreciation, but never thought about narrative
appreciation. In the former, people learn to apply music theory about such concepts
as melody, rhythm, chord progressions, and harmony, plus knowledge of musical
genres and styles, to performances in which they participate through listening or
performing. Some people who learn to better appreciate music do so for professional
reasons; others, to deepen their enjoyment. Narrative appreciation is analogous to
music appreciation in that it brings theoretical concepts from narratology to bear on
how people experience and assess stories. Readers will be introduced to quite a
large number of such concepts in this book, such as action, sequence, irony, plot,
and complication. If readers are able to understand and use such concepts, we hope
they will benefit both professionally and personally. They will be equipped to
understand more about workplaces and the lives of their occupants, to get a better
grasp of challenges and opportunities at work, to connect with fellow employees or
others in the same profession, to exercise leadership, or to interact more effectively
with customers. It is also possible simply to appreciate workplace narratives because
they are everywhere around us, highly varied and sometimes even beautiful.
The Ubiquity of Workplace Narratives
Our examination of workplace stories began with a collection of stories published
in articles in academic journals, management books, case studies, and similar literature.
Of the 150 stories we acquired from such sources,1 nearly all are worthwhile and
credible items to examine and many are instructive, but few have the fully worked-up,
dramatic character of Joseph Campbell’s (2008) heroic tales. Few are so well-told
that they transport the reader or listener to the scene of action. Our experience with
the stories in our original story collection seems to mirror Gabriel’s (2004), whose
interview-based collection of stories from organizations also had few fully developed
narratives. However, rather than lamenting the infrequency of such “stories with a
capital S,” our attention has been drawn toward the “small s” stories that pervade
work in sports, business, politics, warfare, health care, education, and various kinds
of at-home work. As we started to be less restrictive about what counts as an
organizational narrative, we were treated to a fascinating array of stories and we
were led to explore more and more narratological concepts in order to make sense
of them. The approach we take to narrative appreciation in this book is aimed at
giving readers a similar experience.
Conversational Narratives
Many workplace stories start out as anecdotes shared in conversations with
coworkers. Individuals tell about experiences they have had, events they have observed,
and media stories that captured their attention. Often, the stories told by one person
spark a related story from another, resulting in what Boje (1991) calls “story rounds.”
Narrative Appreciation 3
For instance, the authors began their workday recently when one related Gabriel’s
(2004) ambiguous story about the lorry driver who may have killed two cats accidentally. The story goes that an unfortunate woman watched a driver kill her pet
cat as it was sleeping by the side of the road. After she complained to police, they
caught the driver and asked him what had happened. He explained that he had hit
the cat with his van, and since it would have been cruel to leave the wounded cat
in misery, he finished it off by bashing it over the head. But was it a case of mistaken identity? When police examined his lorry, they found another dead cat
beneath the wheel well.
Relating Gabriel’s story touched off another about a kid in Oklahoma accidentally
hitting a dog during his first trial of driving a tractor on public roads and being
unjustly accused of doing so on purpose. The elements of pets being run over by
vehicles and attributing the responsibility of death to a person made these stories a
pair. Such a chaining of stories in a series of topics is common (Bormann, 1972).
Stories in Songs and the Media
Another way in which meaning is chained out is when melody and rhythm are tied
to story. Our mentioning songs in connection with workplace stories may seem a
bit unusual, but it is completely in keeping with narrative appreciation. Authors
have noted the importance of song at work, such as the use of rock music by soldiers
during the Vietnam War (Grossberg, 1988) and, more recently, the Iraq War,
where American troops used heavy metal and rap music in their Humvees, in part to
amp up their aggressiveness as they entered battle (Pieslak, 2009). The contemporary
workplace is far more music-filled than ever. People at work are now listening
through earphones to songs and podcasts.
Much of the content of workplace talk is the importation of mass media stories
into personal conversations. For example, as we were working on this book in the
spring of 2009, a sassy, midde-aged auditioner on Britain’s Got Talent, Susan Boyle,
knocked the whole world’s socks off with her performance of “I Dream a Dream”
from Les Miserables. Judges and the show’s live audience changed instantly from
smug disbelief to wholehearted approval as she began to sing. When she walked on
stage, appearing almost preposterously frumpy and, oddly, both self-confident and
diffident, the judges were seen rolling their eyes. But once she struck her first notes,
the entire audience, judges included, openly marveled at the power of her singing
and her sensitive delivery. She did an amazing job by any standard. Many of the
26 million viewings of Susan Boyle on YouTube as of that time, especially for the
first two weeks after her audition, were shared by people at work. She became a
story as people analyzed her popularity, marveled at her ability, sought out details
on her authenticity, noticed her costume makeover the next week, and guessed that
she was likely to continue to win. Part of the power of her story, of course, was its
liminality, the uncertainty of what would come next (Turner, 1987). Polster refers
to this as directionality in stories (1987). People at parties and over the cafeteria table
4 Narrative Appreciation
made guesses as to why she had become a cultural icon. Maybe, they concluded, it’s
because we like to see a person move from singing in the shower to singing on the
grand stage, someone who rises above it all, who surprises us, who teaches us a
moral and cultural lesson: don’t judge a book by its cover.
The picture of a New York street scene from the June 2009 cover of The
New Yorker was composed entirely on the artist’s iPhone. He commented in that
same issue that drawing in this way allowed him to turn an observed scene into a
story immediately and portably. The New Yorker’s website even contains a video
(Colombo, 2009) of the cover being drawn on the iPhone application. This suggests
that producers of such media are conscious of capturing and sustaining people’s
attention with the kinds of stories they tell, the tools they draw upon, and the
process used to tell the story.
Rather than seeing organizations as story-free zones, a better characterization is
that they are about as full of stories in routine conversation as they ever were, and
on top of that there has been a tremendous increase in the availability of stories in
song and other media. We view organizations as story-rich zones. Events occurring
outside organizations, such as in the home, the community, or society at large, are
fodder for workplace conversations in which stories are exchanged. People on the
way to work, at work, and on the way home are taking with them smartphones,
tablet computers, and digital music players to look at and listen to all kinds of
content that includes stories. They are checking blogs, checking news-aggregating
sites, looking at newspaper sites and cable news sites, talking to each other, and
listening to music and podcasts. They are going on YouTube and seeing videos of
everything from The Daily Show to Ali G pretending to interview Andy Rooney, to
someone being interviewed on Inside the Actor’s Studio, to narrations of John Prine
about the origins of his song “Chain of Sorrow,” to a podcast of a culture innovator
giving a 20-minute lecture at TED or a radio broadcast of This American Life. All of
these sources and sites and thousands more are purveyors of stories that individuals
share with each other in the workplace.
Because there are so many independent producers of content, professional media
products are not the only ones that get people’s attention. Instead, people can put
songs up on their websites. It is easy to put a podcast up on iTunes. There is great
availability of independently produced material, and many people shun corporate media
content in favor of listening to “indy” media. Younger and middle-aged people
now seldom go anywhere without their phones and earphones, and it is hard to keep
them from listening, even when we would prefer their attention was concentrated
elsewhere.
Both when face-to-face and when communicating via media, stories are often
about what people have heard lately. We can’t throw a party for people from work
anymore in which several don’t get out their smartphones to show what they heard,
or saw, or were able to do in the last week. People really love doing this. Sharing of
song lists would be a perfect example. The ability to show things on computer
screens is driving technology design so that people can comfortably display for
Narrative Appreciation 5
others what is on their computer screen. Not long ago, to share stories via media,
we would gather around computer screens as though they were one-sided campfires.
