Storytelling in Organizations

From Theory to Empirical Research

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780230271753
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Storytelling in organizations isa notion that encompasses both the stories that the organization produces and the ones told by its members. It provides both an in-depth treatment of the literature on narratives, stories and storytelling and an extensive empirical case from an American banking institution.

Part I

Studying Stories: A Theoretical Background

1

Stories, Narratives and Storytelling Practices

To provide a nonambiguous definition of narrating seems to be quite a complex endeavor. There are multiple interpretations of the phenomenon, as well as countless scholars who have provided narrative definitions according to their epistemological foundations and the purposes of their analyses.

In the first chapter I will pull together some of these interpretations and highlight some of the key concepts concerning a narrating definition that can be useful ground for the second part of the book – where we will see them at play in a specific organizational context. The first chapter stands at the crossroads of different disciplines as narrative analysis, originally conceived in the literary criticism tradition, has over time acquired significant importance in the social sciences – informed by the insights of disciplines such as philosophy of language, pragmatics of communication or sociolinguistics, just to name a few.

A distinction must be made between the study of narrative using a structuralist approach, the study of narrative using a sociological approach and the study of narrative using a combination of the sociological approach and insights from postmodern philosophical thought and phenomenologist sensitivity, which will be my approach.

1.1 Beyond Fabula and Syzhet?

For a first definition of narrative we can recall the work of literary theorists who were interested in narratology (Todorov, 1965, 1986), that is to say the analysis of the structures of narrative literary texts, the main question for them being: what are the possible basic structure of narratives? “What is narrative per se? What properties must a text have to be called a narrative, and what properties disqualify it?” asks Chatman (1984, p. 258), within the intellectual debate that grew out of the symposium “Narrative: the Illusion of Sequence”, held at the University of Chicago on 26–28 October 1979.

Vladimir Propp’s thorough analysis of Russian Folktales (Propp, 1928) is a significant example of structuralist endeavor and probably the first contemporary study on narrative analysis. I use the word contemporary in order to distinguish it from the hermeneutic studies of scriptures, which date back to the middle ages. Aristotle’s Poetics can also be considered a pioneering work in narrative analysis, although my decision is to start with contemporary accounts.

In order to approach the narrative definition given by narratologists we have to start from what it is considered for them to be the key element of every narrative text, that is to say temporal development (Chatman, 1978; Prince, 1982). Every narrative text is characterized by a development, by a set of events following one after the other which are able to signal the passage from one opposite to the other, from an initial to a different final state (often in the form of a conflict). Using the words of two bespoken narratologists, narrative “may be defined as the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence” (Prince, 1982, p. 1), or can be viewed as “the shift from one equilibrium to another … separated by a period of imbalance” (Todorov, 1986, p. 328). The constant element of narrativity for narratologists seems to be a sort of evolution, a shift that can be related to time sequence.

However, the time of the events does not always correspond to the time of narration, that is to say that the events are presented in narrative in a way that does not always correspond to their chronological evolution.

If we think of certain movies such as Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) where a set of intertwined events is broken down and reassembled in nonlinear sequences, or the French Irréversible (Noé, 2002) where the narration is made in reverse to the chronological time sequence of events, we should have no difficulties in understanding such a distinction.

It comes from the Russian Formalist tradition – the distinction between the notion of

(fabula) indicating the events in their chronological sequence and the notion of

(syzhet) indicating the events in the order presented in the text (Tomaševskij, 1975, p. 185). Formalist scholars such as Boris Eichenbaum, Viktor Šklovskij and Boris Tomaševskij have provided great insights into the description of different devices used in literature (flashbacks, frame story, in medias res, parallel, etc.) to construct the syzhet (Šklovskij, 1925; Todorov, 1965). If we just think of our personal narrative readings we can find examples of these devices, speaking for myself I can think of the Boccaccio’s Decameron frame story studied during middle school or the fascinating childhood reading of One Thousand and One Nights, or again for parallel Anna Karenina, and so on.

The distinction between fabula and syzhet relies on a diegetic distinction, where diegesis refers to the telling, as opposed to mimesis, which refers to the showing. Diegesis is basically the telling of the story by the narrator, the entering into a created time-space continuum. Each story entails a different time-space continuum and syzhet indicates how this time space is manipulated or presented, by the teller. Many narratology terms are also used in film theory as a matter of fact many examples can be made just using the film material. In films, diegesis is sometimes made explicit by the voice of the narrator or by showing the contrast between the “narrative space” and the real situation of the teller.

