Carl Rhodes and Andrew D. Brown - Libero.it · development of narrative approaches in...

International Journal of Management Reviews Volume 7 Issue 3 pp. 167–188 167

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKIJMRInternational Journal of Management Reviews1460-8545© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 200573ORIGINAL ARTICLENarrative, organizations and researchXX

Narrative, organizations and researchCarl Rhodes and Andrew D. Brown

Given the rapid expansion of narrative approaches in management and organization theoryin recent years, this paper investigates the contribution of this literature to the under-standing of organizations and processes of organizing. The paper tells the story of thedevelopment of narrative approaches in organizational theory. Narrative’s contribution to sub-stantive areas of organization theory is evaluated. These developments are then reviewedin relation to an ongoing tension between story and science. We conclude by contemplatingsome of the criticisms, and the future, of narrative research.

Introduction

What is a good story worth? In a famousexchange of views published in the Academyof Management Review in 1991, Dyer andWilkins argued that, not only was the point ofcase research to produce an ‘exemplar’, ‘a storyagainst which researchers can compare theirexperiences and gain rich theoretical insights’(p. 613), but that the ‘classics’ in organizationstudies ‘are good stories’ (p. 617). In reply,Eisenhardt (1991) contended that stories arenot theories, and while ‘[g]ood storytelling maymake … studies entertaining to read … theirtheoretical impact comes from rigorous methodand multiple-case comparative logic’ (p. 621).This dialogue crystallizes a key theme that hascome to characterize the development of nar-rative research in organization theory – theongoing tension between stories and science.To explore this, we tell the story of the devel-opment of narrative research and assess thecontribution it has made to organization the-ory more generally. Piecing together this storyis important because, despite the burgeoning

of the literature on narrative since 1991 (e.g.Boje 2001; Czarniawska 1999; Gabriel 2000),as yet there has been no attempt to assess sys-tematically the value of this literature to ourunderstanding of processes of organizing, orto consider critically its impact on our field.

In telling the story of narrative research, werecognize that our story, rather than just beinga passive rendering of events, assumes ‘thedouble role of mimesis-mythos’ (Kearney2002, 12). That is, a story, unlike a chronol-ogy – a list of events in date order – is a ‘cre-ative re-description of the world such thathidden patterns and hitherto unexploredmeanings can unfold’ (ibid., 12). An import-ant implication of this observation is that anyparticular series of events can be incorporatedin many different stories, each of which issusceptible to multiple interpretations(Rhodes 2001a). To author a story is always acreative act, and our story is just one of manythat could be told about narrative research.Ours is not a quest for scientific truth, but aquest for meaning. This is a key issue that willform a main theme of the paper. In our terms,

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Narrative, organizations and research

the ‘fact’ that any series of events can be nar-rated in a plurality of ways is less of a ‘prob-lem’ for research; it is an issue that has as itscore how researchers should take responsibil-ity for their work (Rhodes and Brown 2005).We have chosen to write this paper, to emplotthe story of narrative research, in order thatit might be better understood, appreciatedand interrogated by those who use it. In theseways, we hope to contribute to existing meth-odological dialogues.

The value of narrative methodologies is byno means undisputed. Even scholars who con-duct case study research often express a pro-found unease when it is suggested that theirpreferred representational strategy is a kind ofstory, and that such stories may appropriatelybe evaluated against literary criteria. As Lie-blich et al. (1998, 1) have asserted, frequentlythe study of narrative ‘has been criticized asbeing more art than research’. Why art is notof value as knowledge is more often assumedthan argued. It is to question such assump-tions that we review and assess the impact ofthe concept and associated theories of narrativewithin organization studies. This task is importantand overdue, not only because of the largenumber of studies that now adopt the methodsand vocabulary associated with various narra-tologies, but also because it is valuable for usto reflect on, and to problematize, the ways inwhich the organization theory literature isdeveloping. We start by introducing the notionof narrative and tracing its development inorganizational theory. We then examine fivemajor areas of inquiry where narrative has beenused in organization theory: (1) sensemaking,(2) communication, (3) politics and power, (4)learning/change, and (5) identity and identifi-cation. We next discuss the main theoreticalcontributions and limitations of this researchbefore concluding with an assessment of crit-icisms, future challenges and possible directions.In so doing, we make the point that organizationtheory is still limited by a meta-theoreticalperspective that sees science and stories asseparate domains, rather than different formsof knowledge. It is this unresolved conflict

that characterizes the unfinished story of thedevelopment of narrative research.

Narrative in Social and Organizational Research

The development and use of narrative approachesis one symptom of the ‘linguistic turn’ that hasoccurred not just in organization studies butin the social sciences generally (Alvesson andKarreman 2000; Deetz 2003). Narratologicalconcerns have been raised in disciplines asdistinct as sociology (Ezzy 1998; Maines 1993;Somers 1994), history (Carr 1986; White 1987),various branches of psychology (Rappaport2000; Sarbin 1986; White and Epston 1990),communication studies (Cooren 1999; Fisher1984), folklore (Georges 1969; Robinson 1981),anthropology (Geertz 1988; Levi-Strauss 1963)and philosophy (Ricoeur 1983).

In organization theory in particular, it hasbeen suggested that ‘[o]rganizational story andstorytelling research has produced a rich bodyof knowledge unavailable through other meth-ods of analysis’ (Stutts and Barker 1999, 213),that the adoption of a narrative approach ‘mayincrease the relevance of organizational know-ledge produced by academics’ (Ng and deCock 2002, 25) and that the use of narrativeapproaches might encourage organization theory‘to reinvigorate itself’ (Czarniawska 1998, 13).Boje (2001) has distinguished narratologies asdistinct as living story, realism, formalism,pragmatism, social constructionism, poststruc-turalism, critical theory and postmodernism,each with its own preferred research agenda andconstitutive assumptions. Yet, while the com-munity for which narrative is a legitimate meansof analysing and representing human relationsis in some ways disparate (Riessman 1993,16–17), it is cohered by a shared interest inwork that ‘is informed by or centers on nar-rativity’ (Fisher 1985, 347), and researchassumptions that favour pluralism, relativismand subjectivity (Lieblish et al. 1998, 2). AsCurrie (1998) has argued, there is discernible‘an abstract pool of resources drawn eclecticallyfrom different narratological histories’ (p. 14)

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that forms ‘a single body’ (p. 27) which ‘has con-verged into an increasingly shared vocabularywith increasingly similar objectives’ (p. 135).