We didn’t anticipate that the laptop and the tablet computer, without the tether of
a power cord, would so easily facilitate moving the computer from lap to lap. The
smartphone allows people to show each other things from YouTube or Hulu or
other video sites, and people are frequently playing tunes for each other. We defy
anyone to say media are not entering workplaces. This is not just “banana time”
(Roy, 1959). This is fully integrated with how people work today.
In sum, there is just more now to appreciate, since the artistry exhibited in these
mass media and independent productions means the sheer volume of workplace
narratives is greater than ever before. Our access to wonderful stories, and, of
course, our exposure to stories that meet few people’s critical standards, has never
been greater.
Criteria for Narrative Appreciation
With the greater availability of stories comes a greater opportunity for narrative
appreciation. In our view, people who have learned to recognize and prize stories
are more likely than others to engage in the following:
1. They notice the stories around them and attend not just to the content, but to
the telling itself. Style and culture are evidenced in stories; you have no story
without them.
2. They actively search for compelling stories as they listen to conversations, read,
and view media. In Weick’s (1995) terms they are continually sensemaking their
environments. They interpret the world through stories, and each story begins
with a sequence. What to make of this event? How did this start? What are its causes?
3. They cultivate a memory for stories, much like wannabe comedians remember
jokes they hear. A sage uses narratives to interpret a culture and cannot offer an
interpretation without them.
4. They check out the stories for verisimilitude, rather than necessarily taking them
at face value. We not only listen to stories; we assess them for their ability to
represent some version of reality accurately.
5. They become more sensitive to nuances of stories. For example, given the
character of the actors, they might attend to whether and how characters are
changing and why. They make more fully formed and complex interpretations
by including as many forces that contribute to the plot as they can imagine.
6. They relay stories they have run across to others who like stories. Stories spread
virally as people pass them on from one storyteller to another. Stories are like
peanuts: having one invites another.
7. They are more willing to narrativize their own lives and see them as grand,
developing stories (Polster, 1987). They are willing to tell or write stories of
their own rather than missing out on storytelling opportunities.
6 Narrative Appreciation
8. They utilize stories as a vehicle in their communication with others. The practical
knowledge of stories, how they can be used in the workplace, has a robust
history. One can sell a product with a story, promote an image with a story, tell
a story to make life interesting, and learn through a story.
9. Through practice, they get better at telling stories, listening receptively to others’
stories and, consequently, at communicating. They become willing participants
in story rounds.
Six Stories
In the following, we provide six abbreviated examples of workplace stories to illustrate
the wide range of story types and content we will be considering throughout this
book. The first two of them were conversational narratives exchanged between the
authors. The third and fourth were told in oral history interviews and are part of
the American Folk Life Collection in the Smithsonian. The fifth is a story song, by
American folk singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie, about an important battle in
American labor history that occurred in 1914. The sixth and final is a selection
from the memoir The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. We make no particular claims
about these narratives except that they all pertain to people working, encountering
organizations, and telling about their experiences, and they are typical of the stories
we examined as we were writing this book.
1. Told by one author of this book to another on a road trip:
Have you ever seen the TV show The Office? One of my favorite episodes is when
Ryan, who’s taking business courses, asks Michael, his delusional manager, to speak to
one of those classes as a visiting expert. And of course Michael agrees, sure that he’s just
the expert that’s needed but not knowing that students who persuade their bosses to speak
are given extra credit. So Michael comes to class and, fancying himself like the inspirational
teacher in Dead Poets Society, he insists that the students tear out the Table of Contents
of their expensive business textbook. He’s thinking he’ll teach them that life experience
always trumps book learning. What makes the scene particularly hilarious is that it relies
on our having seen the movie and knowing that the Dead Poets teacher, played by Robin
Williams, wasn’t trying to make that point at all. He was simply trying to teach his
students to resist wholesale categories and to think independently, which is why he insists
that they shred the Table of Contents of their literature textbook. Anyway, at the end,
Michael walks away complacently saying, “They’re inspired now,” when, in fact, the
students have simply been left dumbfounded.
2. From a conversation between two of the authors on a road trip:
Larry: I once told [consultant and former University of Texas Communication professor]
Ron Bassett a story of one of the most horrifying experiences I ever had. As an eighth
grader, I was taller than the other kids and I was sure I’d make the school basketball team.
When it came time to reveal who had actually made it, the coach stood in the middle of all
ten of us would-be’s holding just nine jerseys—eight beautiful black-satin ones, plus one
Narrative Appreciation 7
dingy orange one. If you were among the chosen, he’d toss you a jersey and you’d know
you had made the team. So I’m wondering which of the black jerseys is mine. Well, he
tosses out the first one, then the second, then the third. I’m still waiting for mine. But
now, instead of wondering when I’m getting my fancy jersey, I’m down to wondering,
“Am I going to get a black one? Jeez, I hope I don’t get that old dingy orange one. That
one’s obviously for the weakest of the weak.”
Bud: And then someone wouldn’t get anything at all?
Larry: Right. There were ten of us and just nine jerseys. Well—and I’m remembering it
like it was yesterday—it got down to just two black jerseys and one orange one. So then
my hope changes to, “Omigod, I hope I at least get the orange jersey.” And, wouldn’t
you know, he tosses that final dingy jersey to somebody else. So, a team that I thought
I was going to be a star on, the coach says, “No, not really, Larry. You’re not on the
team.” But at least I had the satisfaction later that same school year of making a speech
that got me to the state championships.
Ron, an old friend, hears all this and says, much to my surprise, “Larry, you’re like
that. If someone closes you off from one avenue, you will go find another one.”
I had never made the connection. Never. And he saw it instantly. After that, I knew it
was true. In that sense he made a therapeutic intervention, saying, “Look what you did!”
And both things—the failure and the achievement—have always meant a lot more to me.
I had moved from pain to learning. I had been in horrifying pain. I found myself asking,
“How did I let that happen to me? How could I be so foolish to be so out of it?” I was
probably sort of impossible then, and I think the coach was, in fact, trying to teach me a
lesson. I was acting like I knew I had the team made, and I wasn’t trying. Hell, I was
already six feet tall, and everyone else was way shorter, and they were putting more effort
into it in some ways than I was. I thought, “Shit, I’m big. Why do anything?” Coach
was probably right, for all I know.
3. From StoryCorps Oral History Project, The Chaplain’s Story (Isay, 2007,
pp. 98–99):
In the basement of the hospital, in a windowless room, they pack the surgical instruments
before surgery. Each surgery has a list of all of the instruments they need, and at the top
of the list is the patient’s name. The technician is given this list and it is up to her or to
him to pack these instruments and take them up to the OR for a particular surgery. One
of the women told me that as she packed these instruments and she knew the patient’s
name, she would pray for that patient, and that she had been doing that for 40 years. And
I thought, “No one knows that she is doing this, but here she is, a person who has been
working at that hospital for longer than most of us, who is doing this incredibly important
job that has to be done precisely and carefully, and as she’s doing this, she’s praying for the
patients she will never meet and the patients she’ll never see, she’ll never know the outcome but she knows that she’s helping to make their surgery possible.” Then, I found out
that most of them [the other instrument packers] did it.
You know, people work really hard and are so essential, but often not seen by patients
and families. They just assume these people are doing their work, and they don’t realize
how rich their lives are and how rich their stories are.
8 Narrative Appreciation
4. From the StoryCorps Oral History Project (Isay, 2007, pp. 89–90):
We had this man, Old Man Pete, who lived across the street. He had a defect in his spine
and never could stand up straight. He was always bent over as if he was picking up a
quarter off the sidewalk. He always did odd jobs … There was a truck that would deliver
coal. It would back up into the driveway, and we had a window that went to the cellar.
