narrative ss.pdf

Narratives in Social Science Research

INTRODUCING QUALITATIVE METHODS provides a series of volumes which introduce qualitative 

research to the student and beginning researcher. The approach is interdisciplinary and 

international. A distinctive feature of these volumes is the helpful student exercises. 

One stream of the series provides texts on the key methodologies used in qualitative 

research. The other stream contains books on qualitative research for different disciplines 

or occupations. Both streams cover the basic literature in a clear and accessible style, but 

also cover the ‘cutting edge’ issues in the area. 

SERIES EDITOR 

David Silverman (Goldsmiths College) 

EDITORIAL BOARD 

Michael Bloor (University of Wales, Cardiff) 

Barbara Czarniawska (Göteborg University) 

Norman Denzin (University of Illinois, Champaign) 

Barry Glassner (University of Southern California) 

Jaber Gubrium (University of Missouri) 

Anne Murcott (South Bank University) 

Jonathan Potter (Loughborough University) 

TITLES IN SERIES 

Doing Conversation Analysis 

Paul ten Have 

Using Foucault’s Methods 

Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham 

The Quality of Qualitative Research 

Clive Seale 

Qualitative Evaluation 

Ian Shaw 

Researching Life Stories and Family 

Histories 

Robert L. Miller 

Categories in Text and Talk 

Georgia Lepper 

Focus Groups in Social Research 

Michael Bloor, Jane Frankland, Michelle 

Thomas, Kate Robson 

Qualitative Research Through Case Studies 

Max Travers 

Gender and Qualitative Methods 

Helmi Jarviluoma, Pirkko Moisala and 

Anni Vilkko 

Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis 

Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer 

Qualitative Research in Social Work 

lan Shaw and Nick Gould 

Qualitative Research in Information Systems 

Michael D. Myers and David Avison 

Researching the Visual 

Michael Emmison and Philip Smith 

Qualitative Research in Education 

Peter Freebody 

Using Documents in Social Research 

Lindsay Prior 

Doing Research in Cultural Studies 

Paula Saukko 

Qualitative Research in Sociology: 

An Introduction 

Amir B. Marvasti 

Criminological Research 

Lesley Noaks and Emma Wincup

Narratives in Social Science Research 

Barbara Czarniawska 

SAGE Publications 

London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi

© Barbara Czarniawska 2004 

First published 2004 

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or 

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those terms should be sent to the publishers. 

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Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, India 

Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead

Contents 

Foreword (David Silverman) viii 

Acknowledgments x 

1 The ‘Narrative Turn’ in Social Studies 1 

A brief history 1 

Enacted narrative as a basic form of social life 3 

Narrative as a mode of knowing 6 

Narration as a mode of communication 10 

Is there room for narrative in a postmodern society? 12 

About this book 14 

Exercise 15 

Further reading 15 

2 How Stories Are Made 17 

Narratives into stories 17 

The ways of emplotment 20 

Watching while stories are made 23 

Exercises 31 


3 Collecting Stories 33 

Oral history 33 

Collecting stories 36 

Telling stories 38 

Stories in and about organizations 40 

Ways of story collecting 43 

Exercises 45 


4 Narratives in an Interview Situation 47 

What is an interview? 47 

An interview as an interaction and as a narrative 

production site 49 

Difficulties connected to eliciting narratives in 

an interview situation 51 

Avoiding accounts 54

vi 

NARRATIVES IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH 

Interview transcript as a narrative 55 

Exercise 59 


5 Reading Narratives 60 

Hernadi’s triad 60 

The difficulty of explication 61 

Varieties of explanation 63 

Exploration 71 

Reading Egon Bittner 72 

Exercise 74 


6 Structural Analyses 76 

The morphology of a fairytale 76 

Morphology of evolution theories 78 

Actant model 79 

Scripts and schemas 82 

Other kinds of structural analysis 83 

Exercise 86 


7 Close Readings: Poststructuralism, Interruption, 

Deconstruction 88 

Poststructuralism in action 88 

Interruption 91 


Changing worlds 98 

Exercise 101 


8 Reading Social Science 102 

Dramatist analysis of drinking driver research 102 

The anthropologist as author 105 

Storytelling in economics 108 

Leadership as seduction: deconstructing 

social science theory 112 

Narratives from one’s own backyard 115 

Exercise 115 


9 Writing Social Science 117 

Mimesis, or how to represent the world 117 

Plot, or how to theorize 122 

Exercise 129 

Further reading 130

CONTENTS vii 

10 Narrativizing Social Sciences 131 

The dangerous stories from the field 131 

The worrisome stories of the field 132 

The hopeful narratives 134 


Glossary 138 

References 142 

Author index 153 

Subject index 156

Foreword 

David Silverman 

Qualitative research began as a ‘naturalistic’ genre (see Gubrium and Holstein, 

1997). In this sense, the anthropologists and the sociologists of the 1930s working 

at the University of Chicago set out to document the ‘raw’ world as it was 

lived and experienced by its subjects. ‘Naturalism’ produced rich and compelling 

accounts of various aspects and forms of everyday life. However, in the 

second half of the century, many qualitative researchers became suspicious 

about the claims of this genre. 

For some, the naturalists failed to recognize sufficiently the gendered and 

socially and ethnically stratified character of the world – and of their own writing 

about it (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000). For others, an observer’s ability to see 

regularities in ‘everyday life’ depends upon a complex body of linguistically 

mediated interactions that demand analysis. Discourse analysis (DA) and conversation 

analysis (CA) grasp this point and, in doing so, they offer a cumulative 

body of empirical work that richly documents how interaction is put 

together in real time by its participants (see Silverman, 2001: Ch. 6). 

Narrative analysis (NA) shares this linguistic turn with DA and CA. 

Arguably, NA has had a broader appeal to qualitative researchers than either 

DA or CA perhaps because it appears to fit better into quite conventional 

research studies. For instance, while CA and (to an increasing extent) DA tend 

to favor ‘naturally occurring’ data, narrative researchers often work with openended 

interviews. In doing so, they have provided their mainstream colleagues 

with a helpful means of reading sense into their interviews – still the most preferred 

form of qualitative data. 

Barbara Czarniawska has been foremost among those scholars working on 

narratives (see Czarniawska, 1997; 1998; 1999a; 2003b). Indeed, her work 

encompasses many of the themes that concern qualitative researchers at the 

beginning of the twenty-first century: the turn to language, the recognition of 

gender and power relations, and the postmodern concern with how we narrate 

our own research. 

Narratives in Social Science Research is enriched by Barbara’s long interest in 

the subject, documented by several publications and graduate courses on the 

topic that she has taught in many countries. It is intended as a textbook for 

social science researchers who are interested in using a narrative approach: finalyear 

undergraduates and graduate students but also researchers who decide to 

explore new perspectives. It can be used in anthropology, social psychology,

FOREWORD ix 

sociology, management, economics, political sciences, cultural geography, and 

cultural studies. It will work effectively both as a main text in a course in narrative 

methods and as a supplementary text in general methodology courses. 

The book begins with a brief historical sketch of the relationship between 

the humanities and social sciences and the recent rapprochement between the 

two as expressed in the interest in the narrative. It ends with listing possible 

reasons for using a narrative approach. The structure of the main part of the 

book helpfully follows the chronology of a research project. It demonstrates 

how a narrative approach can be applied in fieldwork (observing how stories are 

made, collecting stories, evoking narratives), how such collected or produced 

narratives can be read (interpretation, structural analysis, close readings), and 

ends by exploring the analogy between social science writing and other texts. 

Most chapters have one or more exercises and a helpful further reading list. A 

particularly helpful point is that examples in all the chapters are taken from 

many different branches of social sciences and draw upon the author’s own 

research. 

As editor of this series, Introducing Qualitative Methods, it is a pleasure to welcome 

a scholar of Barbara Czarniawska’s distinction. I have no doubt that this 

book will be of great value to both students and researchers. 

David Silverman 

London

Acknowledgments 

I would like to thank the participants of the graduate course given at Göteborg 

University in the Fall of 2002 for the patience and attention they gave this 

book’s first draft: Kems o.Adu-Gyan, Maria Bolin, Dorit Christensen,Andreas 

Diedrich, Malin Gawell, Märta Hammarström, Patrik Johansson,Tina Karrbom, 

Elisabeth Ravenshorst, Nicklas Salomonson,Anna Maria Szczepanska, Kristian 

Wasen, and Cecilia Åkerblom.

1 

The ‘Narrative Turn’ in Social Studies 

A brief history 1 

Enacted narrative as a basic form of social life 3 

Narrative as a mode of knowing 6 

Narration as a mode of communication 10 

Is there room for narrative in a postmodern society? 12 

About this book 14 

Notes 16 

A brief history 

One of the most quoted utterances proclaiming the central role of narratives 

in social life comes from Roland Barthes (1915–1980), the French semiologist 

and literary critic: 

The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious 

variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances – as though any 

material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, 

spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all 

these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, 

tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting … stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news 

item, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is 

present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of 

mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all 

human groups, have their narratives … Caring nothing for the division between good 

and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply 

there, like life itself. (Barthes, 1977: 79) 

Transnational, transhistorical, transcultural: indeed, even the interest in narratives 

dates from much earlier than the 1970s. The beginnings of narrative 

analysis can well be placed in the hermeneutic studies of the Bible,Talmud and 

Koran. Contemporary accounts usually begin with the work of a Russian formalist,Vladimir 

Propp, who published his Morphology of the Folktale in 1928, 

meticulously analyzing what he saw as the underlying structure of Russian

2 


folktales. Russian formalists and then postformalists such as Mikhail Bakhtin 

continued to develop narrative analysis, but it first received wider recognition 

in 1958 when Propp’s book was translated into French and English. It has been 

the second English edition, that of 1968, which has met with great attention 

within and outside literary theory. 

The contemporary literary study of narrative, claims Donald E. 

Polkinghorne (1987), has its origins in four national traditions: Russian formalism, 

US new criticism, French structuralism, and German hermeneutics. 

Going even further back in time, much of linguistic and narrative analysis can 

be traced to the disciples of two comparative linguists: the Pole, Jan Niecislaw 

Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929), and the Swiss, Ferdinand de Saussure 

(1857–1913). 1 The Soviet revolution put an end to the cooperation between 

the East and the West, but émigrés such as Roman Jakobson (linguist),Tzvetan 

Todorov (literary theorist), and Algirdas Greimas (semiologist) continued to 

develop the East European tradition in France, while Mikhail Bakhtin and 

others persevered in their efforts behind the Iron Curtain. 

What all these movements had in common, and contrary to traditional 

hermeneutics, was their interest in texts as such, not in the authors’ intentions 

or the circumstances of the texts’ production. Such was the main tenet of the 

New Criticism, as represented by Northrop Frye and Robert Scholes, who 

looked not only for universal plots but also for the evolution of the narrative 

in history. The French narratologists, such as Tzvetan Todorov and Roland 

Barthes,were more under the influence of the structuralism of the anthropologist 

Claude Lévi-Strauss, who had earlier read Propp. Lévi-Strauss, along with the US 

linguist Naom Chomsky, looked for the invariable structure of the universal 

human mind.Another criticism (but also extension) of traditional hermeneutics 

came from Germany. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) is best known as a promoter 

of contemporary hermeneutics. Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss 

went further, creating their own reception theory; Iser especially puts emphasis 

on the interaction between the reader and the text (Iser, 1978).Among all those 

there was, and is, the formidable presence of Paul Ricoeur, who took into consideration 

those aspects of various schools that related to his main interest: the 

relation between temporality and narrative (Ricoeur, 1984; 1986). 

This interest in narrative spread beyond literary theory to the humanities 

and social sciences. Historian Hayden White shocked by claiming that there 

can be no discipline of history, only of historiography, as historians emplot the 

events into histories instead of ‘finding’ them (White, 1973).William Labov and 

Joshua Waletzky espoused and improved on Propp’s formalist analysis, suggesting 

that sociolinguistics should concern itself with a syntagmatic analysis of 

simple narratives, which would eventually provide a key to understanding the 

structure and function of complex narratives (Labov and Waletzky, 1967: 

12–13). Richard Harvey Brown, in a peculiar act of parallel invention, spoke of 

‘a poetics for sociology’ (1977), seemingly unaware that Mikhail Bakhtin had 

postulated it before him (Bakhtin, 1928/1985).

THE ‘NARRATIVE TURN’ IN SOCIAL STUDIES 3 

By the end of the 1970s, the trickle became a stream.Walter R. Fisher (1984) 

pointed out the central role of narrative in politics and of narrative analysis in 

political sciences; Jerome Bruner (1986) and Donald E. Polkinghorne (1987) 

did the same for psychology; Laurel Richardson (1990) for sociology; while 

Deirdre McCloskey (1990) scrutinized the narrative of economic expertise. By 

the 1990s, narrative analysis had also become a common approach in science 

studies (see, e.g., Curtis, 1994; Silvers, 1995). 

Enacted narrative as a basic form of social life 

One of the reasons for an eager espousal of a narrative approach in both the 

humanities and social sciences might be that it is useful to think of an 

enacted narrative as the most typical form of social life (MacIntyre, 

1981/1990: 129).This need not be an ontological claim; life might or might 

not be an enacted narrative but conceiving of it as such provides a rich 

source of insight.This suggestion is at least as old as Shakespeare and has been 

taken up and elaborated upon by Kenneth Burke (1945), Clifford Geertz 

(1980),Victor Turner (1982), Ian Mangham and Michael Overington (1987), 

and many others. 

Let me then begin with the basic tenet of Alasdair MacIntyre’s philosophy: 

that social life is a narrative. It is usually assumed that social life consists of 

actions and events, where the difference between the two is as assumed intentionality 

of actions. In many social science texts, however, the term ‘action’ has 

been replaced by or used as an alternative for ‘behavior’. In my own field, 

‘organizational behavior’ is a term that is taken for granted – unproblematic 

even for otherwise critical authors and readers. But is there any reason to 

argue about the difference between ‘action’ and ‘behavior’? There is, if we 

recall that the notion of ‘behavioral sciences’ goes back to eighteenth-century 

empiricism, in which the ‘sense-datum’ was proposed as the main unit of cognition 

and the main object of scientific study.Were we to describe our experience 

in terms of sensory description only, ‘we would be confronted with 

not only an uninterpreted, but an uninterpretable world’ (MacIntyre, 

1981/1990: 79). Such a world would indeed be a world of ‘behaviors’, both 

meaningless and mechanical, because if sense-data were to become the basis 

for the formulation of laws, all reference to intentions, purposes, and reasons – 

all that which changes behavior into a human action – would have to be 

removed. 2 

MacIntyre and many other advocates of a narrative approach to social 

phenomena limit the concept of action to human beings: ‘Human beings can 

be held to account for that of which they are the authors; other beings cannot’ 

(MacIntyre, 1981/1990: 209). In Chapter 6 I show that such a limitation is not 

necessary but, at present, let us remain with the authors who were interested 

in grasping human conduct via the notion of narrative. Thus Alfred Schütz

4 


(1899–1959) pointed out that it is impossible to understand human conduct 

while ignoring its intentions,and it is impossible to understand human intentions 

while ignoring the settings in which they make sense (Schütz, 1973). Such 

settings may be institutions, sets of practices, or some other contexts created by 

humans – contexts which have a history, within which both particular deeds 

and whole histories of individual actors can be and have to be situated in order 

to be intelligible. 

The concept of action in the sense of an intentional act occurring between 

actors in a given social order (Harré, 1982) can be further related to three relevant 

traditions of thought. One is literary hermeneutics as represented by 

Ricoeur (1981), who suggested that meaningful action might be considered as 

a text, and vice versa. Meaningful action shares the constitutive features of the 

text; it becomes objectified by inscription, which frees it from its agent; it has 

relevance beyond its immediate context; and it can be read like an ‘open work’. 

The theory of literary interpretation can thus be extended to the field of social 

sciences. 

The second important tradition is that of phenomenology, introduced into the 

social sciences by Alfred Schütz and his pupils, Peter Berger and Thomas 

Luckmann. Phenomenology’s encounter with US pragmatism produced two 

offshoots that are relevant to the present context. One is symbolic interactionism 

as represented by Herbert Blumer and Howard S. Becker. Another is 

ethnomethodology as developed by Harold Garfinkel, Aaron Cicourel, and 

Harvey Sacks. Their inspiration was taken up with particular success by the 

British sociologist, David Silverman (see, e.g., Silverman, 1975; Silverman and 

Jones, 1976; Silverman and Torode, 1980). 

Ethnomethodology is significant here because it introduces the notion of 

accountability as a central concept in the understanding of social action. 

Accountability is the main bond of human interactions; indeed, the main social 

bond. Conduct can be treated as an action when it can be accounted for (before, 

simultaneously, or after the act – Harré, 1982) in terms that are acceptable in a 

given social setting. People spend their lives planning, commenting upon, and 

justifying what they and others do.Although some of this takes place in imaginary 

conversations conducted in people’s heads, most takes place in ‘real’ conversations 

with others. 

A limitation of traditional ethnomethodological thought is that it has difficulty 

in explaining the connections between different rules of accounting that 

appear to be ascribed to specific situations. A ‘conversation between lovers’ 

runs along a different script from a ‘conversation of a teenager with her angry 

mother’, but conversations between lovers and between teenagers and their 

angry mothers occurring in the same place over the same time period tend to 

resemble one another. How is this possible? Latour (1993b) suggested that 

ethnomethodology could explain sociality, but not society: there is nothing to fix 

various actions, to make situations repeatable. For him, technology is such a fixing 

and connecting device. In the example above, movies and TV have done a


lot to propagate appropriate conversation scripts, for lovers and for teenagers. 

Speaking more generally, it is reproduction technologies that permit locating 

present conversations in history – that is, in past conversations. 

Observing how conversations are repeated and how they change permits 

their classification into genres, as in literary criticism. One of the most central 

contemporary genres is that of life story: biography or autobiography. Although 

that which Elisabeth Bruss (1976) called ‘autobiographical acts’ existed as early 

as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were regarded as private documents.‘Biography’ 

became a recognized term after 1680, but the term ‘autobiography’ 

was found in English texts only in 1809 (Bruss, 1976). It is therefore 

appropriate to pay attention to this genre of narrative, looking for a clue to 

understanding other modern genres. Its common characteristic is that a narrative 

of an individual history is placed in a narrative of social history (be it a 

family or a nation) or even in a history of the narrative. 

As to the first narrative (that of an individual history), its importance is connected 

with the fact that in order to understand their own lives people put 

them into narrative form – and they do the same when they try to understand 

the lives of others. Thus actions acquire meaning by gaining a place in a 

narrative of life. ‘Living is like writing a book’ is a saying known in many 

languages. 

This sounds as if people could tell stories as they please and, in so doing, 

shape their lives as they see fit.This is actually a typical criticism of social constructivism: 

that it conceives the world as a collection of subjectively spun 

stories. 3 But we are never the sole authors of our own narratives; in every conversation 

a positioning takes place (Davies and Harré, 1991) which is accepted, 

rejected, or improved upon by the partners in the conversation.When a new 

head of department introduces herself to her collaborators, she tells them how 

she wants to be perceived.Their reactions will tell her how much of this has 

been accepted or rejected, what corrections have been made, and how the 

members of the group want to be perceived by their new boss. But the end of 

the introductory meeting does not end the positioning thus begun; this will 

continue as long as these people work together, and even longer in the history 

they will tell later. 

What is more, other people or institutions concoct narratives for others 

without including them in a conversation; this is what power is about. Some 

people decide about other people’s jobs, their livelihoods, their identities. But 

even as puppets in a power game, people are still co-authors of history – that 

other enacted dramatic narrative in which they are also actors. 

How can individual narratives be related to societal ones? To understand a 

society or some part of a society, it is important to discover its repertoire 

of legitimate stories and find out how it evolved – this is what I have called 

above a history of narratives.Thus, as MacIntyre reminds his readers, the chief 

means of moral education in pre-modern societies was the telling of stories in 

a genre fitting the kind of society whose story was being told. In the process

6 


of socialization or, as anthropologists call it, enculturation, young people were 

helped to attribute meaning to their lives by relating them to the legitimate 

narrative of the society to which they belonged. Thus the main narrative of, 

and in, heroic societies was epic and saga, whereas the genre of city-states was 

tragedy, both reflecting and expressing the prevalent stance toward human fate 

and human community. 

Although neither of these cultures (the heroic societies nor the Greek citystates) 

was exactly unitary or consistent, MacIntyre nonetheless claims that it 

was only medieval cultures that first encountered the problem of multiple narratives 

on a global scale – with many ideals, many ways of life, many religions. 

How, then, could anybody tell a particular story? To begin with, it is obvious 

that every age hosts many competing narratives (indeed, periodization itself 

belongs to one story or another) and, in principle, one could choose to relate 

such a story to any of them. On the other hand, it makes sense for interpretive 

purposes to speak of a dominant or prevalent narrative genre at any one time – 

what is called in science the mainstream. 

The novel, for instance, is regarded as the most characteristic genre of modern 

times. Kundera (1988) places Cervantes together with Descartes among 

the founders of the Modern Era. Other new genres emerged in modernity, 

such as the above-mentioned biography and autobiography (both a consequence 

of the modern institution of personal identity), while others changed 

their character so that a ‘modern poetry’ emerged, for instance.Thus when we 

read Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), the forerunner of modern ethnology, we 

know that we are reading a philosophical treatise and that it is not a modern 

one. In this sense genres are like any other institutions, or maybe all institutions 

are like genres:‘A literary institution must reflect and give focus to some consistent 

need and sense of possibility in the community it serves, but at the same 

time, a genre helps to define what is possible and to specify the appropriate 

means for meeting an expressive need’ (Bruss, 1976: 5). 

If we add instrumental needs to expressive needs (or better still if we remove 

any divide between them), social theory and social practice can be treated as 

special genres of narrative situated within other narratives of modern (or postmodern) 

society. Social sciences can therefore focus on how these narratives of 

theory and practice are constructed, used, and misused. But before moving on 

to concrete examples, we will examine the present understanding of the concept 

of narrative in social sciences and humanities. Two such perspectives are 

especially relevant: seeing narrative as a mode of knowing and narration as a mode 

of communication. 

Narrative as a mode of knowing 

Knowledge is not the same as science, especially in its contemporary form. (Lyotard, 

1979/1986: 18)


In 1979, the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec asked 

French philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard, to write ‘a report on knowledge in 

the most highly developed societies’ (Lyotard, 1979/1986: xxv). In his report, 

Lyotard contrasted the narrative form of knowledge, typical of the non-modern 

type of society, with that modern invention – scientific knowledge.There is a 

peculiar relationship between the two, he said: while science requires narrative 

for its own legitimation (there has to be a story to tell why scientific knowledge 

is important at all), it repays the favor in poor coin. 4 Not only does it 

refuse to perform the same service and to legitimize narrative knowledge (with 

the possible exception of structuralism and formalism in literary theory) but 

also it fiercely denies narrative its legitimacy as a form of knowledge and, above 

all, demands that the question of knowledge status and legitimation remains 

taken for granted, unexamined. Paradoxically, however, as the grand narratives 

of legitimation lost their privileged status, narrative and science both came 

back into the light of scrutiny. 

One of the authors to take up this scrutiny was Jerome Bruner, who compared 

the narrative mode of knowing 5 with the logico-scientific mode, also 

referred to as the paradigmatic mode of knowing (Bruner, 1986).The narrative 

mode of knowing consists in organizing experience with the help of a scheme 

assuming the intentionality of human action. Using the basic concepts of literary 

theory, Polkinghorne (1987) followed Bruner’s lead in exploring the narrative, 

an attempt that I will discuss here at length in order to point out its 

interesting tenets. 

Plot, says Polkinghorne, is the basic means by which specific events, otherwise 

represented as lists or chronicles, are brought into one meaningful whole. 

‘The company suffered unprecedented losses’ and ‘the top managers were 

forced to resign’ are two mysterious events that call for interpretation. ‘With 

the company suffering unprecedented losses, the top managers were forced to 

resign’ is a narrative.The difference lies in the temporal ordering and thus in a 

suggested connection between the two. As the example indicates, some kind 

of causality may be inferred but it is crucial to see that narrative, unlike science, 

leaves open the nature of the connection. A law-type statement such as ‘when 

a company suffers losses, its managers resign’ invites falsification or verification 

on a statistical scale, but not a re-making and negotiation of meaning, such as: 

‘Are you sure? I’ve heard they started losing when the managers resigned, as 

they took their customers with them?’ 

What is considered a vice in science – openness to competing interpretations 

– is a virtue in narrative.This openness means that the same set of events 

can be organized around different plots. ‘The top managers were forced to 

resign when it became clear that the company’s losses were covered up for a 

long time’ or ‘The top managers were forced to resign even if the auditors were 

to blame’ gives the same chain of events a different meaning. In 2002, the year 

of the Enron,World Com and Arthur Anderson scandals, such tentative plots 

were found daily in the media.

8 


Polkinghorne also discusses a special type of explanation that is possible 

within a narrative, where the ‘motives’ can be reconciled with ‘causes’ in an 

interpretation of action. Within the logico-scientific mode of knowing, an 

explanation is achieved by recognizing an event as an instance of a general law, 

or as belonging to a certain category.Within the narrative mode of knowing, 

an explanation consists in relating an event to a human project: 

When a human event is said not to make sense, it is usually not because a person is 

unable to place it in the proper category. The difficulty stems, instead, from a person’s 

inability to integrate the event into a plot whereby it becomes understandable in the 

context of what has happened … Thus, narratives exhibit an explanation instead of 

demonstrating it. (Polkinghorne, 1987: 21) 

Notice also the implicit differentiation between an ‘event’ and an ‘action’: the 

latter is an event that can be interpreted, made sense of, by attributing intentions 

to it.‘A flood’ is an event but ‘a flood due to the poor quality of cement 

used in the dam construction’ is quite another story.While a logico-scientific 

text would have to demonstrate and prove the difference between the two, a 

narrative can simply put the elements close to one another, exhibiting an 

explanation:‘As water sprang in all directions, the engineer looked up and saw 

the growing hole in the dam.’ 

While it may be clear that narrative offers an alternative mode of knowing, 

the relative advantage of using this mode may remain obscure. Bruner (1990) 

points out that in narrative it is the plot rather than the truth or falsity of story 

elements that determines the power of the narrative as a story. A narrative 

which says ‘The top managers resigned and then it rained a whole week’ (i.e. 

a narrative with no plot or an incomprehensible plot) will need some additional 

elements to make sense of it, even though the two events and their temporal 

connection may well be true and correct in themselves. Bruner (1990: 

44) calls this the narrative’s indifference to extralinguistic reality, which is compensated 

by an extreme sensibility to the reality of the speech (i.e. the occasion 

when the narrative is presented). ‘The top managers resigned, and then it 

rained the whole week’ may produce an outburst of hilarity when, for example, 

told on a sunny day by the new CEO to his board of directors.There are 

no structural differences between fictional and factual narratives, and their 

respective attraction is not determined by their claim to be fact or fiction.The 

attractiveness of a narrative is situationally negotiated – or, rather, arrived at, 

since contingency plays as much a part in the process as esthetics or politics. 

This negotiation takes place even when readers are reading in solitude – a 

sleepy reader will find a text less attractive than an alert reader, etc. 

Is there no way to tell the difference between a fictional and factual text, 

between belles lettres and social science, for that matter? There is, and to explain 

it I will borrow from Tzvetan Todorov, the Bulgarian-French literature theorist 

and linguist with a great interest in social sciences, his concept of a fictional


contract (1978/1990: 26). In this tacit contract between the author and the 

reader, the authors plead: suspend your disbelief, as I am going to please you. 

In what can be called a referential contract, the researcher pleads: activate your disbelief, 

as I am going to instruct you. It goes without saying that if the scientific 

author manages to please the reader as well, it is a bonus. 

In the meantime, the lack of structural differences between fictional and 

factual narratives is suspected to account for most of their power. Narrative 

thrives on the contrast between the ordinary, what is ‘normal’, usual, and 

expected, and the ‘abnormal’, unusual, and unexpected. It has effective means 

at its disposal for rendering the unexpected intelligible: ‘The function of the 

story is to find an intentional state that mitigates or at least makes comprehensible 

a deviation from a canonical cultural pattern’ (Bruner, 1990: 49–50).This 

is possible because the power of the story does not depend on its connection 

to the world outside the story but in its openness for negotiating meaning. 

‘This is a true story’ and ‘This never happened’ are two ways of claiming genre 

affiliation, but genre affiliation does not decide whether a story is found interesting 

or not. Se non è vero è ben trovato (even if it’s untrue it is still beautifully 

put), says an Italian proverb. 

As narratives explaining deviations are socially sensitive, a form of story 

whose power does not reside in the difference between fact and fiction is convenient 

for such sensitive negotiations. One or many alternative narratives are 

always in the offing. In Enron’s story, the blame and, consequently, the part of 

the Villain, was given in alternative versions to the US government, to Enron’s 

executives, to auditors, or to all of them.The events acquire a meaning by the 

application of abduction (a guess, a tentative plot), which introduces a hypothetical 

connection – just like a hypothesis but still claiming openness. Yet 

another story might offer a better or more convincing explanation, without 

ever challenging the truth or falsity of the story elements.There is no way of 

deciding between different stories except by negotiation: between the writers 

(as in a public debate), between the writer and the reader (where the writer 

tries to get the upper hand but the reader has the last word), or between 

various readers, as in a private conversation. Stories, claims Bruner, are ‘especially 

viable instruments for social negotiation’. 

This ‘method of negotiating and renegotiating meanings by the mediation 

of narrative interpretation’, it seems to Bruner, ‘is one the crowning achievements 

of human development in the ontogenetic, cultural and phylogenetic 

sense of that expression’ (1990: 67).The human species developed a ‘protolinguistic’ 

readiness for the narrative organization of experience. This primitive 

disposition of the child is encouraged and elaborated in the course of life, 

exploiting the richness of the existing repertoire of stories and plots. An adult 

person will enrich, challenge, and continue this repertoire. 

The analogy between the enculturation of a child and an acculturation of an 

immigrant or a new employee is obvious, but I want to carry the point even 

further. Even scientists become scientists with the help of narrative. Graduate

10 


students read mountains of books on methods, like this one, but when they 

want to submit their first paper to a referee journal, they ask a colleague who 

has already published: ‘How did you go about it?’ The method books are 

accompanied by growing numbers of biographies and autobiographies, and 

they themselves are richly illustrated with stories. 

It is not difficult to admit that narrative knowledge is ubiquitous in all social 

practices. Managers and their subordinates tell stories and write stories, to one 

another and to interviewers, be they researchers or journalists. So do doctors 

and patients, teachers and pupils, salespersons and customers, coaches and football 

players. The genre of autobiography – personal and organizational – is 

steadily growing in popularity, while the older types of stories – folktales, 

myths, and sagas – acquire new forms thanks to new technologies and new 

media. 

A student of social practices re-tells narratives of a given practice and constructs 

them herself, first and second hand. Nevertheless, she cannot stop here 

as, by doing that, she will be barely competing with the practitioners themselves, 

and from a disadvantaged position. She must go further and see how the 

narratives of practice unfold. This interest can lead her to a stance espousing 

the ideas of logico-scientific knowledge, as formalism and structuralism tended 

to do, or those closer to the poststructuralist edge of the spectrum of narratology. 

I shall introduce both types but, before that, we will look at another use 

of narrative – narration as a communication mode. 

Narration as a mode of communication 

Narration is a common mode of communication. People tell stories to entertain, 

to teach and to learn, to ask for an interpretation and to give one.When 

US political scientist,Walter Fisher, read MacIntyre’s work, he suddenly understood 

that his own work in the area of communication had stemmed from a 

conception of the human being as Homo narrans (Fisher, 1984). From this 

emerged an attempt to combine the narrative and paradigmatic modes of knowing 

in what he calls a narrative paradigm of communication. 

The narrative paradigm is based on a notion of narrative rationality (Fisher, 

1987), in contrast to the conventional model of formal rationality whereby 

human communication is supposed to follow the rules of formal logic. 6 

Rationality as redefined by Fisher involves the principles of narrative probability – 

a story’s coherence and integrity – and narrative fidelity – a story’s credibility 

established by the presence of ‘good reasons’ (i.e. ‘accurate assertions about 

social reality’) (Fisher, 1987). This redefinition of rationality, he claims, provides 

a radical democratic ground for a social-political critique, inasmuch as it 

assumes that everybody is capable of narrative rationality. Unlike the traditional 

notion of rationality, it also allows for interpretation of public moral argument 

(see also R.H. Brown, 1998). Fisher demonstrated the use of his concepts in his


analysis of the nuclear war controversy as a public moral argument (1984) and 

of the political rhetoric of Ronald Reagan (1987). 

Fisher’s claim that ‘all forms of human communication need to be seen fundamentally 

as stories’ (1987: xiii) can be regarded as both narrower and more 

extensive than MacIntyre’s conception of narrative. According to my reading 

of the latter, narrative is the main form of social life because it is the main 

device for making sense of social action.Thus it either subsumes communication 

as a kind of action or makes it redundant (everything is ‘communication’). 

However, if one insists on preserving the notion of communication to denote 

a special kind of social action, it becomes clear that there are other forms of 

human communication than narrative. Fisher has himself enumerated several: 

technical argument, poetic discourse, or such speech acts Gumbrecht (1992) 

called description and argumentation. 

Some discourses or speech acts may aim at the destruction or at least the 

interruption of the narrative.The Dada movement in art provides an extreme 

example of an experiment in human communication which opposed the 

storytelling mode and yet we make sense of it by placing it in the narrative of 

Modern Art or, alternatively, in the narrative of European history at the 

moment when post-World War I frustration was at its height (Berman, 1992). 

Fisher also wants to conduct a ‘criterial analysis’ of narratives: it is not 

enough for him to see narrative as good or bad for the purpose at hand, to paraphrase 

Schütz. Consequently, he rejects pragmatism while sharing many of its 

ideas. His understanding of rationality is still geared to the application of criteria 

rather than the achievement of consensus (Rorty, 1992). This means that, while 

espousing the narrative mode of knowing, Fisher does not want to abandon 

the paradigmatic (logico-scientific) one; hence his expression ‘the narrative 

paradigm’. There must be a priori criteria for what is good or bad in telling 

stories. This requirement recalls the argument in Habermas (1984) that there 

must be a set of criteria for a good dialogue external to the dialogue itself. 

Fisher does, in fact, acknowledge his debt to the German philosopher. 

I am dwelling on this issue to warn the readers that I adopt a new pragmatist 

view. Consequently, while sympathizing with many of Fisher’s ideas, I do 

not espouse his overall purpose:‘It is a corollary of the general pragmatist claim 

that there is no permanent ahistorical metaphysical framework into which 

everything can be fitted’ (Rorty, 1992: 64). I do not accuse Fisher of planning 

to come up with such a framework but his criteria certainly look as though 

they could be fitted into one. Pragmatically again, it is possible to envisage 

many situations in which the construction of such criteria might well serve a 

particular purpose. Once they have received a special status, however, they will 

end up as ‘principles’ and ‘criteria’ usually do: obstructing their own change or 

reform. 

