Narratives

Conceptual Overview

Organizational narrative has challenged standard views of organizations built around the themes of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and authority, and emphasizes, if not the primacy, at least the relative autonomy of the symbolic dimension. This is itself part of the broader linguistic turn in the social and human sciences—a propensity to view many social and psychological phenomena as constituted through language, sustained through language, and challenged through language.

Approaches differ in the study of organizational narratives. At the most daring and extreme, some, including Barbara Czarniawska, have argued that organizations are themselves discursive effects, subnarratives within the grand narrative of modernity. From this perspective, organizations share the fate of other effects of modernity, such as the sovereign self, the body, or indeed “facts,” becoming discursive constructions. Other theorists have looked at narratives as constitutive of organizations but not as fully constituting them. Narratives in organizations may appear in many forms, including stories (official and unofficial), advertisements, brochures, reports, and so forth, yet they do not exhaust the domain of organization. Important as it is to study them, they are not enough for a complete understanding of organizational or social practices.

An influential approach to narrative was offered by Roland Barthes, who argued that narratives include a wide variety of genres, such as myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, and conversation. He viewed narrative as the core feature of all societies across the ages, arguing that there have been no people without narratives.

Critical Commentary and Future Directions

Stories are frequently used interchangeably with narratives, narratives with texts, and texts with discourse. In particular, the tendency among numerous theorists (following the practice of journalists) has been to stretch the idea of story so that it encompasses virtually any [Page 945]aspect of sensical discourse. “What is the story?” is seen as an invitation to offer any explanation. As David Boje has argued, any discursive device that generates and sustains meaning and any meaningful text is then seen as a story. Such an approach unfortunately obliterates some of the unique qualities of stories and narratives that make them vivid and powerful but also fragile sensemaking devices. Some authors have expressed reservations at such pan-narrativist views, arguing that not all texts are narratives and not all narratives are stories. Narratives can then be seen as particular types of text and stories as particular types of narrative. Following Yiannis Gabriel, unlike definitions, labels, lists, recipes, and other texts, narratives involve temporal chains of interrelated events or actions, undertaken by characters. They are not mere snapshot photographic images, but require sequencing and plots. Narratives may differ in their relation to actual events, from fairly accurate accounts to totally fantastic ones. One of their vital qualities is that precision is often sacrificed in the interest of effect, in what is known as poetic license. Good narratives and, in particular, good stories are memorable, pithy, and full of meaning, stimulating emotion and fantasy. This is what makes them quite powerful devices in management of meaning and emotion and the diffusion of knowledge.

...