It would take me two or three days to shovel five tons of coal into the cellar. One day I
asked Old Man Pete would he want to shovel in five tons of coal? He said, “Sure, I’ll do it.”
So the next load that came—it was wintertime—I went across the street to where he lived, and
I said, “How much would you want?” He said, “A dollar a ton.” He made five dollars.
About thirty minutes later the doorbell rings, and Old Man Pete’s at the door. I said,
“You all done?” He said, “Oh, yeah, I’m done. You got the five dollars?” I gave him
the five dollars, and I said, “How did you get that coal in there so quickly?” He said,
“I’ll tell you how it’s done. You take the shovel, you fill it up with coal in one big scoop,
and then you put it in the window. Keep doing it in a motion that’s constant and don’t look
up to see what you have left. The trick is to not look up to how much more you have to do
but just to keep doing it. If your body goes into a motion of shoveling and tossing it,
shoveling and tossing it in, all of a sudden you have no more to shovel.” That’s when I learned
when you have a job to do, don’t keep looking up to see how much left there is to do. If
you keep working at your job, it’ll be done. That’s one piece of advice that I’ve lived by.
5. Lyrics from “Ludlow Massacre” by Woody Guthrie. Used by permission:2
It was early springtime and the strike was on,
They moved us miners out of doors,
Out from the houses that the company owned,
We moved into tents at old Ludlow.
I was worried bad about my children,
Soldiers guarding the railroad bridge,
Every once in a while a bullet would fly,
Kick up gravel under my feet.
We were so afraid they would kill our children,
We dug us a cave that was seven foot deep,
Carried our young ones and pregnant women,
Down inside the cave to sleep.
That very night you soldiers waited,
Until us miners were asleep,
You snuck around our little tent town,
Soaked our tents with your kerosene.
You struck a match and the blaze it started,
You pulled the triggers of your gatling guns,
I made a run for the children but the firewall stopped me,
Thirteen children died from your guns.
Narrative Appreciation 9
I carried my blanket to a wire fence corner,
Watched the fire till the blaze died down,
I helped some people drag their belongings,
While your bullets killed us all around.
I will never forget the looks on the faces,
Of the men and women that awful day,
When we stood around to preach their funerals,
And lay the corpses of the dead away.
We told the Colorado Governor to call the President,
Tell him to call off his National Guard,
But the National Guard belong to the governor,
So he didn’t try so very hard.
Our women from Trinidad they hauled some potatoes,
Up to Walsenburg in a little cart,
They sold their potatoes and brought some guns back,
And they put a gun in every hand.
The state soldiers jumped us in a wire fence corners,
They did not know that we had these guns,
And the Red Neck Miners mowed down them troopers,
You should have seen those poor boys run.
We took some cement and walled that cave up,
Where you killed those thirteen children inside,
I said, “God bless the Mine Workers’ Union,”
And then I hung my head and cried.
6. From the memoir The Liars’ Club, by Mary Karr (1995, pp. 57–58):3
The men of the Liar’s Club arrived with their pickups and toolboxes to turn our
garage into an extra bedroom for my parents who had been sleeping on a pull-out sofa in
the living room during Grandma’s visit. I guess they wanted to make her a nicer place
in which to die. That didn’t register in me at the time. I had nearly blocked all glimmer
of her very existence—alive or dead, sick or well—from my waking thoughts. Each
morning, about the time Lecia and I reached the bottom of our soggy Cheerios, somebody’s
work boots would stamp up the porch steps, and the screen would bang open, and Daddy
would start getting down clean coffeemugs.
The men arrived early and worked steadily through the hotter part of every day. They
had all taken their vacations then in order to help out. They worked for nothing but free
coffee and beer. By mid-morning they had stripped off their shirts. They had broad backs
and ropy arms. They suffered the fiercest sunburns that summer I ever remember seeing.
Ben Bederman had a round hairless beer belly that pooched over his carpenter apron, and
his back burned and peeled off in sheets, then burned again until it finally darkened to the
10 Narrative Appreciation
color of cane syrup. The men pulled Lone Star beers all afternoon from the ice in two red
Coleman coolers that Daddy packed to the brim every morning.
A few times a day, somebody’s wife would show up with food. Say what you like
about the misery of hard labor—I once had a summer job painting college dorms that I
thought would kill me—but it can jack up the appetite to the point where eating takes on
a kind of holiness. Whether there were white bags of barbecued crabs from Sabine Pass or
tamales in corn husks from a roadside stand, the men would set down their tools and grin
at the sheer good fortune of it. They always took time to admire the food before they
started to eat—a form of modesty, I guess, or appreciation, as if wanting to be sure the
meal wouldn’t vanish like some mirage. Daddy would stop to soak his red bandana in a
cooler’s slush and study whatever was steaming out of the torn-open sack while he mopped
himself off. “Lord God, look at that,” he’d say, and he’d wink at whoever had brought it.
Ben’s wife, Ruby, pulled in once with a washtub of sandy unshucked oysters that …
took two of the men to heave out of the truck bed. She spent the better part of a morning
opening them with a stubby knife. When she was done, there were two huge pickle jars of
cleaned oysters sitting in the washtub’s cold water. We ate them with hot sauce and black
pepper and lemon. (Lecia says I would eat them only in pairs, so none would feel lonely
in my stomach.) The oysters had a way of seeming to wince when you squeezed the lemon
on them. They started off cold in your mouth, but warmed right up and went down fast
and left you that musty aftertaste of the sea. You washed that back with a sip of cold beer
you’d salted a little. (Even at seven I had a taste for liquor.) And you followed that with a
soda cracker.
Before that summer, I had many times heard long-winded Baptist preachers take ten
minutes to pray over card tables of potato salad and fried chicken at church picnics, but the
way those sweating, red-faced men sat around on stacked pallets of lumber gulping oysters
taught me most of what I know about simple gladness. They were glad to get fed for their
labor, glad they had the force to pound nails and draw breath. Of course, they bitched
loudly about their aches and mocked each other’s bitching. But unless I’ve completely
idealized that fellowship, there was something redeeming that moved between these men.
Even the roofing part of the job, which involved a vat of boiling tar and whole days on top
of the new garage beyond the shade of our chinaberry, didn’t wipe it out. At evening, they
would pull off their work boots, then peel off their double layers of cotton socks and lay
them to dry across the warm bricks. Daddy had a habit of tipping the beer coolers out right
where they stood in the grass, so cool water rushed over their sweaty feet. At that time of
day, with night coming in fast, and the men taking a minute to pass a pint of Tennessee
whiskey between them or to light their smokes, there was a glamor between them that
I sensed somehow was about to disappear. When they climbed into the cabs of their trucks,
I sometimes had a terrible urge to rush after them and call them back.
Six Angles for Narrative Appreciation
The six clusters of ideas that we introduce here and explain fully in subsequent
chapters represent interpretative viewpoints for understanding and appreciating
Narrative Appreciation 11
narratives. We refer to them as “angles” instead of story components or elements
because we want to make it clear that they are interpreters’ resources, not intrinsic
features of the narratives. We arrived at them first by categorizing narratives from
the workplace using such categories as action, character, motivation, and complexity.
We discovered that we could make capable interpretations of the collected narratives
using such categories, but that our interpretations were deeper when we utilized
several of the categories. In fact, our failure to use multiple categories left us with
interpretations that were hardly more than restatements of the narratives themselves.
For instance, although it is possible to talk about action, motivation, and moral
outcome but not talk about the character/actor who is doing the action, it doesn’t
make for as illuminating an interpretation as when both angles, and others as well,
are all drawn upon to interpret a story.