The notion of an ‘ideal speech situation’, coined by Habermas (1984), 

achieved wide resonance in organization theory and practice, especially as a 

way of improving organizational communication (Gustavsen, 1985). A similar

12 


success can be predicted for Fisher’s ideas, which lend themselves well to 

consultancy purposes: with a list of ‘conditions for a good narrative’, organizational 

communication can surely be improved.And yet understanding of organizational 

reality, such as informs the present book, indicates that such an effort 

is impossible. ‘An ideal speech situation’ and ‘a good narrative’ are things that 

have to be locally negotiated, and those are valid only for a given time and 

place. They are results not preconditions of organizational communication. 

Some claim that this phenomenon of the constant construction of society is in 

itself local and temporal and belongs to ‘late modernity’ or ‘postmodernity’. 

Is there room for narrative in a postmodern society? 

While there is general agreement that the epoch in which we now live is different 

from that which is called ‘modernity’ (although it is not yet sure how, as 

epochs are best named after they ended), there is disagreement about the type 

of reflection that has been called ‘postmodern’. For some, ‘postmodern’ is 

merely a description of a school of architecture and any other use of the word 

is unwarranted. For others,‘postmodern’ means a pretentious, hermetic vocabulary, 

plaguing mostly the humanities, but recently also the social sciences. In 

this text,‘postmodern’ is applied to a kind of social reflection that is characterized 

by three tenets: 

1 It refuses the correspondence theory of truth, according to which statements 

are true where they correspond to the world, on the basis that it is impossible 

to compare words to non-words (Rorty, 1980). 

2 Consequently, it challenges the operation of representation, revealing the complications 

of any attempt to represent something by something else. 

3 And, therefore, it pays much attention to language (in a sense of any system of 

signs – numbers, words, or pictures) as a tool of reality construction rather than 

its passive mirroring. 

It might seem, however, that this text goes against the grain of what is one of the 

main tenets in the postmodern reflection – that is, that ‘history has come to an 

end’ (Fukuyama, 1992) or that the grand narratives – of progress, of emancipation, 

and recently even of economic growth – have been abandoned (Lyotard, 

1979). Answering Lyotard on behalf of the pragmatists, Rorty claims that ‘we 

want to drop metanarratives, but keep on recounting edifying first-order narratives’ 

(1992: 60). History may be dead but only if we were attached irrevocably 

to one specific version of it.Abandoning the modern metanarrative of emancipation 

does not mean giving up the longing for narratives that we happen to like 

in a benign ethnocentrism which values our own way of life but relinquishes the 

idea of ‘modernizing’ other people who are ‘underdeveloped’,‘premodern’, or in 

some other way different from us.A quest for a good life extends to becoming a


quest for a good society, excluding a missionary zeal which forces other people 

to adopt our point of view but including a readiness to listen to other people and 

their narratives so that we might include them in our own narrative if we 

happen to like them (Rorty, 1991).And Lyotard agrees: it was only the narratives 

of legitimation, the ‘metanarratives,’ which were exposed to the postmodern critique: 

‘the little narrative remains the quintessential form of imaginative invention, 

most particularly in science’ (1979/1986: 61). 

The question then arises as to whether it is in fact possible to construct any 

shared concepts, whether it is possible to have a conversation, an exchange of 

narratives – without recourse to a metanarrative of some kind. In answering 

this, MacIntyre (1981/1990) emphasizes the unpredictability of an enacted 

dramatic narrative of life and history. Such construction is never finished and 

in the negotiation of meaning the results are for ever uncertain.The old metanarratives 

sinned in their ambition to end a conversation by trying to predict 

its outcome. If a canon is already known, there is nothing left to talk about. 

The narrative structure of human life requires unpredictability and this is, 

paradoxically, why the alleged failure of the social sciences (namely, their failure 

to formulate laws and consequently the failure to predict) is in fact their 

greatest achievement. According to MacIntyre, this should be interpreted not 

as a defeat but as a triumph, as virtue rather than vice. He adds provocatively 

that the common claim that the human sciences are young in comparison with 

the natural sciences is clearly false, and they are in fact as old, if not older.And 

the kind of explanations they offer fit perfectly the kind of phenomena they 

purport to explain. 

Unpredictability 7 does not imply inexplicability. Explanations are possible 

because there is a certain teleology – sense of purpose – in all lived narratives. 

It is a kind of circular teleology because it is not given beforehand but is created 

by the narrative.A life is lived with a goal but the most important aspect of life 

is the formulation and re-formulation of that goal. This circular teleology is 

what MacIntyre calls a narrative quest.A virtuous life, according to him, is a life 

dedicated to a quest for the good human life, where the construction of a definition 

of a ‘good life’ is a process that ends only when a life comes to an end. 

Rather than being defined at the outset, a ‘good life’ acquires a performative 

definition through the living of it. A search looks for something that already 

exists (as in a ‘search for excellence’); a quest creates its goal rather than discovers 

it.The proponents of means–ends rationality defend the notion of the a 

priori goals, while the pragmatists declare it to be impractical.A narrative view 

gets rid of the problem by reinstating the role of goals as both the results and 

the antecedents of action.Whole communities as well as individual persons are 

engaged in a quest for meaning in ‘their life’, which will bestow meaning on 

particular actions taken. 

Therefore a student of social life, no matter of which domain, needs to 

become interested in narrative as a form of social life, a form of knowledge, 

and a form of communication.

14 

There is an apparent difference between MacIntyre and Fisher, on the one 

hand, and another advocate of a narrative approach, Richard Harvey Brown, on 

the other, as regards the role of narrative in contemporary society. The first two 

celebrate narratives whereas Brown sees them as an endangered species:‘Narrative 

requires a political economy and collective psychology in which a sense of lived 

connection between personal character and public conduct prevails’ (1987: 

144). This condition, Brown claims, is rare in contemporary western societies, 

where personal character has become separated from public conduct (see also 

Sennett, 1998). The difference is misleading in that both MacIntyre and Fisher 

feel there is a need to celebrate narrative precisely because there is a rift between 

private and public discourse, because the language of virtues has become obsolete 

(MacIntyre, 1981/1990), and because a public moral argument has become an 

oxymoron in the light of emotive ethics (Fisher, 1984; 1987).All three authors – 

and indeed most of the adherents of the narrative mode of knowing, whether or 

not they call themselves such – are vitally interested in constructing a public 

moral discourse which avoids nostalgia trips to the past (especially to totalitarian 

pasts) and does not stop at denouncing the postmodern fragmentation.They may 

differ in their view on the ultimate purpose (emancipation for Fisher and Brown, 

a quest for virtues for MacIntyre, and a fight against cruelty for Rorty), but there 

is always a moral vision in their theories. 8 

About this book 


Figure 1.1 depicts various uses of narrative and its analysis in social science 

studies, simultaneously announcing the contents of this book.Thus Chapter 2 

concerns the ways in which stories are made in various fields of practice 

(including scientific practice, although this field receives more attention in 

Chapters 8 and 9). Chapter 3 concerns story collection, while Chapter 4 shows 

that interviews allow all three activities, being an observation of how stories 

are made, an opportunity for story collection, and a possibility to provoke 

storytelling. Chapter 5 introduces a general framework of text interpretation. 

Chapter 6 illustrates structuralist ways of analyzing texts, whereas Chapter 7 

introduces poststructuralist and deconstructivist ways of reading a text. Chapter 8 

offers examples of readings of scientific texts, while Chapter 9 discusses issues 

important in writing a scientific text. Chapter 10 discusses the consequences 

of narrativizing social sciences. 

Chapters 2–9 have a similar structure: they begin with a general introduction 

of a given aspect of a narrative approach, continue with one or more examples of 

well-known works illustrating this very aspect, and end with a detailed example 

of a given textual operation. Examples are often taken from my own work, not 

because it is exemplary but because it permits me to take liberties impossible to 

take with texts of other authors. Chapters 1–9 end with one or more ‘exercises’ 

whose aim is to create material that can be used in exemplifying the contents of 

the next chapter.The readers can replace the exercise material with their own field

Field of practice 


• Watch how the stories are being made 

• Collect the stories 

• Provoke story telling 

• Interpret the stories (what do they say?) 

• Analyze the stories (how do they say it?) 

• Deconstruct the stories (unmake them) 

• Put together your own story 

• Set it against/together with other stories 

material. Chapter 10 does not contain an exercise as the exercise is the reader’s 

own text – to be created.All chapters end with a ‘further reading list’ that might 

serve as a guide among the long list of references to a reader who wants to deepen 

his or her introduction to the narrative approach to social sciences. 

Exercise 1.1: my life so far 

EXERCISE 

Write a chronological account of your own life. (If you are working in a group, 

decide from the start whether you want to share your biography with the 

others. A conscious censorship works better than a subconscious one.) 

FURTHER READING 

Field of research 

Bruner, Jerome (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: 

Harvard University Press. 

Czarniawska, Barbara (1997) Narrating the Organization. Dramas of 

Institutional Identity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 

Fisher, Walter R. (1987) Human Communication as Narration: Toward a 

Philosophy of Reason, Value and Action. Columbia, SC: University of 

South Carolina Press. 

Nash, Christopher (ed.) (1990) Narrative in Culture: The Uses of 

Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy and Literature. London: Routledge. 

Mitchell, W.J.T. (ed.) (1980) On Narrative. Chicago, IL: University of 

Chicago Press. 

Polkinghorne, Donald E. (1987) Narrative Knowing and the Human 

Sciences. New York, NY: SUNY Press.

16 

Notes 


1 For a short description of their work see, e.g., The New Encyclopædia Britannica 

(1990): Micropædia,Vol. 1: 969; Vol. 10: 427. 

2 This feat was, of course, never accomplished, although seriously attempted.The best 

example of lingering ambiguity is the famous – and infamous – psychological 

notion of ‘attitude’ which, by insisting on preserving the mechanical together with 

the intentional, promised much and gave little. 

3 For a review of criticisms against social constructionism, and a defense, see 

Czarniawska (2003a). 

4 Richard Harvey Brown (1998) shows how Descartes and Copernicus created acceptance 

for their scientific apparatuses by placing them in ‘narratives of conversion’. 

5 An interesting tautology, as Bruner points out: ‘narrative’ in Latin probably comes 

from gnarus (‘knowing’). 

6 Here once again one is reminded of the ethnomethodological redefinition of rationality 

as a rhetoric to account for social actions (Garfinkel, 1967). 

7 Unpredictability is far from total: there are predictabilities that we ourselves create 

(as in timetables); there is predictability in statistical regularities; there is knowledge 

of causal regularities in nature and social life. 

8 This should not be taken as moralizing; the authors’ interests mentioned here lie in 

improving the discourse on morality not in telling people or nations what they 

should do with their lives.

2 

How Stories are Made 

Narratives into stories 17 

The ways of emplotment 20 

Watching while stories are made 23 

Notes 32 

This chapter introduces a differentiation between narratives as purely chronological 

accounts and stories as emplotted narratives. Consequently, it focuses on 

work of ordering – seen as collective efforts at emplotment in everyday life and 

work. 

Narratives into stories 

The quotation from Barthes that opened Chapter 1 represents the most inclusive 

definition of narrative encountered in texts on narrative analysis: everything 

is a narrative or at least can be treated as one. Usually, however, a narrative 

is understood as a spoken or written text giving an account of an event/action 

or series of events/actions, chronologically connected. Indeed, it is easy to say 

what is not a narrative even if it is a text: a table, a list, a schedule, a typology 

(Goody, 1986). 

Historian Hayden White, in The Content of the Form (1987), has convincingly 

demonstrated the advantages of a narrower definition of narrative, indeed of 

distinguishing between a narrative and a story. He described how the way of 

writing history in Europe changed with time. Annals registered only some 

dates and events and did not attempt to connect them. Chronicles presented 

some causal connections but were devoid of plot or a meaningful structure. 

Only the products of the modern way of writing history can earn recognition 

as stories that are more than chronological compilations. White quotes 

the example of the ‘Annals of Saint Gall’ as most typical of early European 

historiography:

18 


709. Hard winter. Duke Gottfried died. 

710. Hard winter and deficient in crops. 

711. 

712. Flood everywhere. 

713. 

714. Pippin, mayor of the palace, died. 

715. 716. 717. 

718. Charles devastated the Saxons with great destruction. 

719. 

720. Charles fought against the Saxons. 

721.Theudo drove the Saracens out of Aquitaine. 

722. Great crops. 

723. 

724. 

725. Saracens came for the first time. 

726. 727. 728. 729. 730. 

731. Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died. 

732. Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday. 

733. 

734. (White, 1987: 16) 

A History of France by Richerus of Rheims (c. 998) is, for White, an example of a 

chronicle – a narrative but not yet a (hi)story. It has a subject, a geographical 

location, a social center, and a beginning in time: 

But the work fails as proper history, at least according to the opinion of later commentators, 

by virtue of two considerations. First, the order of the discourse follows 

the order of chronology; it presents events in the order of their occurrence and 

cannot, therefore, offer the kind of meaning that a narratologically governed 

account can be said to provide. Second, probably owing to the ‘annalistic’ order of 

discourse, the account does not so much conclude as simply terminate; it merely 

breaks off … and throws onto the reader the burden of retrospectively reflecting 

on the linkages between the beginning of the account and its ending. (White, 

1987: 17) 

Thus, if the monks of Saint Gall decide to turn their annals into a chronicle, it 

could have looked like this (I am now taking liberties with White’s and the 

monks’ texts): 

The year 709 was the beginning of harsh times for the land all around 

us. Two hard winters inevitably led to bad crops, and people were dying 

like flies. Among them was Duke Gottfried, mourned by all his people. 

And while it seemed that nature became benevolent again, flood struck 

in 712.

HOW STORIES ARE MADE 19 

After that, however, God took mercy on his people. For a good five 

years nothing much happened, apart from the fact that Pippin, mayor of 

the palace, died. The great leader, Charles, successfully combated the 

Saxons in 718 and in 720, while his ally, Theudo, drove the Saracens out 

of Aquitaine. Crops were great in 722, and the land enjoyed peace when, 

in 725, the Saracens came for the first time. They were defeated but 

came again in 732, and reached as far as Poitiers. This happened almost 

immediately after Blessed Bede, our presbyter, died. 

This is a narrative but it is still not a story as it lacks a plot. It needs to be 

emplotted. How can this be done? First, we need a working definition of a plot. 

Todorov proposes such a definition of a minimal plot: 

[it] consists in the passage from one equilibrium to another.An ‘ideal’ narrative begins 

with a stable situation which is disturbed by some power or force.There results a state 

of disequilibrium; by the action of a force directed in the opposite direction, the equilibrium 

is re-established; the second equilibrium is similar to the first, but the two are 

never identical. (1971/1977: 111) 

The second equilibrium may only resemble the first in that it is an equilibrium; 

it is not uncommon that its contents are the reverse of the first.A company 

in trouble may reorganize and become profitable again or it may go into 

bankruptcy, thus restoring market equilibrium.The episode that describes the 

passage from one state to another can have one or many elements: there can 

be one single force that changes the state of affairs into another one (‘a paradigm 

shift’) or a force and a counterforce; the two latter often consist of an 

event and an action (a flood and emergency management). Usually, plots are 

much more complicated and contain chains of actions and events, oscillating 

states of affairs, apparent actions, and wrongly interpreted events, as in suspense 

or mystery, but a minimal plot is enough to make sense of a narrative.Thus the 

famous excerpt used by Harvey Sacks (1992: 223–6) as material for two 

lectures (‘The baby cried.The mommy picked it up’) needs to be completed 

by a third sentence (e.g.‘The baby stopped crying’) to become a story. 

I will take a further liberty with White’s and the Annals’ text to try to complete 

the ‘chronicle of St. Gall’ into a proper story. Such stories, or histories, can 

be numerous, depending on who writes them.A contemporary historian, careful 

not to jump to conclusions, might thus turn the ‘chronicle’ above into a 

‘history’ by adding a simple ending: 

ENDING 1. As we can see, the early history of Europe was a constant 

fight against hostile nature and hostile invaders. [Plot becomes circular; 

the second equilibrium never lasts, as either nature or invaders hit 

back.]

20 


A monk of Saint Gall, after having taken a course in narrative writing, would 

be more likely to pen something as follows (the added information about the 

Mass is speculation based on the fact that the battle was fought on Saturday): 

ENDING 2. As we can see, the early history of France was the history of 

a people tried severely by their God who, however, was their only solace. 

When Blessed Bede died, Charles found it very difficult to lead his 

soldiers against the Saracens. But a great Mass was said on Sunday, 

after the victory. [Christianity is the force of change and the way of accepting 

adversities.] 

Finally, a theoretician of leadership could emplot it still differently: 

ENDING 3. As we can see, the presence of a strong leader was crucial for 

the survival of the people. When Duke Gottfried died, a harsh winter, deficient 

crops, and floods were felt painfully. When Charles took his place 

before his people, the hardship of nature ceased to occupy the minds of 

the people who bravely fought at the side of their leader. [Leadership is 

the crucial factor between failure and success.] 

Although adding one paragraph at the end of a chronicle, as I have just done, 

is not the most sophisticated manner of plotting, it is not unusual. The end 

explains (one could say, retro-jects) logical connections between various 

episodes (for more on end-embedded plots, see Chapter 6). Usually, however, 

the work of plotting is more complex. 

The ways of emplotment 

Hayden White (1973) pointed out that, surprisingly enough, modern stories 

are often emplotted with the help of classical rhetorical tropes (figures of 

speech).There are four classical rhetorical figures or master tropes: metaphor, 

metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. 

Tropes are figurative expressions. The word comes from tropos (Greek for 

‘turn’) and is used to mark various ‘turns’ of a purely literal expression. 

Metaphor, perhaps the most well-known trope, explains a less known term by 

connecting it to one better known:‘the moon is a silver plate.’ Metonymy substitutes 

something in the vicinity for the original object or its attribute for the 

object itself: the crown for the kingdom, the banner for the country. 

Synecdoche builds on the part–whole relationship where the part symbolizes 

the whole or the whole symbolizes the part: hands for workers, brains for 

intellectuals. Irony builds on inverted meaning – the opposite of what is ostensibly 

expressed. In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Bennet, who is very fond of irony,


says: ‘I admire all my three sons-in-law-highly. Wickham, perhaps, is my 

favorite’ (Lanham, 1991: 92). 1 

Tropes are not mere ornaments used to embellish speech or to deceive its 

audience.They permeate all linguistic utterances.They have affinities to certain 

dramaturgical conventions (that is, enacted and emplotted narratives), which are 

easily recognizable by an audience familiar with those conventions – in this 

case, an audience of European origins. 

Romance is a narrative form focused on a single Character and his or her 

potentialities. Its standard plot is that of the knight’s quest, the chivalry tale in 

which the hero, after a prolonged search including various trials and adventures, 

regains what is lost – love, the meaning of life, success and glory, or all 

the above. Metaphor is the basic rhetorical figure of Romance: the hero or the 

heroine symbolize order, their enemies represent the forces of Evil, etc. 

Romance is built on the romantic assumption that all creatures and things in 

the world have a true and deep meaning which, after purging his or her soul, 

the hero or the heroine can reveal and so an initial metaphor will in the end 

become a proper name. 

Tragedy views humankind as subjected to a number of laws of fate, laid bare 

through the central crises that constitute the hub of the narration.Tragedy is 

built around metonymy as this classical rhetorical figure compares phenomena 

from a perspective of juxtaposition: phenomena or objects that are near to one 

another in time or space. A typical example is the tragic Sisyphus mythos, 

where the boulder, eternally pushed up the hill by the tragic hero and eternally 

rolling down again, stands for the fate of Sisyphus. 

In Comedy human beings are not represented as subject to laws of fate but 

rather as organically forming parts of a higher unity which, despite setbacks 

and (funny) complications, works to resolve everything into harmony – the 

characteristic happy ending. Thus Comedy always moves between two societies, 

one deficient, the other desirable. In Comedy, the final state is a society 

that optimally integrates the Characters.The transition to the new and better 

society does not take place without friction; on the contrary, complications 

connected to it give fuel to the narration.A central role in these complications 

is played by ‘obstructing characters’ who are the comics of Comedy. On the 

other hand, there are always characters who support a happy ending. Both 

these types of characters are functionally or dysfunctionally linked to the harmonious 

working of the whole society.This is why the rhetorical figure corresponding 

to Comedy is synecdoche, the trope that represents the whole by 

one of its parts. 

Satire shows the absurdity of all that occurs and therefore also of all the previously 

mentioned narrative conventions. It must reject as illusions the rational 

laws of fate in Tragedy, the pursuit of a common harmony in Comedy, and the 

self-fulfillment and disclosure of true meaning in Romance. Irony – the trope 

of skepticism, of contradiction, and of paradox – is the favored rhetorical figure 

of Satire. 2

22 


The Swedish organization scholar, Kaj Sköldberg, discovered that different 

representations of organizational change he was studying were emplotted using 

these classical plots, thus resulting in different versions of the same sequence of 

events (Sköldberg, 1994; 2002). One version of the change was tragic. The 

organization has ended up in a crisis due to a fatal error: it has suffered from 

ignorance of the inexorable laws of fate – in this case a lack of cost awareness, 

the symptom of which is serious hubris concerning expenses and the prospects 

of expansion.The problem was being solved by means of rationalization.These 

may be saving measures; the drama can then be played in the genre of triumphant 

Tragedy.The means may also be computerization, which belongs to 

another tragic genre, the fatalistic one: computers are usually represented as 

deus ex machina, something one ‘must’ have because then all problems will be 

resolved. 

Another version of the reorganization was a Romantic Comedy, performed 

for an enthusiastic audience. In theater as in life, romantic comedy is an all-time 

favorite. After all, Comedy always presents the transition from an original and 

deficient state of affairs to a final and desirable one.The initial state of the organizations 

Sköldberg studied was characterized by ridiculous regulations. The 

final state was deregulation, implicitly tied to a mythical Golden Age (i.e. free 

market before regulation). Deregulation meant an unhappy organization had to 

be divided into happy local subcommunities – hence decentralization. The 

main drama of Comedy was combined with diverse Romantic activities directed 

at the personnel (comically called ‘human resource management’), through 

which the members of the organizations were expected to regain their true but 

forgotten selves. 

In the third version, that of the critics of the reform, a tale was enacted 

according to the Satirical convention. It caricatured both the previous dramas, 

showing that they were incompatible. In addition, a general disintegration or 

decoupling appeared between the components of the change so that the genre 

could be defined as fragmented Satire.The decoupling varied in strength but 

was omnipresent in numerous variations: as a decoupling between decentralization 

and computerization, between problems and solutions, between power 

and power base, between management and employees, and between various 

symbols. 

Sköldberg’s exercise was not an eccentric application of classical genres to 

a contemporary material. Classical plots are easily recognizable and much 

appreciated by modern audiences. Although the same public appreciates and 

enjoys the revolutionary and experimental approaches of modern and postmodern 

drama, its tastes (in art and beyond) are often conservative.This is why 

it is so difficult to replace the traditional story of leadership as male pursuit by 

its feminine versions (see Chapter 7), or for that matter the Hollywood plot, 

where all ends in a happy ending. The classical repertoire of plots is very 

resilient.

Watching while stories are made 


All the examples above indicate that sensemaking is a retrospective process, 

requiring time, but they do not actually demonstrate how a collective narrative 

is woven from disparate events.This is difficult to demonstrate because of the 

inevitable conflict between ‘the prospective orientation of life with the retrospective 

orientation of narrative’ (Ryan, 1993: 138). It is impossible to monitor 

the actors in order to capture the moments during which they elaborate their 

life experience into a story, not only in the case of the monks of St. Gall but 

even in the case of living actors.Yet Marie-Laure Ryan (1993) succeeded in 

locating what she calls ‘a factory of plot’ (p. 150): live radio broadcasts of sports 

events.There, ‘the real life situation promotes a narrative tempo in which the 

delay between the time of occurrence of the narrated events and the time of 

their verbal representation strives toward zero, and the duration of the narration 

approximates the duration of the narrated’ (p. 138). Thus, live broadcasts 

(not only of sports events) are of great interest to a narratively minded 

researcher. 

A broadcast is constructed around three dimensions: the chronicle (what is 

happening), the mimesis (how does it look, a dimension that allows the listener 

to construct a virtual picture of the events), and the emplotment (how things are 

connected; a structure that makes sense of the events). 

While emplotment is considered central for building a story, it is obviously 

the chronicle that is central to a sports broadcast.The necessity of matching the 

narrative time to real time creates specific challenges and responses. One is 

‘empty time’ (the ‘missing years’ in the annals) when ‘nothing’ is happening on 

the field and the broadcasters fill it with past stories and general chat, at the risk 

of being caught in the middle of the story by a new event.Another is the congestion 

of events, a problem usually solved by quickening the pace of speech, 

sometimes to an impossible speed. 

One way of filling empty time is to turn it to the service of the mimetic 

dimension of the broadcast. When there is a lull after a dramatic event, this 

event can be retold with an emphasis on how it happened. 

The real challenge, however, is the emplotment of the broadcast.The broadcasters, 

says Ryan, perform it using three basic operations: constructing characters – 

that is,introducing legible differences between the actors (a hero and an opponent); 

attributing a function to single events; and finding an interpretive theme that subsumes 

the events and links them in a meaningful sequence (‘near success’,‘near failure’, 

etc.: p. 141). 

The close analogy between sports events and organizational performance in 

contemporary societies has been commented upon extensively (Corvellec, 

1997; see also Chapter 8). Indeed, the spectators (e.g., the shareholders) insist 

on seeing the chronicle of the events, not least because they want to have 

an opportunity to make their own emplotment. Although the real interest

24 

concerns the plot (‘why do you have losses?’), the loosely espoused principles 

of logico-scientific knowledge turn the attention away from the operation of 

emplotment. Plots are given (in the form of scientific laws) so the only activity 

required is to recognize their pattern in the chronicle. This hiding of the 

emplotment process results in the scarce interest in mimesis – on the part of 

the actors, spectators, and observers/researchers alike. And yet it is the mimesis, 

the how, that offers most rewards as to the way events become connected 

with the help of an accessible repertoire of plots: a dirty princess cannot marry 

a prince, a dishonest company cannot remain on a stock market, etc. 

What prompted me to apply White’s recipe for a chronicle and a history to 

the text of the annals was the analogy I saw between these three forms and the 

story making that I was able to watch during my study of management in three 

European capitals (Czarniawska, 2002).The minutes of my direct observation 

resembled annals, even if contemporary metrology permits a more detailed 

measure of time. Also, most organizational reports resemble annals (Gabriel, 

2000). On the other hand, interview transcripts resembled chronicles: they 

reported the chronological and causal chains of events but did not have a point 

or a plot.After some time, however, I could see how complete stories begin to 

emerge. In certain situations, though, stories had to be produced at once. 

During my study of city management in Warsaw I have been shadowing the 

director of the Metro Construction General Headquarters – a city-owned 

company that was building a subway in Warsaw which was hoping to operate 

it after it was built. Here are some excerpts from my observation: 

Day 1. 


14.00. I am sitting in Director General’s (D) office talking to the Finance 

Director (FD). 

FD: On Wednesday at 10 a.m. there will be a press conference with a 

participation of the City Mayor. One of the things discussed will be 

the metro … You see, our organization dates from the times when 

contractors would choose an investor and the General Headquarters 

had the function of a super-contractor. Nowadays it is the investor 

that chooses contractors. For us, it would be the most advantageous 

to have one investor, and many contractors, where MCGH would 

have the role of the coordinator. 

BC: What would be, according to you, an ideal organization structure for 

the Metro? 

FD: I’m not a copyist and I don’t believe that it’s necessary to imitate 

something, but for me the Swiss are the model of democracy and 

good management. When it comes to the public transportation, 

they’ve solved it in the most reasonable way. Outside of Zurich, in 

cantons and municipalities…

14:50. Enters D. 

…there are non-profit joint-stock companies, because metro is an 

unremunerative institution. Larger share means more money you put 

in, I believe such a solution would be the best one. 

BC: Who are shareholders? 

FD: Municipalities, districts. The Swiss solution admits persons who are 

interested in the development of the public transportation, but their 

participation is minimal, few percents and the rest belongs to a 

municipality in proportion to the quantity of transports. Depending 

on the management system you obtain specific results – the better 

financial arrangement the higher benefits, you have to pay less. 

Every administrative and economic decision is taken by voting, as 

every decision-maker has well-defined competencies. It’s the democratic 

system that has been formed in 600 years and everybody 

cooperates together in an ideal symbiosis. 

This is a draft of the first story, launched by FD: an ideal property structure 

for the future metro company, legitimated by the long history of Switzerland’s 

success. ‘Switzerland’ serves as a Utopia: a land where everything works as it 

should: 

FD: turns to D: You are invited to a press conference. 

D: I won’t be here – I have an appointment with a doctor. What it will 

be all about? 

FD: Mainly about the investors and the contractors. 

D: That’s too bad. But what is to be the theme of the press conference? 

FD: A great improvisation, as usual… 

D: Did we make for the Deputy Mayor a list of the things we are doing? 

FD: Yes, but I don’t have it on me. I gave him 3 copies. 

D: I understand that Mr. City Mayor will talk… 

FD: And we will be sitting in the back… But at least his attitude was 

extremely peaceful. 

D: All of them have changed, now they are all very nice. It was confirmed 

that the Council can’t appoint or revoke contractors till the elections... 

but if the president and the parliament agree that the elections should 

be postponed for a year we will have to do something about it. All who 

were able to, have already settled their affairs and will sit and twiddle 

their thumbs … We have to meet Mr. X from the county governor – to 

find out how the metro will be placed in the future governance system, 

whether it will be included in the City or in the county... 

3:15 p.m. Enters the secretary. 

S: Kislewski is on the phone. 

D: The one that did the movies? 

HOW STORIES ARE MADE 25

26 


S: Not Kieslowski 3 but Kislewski. (Turning to FD): A Swiss company is 

calling to say that they guarantee completion of the tunnel. 

FD: Tell them to call in three years. 

S: Does it mean that we are not interested? 

FD: We are, but in three years. The tunnels we did have been completed, 

and the next ones will be ready to be built in three years. 

BC: Don’t they know it? 

FD: Probably not. But seriously, the construction of the next section of 

the metro will be feasible in three years… But we have the contractors 

for the whole thing. Should I fire our miners? 

10 minutes are spent in getting rid of Kislewski (D to BC: You know, here 

everybody has to talk with the director). 

The Director suggests that there is a more important interpretative theme than 

the ideal shape of a company: the political positioning of the future metro 

company.The real Swiss intervene. Observe my own story making: I am omitting 

parts of the conversation (…) and yet I keep the fragment about 

Kislewski–Kieslowski because I will be able to ascribe it a function later on: 

D: (on the phone): Good morning, I’d like to know how the things 

are going on... What do you mean we are not importers? The 

City is importing, the City Mayor. [He turns on the loudspeaker 

so that I can hear.] 

A woman: You told me that it’s Foreign Trade Co. which imports. 

D: It does, on orders from the City Office. 

W: Well yes, they are importing but we don’t have any information… 

D: And what kind of information can we give you? 

W: What kind of agreement is it, how does it work… 

D: Will a copy of the agreement be enough? 

W: Yes, please. 

D [to me]: Have you heard? You haven’t heard the beginning. We buy the 

metro cars from Russia, a very high VAT, 25%. Buses and 

trams are VAT exempt. But in order to be exempt from VAT the 

metro cars have to be bought by an administrative unit which 

is exempt from VAT… 

FD: It’s not clear whether we are talking about a direct import tax 

or VAT. 

D: … but such a unit does not exist. An operational unit which is 

buying these cars will be established only the next year. I 

spoke with the Ministry and I was told that there is no 

problem; it will be done in January. I came back from the sanitarium 

in March, nobody knew anything. A secretary told me 

that the boss is out, she can’t find anything and I should talk 

to a VAT director. The director was very nice – they all want 

nothing else but to help you and settle matters, but he said

that import VAT is somebody else’s business. This other director 

says that if it’s import VAT it must be Madam Bartczak. 

Madam Bartczak says that she doesn’t know anything, but if 

everybody says that it’s her office, it must be it. Eventually 

she rummaged at the bottom of a drawer and she found it 

there – if I hadn’t called she would have never looked in it. I’ve 

told her once more that the City Office imports through its 

import agency. She told me no problem. But just in case I 

called her again – and you heard yourself. Now she tells me 

that it’s Foreign Trade and not the City Office! So I tell her 

once more that Foreign Trade is the city office’s agency. So 

she wants to see it on paper… 

At this point not much is known: it is a chronicle of events – contemporary 

(conversations, telephones) – but also of the past.We learn that MCGH had a 

different structure and organizational identity in the past and that these will be 

changed presently as a part of a general change in city management caused by 

the change of political regime (a potential story in its own right).We learn also 

that on Wednesday some kind of a story must be produced at a conference, and 

we can guess that various kinds of plots are in the offing, informed by different 

political interests. FD has his own dream plot: follow the example of the 

Swiss. Directors suspect both the city and the county of emplotment of their 

own. By Wednesday, MCGH must arrive with their own story and try to make 

it win against competitive stories and plots; we do not know yet which. Such 

a story needs supporting evidence and the Director’s telephone conversation 

was an effort to secure it (story making can be hard work), but it has also served 

as an instructive story for my benefit: see how chaotic everything is? 

Day 3 (Wednesday). 


9.30. A car arrives. D and I are on our way to press conference (he cancelled 

his doctor’s appointment) when the Technical Director comes in. 

TD: What am I supposed to do with that engine driver from St. Petersburg? 

[Who was to drive the engine on a trial run of the subway.] 

D: I don’t know, it’s your engine driver. 

TD: Our own engine drivers have never driven this kind of engine and can 

run into problems. 

D: Find some engine drivers on the black job market, or take two 

engine drivers from Minsk. [This is what happens in Kieslowski’s 

movie.] 

TD: How can I do such a thing! 

D: Do it any way you want, but do not make a big fuss of that engine 

driver from St. Petersburg, because they will immediately request a 

cooperation agreement and sure enough there will be a talk in town 

that the Russians teach us and that we exchange experiences…

28 


TD: Well I know, but how can I use him unofficially… 

D: Well maybe not unofficially, but without letting everybody know. 

TD: But where do I get another driver… 

D: Oh, I don’t know. 

By saving two bits of action/dialogue (Kislewski’s telephone and the allusion 

to Kieslowski’s movie). I can attribute to them a function in my narrative: I can 

show how people use the contextual material to make sense of their own organizing 

(Czarniawska, 2000; 2002). But this function is not important for the 

narrative the directors are making. A story that becomes more and more central 

for them is the involvement of Russian contractors in the metro construction. 

While the Director can permit himself to produce a facetious plot à la Kieslowski 

in the safety of his office (‘get two drivers from Minsk if you do not want one from 

St. Petersburg’), at the press conference the plot is clear and obviously decided 

together with the Deputy Mayor, who continues to produce anxious cues: 

The press conference takes place at the city hall in Bankowy Square. 

When we enter the room there is one man from Gazeta Wyborcza (the 

main Polish daily) and quite a few women journalists, very young. At 

10:04 enters Deputy Mayor and his spokesperson (a woman). More journalists 

arrive… 

Spokeswoman: We have many novelties to present, as we would like to 

present to press all the fields of activity of city administration. 

Today is the first part – the metro. 

D: It won’t be possible neither to complete the metro 

before the end of the council’s term nor to extend the 

term, but the present council is giving metro a lot… How 

much? After 12 years we have built 12 km. Some say 

it’s a long time, others say that there were investments 

which took much more time, and not only in Poland. At 

any rate, now the political and economic conditions are 

different and the metro construction can proceed. 