The history of narrative in organizationresearch is relatively brief, and the diverseunderstandings and deployment of narrative inorganization theory noted above are relativelyrecent occurrences. The earliest explicit uses ofnarrative approaches to inform research meth-odology in management and organization the-ory date from the 1970s (e.g. Clark 1972;Mitroff and Kilmann 1976, 1978). Most com-monly such studies took as their methodolog-ical position that stories, myths, sagas and otherforms of narrative were an overlooked yet valu-able source of data for research in organiza-tions. For example, in their 1976 study, Mitroffand Kilmann noted that, at the time, there hadbeen little systematic study of organizationalmyths and stories, as this was not consideredto be the ‘proper focus of studies of the socialsciences’ (p. 191). Working against this dom-inant logic, they devised a research projectwhich gathered short stories written by man-agers to express their concept of an idealorganization and compared it with the resultsof a short personality test based on a Jungianpersonality typology. Their methodologicalposition was that stories gave the researcheraccess to the unconscious yet projective imagesof what the organization meant to the managers.

As the research focus on organizational cul-ture and symbolism grew in the 1980s and1990s, so did the use of narratives to explorethe meaning of organizational experience.Researchers recognized that storytelling wasan important means through which managersacquired knowledge at work and suggestedthat stories be taken as a credible source ofknowledge by scholars (Hummel 1991). Theemerging issue was how to use stories as‘devices which peer into human desires, wishes,hopes and fears … [where] … the best storiesare those which stir people’s minds, heartsand souls and by doing so give them newinsights into themselves, their problems andtheir human condition. The challenge is todevelop a human science that more fully serves

this aim’ (Mitroff and Kilmann 1978). Buildingon arguments such as these, researchers soughtnew ways to incorporate stories into research.Often located within a social constructivistframework (Boyce 1996), the use of narrativesas data enabled researchers to examine emo-tional and symbolic lives within organizations(Gabriel 1998; Van Buskirk and McGrath 1992).

Complementing the idea that people inorganizations are storytellers and that theirstories constituted valid empirical materialsfor research, a related methodological positionsoon began to be articulated which recognizedthat researchers, too, are storytellers. As wellas pioneering new ways of using narratives asempirical materials, researchers have alsodeveloped new methodological positions interms of the narrative nature of research itself.In reviewing case studies in organization andmanagement theory, Dyer and Wilkins (1991)made the observation that such studies gaintheir power from their narrative elementsrather than just their abstract concepts. Theysuggested that these stories use the theory asa plot and are highly effective and persuasivemeans of communicating research (especiallyin contrast to statistical demonstrations oftheory). What was recognized was that disci-plines in the social sciences ranging fromsociology to ethnography and to organizationstudies had long been founded on the abilityto tell a good story (Clegg 1993) such that,although not traditionally a trademark of sci-entific texts, narrative is always present inthem (Czarniawska 1999). Research tended touse the term ‘story’ rather than ‘narrative’, totreat organizational stories as in vivo artefacts,and to emphasize that their importance derivedfrom the insights they provided on other aspectsof organization, such as how control is exer-cised (Wilkins 1983) and organizationaldistinctiveness claimed (Martin et al. 1983).

Today, narrative research is much moremulti-faceted – narratives are recognized notonly as a form of data (Mitroff and Kilmann1976), but also as a theoretical lens (Pent-land 1999), a methodological approach (Boje2001), and various combinations of these.



Narrative and its near conceptual neighbourssuch as story (Boje 1995), fantasy (Gabriel1995), saga (Clark 1972) and myth (Kaye1995) have been implicated in studies of proc-esses of socialization (Brown 1982), learning(Tenkasi and Bolman 1993), strategic individ-uality (Harfield and Hamilton 1997), the exerciseof power and control (Mumby 1987), sense-making (Brown 1986), culture formation (Jordan1996), collective centring (Boyce 1996), com-munity mediation (Cobb 1993), IT implemen-tation (Brown 1998), and even the policy decisionsof academic journals (Boje et al. 1996). Thiswealth of work from those who collect storiestold in organizations (Martin et al. 1983), tellstories about organizations (Van Maanen1988), define organizations as storytelling sys-tems (Boje 1991a; Currie and Brown 2003),and conceptualize organization studies as a setof storytelling practices (Clegg 1993; Czarni-awska 1999; Hatch 1996) is both indicativeand constitutive of narrative’s impact.

Using Narrative Research to Study Organizations

To examine the substantive contribution ofnarrative research, in this section we continueour story by discussing five of the principalresearch areas within organization studies towhich narrative has been directed: (1) sense-making, (2) communication, (3) learning/change, (4) politics and power, and (5) iden-tity and identification. In considering thesefields, we seek to demonstrate the depth andreach of the contribution of narrative to organ-ization theory.

Narrative Sensemaking

There is a broad consensus among narrativescholars that sensemaking refers to processesof narrativization (MacIntyre 1981), that ourversions of reality take narrative form (Bruner1991), and that stories are means of interpret-ing and infusing events with meaning (Gabriel2000). Further, the recognition that ‘the per-formance of stories is a key part of members’

sensemaking’ (Boje 1995, 1000) in organiza-tions emphasizes that people understand com-plex events in ways which are integrated andtemporally coherent rather than, for example,as atemporal and disconnected ‘frameworks’(Cantril 1941, 20). As Weick (1995) argues,stories are pivotal to sensemaking becausethey aid comprehension, suggest a causal orderfor events, enable people to talk about absentthings, act as mnemonics, guide action andconvey shared values and meanings. There isa wealth of theoretical and empirical workthat suggests stories help participants reduce‘the equivocality (complexity, ambiguity, un-predictability) of organizational life’ (Brownand Kreps 1993, 48), are ‘the main source ofknowledge in the practice of organizing’(Czarniawska 1997, 5–6), and ‘can be usedto predict future organizational behavior’(Martin 1992, 287). Key to this is the use ofnarrative order to delineate emplotment andcausality out of endemically chaotic and dis-organized (Cooper 1990) life at work. Thepresence of a plot in stories constructs thepassage from one state of affairs to another(Czarniawska 2004) so that the sensemakingthat is done through narrative will always betemporal rather than static.

A sensemaking perspective sees organiza-tions are narratively constructed (Bruner 1991)from ‘networks of conversations’ (Ford 1999,485). Within such processes, however, it isalways possible for different potential mean-ings to emerge through the social and politicalprocesses of sensemaking. Narrative sense-making thus attests to the pluralization ofpossible ways that sense can be made. Recog-nition of this has permitted researchers tostudy the different ways in which elaboratednarratives and narrative fragments are or arenot sufficiently consistent and continuous tomaintain and objectify reality for participants.More than this, narratives ‘are the style andsubstance of life’ (Trible 1984, 1) throughwhich ‘identities, moral orders and relationalpatterns are constructed’ (Cobb and Rifkin1991, 71) out of the multitude of subject posi-tions socially available.