The six angles seem to accommodate most of what narrative scholars have written
over the years and, at the same time, seem to find ready application to workplace
narratives. Each particular angle overlaps with, and is supported by, the others. Each
will be addressed in a separate chapter below.
Action, motivation, and moral outcome. These three concepts encompass
what is done in a narrative, why it is done, and its assessment as right or wrong. They
cluster together because they all are involved whenever questions of responsibility
and accountability arise, and these are key topics for understanding organizations
(Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983). To put it most bluntly, there is no story without
action; there is no action without motivation; and there is no motivation without
moral assessment—or in Stanley Fish’s (2010) words, learning. We find motivations
especially interesting when there are mixed motivations—when there are multiple
reasons for actions, and when moral assessments are difficult to calculate. The moral
of the story is the result of action—the difference between an assessment at time
one, when the story starts, and time two, when the story ends (Czarniawska, 1998).
Sequence and locale. Stories have spatio-temporal dimensions that are inseparable
(Hawes, 1973, 1974). Stories make more sense and are more interesting when the
action is located in a specific time and place. The place may be on an island, it may
be in the center of a city, it may be in outer space, but the context of the place helps
the listener calibrate and make sense of what is going on in the story. Sequence
refers to the temporal unfolding of events over time. In a story it’s important to
know what preceded the current circumstance so as to know what put the actors in
the present position. Sequence is especially important as the events of the story
develop across time in a way that leads to their coming together in a moment of
truth. All the past makes sense in relation to the climax of the story.
Character and identity. Character and identity are paired because they work
together to make up an assessment of who a person is in the story and how you
know who they are. “Characterization is the presentation of the nature of the
people in a story” (Bal, 1997, p. 59). Character tends to be an external evaluation,
an assessment of the person from the outside by a community, or by someone in a
hierarchy whose assessment matters. In the person’s favor is identity construction,
12 Narrative Appreciation
his or her way of saying, “This is who I am.” Actors tend to draw on nationalities,
organizational identities, gender, size, looks, age, and anything else that constructs
an identity that will leave the impression they want on the observer. Note that
identities are not automatically directed toward putting one’s best foot forward. Some
may want to leave the impression they are “the bad boy” or the “screw-off” because
they want attention, or because such an impression gives them latitude in behavior,
or because it causes onlookers to be amazed that anything good came of them.
Interest and memory. Stories are more interesting than mere facts because
cognitive processes that draw causal relations among important elements of the story
give the listener work to do. The result of the interpretations the listener makes
causes the story to be interesting and memorable. Some stories are fascinating since
they produce such intense interest as to be spellbinding for the listener (Green &
Brock, 2000). Memory also comes into play when the storyteller draws on her or
his memory to select what to put into the story. This selection of materials is no
innocent act. Telling one story, utilizing one set of facts, not only tells that story but
also masks other interpretations of what went on (Lyotard, 1984; Fisher, 1987).
Aesthetics. Aesthetics has to do with the beauty of a story. We can understand
aesthetics by looking at its polar opposite, anesthetics, which is a medical term for
shutting down the senses. Aesthetics is a sensory response to stories, epitomized by
ones that make the hair stand up on the back of our neck. Aesthetics is difficult to
classify because it comes in many forms, some elegant, others natural, or coarse. Style is
connected with aesthetics because it is a kind of personal expression of beauty,
represented by how a person presents her- or himself through actions and decisions
(Brummett, 2008).
Complexity and control. Complexity and control operate together because
complexity refers to conditions that cannot be predicted, that are beyond control.
Something, or maybe a host of things, is in play that cannot be corralled and managed
in a predictable way. The axiom that “truth is the first casualty of war” is applicable.
Once the fighting starts, things fall apart in a hurry, not only because interpretation
becomes confusing; also, coalitions frame and interpret happenings and evidence for
their own purposes. In narratives, against the likelihood of things falling apart, or
not going as predicted, is the desire to control—to affect outcomes, to hold things
together. In Bakhtin’s famous terminology, these are called the centripetal and
centrifugal forces—the things that hold the structure (relationship, family, organization,
culture) together, and the things that tear it apart (Bakhtin, 1981). The integration
of complexity is achieved by drawing inferential conclusions from ambiguous data
by “connecting the dots.”
Applications for Narrative Understanding
The knowledge of the six angles we will be explaining might be utilized whenever
anyone seeks to present or interpret a story. But knowledge of the angles can
be applied more particularly to successfully negotiate various kinds of recurrent
Narrative Appreciation 13
organizational activities. We refer to these more particular contexts of narrative use as
“applications.” All are forms of communicative action that can be pursued narratively
and which are relatively common forms of organizational activity. We conceive of an
application as a verb such as to transport, celebrate, or elevate that can be enacted and
elaborated with major points that could be practiced, as in an exercise on the topic
in a classroom, or from observation in the world of work. By transferring concept
to application, we intend to show what people can do with stories when the topics
of these chapters are invoked or made use of for a particular purpose in a particular
setting. We caution, however, that the six applications we develop in this book are
by no means the only applications. Our fondest hope is that readers will be able to
use what they find here and make novel applications. We will have more to say about
this in the next chapter, in which we unveil what we call an “open architecture”
for organizational narratology that promotes broad and creative uses of the narrative
concepts we develop.
We draw attention to six applications. Below, each is explained briefly.
Explanation. The essential activity goes from a partial understanding of a set of
events toward a fuller interpretation that reveals more precisely what happened and
why. The organizational actor seeks and finds evidence that a particular sequence
of actions captures what happened and that a particular set of causal relationships,
whether physical or motivational or metaphysical, plausibly explains why it happened. Explanation requires selection from alternative ways of describing events and
alternative motives for them.
Explaining a scientific finding by relating a story is an example of the use of
explanation. In the history of organizational studies, one can see the importance of
and possibility for explanation by starting with particular studies, such as the Stanley
Milgram authority experiments (1963) that caused experimental subjects to think
they were giving electric shocks to strangers. The finding represents the story’s punch
line: people were willing to punish and injure others merely because they were
ordered to do so. Over the years since the study was conducted, its ethics, both for
Milgram and for what his results show about the morality of his findings, have been
a controversial topic. Stories about the experiments, such as what it was like to
participate in them, can give a deeper understanding of the meaning of the events
to the actors and, therefore, a more nuanced view of why they acted as they did.
To bring these experimental findings to life, nothing explains it quite like a story
(Polkinghorne, 1988). In short, many experimental findings tell a simplified version
of a larger concept. The sensemaker can build on the main nugget of the story to
communicate a stronger grasp of the concept.
Imagination. Imagination is central to the creation of an image in a narrative;
it is about being able to see other times and places through indirect experience.
Imagination is placing a set of circumstances and people in a different space and
time continuum via a story and hypothesizing about them to construct an idea of
what might have been, or what will be. The concept is about liberating the mind to
fantasize about something that is not presently real, but is capable of generating an
14 Narrative Appreciation
emotional involvement from playing out the implications of those circumstances
(Snowden, 2003).
The imagination application is about mining stories about other times, other
people, and other situations for their personal significance. This has to do with
re-applying narrative from something about someone else to something that pertains
to one’s own life and circumstances; thus imagination both reaches out and draws in.
Applying their knowledge of narratives, though, means that people are able to
imagine how their own situation would be different if the events narrated in a story
happened to them (Browning & Boudes, 2005). Imagination involves telling a
story that appears to end at one time and place but that, more interestingly, and in fact,
ends at another time and place. Such stories take a grand perspective or vista about a
circumstance. They stretch time across an extended period (weeks, years, decades)
to tie what happened at one moment to a distant past or future. The essence here is
to apply the transformational power of stories we encounter to improve our own
lives and careers. The essential movement is from personal stasis or decline to
change based on a renewed understanding of what is possible (Browning, 1991).