Even though it’s almost ready there is a lot of work to 

be done. We don’t have all norms ready as it hasn’t been 

decided whether it’s a train or a tram, whether the traffic 

should be left-sided or right-sided, and which of the 

central institutions will take care of the metro. The number 

of norms is enormous, and many concern passengers. 

First of all there are safety norms, of the utmost 

importance, but also organizational and technical norms 

are important. What we have for the time being you will 

find on this page [He hands out a sheet with technical 

data and asset distribution: stations, cars and crews.] 

I have to say that even though we have started in a 

political system which isn’t remembered well, we were

able to modernize, and we have technologies that are 

second to nobody in the world. 

Deputy Mayor: Mr. Director, can you point out that we supervise car 

production because many people feel uneasy about it… 

D: Of course! We buy Russian metro cars and we have had 

problems with their construction and quality of execution. 

The cars that were originally donated were delivered 

3 months after the promised delivery date. We 

weren’t allowed to interfere with production. But according 

to a new contract, the Polish State Railways carries 

out the direct operational supervision and already after 

a few weeks it turned out that there are differences in 

opinion between our supervisors and their workers. I 

could say even that there are conflicts, but the management 

is on our side because they see that this is the 

only opportunity for the factory to survive. 

Deputy Mayor: But Mr. Director, you have to say explicitly that we have 

control over what they are doing, because the way you say 

it sounds like if we didn’t know what’s going on there. 

D: Why, of course. If they deliver cars that are not finished 

properly, let’s say on Friday, hoping that controllers went 

for the weekend, our supervisors will see to it that they 

work on Saturday and Sunday. 

The remaining questions concern the dates of the possible opening of the 

metro; no further issues concerning investors or contractors are mentioned. 

The plot is simple – that of conversion: at the beginning of the construction 

the involvement of the Russians was large; now the political system has 

changed and the relationship has changed accordingly. Before, Russians were 

teaching and helping the MCGH; now it is MCGH who teaches and helps the 

Russians. The Director attempts to weave in his favorite plot – the transformation 

of MCGH (‘although we have started in a political system which is not 

remembered well’) but the Deputy will have none of it: get back to the 

Russians! Did the emplotment work? 

Day 4. 


10:23. A journalist from Gazeta Wyborcza comes to the Director’s office. 

D: You didn’t write anything about yesterday’s press conference. What 

was the reason? You didn’t bother? 

J: No, we wrote but… 

D: About the press conference but not about the metro. 

J: Well I wouldn’t know, … but I have an idea. 

D: What kind of idea? 

J: Metro construction is almost finished, but it doesn’t show, you said 

it yourself yesterday, it is all under the ground. Therefore our newspaper 

would like to show it, to show it step by step, to write a reportage.

30 


D: It’s fine with me. 

J: Of course we will need a leading story. 

D: I would suggest following points. First, how we bring specific structures 

into operation, how investments are converted into operations. 

Second, particular stations. Some of them will be esthetically more 

interesting than others, some will have very modern escalators, etc. 

Third, the delivery of the Russian metro cars – from the border to the 

driving tests. You could go to Brest [border railway station]. 

J: Or to St. Petersburg. 

D: I can’t fix that for you, a contact of course, not the trip. 

J: But of course the trip will be paid by the newspaper… 

D: Of course I have to inform you that you aren’t the only interested, for 

example Top Canal [TV] shot a few photographs and showed them, it 

was very interesting, it looked quite different than how I see it. 

J: We as a newspaper don’t have such possibilities. 

D: But you have a photographer, although frankly, one can hardly see 

anything on your pictures. 

J: But it will improve… 

D: Everybody says that everything will improve, but the fact is, only 

Rzeczpospolita and Zycie Warszawy have good quality pictures. 

J: Don’t forget that if a subject is of general interest, for example the 

production of the metro cars in St. Petersburg, we can print it on 

Friday [Gazeta Wyborcza publishes on Fridays a weekly supplement 

printed on fine paper with colored illustrations and photographs]. 

D: I would like also to get something out of it. To settle a thing or two 

with your help. I would wish that you weren’t only the metro’s guest 

but also got in touch with authorities such as county administration, 

city administration. They have to be taught how to answer the old 

questions, why this station is here and not there, why this one was 

canceled and that one introduced. After all, the metro will open during 

their term in office. 

J: We have common interests… 

[The interview continues for an hour or so and, finally, the journalist goes 

out. He stops at the door, saying]: The car production, this is something 

I wouldn’t like to miss. 

D: The Russians will be grateful if you write something nice about them 

for a change. 

J: It depends very much on what I’ll see. 

The story has been delivered with a proper kind of emplotment, as far as I 

could judge, but its most important audience – the leading newspaper – has 

not been listening. Finally, the Director has their representative in his office and 

can openly negotiate about their mutual interest.‘The Russian plot’, however, 

will not be easy. The journalist clearly signals both strong interest and an 

unwillingness to buy an already-plotted story: he will have to go to see 

for himself in order to decide. Observe that, for him, as for most reporters,

mimesis and character development are much more important than they are 

for the managers (and, perhaps, for the students of management?). 

The emplotment continues. Unlike in a sports broadcast, the chronicle is not 

very important. Mimesis (the way of describing events) is a means of selling a 

given type of plot, but the plot is central.The battle of emplotment is a power 

battle: it is the old saying that it is the victors who write history. 

Exercise 2.1: multiple identities 

EXERCISES 

Try to emplot your biography in three different ways (possible plots: 

‘The quest for knowledge’, ‘Success story’; possible genres: Romance, 

Comedy, Satire). Do not go to Exercise 2.2 until the task is completed. 

Exercise 2.2: life stories 

Reflect on the work that went into changing your biography into a story 

with a plot. Where did the plots come from? Your fantasy? Media? Your 

family history? What changes in structure (omissions, completions) 

were needed to achieve the plot? Has mimesis (the descriptions) 

changed with the various plots? 

Exercise 2.3: observing how stories are made 

Take as a starting point any event reported in the media from the time 

it happened. Watch and note down how it is being made into a story: 

are there competing plots? What means are used to saturate the event 

with meaning? Whose story wins at the time you end your observation? 



Linde, Charlotte (1993) Life Stories. The Creation of Coherence. 

Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Shotter, John, and Gergen, Kenneth J. (eds) (1989) Texts of Identity. 

London: Sage. 

Sköldberg, Kaj (2002) The Poetic Logic of Administration. Styles and 

Changes of Style in the Art of Organizing. London: Routledge.

32 

Notes 


1 As every reader of Jane Austen knows,Wickham was the wicked one. 

2 Richard Harvey Brown (1998) postulates that this genre, and the trope of irony, is 

best suited for social sciences (see also Chapter 10). 

3 At that time, Kieslowski’s Three Colors: White (a film about Warsaw under the new 

regime) had been released.

3 

Collecting Stories 

Oral history 33 

Collecting stories 36 

Telling stories 38 

Stories in and about organizations 40 

Ways of story collecting 42 

Notes 46 

Oral history 

For history, ethnology, and cultural anthropology, the narrative turn was a 

novelty only insofar as it applied to their own writings (I will return to this 

topic in Chapters 8 and 9). Stories as one kind of field material were no news 

to them. Oral history – of families, communities, and societies – relies upon 

the collection of stories (Paul Thompson, 1978).The famous The Making of the 

English Working Class (by E.P.Thompson, 1963) was based on a collection of 

reports by paid government informants in the early nineteenth century. Paolo 

Apolito’s relation concerning apparitions of the Madonna in Campania, Italy 

(1990/1998), was originally entitled ‘It’s been said that they have seen 

Madonna’ – not a felicitous phrase in English but pointing toward ‘circulation 

of stories’ as an important element in a community’s life. As Paul Connerton 

expressed it in his How Societies Remember, ‘The production of more or less 

informally told narrative histories turns out to be basic activity for characterisation 

of human actions. It is a feature of all communal memory’ (1989: 16–17). 

Much as the folklore scholars would agree with all these statements (see, e.g., 

Narayan and George, 2002), a student of contemporary western society might 

have objections. Isn’t oral history something exotic or something from the distant 

past, rudimental and unimportant in modern, literate societies? 

Comparative studies of literate and non-literate societies (Goody, 1986) 

show that, while narratives exist in both oral and literate cultures, there are 

indeed three forms of text which became possible only due to the existence of 

the script: tables, lists, and recipes.The first two differ from the narrative in that

34 


they present items of information in a disjointed, abstract way. In order to 

memorize a list or a table, a mnemonic device is required to make up for the 

lack of connections.The recipe assumes a chronological connection and thus 

seems to resemble a narrative, but it lacks the propelling force of a cause or an 

intention – the plot of the narrative. Clouds lead to rain and greed leads to 

crime; sifting the flour does not lead to breaking eggs. The recipe fulfills the 

learning function of the narrative in that it provides the learner with a vicarious 

experience – but in a way that is closer to that of tables or lists. One could 

say that recipes are lists, but of actions, not of objects. 

In his Foucault’s Pendulum (1989), Umberto Eco provides an amusing illustration 

of one difference between lists and narratives. In his story, the 

Rosicrucians, with the enthusiastic researchers – Casaubon, Belbo, and 

Diotallevi – on their heels, were presented with an old parchment from Provins 

(Provence), which contained the following text: 

a la … Saint Jean 

36 p charrete de fein 

6 … entiers avec saiel 

p … les blanc mantiax 

r … s … chevaliers de Pruins pour la … j.nc 

6 foiz 6 en places 

chascune foiz 20 a … 120 a … 

iceste est l’ordonation 

al donjon li premiers 

it li secunz joste iceus qui … pans 

it al refuge 

it a Nostre Dame de l’altre part de l’iau 

it a l’ostel des popelicans 

it a la pierre 

3 foiz 6 avant la feste … la Grand Pute. (Eco, 1989: 135) 

They reconstructed it as a great PLAN of the Templar Knights, seeking revenge 

against their enemies in the centuries to come: 

THE (NIGHT OF) SAINT JOHN 

36 (YEARS) P(OST) HAY WAIN 

6 (MESSAGES) INTACT WITH SEAL 

F(OR THE KNIGHTS WITH) THE WHITE CLOAKS [TEMPLARS] 

R(ELAP)S(I) OF PROVINS FOR (VAIN)JANCE [REVENGE] 

6 TIMES IN 6 PLACES 

EACH TIME 20 Y(EARS MAKES) 120 Y(EARS) 

THIS IS THE PLAN 

THE FIRST GO TO THE CASTLE 

IT(ERUM) [AGAIN AFTER 120 YEARS] THE SECOND JOIN THOSE (OF 

THE) BREAD 

AGAIN TO THE REFUGE

COLLECTING STORIES 35 

AGAIN TO OUR LADY BEYOND THE RIVER 

AGAIN TO THE HOSTEL OF POPELICANS 

AGAIN TO THE STONE 

3 TIMES 6 [666] BEFORE THE FEAST (OF THE) GREAT WHORE. (Eco, 1989: 

135–6) 

Casaubon’s girlfriend, Lia, a researcher in her own right, reads it very differently 

and with much better support in the sources. According to her, it is a 

simple shopping (or, rather, selling) list containing a merchant’s order for cloth 

and roses, Provins’ most important products at that time: 

In Rue Saint Jean: 

36 sous for wagons of hay. 

Six new lengths of cloth with seal 

to rue des Blancs-Manteaux. 

Crusaders’ roses to make a jonchée: 

six bunches of six in the six following places, 

each 20 deniers, making 120 deniers in all. 

Here is the order: 

the first to the Fort 

item the second to those in Porte-aux-Pains 

item to the Church of the Refuge 

item to the Church of Notre Dame, across the river 

item to the old building of the Cathars 

item to rue de La Pierre-Ronde. 

And three bunches of six before the feast, in the whore’s street. 

Because they, too, poor things, maybe wanted to celebrate the feast day by making 

themselves nice little hats of roses. (Eco, 1989: 536) 

But this sober reading comes too late: the three males have already launched 

themselves into mortal danger because of their belief in the Plan. Eco’s point 

concerns the dangers of overinterpretation (I return to this issue in Chapter 5). 

But he also shows how dedicated they are to their story: Lia’s prosaic list cannot 

compete with the allure of a narrative. 

Yet modern organizations are not supposed to be alluring but sober; and 

tables, lists, and recipes are undoubtedly the modern props of knowledge. 

Formal organizations, those epitomes of rationalized collective action, are often 

presented as sites where narrative has no role for learning and memory, at least 

within programmatic attempts to influence organizational learning.Tables and 

lists (many ‘models’ and taxonomies are complicated lists) are given priority as 

teaching aids in schools as well as in companies. Again, while they can fulfill 

certain functions that narratives cannot, the reverse applies even more. Almost 

certainly the greater part of societal learning happens through the circulation 

of stories (Weick, 1995; Orr, 1996).Also, the extent to which the modern props

36 

of learning – and the technologies of writing which support them – are used 

in modern organizations varies. My studies of city management revealed, for 

example, that in the Stockholm city office many important deals were made 

on the phone, whereas in Warsaw every agreement had to be confirmed in 

writing. Stockholm, however, was flooded with leaflets, brochures, and memos, 

whereas in Warsaw there were very few of these and important information 

was conveyed face to face only. Oral cultures are not necessarily ages away. As 

Goody and Watt (1968) observed, the oral tradition remains the primary mode 

of cultural orientation even in a literate culture, which is rather fortunate in 

light of the unlimited variety and fragmentation of the written sources available. 

And the oral tradition depends on the narrative. 

Each field of practice (including the practice of research) has, at any point 

in time, a series of stories in circulation. They might concern recent events 

that are in need of emplotment or, to the contrary, be focused on a distant 

history, giving coherence and legitimacy to the field of practice as it is today. 

Each family has a repertoire of such stories.They are offered to newcomers 

as the means of introduction to a community, but they are also repeated in 

the presence of the very actors who participated in the event, thus consolidating 

a community feeling by reifying its history. Many of them have a 

quasi-mythical character and are exploited in similar fashion, as described in 

many an anthropological study.This chapter explains the pragmatic functions 

of such stories and quotes well-known examples of studies based on story 

collection. 

Collecting stories 


In the light of what was said above about the role of stories in learning and 

memory, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the earliest studies of modern 

phenomena that relied on story collection came from the field of education. 

Burton R. Clark (1972) studied three famous US colleges (Reed, Antioch, and 

Swarthmore) and in all these places discovered a story in circulation that was 

rooted in history, claimed unique accomplishment, and was held in warm 

regard by the group who was recalling it. He called these stories ‘organizational 

sagas’: 

Saga, originally referring to a medieval Icelandic or Norse account of achievements 

and events in the history of a person or a group, has come to mean a narrative of heroic 

exploits, of a unique development that has deeply stirred the emotions of participants 

and descendants.Thus a saga is not simply a story but a story that at some time has had 

a particular base of believers … The element of belief is crucial, for without the credible 

story, the events and persons become history; with the development of belief, a particular 

bit of history becomes a definition full of pride and identity for the group. 

(Clark, 1972: 178)

All three sagas fulfilled the same (symbolic) function but they differed in plot. 

The Reed College saga told the story of creative acts performed by a pioneerlike 

leader in an (educational) desert.The Antioch College saga was the story 

of an established organization in deep crisis, saved by a Utopian reformer.The 

Swarthmore College saga was a story of a successful organization that was in 

danger of succumbing to complacency, until rescued by a leader sensitive to the 

winds of change. 

Although the basic plot varied, the central Character remained the same. 

Indeed, modern stories tend to reproduce the masculine domination, offering 

few, if any, counterparts of folklore stories about witches and wise women.This 

characteristic is not limited to heroic sagas where the presence of charismatic 

leaders is a part of the classical plot. Anthropologists Sabine Helmers and 

Regina Buhr (1994) carried out a field study in a large German company producing 

typewriters.They spent three weeks in the company, conducting interviews 

and observing. During their stay several interlocutors, all men, told them 

the following story: 

The Tactful Typewriter Mechanic 


The new secretary had called in the mechanic many times because her electric typewriter 

kept making spaces where they didn’t belong.After trying unsuccessfully to find 

the cause, the mechanic decided to observe the secretary at work for a while. He soon 

discovered the problem.The girl, generously endowed with feminine attractions, kept 

hitting the space key involuntarily every time she bent forward.The mechanic showed 

that he was capable of dealing with this rather delicate situation. He found the excuse 

to send her out of the office and raised her swivel chair four centimeters. Since then 

she had no problems with her machine and has nothing but praise for the excellent 

mechanic. (Helmers and Buhr, 1994: 176) 

At first, say Helmers and Buhr, they did not pay much attention to the story 

but its repetitions made them curious.The story was told as if the event took 

place the day before, but the attempt to trace it led them to an Austrian inhouse 

publication for a typewriter dealer dated 2 June 1963 (the excerpt is 

quoted as from that source).Thus a practically ancient story was kept alive 

by retelling it and was given relevance by situating it contemporarily and in 

the narrators’ own company. The tale had its ‘sisters’ in other companies, 

industries, countries, and times. Helmers and Buhr were able to show that 

such stereotyping of women as ‘dumb blondes’ actually hampered technological 

developments in the typewriter industry. Stories of the kind they 

encountered redefined many technically solvable machine errors as ‘users’ 

problems’. 

The title of this chapter might be somewhat misleading: ‘collecting stories’ 

sounds like a passive occupation, stories waiting like mushrooms to be picked. 

In fact, Boland and Tenkasi (1995) were worried that too many researchers

38 

expected exactly that. Boland and Tenkasi took a highly critical view of 

‘collecting’ organizational narratives as if they were artifacts for ever petrified 

in organizational reality waiting to be ‘discovered’ by a researcher. Yet every 

narrative becomes new with each retelling, and the ‘petrification’ of stories is 

not the result of the myopia of the researcher but of intensive stabilizing work 

by the narrators, some examples of which we saw in Chapter 2. Nevertheless, 

story collection needs to be supported by the study of narrative performances, 

such as undertaken by David Boje (1991). 

Telling stories 


Boje took inspiration from studies of Harvey Sacks (1992) and his followers, 

who investigated the occurrence of stories in conversations. 1 One context 

especially rich for the story-carrying conversation was, he observed, a work 

organization: 

In organizations, storytelling is the preferred sense-making currency of human 

relationships among internal and external stakeholders. People engage in a dynamic 

process of incremental refinement of their stories of new events as well as on-going 

interpretations of culturally sacred story lines. When a decision is at hand, the old 

stories are recounted and compared to an unfolding story line to keep the organizations 

from repeating historically bad choices and to invite the repetition of past 

successes. In a turbulent environment, the organization halls and offices pulsate 

with a story life of the here and now that is richer and more vibrant than the firm’s 

environments. 

Even in stable times, the story is highly variable and sometimes political, in that part 

of the collective processing involves telling different versions of stories to different 

audiences … Each performance is never the completed story; it is an unraveling process 

of confirming new data and new interpretations as these become part of an unfolding 

story line. (Boje, 1991: 106) 

Boje thus set out to record everyday conversations in a large office-supply 

firm he was studying in order to capture spontaneous storytelling episodes. He 

then used the program ETHNOGRAPH to code the over 100 hours of tape 

recordings, a procedure that took him 400 hours. His findings concerned two 

aspects of storytelling: how they occur in conversations and in what way they 

are used. As far as the first aspect is concerned, Boje discovered that storytelling 

in contemporary organizations hardly follows the traditional pattern of a narrator 

telling a story from the beginning to the end in front of an enchanted 

and attentive audience. Narrators told their stories in bits and pieces, were 

often interrupted, sometimes for the purpose of complementing the story, 

and sometimes for aborting the storytelling. As to uses to which stories were 

put, Boje classified them into pattern finding, pattern elaboration, and pattern


fitting. This classification exemplifies well Karl Weick’s insights concerning 

sensemaking (1995).A story is a frame – a frame that emerges and is tried out, 

a frame that is developed and elaborated, or a frame that can easily absorb the 

new event. 

Boje’s study shows that the line between ‘story making’ and ‘story collecting’, 

topics of two separate chapters in this book, is very fine if it exists at all.The structuring 

of this book does not correspond to the ‘structure of reality’, as it were; it 

is a device used to structure a text. Also, although both Boje’s and Gabriel’s (see 

the next section) studies were done in workplaces, storytelling is not limited to 

such sites. Family is an obvious site for storytelling, as are playgroups and various 

associations. Still, the ‘work-worlds’ may deserve special attention. 

The concept of a ‘work-world’ is inspired by Benita Luckmann (1978), who 

pointed out that the lifeworld of modern people is divided into segments or 

subuniverses. One such small lifeworld of a modern person is a world of work, 

the other two being family and ecological community (the list should now be 

extended to include virtual communities). Accepting her reading means a 

deviation from the common viewpoint that workplaces are ruled by the rigid 

arm of the ‘system’ and hence stand in opposition to the ‘lifeworld’. 2 

Luckmann demonstrated two interesting traits of such ‘small lifeworlds’: one, 

that they are surprisingly similar to traditional communities; and, two, that the 

main difference between ‘the modern person’ and his or her traditional equivalent 

is that there are several such worlds in modernity which requires (but also 

permits) frequent ‘gear shifting’. The stories circulate in all, although gear shifting 

might also mean genre shifting. 

Luckmann’s idea found an excellent illustration in Julian E. Orr’s (1996) 

ethnography of the work of technicians who repair copying machines.While 

employed by a big corporation, the technicians practically managed to ignore 

it. They conceived their job – in the sense of a work practice rather than a relation 

of employment and hierarchy – as an individual, challenging task, made 

possible by a supportive community.The community was a context where ‘war 

stories’ were swapped and where the collective knowledge was produced, 

maintained, and distributed. Orr concludes that: 

the skilled practice of field service work [is] necessarily improvised…, and centered 

on the creation and maintenance of control and understanding. Control and understanding 

are achieved through a coherent account of the situation, requiring both 

diagnostic and narrative skills. Understanding is maintained through circulation of 

this knowledge by retelling the narratives to other members of the community, 

and this preservation of understanding contributes to the maintenance of control. 

(1996: 161) 

Orr is very clear on one point: the stories are not about work, they are the work 

of the technicians, even though they may create other outcomes:

40 


when technicians gather, their conversation is full of talk about machines. This talk 

shows their understanding of the world of service; in another sense, the talk creates that 

world and even creates the identities of the technicians themselves. But neither talk nor 

identity is the goal of technicians’ practice.The goal is getting the job done, keeping 

the customers happy, and keeping the machines running. (1996: 161) 

The technicians’ stories are not ‘organizational stories’; they are ‘stories that 

organize’ (Czarniawska and Gagliardi, 2003). Most likely, the storytelling 

registered by Boje (1991) fulfilled similar functions, although he focused more 

on their formal role in the sensemaking process. What makes the difference 

between storytelling as reported by Boje and Orr and that described by 

Gabriel (see the next section) is that those ‘work stories’ are of a doubtful 

aesthetic or political value and are often elliptic and difficult to understand for 

a bystander. ‘Organizational stories’, on the other hand, seem to be meant for 

a general audience and – although no doubt fulfilling multiple functions – can 

hardly be of practical use for a problem at hand. 

Stories in and about organizations 

Yiannis Gabriel (2000) begins his book with a confession: he is a story lover, 

and it is a love story that dates from his childhood and carries into his family 

life. For a long time, however, he saw storytelling and working life, and especially 

working life consisting of doing research on working life, as two separate 

domains. Both as an employee and as a researcher, however, he was struck by 

two observations. First of all, different people told him the same, or very similar, 

story, as if they had rehearsed it beforehand. Secondly, long after his working 

experience or his research had ended, these stories remained in his memory 

longer than facts and people. Hence his present effort, although inspired by 

folklore research, aimed at answering three questions: 

1. How can we study organizations through the stories that are told in them and 

about them? 

2. What do stories tell us about the nature of organizations as distinct forms of 

human collectivity? 

3. What do stories encountered in organizations tell us about the nature and functions 

of storytelling? (Gabriel, 2000: 2) 

I am quoting these questions verbatim as a kind of warning. Many young 

scholars, fascinated by the presence of stories, proceed to do studies that show 

this presence. This is not enough; besides, it has already been done as documented 

not least by examples I am quoting here.A similar phenomenon happened 

in economics, according to Robert Solow (1988), when the economists 

were informed (mostly by Deirdre McCloskey, 1985) that economics uses


metaphors in its writings. The result was a series of studies that Solow 

summarizes as ‘Look, Ma, there is a metaphor!’ studies. The same thing is taking 

place in narrative studies: many of them are of the ‘Look, Ma, there is a narrative!’ 

type. Yet pointing out that science uses stories and metaphors, and so 

do other types of human activities, cannot be the whole program. The point 

is: what are the consequences of scientific rhetoric and what are the consequences 

of storytelling – for those who tell the stories and those who study 

them? 

Gabriel adopts a narrow definition of the story, such as the one I took on in 

Chapter 2, and contrasts stories with other common types of organizational 

narratives: opinions and reports (the latter clearly a modern version of a chronicle; 

see Chapter 2). Here is an example of a complete story that is worth 

repeating for its entertainment value: 

There was a chap driving a lorry and he hit a cat so he got out of the lorry and saw 

this cat on the side of the road and thought I’d better finish it off … smashed it over 

the head, got back in and drove off. A lady or a chap phoned the police and said I’ve 

just seen a Board lorry driver get out and kill my cat. So they chased after the van and 

found it and asked the driver whether he had killed the cat so he said he had run over 

it and couldn’t leave it like that … it’s cruel so I finished it off. So they said can we 

examine your van and he said yes by all means so they examined the van and found a 

dead cat under the wheel arch. So it was the wrong cat [he had killed] sleeping at the 

side of the road. (Gabriel, 2000: 23) 

Gabriel points out that it does not make sense to check the veracity of the 

story, and treats it as an example of organizational folklore. 3 I would like to 

point out that, like the story of a tactful mechanic, it contains many a message 

about Board company. It is not the plot (a comic road story involving a case of 

mistaken identity) but the mimesis that carries the message: we learn that Board 

drivers are people sensitive to the suffering of animals and that the British 

police force reacts promptly even to extremely exotic complaints with exceptional 

thoroughness and alacrity. 

Gabriel then moves to inspecting ‘the ways the stories are made’, showing 

how the same incident involving the explosion of a fire extinguisher takes the 

form of four different stories. He proceeds to trace the poetic tropes at work 

in story making in a way inspired by White and resembling that of Sköldberg 

(Chapter 2). He gives examples of an epic story, a tragic story, and a comic 

story (he has not found a romantic tale) and proceeds to analyze them according 

to five features: (1) a protagonist; (2) a predicament; (3) attempts to resolve 

the predicament; (4) the outcome of these attempts; and (5) the reactions of 

the protagonist (p. 61). This kind of structural analysis will be given more 

attention in Chapter 7; for now, we will look for the answers to Gabriel’s 

questions. 

Surprisingly enough, Gabriel is more pessimistic about story-based research 

than his own text. In a somewhat mournful ending, he says:

42 


Unlike the café and the pub, the village square and the family table, organizations do 

not appear to be a natural habitat of storytelling – after all most people in organizations 

are too busy appearing to be busy to be able to engage in storytelling. Nor is 

trust, respect, and love among members of organizations such as to encourage free and 

uninhibited narration. Moreover, stories in organizations compete against other narrativities, 

especially against information and data, but also against clichés, platitudes, 

acronyms, artefacts small and large, arguments, opinions, and so forth. In such an 

environment, amidst the noisy din of facts, numbers and images, the delicate, timeconsuming 

discourse of storytelling is easily ignored or silenced. Few organizations are 

spontaneous storytelling cultures. (2000: 240) 

As a worker daily drowned in the ocean of repetitive stories, I almost wish 

Gabriel was right. As his reader, I think Gabriel is using a hyperbole – a selfconscious 

exaggeration (Lanham, 1991: 86). The quotation continues: ‘Yet, 

there is storytelling going on in organizations, and some organizational stories 

are good stories.’ And the bulk of his book shows how revealing the study of 

stories actually is (on the matter of whether I have the right to go against an 

author’s explicitly stated intentions, see Chapter 5). 

To begin with, the stories he found were not few: 130 interviews gave rise 

to 404 stories. (Gabriel also gives useful advice in such practical matters as 

eliciting and collecting stories.) The following analysis of stories 4 elucidates 

several extremely important and often otherwise hidden aspects of social life. 

One such aspect is the role stories play in the drama of organizational power 

and resistance, at which I hinted in the previous chapter. Another is that 

stories permit access to the emotional life of organizations.This topic has been 

taken up by other writers (see a collection edited by Fineman, 1993), but 

Gabriel addresses a highly original aspect: stories as revealing the nostalgia 

present in organizations. A third aspect, closely related, is the religious side of 

organizing: Gabriel offers a compelling interpretation of the longevity of the 

leader-as-a-hero kind of plot – the leader is a kind of surrogate God in organizations:‘By 

highlighting the untypical, the critical, the extraordinary, stories 

give us access to what lies beyond the normal and the mundane’ (2000: 240). 

Gabriel speaks here in tune with Jerome Bruner, who pointed out that ‘The 

function of the narrative is to find an intentional state that mitigates, or at least 

makes comprehensible, a deviation from a canonical cultural pattern’ (1990: 

49–50). Thus stories might not tell all about work-worlds, but they do tell 

a lot. 

Ways of story collecting 

The literature on story collecting reveals at least three main ways of collecting 

stories. The first is the one used by Boje and Orr: recording of spontaneous 

incidents of storytelling during prolonged field research. As pointed out by


Gabriel, this is not easy: it requires a special sensibility (which can be acquired, 

however, in the field), a good memory, or a skillful and unobtrusive use of 

recording devices. 

The second approach is the one used by Gabriel himself: eliciting stories. 

Looking at his interview guide, I was struck by its similarity to Flanagan’s critical 

incidents technique (1954). This technique has been invented within an 

approach very distant from a narrative one and yet nothing says it cannot be 

used for that purpose. 

This particular technique originated in the Aviation Psychology Program of 

the US Army Air Forces in World War II, with the specific purpose of developing 

procedures for the selection and classification of aircrews. Flanagan asked 

pilots to tell him about critical incidents in their service. 

Flanagan defined an incident as an observable human activity that can be 

seen as a whole: it has a beginning and an end, even if it can be related to many 

other, earlier and later activities.A critical incident is an incident that is untypical 

in the sense of not happening regularly, even if typical for a given type of 

activity (and therefore, for example, an activity repeated several times every day 

is not a critical incident). It must, however, be important from the point of 

view of the main activity of processes taking place in the site under study. Both 

judgments (untypical, important) must be made by the observer under the 

guidance of the researcher. 

The procedure (usually an interview but also an observation technique) 

should cover the following steps: 

1 Establishing general aims of an activity. (Researchers who believe, like Karl 

Weick, that aims of an activity are best discovered specifically and post factum 

might replace it with a question concerning the type of activity.) 

2 Describing the unit and the actors. (Again, Flanagan has clearly in mind formal 

organizations. Researchers who study other type of communities will be satisfied 

with a description of a site at which the activity takes place. A good 

description should resemble stage specifications, so that it is clear where are the 

doors and where are the windows – metaphorically speaking – what costumes 

should actors wear, etc.) 

3 Choosing an incident. During an interview, the interviewer and the interviewee 

make the choice together. During an observation, the observer decides and 

justifies the choice. 

4 Description of the critical incident. Again, it should resemble a play script. It 

must be chronologically ordered, detailed (everything of importance for understanding 

the whole), and complete with the intentions of actors (as declared by 

themselves or attributed by the observer). 

5 Critical judgments of the observer may be included but must be clearly separated. 

This description of the procedure makes it clear that the resulting account 

might well be a story or a chronicle. Unless the study aims at storytelling

44 


specifically, it does not matter much as chronicles and other types of narratives 

are also texts permitting interesting interpretations. 

The third way of collecting stories is to ask for them. Much as I focus in this 

chapter on oral histories, written stories are also created and circulated, not 

least in the new medium of the Internet.Accordingly, I used such an approach 

(which is still a variation of Flanagan’s technique) in a study on power in 

organizations. Students of management, psychology, and sociology in different 

countries were given the following instruction: 

Name or pseudonym: 

Age: 

Gender: 

Power is one of the phenomena that always interested social scientists, 

were they philosophers or organization theorists. Nevertheless, we do not 

really know what power looks like in concrete, contemporary organizations. 

Please think for a moment about an incident involving organizational 

power that you recently observed. Take some time now, before 

reading further, to remember the details of that incident. 

Now please describe, as fully as possible, the details of that incident, 

explaining the situation that led to the incident, the people involved, what 

was said and done by whom, and the consequences of the incident. Take 

as many additional pages as you wish. 

Why have you chosen this particular incident? Could you comment on 

organizational power as you see it and as it is described in your incident? 

Thank you very much for your cooperation! 

This instruction resulted in a whole collection of very interesting stories. 5 

Monika Kostera uses a similar technique (2002), sometimes changing it so that, 

instead of a theme, the respondents are asked to complete a story of which they 

are given the first line (‘You are free to go, said the Managing Director’). She 

also asked managers to write short poems and they obliged her (Kostera, 1997). 

Scheytt et al. (2003) applied the same instruction in a study of the notion of 

‘control’ in different cultures. 

The choice of a specific technique depends on opportunities, personal 

talents, and preferences. Throughout this book I avoid giving specific recipes 

(I prefer to quote stories) because most prescriptions, sensible as they were in 

a given context of use, can easily turn absurd in another one. If there is one 

general rule of field research it is that all techniques must be context sensitive. 

A field researcher is constantly making decisions as to the next step to take (not 

least moral decisions), and there is no authority in the academic word who 

could foresee all contexts and all occurrences.

The point I was trying to make in this chapter is that long-lived narratives, 

especially stories, are sediments of norms and practices and, as such, deserve careful 

attention. Each workplace, each group and community has a contemporary 

and historical repertoire of stories, sometimes divided into ‘internal stories’ 

and ‘external stories’, sometimes stories spread abroad with a hope of their 

return in a more legitimate form – for example, via mass media (Kunda, 

1992). 

Boland and Tenkasi (1995) have made an important point, however. Stories 

do not lie around – they are fabricated, circulated, and contradicted. Using an 

industrial metaphor (following Michel de Certeau, 1984), it could be said that 

stories are produced (concocted, fabricated), sold (told, circulated), and consumed 

(listened to, read, interpreted) – often all in the same performance. Nor 

is a story collector, in this case a researcher, a mushroom picker: he or she listens 

selectively, remembers fragmentarily, and re-counts in a way that suits his 

or her purpose. Interestingly enough, all these phenomena can be observed in 

one type of interaction: an interview. 

EXERCISES 

Exercise 3.1: family or workplace story 

Does your family have a story that is often told when guests are 

around? (This notion encompasses strangers as well as visiting family 

members.) If not, can you recall a story that is told to visitors at 

your workplace? Perhaps you remember stories told to you when you 

were a new employee? Write up whichever story is easier to 

retrieve. 

Exercise 3.2: collective storytelling 


Show your story to another family member or to a colleague 

at work. Ask him or her whether you remembered it well and 

ask him or her to correct your story on paper (make sure the 

story is double spaced). Compare the two versions. What do the 

corrections say about yourself? About your family member or your 

colleague? What does the story say about your family or about your 

workplace?