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Theorists with postmodern inclinations havegone so far as to say that stories should beregarded as ontologically prior to sensemak-ing, and that what people seek to make senseof are not events themselves, but accounts ofthem. Storytelling, then, has also been consid-ered as a way that people reflexively makesense of organizations and organizational lifeand infuse their working lives with meaning.Accordingly, there is no ‘other reality’ to findunder or behind narratives, because narrativesform ‘the very texture of events’ (Skoldberg1994, 233) and the means through whichorganizations are reflexively constructed. Inaddition, this suggests that, in appraising anygiven narrative, ‘there is no single basicallybasic story subsisting beneath it but, rather, anunlimited number of other narratives that canbe constructed in response to it or perceivedas related to it’ (Smith 1981, 217). The reflex-ivity of narrative sensemaking thus assumesthat language ‘affects what we see and eventhe logic we use to structure our thought’(Thatchenkery 2001, 115) such that narrativesare structures through which events are madesense of rather than just being representationswhich convey meaning.

It has been claimed that ‘The ultimate lackof sense is when you cannot produce a narra-tive to go with a situation’ (Wallemacq andSims 1998, 121). Generally understood as thoseprocesses of meaning production wherebypeople subjectively interpret phenomena andproduce inter-subjective accounts (Weick 1995),processes of sensemaking are widely regardedas vital to our capacity to organize success-fully. In particular, Orr’s (1990) study ofphotocopy repair technicians and Patriotta’s(2003) research on shop floor operatives bothsuggest that narratives are fundamental diag-nostic tools that foster the spread of commonunderstandings within communities of work-ers. This reflects a foundational assumption ofthe literature which suggests that humans are,either by nature (Brown 1986, 73) or as a resultof socialization processes (Goody and Watt1962–63; Krashen 1982), predisposed tothink in storied form. Extending Burke’s (1968)

definition of man as a symbol-using animal,our species has been referred to as ‘homo nar-rans’ by a communication theorist (Fisher 1984,6), ‘homo fabulans – the tellers and interpret-ers of narrative’ by a literary theorist (Currie1998, 2), and as ‘essentially a story-tellinganimal’ by a moral philosopher (MacIntyre1981, 201). Sociologists have defined a per-son ‘as a self-narrating organism’ (Ezzy 1998;Maines 1993, 23), the historian White (1981,1) has described the ‘impulse to narrate’ as‘natural’, and psychologists of various hueshave characterized narrative as ‘a primarycognitive instrument’ (Mink 1978, 131; Polk-inghorne 1988, 1) that underlies our thinkingand emotional life (Rappaport 2000, 40), asan agent of both memory (Bower and Clark1969) and meaning (Bruner 1990). In organ-ization studies, Boland and Tenkasi (1995)have argued that narratives constitute the basicorganizing principle of human cognition.

Communicating with Stories

As a form of communication, narrative hasbeen employed by examining the stories thatpeople in organizations tell one another inorder to describe past or anticipated events,relationships, successes, failures and emotions(Boje 1991b; Jones 1990). Inherent in thisapproach is the view that people use narra-tives to order their experience as they makesense of it. Rather than regarding communica-tion as a form of transmission (Brown 1985),narrative recasts communication as a form ofsymbolic action (Weick and Browning 1986)which provides sequence, meaning and struc-ture for those who live, create or invent stories(Browning 1992; Fisher 1984, 1985). This hasenabled researchers to study communication asa means through which organizational realityis reflexively constructed through discursiveaction (Cooren 1999). Such action is mediatedthrough stories, where stories are understoodas symbolic forms of discourse that are a‘framework for reality construction in the organ-ization’ (Brown 1986, 80), that provide acommon symbolic ground for organizational



culture (Bormann 1994) and enable the crea-tion, transformation and maintenance of thatculture (Myrsiades 1987). Narratives are thusregarded as the means through which experi-ence is reflexively reconstituted, made mean-ingful and made communicable. This is aconstitutive reflexivity which sees accounts ofthe world as constituting the affairs that theyspeak of (Macbeth 2001).

Central to communication is the form oftemporal sequencing that narratives perform(Browning 1992; Fisher 1984, 1985). Thisinvolves assembling and reassembling eventsas they are experienced into meaningfully temp-oralized narratives through which symbolicmeaning and causal explanations can beinter-subjectively discussed, contested and (per-haps) agreed upon. The temporalized expres-sion of the meaning of organizational eventsis achieved by imposing narrativity onto thoseevents, no one narration is necessarily correct,true or accurate, but rather that there are ‘asmany narratives as there are actors’ (Cooren1999, 301; see also Boje 1995). A distinctfeature of narrative approaches has been thestudy of how different forms of communica-tive narration can produce different organiza-tional realities that exist simultaneously(Boje et al. 1999). Thus an organization can beregarded as a ‘multidiscursive and precariouseffect or product’ (Law 1994, 250) – a ‘story-telling organization’ (Boje 1991a, 1995) that isenacted both through stories and through thegenres in which they are told (Rhodes 2001a).This is in contrast to the more traditionalapproaches to organizational communicationthat regard organizations as closed systemswith no contests over meaning (May 1994).Attention to plurality has enabled researchers tofocus on how competing narratively embodiedinterpretations interact and how some storiesbecome dominant and others marginalized(Aaltio-Marjosola 1994; Boje 1995).

Communications reflect the everydaydramas which people in organizations find import-ant, and these can both support and opposemanagerial narratives (Brown and McMillan1991). Narrative theory has been used to argue

that communication is not about objectivefacts that exist independent of the person orgroups through which they are transmitted.Rather, stories are subjective and inter-subjectiveaccounts of experience. The value of studyingstories is that they are ‘inherent and powerfulin organizational communication’ (Smith andKeyton 2001, 174); they are ‘the blood vesselsthrough which changes pulsate in the heartof organizational life’ (Boje 1991b, 8) andare ‘vehicles of communication management’(Kaye 1995, 1). From this perspective, story-telling is an important aspect of managerialbehaviour (Irwin and More 1993; Kaye 1995;Morgan and Dennehy 1997). Stories are adevice through which managers work to informemployees about their preferred organiza-tional cultures (Wilkins 1984) and providemanagers with a form of social and inter-subjective interaction that reflects belief sys-tems, role expectations, interpersonal normsand conditions for work behaviour (Hansenand Kahnweiler 1993; Irwin and More 1993).These stories are of value to researchers becausethey contain the subject-specific morals andbeliefs of the people telling them (Hansenand Kahnweiler 1993; Martin 1982), serve asvehicles for community memory (Orr 1990),and socialize people into organizational norms(Brown 1985). Stories are, thus, important tothe study of organizational communicationbecause they are central in creating and main-taining corporate culture (Weick and Brown-ing 1986), and legitimizing ‘the power structurewithin a group or organization’ (Brown 1986,78–79). Such communication processes involvethe co-production of organizational realitiesthrough particular instances of story perform-ances (Boje 1991a). The active nature of suchstorytelling attests to the way that communi-cation is subjectively enacted within givensocial and cultural meaning structures ratherthan being transmission based.

