The narrative approach in investigating organizational processes: linguistic tools to reveal “the story in the making”

Abstract

The research question addressed in this paper is essentially how far a narrative approach can go towards identifying, describing and explaining the dynamics of subjectively co-constructed organizational realities, and so affirm its unique value as a research paradigm. The study uses selected extracts from a data set of management-leadership communications in order to illustrate a unifying framework for narrative. The conceptual model which I present can be used as a research platform from which to describe a variety of story types and to see what they have in common as “stories”. The multifactor analysis deriving from this theoretical framework uses methodologies from discourse analysis, enabling us to link overarching narrative features with their pragmatic, persuasive purposes through the identification of key linguistic features. These linguistic resources (lexico-grammatical choices and patterns, and pragmatic-semiotic strategies) constitute the building materials on which these stories are construed. Storytelling in organizational discourse can then be seen in its complexity, incorporating real and hypothetical accounts, completed, ongoing or overlapping narrations, many of which are intrinsically embedded and essentially pluri-vocal in nature. In sum, qualitative discourse analysis of this kind can provide a unique window onto how the organization becomes literally “storied into being” in accordance with the “performance” of its organizational “actors”.