46 


Boje, David M. (1991) ‘The storytelling organization: a study of story 

performance in an office-supply firm,’ Administrative Studies Quarterly, 

36: 106–26. 

Gabriel, Yiannis (2000) Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions 

and Fantasies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Orr, Julian E. (1996) Talking about Machines. An Ethnography of a 

Modern Job. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 

Notes 


1 The reader might wonder how David Boje was able in 1991 to partake in the 

insights of Sacks’ book published in 1992. Sacks’ complete Lectures on Conversation 

were first published in 1992, 17 years after his tragic death, but circulated as paper 

copies of the transcriptions made by Gail Jefferson, and some of them were published 

separately before 1992. 

2 ‘System’ and ‘lifeworld’ are Husserl’s terms, used much by Alfred Schütz and his 

disciples. 

3 Gabriel points out that the notion of organizational folklore (cultural practices and 

artefacts that are symbolic, spontaneous, and repetitive) has not received much 

attention from organizational scholars. I agree with him that this is highly regrettable 

as all kinds of bodily practices and artefacts are powerful carriers of social 

memory (Connerton, 1989). I suppose the reason is that they are very difficult to 

study and require a special kind of trained sensitivity, not part of the usual curricula 

for social science researchers. 

4 Gabriel, like Boje, used a computer program: Cardbox-Plus. 

5 The results of this study can be found in Czarniawska-Joerges and Kranas (1991), 

Czarniawska-Joerges (1994) and Czarniawska (2003b); see also Chapter 7.

4 

Narratives in an Interview Situation 

What is an interview? 47 

An interview as an interaction and as a narrative 

production site 49 

Difficulties connected to eliciting narratives in an 

interview situation 51 

Avoiding accounts 54 

Interview transcript as a narrative 55 

Notes 59 

What is an interview? 

The ingenious spelling of the title of Steinar Kvale’s book (InterViews, 1996) 

brought to the attention of researchers like myself at least two unpleasant 

insights about their favorite technique. The first concerned what, in its usual 

form, an interview is not: it is not a mutual exchange of views. A more correct 

name would be, perhaps, an ‘inquisition’ or an ‘interrogation’, quite in tune 

with the deplorable tradition of calling the interviewees ‘informants’. The 

second insight concerned what, in its frequent version, an interview unfortunately 

is: collecting views and opinions on whatever topic is mentioned. If an 

interview is not a part of an opinion survey, this is not what researchers are 

after: they want to know facts, or attitudes, or many other things outside the 

interview, the ‘reality behind it’, as it were. 

But should a research interview be an exchange of views between the two 

parties? Kvale takes up a normative, philosophical perspective and claims that, 

as conversations are the main mode of knowledge production in our societies, 

the model of conversation, especially its version known as a philosophical dialogue, 

should become the model for interviews. An interview is two persons 

seeking knowledge and understanding in a common conversational endeavor. 

As long as this postulate is crafted in theoretical terms, there is no need to 

raise any objections to such an ideal although, semantically speaking, this is a 

definition of a dialogue, not of an interview. An interview is, indeed, a common 

enterprise in knowledge production. The practice of research interviewing,

48 


however, creates its own complications. Kvale is the first to notice that what he 

calls a ‘professional interview’ assumes a power asymmetry: the ‘professional’ 

interrogates the ‘object’ or, in psychological parlance, the ‘subject’, who responds 

to the best of his or her knowledge. No wonder that graduate students, at least 

in Sweden, used to call their interlocutors ‘the interview victims’. 

There is, however, a peculiar symmetry to this asymmetry. First of all, it is 

unrealistic to think about a researcher in terms of an omniscient professional. 

She or he might be professional in her or his own profession (that is, research) 

but not in the profession of the interlocutor, whose profession is the topic of 

the conversation.This point is especially obvious in life stories, where the narrators 

are the only experts on the question of their own lives. The ‘power of 

knowledge’, if not other types of power, lies on the side of the interviewee. 

What the researchers have to offer in exchange is not their views but their 

respectful and interested attention. 

It happens quite often that an interviewed person demands to know the 

opinion of the interviewer, or the science she or he represents, on the matter 

in question. But woe to those who take it literally. In most cases, it is either a 

political trap (the interviewee wants to enlist the researcher on his or her side 

in an ongoing conflict) or a simple rhetorical diving board. I must admit that 

I have fallen into this trap many a time and started to expand on my views on 

the matter only to notice the impatience with which my interlocutor waited 

for me to end my peroration and give him or her the floor. 

The experience of 30 years’ interviewing in four countries taught me that 

practitioners, especially those in elevated positions, are often quite lonely in 

their thoughts. Every exposition of their thinking within their own organizations 

has political and practical consequences: others listen, draw conclusions, 

and act accordingly. There is also a limit to the amount of ‘thinking aloud’ that 

even the most loving family can take during the dinner hour.A research interview 

thus opens a possibility for an unusual but symmetrical exchange. 

The practitioners offer a personal insight into the realities of their practice. 

The researchers offer that which our profession has an abundance of but others 

do not: an opportunity of trying out one’s thoughts without practical 

consequences. 

This still does not resolve the second doubt I raised at the outset. Are personal 

insights and subjective views all that an interview will yield a researcher? 

The symmetrical situation described above can be satisfactory to a therapist, 

but should it be acceptable to a researcher? 

Another vain hope connected to an interview situation is that it will yield 

‘information’,‘facts’. I understood just how vain that hope was in my study of 

a reform in Swedish municipalities (Czarniawska, 1988). I asked a simple question 

(I thought) about the beginning of the reform. I received answers that 

located it anywhere from the early 1930s to the late 1970s. It was valuable 

information but not of the kind I expected.To begin with, an unaided memory 

always falters: people do not remember dates and numbers.There are documents

NARRATIVES IN AN INTERVIEW SITUATION 49 

where such facts can be found (always with the caveat that their production 

must be carefully examined). Further, what people present in the interviews is 

but the results of their perception, their interpretation of the world, which is 

of extreme value to the researcher because one may assume that it is the same 

perception that informs their actions. In this light, the reform that was prepared 

in the 1930s belongs to a whole different world of meaning from the reform 

that started in the 1970s; it indicates that those people were in fact implementing 

different reforms. 

It is important to understand that interviews do not stand for anything else; 

they represent nothing else but themselves.An interview is an interaction that 

becomes recorded, or inscribed, and this is what it stands for. Such a pitiless 

definition of an interview situation, however, worries many a researcher. Of 

what value is an interaction between a researcher and a practitioner? 

In social studies this value is quite obvious. An interview is not a window 

on social reality but it is a part, a sample of that reality.An interaction where a 

practitioner is submitted to questioning from an external source is typical, in 

the sense of being frequent, of the work of many people who, in a world of 

many and fast connections, have constantly to explain themselves to strangers: 

people from the overseas division, from another department, from the audit 

office, from a newspaper. We live in an ‘interview society’ (Atkinson and 

Silverman, 1997; Gubrium and Holstein, 2002). While each one of these 

accounts will be unique in the way every interaction is, it would be both presumptuous 

and unrealistic to assume that a practitioner will invent a whole 

new story just for the sake of a particular researcher who happened to interview 

him or her.The narratives are well rehearsed and crafted in a legitimate 

logic.This ‘logic of representation’ might be another problem, and I will return 

to it later. 

An interview as an interaction and as a 

narrative production site 

David Silverman’s approach to interviews based on the insights of symbolic 

interactionism can be very helpful to desperate researchers. He pointed out 

that an interview can be treated as an observation of an interaction between 

the two people in question (Silverman, 2001). Silverman goes further than 

the classic interactionists, challenging the quasi-naturalist assumptions made 

by symbolic interactionism and suggesting sensitive ways of minimizing 

many traps connected with an overconfidence in the interview as a ‘natural’ 

interaction. 

One such commonsensical but immensely valuable measure is to make the 

interviews accompany direct observation, a recommendation often made by 

ethnographers (see, e.g., Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995). Not only is there 

then a shared experience to which both interlocutors can easily refer but also

50 


it makes it much easier for the interviewer to visualize the stage on which the 

reported events are taking place, which greatly enhances understanding. Seeing 

a scene previously described by someone always makes one realize how many 

cues we lose in our exaggerated reliance on verbal reports.This realization leads 

more and more researchers to use video equipment whenever possible, 

although videotaping exacts its price in making the observation more obtrusive. 

But, if I may add in passing, there are no entirely unobtrusive methods; 

indeed, there is no reason to expect that researchers can get a ‘free ride’ in the 

social world. Every interaction has its price – and it is a part of the duty of each 

member of society to pay as demanded. 

An interview can thus be treated as a recorded interaction and then analyzed 

with such assistance as conversation analysis (see, e.g., Edwards and Lampert, 

1993; Psathas, 1995; ten Have, 1998; Silverman, 2001). Here I would like to 

point out yet another possibility offered by interviews, inasmuch as they can 

be steered away from a monologue containing general views on abstract 

matters. Such an interview may become more like a manipulated conversation, 

where the manipulation is acknowledged and accepted by both parties. Such 

conversations might be a rich source of knowledge about social practice insofar 

as they produce narratives. Here I return to a wider meaning of the term 

‘narrative’ that includes stories, but also chronicles (or reports, as Gabriel, 2000, 

calls them). 

During an interview, an interviewee may retell narratives that circulate on a 

given site of practice, or the interview itself may become a site for a narrative 

production. Prompted by the researcher, a practitioner may concoct a narrative, 

thereby revealing to the researcher the narrative devices in practical use. 

Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the interviewee should resort to a repertoire 

of narrative devices unusual for his or her practice. 

Miller and Glassner point out that ‘interviewees sometimes respond to interviewers 

through the use of familiar narrative constructs, rather than by providing 

meaningful insights into their subjective view’ (1997: 101). It is ‘rather than’ 

I want to contest, much as I am in sympathy with the authors’ general stance. 

‘Meaningful insights into subjective views’ can only be expressed by ‘familiar 

narrative constructs’ (although this expression may take the form of deviating 

from or subverting these constructs), otherwise they could not be understood 

or even recognized as such.We all live and communicate thanks to the incessant 

use of a widely accessible (rather than ‘shared’) cultural repertoire. People 

are using plots they learned from films and TV series (not to forget fairytales) to 

emplot their own narratives, as we have seen in Chapter 2.This does not make 

them ‘cultural dupes’ because they created this repertoire themselves and, if not 

they, their parents did.This paradox has already been powerfully formulated by 

Berger and Luckmann (1966): we create ‘culture’ so that it can create us. 

The difference between ‘meaningful personal insights’ and ‘familiar narrative 

constructs’ lies mainly in the interest of the researchers. Individual life histories 

are unique compositions of materials accessible in the common repertoire, but


it is this uniqueness that is of interest to a student of personal narratives 

(Riessman, 1993).What is a figure for Catherine Riessman is for me a background, 

and vice versa. Organizational stories delimit a dominant, or a legitimate, 

range of such compositions in a given time and place, and thus it is their 

familiarity, their repetitiveness, that is of interest to a student of organizing. 

For all these reasons, it is possible to see each community as a site of narrative 

production, among many other things it may produce. An interview can 

thus become a micro-site of such production or just a site of distribution 

where a researcher is allowed to partake in narratives previously produced.This 

does not mean that research interviews always evoke narratives; unlike spontaneous 

conversation, they may incite a conscious avoidance of narratives insofar 

as they are constructed as arenas where only logico-scientific knowledge 

can be legitimately produced. It is then the task of the interviewer to ‘activate 

narrative production’ (Holstein and Gubrium, 1997: 123). 

Difficulties connected to eliciting 

narratives in an interview situation 

‘Telling stories is far from unusual in everyday conversation and it is apparently 

no more unusual for interviewees to respond to questions with narratives if 

they are given some room to speak’ (Mishler, 1986: 69). Indeed, in many cases, 

answers given in an interview are spontaneously formed into narratives.This is 

usually the case of interviews aiming at life histories or, in an organizational 

context, at career descriptions, where a narrative is explicitly asked for and 

delivered.This is also the case of interviews aiming at a historical description 

of a certain process, although the narrative may then be seen only as an introduction 

to the ‘interview proper’ that would switch to an analytical mode, aiming 

at producing logico-scientific knowledge.When the topic of an interview 

is a reform or a reorganization (that is, a chain of events that unfold in time), 

there is nothing unusual in formulating a question that prompts a narrative: 

‘Can you recall when you first started to talk about the necessity of reorganizing 

your department? And what happened next?’ 

But in most cases both sides have to combat the shared conviction that ‘true 

knowledge’ is not made of narratives. ‘Why did you decide to reform?’ and 

‘What were the factors that made a reorganization necessary?’ will be perceived 

as more ‘scientific’ questions, prompting analytic answers. Also, the questions 

concerning ‘the beginnings’ are not as innocuous as they seem. 

In what follows I quote two examples taken from my studies of big-city 

management where, in the first stage of the project, I conducted a round of 

interviews with the politicians and the officials managing the city, to be followed 

by shadowing (Czarniawska, 2002). The first example comes from 

Warsaw, the second from Stockholm; the first interlocutor was a woman and 

the second a man:

52 


BC: Would you start with describing your work, please? What do you do? 

What are your responsibilities? How does your working day look? 

I: No. Sorry, but in my case, I must begin with history. 

This short example illustrates a type of difficulty often experienced by 

researchers interested in oral history. Paul Connerton pointed out that, while 

oral historians usually, and unreflectively, assume a chronological timing of an 

account, their interlocutors might have another time frame. People whose life 

is not controlled by modern institutions might see their life not as a ‘curriculum 

vitae’, a current of life, but as a series of cycles.The basic cycle is the day, 

then the week, the month, the season, the year, the generation (Connerton, 

1989: 20). 

Connerton makes an important point but he underestimates the amount of 

‘premodern’ in modern institutions. Cyclical time is, in fact, a very obvious way 

of measuring time in contemporary organizations: workdays, workweeks, budget 

years, and generations. In the example above, it was I who suggested the 

cyclical timeframe (‘a working day’), whereas my interlocutor chose to place 

her actions with reference to their place in the history of the social settings to 

which she belonged (Connerton, 1989: 21). The point is, the interviewees 

might choose diverse timeframes for their account: chronological, cyclical, or 

kairotic (a narrative time, punctuated by important events, which might even 

run backward in chronology). 

It is important to let the interlocutors choose their own time frame.Asking 

‘when did it all begin?’ is not especially helpful, as my earlier example indicated. 

In the present case, the interview in Warsaw was saved at the outset as 

my interlocutor took control of the interaction, much to my relief. I had no 

such luck in Stockholm, however: 

BC: What do you see as the main task in your work? 

I: My task is to fill the role of a group leader of the next-to-largest political 

party and to lead the opposition. 

BC: But what does it mean in terms of your job? What do you do? 

I: The political sciences state clearly that this role is that of a person 

who, in a democracy, was elected to be the foremost representative 

of some kind of a political movement or a group. 

BC: But what kind of tasks do you perform? You come here every morning, 

and then, what do you do? 

I: All that has to do with governance and management of the city. 

We went on like that for a good while until I struck a lucky solution: I asked 

my interlocutor to describe his previous day in the office in detail. It resulted 

in the most minimalist kind of a narrative based on chronology only (‘In the 

morning I met my party colleagues …’). But the very poverty of this narrative 

prompted elaboration: ‘You must know that, at present, we are trying to


develop a new way of working together’ and a narrative ensued.Almost every 

fragmented detail of the day served as an element in a story of its own. 

I am not quoting these excerpts simply to document my clumsiness as an 

interviewer, lamentable as it may be. Clever interviewers who never make 

mistakes reduce their interlocutors to puppets reciting what the researcher has 

previously thought up.As Latour (2000) points out, the true irony of the comparison 

between the natural and social scientists is that, while the former 

encounter a continuous resistance in their objects, who do not want to do 

what researchers tell them to, the social subjects eagerly play a role of pliable 

objects when asked to do so in the name of Science. 

The apparent misunderstanding between me and the second interlocutor 

reveals, however, further interesting things about research interviews. I wanted 

to know what he did, but he told me what his role was, in abstract terms. One 

could say, borrowing Bourdieu’s (1990) term, that I wished to reconstruct the 

logic of practice, but could one say that my interlocutor’s answer followed the 

logic of theory? In part, yes; after all, he even quoted political science to legitimize 

his answer. But the logic dominating his response is what I called a logic 

of representation (Czarniawska, 1999b), and what Bourdieu called ‘officialization’ 

(1990). 

I use ‘representation’ here in only one of its many meanings: not in the sense 

of rendering an equivalent of something else, as in ‘representation theory of 

truth’, and not in the sense of ‘political representation’, but in the sense of ‘presenting 

oneself in a good light’.The logic of representation is like an elegant 

outfit put on when visitors are coming. It is used by everybody in positions 

that require official accounting for organizational practices. It borrows from the 

logic of practice its fondness for narratives but its narratives are stylized and 

abstract.They never take place in concrete circumstances but usually start with 

‘if’ or ‘imagine that’. It borrows from the logic of theory its models of formal 

rationality, where the carefully selected means lead to achievement of wisely 

chosen goals. It quotes from both practice and theory but, in contrast to both, 

it is rhetorically skillful and self-conscious. 

It is mostly the logic of representation, the dressing up for visitors, which 

is exhibited during research interviews. But there is always an improvisation 

in an interview which is absent from formal representations such as annual 

reports and corporate videos. All interactions contain mixed styles of representation 

and quotations from different types of logic.A friend might quote 

a poem to better express his feelings or a colleague might relate during a 

coffee-break a whole theory she read the day before.Also, the logic of representation 

is but a more conscious and elaborate form of everyday accounts, 

an example of a correct grammar of motives (Burke, 1945). As Scott and 

Lyman observed in their influential article, ‘[a]n account is a linguistic 

device employed whenever an action is subjected to valuative inquiry’ 

(1968: 46). Thus, it is the account type of narratives we want but do not 

always obtain.

54 

Avoiding accounts 


Scott and Lyman continue by explaining that accounts are made to explain 

‘unanticipated or untoward behavior’ (1968), and this circumstance seems to 

indicate a difference between spontaneous accounts and research interviews. I 

would claim that, to the contrary, this caveat shows why the responses in 

research interviews are accounts in the exact sense of that given by Scott and 

Lyman:‘An account is not called for when people engage in routine, commonsense 

behavior in a cultural environment that recognizes that behavior as such’ 

(1968: 47). When managers manage they engage in routine, commonsense 

behavior in a cultural environment that recognizes their behavior as such. A 

research interview is a staged situation where, by mutual consent, the recognition 

of a given behavior as ‘routine and common sense’ is suspended. The 

researchers play the role of ‘foreigners’ or ‘visitors from another planet’, whereas 

the practitioners agree to explain their behavior as if it were not routine and 

commonsensical, thus making it into ‘action’. 

Reconciled to the ubiquitous presence of the logic of representation (the 

logic of practice is present in interviews only insofar as they are the practice of 

taking part in an interview) and acknowledging the account-like character of 

interview responses, we might want to learn from Scott and Lyman about the 

usual strategies for avoiding accounts, as these are strategies that will exclude 

or impoverish narratives in an interview. They mention three: mystification, 

referral, and identity switching. 

A mystification occurs when ‘an actor admits that he is not meeting the 

expectations of another, but follows this by pointing out that, although there 

are reasons for his unexpected actions, he cannot tell the inquirer what they 

are’ (1968: 58). In many studies, a mystification might have legal grounds, as 

when information is classified as confidential or when recounting somebody 

else’s behavior can be read as slander. But it is the referral that is most commonly 

used: the interlocutor refers the researcher to a more competent source of 

information (‘If you want to know what we do, look at the web’) or refuses to 

speculate about other people’s perceptions (‘I am afraid you must ask her how 

she felt when this happened’).Another kind of referral is the one that happens 

in the interview I quoted above: my interlocutor referred me to political 

science, where a legitimate account of his activities was to be found. An identity 

switching (that is, pointing out that the researcher assumes another interlocutor’s 

persona than the one he or she wishes to present) is also frequent: 

‘I am not a person who tells tales.’ After all, to quote Scott and Lyman for the 

last time, ‘every account is a manifestation of the underlying negotiation of 

identities’ (1968: 59). 

An interesting addition to this list comes from science studies (Mulkay and 

Gilbert, 1982).The scientists interviewed by the two authors did not account 

for, and thus did not produce narratives about, what they considered to be


correct knowledge.They accounted for and told stories about errors and mistakes. 

This throws additional light on my difficulties reported above: confronted with 

‘correct knowledge’, I could hardly question it or feign ignorance.An impasse 

occurred which could be resolved only by re-establishing the premises that 

made it legitimate for the interviewer to ‘wonder’. 

How, then, to obtain narratives in a situation which prompts the use of the 

logic of representation and offers many possibilities of avoiding an account? 

There are a great many suggestions, varying from the ways of eliciting stories 

(Mishler, 1986; Gabriel, 2000), through eliciting descriptive material (Spradley, 

1979), to eliciting any type of response ( Johnson and Weller, 2002). My 

problem with many of those suggestions is that they try to generalize and to 

abstract from situated experiences. I suggest that these texts be treated as a valuable 

collection of research narratives but I would warn, as before, against treating 

them as recipes.What worked miracles in one situation might cause trouble 

in another. It is important to elicit a narrative concerning the issue of interest 

to the researcher, but … sometimes another issue, brought spontaneously by 

the interviewee, turns out to be more interesting. 

The discussion above reviews the difficulties of eliciting any kind of narrative 

at all. Once this difficulty has been overcome (skillfully or clumsily), the 

next concern is to get a complete story or a narrative.There, the commonsensical 

schemes suggested by Gabriel or Flanagan (as reported in Chapter 3) are 

as good as any. Personally, I recommend a ‘recall check’: will I be able to retell 

this story? If not, what is missing? 

Interview transcript as a narrative 

There are basically two things that can be done with – and to – narratives 

elicited in interviews.The first is to concoct a researcher’s own narrative out of 

them – that is, to write up, or to rewrite, or to interpret them.These are synonyms 

– after all, each act of interpretive reading writes a story anew.Treated 

in this way, the narratives coming from interviews do not differ from other 

narratives: field notes, documents, official histories. The ways of reading and 

analyzing them will be reviewed in the remaining chapters. 

The second is to analyze them as narratives of interviews, a special kind of texts. 

Conversation analysis offers technically sophisticated ways of dealing with such 

texts when they are taken to be inscriptions of social interactions. Here I suggest 

a way of looking at the interview as an inscription of narrative production. 

The following radio interview has been recorded and transcribed by 

Veronica Gabrielli from Padua, 1 whom I thank for permission to use it. It was 

originally transcribed with the notation of conversation analysis, but my subsequent 

translation from Italian to English made this notation unusable. I have, 

however, preserved the capital letters for indicating the emphasis:

56 


An interview with Isabella Spagnolo, grower of the red chicory of 

Treviso, and Sergio Grasso, both pioneers of ‘safe foods’ 

1. Paola, the journalist: We are here in the kitchen to talk about the 

coming week that is very IMPORTANT to us. On Sunday, the 3rd of 

December, in 100 Italian cities will take place an event ‘Friendly 

countryside’, an exhibition aimed at TEACHING people about the 

most authentic produce in our country. We start with this VERY 

YOUNG producer, who is a role model for many women in the 

Northeast Italy. Let us move to the district of Treviso together with 

Isabella Spagnolo who is a GROWER of the RED CHICORY of Treviso. 

Good morning! 

2. Isabella: Good morning Paola. 

3. Paola: Good morning Isabella. Welcome. We have also with us 

another pioneer, even he from Treviso… 

4. Sergio: Hmm, sort of a pioneer… 

5. Paola: … our Sergio Grasso. Well, when we say RED CHICORY … let 

us begin with saying that you are so INCREDIBLY YOUNG, yet you 

threw yourself, soul and body, into this production… 

6. Isabella: Yes, one may say so… 

7. Paola: … with passion. 

8. Isabella: Exactly. I am ENTHUSIASTIC about agriculture, as I claim 

that at this moment it has a FUNDAMENTAL importance for us all. 

And exactly because we are the PIONEERS of safe foods, and we are 

CERTAIN of what we are producing and how we are producing it… 

9. Paola: It is the slogan of our times… 

10. Isabella: This product of ours, of the district of Treviso, is FABU- 

LOUS, it is a miracle of nature. It is not as you people see it in the 

field, because the miracle takes place under the water, in the 

springs that you can find ONLY in the district of Treviso, which 

cause that the heart of the chicory matures into this BEAUTIFUL red 

chicory… 

11. Paola: This means that if I come for a visit to YOUR region, I won’t 

see this in the fields… 

12. Isabella: No, it is truly a MIRACLE, an EMOTION, which grows only in 

the earth where there are warm springs, so that chicory is collected 

from the FIELD, and put under the water, and thus this strange 

flower, called FLOWER OF THE WINTER, blooms. 

13. Paola: As you could hear, Isabella is not only an enthusiast, she is 

also a poetess. We need to take a short break now, and afterwards 

you must tell me all.… 

14. Paola: This BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL woman of 29, Isabella Spagnolo, 

who is now sitting next to me, is a coordinator of women entrepreneurs 

associated in Coldiretti di Treviso… but also a producer of 

wine and…


15. Isabella: … of red chicory. 

16. Paola: … of red chicory. And now we turn to our Sergio, who is from 

Treviso, to talk about red chicory, but the red chicory from Treviso. 

This goldmine that you have… 

17. Sergio: This flower that we eat… 

18. Paola: This flower that we eat… 

19. Sergio: THAT from Treviso is called FLOWER THAT WE EAT, whereas 

that from Castelfranco, a stone’s throw away from Treviso, is called 

the ROSE OF CASTELFRANCO. It is a chicory… 

20. Paola: Now then, Isabella… 

21. Sergio: … and there are many chicories, but the one from Treviso is 

certainly the best whitened chicory, that is, submitted to the process 

of LIGHTENING, is the BEST chicory of all, belongs to the most innovative 

tradition, as it can be used in many ways. 

22. Paola: Isabella, a young girl like you who is a producer, that is, who 

cultivates, what is your life like? That is, what is your work like? 

23. Isabella: Certainly the most important is the MANAGEMENT of production, 

as we obviously feel the burden of the responsibility that we 

have, and this is the responsibility to GUARANTEE the quality of the 

product, in fact our product is marked IGP, a trademark that says 

that the product can be made only in the specific district, Treviso, 

OUR DISTRICT, and that is submitted to QUALITY control, thus we 

deliver a certified product and feel responsible for it. After which 

there is the COMMERCIAL part of it, the presentation of the product, 

like the one I am doing now, where we need to tell what we do… that 

for us it is the usual way… 

24. Paola: Well, Isabella, how much PRIDE brings this product to Treviso, 

as it travels all around the world… 

25. Isabella: It is an outer point of the diamond 2 formed by FABULOUS 

products from Veneto region such as potatoes, asparagus, beans, 

squash and wine, and many other products which go well with the 

red chicory of Treviso. 

26. Paola: Well, how do you cook it? 

27. Isabella: There is a LOT of ways. It is wonderful fried, grilled, fantastic 

for making risotto con radicchio, obviously you put LOTS of 

chicory and little rice, this is fundamental for this dish, and then you 

can combine it, it goes well with the wine from ITS land, Rabboso, 

which is born… it is a truly ABORIGINAL, you find it only in the 

province of Treviso, and then… 

28. Paola: ABORIGINAL … you are also aboriginal. 

29. Isabella: … well, yes… I am in love with nature and with the PRODUCT … 

30. Paola: And this is the end, Isabella Spagnolo will be in the city 

square on this Sunday dedicated to Coldiretti … 

31. Isabella: I will! there will be, on hundred squares, WE young 

producers from Coldiretti, and we will offer to the consumers the 

products with a certified QUALITY, so that the consumer will trust

58 


us, trust that we do with such love, such passion and constant 

dedication… 

32. Paola: … and she is only 29… Who knows where will she be in 10 

years! Thank you Isabella Spagnolo, thank you Sergio Grasso, and 

thank you, the red chicory of Treviso! 

I chose this interview because, in my reading, it represents an interesting case 

of a ‘battle over a narrative’ that is made distinct by the specific format of a 

radio interview. A real-time interview is severely limited in time; the person 

officially in power (the journalist) cannot use many of her privileges and has 

to fight on an (almost) equal footing. In this sense, it is an exception from the 

usual battle over a narrative but its exceptional character only serves to highlight 

its character. 

The battle is mostly fought between Paola and Isabella and it concerns the 

protagonist of the narrative: is it to be a young woman entrepreneur or the red 

chicory of Treviso? Paola opts for the first, Isabella opts for the second. Sergio 

is on Isabella’s side and therefore Paola has not much use for him: he is allowed 

to speak once (utterances 17–21) but already at utterance 19 Paola wants to 

return to Isabella as it is clear that Sergio will continue to speak of red chicory. 

(We never learn what age he is.) 

Paola seems to want to know all about Isabella, not about red chicory (she 

even says so in utterance 13). Until the break, the narratives are on a par, as 

Isabella speaks of red chicory whereas Paola punctuates the ways in which 

Isabella speaks of red chicory, thus concentrating the attention on Isabella.After 

the break, however, Isabella’s narrative wins. Sergio supports it. 

After Paula has taken the floor from Sergio, she attempts to elicit Isabella’s 

life story (or at least work life story) in utterance 22. But Isabella delivers a 

eulogy of red chicory, framed in the fashionable terms of marketing (upon 

checking, it has been confirmed that the young entrepreneurs associated in 

Coldiretti were given marketing courses). By utterance 28 Paola gave up, the 

time was coming to an end, and there was a slight touch of sarcasm audible on 

the tape as she called Isabella ‘also aboriginal’.At the end of the interview, she wittingly 

recognized the true protagonist of the interview-born narrative, thanking 

‘the red chicory of Treviso’. 

My reading of this interview is supported by a fascinating study of Italian 

women agricultural entrepreneurs conducted by Valérie Fournier (2002). She 

showed how these women consciously used the identity of ‘young women’ or 

withdrew from it for strategic purposes. Isabella is certainly a brilliant example 

of this.Another interesting aspect of this interview is that Isabella is pushed into 

an identity of ‘young beautiful woman’ not by a man but by another woman. 

We all use conventional typifications of one another.

EXERCISE 

Exercise 4.1: an interview as a site of narrative making 

Record an interview from the radio or TV (an alternative: use a transcript 

of your own interview). Look for the traces of narratives-in-making: 

Can you see the work of emplotment? Are there competing narratives? 

Is the narrative-making successful? 


Gubrium, Jaber F., and Holstein, J.A. (eds) (2002) Handbook of 

Interview Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 

Kvale, Steinar (1996) InterViews. An Introduction to Qualitative 

Research Interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 

Mishler, Elliot G. (1986) Research Interviewing. Context and Narrative. 

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Riessman, Catherine Kohler (1993) Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park, 

CA: Sage. 

Silverman, David (2001) Interpreting Qualitative Data. Methods for 

Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction (2nd edn). London: Sage. 

Notes 


1 As a part of coursework during a method course held by me at the University of 

Venice, Fall, 2000. 

2 Isabella borrows this expression from Michael Porter, the guru of marketing.

5 

Reading Narratives 

Hernadi’s triad 60 

The difficulty of explication 61 

Varieties of explanation 63 

Exploration 71 

Reading Egon Bittner 72 

Notes 75 

Hernadi’s triad 

As there are a great many ways of reading (before one even decides whether it 

is an ‘interpretation’ or an ‘analysis’ that takes place), the ‘hermeneutic triad’ formulated 

by Paul Hernadi (1987) might be a helpful classificatory device. (see 

Table 5.1). It separates conceptually three ways of reading a text, in practice 

usually present simultaneously and intertwined.The attraction of his classification 

consists in, among other things, abolishing the traditional divides between 

‘interpretation’ and ‘explanation’ by pointing out that various modes of reading 

are possible, and in fact desirable, at the same time.The triad begins with 

the simplest step – the rendering of a text in a reader’s vocabulary (‘what does 

this text say?’), continues with various ways of explaining it (‘why does this text 

say what it does?’ or ‘how does this text say what it does?’), and ends with a 

step that is closer to writing than to reading:‘what do I, the reader, think of all 

this?’ 

Explication corresponds to a stance that the Italian semiotician, Umberto 

Eco (1990), calls that of a naive or a semantic reader. It is guided by an ambition 

to understand a text, and Hernadi uses here the famous literary theorist 

Northrop Frye’s (1957) insight showing that it implies humility on the part of 

the reader: standing under the text. Explanation sets the reader above the text. 

The innocuous question ‘what does the text say?’ is replaced with an interruptive 

‘how does it say it?’ (Silverman and Torode, 1980) or a more traditional 

‘why does the text say what it does?’ This equals the stance of a critical or a 

semiotic reader (Eco, 1990). Hernadi’s triad is egalitarian in that it puts all

TABLE 5.1 The hermeneutic triad 

explanatory efforts on the same plane: be it semiotics, criticism, structural or 

rhetorical analysis, deconstruction – they all attempt to disassemble the text to 

see how it was made. 

Exploration, or standing in for the author, might be seen as not appropriate 

for scientific texts, a genre that does not encourage existential enactment – that 

is, the readers bringing their lives and preoccupations into the text.Yet it can 

be found in most readings implicitly or explicitly: in the conclusion of a positivist 

scholar, in the confessional remarks of an ethnographer (Geertz, 1988;Van 

Maanen, 1988), in standpoint feminism (Smith, 1987; Martin, 1990; Calás and 

Smircich, 1991), and in empowerment ambitions of a narrative analyst 

(Mishler, 1986; Brown, 1998). 

The difficulty of explication 

READING NARRATIVES 61 

Explication Explanation Exploration 

Standing under Standing over Standing in for 

Reproductive translation inferential detection existential enactment 

Reconstruction 

Source: After Hernadi (1987) 

Deconstruction Construction 

While the most obvious way to explicate is to summarize somebody else’s text 

(I will do this later), the issue of explication becomes much more complex 

when the narratives come from the field of practice under study. To begin with, 

they are many and they are rarely complete.Traditional rendering of this operation 

consists of the researcher writing ‘the one true story’ of what ‘really happened’ 

in a clear, authoritative voice. This procedure is nowadays considered an 

anathema, but such a judgment is somewhat hasty. After all, there are many 

good reasons to make up a consistent narrative out of many partly conflicting 

ones, or out of an incomplete or fragmented one; for instance, a coherent narrative 

is easy to read. The justice or injustice done to the original narrative 

depends on the attitude of the researcher and on the precautions he or she 

takes. 

The second, and perhaps the main problem, is that of rendering somebody 

else’s story in one’s own idiom. No matter how well meaning the researcher is, 

such a translation is a political act of totalizing.This problem became acute in 

anthropology as literacy increased in previously oral societies (Lejeune, 1989). 

The Other, who before was just ‘described’, took on the task of self-description 

and of questioning the descriptions of the anthropologists. But when a field of 

practice under study is highly literate, the re-descriptions undertaken by the 

researchers are open to practitioners’ comments and questions, which makes 

the problem less morally implicated but more politically complex. The status 

of science, especially the social sciences, does not stifle the protests and critiques

62 


any more.As I pointed out at some length in a different context (Czarniawska, 

1998), the ‘voices of the field’ reported in organization studies are as literate and 

eloquent as those of the reporters, and often have greater political clout.Thus, 

the choice seems to lie between the Scylla of silencing other people and the 

Charybdis of trying to shout louder than they do. 1 

Whichever way is chosen, it does not release the researchers from the 

responsibility for what they write and the duty to respect their interlocutors. 