Narrative, Change and Learning

The development of narrative approaches has alsobeen extended into the study of organizational


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change and learning. Such approaches drawheavily on the notion of narrative as a form oftemporal order in that, like narrative, changeis a time-based construct. While some theo-rists have argued that organizational changesare often constituted by changes in the narra-tives that participants author (e.g. Brown andHumphreys 2003), the major focus of this lit-erature has been on how stories are a way ofmanaging change in organizational culture. Inparticular, stories achieve this by encapsulat-ing and entrenching organizational values (Meyer1995), and by encouraging people in organ-izations to reformulate the meanings associ-ated with organizational stories of both thepast and the future (Feldman 1990; Kaye1995; Kelly 1985; McConkie and Boss 1994;McConkie and Wayne 1986; Wilkins 1984).In this respect, stories are a ‘powerful mediafor bringing about changes in people and inthe culture of their workplace’ (Kaye 1995,1). These stories are said to relate the unstatednorms that inform managerial rhetoric aboutorganizational change (Feldman and Skold-berg 2002), as well as enabling the develop-ment of rich models of change and decisionmaking that capture its complexity and detail(Stevenson and Greenberg 1998).

In terms of strategic change, stories havebeen theorized as diagnostic aids that peopleuse to understand organizational norms andvalues, as management tools to involve peoplein the change process, and as means for help-ing people envision potential future realitiesfrom creative interpretations of the past (Barryand Elmes 1997; Boje 1991b; McConkie andBoss 1994). By linking past, present and future,such stories are said to be able to produce lim-inal conditions between current realities andfuture possibilities by constructing an ‘as if’reality that helps people deal with ambiguityand change and thus helps create new andapparently legitimate structural conditions(Feldman 1990).

Narrative approaches have also contributedto understanding how particular meaningsascribed to organizational changes becomedominant (Rhodes 2001a). Stories that circulate

culturally across organizations have been seento provide accepted scripts through which tounderstand the dynamics of different organ-izational cultures (Martin et al. 1983). Storiesare in this sense relational processes (Abma2003) that allow collective action to be insti-gated (Gold 1997). During change efforts,these collective stories can act as a means ofsocial control that prescribe or reinforce man-agerially preferred behaviours and values(McConkie and Boss 1986). This has led tosuggestions that ‘we need theories of changeand consulting from a multiple narrative per-spective’ (Boje 1994, 457) and that theseshould be analysed in situ as embedded inorganizational dialogues (Rhodes 2000b). Suchdialogues stand in opposition to managerialmonologues or ‘grand stories’ (Aaltio-Marjosola1994) that enable hegemony to masquerade asconsensus (Rhodes 2000b). To create dialogue,stories have also been employed as forms oforganizational development intervention throughthe use of storytelling workshops which elicit‘counter stories’ in order to challenge existingand outmoded ways of working (Abma 2000,2003). Such interventions have also beenstudied in their function of introducing thevoices of those who were hitherto unheard inorganizational dialogues (Boje 1991b; Hum-phreys and Brown 2002a,b).

Another critical contribution of narrativeresearch to the study of change has been anexamination of how people in organizationsconstruct their own narratives about changethat can be inconsistent with those storylinescentrally promulgated (Rhodes 2000a; Vaara2002). This suggests that the meaningsattached to change are not fixed or deter-mined, but rather that people are reflexivelyengaged in developing their own interpreta-tions of, and reactions to, change. The use ofdifferent narrative strategies has even beenshown to enable what were previouslyregarded as failed change projects to be re-narrated as successful, and vice versa (Vaara2002). It has also been demonstrated thatstories can serve as means to provide legiti-macy for organizational changes that might



otherwise have been considered illegitimate,irrational or unnecessary (Rhodes 1997).In this sense, the meaning of change isreflexively constructed rather than beinginherent in the material events that constitutethe change. Further, stories can provide ameans for managers to exonerate themselvesfrom responsibility for failed change efforts(Brown and Jones 1998; Vaara 2002) andfor founders of new organizations to justifythe existence of them, and convince othersto invest in them (O’Connor 2002).

The relationship between narrative andlearning based approaches to organizationalchange is well established at both organiza-tional and inter-subjective levels (Taylor et al.2002; Tenkasi and Boland 1993; Vance 1991).Here learning is understood as occurring withinthe subjectively and inter-subjectively acceptedstructures of meaning embedded in repeatedstories (Levitt and March 1988); stories whichencapsulate the complexity of practice betterthan static or abstract models do. These storiescan be regarded as stores of collective memorycommunicated and institutionalized throughrepetition (Orr 1990; Weick and Roberts1993) that can be re-narrated to produce a‘diagnostic bricolage’ (Orr 1990, 185) used tosolve novel problems. In this way, storiesare a means of learning that communities usecollectively and contextually to change andimprove practice (Brown and Duguid 1991;Kreps 1990). Stories can thus foster ‘learning-in-organizing’ when change emerges fromdialogue between the many different possibleways of re-narrating the organization (Abma2000). The circulation of such stories in organ-izations has also been shown to be a way ofsensitizing managers to other ways of under-standing their organizational realities, helpingthem develop new insights, stimulating crit-ical thought and enabling problems to be ana-lysed and solved in novel and more effectiveways (Gold and Holman 2001; Gold et al. 2002;Mitroff and Kilmann 1975). For researchers,this has meant that stories can be analysedin terms of how they help people subjectivelymake sense of the strategic reasons for

change in relation to the meaning structures inorganizations more generally (Dunford andJones 2000).

The Power and Politics of Narrative

Studying power from a narrative perspectiveenables it to be understood as a dynamic phe-nomenon, the form and enactment of whichis subject to change over time. From a per-spective which suggests that organizations are‘domains of legitimate authority’ (Mumbyand Stohl 1991, 315), narratives are regardedas a significant means by which organizationsare discursively constructed and, importantly,reconstructed as regimes of ‘truth’ (e.g. Clegg1989). The plasticity and interpretative flexi-bility of narratives also makes them particu-larly well suited for use in political games,where individuals and coalitions need oftento present information differently to differentaudiences in order to secure acquiescence andenthusiasm (Brown 1985; Brown and Kreps1993). Interestingly, analyses of political activitysuggest that it is those narratives which aremost coherent and earliest promulgated thattend to prevail, while those that are less coher-ent, or developed secondarily, are more likelyto become marginalized or colonized by otheraccounts (Cobb 1993; Cobb and Rifkin 1991).On this reading, narratives are a potent polit-ical form that dramatize control and compelbelief while shielding truth claims from test-ing and debate, and command attention andmemory, often without exciting argumentativechallenge (Witten 1993, 100). In this sense,power is understood as an attempt to stabilizemeaning structures over time. However, inpractice such stabilizations are best regardedas temporary. As Clegg (1989, 152) describesit, ‘there is no reason to expect that represen-tations will remain contextually and histor-ically stable, but every reason to think thatthey will shift’.