Celebration. At the root of the celebration of character and identity is the
modulation from a restricted or unappreciated identity toward a more complex
viewpoint involving more dimensionality and a capacity for change. The celebrated
character is not one who does only what was expected, only what was in keeping
with an initial set of conditions and opportunities, but rather someone who transcends
the limits of initial conditions, resources, and personal qualities to turn into someone better (McAdams, 1996). Thus, in memorializing someone, we narrate what it
might have been plausible for them to become had it not been for their sterling
character, then we praise them for rising above normal expectations.
Celebration calls attention to the qualities possessed by the actor and to the possibility of reauthoring the self by characterizing them in favorable ways. Perhaps the
most powerful application is to use stories for the redefinition of the self. This
begins by being able to place an actor in a historical context and entails seeing
characteristics that had previously been left out or understanding and building upon
strengths that were overlooked in previous interpretations.
Transportation. The transportation application addresses how a story moves, or
transports, a listener or reader by its sheer power. The gist of the idea is telling a story
that so moves listeners that they lose awareness of their current setting, are shocked
when they “come out of it,” and are affected by their moment of trance by the
story to such an extent that they are changed by it (Green & Brock, 2000). This is
one of those applications that is better known in everyday parlance by its opposite.
What we say when a story flops is, “I guess you had to be there.” The potential to
be transported was there, but the particular telling was unsuccessful. So the real
objective for this application is to take people somewhere, to move them out of
their cubicle into a drama.
Of course, the power to move people is not universal; what moves one listener
might not affect another. For instance, the chaplain’s story about people in the
Narrative Appreciation 15
basement of the hospital blessing surgical instruments they were assembling was
transportative for the authors. We were moved by the employees’ faith or hope that
their distant caring could make a difference, perhaps saving the patient’s life. We were
also moved by the chaplain’s insight that there are people throughout organizations
who are aligning their routine tasks with larger, more elevated goals, even though
their activities are not celebrated.
Circumspection. We use the term “circumspection” to mean reflecting upon
what happened in the past, altering understandings about the circumstances of action,
and prudently anticipating future events. Circumspection “is the ability to understand
how to stage an optimal performance and to anticipate any difficulties that may arise.
It also entails the ability to select the kind of audience that will be most receptive
to one’s performance” (Quinn, 2005, p. 344). The ability to anticipate events, to
foresee what a different narrative future might be like, is operationalized in the
writing and interventions of David Snowden (2000). His work emphasizes the
capacity of stories to carry an ambiguous array of events and then interpret meaning
from these events as though they were informative. Many examples of circumspection occur in educational settings where participants are asked to reflect on
what happened, what might have happened, and what can be learned from it.
Circumspection as we use it here has a dual meaning: it invites philosophical
reflection, but is also “grounded in the pragmatic orientation of getting around,
coping, ‘doing a life’” (Scult, 2004).
Events like those that must be planned for by High Reliability Organizations
(HROs) are complex and unpredictable, yet structures for managing them need to
be created, utilized, and adapted. Circumspection is the process through which a
collection of people can design these new structures. Moreover, people managing
the unexpected prepare themselves in certain ways to be able to be resilient, to learn
from mistakes, to not exhibit hubris, to be open to diverse ideas, to be ready to
improvise, and so forth. Preparation largely means coming up with an integratively
complex response to complex-chaotic-unpredictable circumstances. Improvisation
means continuously adapting activities as matters progress. The chief movement is
from what have been termed “terrible simplifications” (Watzlawick, Weakland, &
Fisch, 1974) toward more complicated understanding of states of affairs, along with
a movement from a fixed or rigid response to one that is more provisional, flexible,
and fitting.
Stories about saving for a rainy day, developing slack resources, enlarging personal
competencies, learning from experience, taking timely action, not jumping the gun,
building high-quality connections before they are needed—all of these put this kind
of circumspection on display.
Elevation. We use the term “elevation” in one sense to mean creating heightened
sensory awareness. The epitome of aesthetic response to a story is to have the hair
stand up on the back of one’s neck. The ghost story told by the campfire is a good
example. The problem with that is that with a horror story, usually violence is
involved or implied. One of the reasons that violence is so prominent in popular
16 Narrative Appreciation
culture is that the easiest way to create hair-raising, to arouse the audience, is to
depict blood and sex—as if to say, “Okay, if that’s aesthetics, and aesthetics is arousal,
vitality, and aliveness, then the easiest thing to do is blood and sex,” which is why
people take effortless means in popular culture to create responses. The more blood
the better.
With this as a standard, there is real timidity in the workplace stories we collected,
with very few having anything to do with violence or desire. In fact, the only
stories are about efforts to avoid creating desire and cautionary tales about people
caught with their pants down (Boje, 2001). We do not suggest upping the violence
and portrayal of desire as means of application. Rather, the challenge is greater.
The second sense of the term “elevation” is to raise the audience’s horizons about
what is possible, as in “raising the level of play” or “elevating one’s game.” We
know that people can arouse audiences through stories of sex and violence, but how
else? Can other themes of human capability, striving, coordination, accomplishment,
and revelation be drawn upon to transport listeners? The elevation application shifts
the audience from a dulled to a thrilled attentiveness and from a base to an elevated
horizon of possibilities. Consider hearing powerful harmony created by a duet or
choir. For example, one of the authors was rehearsing for a wedding with a woman
he had never sung with before. In the Guy Clark song, “I Don’t Love You Much,
Do I?” the harmony became so rich that 16 years later it remains a spine-tingling
experience.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have called attention to the presence and variety of narratives in
the workplace and argued for the centrality of narratives for understanding workplaces
and the lives of people who comprise them. To make this point, we have shown
how ubiquitous narratives are in the contemporary organization and we have tried
to suggest the vast variety of stories available to people at work today.
We have not contented ourselves to write about stories in the abstract, but have
also revealed six stories that made an impression on us. The stories that were provided
are examples of those to which we have attended as we sought to explore and
develop the concepts of narrative appreciation this book unveils.
Six angles on narrative appreciation have been introduced. Each of these is a
concept or combination of concepts that helps to refine and illuminate knowledge
of what is happening when people tell and consume stories. Our purpose in identifying these angles on narrative is to isolate a few ways of examining narratives that
can significantly enhance how they can be understood and appreciated. Each of
these angles will be elaborated upon in a subsequent chapter.
The distinctiveness in our presentation will become more evident in Chapter Two,
where we address an expanse of previous literature on narratives and position our
own work within that tradition. In that chapter, we argue for what we call an “open
architecture” for organizational narratology. We develop the open architecture by
Narrative Appreciation 17
explaining several important narratological principles that form a platform upon
which subsequent narratology can be created and expanded. After showing our
indebtedness to previous scholarship and highlighting a few of the divergences
between its perspectives and our own, we devote one chapter each to the six angles
on narrative appreciation. In each case, we highlight an application to show how
the particular angle can empower action and understanding of that application. Our
book concludes with a chapter that addresses complications of our approach and
implications of our work for narrative research in organizations.
We conclude with a few directions for subsequent writing and thinking about
the place of narratives at work.
2
AN OPEN ARCHITECTURE FOR
ORGANIZATIONAL NARRATOLOGY
Introduction
This book cultivates appreciation for—and celebrates the beauty, power, and
usefulness of—stories in organizational life. To set the stage for the discussions
of the six angles for narrative appreciation contained in the following chapters, in
this chapter we propose what we term an “open architecture” for the analysis of
organizational narratives. Our approach is analogous to open architecture of computer
operating systems, like Linux, in comparison with proprietary systems, such as
Apple’s OS X or Microsoft’s Windows. One advantage of open architecture is that
there is a common platform users must employ, but wide latitude beyond that for them
to augment and refine the system. The system thus has the potential to get better,
faster. The other key advantage is the democratic nature of open architecture;
anyone with the requisite knowledge and skill can add to it, so its future capabilities
are less restricted. Applications that the original designers could not anticipate can be
incorporated into the system by the universe of designers seeking to augment it.
