Narratives as social practice in organisational contexts

Abstract

Organizational studies, as a discipline, has displayed a strong interest in the use of narrative analysis to investigate issues of concern to scholars, such as those around sense-making, communication, politics and power, learning and change, as well as identity and identification (Rhodes & Brown, 2005). However, much, though of course not all, of this research has tended to focus on ‘big’ stories – i.e., “those derived from interviews, clinical encounters, autobiographical writing, and other such interrogative venues” (Freeman, 2006, p.131) – and has paid lit-tle attention to small stories – i.e., “those derived from everyday social exchanges” (Freeman, 2006, p.131; see also Georgakopoulou, 2006). Moreover, these ‘big’ stories are often analysed as decontextualized end-products (the outcome). Conse-quently, the fine-grained detail of the exact formulation of stories (the medium), which necessarily has an impact on the narrative as product, is often overlooked. Furthermore, other aspects of the storytelling activity, such as the extent to which narratives are told in collaboration with others – ranging from interviewers for ‘big’ stories to co-tellers for ‘small’ stories – and questions around why particular narratives are told at one particular point in time and place rather than at another tend to receive much less attention (though see Clifton et al., 2020). Yet, we argue that these aspects of storytelling are particularly deserving of academic attention. This is because they enable researchers to obtain a much more multi-facetted insight into how narratives are produced and how they work in the specific context in which they occur. This is exactly what a narrative as social practice-approach capitalizes on, namely the actual in situ telling of the stories (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008). It has a clear emphasis on the analysis of stories as sequentially organized dialogic constructions which are embedded in the local business of the storytellers and which are rhetorically