The importance of shared narratives in cre-ating and sustaining organizations as fracturedand hierarchical locales in which individualsand groups are enmeshed in reciprocal but


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asymmetric power relationships has been widelydiscussed (Boje 1995; Brown 1998; Czarni-awska 1997). Narratives structure systems ofpresence and absence in organizations, insinu-ating particular sets of meanings into every-day practices, which are represented asauthoritative, while excluding alternativeconceptions (Hall 1985, 109; Westwood andLinstead 2001, 111). Following Foucault (1979),narratives are a type of discursive practice thatfunctions as a disciplinary form, constitutingorganizational participants, actions and rela-tionships in particular ways. The focus ofstudy thus turns to how particular dominantnarratives emerge from a multitude of possi-bilities, and the task of the researcher is toanalyse which narratives dominate (and whichdo not), and how they came to do so. Oftenthis means examining the disputation betweenmore and less powerful narratives (Kelemanand Hassard 2003). Further, although particu-lar narratives might be more powerful thanothers, they are rarely monolithic, and narra-tive approaches have been used to theorizeorganizations as ‘heteroglossic’ (Bakhtin 1981)entities in which competing centripetal andcentrifugal forces operate through multiple,often partially overlapping narratives, creatingand sustaining polyphonic and plurivocal soci-eties (Rhodes 2000b).

From a micro-perspective, narratives havealso been recognized as important politicaltools. Narratives are, then, simultaneously ‘theground on which the struggle for power iswaged, the object of strategies of domination,and the means by which the struggle is actu-ally engaged and achieved’ (Westwood andLinstead 2001, 10). Narrative researchers havebeen concerned with the way that narrative isused to reflexively reproduce power relationsand the way that researchers too are embed-ded in those relationships (Boje et al. 1999).The issue that arises is ‘not only the languageof power but also the power of the languageof power’ (Clegg 1993, 40). Pertinent ques-tions raised for researchers are: Who getsincluded in the research? Which stories areprivileged? Who is silenced? These in turn raise

questions concerning how ‘certain discursivepositions embraced by researchers will seekconsensus by reinforcing prevailing language;[and how] other positions will attempt todestabilize and challenge the status quo’(Kelemen and Hassard 2003, 80). Most differ-ences, however, will have their impact throughbeing encoded in narratives that render suchdistinctions salient, memorable and meaning-ful (Brown 1998). Researchers’ roles in thisprocess are central to understanding theirposition in the power relations they are study-ing, as writers unavoidably intervene in therepresentations they create, and the storiesthey tell, where these acts of representation alsosuppress alternatives (Law 1994; Linstead1993).

Scholars interested in power and organiza-tion have often linked narratives to notions ofhegemony and legitimacy as they relate tosubjectivity. Drawing on Gramsci (1971), hege-mony is generally understood to refer to ‘thesuccessful mobilization and reproduction ofthe active consent of dominated groups’(Clegg 1989, 160). Hegemonic domination isnever completely fixed or permanent but,rather, always subject to renegotiation, a con-stant work-in-progress. Nor is it ever com-plete, for ‘no hegemonic logic can accountfor the totality of the social and constitute itscentre’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 142). Theinterplay of different hegemonic claims is,however, discernible through an analysis ofthe shared narratives of different hegemonicgroups (Humphreys and Brown 2002a,b)which imprison those subject to them bydenying contradictions, naturalizing inequali-ties and re-presenting minority interests asuniversal, fixed and immutable (Clair 1993;Mumby 1987). It is through such processesthat subjectivity, as it is narratively embodied,is deeply connected to ‘complex socio-cultural,behavioural and emotional disciplinary regimes’(Iedema 2003, 32). Narrative approachesenable subjectivity to be understood as being,at least in part, a product of socioculturalnarratives that seek to define particular waysof being (Chappell et al. 2003).



Identifying with Narratives

It has been variously suggested that the iden-tities of individuals are constituted throughprocesses of narration (Carr 1986, 5), that identitiesexist only as narratives (Currie 1998, 17), andthat life is an enacted narrative (MacIntyre1981) which is plotted over time (Chappell etal. 2003). These narratives are generally recog-nized to be appropriated from the grand nar-ratives of the communities and cultures towhich an individual belongs (Rappaport 2000,6), and to be ‘punctuated by gaps and uncer-tainties’ (Wiener and Rosenwald 1993, 30) whilealso exhibiting a reasonable degree of integra-tion and coherence over time (Grotevant 1993,123). Indeed, the relationship between tempo-ralization and identity has been the subject ofintense debates in phenomenological approachesto philosophy. Within such debates is a con-test over whether identity is best regarded asthat aspect of a person that is stable andenduring over time, or whether identity is moremalleable within temporal structures. In organ-izational research, the most common approachhas been to regard identity as a form of self-narrative (Gergen and Gergen 1988), whichcan then be used to explain how workers are‘enjoined to incorporate the new managerialdiscourses into [their] … self-identity’ (Alves-son and Willmott 2002, 622).

Perhaps the greatest value that narrative hasbrought to the study of identity rests in a con-sideration of the many possible identities thatorganizational members can adopt and theways in which particular identities strive fordominance. Importantly, there is a consensualacknowledgement that solitary narrators donot have carte blanche, but are constrainedin the stories they tell about themselves, notleast by the cultural resources at their disposaland the expectations of others (Rosenwaldand Ochberg 1992, 9). Less sanguine theoriststend to describe narrative identities as powereffects, arguing that ‘[w]e come to be who weare (however ephemeral, multiple, and chang-ing) by being located or locating ourselves(usually unconsciously) in social narratives

rarely of our own making’ (Somers 1994,606). Within organization studies, a consider-able volume of work has been conductedwhich supports the view that narratives are‘[a] highly effective way of analyzing howidentities are continuously constructed’ (Gabriel1999, 196). In particular, critical theorists haveargued that narratives provide an insightful meansof analysing subjectively construed identitiesas complex outcomes of processes of subjuga-tion and resistance that are contingent andperpetually shifting (Jermier et al. 1994; Rose1989). Together, these approaches coalescearound the idea that the identity of a person isnot fixed, but rather arises from the many pos-sible cultural forms of identification available.