The formalist distinction between fabula and syzhet has been assimilated with the distinction between story and discourse, where story is the whole of the narrated events and discourse is the way in which the author has presented them to us.¹

In the words of formalist narratologists the way events are presented follows specific patterns that although different in each story can nevertheless be assimilated. Similarly to the structural interpretation of myths, formalist narratology emphasizes the structure of every story rather than its always changing material or the contextual aspects under which stories come to be recounted.

In this sense, an interesting and alternative point of view comes from a narratologist named Gérard Genette, who distinguishes between story (histoire), discourse (récit) and narrative (narration) (Genette, 1972). The first term (histoire) refers to the events that are the object of a discourse: the signified or narrated content; the second term (récit) refers to the utterance of an account of one or a series of events, through which the events are presented, in other words the signifier or the narrative text itself; and the third term (narration) refers to the act of telling itself. What is interesting is that as a narratologist he introduces this third instance, even though in his work it is treated as something internal to the text. As Jedlowski argues this is tied to the nature of narratologist’s interests which are the logical models working within the texts rather than the narrating as an empirically observable action (Jedlowski, 2000, p. 14). It is the situation of the telling that is outside narratologists’ interests while the figure of the storyteller with its sociological presence, as in Walter Benjamin The Storyteller (Benjamin, 1936), is actually the focus of my analysis. Genette’s distinction is very important as it allows us to bridge narrative theory as conceived in the narratology tradition with the sociological accounts that are the focus of this study.

Returning to Genette’s distinction a further element of ambiguity may be generated by the fact that in colloquial French récit is more likely to be assimilated with the English acceptation of narrative than to the one of discourse. If I consult the dictionary I find that récit = relation orale ou écrite de faits vrais ou imaginaries (Micro, Robert, 2003) is the same as, narrative = spoken or written account of connected events (The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 2003), whereas Genette’s narrative (narration) refers more to the actual act of telling rather than to the narrative utterance (discourse or text).

It is interesting noticing here that in the organizational domain, scholars have strongly debated on story and narrative definitions: basically every single author has his or her own interpretation of the topic, and uses the terms narrative and story with different acceptations.

My personal focus is on storytelling as a practice inscribed in social relations and for this reason I would insist on the notion of narrating or storytelling instead of talking about stories or narratives. I will put the subject, the narrator, and his or her experience at the center of my analysis. In the narrative analysis of texts performed by Russian Formalists there is no interest for the context in which the text was generated: there is no reference made to the narrator’s (author) experience nor to the relation between the author and the reader. Those studies represent, nevertheless, the basis for interpretation of many narrative analysis studies in both communication and organizational research, and for this reason I think it is relevant to discuss them in this work.

The idea for me is that of both envisioning narrating and finding a way to study the phenomenon, where the experience of the people involved could be the center of the analysis.

Whether the result is a story or a narrative is not important, as the separability of the two is questioned. Bakhtin (Bakhtin and Medvedev, 1978, p. 113) was probably the first one to point out that the distinction between fabula and syzhet is redundant and to affirm that story/fabula itself is a form of artistic creation as well as syzhet/narrative, (he uses the word plot, which creates further confusion) “even in life we see the story with the eye of the plot” (Bakhtin and Medvedev, 1978, p. 139). This apparently simple consideration entails a radically different understanding of the aforementioned concepts. The idea is that fabula itself is not a fixed and atemporal instance. Fabula is reconstructed given the context and the current perspective of the narrator, that is to say that not only discourse but also story (if one exists) changes in every account.²

There has been an interesting debate between Chatman and Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1981) in which Herrnstein Smith argues “For any particular narrative, there is no single basically story subsisting beneath it but, rather, an unlimited number of other narratives that can be constructed in response to it or perceived as related to it” (Herrnstein Smith, 1981, p. 217).

Herrnstein Smith also relaxed the assumption of two connected events and the beginning, middle, end as the minimum condition for narrativity, proposing a definition of narrative as “someone tells someone else that something happened” (Herrnstein Smith, 1981, p. 228).

On the same line Hannah Arendt (1985, pp. 261–262) argues, “Reality is different from, and more than, the totality of facts and events, which anyhow, is unascertainable.” “Who says what is … always tells a story, and in this story the particular facts lose their contingency and acquire some humanly comprehensible meaning.”

It is important to clarify here that the problematic relation between a preexisting or independent reality and narration will be solved using Ricoeur’s thinking (1983, 1992), which will appear in different sections throughout the work.