In this case, our idea of open architecture is composed of eight premises about
the nature of organizational narratives with which existing narrative research is consistent, along with six angles for deepening narrative appreciation. We are essentially
recommending that narratologists examine the goodness of fit between their
favored approaches to narrative and the eight premises we identify, then use one or
more of the six angles to deepen their understanding of and appreciation for a
particular narrative and narratives in general.
Since we are proposing an open architecture for subsequent narrative analysis and
research, our approach invites augmentation and refinement. We explain our position
by offering and expounding upon eight premises about the nature of organizational
narratives. As we discuss each of these premises, we call attention to a few of the
20 An Open Architecture for Narratology
prominent scholars of narrative whose work is aligned with or diverges significantly
from our approach. Where there are major points of divergence between ours and
others’ approaches, we will point them out without dwelling upon them.
In the conclusion of this chapter, we amplify on what our open architecture for
narratology affords for organizational actors and researchers.
1. Narratives are Communicative Acts
In this book, we situate ourselves as cognizant of not only the “linguistic turn”
(a focus on the philosophy of language, as in the work of Wittgenstein) but
also of how it applies to the interpretive approach to organizations (Putnam &
Pacanowsky, 1983) and various approaches to the analysis of talk and writing as
discourse (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004). This positioning will enable us to mesh what
we understand about narrative discourse with what we take to be some of the best
theorizing about organizations. Often this centers on the issue of how people
engage in interpretation in the workplace (Cohen, March, & Olsen, 1972). As a
result, we set up a strong emphasis on stories as sensemaking (Weick, 1995).
For this reason we, like Czarniawska (2004), emphasize the distinction between
action that is interpreted versus mere behavior that is measured. “Behavior” is the
preferred term of industrial psychologists because it is a limited term—the number
of swings of a hammer or the number of keystrokes in a day are “behaviors”
because they are measurable and ordinal, and because they are either happening or
not. In their 1972 treatise The Explanation of Social Behavior, Harré and Secord
showcase “the act-action” sequence, which refers to behavior (an act) that is interpreted
(an action). Czarniawska (1998), extending that notion, argues that conduct can be
treated as action when it can be accounted for in narrative terms that are acceptable
in a given social setting. In that positioning, her work accords with constructionism.
For her, the response an audience makes to a narrator’s claim will determine the
actual effect of the speaker’s words.
Taylor and Van Every’s (2000) work on narrative has come to define the Montreal
school of organizational communication. They place communication at the center
of the organizing process and construe an organization as “a form of life” that
operates within the conversational practices of its members. As a result, it operates as
a “social and cultural world to produce an environment whose forms both express
social life and create the context for it to survive” (p. 324). Following Bruner (1986,
1990), they conceptualize narrative as a causal, problem-laden structure that requires
resolution.
Part of Taylor and Van Every’s (2000) contribution has been to help Englishspeaking narratologists understand the abstruse conception of narrative developed
by the French semiotician Algirdas Greimas. For Greimas, most narratives involve
two stories at once, each on an intersecting path, between a “sender” (protagonist)
who initiates the action and a “receiver” (antagonist) who must respond to that
action, and with an outcome (usually in a conflict narrative) that is euphoric for the
An Open Architecture for Narratology 21
protagonist and dysphoric for the antagonist—there is always good news and bad
news in stories. The moral of any story depends on the point of view taken, both
by the writer and by the reader. The protagonist’s and antagonist’s story paths have
in common an issue that intersects and explains the motivation of the actors. But
Taylor and Van Every observe that Greimas’ idea extends beyond the specific story
being told to represent grander cultural themes, Good vs. Bad, Individualism vs.
Community, and so on. In Greimas’ terms, each narrative will have “an abstract
deep level and a more concrete surface level” (Greimas & Ricœur, 1989, p. 554).
Complex oppositions often display these contrasts between cultural themes. For
instance, a narrative might focus on a character who is standing up for good but also
has his or her moral limitations. Thus there are ambiguous oppositions between grand
meanings and local specifics. Such ironies keep us attentive in stories.
Greimas’ use of the term “receiver” opens the door to linking narratology
to traditional communication theory that identifies the basic SMCR model of
communication, made up of a Sender, Message, Channel, and Receiver. He says the
“narrative … posits relations between … the sender and receiver” (Greimas & Ricœur,
1989, p. 554). Despite all the attention given to the senders’ art of crafting a message or initiating an action, receivers are important because in their own kind of
ambiguity, receivers tend to apprehend a narrative differently; hence the use of the
term “polyvocality.” What a receiver wants within a story often changes over time,
including preferences that can shift at any given moment.
2. Narratives Occur in Conversations as Well as Monologues
Traditionally, narratives are understood as monologues offered by a single storyteller—
for example, Winston Churchill’s famous speech to the House of Commons about
the forthcoming Battle of Britain. But people also tell stories in conversations
(Czarniawska, 1998; Tracy, 2002) and in story rounds (Boje, 2011). In Tracy’s (2002)
view, narratives are told for all sorts of reasons, including to entertain, persuade,
instruct, explain, warn, threaten, and praise, to name just a few. When, during a
conversation, we elect to use a story to accomplish one or more of these acts, we
need to make way for that story in the ongoing stream of interaction. Often we’ll do
some initial work to find out what our intended listeners, or “recipients,” may already
know about the event in order to best tailor our telling of it to them (Nofsinger,
1991). In the view of conversation analysts, we need to arrange for listeners to grant
us an extended turn at talk within which to tell the story (Goodwin, 1984), since
most stories are involved enough to require our listeners’ forbearance. A story
preface, such as “Did I tell you about what Sarah Palin did now?” creates this
opportunity. Conversationalists play out interacting roles as they offer explanations,
request reasons, and provide other opportunities for the storyteller to continue with
his or her story.
After the story is launched, others present play important roles that determine
how the story comes out (Mandelbaum, 1989, 2003). Recipients of stories can and
22 An Open Architecture for Narratology
do ask questions about the action which can actually “drive” stories in a new
direction and therefore can influence how a story ends up getting told. For example, a
listener could ask, “So, what was so-and-so doing while that was going on?” which
would introduce another actor into the story. Or the hearer might ask the primary
teller how s/he was feeling about the action, or what s/he thought the action
meant, or what might be done about it. By such maneuvers, hearers modify the
story in its telling as opposed to being passive recipients of story set-pieces.
It is very commonplace for stories to be co-authored as opposed to being told by
just one person. The idea of co-authorship of stories (Mandelbaum, 1989) is that people
assist each other in their telling of them. Although co-authors might not contribute
components of the story, they nevertheless participate through what they say as they
listen, offering acknowledgment tokens, assessments, and continuers to align with
the telling (Nofsinger, 1991; Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2000). In other words, even
when one party is the primary teller, others show their appreciation, acknowledgment,
humorous uptake, and confusion, to name just a few of the possible contributions.
3. Narratives Engage Listeners Through Incompleteness
Listeners are drawn into narratives. On some occasions their engagement involves
merely experiencing a story as entertainment, as when they might exclaim, “That
book proved a really fast read.” In other instances, when listeners become unaware
of where they are—become lost in the narrative—they are in effect “transported”
by the story (Green & Brock, 2000). In these instances, narratives have the power to
increase the effort and involvement by the listener in making sense of the story.