Narratological approaches to understandingidentity offer especially interesting means ofexploring the phenomenon of identification interms of how individuals’ beliefs about theirorganizations become self-reflexively defined(Pratt 1998, 172). Albert (1998, 12), for example,has argued that identification processes ‘arebest described in narrative and qualitativeterms … and are therefore linked to and legit-imated by studies of narrative and by the con-tinuing development of qualitative approaches’.

Other scholars have contended that storiesfunction to promote identification (Brown1985), that participants express understandingand commitment to organizations through sto-ries, and that members’ degree of familiaritywith dominant organizational stories mayindicate their level of adaptation to the organ-ization (Brown 1982; McWhinney 1984). It isby means of identification narratives that peo-ple consciously and unconsciously elaborateand re-elaborate their relationship with theorganizations to which they belong, centringthemselves (Bowles 1989) as ambivalent,detached or committed (Elsbach 1999). Thecentral contention here is that, in any giveninstance, the nature of the integration (Pratt1998) or fusion (Ashforth 1998, 269) of theindividual self and the organization impliedby an identification relationship can valuablybe researched through the self-narratives thata person authors.


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Narrative has been implicated not just inconceptions of individual identity, but theidentity of groups (including those based onethnicity and gender), organizations, commu-nities, and even entire nations (Currie 1998,2). The theoretical basis for understandingcollective identities as, and through, the narra-tives that they author has been sketched byCarr (1986, 128) who argues that narration ‘iswhat constitutes the community’ in the sensethat narratives establish and maintain connec-tions between people who may or may notknow each other personally. Empirical explo-rations of collective identity narratives havebeen conducted by community psychologists,who have asserted that ‘Community narrativesare central to the identity of the community’(Stuber 2000, 509), and that ‘A communitycannot be a community without a shared nar-rative’ (Rappaport 2000, 6). Similarly, organ-izational scientists have described narrativesas expressive of organizational distinctiveness(Clark 1970, 1972), vehicles for uniquenessclaims (Martin et al. 1983), and as means for‘collective centering’ (Boyce 1996). Empir-ical research suggests that frequently told taleshelp to establish and maintain organizationalidentity (McWhinney and Battista 1988, 46),that organizations ‘exist to tell their collectivestories’ (Boje 1995, 1000), and that ‘[o]rgan-izations need a coherent narrative just as[individual] humans do’ (Czarniawska 1997,24). It is through the investigation and analy-sis of the narratives that participants authorabout their groups, departments and organiza-tions that we may come to a sophisticatedunderstanding of working lives (Humphreysand Brown 2002a,b; Terkel 1972).

Discussion and Conclusion

So far we have provided a literature review offive main areas of organization research wherenarrative-based approaches have been applied,and assessed the theoretical value that theyhave added. In this section, we develop ourstory further by considering these studies col-lectively in terms of the main contributions,

implications and limitations of narrativeresearch. We argue that, while narrative hasdeveloped as a sophisticated research method-ology, its exclusion from, and opposition to,a narrowly defined scientific paradigm inorganization theory imposes limitations on itsfurther development, and on the developmentof organization theory itself. Narrative meth-odologies emphasize aspects of organizationand organization theory, such as temporality,plurality, reflexivity and subjectivity, that areunderplayed by traditional approaches. Fur-ther, we suggest that science and stories areboth important in organization research, andthat attention to one need not necessarilypreclude understanding of the other.

The Contribution of Narrative Research

One key contribution of narrative research isthe attention it focuses on temporal issues inorganizations. Narrative involves the unfold-ing of a story of events and experiences overtime. Emplotment is a key feature of narra-tive, and ‘plot requires a pre-understanding oftime and temporal structures’ (Boje 2001,113) so, by invoking narrative, one is concom-itantly employing time as a central organizingconcept. In this sense, narrative locates obser-vations in time rather than regarding thoseobservations as ‘a logically formulated set ofprinciples valid at all times’ (Czarniawska1997, 174). Thus, rather than viewing organ-izations as static, homogeneous and consistententities, narrative approaches demonstrate theprocessual characteristics of organizations andcan render both the paradoxes and complexcausal relationships inherent in organizationalchange open to analysis.

Narrative research also has value because itpermits consideration of the different possiblemeanings of organizational action (Boje 1995;Rhodes 2001a). This has enabled research tofocus not only on the object of study (what isnarrated) as a singular reality, but on the plu-rality of different possible stories and story-tellers. This feature implies an appreciationthat any given narrative structuring is not



necessarily implicit in what is being studied, butrather that narrative is a form of ordering thatis imposed on what is being studied in orderto make sense of organizational phenomena.By implication, it is recognized that there ismore than one way to tell a story and that‘multiple voicing’ (Gergen and Gergen 2000)is always possible. Such pluralization drawsattention to a ‘crisis of validity’ (Denzin andLincoln 1994) such that narrative can generatedifferent and potentially competing storieswhich highlight that knowledge about organ-izations is actively constructed rather than astable entity to be explicated.

Recognizing the multiple ways that storiescan be told encourages a view of organiza-tions as actively constructed through discur-sive activity. By implication, both researchersand people in organizations are actively involvedin the narrative reconstitution of organiza-tions, and the choices made about what isincluded and excluded in the stories that aretold and re-told by researchers. When researchis re-cast as a process of telling stories aboutstories, the means by which those stories arecreated is an important area for analysis andmethodological reflection. This draws atten-tion to the reflexivity inherent in the researchenterprise – an issue that has been said to bea primary innovation in recent developmentsin qualitative methodologies more generally(Gergen and Gergen 2000).

Narrative theorizing represents a moveaway from the ‘aperspectival sense of objec-tivity with the realist ontology that typifies muchof organization science’ (McKinley 2003, 142).Instead, narrative has been used to studyorganizations in relation to the subjectiveinteractions that produce narrated meanings(including those of the researcher), as well asa problematization of the very definition ofwhat we mean by a ‘subject’ qua person. Thisis an epistemological position that the ‘knowerand respondent cocreate understandings’(Denzin and Lincoln 2003, 35), includingunderstandings of who they are and their rela-tion to others. Thus, narratives are meansthrough which organizations are brought to

life in the different ways that people canconstruct meaning and identity from organiza-tional events and experiences. The organizationis not regarded as an object of study, but seenrather to be subjectively and inter-subjectivelyconstructed through the stories told by bothresearchers and organizational stakeholders.