But this responsibility and respect do not have to be expressed in a literal repetition 

of what has been said. A researcher has a right, but also a professional 

duty, to do a ‘novel reading’, in an apt expression coined by Marjorie DeVault 

(1990): an interpretation by a person who is not socialized into the same 

system of meaning as the narrator but is familiar enough with it to recognize 

it as such. At any given time and place, she continues, there are dominant and 

marginal readings of the same text and, I may add, there are a number of narratives 

reporting the same developments but plotting them in different ways, as 

we have seen in the examples of studies by Gabriel (2000) and Sköldberg 

(2002). Some plots are dominant while others are considered marginal, but it 

is not necessary that the researcher subscribe to the dominant plot.Agreement 

is not always the best way of expressing respect.The researchers’ duty is, however, 

to assume authorial responsibility for the narrative they concocted and 

also to admit the existence of opposition from the interlocutors, if they are 

aware of it. 

There are many ways of paying respect to one’s interlocutors. One is a multivoiced 

story, recommended by many anthropologists (see, e.g., Marcus, 1992). 

There are then not one but many narratives; as in a postmodern novel, all tell 

their story and the researcher does not have to take a stand on which is ‘right’ 

and which is ‘wrong’.Thus Gabriel was able to quote all four accounts of an 

explosion of a fire extinguisher. One account was a chronicle that merely 

reported the sequence of events, while the remaining three constructed three 

different stories with different heroes, victims, and plots. 

An excellent example of such a multistory is a novel by Iain Pears, An 

Instance of the Fingerpost (1998). It is a kind of a history of a medical invention 

(the transfusion) and is situated in seventeenth-century Oxford. It contains four 

stories accounting for the same course of events.The readers can choose which 

one to believe but the final effect is rather that of understanding why the stories 

differ as they do. 

One has to point out, however, that polyphony in a text is but a textual strategy 

(Czarniawska, 1999a).‘The voices of the field’ do not speak for themselves; 

it is the author who makes them communicate on his or her conditions. 

Therefore it is more adequate to speak, in line with Bakhtin (1928/1985), 

about ‘variegated speech’ of the field, about leaving traces of different dialects, 

different idioms, and different vocabularies, rather than homogenizing them 

into a ‘scientific text’. This is actually Pears’ most impressive achievement. 

Again, this textual strategy is not as drastically different from one authoritative

story as it may seem. Even pasting together fragments of narratives taken 

straight from an interview protocol decontextualizes them but, in return, it also 

re-contextualizes them (Rorty, 1991). It is not a matter of ‘quoting literally’; it 

is a matter of recontextualization that is interesting (‘novel’), credible, and 

respectful. It is clear, however, that explication already prepares the ground for 

explanation and exploration. 

Varieties of explanation 


Explanation is often set in contrast to interpretation, but most likely Hernadi 

chose the word to achieve the alliteration effect. It can be argued, though, that 

certain types of hermeneutic thoughts advise a jump from explication to 

exploration. From the pragmatist point of view, however, such a jump is impossible 

as all explication is tinted with explanation and all inquiry asks both ‘what 

does this text say?’ and ‘how come?’ Similarly, hermeneutics, the philosophy 

and theory of interpretation, offered many a different suggestion on how to 

tackle interpretation in many ages of its existence.The point is that the question 

‘how come’ assumes many guises in various schools of thought. Solutions 

change, but problems remain. As Umberto Eco put it: 

To interpret means to react to the text of the world or to the world of a text by producing 

other texts … The problem is not to challenge the old idea that the world is a 

text which can be interpreted, but rather to decide whether it has a fixed meaning, 

many possible meanings, or none at all. (1990: 23) 

Let me introduce a simple classification of different schools of thought concerning 

the modes of explanation, or interpretation, ordered into three groups: 

subjectivist (voluntarist), objectivist (determinist), and constructivist. 

Subjectivist explanation: intentio auctoris or intentio lectoris? 

Perhaps the most traditional way of explaining texts is by deducing the intentions 

of their author.This tradition comes from reading the Bible,Talmud or 

Koran as authored by God, and therefore the utmost task of the reader (an 

expert reader in Catholicism and Judaism, everybody in Protestantism and 

Islam) is to try to discover God’s intentions. 

Even so, there have been many opinions as how to proceed when trying to 

discover God’s intentions. Encyclopaedia Britannica (1989, 5: 874) lists four major 

types of biblical hermeneutics.The first, literal, prohibited any kind of explanation: 

explication was the only operation permitted on the divine text. The 

second is moral hermeneutics, which seeks ethical lessons in the Bible.The third 

is allegorical interpretation, which assumes a second level of reference behind 

persons, things, and events explicitly mentioned in the Bible.The fourth type

64 


is called anagogical 2 or mystical and assumes that the Bible prefigures the future, 

the events to come. An excellent, if ironic, exemplification of this last kind of 

reading is to be found in Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1989) quoted in the previous 

chapter, in which a group of Cabbalists discovers divine plots in all texts 

they come across. 

Is biblical hermeneutics of any relevance for social science, apart from being 

a piece of historical information? Perhaps not literal and mystical, but moral 

and allegorical interpretations clearly are. They cannot be used in relation to 

narratives in the making – bits of interviews, conversations, observations – but 

they can be used whenever one can, in fact, speak of an author’s intentions, as 

in advertisements or in various types of representation documents (annual 

reports, home pages, autobiographies).What is more, contemporary authors are 

themselves hermeneutic readers, quite often quoting the Bible when in search 

of ethical lessons and/or allegories that make sense to a contemporary reader. 

In modern versions of hermeneutics, the divine author was replaced by the 

psyche of the human author. Such a move is attributed to Friedrich E.D. 

Schleiermacher (1768–1834), considered the founder of modern Protestant 

theology, who, through his interest in the classics and the Romantics, led away 

from the exegesis of the gospel toward a religion based on human culture 

(Robinson, 1995). He postulated that to gain the meaning of a text one has to 

understand the mind of the author because it is there where God lives and 

works. Phenomenology and psychoanalysis freed themselves from religious 

contexts but still read texts as traces of the state of mind of their author (Marcel 

Proust and James Joyce were perhaps the authors most frequently and thoroughly 

read this way). 

Looking for an author’s intention was never a distinct tradition in the reading 

of scientific texts (in other sense than pure explication or ‘what the author 

intended to say’). This was because the author’s psyche was not supposed to 

interfere with the writing of a scientific text: the truth should be writing itself. 

But the subjectivist approach was, and still is, applied to ‘subjects’ – people 

under study and the narratives produced by them. 

In literary theory and philosophy, the most potent response to the tradition 

of intentio auctoris was Gadamer’s hermeneutics (1960/1975). This book is not 

the right place to give justice to his work that, as a blurb on Truth and Method 

correctly says, ‘takes the literature of Hermeneutics to new heights’. For 

Gadamer, hermeneutics was a philosophy, a quest for truth, and only marginally 

a method (indeed, Ricoeur, 1981, claims that Gadamer’s book should have 

had the title ‘Truth OR Method’). Gadamer himself says of his work that ‘[i]t 

is concerned to seek that experience of truth that transcends the sphere of control 

of scientific method wherever it is to be found, and to inquire into its legitimacy’ 

(1960/1975: xii). Human sciences should join philosophy, art, and 

history: ‘modes of experience in which a truth is communicated that cannot 

be verified by the methodological means proper to science’ (p. xii).At the same 

time, Gadamer claims he does not intend to continue Dilthey’s distinction

etween the ‘human’ and the ‘natural’ sciences and their methods. He is not 

against applying natural sciences’ methods to the social world, but such an 

endeavor has nothing to do with reaching truth through experience; it belongs 

with practicalities and bureaucracy. Similarly, he claims to have gone beyond 

Romanticism and subjectivism, but his critics show that all these influences are 

still decisive in Gadamer’s work.This critique is understandable in the light of 

the following statement: ‘Understanding must be conceived as a part of the 

process of the coming into being of meaning, in which the significance of all 

statements … is formed and made complete’ (Gadamer, 1960/1975: 146). 

The possibility of meaning which will reveal the significance of all statements 

is an ultimate Romantic dream; also, even a small portion of intersubjectivity 

will put into question and on to the table of argumentation the 

judgment of ‘completeness’. But my comments are not an attempt to diminish 

a brilliant contribution of a great philosopher; they are only a way to point out 

that, in spite of Gadamer’s protestation, the attraction of his version of 

hermeneutics is its Romanticism, subjectivism, and his mistrust of natural 

science methods applied to humanities. In his view, such methods assume and 

require an alienating distanciation as opposed to the experience of belonging typical 

in arts, history, and humanities. It will take Ricoeur to point out the possibility 

of joining the two. And if Gadamer still remains close to subjectivity, it is 

the subjectivity of the reader, not of the author; it is the reader’s experience 

that leads to truth as understanding.What is more, this experience is verified 

by tradition in a kind of temporal intersubjectivity. In this way, the road to 

reader-response theory has been paved. Similarly, Gadamer’s observation of 

language’s formative influence on thought makes room for both objectivist and 

constructivist theories of reading. 

Objectivist explanations 


Objectivist explanations are the proper territory of sciences, and literary 

theory experienced a period of scientification, especially in the 1970s, when 

sociology was at its peak. One kind of objectivist explanation is by relation to 

external structures: class, power relationships, gender, or even a specific historical 

situation. Even if the writers’ biographies might count, the authors are seen 

as ‘children of their times’ and their texts, accordingly, as ‘products of their 

times’. Marxist, neo- and post-Marxist works are examples of such a kind of 

explanation. 

Jürgen Habermas’s work has been of enormous importance for the social 

sciences. His focus is not so much hermeneutics as critique of ideology which, 

however, can also count as a theory of reading. His relationship to Marxism, 

points out Ricoeur (1981), is like Gadamer’s to Romantic philosophy: distancing 

and yet belonging. The task of critical social sciences – and therefore of 

critical reading – is to unmask interests that underlie the enterprise of knowledge 

(Habermas, 1972). This task differentiates critical social sciences from both

66 


empirical-analytical studies of social order and from historical-hermeneutic 

studies suggested by Dilthey and Gadamer. The purpose of the critical social 

sciences is emancipation, which is achieved by self-reflection.The critical social 

sciences provide the tool for such emancipation, revealing the relations of 

dependence hidden behind relations (not forces, as in Marxism) of production. 

Self-reflection prompted by critical social science is the road to freedom from 

institutions. 

Another variation of the Marxist theory of interpretation can be found in 

the literary theory of, for example, Fredric Jameson (Jameson, 1981; Selden, 

1985). He calls it a ‘dialectical criticism’, as it strongly focuses on the Hegelian 

notion of the relationship between the part and the whole (the idea behind all 

conceptualizations of ‘hermeneutic circle’ 3 ), the concrete and the abstract, the 

subject and the object, the dialectics of appearance and essence. This kind of 

criticism does not analyze isolated works; each work is but a part of a wider 

historical situation, and so is each reading. A dialectical criticism seeks to 

unmask the surface of the text to reach the depth of the concrete historical 

ideology that informed it. While Habermas is mostly concerned with the 

notion of ‘dialogue’, Jameson is strongly convinced about the central role of 

narrative in human knowledge: the narrative is a basic ‘epistemological category’ 

to be met everywhere and which needs to be interpreted. 

Jameson’s dialectical criticism is close to another kind of objectivist explanation: 

structuralism. Indeed, his treatment of narratives recalls that of Barthes, 

and he uses Greimas’ categories in analysis. This is hardly surprising: Selden 

(1985) points out that the economic writings of Karl Marx are structuralist. 

But as structuralism and deconstruction are not only ‘philosophies of reading’ 

but also techniques, they will be treated in subsequent chapters. 

A third example of a post-Marxist theory of reading is the one from a feminist 

standpoint, best represented by Dorothy Smith (1990; 1999). Her readings 

are aimed at exploring the relations of ruling: 

The institutional order of the society that excluded and silenced women and women’s 

experience is elucidated from women’s standpoint in the local actualities of our everyday/everynight 

world as they are organized extra-locally, abstracted, grounded in universalized 

forms, and objectified.The phrase ‘relations of ruling’ designates the complex 

of extra-local relations that provide in contemporary societies a specialization of 

organization, control and initiative.They are those forms that we know as bureaucracy, 

administration, management, professional organization, and the media. They include 

also the complex of discourses, scientific, technical, and cultural, that intersect, interpenetrate, 

and coordinate the multiple sites of ruling. (1990: 6) 

In an essay ‘K is mentally ill’ (1990), Smith analyzes an interview showing how 

K comes to be defined by her friends as mentally ill. 4 In ‘The social organization 

of subjectivity’ (1990) she analyzes a transcript of a meeting at the 

University of British Columbia in the ‘hot year’ of 1969. In ‘The active text’ 

(1990) she compares two texts describing the same course of events:a confrontation

etween police and people in Berkeley, California, in the 1960s. One is a 

letter published in an underground newspaper and the other is a leaflet with 

the Mayor of Berkeley’s version of the events. 

A point worth emphasizing is that the work of Dorothy Smith could be as 

well classified under ‘constructivist’ explanations. Using inspiration from Schütz 

and ethnomethodology, she highlights the relations of ruling as processes, not 

as structures. The key word is ‘objectified’ rather than ‘objective’. This shows, 

once again, that the differences between various perspectives are very subtle, 

although they sometimes become exaggerated for the sake of enacting ‘paradigm 

wars’. But the authors presented throughout this book have one thing in 

common: their interest in, and their conviction of the importance of, narratives. 

Rather than wasting time and energy on fighting battles with other 

schools of thought, they learn from each other. 

Constructivist explanations 


The theoreticians I am discussing below are not usually referred to as ‘constructionist’, 

and it is not my intention to justify such labeling of their work. I 

have chosen to present it under this title because what they all have in common 

is a belief that the meaning of a text is neither to be ‘found’ nor ‘created’ 

from nothing: it is constructed anew from what already exists (a text, a tradition, 

a genre) in the interaction between the readers and the text, among the readers, 

and between the author, the readers, and the text. 

One kind of constructivist explanation is known as reader-response theory. 

German literary theorist, Wolfgang Iser, and aesthetic theorist, Hans Robert 

Jauss, have both extended and criticized Gadamer’s work and created their own 

reception theory, where especially Iser emphasizes the interaction between the 

reader and the text (1978). Reader-response theory continues the phenomenological 

inspiration, but is also influenced by US pragmatism in the rendition 

of William James (while Umberto Eco and Richard Rorty, see below, are 

influenced by, respectively, Charles Peirce and John Dewey). For Iser: 

a meaning must clearly be the product of an interaction between the textual signals and 

the reader’s acts of comprehension … As text and reader thus merge into a single 

situation, the division between subject and object no longer applies, and therefore follows 

that meaning is no longer an object to be defined, but is an effect to be experienced. (1978: 10, 

emphasis added) 

And if meaning is an effect produced (or not) in an encounter between the reader 

and the text, ‘the interpreter should perhaps pay more attention to the process 

than to the product’ (1978: 18). The meaning production becomes more interesting 

than the meaning; this alone puts literary theory closer to social science. 

But if meaning equals experience, all the criticisms directed at Gadamer’s 

hidden subjectivism might apply. Iser concedes that a subjectivist element 

might come in at a late stage of interpretation, where the effect restructures

68 


experience – in other words, in the stage of exploration. At the stage of 

explanation, however, the reader follows ‘intersubjectively verifiable instructions 

for meaning-production’ that each text contains, even if it may end in a 

variety of experiences (Iser, 1978: 25).This notion makes Iser’s ideas close to 

Eco’s intentio operis; indeed, Eco borrows Iser’s concept of an ‘implied reader’. 

The pragmatists, however, are not in agreement over what a pragmatist 

theory of reading should be. In response to the recent wave of polysemous theories 

of interpretation that claim that readings are countless, Eco (1992) pointed 

out that interpretations are indefinite but not infinite. They are negotiations 

between the intention of the reader (intentio lectoris) and the intention of the 

text (intentio operis).These negotiations can result in a first-level reading (typical 

for a semantic reader) or an overinterpretation, a reading that ignores the 

text (a tendency of a semiotic reader). Most readers live some place between 

those two extremes, and different readers have different interpretation habits. 

Richard Rorty (1992) had difficulty in accepting Eco’s pragmatic interpretation 

model precisely because of his pragmatist position. Despite all repudiations, 

there is a clear hierarchy between Eco’s two extreme readers: the semiotic 

reader is a clever one (presumably a researcher), whereas the semantic reader is 

a dupe (presumably an unreflective practitioner).Also, the difference proposed 

by Eco between an ‘interpretation’ (which respects intentio operis) and ‘use’ (for 

example, lighting a fire with a text, but more generally just a disrespectful reading) 

is something that Rorty could not accept. For him, all readings are ‘uses’. 

If a classification of uses – i.e. readings – is required, Rorty suggested a distinction 

between a methodical reading, one that is controlled by the reader and 

the purpose at hand, and an inspired reading, which changes the reader and the 

purpose as much as it changes the text. 

So, who is right? At this point other constructionist theories of interpretation 

might be of help. What is a ‘reasonable interpretation’ and what is an ‘overinterpretation’ 

is negotiated not so much between the text and the reader as 

among the readers (intersubjectivity). In that sense, intentio operis is but a frequent 

reading of a given text in a given place at a given time. It is impossible, 

however, to establish the intentio operis of a given text once and for all. 

Intentions are being read into the text each time a reader interprets it. Again, 

this does not mean there is an unlimited variety of an idiosyncratic interpretation. 

If genres are institutionalized ways of writing, there are also institutionalized 

ways of reading, such as ‘new criticism’ or ‘deconstruction’. In a given time 

and place there will be dominant and marginal readings of the same text 

(DeVault, 1990), and this makes the notion of ‘interpretive communities’ very 

useful (Fish, 1989). Social science still lacks efforts to discover and describe such 

interpretive communities of its own readers. 

Of relevance here are institutionalist explanations that look for inspiration in 

genre theory, which is a literary theory of institutions.A genre is usually conceived 

as a system of action which became institutionalized and is recognizable 

by repetition; its meaning stems from its place within symbolic systems

making up literature and culture, acquiring specificity by difference from other 

genres (Bruss, 1976: 5). A genre offers to a writer a repertoire of expressive 

means and to a reader a repertoire of reading clues.Although the writers might 

subvert and transgress genres, and so may the readers, they can both rely on this 

recognizable repertoire.When we recognize a text as a detective story, we form 

certain expectations about how it should proceed; if it does not, it might 

enchant us (a new genre is emerging!) or disappoint us (this is a bad detective 

story). 

Although I myself opt for constructionist explanations, there are a great 

many excellent explanations of subjectivist and objectivist type. One can ask: 

what are the reasons (motives) behind this text? Which are the causes that 

formed this text? How is this text read and by whom? Or how does this text 

say what it does? All are excellent questions and they all have in common one 

thing: they interrogate a text, which is the raison d’être of each inquiry. One way 

of doing so seems especially suitable for social sciences and therefore I present 

it separately here: it is an analogy between an action and a text, postulated by 

Paul Ricoeur. 

Action as text; text as action 


The French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, while essentially operating from within 

the reader-oriented end of the spectrum, was uncomfortable with the intrinsic 

subjectivity associated with such hermeneutics and decided to walk the fine 

line between a call for objectivity (grounded in the text) and the possibility of 

a great many interpretations of the same text (Robinson, 1995). He both integrated 

and went beyond the works of Gadamer and Habermas. 

In order to be able to do this, he introduced a specific understanding of a 

text (a written narrative).To him, the text is primarily a work of discourse – that 

is, a structured entity that cannot be reduced to a sum of sentences that create 

it. This entity is structured according to rules that permit its recognition of 

belonging to some kind of a literary genre: a novel, a dissertation, a play. Even 

if each text can be classified as belonging to some genre (or as transgressing 

some genre), it has its unique composition, and when such composition is 

repeated in the work of the same author, one can speak of a style. Composition, 

genre, and style reveal the work that was put into creating a given specimen of 

discourse. 

But it is important to notice that the text is a written work of discourse, 

which means that it is more than the inscription of an earlier speech (this is 

why such inscriptions cannot be read and analyzed in the same way as proper 

texts). Speaking and writing are two separate modes of discourse. Ricoeur 

(1981; John B. Thompson, 1981) introduced the concept of distanciation to 

point out the difference between the two. Text has acquired a distance from 

speech (even if it might have been originated in a speech).This statement is of 

no surprise to anyone who has tried to turn an oral presentation into a paper.

70 


The first form of distanciation consists in that – through a text – meaning 

acquires a longer life than just the event of the speech. The institution of 

minutes corroborates this. 

The second form of distanciation concerns the intentions of the speaker 

and the inscribed speech. While, in the case of speech, looking for intentio 

auctoris makes sense, as the speaker can always deny having said a concrete thing, 

when it comes to interpretation of the text, the author and the reader acquire 

more or less equal status. This is, by the way, why sending the transcripts of 

the interview to the interviewees is a risky procedure: the interviewee considers 

the transcript of the interview a written text and corrects it accordingly. 

The corrected text has little to do with the original speech, not because 

the interviewer heard wrongly but because the two are different forms of 

discourse. 

The third form of distanciation concerns the distance between the two 

audiences: a speech is addressed to a concrete audience (even in the case of 

radio and TV speeches, where there are statistics showing who listens to what 

and when), while a written text is potentially addressed to anyone who can 

read.A (common) conviction that texts can be written for a concrete audience 

is based either on the belief in the repetition of the past (the past readers of 

John Grisham’s novels will most likely be the readers of John Grisham’s future 

novels), or on the belief in the possibility of creating the text’s own audience, 

of shaping the reader, as Flaubert said of Balzac. In authors who are neither 

Grishams nor Balzacs, such a conviction is an expression of either naïveté or 

hubris. 

The fourth form of distanciation concerns the text’s separation from the 

frame of reference the speaker and the audience might have shared, or might 

have created together. During a talk, it is enough to ask the audience whether 

they are familiar with a certain segment of reality and adapt the speech accordingly. 

The frame of reference of future readers remains unknown to the writer. 

‘Will they be old enough to remember who Gerard Philippe was?’ 5 is a kind 

of question that cannot be answered with certainty in advance.Texts intended 

for a certain audience can be unexpectedly adopted by quite another type of 

audience. William Gibson, author of science fiction novels, was surprised to 

learn that computer programmers become inspired by his books (Kartvedt, 

1994/95). 

This way of defining the text has consequences for the theory of interpretation. 

The two first forms of distanciation mean that ‘the problem of the right 

understanding can no longer be solved by a simple return to the alleged intentions 

of the author’ (Ricoeur, 1981: 211).The other two forms of distanciation, 

the unknown audience and its unknown frame of reference, can be dealt with in 

two different ways. One is the structuralists’ (and poststructuralists’) way: concentrate 

on the text alone, leaving aside the question of its possible referents. 

The second is the one proffered by Ricoeur himself:‘to situate explanation and

interpretation along a unique hermeneutical arc and to integrate the opposed 

attitudes of explanation and understanding within an overall conception of reading 

as the recovery of meaning’ (1981: 161).The analogy between the text and 

the action, which I mentioned in Chapter 1 as one way of introducing narrative 

to social sciences, is an example of such a conception of reading. 

Meaningful action shares the constitutive features of the text: it becomes 

objectified by inscription, which liberates it from its agent; it has relevance 

beyond its immediate context; and it can be read like an ‘open work’. Similarly, 

a text can be attributed to an agent (the author); it is possible to ascribe (rather 

than ‘establish’) intentions to its author; and it has consequences, often unexpected. 

In such conceptualization, a text does not ‘stand for’ an action; the relationship 

between them is that of an analogy, not a reference. 

Exploration 


Exploration means the reader stands in for the author, becomes the author.This 

may be unusual with most readers but it is the meaning of the practice of social 

science. The social science reader reads in order to become an author: no 

matter what school of explication and explanation he or she belongs to, no 

matter whether the reading turns out to be methodical or inspired in kind.This 

is why Chapters 8 and 9 are dedicated to modes of writing as the final act in 

scientific reading. 

The modes of exploration will differ according to the theory of reading 

espoused. The subjectivists, as mentioned before, might skip explanation and 

reveal their own experience as the way of exploring the topic.The objectivists 

might skip the exploration, or rather treat the combination of an explication 

and an explanation as producing the exploration: a recounting of a text combined 

with a text’s critique amounts to an ‘improved’ text.The constructivists 

might want to spend some time on reflection over their own process of interpretation 

or they might not; they may also skip explanation and use explication 

as a building material for their own stance. 

One case of an amazing exploration is, however, worth mentioning.This is 

Donna Haraway’s ‘A cyborg manifesto’ (1991). It can perhaps be compared to 

Thomas Nagel’s ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ 6 (1979). But while Nagel designed 

a gentle philosophical thought experiment, Haraway is literal: 

By the late 20th century, we are all chimeras, mythic hybrids of machine and organism, 

in short, cyborgs. In recent Western science and politics, the relation between 

organism and machine has been a border war.This essay is an argument for pleasure in 

the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. A socialistfeminist 

must pay particular attention to the redesign of cyborgs, i.e. to genetic 

engineering. (1991: 149)

72 

In this sense, all feminist writings are a huge exploration experiment: the 

non-gendered Author has been transformed into a woman, into a feminist, 

who looks at the world anew from the feminist standpoint. But Haraway goes 

even further and finds the ‘female identity’ a thing of the past. Her exploration 

is directed toward the future: people are cyborgs already and they are busy with 

further redesign of cyborgs (Haraway’s later project concerns a genetically 

engineered mouse – 1997).What is it to be a cyborg? 

A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary 

identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); 

it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure 

in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The 

machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated.The machine is us, 

our processes, an aspect of our embodiments … Gender might not be the global identity 

after all. (Haraway, 1991: 179) 

This is, then, a quintessence of exploration: to throw one’s identity into a text 

or to construct one’s identity through a text. Such a move is still rare in social 

sciences but it does not surprise anymore. 

The short descriptions of various schools of reading that form this chapter 

do not permit their application to a concrete text, not only because they are 

brief and summary but also because they are philosophies, not methods or 

techniques, of reading. They are presented here because a choice of a method 

or technique of analysis needs to be preceded by a choice of a theory of reading 

that one finds agreeable. This book is therefore meant as an introduction 

to the repertoire of theories: the reader might then proceed to gather a more 

thorough knowledge of a theory that suits him or her. 

I end this chapter with a short example of three phases in reading as a way 

of illustrating why such a reflection over which theory of reading to espouse 

is unavoidable. 

Reading Egon Bittner 


The following is a short excerpt from the classic text by Egon Bittner, ‘The 

concept of organization’ (1965): 

3. The Study of the Concept of Organization as a Common-Sense Construct 

Plucked from its native ground, i.e. the world of common sense, the concept of rational 

organization, and the schematic determinations that are subsumed under it, are devoid of 

information on how its terms relate to facts.Without knowing the structure of this relationship 

of reference, the meaning of the concept and its terms cannot be determined. 

In this situation an investigator may use one of the three research procedures. He 

can, for one thing, proceed to investigate formal organization while assuming that the 

unexplicated common-sense meanings of the terms are adequate definitions for the

purposes of his investigation. In this case, he must use that which he proposes to study 

as a resource for studying it. 

He can, in the second instance, attach to the terms a more or less arbitrary meaning 

by defining them operationally. In this case, the relationship of reference between 

the term and the facts to which it refers will be defined by the operations of inquiry. 

Interest in the actor’s perspective is either deliberately abandoned, or some fictitious 

version of it is adopted. 

The investigator can, in the last instance, decide that the meaning of the concept, 

and of all the terms and determinations that are subsumed under it, must be discovered 

by studying their use in real scenes of action by persons whose competence to use 

them is socially sanctioned. (p. 247) 

Explication (what does this text say?) 


Bittner lists three possible approaches to studying formal organizations. The first approach 

consists in assuming that people understand the concept ‘formal organization’ in the same 

way that the researcher does and in studying what he considers a formal organization to be. 

The second starts with the researcher introducing his own definition and proceeding accordingly, 

with no reference to other people’s understanding. In the third, the researcher tries to 

discover how the concept is applied by people who use it to structure their own action. 

I hope that this simple example shows how complex the operation of explication 

actually is.The text is shorter then Bittner’s, but does it say the same thing? 

I had many a quarrel with students who understood it differently. Also, many 

times the sheer translation from one language to another (as when my students 

explicate it in Swedish or in Italian) changes the context of use: shall one translate 

literally? Or functionally? That is,looking for similar but not exactly the same 

expressions in the other language (volumes have been written about it; for the 

latest one, see Eco, 2003)? Also, observe the change of vocabulary:‘persons whose 

competence to use them is socially sanctioned’ are ‘competent members’ – this 

is ethnomethodology speaking;‘people who use it to structure [the meaning of] 

their own action’ is Wittgensteinian, or pragmatist.Thus an innocent explication 

is already halfway to explanation and exploration. I will follow this lead. 

Explanation 1 (why does this text say what it says?) 

It is easy to see that Bittner is writing it in 1965. The ethnomethodological revolution 

is in the offing (Garfinkel, Sacks, and Bittner himself ) and their main enemy is positivism. 

Schützian phenomenology is a support, partly a starting point: concepts removed 

from the context of common sense lose their meaning but concepts that remain within the 

context of common sense cannot be explored. Thus, the first researcher is a dupe, a 

person who does not understand what the inquiry is all about. Probably, it is just a 

straw man to detract attention from the real target of attack. The second researcher is the 

positivist who does not care about the world of common sense: he just defines the word 

as it fits him and continues to study this ‘figment of his imagination’ [a typical expression

74 

used in those times in sociological debates]. The third researcher is a good guy; he is an 

ethnomethodologist. 

Explanation 2 (how does this text say what it says?) 

To the reader, this text might appear heavy handed and convoluted. Why, the subject 

of the first sentence consists of four clauses, enough to discourage the bravest of readers. 

But this apparent lack of style (or at least stylishness) might actually be a sign of style. 

Bittner’s text is a contemporary of James D. Thompson’s Organizations in Action 

(1967), which I have quoted as exemplary of the ‘scientistic’ style so prevalent in the 

1960s and the 1970s (Czarniawska, 1999a). It could even be that the heavy syntax 

is a remaining trace of the influence of German philosophy on US social science writing. 

Observe also the taken-for-granted use of the masculine pronoun. 

Kinds of explanation can be multiplied almost infinitely; they can also be combined, 

depending on the purpose of the reader. In fact, all kinds of text analysis 

presented in Chapters 6 and 7 can be applied to Bittner’s text.What they all 

have in common, and so do my two ‘explanations’, is that they set the text 

against other texts, they ‘contextualize’ it (even deconstruction does it). 

Exploration 


Writing 35 years after Bittner, it seems obvious to me that the third strategy is the only 

one that makes sense. I know from my bitter experience of studies in different cultures 

that people whose practice I study very often use the same concepts in a way opposite to 

the way I do. But Bittner did not foresee one consequence of the second research stance: 

that the ‘competent members’ will become familiar with uses suggested by the second type 

of researcher and will hurl them at the third type of researcher. Often times, the researcher 

only reaps what her colleagues have sown before her. 

The last comment and its agricultural metaphors are meant to be an allusion 

to the ‘red chicory interview’: there, the young entrepreneur used, in an everyday 

situation, textbook concepts to give meaning to her own experience. Not 

even everyday life and social science can be safely separated: social science feeds 

forward its own reading. 

EXERCISE 

Exercise 5.1: explication, explanation, exploration 

Take a short text (which would qualify as a text by Ricoeur’s definition) 

of one of your favorite social science writers and go through three reading 

phases.


Eco, Umberto (1992) Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press. 

Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1960/1975) Truth and Method. New York, NY: 

Continuum. 

Iser, Wolfgang (1978) The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic 

Response. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Jameson, Fredric (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a 

Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 

Ricoeur, Paul (1981) Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. New York, 

NY: Cambridge University Press. 

Smith, Dorothy E. (1990) Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the 

Relations of Ruling. London: Routledge. 

Notes 


1 Scylla and Charybdis were, in Greek mythology, two monsters situated on both 

sides of the narrow waterway that Odysseus had to pass. 

2 From the Greek anagein (‘to refer’). 

3 A term often used by continental philosophers in the tradition running from 

Schleiermacher and Dilthey to Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. It has to do with 

the inherent circularity of all understanding. The concept postulates that the 

unknown can be apprehended only by a mediation of that which is already known. 

4 This is an analysis of an interview, which is exemplary both in how the account is 

elicited (issues discussed in Chapter 4) and the creative, non-formalist use of structural 

analysis (Chapter 6). 

5 Tragically deceased French film-actor (1922–59), the icon of the 1950s. 

6 Nagel received an energetic answer based on bat studies from Kathleen Akins (1993 – 

‘What is it like to be boring and myopic?’).

6 

Structural Analyses 

The morphology of a fairytale 76 

Morphology of evolution theories 78 

Actant model 79 

Scripts and schemas 82 

Other kinds of structural analysis 83 

Notes 87 

One traditional way of analyzing a narrative is structuralist analysis – an enterprise 

close to semiology and formalism (Propp, 1928/1968; de Saussure, 1933/1983; 

Barthes, 1977).This enterprise was taken up and developed in anthropology by 

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1968). The socio-linguists William Labov and Joshua 

Waletzky espoused and improved on Propp’s formalist analysis, suggesting that 

socio-linguistics should occupy itself with a syntagmatic analysis of simple narratives, 

which will eventually provide a key to understanding of the structure 

and functions of complex narratives.Their appeal has been taken up by several 

sociologists (Watson, 1973; Mishler, 1986; Riessman, 1993). 

The morphology of a fairytale 

Vladimir Propp (1895–1970) was a member of the Russian formalist group 

who wrote his Morphology of the Folktale in 1928, when the formalist trend ran 

into a crisis in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Bakhtin and his collaborators then 

developed what can be called a postformalism, under the guise of Marxist critique. 

But Propp’s book is a classic example of structuralist analysis – applied to 

a collection of fairytales with the aim of describing Slavic folktales. His book 

was translated into English only in 1968, after Lévi-Strauss made it famous by 

his analysis of myths. 

Propp’s aim was highly scientific: he wished to classify forms of Slavic fairytales 

‘according to their component parts and the relationship of these components

STRUCTURAL ANALYSES 77 

to each other and to the whole’ (1968: 19): a morphology, as in botany. Having 

analyzed 100 fairytales (out of a collection of 449) he noticed that the same 

character can perform different actions and that different characters may perform 

the same action. Some actions can have different meanings depending on 

when and where in the narrative they take place, while others always have the 

same meaning. On this basis, Propp decided that the most important component 

of the tale is the function that an action of a character plays in the whole 

of the story. Consequently, he distilled a list of functions where function was 

understood as ‘an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance 

for the course of action’ (1968: 21). 1 I will quote this list of functions 

(together with their definitions) but without the formal notation (which, in my 

view, mystifies rather than clarifies the analysis; Propp abandoned it later 2 ). 