Stories are engaging for what they leave out as well as for their specifics or other
aspects of their production, such as the language used. Because good stories tend to
omit material, they are not at their best when they are completely comprehensive.
Instead, people are drawn into stories when the listener imagines and fills in story
details with missing information that requires inferences. The listener is required to
fill in the blanks for the story to make sense (Weick & Browning, 1986). The main
narrative literature that supports this position is Reader Response Theory (Lang,
1980; Tompkins, 1980), which assumes that the story is nothing until and unless
the respondent, the listener, makes sense of it. Such a position affirms the basic
communication model, which posits that the feedback stage of any message is the
moment when the influence of that message is affirmed or denied by the recipient.
The other literature that is friendly to the conception of narrative as incomplete
is rhetorical theory, especially as represented in the concept of the enthymeme.
In classical rhetorical theory (Aristotle, 1991), an enthymeme is a truncated syllogism—
a set of premises and a conclusion used in formal logic—with a missing premise.
The audience participates by supplying the missing premise based on cultural
identification with the story (Weick & Browning, 1986).
Literally, the word enthymeme means “something in the mind” (Aristotle, 1991,
p. 33). When narrators share a story that matches a cultural identity, they can
An Open Architecture for Narratology 23
“communicate without making every assumption explicit.” In its simplest form, the
enthymeme is an inside joke between narrator and listener. In its most powerful
conceptualization, it is the basis for persuasion. Enthymemes are a prevailing tool of
persuasion because they allow audience members to draw on beliefs that they already
have—beliefs that are integral to the institutional order (Hartelius & Browning, 2008).
Part of the incompleteness of narratives is the moral implications that listeners might
draw from them. The moral component of narratives is part of the reason people
can find them engaging. We enlist narrative in our daily communication by marking
off a piece of time, saying what went on within it, painting a picture of characters
that listeners will find convincing, and drawing some kind of conclusion from what
is said that has an evaluative, moral component (Ricœur, 1974; Polster, 1987).
4. Narrative Meanings are Negotiable
Organizational narratives often require some kind of uptake from listeners. People
who listen actively to others’ stories often summarize what they took it to mean. In
conversation analysis, this is termed “formulating” the gist or upshot of the story
(Heritage & Watson, 1979). An example would be, “So you are saying you can’t
deliver until the damaged part is repaired?” Such a formulation reveals what the
interpreter thought the story meant, something that can be negotiated subsequently.
In couples therapy, therapists respond to the stories husbands and wives tell them by
coming up with a formulation, essentially supplying the couple with a new way to
understand what their stories mean (Weick & Browning, 1991; Buttny, 2004).
Buttny (2004) has shown that therapists negotiate these problem formulations when
clients do not initially concur.
If stories were told as set pieces, and if listeners passively absorbed them without
making their own contributions to the telling, then there would be limited chances to
respond to and interpret stories. But even viewers of media narratives, such as narratives
of health and illness portrayed on television, are far from passive. Rather, according
to Davin (2003, p. 674) they actively construct responses to media narratives as they:
produce complex, multi-layered, sometimes contradictory and/or unexpected
interpretations. They read and use broadcasts according to their mood and
wants at a particular moment. They generate meanings in their encounters
with flexible texts, meanings which cannot be predicted by content analysis
of broadcasts alone … By empathizing with characters, by assessing the disadvantages of different courses of action, by discussing storylines with relatives
and friends, by filling in the blanks, by creating narratives, by playing games
with the stories, etc., … viewers engage with, and learn from broadcasts.
In the case of conversational stories, due to the interactional nature of storytelling,
virtually any moment within a telling can alter the progress of the story and what it
is taken to mean. A key for the negotiation of meaning in a story is the point of
24 An Open Architecture for Narratology
view of the teller, the protagonist, and the listener. The most important element
of point of view is the vested interest of these three positions and the closeness of
the teller to the action he or she narrates. As Bruner says, “The Self as narrator not
only recounts but justifies” (1990, p. 121).
As people tell stories, they may also try to influence the significance others will
attach to them. For instance, they may offer disclaimers (Hewitt & Stokes, 1975) in
the midst of stories, such as by saying “I don’t mean to be judgmental, but … ”
before going on to say something judgmental. Another aligning action (Stokes &
Hewitt, 1976) is to qualify what one is saying, such as by acknowledging that a
piece of research is at an early stage and the conclusions drawn are just tentative.
Accounts (Scott & Lyman, 1968) may also be given to explain why the narrator
acted in ways others might think are questionable. Stories launched on one trajectory
often change as tellers and listeners negotiate what really happened and what it
really means (Mandelbaum, 1989).
5. Narratives Invite Sensemaking
Weick (1995) views narrative as the basic tool for achieving what he calls
“sensemaking”—the cognitive process for rendering varied and uncertain information
into plausible causal explanations. The fused term “sensemaking” is Weick’s own
neologism. He devised it to convey the idea that sensemaking, as he defines it, is
so all-encompassing in organizations that it deserves being distinguished as a new
usage about a new concept (Browning & Boudes, 2005). Sensemaking is always
retrospective. People within any organization are constantly trying to create order
and to make retrospective sense of what has occurred (Weick, 1995). Accordingly,
organizations become interpretation systems of participants who, through the back
and forth of their own understandings, provide meanings for each other via their
everyday interactions. For Weick, actors know who they are by what they say to
others and how others respond to them (Browning & Boudes, 2005). Weick (1995,
p. 8) observes, “People verbalize their interpretations and the processes they use to
generate them.” A distinctive feature of sensemaking is the way action (what people
say) and organization (the formal system that those people are in) collaborate to
make up the structure. For example, say an author and her editor collaborate with
an agreed-upon contract to improve the author’s book manuscript. That contract,
which might include, among other things, the technology they’ll use, the hourly
rate, the authority of the editor, and the work site of their collaboration, is their
organizational structure. Their discussions that hammer out an agreement on the
best wording and meaning make up their interactions. Weick would have us see
those discussions as a type of action because generating discourse is an act of
performance and production. Sensemaking is about composing and delivering a
message as well as interpreting one—in his words, “authoring as well as reading”
(Weick, 1995, p. 7). For Weick, sensemaking is placing an interpretative structure
on some incident or environment—that is to say, offering a plausible understanding of
An Open Architecture for Narratology 25
it that is based on assessing various pertinent factors, which might include historical
precedents, the social context of the decision-makers, the knowledge of people
“on the ground” as opposed to what is understood by management sometimes far
removed from the scene, and so on. Additionally, Weick views sensemaking as best
done in small pieces, or what he calls “chunks,” to avoid premature, wholesale conclusions. One’s specific understanding of those chunks enables one to combine the
causal inferences that can be interpreted narratively. Stories “gather strands of
experience into a plot” or a “good narrative” that provides a “plausible frame for
sensemaking” and a way of mapping formal coherence on “what is otherwise a
flowing soup” (Weick, 1995, p. 128). Narrative is the container, if you will, for the
interpretation process that is involved in making sense out of an uncertain and
sometimes deceptive world.
Of course, others besides Weick have understood narratives as central to interpretation
processes in organizations. Boje (1991), Czarniawska (1997) and Polkinghorne (1988)
also view narratives as the grist for sensemaking. As stated by Starkey and Crane
(2003, p. 221):
At a time when the past monopoly of the sciences on rationality has been
weakened, narrative can endow our experience with meaning and generate
stories that allow or motivate us to see new connections between events.
Narrative can draw our attention to blind spots and help us see what we
could not see before: that key concepts do not so much constitute a theory
with predictive validity as provide a guide for interpretation.
