THE USES OF NARRATIVE IN ORGANIZATION RESEARCH

Abstract

A so-called literary turn in social sciences in general and in organization studies in particular has resulted in re-discovering the narrative knowledge in organization theory and practice. Organization researchers watching the stories being made and distributed collect organizational stories and provoke story telling in their contacts with the field of practice. This paper takes up the variety of ways of reading such narratives, classifying them into the three steps delineated in the hermeneutic triad: explication, explanation, and exploration. Explication raises the issues of interpretation and overinterpretation; and finds different solutions in pragmatist vs. traditional hermeneutic theory of interpretation. Explanation has a wide range of techniques and approaches to offer, from structuralism through poststructuralism to deconstruction. Narratology is of help also in the last stage, exploration, offering reflection concerning the construction of the researcher&#39s own story by genre analysis etc. The paper ends in a review of most common attitudes towards text analysis: text as the key to the world, text-as-world, texts in the world (science as conversation).