The basic idea is that we inhabit a world that has a temporality characterized by a “before” and an “after”, as suggested by history or physics, yet it is only our ability to experience the reality that makes this temporality significant for us. Human time for Ricoeur is the place where phenomenological time is reinscribed on cosmological time. Stories articulate this third time, as time becomes human time when it is narrated. Of course each narrative represents an alternative to how experience is temporalized and this is because reality holds a surplus, an excess of sense that shapes stories in unlimited configurations.

In a similar perspective “experience is made or fashioned; it is not encountered, discovered or observed”, says Schafer (1992), and again, “introspection does not encounter ready made material” but instead creates those materials according to its current expectations and interpretations (p. 23). “The Self is a kind of telling, it is a telling rather than a teller” (Schafer, 1978, p. 86).

Schafer argues that there is nothing simply there before the various tellings and retellings through which we shape our lives, and this I believe is a good starting point for my work, which goes beyond the fabula/syzhet distinction. It must be noticed that although Schafer’s citation can be fully inscribed in the postmodern sensitivity (“there is nothing”), Ricoeur’s position is not as strong in this sense; there is something before or independent of narration for Ricoeur, but it can be accessible and shaped only through narration. In my study I will adopt Herrnstein Smith’s definition “someone tells someone else that something has happened” and amend it with Ricoeur’s sensitivity to temporality and experience as the starting point for my analysis.

1.2 Narrative time

Such arguments will be revisited, but before doing so I will spend some more time on the notion of time for narrative definitions. I have already talked about the order of the events as presented in the text and the order of the events in the words of formalist/structuralist narratologists. Here I want to talk about the story time (erzählzeit) and the discourse/narration time (erzählte zeit). It is a distinction, formulated in the forties by Günther Müller, elaborated on by Ricoeur (1983) and which is the object of the three volumes Time and Narrative. In this fascinating study the French philosopher asks himself what is the relationship between the time of/within the narratives and the objective notion of time (assuming that the latter exists and is not a “mere illusion, albeit a very persistent one” as suggested by Einstein). In order to answer this question Ricoeur (1983, vol. 3, p. 17) introduces the distinction between cosmological time (time of the world, temps du monde in French) and phenomenological time (time of the soul, temps de l’âme, in French) that is to say between subjective and objective time as elaborated respectively by Aristotle and Augustine.

Leaving aside the possible aporia between a notion of time as an “attribute of movement” (Aristotle, Physics, IV, 11, 2, 10) and a notion of time related to the “distentio animi” (Augustine, Confessions) the French philosopher provides us with an extremely powerful suggestion for the narrating of organizational life, which is the focus of my study. Is the time of narratives of organizational life the time of the world, the cosmological time of the clock and of the movement of stars or is it the soul time, the phenomenological time, the time of the relevant events of our lives?

Not only Aristotle but also Newton, Leibniz, Husserl and Kant are recalled to attention by Ricoeur’s distinction between a notion of time as a priori concept which exists before experience and a notion of intuitive time, as the expression of our inner lived experience and thus invisible time (Ricoeur, 1983, vol. 3, p. 37).

Ricoeur’s powerful suggestion stands in the answer, in the identification of a third time, the time of narrative, which is “the inscription of phenomenological time on cosmological time” (Ricoeur, 1983, vol. 3, p. 109).

What appears to be a simple suggestion bears important consequences in the study of narrating in organizations, where subjects cope daily with a temporality that is often conflicting with their personal one and where the role of narrative can be subject to different endings for the subjects involved.

1.3 In-betweenness

Furthermore, it is important for me to highlight that narratives live within a dialogic relationship between both mediated and disruptive forms to which they are oriented.

My study on the contextual and relational aspects of both narrating and deciding will search not only for plotted narratives but also for the act of narrating in which the story is not yet there or is challenged or searched for by the narrator. I will also try to explore what the relations are between the dominant stories or narratives and the contingent and local meanings of those stories for the actors involved. Some scholars have used Bakhtin’s suggestion of centripetal and centrifugal forces, where centripetal refers to official language and ideology and where centrifugal refers to local and unofficial language. While “the epic world is an utterly finished thing … it is impossible to change, to re-think, to re-evaluate anything in it. It is completed, conclusive and immutable, as a fact, an idea and a value” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 17). On the contrary the dialogized novel performs the destruction of epic distance and sets its first step in the “comic familiarization of the image of man” (p. 35).

As in the tril...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Table
• Foreword by David Boje
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Studying Stories: A Theoretical Background
• Part II: Research Experience
• Part III: Coming Back to Theory
• Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index