These are as follows: 

1 One of the members of a family absents himself from home. 

(ABSENTATION) 

2 An interdiction is addressed to the hero. (INTERDICTION) 

3 The interdiction is violated. (VIOLATION) 

4 The villain makes an attempt at reconnaissance. (RECONNAISSANCE) 

5 The villain receives information about his victim. (DELIVERY) 

6 The villain attempts to deceive his victim in order to take possession 

of him or of his belongings. (TRICKERY) 

7 The victim submits to deception and thereby unwittingly helps his 

enemy. (COMPLICITY) 

8 The villain causes harm or injury to a member of a family. (VILLAINY) 

8a One member of a family either lacks something or desires to have 

something. (LACK). [At this point Propp breaks down and admits the difficulties 

of a disjoint classification.] 

9 Misfortune or lack is made known; the hero is approached with a 

request or command; he is allowed to go or he is dispatched. (MEDIA- 

TION, THE CONNECTIVE INCIDENT) 

10 The seeker agrees to or decides upon counteraction. (BEGINNING 

COUNTERACTION) 

11 The hero leaves home. (DEPARTURE) 

12 The hero is tested, interrogated, attacked, etc., which prepares the way 

for his receiving either a magical agent or a helper. (THE FIRST FUNC- 

TION OF THE DONOR) 

13 The hero reacts to the actions of the future donor. (THE HERO’S 

REACTION) 

14 The hero acquires the use of a magical agent. (PROVISION OR RECEIPT 

OF A MAGICAL AGENT) 

15 The hero is transferred, delivered, or led to the whereabouts of an 

object of search. (SPATIAL TRANSFERENCE BETWEEN TWO KINGDOMS, 

GUIDANCE) 

16 The hero and the villain join in direct combat. (STRUGGLE)

78 


17 The hero is branded. (BRANDING, MARKING) 

18 The villain is defeated. (VICTORY) 

19 The initial misfortune or lack is liquidated. (No definition; the peak of 

narrative, and a pair with 8, VILLAINY) 

20 The hero returns. (RETURN) 

21 The hero is pursued. (PURSUIT) 

22 Rescue of the hero from pursuit. (RESCUE) 

A great many tales end here, says Propp, but not all. More complicated fairytales 

have further functions: 

23 The hero, unrecognized, arrives home from another country (UNREC- 

OGNIZED ARRIVAL) 

24 A false hero presents unfounded claims. (UNFOUNDED CLAIMS) 

25 A difficult task is proposed to the hero. (DIFFICULT TASK) 

26 The task is resolved. (SOLUTION) 

27 The hero is recognized. (RECOGNITION) 

28 The false hero or villain is exposed. (EXPOSURE) 

29 The hero is given a new appearance. (TRANSFIGURATION) 

30 The villain is punished. (PUNISHMENT) 

31 The hero is married and ascends the throne. (WEDDING) 

Propp also discerned additional elements of the tale, among which the most 

interesting is the division of the sphere of action between different characters: 

the Villain, the Donor, the Helper, a Princess, a Princess’s Father, the Dispatcher, 

the Hero, and the False Hero. 

Morphology of evolution theories 

Misia Landau (1984; 1991), a paleoanthropologist, observed that the various 

theories of human evolution can be seen as versions of the universal hero tale 

in folklore and myth. Having applied Propp’s analysis to those texts, she was 

able to show that the narratives all have a similar, nine-part structure, featuring 

a humble hero (a non-human primate) who departs on a journey (leaves his 

natural habitat), receives essential aid or equipment from a donor figure (an 

evolutionary principle – e.g. natural selection or orthogenesis), goes through 

tests (imposed by predators, harsh climate, or competitors), and finally arrives 

at a higher (that is, more human) state.While until this point all evolution theories 

are ending-embedded – that is, see the emergence of humanity as the 

purpose of evolution (see the section ‘Scripts and schemas’) – predicting the 

future, they hesitate between a happy end or a disaster.

Analyzing both classic and modern tales on evolution, Landau showed not 

only their common narrative form but also how this form accommodates 

differences in meaning – that is, widely varying sequences of events, heroes, and 

donors. Consequently, the interpretations of fossil record differed according to 

what the paleontologist believed was the donor (that is, the primary evolutionary 

agent). 

Landau’s reading confirms Bruner’s observation that a narrative is an excellent 

form for negotiation of meaning. Several of her narrators – Thomas Henry 

Huxley,Arthur Keith, Elliot Smith – have fought great battles with their opponents 

(Huxley with Owen, Keith and Smith with one another), never mentioning 

their names. Instead of engaging in a scientific debate, they tried to 

‘outnarrate’ their competitors. 

Her conclusion was that scientists have much to gain from awareness that 

they are tellers of stories, and that an understanding of narrative can provide 

tools for creating new scientific theories and analyzing old ones. The aim of 

her exercise was to liberate paleontology from its conventional narrative corset 

and open it for new forms of narrative. Indeed, in her next effort (1987), she 

compared the evolutionary theory to Milton’s Paradise Lost. 

Landau’s use of Propp’s analysis is instructive because it is extremely conscious 

of its purpose.As she says herself: ‘[t]he main purpose in fitting theories 

of human evolution into a common frame-work is not to demonstrate that 

they fit’ (1991: 11–12).The purposes can be two: either to show that they fit 

in spite of their diversity, thus upholding traditional cultural values (the case of 

paleontology); or to show how texts deviate from a generic scheme, thus subverting 

given cultural values (the case of the nineteenth-century novel, as 

demonstrated by Jameson, 1981). Just showing that Propp’s analysis can be 

applied to a text does not reveal much. 

Actant model 


This is why many authors who use structuralist analysis, 3 not the least in the 

sociology of science and technology, use instead the ‘actant model’ suggested 

by the French semiologist of Lithuanian origin, Algirdas Greimas (see, e.g., 

Greimas and Courtés, 1982). Greimas took Propp’s work as a point of departure 

for developing a model for understanding the organizing principles of all 

narrative discourses. Somewhat similar to Ricoeur, he distinguished between 

discursive level (enunciation) and narrative level (utterance), between the ways 

a narrative is told and a narrative itself. 4 

He introduced the notion of narrative program, a change of state produced by 

any subject affecting any other subject (which is equivalent to the minimal plot, 

according to Todorov’s definition quoted earlier). Narrative programs become 

chained to one another in a logical succession, thus forming a narrative trajectory.

80 


Greimas claims to have revealed a canonical narrative schema encompassing three 

such trajectories: 

the qualification of the subject, which introduces it into life; its ‘realization’; by means 

of which it ‘acts’; and finally the sanction – at one and the same time retribution and 

recognition – which alone guarantees the meaning of its actions and installs it as a subject 

of being. (Greimas and Courtés, 1982: 204) 

Observe the pronoun ‘it’; Greimas talks here of a grammatical subject, that 

might or might not reveal itself as a person. He replaced the term ‘character’ 

with the term ‘actant’ – ‘that which accomplishes or undergoes an act’ (p. 5), 

‘since it applies not only to human beings but also to animals, objects, or concepts’. 

This allows us to notice how actants change role throughout a narrative: 

an actant might become an actor (acquire a character) or remain an object 

of somebody else’s action.‘Thus the hero will be the hero only in certain parts 

of the narrative – s/he was not the hero before and s/he may well not be 

the hero afterwards’ (p. 6). ‘So defined, the actant is not a concept which is 

fixed once and for all, but is virtually subsuming an entire narrative trajectory’ 

(p. 207). 

These elements of Greimas’ version of structuralism made it attractive to the 

scholars of science and technology, who intended to give more important place 

to machines and artifacts in their narratives and felt encumbered by the notions 

of ‘actor’ and ‘action’, so clearly assuming a human character and an intentional 

conduct. ‘Actant’ and ‘narrative program’ would do much better; also, as I see 

it, the universalistic ambitions of Greimas were not of much importance for 

them. 

Accordingly, in the example I quote here, Bruno Latour not so much applies 

Greimas’ model as he uses it, in the Rortian sense. In this way, he claims, social 

studies of technology can gain a new narrative resource. In ‘Technology is 

society made durable’ (1992), he presents the history of the invention of the 

Kodak camera and the simultaneous emergence of the mass market for amateur 

photography as a sequence of programs and anti-programs (from the point of 

view of Eastman).The following is an example (where capitals denote actants): 

Program: professional-amateur (A)/wet collodion (C) 1850/paper manufacturing (D) antiprogram: 

doing everything oneself right away. (Latour, 1992: 111) 

While the invention of the wet collodion and the possibilities of paper manufacturing 

opened new venues of servicing serious amateurs and professional 

photographers to Eastman, at the same time it has become possible for the 

photographers to do everything themselves (not exactly in Eastman’s interests). 

Thus Eastman in 1860–70 came up with a new program: producing dry collodion 

plates made ahead of time, a program that was not counteracted by an 

anti-program for a good while.


As the narrative proceeds, says Latour, it is marked by two operations: 

association (called syntagm in narratology) and substitution (paradigm). ‘The 

film is substituted to the plates, and the dry collodion is substituted to the wet 

collodion, capitalists replace other capitalists, and above all, average consumers 

replace professional-amateurs’ (1992: 113). But the question that interests 

Latour, and the reason he conducts this Greimasian analysis, is the question of 

power: 

Is the final consumer forced to buy a Kodak camera? In a sense, yes, since the whole landscape 

is now built in such a way that there is no course of action left but to rush to the 

Eastman company store. However, this domination is visible only at the end of the story. 

At many other steps in the story the innovation was highly flexible, negotiable, at the 

mercy of a contingent event. (1992: 113) 

This is an important difference between Latour’s analysis and a conventional 

social science’s. Latour’s reading constructs the story as outcome-embedded: 

each episode is determined by the outcome of the previous one (see also the 

next section). Conventional social science is ending-embedded, or teleological 

(Landau, 1991, quotes paleontology as a typical example). 

Thus, concludes Latour, an innovation is but a syntagmatic line (connecting 

programs to further programs) containing actants – human and non-human – 

that were recruited to counter the anti-programs. Each time an anti-program 

emerged or was introduced (e.g. by competitors), Eastman Kodak managed to 

recruit new actants to their next program. In this way Eastman Kodak has 

become an important actor – but only at the end of the story. Contrarily to 

many heroic narratives, there was nothing in the ‘character’ of Eastman Kodak 

at the beginning of the story that could help the observer foresee its final success. 

It was an actant as any other, and it became an actor because it succeeded to 

recruit many other actants to its cause. But at many time points in the story, 

Eastman Kodak could have shared the fate of many other entrepreneurs who 

ended up bankrupt and unknown. 

One could therefore summarize the Latourian/Greimasian procedure as follows. 

It begins with an identification of actants (those who act and are acted 

upon). Thereupon one follows the actants through a trajectory – a series of 

programs and anti-programs – until they become actors, that is, acquire a distinct 

and (relatively) stable character.Which actants have a chance to become 

actors? Those whose programs succeeded in combating anti-programs (alternatively, 

those whose anti-programs won, as in the stories of opposition and 

resistance). This success, suggests Latour, is due to association: formation and 

stabilization of networks of actants, who can then present themselves as actornetworks. 

Latour uses many more Greimasian concepts in his analysis which is longer 

and more complex than I present it here. However, I wish to call attention to 

two aspects of his structuralist analysis. To begin with, Latour does not introduce

82 

the whole of Greimas’ apparatus – he simply uses bits of it. 5 He does not seem 

interested in demonstrating his knowledge or skill in using the model: he is 

using it because the model permits him to say things about his chosen topic – 

innovation and power – that he would not have been able to say otherwise.At 

the risk of sounding too normative, I nevertheless want to express a conviction 

that narrative analysis should be used to elucidate matters of interest in social 

sciences, and not for the sake of using it. Propp and Greimas have already told 

us what the canonical structures of narratives are; social scientists must show 

their consequence in and for social life. 

Scripts and schemas 


In psychology, the interest in stories, or at least storytelling (enunciation), goes 

back to Frederick C. Bartlett and his studies of remembering (1932). While 

Jerome Bruner and Donald E. Polkinghorne brought narrative back into psychology 

in its literary version, cognitive psychologists were developing the 

notion of scripts (see, e.g., Schank and Abelson, 1977) and schema (Mandler, 

1984). 

Jean Matter Mandler suggests that it is important to distinguish a story 

grammar and a story schema: 

A story grammar is a rule system devised for the purpose of describing the regularities 

found in one kind of text.The rules describe the units of which stories are composed, 

that is, their constituent structure, and the ordering of the units, that is, the 

sequences in which the constituents appear. A story schema, on the other hand, is a 

mental structure consisting of sets of expectations about the way in which stories proceed. 

(1984: 18) 

In my reading, a story grammar is the analysis of the text, a search for intentio 

operis, or a semiotic strategy; a story schema is the repertoire of plots typical for 

a certain interpretive community. 

Mandler gives an example of the analysis of story grammar where she uses 

categories inspired by Propp, extended and reformulated (1984: 22–30). Like 

other structuralists, Mandler assumes that all stories have a basic structure that 

remains relatively unchanged in spite of the differences in the content of 

various stories: 

1 A setting, which introduces a protagonist and other characters, and 

statements about the time and place of the story. One or more 

episodes that form a plot of the story. They also have a similar 

structure: 

2 Episode(s):

2A a beginning (one or more events) 

2B a development: 

– the reaction of a protagonist: simple (anger, fear) or complex. If 

complex, it is followed by 

– the setting of a goal (what to do about the beginning event(s)), 

– a goal path, an outcome (success or failure) 

2C The ending, including a commentary: concerning the consequences 

of the episode, or the protagonist’s or the narrator’s reflection. The 

ending of the final episode becomes 

3 The ending, which might also contain a moral lesson. 

Episodes can be temporally or causally connected (the two rules of association).There 

are two kinds of causal connections.The first is ending-embedded: 

the end reveals the substitution, or the transformation – for example, a new 

protagonist–goal combination (after the suitor saved the heroine’s life she 

understands she always loved him). The second is outcome-embedded: the 

structure of the story and the connections between episodes depend on the 

episode’s outcome and therefore they can change during the narrative (for 

example, a hero who failed starts a different chain of episodes or an antiprogram). 

In Hayden White’s terms, these are the standard ways of emplotment. 

As suggested in the previous sections, ending-embedded plots are typical of 

conventional social science theories, whereas outcome-embedded plots typify 

theories that allow for contingencies. 

Mandler and her collaborators then proceeded to a series of experiments 

aimed at testing both cognitive structures and recall. In one of the experiments 

they built three types of stories (temporal, ending-embedded, and outcomeembedded) 

but presented the elements as unconnected (omitting ‘and’,‘then’, 

and even punctuation marks). The subjects connected the stories, sometimes 

following the standard grammar (a ‘canonical’ version), and sometimes providing 

alternative structures (i.e. schema). In another experiment, one version of 

the story presented it in a schematic version (in this case, temporal), while the 

other presented the story in a way that interleaved its episodes (‘…meanwhile’). 

In recall of the interleaved story, many subjects (and especially 

children) reconstructed a schematic story rather than the story they actually 

heard (both stories were perfectly understandable). (Please bear this experiment 

in mind when reading the next chapter.) 

Other kinds of structural analysis 


Although structuralist analyses are best known they are not the only kind of 

structural analysis of narratives. Such analyses are made in many disciplines, 

from literary theory to linguistics to semiotics to ethnomethodology. In fact, as

84 


pointed out Latour (1993a), semiotics can be seen as an ethnomethodology of 

texts, an analogy that is easy to accept if one assumes, after Ricoeur, that a text 

is a written fragment of a discourse. 

Narrative analysis also constitutes part of rhetorical analysis: narratio is the 

second part of a six-part classical oration (see also Chapter 9). Kenneth Burke’s 

pentad (Scene, Actor, Agency, Act, and Purpose) that stems from the rhetorical 

tradition has been much used in social sciences (Burke, 1968; Overington, 

1977a; 1997b; Mangham and Overington, 1987; Czarniawska, 1997) and I shall 

return to it in Chapter 8. In my own narrative analysis, I am especially attracted 

to the work of Tzvetan Todorov, very likely because his way of writing appeals 

to me most (I do believe that an affinity with an author facilitates the use of 

his or her method).Todorov is a literary theorist and thus a specialist in a subject 

that I am more familiar with than semiotics or linguistics, and he uses a 

structuralist analysis in a non-formalized way, borrowing freely from Propp and 

Greimas but not following either of them exactly. 

In a Foreword to Todorov’s The Poetics of Prose the US literary theoretician 

Jonathan Culler summarized it very succinctly: ‘When poetics studies individual 

works, it seeks not to interpret them but to discover the structures and conventions 

of literary discourse, which enable them to have the meanings they do’ 

(Culler, 1977: 8, emphasis added). Change the adjective ‘literary’ to ‘social’ and 

this is a program that seems to me perfectly feasible in social sciences. 

Todorov is especially interested in plot structure. This is still in agreement 

with Propp and Greimas in the sense that actors – or characters – are results of 

actions, and not of single actions either but of a series of actions. Actants 

become ‘characters’ if they manage to keep the same (or the same but transformed) 

role through a series of actions; or, in Greimasian terms, if their performance 

leads to acquisition of a competence. But a series of actions remains 

such only in an incomplete narrative or in a narrative composed by temporal 

or spatial vicinity; in a story or a complete narrative, the connections are the 

result of the work of emplotment.Therefore it is the plot that is a central feature 

of a narrative and it is a plot that will produce the characters.A clown seen 

in an opening scene will turn into a tragic character if the play is a tragedy 

(possibly, tragicomic). What deserves attention, therefore, is the kind of connections 

between episodes. 

Here I quote a story that one of my interlocutors in Stockholm told me 

about the water and sewers management in the city (Czarniawska, 2002). Like 

many stories, it starts with a description of a state of affairs so bad that it had 

to be changed: 

(Dis)equilibrium 1 

In the 19th century Stockholm was besieged with sickness, with epidemics. 

People had all kinds of stomach diseases and the cause was 

clear: the primitive handling of water, and drinking of dirty water. Thus the


city witnessed epidemics of cholera and many other diseases that today 

are to be found only in developing countries, high infant mortality etc. 

Action 1 

The solution was to build waterworks, which was accomplished by the turn 

of the century. The next step was the sewers, 

Equilibrium 1 

and this was a revolution, a revolution in hygiene. It was fantastic, the way 

one solved society’s hygiene problems. 

Complication 1 

But later on it became clear that the problems were pushed away, and not 

really solved. Water in lakes and the sea had become so polluted that it 

was impossible to bathe there anymore. 

Action 2 

It was then that the first purification plants started to be built. 

The first purification plant, using mechanical devices, was opened in Stockholm 

in 1934. In 1941 a second, bigger one was built; the third in 1950. 

Equilibrium 2 

After that, purification techniques became better and better. Later on, 

water treatment has been built up and improved. In the 1960s the focus 

fell on environmental issues. The first environment protection law was 

enforced in Sweden in 1969. It was extremely helpful for improving the 

situation of discharges and consequently diminishing the pollution of 

nature in general and water in particular. 

Complication 2 

But society was becoming more and more complex. You can see yourself 

how the traffic increases all the time, and how elements dangerous to the 

environment – biocides and fungicides – create more and more problems. 

Action 3 

All this has found its expression during the famous Rio conference that 

adopted the concept of ‘sustainable development’, coined by the Brundtland 

committee. All participating heads of state signed the Rio declaration, so 

that the attention paid to the issues of environment became quite different. 

Equilibrium 3 

Today we talk not about environmental protection, but in terms of sustainability, 

in terms of circulation and natural resource management. This 

is a much wider perspective that sets much higher demands. The level of 

difficulty has increased seriously. 

Stockholm Water is a typical example of an environmental engineering 

company. It is precisely in this type of company that the notion of a long 

horizon, of sustainable development, is most central … There is a holistic 

view of things. We see water in Stockholm as a natural resource that 

is on loan to us. We take it to fulfill the city’s needs, but then we must see 

to it that the water is purified in such a way that it can be given back, can

86 


enter the natural circulation without any damage. And this is what we work 

with: to improve, to optimize this system. (Stockholm, Observation 5/1) 

This seems to be a pretty standard story: whenever the equilibrium is upset, an 

action is taken to restore it; when complications ensue, they, too, are taken care 

of. But there are certain original features of this story. 

To begin with,it is not easy to make a complete list of actants:the ‘water people’, 

local and global, are obvious enough; so is ‘the city’ and the ‘polluters’ (human and 

non-human),but who,or what,stands behind the complications, or anti-programs? 

Who, possibly apart from city authorities, stands for programs? There seem to exist 

three actants, grammatically practically absent (with one exception, Complication 

2:‘society was becoming more and more complex’): Society, Nature, and Science. 

Both Society and Nature stand, albeit unintentionally, for anti-programs: Science 

stands for all positive programs, although that is not mentioned. 

I would like to claim that this is a kind of narrative that Propp could not have 

found in the collection of fairytales because it is a modern story. It has two standard 

actants, which could change their character even within the same story: society 

and nature can bring about problems or solutions. The third important actant, 

Science, ends invariably in a modern story in the way partly similar to Fate in 

ancient stories, as it cannot be resisted. It differs from Fate in its trajectory, though. 

Science comes to no end and achieves no equilibrium; it continues forward and 

upward in a constant progress. The plot in a modern story relies on these two 

devices:society and nature cause disequilibria,and science restores equilibrium,on 

a for ever higher level. This is yet another evolution story in an upbeat version. 

Exercise 6.1: structural analysis 

EXERCISE 

Attempt a structural analysis of ‘My life so far’. 


Cooren, François (2000) The Organizing Property of Communication. 

Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Mandler, Jean Matter (1984) Stories, Scripts, and Scenes: Aspects of 

Schema Theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 

Mishler, Elliot G. (1986) Research Interviewing. Context and Narrative. 


Propp, Vladimir (1928/1968) Morphology of the Folktale. Austin, TX: 

University of Texas Press.

Notes 


1 Propp makes a series of affirmations concerning ‘all fairytales’ which are highly 

problematic but not especially relevant in the present context. 

2 Here is an example (I took the one that was easiest on my keyboard): 

Analysis of a simple, single move tale of class H-I, of the type: kidnapping of a 

person. 

131. A tsar, three daughters. (α).The daughters go walking (β3 ), overstay in the 

garden (δ1 ).A dragon kidnaps them (A1 ).A call for aid (B1 ). Quest of three heroes 

(C↑).Three battles with the dragon (H1-I1 ), rescue of the maidens (K4 ). Return 

(↓), reward (W°). 

β3δ1A1B1C↑H1-I1K4↓W° (Propp, 1968: 128) 

3 For example, Donna Haraway (1992), Catherine Hayles (1993), François Cooren 

(2000; 2001), Daniel Robichaud (2003), and Anne-Marie Søderberg (2003). See 

also Timothy Lenoir (1994) for a cautionary voice. 

4 I do not think it is incorrect to see reading as a kind of enunciation, although it 

might bring different theories too close to one another for their authors. 

5 He does not even quote Greimas – it is known from his other texts that he uses 

him as an inspiration (see, e.g., Latour, 1988; 1993a). Such a move is not recommended 

to young scholars but it further indicates that a use of a specific model is 

not the point.

7 

Close Readings: Poststructuralism, 

Interruption, Deconstruction 

Poststructuralism in action 88 

Interruption 91 


Changing worlds 98 

Notes 101 

Almost before structuralism acquired legitimacy in the social sciences, it was 

swept away by poststructuralism. The move from structuralism to poststructuralism 

was not as dramatic as it may seem. It meant, above all, abandoning 

‘the depth’ for ‘the surface’: if deep structures are demonstrable, they must be 

observable. Structures could no longer be ‘found’, as they were obviously put 

into the text – by those who read the text, including the author (after all, reading 

is writing anew).This meant abandoning the idea of the universal structure 

of language, or of mind, and accepting the idea of a common repertoire of textual 

strategies, which are recognizable to both the writer and the reader. Such 

relaxation of basic assumptions also led to the relaxation of the technique: as 

there is no one true deep structure to be discovered, various techniques can be 

applied to structure a text and therefore permit its novel reading. 

Instead of pursuing a dogmatic treatment of deconstruction, in this chapter 

it is treated on a par with other ways of ‘interrogating’ a text: the chapter contains 

a review of approaches that, albeit launched under different names, have 

in common the same intention of finding out ‘what a text does’ rather than 

‘what it says’, to borrow Silverman and Torode’s distinction (1980). 

Poststructuralism in action 

The example of the use of poststructuralism I want to quote here is both 

unusual and highly instructive.An Australian sociologist, Bronwyn Davies, was

CLOSE READINGS 89 

interested in how people learn their gender: her starting point was the 

assumption that children learn to become male or female and that they do so 

through learning discursive practices in which all people are positioned as 

either male or female (Davies, 1989). 1 She adopted poststructuralism as her 

own discourse (in the sense of vocabulary) because it provided her with the 

conceptual tools – devices – to make sense of her material, allowing her to 

formulate answers to the questions that started her inquiry. She chose it 

because it is a radical discourse which ‘allows us to think beyond the 

male–female dualism as inevitable, to the constitutive processes through which 

we position ourselves as male or female and which we can change if we so 

choose’ (1989: xi). 

This is to me an excellent rationale behind a choice of an approach.At any 

given time there are several approaches, or vocabularies, that are in principle 

equally applicable to a given inquiry. What Foucauldians call ‘discourse’, the 

new institutionalists call ‘meaning system’. The choice is actually an active 

matching process. It is easier to apply a narrative approach to a material composed 

of texts written with words, but it can also be applied to texts written 

with numbers. There are quite a few authors propagating the structuralist 

approach, as I showed in the previous chapter, but some social scientists opt 

for a linguistic variation of structuralism, some for a semiotic one, some, like 

myself, for the literary, and still others decide to make their own mixture. 

Fashion, authority, aesthetic responses all play a role in the choice of an 

approach, and so do logical arguments.As Davies points out, she needed a radical 

approach, as she set out to problematize one of the things most taken for 

granted. 

One part of Davies’ inquiry (I will not be able to report here the whole of 

it) concerned reading a variety of feminist revisions of well-known fairytales 

to seven four- and five-year-old children. She spent many hours with each 

child during a period of one year, reading the stories and discussing what they 

thought of each of the stories. One of the stories was a variation of the wellknown 

‘princess rescued from the dragon by the prince’ story. It went as 

follows: 

At the beginning of the story, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Ronald are planning to 

get married, but then the dragon comes along, burns Elizabeth’s castle and clothes and 

flies off into the distance carrying Prince Ronald by the seat of his pants. Elizabeth is 

very angry. She finds a paper bag to wear and follows the dragon. She tricks him into 

displaying all of his magic powers until he falls asleep from exhaustion. She rushes into 

the dragon’s cave to save Ronald only to find that he does not want to be saved by a 

princess who is covered in soot and only has an old paper bag to wear. Elizabeth is 

quite taken aback by this turn of events, and she says: ‘Ronald, your clothes are really 

pretty and your hair is very neat.You look like a real prince, but you are a bum.’The 

last pages show her skipping off into the sunset alone and the story ends with the 

words:‘They didn’t get married after all.’ (1989: viii)

90 


In the discussions afterwards, the three girls placed themselves in the position 

of the princess, whom they saw as nice and beautiful. They all understood 

Elizabeth’s plan and concluded that Ronald was not nice. One of them, however, 

believed that Elizabeth should have done as Ronald told her (he tells her 

to go away, get changed, and come back when she looks more like a real 

princess). 

Among the four boys, three of them wanted to be in the position of the 

prince.Two of them believed the prince was clever; the third boy did not think 

the prince was nice but still wanted to be like him.The fourth boy recognized 

the prince as ‘not very good’ and ‘stupid’ and wanted to be the dragon, ‘the 

smartest and fiercest dragon in the whole world’. Although the boys understood 

Elizabeth’s plan, they all refused her the position as the central character, 

attributing it to Ronald or the dragon.The two boys who saw Ronald as clever 

argued, for example, that ‘Ronand very cleverly holds on to his tennis racquet 

tightly which is why he stays up in the air’ (p. 61) and that ‘He’s got a tennis 

jumper and he won the tennis gold medal’ (p. 62). All the boys are concerned 

with Elizabeth’s looks: she is ‘messy’,‘messy and dirty’,‘yucky’.‘I’d tell her “You 

look dumb with your old paper bag on”’ (p. 62).There were many clues, says 

Davies, that it was not dirt but Elizabeth’s temporary nakedness that was the 

central problem, although it remained unspoken. Whichever way, this is an 

exemplification of the intricate connection between mimesis and a plot, mentioned 

in Chapter 2: the description of the princess as dirty permitted and justified 

a certain type of plot. 

Davies regrouped the children not according to gender but according to 

whether they understood that Elizabeth is the hero of the story and that 

Ronald is not nice. It turned out that the four children who understood the 

feminist interpretation of the story had employed mothers, and their fathers 

assumed a greater than average share of domestic duties. The three children 

who saw Elizabeth’s action as aiming at getting her prince back and saving her 

future marriage had mothers who were housewives, although two of them 

were well educated. 

Davies points out that it would be a mistake to see a connection between 

children’s ability to imagine women as active agents in the public world and 

mothers’ employment as causal. If there were such a connection, the solution 

to gender inequality would simply be sending all women to work.‘But going 

out to work is not necessarily accompanied by discoursive practices in which 

the work the woman undertakes is seen as giving her agency or power’ (p. 64). 

Indeed, being able to compare an all-female and all-male team working in 

basically the same position in city administration in Warsaw and Stockholm, I 

was struck by the difference in the ways they talked during their job and 

about their job. While men were obviously convinced of both the difficulty 

and importance of their work, women talked in the same way (and often 

interminglingly) about their tasks and about their last summer holidays or 

knitting.

In the second year of her study, Davies kept visiting a number of preschool 

and childcare centers in order to observe the way children talked and acted in 

their everyday lives. Reading stories was part of it and, although the discussions 

were not very extensive, they brought about more interpretations of The 

Paperbag Princes, some of them with an openly sexual context. Nevertheless, the 

dominating line in interpretations was that of a romantic love. For boys, 

Elizabeth is in error when presenting herself to the prince dirty and naked. 

They expect her actions to be demonstrating her goodness and virtue, but they 

see it as Ronald’s right to refuse it as insufficient. The girls are baffled by 

Elizabeth’s refusal of Ronald whom she loved at the outset, and at her decision 

to control her own life. After all, there is no room in a traditional romantic plot 

for selfish thoughts and anger:‘The power of the pre-existing structure of the 

traditional narrative to prevent a new form of narrative from being heard is 

ever-present’, concludes Davies (1989: 69).And, as Jean Matter Mandler could 

have told her, the traditional narratives are easier to recall. 

Interruption 


David Silverman and Brian Torode (1980) earlier pointed out that developments 

in linguistics, semiotics, and literary theory could be of more general significance 

for social scientists than just for specific fields like socio-linguistics. 

They pointed out the closeness between ethnomethodology and semiotics 

before Latour did, and they were against differentiating between discourse and 

narrative, enunciation and utterance, conversation and text: all these could be 

approached similarly.Without referring to him, they were in agreement with 

de Certeau (1984/1988) that there is no clear separation line between writing 

and reading, or between text production and text consumption.They choose, 

instead, to oppose interpretation to interruption (in terms used in Chapter 5, 

explication to explanation) or the question ‘what does a text say?’ to the question 

‘how does a text say it?’: 

The language of interruption approaches another text or conversation with the aim 

of interrogating the relation between appearance and reality that is proposed there. 

It seeks to discover and support the anti-authoritarian practices within ordinary 

language which interpretation opposes and represses. By rejecting any appeal to idealist 

‘essences’ outside ordinary language, interruption represents a materialist turn 

towards the character of linguistic practices themselves. (Silverman and Torode, 1980: 

xi–xii) 

In a more benevolent reading of interpretation-as-explication, suggested 

throughout this book, it is possible both to interpret and interrogate the same 

text. I have therefore applied what I called ‘an interruptive interpretation’ to 

the stories I collected in the power study mentioned in Chapter 2 

(Czarniawska-Joerges, 1994). True, I reduced the texts simply by translating

92 


them into English.This amounts to treating a text as an appearance, changing 

which will not affect the reality behind it. But I did not look for the ‘reality 

behind’: instead, I observed that the texts themselves used the appearance– 

reality contrast as their own devices.The ‘how’ was at the service of the ‘what’: 

people are skillful narrative makers. Consequently, I was able to show what the 

texts did by a specific way of saying of what they were saying: the ‘second-order 

what’ through the ‘how of the what’, so to speak. I here quote some of the 

stories and give them titles that already announce the conclusion of my ‘interruptive 

interpretation’: 2 

Anti-feminist discourse: a Polish student 

A weeping woman was sitting in front of the desk, nervously uncrossing 

and recrossing her legs. Behind the desk, which was entirely covered with 

paper, sat an official talking in a high voice. It appeared that the woman 

had an overdue bill for electricity and water which she promised to pay. 

However, she couldn’t pay it immediately because of temporary financial 

problems. She promised to pay the bill in installments or next month. I 

thought the solution seemed acceptable, but the official reacted sharply 

and remarked sarcastically that his [? in original gender unclear, BC] role 

was collecting dues, not looking for new solutions to people’s private 

problems. 

In this story, we meet the narrator (a woman) and two protagonists: a woman 

who is a victim of bureaucratic power and an oppressor whose biological gender 

is hidden from the reader. In fact, it was the text that interrupted my reading, 

not the other way around.Attempting to translate a text written in Polish 

into English, I realized that, while a stylistic requirement calls for the use of a 

personal pronoun rather than a repetition of the noun, I did not know which 

pronoun to use. I met this difficulty in Polish stories over and over again: sometimes 

even the biological gender of the victim was hidden and could be 

guessed only when the victim was the narrator (who indicated her sex in 

response to a formal request included in the instruction). 

My ‘interruptive interpretation’ led me to a hypothesis (a guess in another 

vocabulary) that the students hid the gender of the protagonists because they 

wanted their stories to be about power, not about gender relations. In the story 

above, if the oppressor was a woman, the story could be read as an example of 

‘women being nasty to one another’ (the hidden assumption being that men 

do not do this to each other) – a popular story in organizations, as I discovered. 

If the oppressor were a man, this would become a ‘feminist story’, which 

is self-condemning. In an amazing work, The World without Women: Gender in 

Public Life in Poland, Agnieszka Graff (2001) shows a collective agreement visible 

in Poland (and in other East European countries) that the ‘women’s issue’ 

is not only unimportant but also possibly threatening to the enterprise of 

building a liberal democracy. This attitude, like the story itself, reaches back


earlier than 1989. Under the socialist regime, the women’s issue was seen as 

threatening to the solidarity of the opposition movement and feminism as 

belonging to the discourse of the oppressor. 

A-feminist discourse: a Finnish story 

My working day ended at 16.15. Managing Director was on holiday. At 

16.20, exactly when I was ready to go home, he came in and demanded 

that I type for him a table seat order. I would gladly point out to him the 

time, explain that I am in a hurry, and also emphasize that he was asking 

me to do something for his private use. But I knew his power, felt his 

authoritative glance and began to type. 

He waited, mentioned how long a time it was taking and banged his fingers 

on the table. When I was ready he took the sheet, looked at it and 

said, coldly: ‘No, this is not how I want it. You must retype it.’ 

I did. Three times. It was 17.30 when I left. I behaved as my secretary’s 

role required because I did not dare to oppose his incredible way 

of exploiting his position of power. 

