Narrative Theory

Narrative theory is an umbrella term for various word-based approaches to the study of human acts, including acts of or associated with governance. These include such approaches as discourse analysis, the analysis of stories or storytelling, or more broadly, interpretive social science, in which narrative analysis may be a part. Narrative approaches draw their theoretical substance primarily from philosophy, developmental psychology, and literary theory. They are part of the late twentieth-century “turns” in the social sciences—turns away from various forms of quantitative, behavioralist approaches to the analysis of human behavior toward more meaning-focused analytic approaches, including the so-called interpretive turn, the linguistic turn, and the argumentative turn. Narrative theories argue for the centrality of expressiveness in human acts and in reasoning about those acts, rather than seeing instrumental rationality as the central human orientation. This is seen as holding for collective selves (e.g., organizations and polities) as much as for individual selves.