Narrative research across the social sci-ences collectively illustrates and elaborates aunique perspective on the human condition ingeneral and organizational life in particular.By listening to, documenting, analysing andreporting the different stories that people tellabout their organizations, narrative research-ers have sought to bring the subjective experi-ence of people in organizations within thefocus of research (Gabriel 1998). This con-cern with subjectivity and inter-subjectivityhas meant that many narrative researchershave become increasingly sensitive to organi-zations as sites of plural and contested mean-ing; including a reflexive sensitivity to theresearcher’s own role as a teller of storiesabout organizations (Rhodes 2001a). Fromsuch a perspective, organizations are under-stood not as singular and objective, but ratheras resulting from different perspectives andaccounts where it is possible that what wecall an ‘organization’ can mean different thingsto different people (Thatchenkery 1992;Walter-Busch 1995). This leads to the study oforganizations as socially constructed verbalsystems where each person who is part of theorganization has a voice, but where somevoices are louder, more articulate and morepowerful than others (Hazen 1993).

The researcher’s attention is thus not onlyplaced on the individual accounts of people inorganizations, but also on the organization asa network of interrelated narrative interpreta-tions (Boje 1995; Phillips and Brown 1993)formed from a ‘pluralistic construction of amultiplicity of stories, storytellers and storyperformance’ (Boje 1995, 1000). This enablesresearchers to examine and compare narra-tives as different ‘takes’ on an organizationand to study the different ways of tellingstories about what is ostensibly the same


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organization or the same incident (Gabriel 1995;Law 1994; Rhodes 2000a, 2001a). Research-ers using narrative approaches both need tobe aware of the different stories told in organ-izations and to seek new ways of representingthem that do not subsume the multiplicity ofstories into a single authoritative account(Aaltio-Marjosola 1994; Rhodes 2001a; Salzer-Morling 1998). Further, it alerts us to therequirement for reflexivity in research suchthat researchers realize that they too are tell-ing stories, and selecting which stories aretold (Hatch 1996; Rhodes 2001a).

Implications for Research: Stories and Science

Narrative methods have contributed broadlyto research in organization theory – the impli-cations of which are significant not only tomethods and processes, but to the whole con-ceptualization of the research enterprise. Theidea that narrative constitutes a kind of meth-odology (or set of methodologies) has playedan important part in questioning conventionalscientific approaches that define narrativesand stories in opposition to fact and in subor-dination to theory and science (Czarniawska-Joerges 1995; Daft 1983; Gabriel 1998;Jacobson and Jacques 1997; Mitroff and Kil-mann 1976). Researchers who use narrativemethods have argued that stories and facts arenot mutually exclusive categories (Gabriel 1991)and that narrative can provide new sources ofempirical material beyond those available to‘normal science’ (Gabriel 1998; Hummel 1991;Mitroff and Kilmann 1976, 1978; Phillips1995), more effective means of representingand communicating research (Daft 1983; Dyerand Wilkins 1991; Rhodes 2001a; Watson, 2000),and sharper analytical tools for research(Czarniawska 1997; Hatch 1996; Pentland1999; Phillips 1995).1 This has marked animportant departure from positivistic researchmethodologies which maintain that ‘scienceshould keep to facts and logic, leaving meta-phors and stories to literature, this being asediment of premodern times and oral societies’

(Czarniawska 1998, 7). Narratological meth-odologies have not only questioned seriouslysuch a marginalization of narrative, but havealso achieved a partial reunification such thatorganizational knowledge might develop froma broader epistemological ambit. Narrative isnot just based on a negative critique of othermethodologies, it also demonstrates real alter-native with substantive analytical benefits.

It has been suggested that the scientificfoundations of management research havecreated conditions for ‘the researcher to beneutral, detached or not engaged in the phe-nomena under study, free from context, andself referencing … [which] … leads one onthe path of disengagement from and abstrac-tion of the variety of management phenomenaunder study’ (Mackenzie et al. 2002, 302).Such forms of management research are pre-occupied with finding theories ‘about howevery organization has to work, how everyemployee is motivated, how all top teams worktogether or don’t’ (Nord 2004, 130). Contrasuch perspectives on science, an achievementof narrative research has been a reconsidera-tion of positions with respect to researchmethodology which are increasingly regardedas being idealistic in their ethos and spuriousin their claims (Denzin and Lincoln 1994). AsWicks and Freeman (1998) have argued, it isa mistake to suggest that science provides an‘anarrative’ and factual way of looking at theworld that goes beyond the subjectivity ofstorytelling. Further, claims to do so consti-tute a political means through which to posita transcendent narrative that operates outsidethe contested and subjective meanings that areascribed to work in both theory and practice.Being explicit about narrative denies claims totranscendence and enables the localities ofpractice to be examined in terms of their com-plexity, contradictions and multivocity. It is inthese ways that narrative offers the possibilityof retreating from abstraction in a way thatengages with the experiences of work, man-agement and organizing.

It is the ability to engage reflexively withthe lived experience of work that is a key



methodological advantage of narrative appro-aches. As Zald (1996) argues ‘narrative andrhetorical techniques … can be used to exam-ine how people in organizations represent andconstruct their lives’ (p. 254). Such ‘every-day’ understandings of work and manage-ment, however, often go unaccounted for inscholarship. Further, when they are consid-ered, they are taken as something to be ana-lysed and not something that might haveepistemic value. Pearce (2004) has suggestedthat management scholars tend to inhabit twoparallel intellectual worlds – the world ofscholarship and the world of ‘folk wisdom’.The former involves thoughtful intellectualwork and careful methodological application,while the latter emerges from experience andculture. For Pearce, it is the world of folk wis-dom that is underappreciated and relativelyunexamined in management research. As hesuggests, a core reason for this is the cultureof scholarship that finds such folk wisdom tobe inferior or irrelevant because of its lack ofscholarly legitimacy. Nevertheless, he sug-gests that folk wisdom has ‘more value thanwe are willing to admit’ (Pearce 2004, 176).Our argument is that narrative methods havethe potential to dissolve the duality betweentraditional scholarship and subjective experi-ence in a way that is methodologically sophis-ticated and theoretically justified. The value ofthis is particularly relevant at a time when ‘thedominant positivist language game of organ-izational analysis no longer offers robustexplanations for the increasingly complex andelusive structures and processes of organiza-tional phenomena’ (Kelemen and Hassard2003, 79). Further, as Weick (1995, 127) hasargued ‘most models of organization are basedon argumentation rather than narration yetmost organizational realities are based on nar-ration’. If these realities are to be a constitu-tive part of organizational research, a sophisticatedtheoretical and methodological understandingof narrative is critical.

Methodologically, narrative provides a meansof engaging with the experience of organizing– it answers the calls for ‘increased attention

to local knowledge’ (Kilduff and Mehra 1997,470) and practice driven theory (Schatzkiet al. 2000). As a result, the subjective realitiesof organizational life might be addressed intemporalized context in lieu of scientificabstraction, yet without giving up on theoret-ical reflection and sophistication. Narrativeresearch is, by and large, an empirical tradi-tion that examines how experience is reflex-ively constructed into stories that may or maynot be commensurate. It provides a methodo-logical position through which to engage notwith a presumed neutral ‘real’ world, but withthe complex nuances of the ‘lived’ world.