The gender of the protagonists is clear (the male superior, the female secretary) 

but not made much of: they simply represent two categories, the powerful and 

the powerless. This is how things go in organizations. Another, similar, story 

ended with the following comment:‘But normally, one does not reflect much 

upon such situations. If one wants to work for people who have power, it is 

best to let them exercise their power. Otherwise, as a secretary, one will not stay 

long.’ 

A similar picture was found in many stories. It has been commented on in 

two different ways: ‘This is how it is – and it is best to get used to it’ versus 

‘This is how it must not be – and it is a shame that it is so.’ What ‘it’ is that 

people in organizations are often helpless, and this is usually related to age 

(sometimes biological, sometimes organizational) and gender.The most obvious 

frame of reference for these stories would be that of the patriarchate: what 

else do age and gender together amount to? But such a feminist interpretation 

was nowhere to be seen in the accounts. One possible explanation could be 

found in such texts as Simonen (1991: 51–2): ‘Finnish women were of great 

importance in political and economic life both during and – unlike their 

sisters in many other Western countries – also after the war … Since the 

Second World War, the education of girls has been more common than that of 

boys in the Finnish countryside.’ 

The official picture is therefore of exceptionally advanced equality (the first 

country in Europe to give women the franchise, 1909) – indeed, a privileged 

position for women. Only recently is there a growing host of interpretations 

that point out that the present ‘power distribution’ was built up during the war 

at the front (Eräsaari, 2002). Even if Finnish women ran factories, public 

offices, and families during the war, the ‘old boys’ came back from the front

94 


with a ready network and simply took over, fostering a new generation of 

‘crown princes’. In the stories told in the study, the tension between the official 

version of reality and the experiential one is solved by depicting the events 

in terms of patriarchal situations, but not analyzing them in those terms.A very 

different textual strategy has been found in Italian accounts: 

Feminist discourse: an Italian narrative 

The new head of the office lacked experience of the area in question, having 

come from a professional background of a very different type than 

what was required for running this particular office. He decided to organize 

and to manage both the personnel and the office as an entirely 

bureaucratic structure, filled with rituals. The personnel found themselves 

forced to operate in a style which differed significantly from the previous 

setup. The consequences were mobilization on the one hand, and lack of 

communication on the other. 

The style of the new boss, which was directed toward seducing as 

many of his collaborators as possible, brought results after a few months. 

The clothes of some people became more ceremonial, more formal. 

Those of the women – more seductive. And so the battle between professionality 

and sexuality had begun. 

The new boss, a man of good looks, did not hide his openly chauvinist 

attitude, calling women ‘Mrs.’ and ‘Miss’,… quite different from ‘Doctor’ 

or ‘Professor’. 

Thus, bureaucracy and ceremony toward the male professionals, and 

what about women? Those who felt marginalized by the previous management 

for being too talented, and therefore too dangerous, thought 

they had finally found a space for themselves. Soon, however, this space 

began to shrink. Alliances, double alliances and intrigues invaded the 

camp … 

This event, where I was involved up to a point, illustrates how, even in 

today’s organizations, the role of a professional woman is far from 

unproblematic. This is especially visible when power, with its various 

mechanisms, tries to increase the boundaries between the male and the 

female, as if they were two separate territories, to be conquered, one by 

professionality (if only superficial) and another by sheer sexuality. 

As you can see, I used the word ‘narrative’ and not ‘story’ in the title of the 

excerpt: indeed, although the narrator speaks of ‘an event’, there is hardly one. 

The text is already an interpretation, and an interruptive one at that.The narrator 

places herself ‘within the gap of “rupture” between formulations of 

“appearance” and “reality’’’ (Silverman and Torode, 1980: 1960). She is a postgraduate 

student of sociology and analyzes her work experience in the language 

of feminism, which happens to be a legitimate discourse in her group, 

and she speaks from a woman’s standpoint (Smith, 1987). But this is hardly a 

legitimate discourse or a typical standpoint in mainstream organizational


TABLE 7.1 What do the texts say and what do the texts do? 

Polish Finnish Italian 

What the texts say 

Appearance Bureaucratic rules Organizational order Bureaucratic and 

organizational order 

Reality Oppression Exploitation Sexism and manipulation 

What the texts do Expose hypocrisy Establish normalcy Expose instrumentality 

(call in a moral and exception of seduction (call in a 

dimension) political dimension) 

Source: Czarniawska-Joerges (1994: 244). 

sociology. Until recently, the issues of sexuality were a taboo in discourse on 

organizations, taken up only in ‘subversive discourses’ or explicitly in critical 

stances, such as Burrell (1984) or Gherardi (1995). 

The Italian students (male and female) openly declared their fundamentally 

critical and political stance when judging organizational practices. It was interesting 

to compare their accounts to those of the Finnish students who raised 

the issue of gender in spite of their relatively apologetic way of describing 

organizations.Additionally, gender in the Finnish accounts was seen as an individual 

and biological attribute (certain employees are female and certain 

employees are young) that acquired a social meaning only in a specific context. 

Furthermore, gender was not related to sexuality. (I have summarized my interruptive 

interpretation in Table 7.1.) 

I found this exercise in interruption interesting and fruitful. I have learned 

from it two further lessons concerning narrative analysis.To begin with, social 

scientists (and semioticians, literary critics, linguists) are not the only ones who 

interpret, interrogate, and interrupt texts. All people do it, some more often 

some less often; the world is full of semiotic readers. Reading a semiotic reading 

is an interesting challenge, somewhat dizzying and requiring a lot of caution, 

but nevertheless very satisfying.The caution concerns the necessity of a 

symmetrical stance, as it were: the awareness that the authors of the text that 

social scientists analyze may turn out even more skillful analysts themselves. 

The dizziness comes from an attempt to keep a balance between standing 

under, over, and for – the analyzed text.The ‘natural attitude’ of a social scientist 

is to stand over, to explain (as I did above), but an admiring explication is 

an attitude to be applied more often. 

The second lesson concerns the matter of language.Although practically all 

narratologists set the constitutive role of language in the central place, the issue 

of analyzing narratives in a foreign language does not attract much attention. 

Even such reflective authors as Silverman and Torode assume that translation is 

unproblematic. But it certainly is highly problematic – especially in this kind 

of analysis. One solution to this difficulty is to make a literal translation first 

and an understandable translation afterwards. It makes for a lot of annotations, 

often making the text incomprehensible. Another solution is to translate only 

the result of the analysis (as I was doing), hoping for the reader’s suspension of

96 

disbelief, in spite of a referential contract with the reader. But the fact that it is 

difficult should not be read as the reason not to undertake this kind of translation 

– it must be remembered that the origins of semiotics go back to comparative 

linguistics and that comparative linguistics was a product of necessity. 

Jan Baudouin de Courtney, one of its founders ( Jakobson, 1978), was a Pole of 

French origins who lived and worked in Estonia and Russia, teaching in 

Russian and German. 

Deconstruction 


To ‘deconstruct’ a text is to draw out conflicting logics of sense and implication, with 

the object of showing that the text never exactly means what it says or says what it 

means. (Norris, 1988: 7) 

Deconstruction is a technique and a philosophy of reading, characterized by a 

preoccupation with desire and power. Used by Jacques Derrida (1976; 1987) 

for reading philosophical texts, it becomes a kind of philosophy itself (Rorty, 

1989). Used by gender scholars, it becomes a tool of subversion ( Johnson, 

1980). Used by organization researchers, it becomes a technique of reading by 

estrangement (Feldman, 1995).As a technique of reading, it earns an excellent 

introduction in Joanne Martin’s article ‘Deconstructing organizational taboos’ 

(1990). 

Martin attended a conference sponsored by a major US university dedicated 

to the ways that individuals and businesses might help to solve societal problems. 

One of the participants, the CEO of a large transnational organization, 

told the conference participants the following story: 

We have a young woman who is extraordinarily important to the launching of a 

major new [product].We will be talking about it next Tuesday in its first worldwide 

introduction. She has arranged to have her Caesarian yesterday in order to be prepared 

for this event, so you – We have insisted that she stay home and this is going 

to be televised in a closed circuit television, so we’re having this done by TV for her, 

and she is staying home three months and we are finding ways of filling in to create 

this void for us because we think it’s an important thing for her to do. (Martin, 1990: 

339) 

Unlike stories exemplified in Chapter 2, this one was found disembedded from 

its original context and recontextualized into the space of the conference. 

Accordingly, instead of following its connections through time and space, 

Martin has decided to deconstruct and reconstruct the story from a feminist 

standpoint (the alternative standpoints were, for example, the political leftist 

or the rationalist). She composed a list of deconstructionist moves. This list,


apart from being a useful aid to anyone who would like to try a hand at 

deconstruction, also reveals the historical roots of deconstruction or, rather, its 

historical sediments. It contains elements of close reading, of rhetorical analysis, 

of dramatist analysis, of radical rewriting – it is a hybrid.Therefore, it does 

not make much sense to speak about ‘proper deconstruction’ or the ‘correct 

use of structural analysis’: the literary techniques should serve as a source of 

inspiration not a prescription to be followed literally. 

Analytic strategies used in deconstruction [(Adapted from Martin, 1990: 355)] 

1 Dismantling a dichotomy, exposing it as a false distinction (e.g. 

public/private, nature/culture, etc.). 

2 Examining silences – what is not said (e.g. noting who or what is 

excluded by the use of pronouns such as ‘we’). 

3 Attending to disruptions and contradictions; places where a text fails 

to make sense or does not continue. 

4 Focusing on the element that is most alien or peculiar in the text – to 

find the limits of what is conceivable or permissible. 

5 Interpreting metaphors as a rich source of multiple meanings. 

6 Analyzing double entendres that may point to an unconscious subtext, 

often sexual in content. 

7 Separating group-specific and more general sources of bias by ‘reconstructing’ 

the text with substitution of its main elements. 

Let me give short examples of Martin’s deconstruction: 

1 Public/private dichotomy: ‘We have a young woman…’ (rather than: a young 

woman works for us).The text itself shows the company’s awareness that this 

division cannot be maintained, revealing at the same time that ‘woman is to private 

as man is to public’, and that actions intended as improvement in the private 

sphere turn out to be serving the public sphere; in other words, the public 

sphere invades the private under the aegis of ‘helping’. 

2 Silenced voices: ‘We insisted that she stayed home…’ One voice that is never 

heard is the physician’s voice, although it could be expected in this context.The 

woman is given a voice (‘She arranged to have her Caesarean yesterday…’) but 

it is unclear whether she did it on suggestion from the company or spontaneously.The 

final word is the company’s:‘We insisted.’ 

3 Disruptions:‘… we are finding ways of filling in to create this void for us.’This 

incoherence, points out Martin, happens at the point where the costs of the 

arrangement are taken up in the text, thus revealing the speaker’s ambivalence 

as to the benefits of the situation. 

4 The element most alien: pregnancy, says Martin, is an alien element in a maledominated 

organization.The visibility of pregnancy calls attention to a whole 

series of organizational taboos: emotional expression and nurturance, sexual 

intercourse.

98 

5 Metaphors: child as a product, product as a child (‘Why a product can be 

launched and a baby cannot’; p. 351). 

6 Double entendres:‘We have a young woman…’ 

7 Reconstruction: Martin creates several, and I am quoting only one that I found 

most poignant, achieved by changing the gender of the protagonist and, consequently, 

a type of operation: 

We have a young man who is extraordinarily important to the launching of a major 

new [product].We will be talking about it next Tuesday in its first worldwide introduction. 

He has arranged to have his coronary bypass operation yesterday in order 

to be prepared for this event, so you – We have insisted that he stay home and this 

is going to be televised in a closed circuit television, so we’re having this done by 

TV for him, and he is staying home three months and we are finding ways of 

filling in to create this void for us because we think it’s an important thing for him 

to do. 

The absurdity of this reconstructed text corroborates what the deconstruction 

revealed: evidence of a suppressed gender conflict in work organizations, blind 

spots of management practice, and theory that fueled the conflict and kept it 

out of view. 

Changing worlds 


I end with an example of deconstruction of a short excerpt from a Swedish 

business weekly from 1994. The text has been provided, together with its 

deconstruction, by Pia Höök from Stockholm School of Economics, and I 

thank her for permission to use it. I have extended and developed Pia’s original 

deconstruction. 3 

Sordid gain rather than long-term planning 

The managers of the small company TrustPhone [the name has been 

changed], which sells security systems for credit cards to the tune of 

$ 250 ml per year, are truly the ‘electronic highway robbers’. They plug in 

their portables wherever they can find a telephone jack available, or even 

do it in secret when they cannot get access – after all, the cellular phones 

are still too expensive for such purposes. There is no head office – there 

is only the central computer which must be contacted as often as possible. 

It is via the ‘head computer’ that everybody cooperates and communicates. 

Management meetings in person take place every second month 

or so. The costs are almost nonexistent and profits are accordingly high. 

… The message to the employees is: Forget job security! The only thing 

one can do is to hold oneself ‘employable’ to many different companies 

or else pay in fat insurance premiums against unemployment. Specialized 

knowledge opens the door to high pay, but as often as not, it is a matter


of learning more, taking more responsibility, working harder and earning 

less. The good side of it all is that many people, irrespective of their skin 

color, nationality, or social background, can break through and have a job 

where they have more control and responsibility than ever before. 

Knowledge workers have power in this company. The bad side is that 

many cannot handle these demands. They join the others in a fight over 

who will serve hamburgers, clean houses, or take care of children – all 

with a very low pay. 

1 Sordid gain/long-term planning: the very title reveals the journalist’s ambivalence 

about the events described in the text. Sordid gain–long-term investment 

is a time-honored dichotomy, where the first part is negative and the second 

positive. The article intends to question this moral dichotomy, proposing the 

possibility of a reversal. 

2 Silenced voices: employees.The whole text is presented from the point of view 

of managers, with the narrator’s voice audible in textual strategies, the choice 

of metaphors, etc.The employees’ point of view is guessed – either by managers 

or by the journalist. 

3 Disruptions:‘Knowledge workers have power in this company.The bad side is 

that many cannot handle these demands.’ The last sentence should have followed 

a much earlier one (‘it is a matter of learning more…’) but, in its present 

context, it seems that knowledge workers cannot handle the demands 

created by having power.This additionally reveals the journalist’s ambivalence, 

which might be caused by reflection over his own work situation – are knowledge 

workers interested in having power? 

4 The element most alien: plugging in your portable in secret is certainly a 

novelty in official commercial practice. But the next sentence justifies it with 

‘After all, the cellular phones are still too expensive for such purposes’.This exotic 

behavior and its justification are explained by the main metaphor of the text: 

5 Metaphors:‘electronic highway robbers.’This is a very congruent metaphor as 

the heroes of the text are, in fact, stealing. But the interesting aspect of, and yet 

another proof of, the journalist’s ambivalence is that ‘highway robbers’ are 

traditionally positive heroes who take from the rich to give to the poor.Who 

are the rich and who are the poor? Perhaps credit card owners, ‘the average 

citizens’, are the poor.Who are the rich? The most likely place to find a telephone 

jack is some kind of a public space – do they therefore steal from the taxpayer 

to give it to the customer? Or do they steal for their own benefit? 

6 Double entendres: (cannot be analyzed as this is a translation). 

7 Reconstruction: the following reconstruction simply reverses the message, 

leading to the following text: 

Long-term planning rather than sordid gain 

The managers of the small company TrustComputer, which sells userfriendly 

computer courses and has 40 employees, are, like everybody 

else in the company, partners in profits as well as in work. They put their

100 


portables at the client’s service wherever they are needed, or even 

organize courses at their own company if the client cannot afford it – after 

all, advanced computer equipment is still too expensive for many to purchase. 

Indeed, theirs is an open office where clients can arrive at any 

time with their problems. Personal communication and close cooperation 

are their maxims – inside and outside the company. Management meetings 

are informal but very frequent – they like each other and appreciate 

highly the frequent exchange of experiences. No wonder that the personnel 

turnover is almost nonexistent and competence is high and constantly 

developing. 

… The message to the employees is: we shall not forget how important 

job security is! The only thing one has to do is to keep oneself up-todate 

with the rapid developments on the computer market, which in itself 

is a fat insurance premium against bad times. Specialized knowledge 

opens the door to high pay but, as often as not, it is a matter of being 

able to learn and to unlearn. It is being said that knowledge gives power. 

In this sense, TrustComputer is the best example of a successful empowerment 

program, as many people, irrespective of their skin color, nationality, 

or social background, can acquire power simply by following their 

life’s passion. As the company guarantees their employment, they can 

spend all their time on acquiring knowledge in order to serve their clients, 

with the same feeling of usefulness as experienced by those who serve 

food or take care of children. 

What seemed to be an innocent play with a text ended up as a confrontation 

of the message typical for the welfare state and workplace democracy with the 

message typical for the (then) coming new economy. A short newspaper text, 

intended to report somewhat exotic work practices, revealed (not least through 

the journalist’s ambivalence) that at stake were two different world and work 

philosophies.The new one was to challenge the old one, with the result uncertain, 

even to the narrator. 

At the end of this chapter it is important to point out that both structural 

and poststructural analyses meant an important turn of the traditional 

hermeneutics: they managed to change the central question from ‘what does a 

text say?’ to ‘how does a text say it?’ Scholars skeptical toward narrative analyses 

are still not convinced, though, since to them one more question remains: 

why? Why do people tell stories? Why do they tell this type of story at this time 

and at this place? Why do they tell stories this way? 

These are questions the answer to which lies in a theory of a phenomenon, 

not in an analysis of a text.The kind of answer depends, in the first place, on 

the aim of the study: is it to understand the nature of humankind? The reaction 

to the collapse of a new economy? The way people make sense of their 

lives? In the second place, it will depend on the theoretical affiliation of the 

scholar: the objectivists will refer the answer to relations of power, the subjectivists 

to the workings of the human mind, and the constructivists will show that the

‘how’ contains a ‘why’. In other words, a narrative analysis forms another 

narrative that, in order to become a fully fledged story, needs to be emplotted. 

Theory is the plot of a dissertation.Therefore I now turn to this special kind 

of narrative – scholarly texts. 

Exercise 7.1: deconstruction 

EXERCISE 

Take a short text (or a fragment of a text) from your daily or weekly 

paper and analyze it using the strategies listed by Joanne Martin. 


Davies, Bronwyn (1989) Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales. North 

Sydney: Allen & Unwin. 

Martin, Joanne (1990) ‘Deconstructing organizational taboos: the suppression 

of gender conflict in organizations’, Organization Science, 

1 (4): 339–59. 

Silverman, David, and Torode, Brian (1980) The Material Word. Some 

Theories about Language and their Limits. London: Routledge & Kegan 

Paul. 

Notes 


1 More on positioning in identity formation can be found in Davies and Harré 

(1991). 

2 As the texts were translated, it would be difficult to look for the elements of the 

text, as Silverman and Torode did, although they did attempt it on a French text 

(1980: 34–5).They distinguished pictures (clauses,‘atomic units of meaning’), stanzas 

(grouping of clauses), and voices (names around which stanzas are built). It is somewhat 

reminiscent of Greimas’ narrative programs, narrative trajectories, and actants. 

3 As a part of course work during a method course held by me at Stockholm School 

of Economics, Fall 1994.

8 

Reading Social Science 

Dramatist analysis of drinking driver research 102 

The anthropologist as author 105 

Storytelling in economics 108 

Leadership as seduction: deconstructing social science theory 112 

Narratives from one’s own backyard 115 

Notes 116 

This chapter claims that all the analytical approaches discussed in previous 

chapters can be, and in fact have been, applied to scientific texts. It thus changes 

the focus from the kind of approach applied to the area to which it is applied. 

It argues that science is a field of practice like any other, and therefore its narratives, 

their production and circulation, can be studied in the same way. Misia 

Landau’s analysis of evolution stories (Chapter 6) already announced this possibility 

and, although many narrative analyses focus on natural science texts 

(see, e.g., Mulkay, 1985; Latour, 1988), there are several that scrutinize narratives 

in social science texts. I will present them chronologically as this order 

will also reveal the developments in reflection mode that took place over time 

in the social sciences. 

Dramatist analysis of drinking driver research 

Joseph Gusfield (1976) was one of the first authors to apply rhetorical analysis 

to social science research. His article begins ominously: ‘The Rhetoric of 

Research! The title imposes the obvious contradiction. Research is Science; the 

discovery of transmission of a true state of things. Rhetoric is Art’ (1976: 16). 

Little did he know that the following years would be spent on dismantling 

this contradiction. Ricca Edmondson wrote Rhetoric in Sociology in 1984 and 

D.N. McCloskey published The Rhetoric of Economics in 1985. In 1987, The 

Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public 

Affairs (edited by Nelson, Megill and McCloskey) was published, followed by

Herbert Simons’ edited collection, Rhetoric in the Human Sciences in 1988. But 

in 1976 the idea of scientific-language-as-a-windowpane (science being a 

window to reality) dominated.Therefore, said Gusfield, an excursion to literary 

theory will help. He did not claim that science was literature but that treating 

science as literature will be productive – the very assumption of this chapter 

and, indeed, of this whole book. 

The material Gusfield analyzed was 45 major research papers concerned with 

drinking and driving in Europe and the USA, and he chose one as most typical 

for a close reading.The analysis was divided into three parts (called acts): the literary 

style of science, the literary art in science, and the relevance of art in science. 

In the first act, Gusfield employed Burke’s dramatist analysis. Such an analysis 

looks for congruence – or incongruence – of five elements, known as 

Burke’s pentad (Burke, 1945/1969): Scene (in the sense of a setting, a context, 

etc.),Act (in the sense of an action, a deed, or an action program),Agent (actor, 

actant),Agency (the means with which the Act is accomplished), and Purpose. 

The following are the results. 

Scene 

All 45 papers were published in research journals: most in medical journals, 

some in journals dedicated to car safety or safety in general.This setting ‘establishes 

a claim for the paper to be taken as an authoritative fact and not as fiction 

or imaginative writing’ (1976: 18–19). 

Act 

READING SOCIAL SCIENCE 103 

There are actually two acts which, in the terms used in this book, could be distinguished 

as the act in the text (what does the text say?) and the act of the text 

(what does the text do?).The act in the text is a causally connected narrative: 

(significant) numbers of drunk drivers turn out to be problem drinkers rather 

than social drinkers; therefore new prevention methods must be employed. Or, 

to put it in terms of a minimal plot: 

1 Once upon a time, drunk drivers were supposed to be social drinkers. 

2 New identification methods permitted recognition of drunk drivers as problem 

drinkers. 

3 New methods of prevention of drunk driving must be found. 

The act of the text is in the article’s structure. It begins with setting up a challenge: 

the old theory of drunk driving is wrong. It continues with the description 

of methods used to identify problem drinkers among the drunk drivers, 

proceeds to the findings achieved with these methods, and ends with policy 

recommendations: ‘This centrality of method and externality of data is the 

major key to the story’ (p. 19).

104 

Agent 

The problem of the agent, or the voice, is not easy. On the one hand, the author 

of a scientific text is the reality itself, and therefore no human voice should 

intrude. On the other hand, the structure of the paper reveals that there is and 

has been an observer and a writer, and this person needs credibility and trust.This 

is resolved, says Gusfield, by introducing the author through his role (an organizational 

affiliation) and by avoiding the active voice: ‘Recent reports have suggested 

…’ (Author, Date); ‘It is increasingly becoming apparent…’; ‘Differences 

were found …’ If I may complete Gusfield at this point, another technique of 

introducing the passive voice is often practiced, invariably with comic effects: 

writing about oneself in the third person:‘As Czarniawska has pointed out…’ 

Agency 

As the result of this specific technique of representing the Agent, the main 

responsibility for action is displaced to Agency (yet another illustration of the 

convenience of the term ‘actant’). In this case, it is the method. 

Purpose 


The purpose of the act is to convince but, due to the specific character of the 

act, only some techniques of persuasion are permissible. In short, pathos must 

be excluded to the benefit of logos (ethos always creeps in, if only in the citation 

procedure). The author ‘means to persuade, but only by presenting an 

external world to the audience and allowing that external reality to do the persuading’ 

(Gusfield, 1976: 20). 

In the second act, Gusfield analyzes the use of tropes in the paper: metonymy, 

metaphor, myth, and archetype, whose use makes the paper close to a generic 

form known as a morality play, ‘in which drinking [sic] driving is an arena for 

the expression of personal and moral character’ (p. 26). In this drama, the drinking 

driver has been transformed from a tolerable social drinker into a stigmatized 

deviant. Thus, in the third act, Gusfield shows that the author of the 

article performed a shift in the hierarchy of main actors: what was down went 

up, what was up went down.The social drinkers are now not only tolerable but 

they are also benevolent – after all, they do not cause drunk–driving accidents. 

The drunk drivers turn out to be problem drinkers, not surprisingly coming 

from the lowest strata of the social structure.Thus, a non-emotional paper has 

produced quite a load of emotions – by performing theater. 

Gusfield himself is well aware that all his comments could be applied to his 

own text, and this is why, I believe, he structures it as a three-act play. He is 

nevertheless convinced that a literary reflection, including self-reflection, will 

be useful not only to scientific texts but even to the public policies that they

are supposed to inform. After all,‘[i]t is this capacity to recognize the context 

of unexamined assumptions and accepted concepts that is among the most 

valuable contributions through which social science enables human beings to 

transcend the conventional and create new approaches and policies’ (Gusfield, 

1976: 32). I wish more policy-makers would read Gusfield. 

The anthropologist as author 


In what follows I will concentrate on the famous work by Clifford Geertz 

(1988), but I would like to point out that, in the same year, John Van Maanen 

published his Tales of the Field. I do not report on both in order to keep a somewhat 

even distribution among samples from different social sciences, but Van 

Maanen’s book is, and has been, of great importance to all ethnographers. 

Geertz begins by saying that, at the moment of his writing, it has become 

obvious that ethnography is not a matter of sorting strange facts into familiar 

categories but a kind of writing.There have been, however, hesitations as to the 

appropriateness of treating it as such. One such hesitation stemmed from the 

assumption that literary reflection is not a duty of anthropologists, who should 

busy themselves doing fieldwork. Another had to do with the feeling that 

anthropological texts, unlike literary texts, are not deserving of such attention. 

The third one, and recognizable to all social scientists, had to do with the suspicion 

that such an analysis will threaten the scientific status of these texts: 

‘should the literary character of anthropology be better understood, some professional 

myths about how it manages to persuade would be impossible to 

maintain’ (Geertz, 1988: 3). Behind them all, says Geertz, there has been an 

anxiety concerning the solution of two problems: of signature (author-saturated 

versus author-evacuated texts) and of discourse (choice of vocabulary, rhetoric, 

pattern of argument).This solution had to be subordinated to the main task the 

anthropologists posited for themselves: creating a convincing impression of 

‘being there’. He decides to inspect how the great authors of anthropology, 

those who opted for a clear signature and a visible ‘theater of language’, succeeded 

in this task. 

The first of them is Claude Lévi-Strauss, the structuralist, and the work 

Geertz inspects is Tristes Tropiques. He does it from a perspective he calls 

‘appreciative and unconverted’ (1988: 27): he does not approve of the idea of 

the universal mind and is skeptical toward structuralism as an approach, but 

admires Lévi-Strauss as an author. He finds several books interweaved in the 

text of Tristes Tropiques. To begin with, it is a travelogue: ‘I went here, I went 

there; I saw this strange thing and that; I was amazed, bored, excited, disappointed; 

I got boils on my behind…’ (p. 33). Secondly, it is an ethnography: apart 

from the ‘report from there’, it has a thesis: that people’s customs form into systems 

(here, a structuralist categorization is clearly visible).Thirdly, it is a philosophical 

text that addresses itself to the issue of the natural foundation of human

106 


society. This leads to yet another text: a reformist tract, based on a devastating 

critique of western society, which spoils the natural order in its misguided 

attempt to modernize. Finally, the book is a symbolist literary text, as has been 

noticed before by literary critics. The mixture, in Geertz’s reading, is a myth of 

Anthropologist-as-seeker. In the eyes of Lévi-Strauss, empiricist Anglo-Saxon 

anthropology is mistaken; the impression of ‘being there’ is either a fraud or 

self-deception. Lévi-Strauss, the mythological seeker, discovers only other 

people’s myths: the world resides in texts. 

Consequently, Geertz proceeds to inspect an Anglo-Saxon author: Sir 

Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard whom he calls ‘stylistically one of the most 

homogeneous writers the world has seen’ (p. 49). The text he chooses is the little 

known ‘Operations on the Akobo and Gila Rivers, 1940–41’, published in a 

British military journal in 1973, where Evans-Pritchard describes his actions as 

a bush-irregular in Sudan. In Geertz’s opinion, this short text displays all the 

traits of Evans-Pritchard’s way of dealing with discourse.The metaphor Geertz 

uses is a ‘slide-show’, which could be called ‘Images of Africa’.The staccato tone 

is one of the devices used to achieve an impression of complete certainty, what 

Geertz calls an ‘of-course’ discourse.The simple subject-predicate-object sentences 

are favored, punctuation marks are scarce, there are no foreign phrases 

or literary allusions:‘Everything that is said is clearly said, confidently and without 

fuss’ (p. 61). The only (barely perceptible) trope is irony, which serves to 

distanciate the author from the events described in the text; in spite of this, the 

effect is strongly visual (hence ‘slide-show’). 

What is the purpose of such a style (Geertz sees Evans-Pritchard as an 

accomplished stylist)? Evans-Pritchard was curious about how was it possible 

to have a cognitive order without science, a political order without the state, a 

spiritual order without a church – in short, a society without modern western 

institutions. His answer was that witchcraft, segmentary organization, and alternative 

ways of imagining divinity work as well.The ‘of-course’ tone witnesses 

to the sincerity of such a judgment, dis-enstranging the apparently bizarre. As 

Geertz puts it, Evans-Pritchard describes the Nilotes ‘as not other but otherwise 

(sensible enough when you get to know them, but with their own way 

of doing things)’ (p. 70). Geertz continues:‘The marvel of this rather dialectical 

approach to ethnography is that it validates the ethnographer’s form of life 

at the same time as it justifies those of his subjects – and that it does one by 

doing the other.’ Alas, this kind of device is no longer available for the ethnographers 

of today – of the era of ‘confidence lost’. 

In the case of Bronislaw Malinowski, Geertz contrasts the anthropologist’s 

famous credo with his diary. Malinowski is known for his belief in participative 

observation, ‘plunging into the life of the natives’ as the only valuable 

method of fieldwork. His diary, published posthumously, caused much uneasiness, 

revealing the author’s hypochondria, xenophobia, and a host of other 

non-heroic and non-scientific attitudes. To Geertz, the diary reveals much 

more than this array of human foibles. It shows that:


there is a lot more than native life to plunge into if one is to attempt this total immersion 

approach to ethnography. There is the landscape. There is the isolation. There is the 

local European population.There is the memory of home and what one has left.There 

is the sense of vocation and where one is going.And, most shakingly, there is the capriciousness 

of one’s passions, the weakness of one’s constitution, and the vagrancies of 

one’s thoughts: that nigrescent thing, the self. It is not a question of going native … It 

is a question of living a multiple life: sailing at once in several seas. (1988: 77) 

If things are so complex and complicated more by the interference of the self, 

how to report them, then? Geertz calls Malinowski’s solution an ‘I-witnessing’: 

rendering one’s account credible through rendering oneself credible. This, 

according to Geertz, is not a psychological but a literary endeavor. In 

Malinowski’s version, it was realized by the projection of two antithetical and 

therefore complementary images: of an Absolute Cosmopolite and a Complete 

Investigator, one standing for romance, the other for science. The first is one 

with the natives; the second is totally distanced from them. In fact, the oxymoron 

of ‘participative observation’ announces it quite openly. And although 

Malinowski’s structural-functionalist theory is considered obsolete, the perplexities 

of the I-witnessing are very much in the center of contemporary 

anthropology, as Geertz’s many examples show. 

The fourth exemplar Geertz discusses is Ruth Benedict. Inspired by Swift 

and his Gulliver’s Travels, she made the familiar culture odd and arbitrary, while 

the exotic one was presented as logical and obvious. Geertz calls this textual 

strategy ‘us/not-us’ and points out that, partly because she was a woman, and 

women are not supposed to be ironic, Benedict’s irony sometimes went unappreciated 

(as compared to that of Ervin Goffman, for example).A juxtaposition 

of the familiar and of the exotic is obviously a sophisticated literary strategy, 

but it is prone to produce disconcert, not least because of its comic effect. 

According to Geertz, the two works that reached mass popularity – Patterns of 

Culture and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword – did so because Benedict managed 

to suppress their humorous aspect, presenting herself as utterly sincere. He 

emphasizes that Benedict’s accomplishment was not her fieldwork, of which 

there was little, and not her systematic theorizing, ‘in which she was scarcely 

interested’ (p. 108), but her ‘distinctive sort of redescription: the sort that startles’ 

(p. 112). 

There are at least two reasons why Geertz’s musing about anthropological 

writing is relevant to all social sciences. One is that anthropology has become 

fashionable, not as before as a postcard from an exotic land, but as a way of ‘being 

here’, to quote Geertz again. Anthropologists came back home, not least as the 

result of the changed political landscape, and infected the rest of us with their 

methods and their doubts. Secondly, but also as a result of it, one premise became 

common to all social sciences:‘[t]he gap between engaging others where they are 

and representing them when they aren’t, always immense but not much noticed, 

has suddenly become extremely visible’ (p. 130).The Other is here, is literate, and 

has a voice – no wonder that the theory of representation is in crisis.

108 


The lessons from reading Geertz reading other authors are many, but one is 

especially poignant:‘the burden of authorship cannot be evaded, however heavy 

it may have grown; there is no possibility of displacing it onto “method”, 

“language”, or … “the people themselves” redescribed … as co-authors’ 

(p. 140). 

Storytelling in economics 

It can be pointed out that anthropology and its offspring, ethnography, even at 

their most ‘scientific’, were always closer to belles lettres than were other social 

sciences. In this case, a good example to consider will be economics – rarely 

suspected of such a propinquity. Deirdre McCloskey has thoroughly analyzed 

the rhetoric of economics (1985; 1994) but she has also devoted some attention 

specifically to the role of narratives in economics (1990a; 1990b). 

‘Economists are tellers of stories and makers of poems, and from recognizing 

this we can know better what economists do’ (1990b: 5). Metaphors (models) 

and stories (narratives) seem to be two competing but also complementary 

modes of knowing.A metaphor can bring a point to a story while a story can 

exemplify a metaphor. In the sciences, metaphors are typical of physics and stories 

of biology. Economics, claims McCloskey, presents a balanced mixture of 

both.The two work best in specific areas: metaphors in predictions, simulations 

and counterfactuals, and stories in explaining something that actually happened. 

It can be seen when their areas of expertise cross: a business cycle is a story, 

describing the past.When applied as a model and therefore to a prediction of 

the future, it dies of its own contradiction: if business cycles could be predicted 

they would not happen (a conclusion worth considering in the context of the 

failure of the new economy). 

Looking at economics as a storytelling business, claims McCloskey, helps us 

understand why economists disagree, without thus necessarily being ‘bad economists’. 