Robichaud (2001, p. 619) asserts that “the role of narration in organizational communication and sensemaking is now widely accepted” and credits the contributions
of Czarniawska, Cooren, Fisher, Boje, and Bruner, among others, for this newly
prominent role.
Fundamental to the understanding of a narrative is the causal interpretation.
One statement of causal development in narrative is Roland Barthes’ (1996) interpretation of the row of telephones from an early scene of the James Bond movie
Goldfinger. That there are two phones in that scene only makes a difference if at
some future point in the narrative their presence becomes causal by driving the story
in a particular direction. Any force that causes the story to pivot (to turn
dramatically), whether it be a telephone or a hero, carries what Barthes labels a
“cardinal” function. Narratives are causal whether they are multi-causal with several
explanations for what happened or whether the cause is singular and a clear point of
the story.
6. Narratives are Culturally Styled
To transport a reader or listener to a different culture, a story needs to provide
adequate detail about the setting, good continuity, and incidents that are plausible
26 An Open Architecture for Narratology
to its place and time (Aristotle, 1981). The good narrative, then, is essentially a good
imitation (Aristotle, 1981). Narratives are culturally styled in the sense that they are
authentic in terms of what members do, say, and think about their actions. For
example, Clifford Geertz (1973) considered the cockfight to be characteristic of an
aspect of Balinese culture, a “text” that could be interpreted to better understand
Balinese life. Narratives arising in and from a culture are similarly revealing. About
the Balinese cockfight text, Geertz (1973, pp. 449–50) concluded:
Every people, the proverb has it, loves its own form of violence. The cockfight is
the Balinese reflection on theirs: on its uses, its force, its fascination. Drawing
on almost every level of Balinese experience, it brings together themes—animal
savagery, male narcissism, opponent gambling, status rivalry, mass excitement,
blood sacrifice—whose main connection is their involvement with rage and
the fear of rage, and binding them into a set of rules which at once contains
them and allows them play, builds a symbolic structure in which, over and
over again, the reality of their inner affiliation can be intelligibly felt.
Karen Tracy (2002) summarizes three ways culture influences narrative activity.
First, listeners from a culture different than the teller’s may assess the character of the
narrator or other actors in unanticipated ways because they are likely to make different
moral assessments of the actors. Second, topics for narratives will often vary from
culture to culture. Third, narrative style varies by cultural group. Some prefer a linear
style; others may skip from topic to topic. To sensitize you to such differences, we
invite readers to reflect upon the kinds of research stories that are privileged in their
ways of doing social science. Since opinion varies as to what constitutes convincing
evidence, some of us would never imagine conducting an experiment or administering a questionnaire as part of our research method, while others would not consider
research that did not involve one or the other of these procedures. Another quick
way to grasp the cultural styling of narratives is to imagine the difference between a
telling in which the narrator mimics the dialect of the actors, versus the narrator
who fails to do so, either through indifference or ineptitude.
According to Bittner (1982), style is one feature that accounts for the distinctive
way things are done in organizations. For example, the U.S. Army has uniforms
with brass buttons that require polishing prior to inspection whereas the Air Force,
having wanted to establish itself as unique from the Army, has tarnished silver that
goes unpolished. Or take the Modern Language Association and the American
Psychological Association. Though both are huge multidisciplinary academic entities
existing side by side, each has developed its own very elaborate style manual for
properly formatting research documents, and woe to any doctoral student who fails
to follow the prescribed form. Such cultural styling of narratives is nicely illustrated
in Russell and Porter’s (2003) study of single older men’s narratives of household
experiences. They observed that these narratives were framed by the importance
of money in these men’s everyday lives. Money was seen to be an index for these
An Open Architecture for Narratology 27
men in that their stories often told how much they could do in their bygone
workdays.
One indicator of a culture’s style is its proportion of lists to stories (Browning, 1992).
For example, a technical culture, such as one focusing on accounting or engineering,
would almost certainly be list-driven, whereas a religious organization is more likely
to base its direction on what it considers holy stories. The former illustrates what
Fisher (1984) would call technical rationality, while the latter illustrates what he
would term narrative rationality. Both have important communicative roles. All of
us would support technical rationality because we want our engineers and architects
to build structures rationally, and all of us want our pilots, before takeoff, to be
consulting a flight checklist rather than simply depending on what they learned
from a narrative. By the same token, though, but for the Ten Commandments and
similar codes, monotheistic religions are built around stories because they are faithbased and because our belief in them arises from historical narrative documents. We
conclude that most cultures evidence a mix of lists and stories, for people have both
procedural parts of their jobs and lives but will also often interpret those procedures
with stories (Browning, 1992).
7. Narratives Come in Many Forms
We side with those, such as Roland Barthes (1996), Barbara Czarniawska (1998, 2004),
and Walter Fisher (1987) who propose a broad, rather than a restricted, idea of what
counts as narrative. Our view permits an almost limitless variety of forms. Barthes
(1996, p. 45) declares:
There are countless forms of narrative in the world. First of all, there is a
prodigious variety of genres, each of which branches out into a variety of
media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man’s stories.
Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or
written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of these
substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories,
epics, history, tragedy drame (suspense drama), comedy, pantomime, paintings
(in Santa Ursula by Carpaccio, for instance), stained-glass windows, movies, local
news, conversation. Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at
all times, in all places, in all societies, indeed narrative starts with the very
history of mankind; there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people
without narrative.
Likewise, Riessman (2008) recognizes a wide variety of forms of narrative. She
includes the memoir (personal account), biography (story of the other), autobiography (story of the self), diaries (daily musings of details), archival documents
(official record of activity), social service and health records (professional proof of
action and accountability), other organizational documents (hard copies that affirm a
28 An Open Architecture for Narratology
history), scientific theories (explanations of probabilities), folk ballads (musical
representations of culture), photographs (visual records of scenes), and other works
of art. Riessman’s (2008) criterion for what counts as narrative is that it comprises a
consequential linking of events that are otherwise disconnected; all the above forms
meet this criterion. Taylor and Van Every argue that narrative is not limited to
merely telling a story, but instead is a “basic trait of all forms of cognitive processing
of social information” (2000, p. 41). Cognitive processing is the causal connections
we make to create understandings, and these connections, say Taylor and Van
Every, are invariably perceived in narrative form.
Considering the full array of forms, many of which differ from the literary works
of art which were the original objects of narratology, we join those who make no
distinction between a narrative and a story, including Czarniawska (1988), Reissman
(2008), and Polkinghorne (1988), and we will use both terms interchangeably. The
range of stories we consider includes the petit récit (Lyotard, 1984), the monomyth
(Campbell, 2008), and everything in between, including the personal story (Bochner,
1994). However, just because something is petit doesn’t mean it is necessarily
underdeveloped. There are a few essential elements to stories/narratives as we view
them, and we would not confuse a story preface or story fragment with a story. In
our view, it is not sufficient that a person attaches meaning to a set of events or that
an interpretation remains implicit to an individual (Lazaroff & Snowden, 2006); a
narrative is a communicative act and, as such, it is both produced and interpreted.
Rather than relegating the term “story” to the basement of narratology, our
approach equates stories with narratives. However, we concur with those authors,
such as Gabriel (2004) and Boje (2001), who recognize that many contemporary
organizational texts are too partial and/or fragmented to be considered narratives.
We think Boje’s term “antenarrative” (2001), applies fairly straightforwardly to an
attempt to engage in narrative that doesn’t get fully launched. Either because others’
stories are told instead, or one can’t get the conversational opportunity to give a
narrative, it is certainly possible for tellings to be “anted” (or offered up) without
being developed fully enough to count …