An Unfinished Story

At the outset of this paper, we stated that ourgoal was to tell a story about narrative research.In approaching this task, we explored thedevelopment and maturation of the use of nar-rative to inform theory and methodology interms of the dramatic tension between scienceand stories. This tension has characterizedthe story of narrative from the beginning. Theearliest studies of narratives in the 1970s hadto be defended against claims that it wasimproper to pay attention to stories in thesocial sciences (Mitroff and Kilmann 1976).Stories were regarded as being of relativelylittle value, because they did not conform topopular social scientific stereotypes of ‘whatconstituted theory’ (Eisenhardt 1991). Indeed,to this day it is palpable that organizationstudies privileges argumentation (Weick 1995)and abstraction (Pearce 2004) over engage-ments with the meaning of experience; thelatter being what narrative approaches are bestequipped to address. Narrative approachesrecognize that ‘all behavior is historical’ andthat such behaviour ‘takes place over time andin particular contexts’ (Zald 1996, 256). Thiscontrasts to ‘most of our mainstream journalarticles [which] are written as if they apply tosome disembodied abstract realm … as if thepaper dealt with some timeless entity’ (p. 256).

It must be noted that the focus on narrativein relation to science, which we have performed


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in our discussion, is important because it iswithin this relation that the story of narrativeresearch has developed in organization stud-ies. The legacy of positivism in this field hasmeant that the emergence of narrative, as anew approach, has had to enter a field charac-terized by the historical dominance of a posi-tivistic or quasi-positivistic scientific rationality.In this process, narrative has often beenmerely dismissed. The story we have told isintended as a rebuttal of such a position.

However, not all critiques of narrativeemerge from the organizational studies strong-holds of (quasi) positivism. Critiques of nar-rative and discourse based knowledge havealso emerged in relation to realist ontologies.Habermas (1992), for example, issues a sternwarning about the consequences of ‘turningscience and philosophy into literature’ (p. 226).In response to what he sees as postructural-ism’s concerted effort to blur, or even oblit-erate, genre boundaries, Habermas maintainsthat the traditional demarcation between sci-ence and narrative/literature is still important.He argues that science needs still to rest onsome idea of validity instead of taking a dis-cursive approach where ‘all validity claimsbecomes immanent to particular discourses’(p. 209). His argument rests on the principlethat science genres differ from literary genresbecause ‘what is said in the text [ … refers to… ] something in the world’ (p. 224). Likeourselves, Habermas is clearly aware thatmany a productive scientist has had the abilityto tell a good story, but he adds that this isnot sufficient for science. Scientific texts, forHabermas, should always be focused on mak-ing validity claims with respect to the goingson in the world and, concomitantly, that thedifference between genres should not beliquidated.

The implication of Habermas’ argument forour own discussion comes down to a consid-eration of how we might understand the natureof that which we investigate. The suggestionis that discursive based knowledge systemsfail to account for the ‘reality’ of the world.Most generally, this rests on a presupposition

that realism is necessary for any ‘sane’ sci-ence. As Searle (1995) describes it, this real-ism is about defending ‘the idea that there isa real world independent of our thought andtalk, and [ … ] defending the correspondencetheory of truth, the idea that our true state-ments are typically made true by how thingsare in the real world that exists independentlyof the statements’ (p. xiii). From the point ofview of social science, realism also postulatesthat ‘it is possible to achieve knowledge aboutthis reality’ (Brante 2001, 168)

The emergence of critical realism in thephilosophy of science (Bhaskar 1978, 1989)and its take up in organization studies (seeReed 2000, 2004) are another means throughwhich realism has been defended and the col-lapse of knowledge into language disputed.Critical realism offers a critique of positivismthat is quite different from that of the discursive/narrative mode that we have been discussinghere. Indeed, Reed (2000) positions criticalrealism directly against discursive approachesbased on social constructivism. For him, thedistinction between reality and knowledge iscrucial, and ‘the material and social worlds ofwhich we are constituent [ … ] cannot betreated as if they are ultimately dependent on[ … ] consciousness or language’ (Reed 2004,415). Although we are not going to resolvedisputes between discursive/narrative con-structivism and realism here (see Tsoukas2000), the point we make is that narrativeapproaches are not only characterized byinternal diversity but are also contested fromvarious perspectives.

In a traditional sense, stories end when thekey tension that informs them comes to a cli-max and is resolved. In the case of our story,no such resolution appears imminent. If any-thing, what we should like to achieve with thispaper is the maintenance of the tension. AsKearney (2002) has argued, ‘truth is not thesole prerogative of the so-called exact sci-ences. There is also a truth, with its corre-sponding understanding, that we may properlycall “narrative”. We need both’ (p. 148).While the history of organization studies has



been dominated by an attempt to emulate theexact sciences, the implication of Kearney’sargument is that such hegemonic moves aremisguided; hubristic even. As we have seen,narrative can provide a different, and valuable,form of knowledge that enables researchersto engage with the lived realities of organiza-tional life – the ‘truth’ that people at work livethrough every day. This is not a knowledgethat aspires to certainty and control but ratheremerges from a reflection on the messy reali-ties of organizational practice (Czarniawska2003). It is this embodied and lived know-ledge that narrative methods enable researchersto access and engage with while embracingscholarly values.

The issue for organization theory is that,while the value and productivity of narrativeknowledge has been demonstrated time andtime again, this has been accomplished despitethe dominance of positivistic (natural scien-tific) schema. If we who study organizationsare to take the lives of others seriously andsympathetically – as a means to understandrather than to control, to accept ambiguityrather than demand certainty, and to engagewith lived experience rather than to abstractfrom it – then the turn to narrative needs to becontinued. It is our hope that this paper willcontribute to broadening the space for suchknowledge.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the insightfulcomments of Mary Jo Hatch, Associate EditorRobert DeFillippi, and two anonymous review-ers, on earlier versions of this paper.

Note

1 Although not our main focus, it is worth notingthat, as well as using narrative as a methodologyto inform the study of organizations, researchershave also studied cultural narratives about organ-izations. This has included research into howorganizations are represented in literary novels(Czarniawska-Joerges and de Monthoux 1994),

popular culture (Hassard and Holliday 1998),television (Rhodes 2001b, 2002) and science fic-tion (Smith et al. 2001).

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Carl Rhodes is from the School of Management, Faculty of Business, University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway NSW 2007; email: [email protected], Australia. Andrew D. Brown is from the School of Management, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK; email: [email protected]

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