Within the traditional perspective on economic texts as transparent 

(that is, economic writing as ‘putting in script theoretical premises and empirical 

findings’), the disagreements are inexplicable, unless by ill will. In the same 

vein, but with some admission of an authorial effort, it is traditionally assumed 

that disagreements are misunderstandings arising from the fact that the writer 

does not have enough time and space (for example, in a paper format) to explicate 

things properly. But, says McCloskey, even if writers did have enough time 

and space, the readers wouldn’t. There is a whole plethora of texts vying for 

attention, and economic texts must fight for it like all others. Finally, another 

traditional explanation of disagreements is a suspicion that the reader is unable 

to take the point of view demanded by the author, this time because of intellectual 

limitations.This suspicion of the readers, promises McCloskey, will vanish 

when the economic authors understand that economics, and schools within


economics, are separate languages, or at least dialects, which to many a reader 

read like texts in a foreign language. 

McCloskey therefore launches on reading economics as storytelling 

embellished with metaphors. She points out that a structuralist reading is not 

an option as ‘[e]conomics is already structural’ (1990b: 13). The ‘functions’ in 

economic texts will never arrive at Propp’s number of 31; there is entry, exit, 

price setting, orders within a firm, purchase, sale, valuation, and not many 

more. ‘Propp … found seven characters … David Ricardo in his economic 

tales got along with three’ (1990b: 14). The economic stories also show a preference 

for a plot that is ending-embedded, as Jean Matter Mandler called it (see 

Chapter 6):‘Go all the way to the third act.’ (1990b: 14).The definition of the 

plot, too, is as designed for economics – the transformation of equilibrium into 

disequilibrium and into a subsequent equilibrium: 

Poland was poor, then it adopted capitalism, then as a result it became rich. 

The money supply increased this year; then, as a result, productivity last year rose and 

the business cycle three decades ago peaked. (McCloskey, 1990a: 26) 

In terms of genre analysis, there are two analyses that are most common. 

Theoretical work in economics is similar to the literary genre of fantasy; the 

empirical work is like a realistic novel. 

McCloskey quotes many examples to corroborate her analysis, of which I 

will quote two. One concerns the literary text that introduced and popularized 

the main concept of classical economics, the Homo economicus.The other concerns 

a contemporary text by an economist, known and quoted widely in 

other social sciences and in the popular press. 

The first text is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. 1 Although the idea of Homo 

economicus came to economics officially, as it were, at the end of the nineteenth 

century as an analogy with molecules, Defoe’s text already presents it in full. 

Robinson Crusoe perceives the world as a series of opportunities to be chosen 

from according to their costs. McCloskey points out that the notion of 

‘opportunity costs’ was fully developed by Austrian economists in the 1870s 

but seemed to be always obvious to poets and, later, to novelists. Robinson 

Crusoe’s situation is a quintessence of scarcity – another notion known earlier 

in literature than in economics: 

Each time Crusoe or any homo economicus faces a choice he draws up a balance sheet 

in his head … but more commonly he uses commercial metaphors, especially those of 

accounting … This is the rational way to proceed – understanding ‘rational’ to mean 

merely a sensible adjustment of what you can to what you want. So the rational person 

is a calculator, like Crusoe, making rough and ready choices about what to put next on 

the boat. … The details of style throughout the book contribute to the force of scarcity – 

a contrast to the stories of shipwrecks in the Odyssey or the Aeneid, over which hover 

intervening gods willing to perform miracles of abundance. (McCloskey, 1990a: 145)

110 


McCloskey analyzes several works of economic historians (Gershenkron, 

Fogel) to show how they constructed their stories, but also offers an interesting 

reading of Lester Thurow’s The Zero-sum Solution: Building a World-class 

American Economy (1985) as an example of an uneasy cooperation between 

stories and metaphors. The book was written in the years of the ‘Japanese 

miracle’ and is addressed to the ways the USA should cope with it. 

Three metaphors govern Thurow’s story: the ‘international zero-sum game’, 

the ‘domestic problem’, which damages US performance in the game, and ‘we’ 

who need to cope with the problem. Income and wealth need to be dredged 

from non-Americans and ‘every competitive game has its losers’.‘For a society 

which loves team sports … it is surprising that Americans won’t recognize the 

same reality in the far more important international economics game’ 

(McCloskey, 1990a: 156).When less benevolent,Thurow changes the competitive 

sport metaphor to a war metaphor, seeing foreign trade as the economic 

equivalent of war. 

Sport metaphors and even war metaphors are as old as modern economics, 

points out McCloskey: in the late nineteenth century, British journalists wrote 

about the ‘American threat’ and the ‘German menace’. US journalists use them 

all the time.The problem with Thurow’s metaphors, however, is that they do 

not fit his story. 

The topic of his story is the exchange of goods and services: Japanese cars 

for US timber, German steel tubes for Soviet natural gas. Such an exchange is 

in metaphorical tune with Adam Smith’s idea of voluntary trade: everyone 

wins – this is why they continue to trade. 

The zero-sum game metaphor concerns only one part of trade: the selling 

side.This is an obvious perspective for a businessperson from Massachusetts but 

it should not be, points out McCloskey, for an economist.An economist, even 

from Massachusetts, should be looking wider.After all, economists claim to see 

around and underneath the economy (‘underneath it all’ being a favorite economic 

turn of phrase), and to account for it from the societal point of view. 

Another metaphor (label?) that needs unpicking is the mysterious ‘we’.Who 

is it, in Thurow’s account? ‘We Americans’? Not necessarily, points out 

McCloskey: 

problems have solutions, called ‘policies’, which ‘we must adopt’. It is not hard 

to guess who the Solver is: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to solve your 

problem … Do economists really know enough that planning for research and development, 

… should be handed over to a MIT-ish organization? (1990a: 158) 

And what is the ‘domestic problem’ that prevents the USA from winning the 

zero-sum game? It is the ‘productivity problem’, and McCloskey has quite a lot 

to say about this: 

‘The Productivity Problem’ in recent American history is not a figment … But in any 

case productivity has nothing to do with international competitiveness and the balance


of payment. As your local economist will be glad to make clear, the pattern of trade 

depends on comparative advantage, not absolute advantage … The overall level of productivity 

has no effect on America’s trade balance. None.And the trade balance is not 

a measure of excellence. None. The two having nothing to do with each other. We 

could achieve an enormous and positive trade balance tomorrow with no pursuit of 

excellence by forbidding imports. Americans want to trade with Tatsuro, and it makes 

them better off to do so: that is all. (1990a: 160–1) 

Does it mean that Lester Thurow is a bad storyteller and unskillful metaphor 

user? To the contrary: it is the fact that he is a skillful storyteller that prevents 

his readers from inspecting his metaphors and his stories. Not only does he use 

taken-for-granted metaphors but he also builds legitimacy for its story in analogy. 

His story is a parallel to the one well known, the one about late Victorian 

Britain:‘in the sunset of hegemony, Britain basked complacently while others 

hustled’ (McCloskey, 1990a: 158). As we have seen in the studies of Mandler 

(1984) and Davies (1989), readers easily recognize familiar narratives and 

unproblematically accept, and even reconstruct, their structure. So it is in a 

truly deconstructivist vein that McCloskey asks her final questions: 

And why would one wish American hegemony to be fastened on the world forever? 

Is it God’s plan that the United States of America should ever after be Top Nation? 

Why should we wish relative poverty in perpetuity on our Chinese and Latin 

American friends? Is this what economic ethics leads us to? (1990a: 159) 

Thurow’s book was written in 1985; McCloskey’s close reading of it in 1990. 

Since then, Japan ceased to be a menace. In 2002, President Bush was more 

than ever dedicated to the zero-sum game (he might even take McCloskey’s 

advice and forbid imports altogether), but the 2001 winner of the Bank of 

Sweden’s prize in the name of Alfred Nobel, Joseph E. Stiglitz, uses a rhetoric 

very different from Thurow’s: 

Global leadership requires not only being against something; it requires being for 

something.We have an alliance against terrorism.We should also have an alliance for 

more global justice and a better global environment. Globalization has made us more 

interdependent, and this interdependence makes it necessary to undertake global collective 

action. (2002: 28) 2 

Perhaps McCloskey’s close reading of economists’ texts has contributed to a 

legitimation of such alternative rhetoric in the economic sciences. 

It has been pointed out to McCloskey that ‘writing well’ is uneconomical, 

that too much awareness of one’s stories and metaphors, too much effort put 

into self-reflection and writing itself, does not pay – in terms of academic 

career. Her answer is, again, couched in ethical terms: 

It is unethical to write badly when at small cost you can do better, and it is especially 

unethical to cultivate obscurity to get some material benefit … I would say, with 

Socrates in the Gorgias, that it is better to suffer evil (lack of promotion) than to

112 


perpetrate it (writing in the Official Style for selfish advantage). (McCloskey, 

2000: 138–9) 

There are two vices in McCloskey’s ‘book of writing’: writing well so as to 

deceive the readers (as in Thurow’s case), and writing badly so as to deceive the 

judges (obfuscation).Tough requirements, but then the stakes of economics are 

high. 

Leadership as seduction: deconstructing social science theory 

The last example of the analysis of social science texts concerns an organization 

theory text, but on a topic that is of interest to many social sciences: 

leadership. Marta B. Calás and Linda Smircich, following the suggestion of 

Baudrillard, juxtaposed the notions of leadership and seduction: 

They wanted us to believe that everything is production.The leitmotiv of world transformation, 

the play of productive forces is to regulate the flow of things. Seduction is 

merely an immoral, frivolous, superficial and superfluous process: one within the realm 

of signs and appearances; one that is devoted to pleasure and to the usufruct of useless 

bodies. What if everything, contrary to appearances – in fact according to the secret 

rule of appearances – operated by the [principle of ] seduction? (Baudrillard, cited in 

Calás and Smircich, 1991: 567) 

What if leadership is a seduction? Calás and Smircich used three poststructuralist 

approaches: Foucault’s genealogy, Derrida’s deconstruction, and feminist 

poststructuralism to re-read four classics of organization theory: Chester 

Barnard’s The Functions of the Executive (1938), Douglas McGregor’s The Human 

Side of the Enterprise (1960), Henry Mintzberg’s The Nature of Managerial Work 

(1973), and Thomas J. Peters and Robert H.Waterman’s In Search of Excellence 

(1982).These texts are important because they were written for the audience 

of practitioners (managers) but have also had a strong impact on the academic 

community. 

As I have already quoted examples of poststructuralist and deconstructivist 

reading, I shall focus on Calás and Smircich’s use of Foucault’s genealogy.As is 

now well known, Foucault used historical analysis to show how various intertwined 

power structures produce, and are reproduced by, a network of practices 

and discourses that is usually called knowledge. 3 Calás and Smircich’s 

ambition is to show how all the consecutive work legitimizes itself by 

announcing change and transformation of the insights of their predecessor, 

while at the same time reproducing and maintaining the same network of 

knowledge-about-leadership production. 

Calás and Smircich began with contrasting the dictionary definitions of 

‘leadership’ and ‘seduction’.They turn out very close, as ‘to seduce’ is ‘to lead 

away’ (or ‘astray’). Seduction is leadership gone wrong, whereas leadership


seems to be a seduction gone right. Also, the words ‘seductor’ or ‘seducer’ are 

deemed obsolete: ‘seductress’ is the only contemporary form. Enriched by 

these etymological insights, Calás and Smircich proceed with their genealogy. 

The texts they choose cover a period of almost 50 years of theorizing about 

organizations, a period that, according to Calás and Smircich and contrary to 

what the authors themselves say, shows practically no change.The text traces a 

circle of seduction – while practices and discourses of leadership change, they 

preserve the same power/knowledge relationships. 

In Barnard’s text, the motive of seduction is present by its absence, by its 

silence. Many a time the text comes close to this dangerous border 

(‘Leadership, of course, often is wrong, and often fails’ – Barnard, cited in Calás 

and Smircich, 1991: 576), dangerous to the maintenance of social structure 

such as an organization, and the succession of leadership. Barnard’s language of 

morality used to describe the leader 

(faith, sacrifice, abstention, reverence) calls to mind images of a priest (usually called 

‘Father’) – an individual of superior determination, whose endurance and courage are 

more inferred from what he avoids (does not do): succumbing to temptation, and engaging 

in sexual intercourse. Seduction, as seduction, is inimical to orderly relations of 

men/human life. (p. 577) 

McGregor’s book was hailed as an introduction of humanistic psychology into 

the managerial discourse.Addressed to the top managers of US corporations in 

the 1960s, it attempts to answer a question: who can be a leader? The book 

claims a separation from Barnard’s idea of a lonely executive in his room on 

the top floor: the leadership postulated by McGregor is egalitarian, relational, 

and situational.Yet according to Calás and Smircich, McGregor only develops 

and embellishes Barnard’s homosocial,‘fatherly’ reasoning. 

McGregor’s innovation is known as replacing ‘theory X’ (traditional management 

theory à la Taylor and Barnard) with a ‘theory Y’ (human relations 

theory).Why, ask Calás and Smircich, those letters? Why not ‘theories A and B’ 

or ‘A and Z’? They point out that it was exactly at that time that women 

became defined as having two X chromosomes, while men were defined as 

‘XY’. McGregor’s can therefore be read, deconstructively but interestingly, as 

an attempt to move from an XY world to a sheer YY world: a homosocial 

order. Alternatively, and it is my alternative, it could be seen as presenting the 

earlier theories as ‘too feminine’ (seductive) to be replaced by more masculine 

(XY). 

Henry Mintzberg’s work was an elaboration of his doctoral dissertation, 

reporting his study that consisted of observing managers in their everyday 

work. The Nature of Managerial Work is a stylized version of the dissertation and 

attempts to answer the question: what do managers do? Calás and Smircich 

observe that in the 13 years that passed between the two books, McGregor’s 

relationship-oriented leader has been transformed into Mintzberg’s ‘solitary

114 


and narcissistic, but omnipotent, leader with no patience for anything but the 

most direct encounter…’ (1991: 586–7). 

In order to understand this transformation, Calás and Smircich widen their 

genealogy to include other texts from the same period: the issue of growing 

narcissism during those 13 years was becoming the central issue in US reflective 

literature. Philip Slater has written about it in his Footholds (1977), and 

Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism became a bestseller in 1979. 

Mintzberg’s narcissistic leader was, therefore, a good representative of his 

time. Narcissism is not limited to men, though; women are perfectly capable 

of narcissist conduct. Quoting Karen Horney, Calás and Smircich claim, 

however, that narcissistic – and seductive – activities in adult age differ 

between men and women. Men define their self-esteem and affirm their 

power through devaluing women, in this way reasserting the narcissistic 

belief about their superior position in society. Feminine seductiveness, on the 

other hand, is a conversion of fear into desirability, a way of promoting a submissive 

identity in order to avoid aggression.Therefore,‘feminine narcissistic 

activities will maintain – through submission or cloning – the homosocial 

order’ (1991: 588): 

Mintzberg’s leader – compulsively masculine in its narcissistic seduction – plays on the 

conditions of modern Western society. Under Mintzberg’s leader, those for whom 

compulsive masculinity is not a value will still submit to its ruling. Lacking other 

options within the system, they will perpetuate the conditions they may be wishing to 

escape. (Calás and Smircich, 1991: 589) 

Just after the article by Calás and Smircich, Organization Studies published ‘A 

letter to Marta Calás and Linda Smircich’ by Henry Mintzberg. Bitterly ironic, 

it also revealed a deeply hurt author. As Gusfield (1976) has already pointed 

out, any ‘close reading’ makes the reader ‘a smartass’ and the writer a dupe. But 

Mintzberg also makes an important point: we – the academic writers – have 

also set out to seduce the readers ‘in a way that puts almost all mortal leaders 

to shame’ (Mintzberg, 1991: 602). 

Some authors solve this difficulty by offering a reflection on their own texts, 

preempting the possible close readings. But no author can preempt all the readings, 

and a reflection over a reflection quickly loses its attractiveness, as brilliantly 

demonstrated in Malcolm Ashmore’s book The Reflexive Thesis (1989). 

Back to leadership: Calás and Smircich see Peters and Waterman’s bestseller 

as closing the circle of seduction. Peters and Waterman confess at the outset 

that they assumed the importance of leadership to be exaggerated: in other 

words, all their predecessors were wrong. It turned out, however, that with 

every excellent company was associated a strong leader (or two).The corporate 

world of the 1980s contained many women, but the basic relationships 

were not changed, although in the text ‘he or she’ and ‘his or her’ were duly 

introduced. When it comes to defining the leader of the 1980s, Peters and

Waterman go back to basics – a ‘transformational leader’.This leader is a male, 

at least grammatically, and is busy with things that Barnard would have 

approved of: raising his subordinates to higher levels of motivation and morality 

(and being raised by them, so that McGregor gets his due), and exercising 

leadership that might be called ‘elevating, mobilizing, inspiring, exalting, uplifting, 

exhorting, evangelizing’ (cited in Calás and Smircich, 1991: 592). 

At the time of writing, seductive leadership took another beating after a 

series of frauds, excessive remunerations, etc. Henry Mintzberg (1999) writes 

about ‘managing quietly’, clearly irritated with narcissistic leaders. Will the 

circle of seduction recreate itself once again? 

Narratives from one’s own backyard 


It can be observed that the narratives from one’s own practice are analyzed like 

all others, possibly with more bravado (after all, the analyst is on safe ground, 

at least epistemologically if not always politically) but also with special care due 

to the fact that the narrators cannot be anonymized. Many different options are 

open beyond those I have presented here.There are works and anthologies that 

concentrate on analysis of a specific discipline: psychology (Ellen Herman, 

1995), anthropology (Clifford and Marcus, 1986), sociology (Richard Harvey 

Brown, 1977; Ricca Edmondson, 1984), social studies of science and technology 

(Ashmore, 1989), management and organization (Czarniawska, 1999a; 

Rhodes, 2001).There are works and anthologies that present an array of analyses 

of social or, as they are sometimes called, human sciences (Nelson et al., 

1987; R.H. Brown, 1989; 1995; 1998; Simons, 1989; 1990; Agger, 1990; Nash, 

1990).There exist comparisons between fiction and social science (e.g., Paola 

Cappetti, 1993). The moment of surprise and disconcert at attempting such 

narrative analysis to social sciences has passed; the opportunities for reflecting 

and learning have barely opened. 

EXERCISE 

Exercise 8.1: social science text analysis 

Take three texts from your discipline dealing with the same topic. 

Compare them for differences and similarities. Then choose an 

approach that seems to be most fruitful (rhetorical analysis, genealogy, 

deconstruction, or a close reading using a combination of several 

approaches) and attempt a comparative analysis of the three.

116 


Brown, Richard Harvey (1998) Toward a Democratic Science. Scientific 

Narration and Civic Communication. New Haven, CT: Yale University 

Press. 

Nash, Cristopher (ed.) (1990) Narrative in Culture. The Uses of 

Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy and Literature. London: 

Routledge. 

Nelson, John S., Megill, Allan, and McCloskey, D.N. (eds) The Rhetoric 

of Human Sciences. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 

Notes 


1 This is not a fancy reading by an exaggeratingly literary mind. Defoe was a journalist 

and a pamphletist, famous for his Giving Alms No Charity and Employing the 

Poor A Grievance to the Nation, published in 1704 (Karl Polanyi, 1944). 

2 Although the notion of US hegemony remains unquestioned. 

3 See Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham’s Using Foucault’s Methods (1998).

9 

Writing Social Science 

Mimesis, or how to represent the world 117 

Plot, or how to theorize 122 

Notes 130 

As mentioned in Chapter 2, there are three elements to a narrative: chronicle, 

mimesis, and plot.As chronicle is usually not a problem in scientific writing, I 

will leave it aside and concentrate on mimesis and plot. 1 

Mimesis, or how to represent the world 

In this book, the notion of mimesis, as representation of the world in a text, is 

related to two elements of ‘the world’: the field of theory and the field of practice 

under study. In other words, I will make no big difference between writing 

a literature review and writing up a fieldwork. 2 Both need to re-present 

scientific literature or inscriptions of everyday life, and both need to emplot 

their representations. 

Problems with re-presentation 

A commonsense answer to a question:‘how to represent?’ is: faithfully. Reality 

should be re-created in the text. A scientific text should reflect what it 

describes, hopefully in a one-to-one correspondence.This should not be any 

problem as ‘facts speak for themselves’, and texts can be rendered loyally to the 

intentions of the authors. 

That this is possible at all was questioned by Impressionists in art and, by 

among others, Jorge Luis Borges in literature, 3 and finally in human sciences. 4 

The following problems emerged:

118 

• The incompatibility of worlds and words (Rorty, 1980; 1989): how can words 

be compared to that which they (purportedly) describe? A one-to-one 

correspondence is impossible if media are different. 5 It is therefore sensible to 

think of representation of an object as involving production of another object 

‘which is intentionally related to the first by a certain coding convention 

which determines what counts as similar in the right way’ (Van Fraassen and 

Sigman, 1993: 74). Representation does not reflect; it creates. 

• The politics of representation (Latour, 1999): considering that there are always 

competing versions of the world in circulation, who, and by what criteria, has the 

right to judge them? This second problem is already a search for a solution to the 

first one: if facts do not speak for themselves, who will speak on their behalf ? How 

do conventions of coding arise? Who has the right to judge what is ‘the right way’? 

As these are complex queries, let me begin from the opposite end and ask: 

what is the purpose of skillful mimesis in a social science monograph? The 

common (academic) sense answer is: in the case of field material, to make readers 

feel as if they were there, in the field; in case of a literature review, to make readers 

feel as if they read the literature themselves. How to achieve these effects, if facts 

refuse to speak for themselves and a truly faithful rendering of somebody else’s 

text is plagiarism? There can be no normative answer to this question, only 

descriptive: I can tell the readers how authors try to achieve this effect. 

Words cannot be compared to non-words, only to other words.This means 

that, as Hayden White (1999) put it, all descriptions of historical objects (and 

social objects are historical) are necessarily figurative. In order to evoke in readers 

an image of something they have not seen, this image must be connected 

to something they have already seen, and tropes – figures of speech – are the 

linguistic means to achieve just this effect.The word metaphor which, in Greek, 

means a transport from one place to another, means exactly that in authorial 

practice: the reader is moved from ‘here’ to ‘there’, be it another physical setting 

or another book.Also, not for nothing are tropes figures of speech: they are 

the means to visualize,‘to paint with words’. 

White speaks of ‘figural realism’ which, as I read it, is identical to what 

Richard H. Brown called ‘symbolic realism’ (1977), with one important difference.While 

Brown considered symbolic realism as a kind of realism, counterpoised 

to, for example, scientific realism, White points out that all realism is 

necessarily symbolic – that is, figurative. Realism differs from other literary 

styles by the preference for certain tropes and not others (understatement 

rather than overstatement, to take an obvious example). Nevertheless, the question 

still remains: how to produce a realistic representation? 

The setting 


While mimesis is a task to be fulfilled throughout the thesis, it is in the description 

of the setting that it comes to the fore. Unfortunately, the setting description

WRITING SOCIAL SCIENCE 119 

tends to be the least attractive part of all theses, which pick up the pace when 

it comes to presentation of what has happened, rather than at the stage when 

it must be said ‘what it looked like’. It seems that many authors become excessively 

conscious of a referential contract:‘I am writing to instruct, not to entertain, 

and you can go and check that my description is correct, if you wish.’ The 

problem is, as all educators know, that the ‘fictional’ and the ‘referential’ contracts 

are never separate; they only take on a different priority in different texts. 

In other words, it is difficult, if not impossible, to instruct without pleasing, or 

entertaining, or moving, the readers. 

The setting, as the term indicates, describes the context of the phenomenon 

under scrutiny – in spatiotemporal terms. A literary context is other theories 

of the same or of similar phenomena, and it is important to locate them in their 

proper time and place.There are no universal theories; there are only theories 

with universalistic claims.They all come from a certain place at a certain time – see 

my attempts to contextualize Bittner’s text in Chapter 5. Common malpractices 

are disregarding the date of the original publication (so that the writings 

of Max Weber seem to be under the influence of the lessons he has learned 

from, let’s say, James G. March and Herbert Simon), or the implicit assumption 

that the insights ‘made in the USA’ are valid all over the world. Each text, even 

that of a classic, is like a letter – written in response to another text and with 

a hope of provoking an answer. It is not always easy to uncover the network of 

correspondents but acknowledgments and introductions are a good place to 

look for the clues.Also, sometimes a de-contextualization is an enriching move, 

but it must be preceded by a contextualization. 

These difficulties do not abate when it comes to a description of the setting 

of a field study. Even here the context is both spatial and temporal. Although 

the two can be presented jointly, as they are two aspects of the same description, 

I shall separate them for explication’s sake. 

In both cases, there are two alternative strategies, which in the case of temporal 

description can be called ‘feedforward’ and ‘feedback’. In the event of a 

feedforward strategy, a history of the phenomenon is presented (‘the story so 

far’). Sometimes a mere chronicle will do; if a complete history (written by 

somebody else) is quoted, it is important to pay attention to the work of 

emplotment so as not to buy a ready-made plot.The choice of the beginning 

is very important, as explained in Chapter 2. 

The choice of a feedback strategy means that the emphasis is on the description 

of ‘here and now’.The narrative reverses in time in a selective fashion – 

only that which will have relevance for the future plot needs to be included. 

Such selectivity is more difficult in a forward movement where a chronicle 

needs to be somewhat complete in order to be understandable, although the 

relevance is always pertinent. 

The two analogous strategies in describing the spatial dimension can be 

called, in photographic terms,‘zooming in’ and ‘zooming out’.The first move 

is from space to place: from describing a large context (a country, an industry,

120 

a global economy) to the concrete field under study, or even a site (‘a school 

in a suburb of a big city’).The second move performs an opposite operation: 

from a detailed description of a concrete place, it telescopes (again, selectively) 

to the whole world if the need be. 

Paul Atkinson, in his The Ethnographic Imagination (1990), gives many examples 

of the ethnographers’ descriptions of their settings, and calls attention to a 

rhetorical figure called hypothyposis: ‘the use of a highly graphic passage of 

descriptive writing, which portrays a scene or action in a vivid and arresting 

manner’ (p. 71). In this way, he claims, an author establishes a narrative contract 

with a reader of a type I would call a hybrid of fictional and referential contracts:‘suspend 

your disbelief, and let me instruct you!’ 

One impressive way of combining all the four moves and thus creating an 

incentive – nay, an urge – to read further is Mike Davis’ Prologue to his City 

of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990).Appropriately titled ‘The 

view from futures past’, it begins in a zoom-in, feedback mode.The author – 

or anybody in his place – is standing ‘on the ruins of [Los Angeles’] alternative 

future … the foundations of the General Assembly Hall of the Socialist 

city of Llano del Rio – Open Shop Los Angeles’s utopian antipode…’ (p. 3). 

Standing there, one can see the whole of Los Angeles County and look into 

the past.While the lens of the camera zooms out, the time goes back to 1914 – 

because this is when the story of the Llano utopia starts.The place determines 

the beginning of the story. Now the time starts moving forward, arriving at 

1990, when infamous city violence put the final end to the myth of a ‘desert 

sanctuary’. 

But this forward move traces only one history – that of the settlers and their 

dreams.The time machine goes back again to the same point and goes forward 

once more, following the trail of politicians, planners, and developers. At this 

point the focus changes to ‘here and now’, now properly contextualized. It is 

time for a hypothyposis: 

On May Day 1990 … I returned to the ruins of Llano del Rio to see if the walls would 

talk to me. Instead I found the Socialist City reinhabited by two twenty-year-old building 

laborers from El Salvador, camped out in the ruins of the old dairy and eager to 

talk to me in our mutually broken tongues. (1990: 12) 

The stage is set: the readers know that the action will take place in Los Angeles 

County in 1990, against the background of another place – a Utopia that never 

came into existence – and another time (the period 1914–90). Now, who will 

tell the story? 

Voices 


While choosing the descriptive devices and strategies is a matter of skill or art, 

this other problem is more political in character. As the map must not be the


same as the territory, it is necessary to silence some of the voices that form the 

polyphony of the world and to give some more space than others. 

Here the parallel between dealing with a field of theory and a field of practice 

is very clear. The problem is common: whom to include, whom to 

exclude, and who deserves which type of attention? In the field of theory we 

have a set of conventions to aid the writer, and a set of practices, more or less 

recommendable. 6 

In brief, there are two main ways of dealing with other authors’ texts. One 

is exegetic – that is, aiming at an explanation or a critical interpretation of a text. 

In this mode the other author’s text is focused on: as a model or as an object 

of criticism.The main thing is then to re-present the other text as well as possible 

(that is, choosing appropriate tropes to connect the monograph to the text 

it analyzes) and then take a stance: admiring, apologetic, critical, a ‘step beyond’. 

The other, much more common in practice but rarely mentioned in prudish 

how-to-write-science books, is an inspired mode (Rorty, 1992, contrasts it with 

‘methodical’ reading), very close to de Certeau’s (1984/1988) idea of reading as 

poaching. In this mode, the other’s text is re-contextualized for the purposes of 

the monograph. The author borrows (acknowledging the loan) notions and 

terms coined by others to use them in the context of the monograph. 

The observation that the inspired mode of using other people’s texts is more 

frequent than the exegetic is not a proof of lax customs in academe: unless exegesis 

is the topic of a monograph, the inspired mode is much more relevant to 

the task at hand. 

What, however, about the field of practice, with its infinite multiplicity of 

voices and vocabularies, structured by power relations that include the social 

science writer? 7 The difficulty of representing the multiple voices in field studies 

8 was perhaps most sharply focused on in anthropology.After decades of allknowing 

anthropological texts that explained the ‘native ways of being’ to the 

‘more developed civilization’, a wave of political and ethical doubts pervaded 

the discipline (best summarized in the volumes edited by Clifford and Marcus, 

1986, and Marcus and Fischer, 1986). Many contributors to these volumes 

opted for a different, polyphonic ethnography, in which people could speak in 

their own voices, which led to much discussion about whether it was in fact 

possible. 

It is worth recalling that these anthropologists took inspiration from Mikhail 

Bakhtin (1981), who had in mind not a polyphony in which many people are 

speaking but something called heteroglossia or ‘variegated speech’. This is an 

authorial strategy consisting of the fact that the author speaks different languages 

(dialects, slangs, etc.) in the text. There is no need for the illusion that ‘these 

people’ talk for themselves; indeed they do not. No reader suspects that the 

four narrators in Iain Pears’ novel (see Chapter 5) are speaking ‘themselves’. But 

the author pays them a compliment by making the reader clearly aware of the 

fact that different languages, dialects, idiolects (personal languages) are being 

spoken within one and the same linguistic tradition.

122 


From this perspective it is easier to approach a suggestion coming from the 

sociology of science and technology: of meeting the duty of representation by 

giving voice even to non-humans (Woolgar, 1988; Latour, 1992). Latour (1996) 

put this suggestion into practice in his study I discuss at more length in the 

next section, where ‘Aramis’ (an automated train system) got a voice of his (?) 

own.At a certain point in this story, Master and Pupil (who study Aramis’‘life’) 

have a heated exchange on the sensibility of such a move:‘Do you think I don’t 

know,’ barks the Master at the doubting Pupil,‘that giving Aramis a voice is but 

an anthropomorphization, creating a puppet with a voice?’ (p. 59). 

Thus social science ends up with a staged conversation in which the goal of 

political representation must live side by side with the awareness that we are 

performing an act of ventriloquism. This amounts to giving up the ambition 

of speaking on behalf of the Other in any literal sense, the ambition to be ‘a 

tribune for the unheard, a representer of the unseen, a kenner of the misconstrued’ 

(Geertz, 1988: 133). But the fictiveness of this polyphony, once revealed, 

relieves social scientists from the criticism of silencing the voices. Social scientists 

do most harm when they impose their interpretations on what they claim 

are ‘authentic voices from the field’. If rendering these voices is the purpose, 

the way to go about it is to quit social science (silence one’s own voice) and to 

engage in the political activity of creating speaking platforms for those who are 

not heard. 

Mimesis is therefore not an easy matter but not the last problem to tackle 

when writing a monograph. It lies in the rhetorical tradition to differentiate 

between mimesis (a description) and emplotment (an arrangement). But this 

differentiation makes only an analytical sense: it is obvious that each description 

must be arranged. This arrangement can be coherent with the arrangement 

of the whole text, or incoherent with it. In other words, mimesis can 

corroborate the plot or oppose it. Although it is possible to think of a mimesis 

opposing the plot and therefore contributing to some kind of a meta-plot, 

it is safe to assume that, in a social science monograph, an attempt at coherence 

is still a virtue. Additionally, as I have pointed out in Chapter 6, the mode of 

description justifies the plot (princes do not marry dirty princesses). I will suggest 

further that description should be subordinated to the requirements of the 

plot, not least in its volume: the descriptive material that is not needed in this 

function can be saved in an appendix. From all this it is obvious that, in my 

view, emplotment is the crucial part of writing a social science monograph – 

and the most difficult. 

Plot, or how to theorize 

Emplotment (a term introduced by Hayden White, 1973, who ventured to say 

that historians do not find plot in history but put it in themselves) means introducing 

structure that allows making sense of the events reported.Traditionally,

it responds to a question:‘why?’ – where, in a positivist view, the answer should 

be formulated in terms of causal laws; in a romantic view, in terms of motives; 

in post-positivist, post-romantic discourse (Brown, 1989), it assumes the form 

of showing ‘how come?’ where laws of nature, human intentions and random 

events form a hybrid mixture. 

Inherited structures 

The easiest way of introducing a structure is by means of chronology, or what 

Mandler Matter called a temporal connection (Chapter 6). Still, there are several 

types of chronologies that might be used. Let us look at a classic form of 

a thesis (a formal oration in Greek rhetoric): 

1 Exordium: catches the audience’s interest while introducing the subject. 

2 Narration: sets forth the facts. 

3 Proposition (or Division): sets forth points stipulated and points to be 

contested (states the case). 

4 Proof: sets forth the arguments in support of the case. 

5 Refutation: refutes opponents’ arguments. 

6 Peroration: sums up arguments and stirs audience. (Lanham, 1991) 

This is an interesting example of how a meaningful structure becomes 

mechanical and a theory becomes pure chronology. The structure looks as it 

does because it was considered to work best (in the sense of doing persuasion 

work); in time, however, it became simply a chronology of a speech. I am quoting 

it partly to show how close it is to what is considered a conventional structure 

of a thesis, but also how meaningful persuasive devices can become 

mechanical by the fact that they are often repeated. 

The following is a traditional structure of a thesis, shared by an article and a 

monograph alike (although an article has to cramp it into a much shorter space 

and the reader has to ‘unstuff ’ it, like a big file that arrives ‘zipped’): 

1 Problem/Issue/Aims (Exordium) 

2 Literature Review 

3 Hypotheses (Proposition) 

4 Method 

5 Results (Narration) 

6 Discussion (Proof) 

7 Conclusion (Peroration) 


The similarity is obvious, and it is no coincidence: the structure of a thesis has 

developed from the structure of an oration. But a thesis, in Ricoeur’s terms, is 

a written, not a spoken discourse (the traditional structure is worth remembering

124 

when preparing an overhead presentation of a thesis!). A contemporary thesis 

is grounded in forensic rhetoric but has some addition of a deliberative 

rhetoric: thus a ‘Literature Review’.What was written before is important in 

another way than previous precedents are important in court.The truly modern 

addition is the ‘Method’: positivism’s contribution to classical rhetoric. 

Not all monographs comply with this structure. It can be called a structure of 

a deductive thesis. An inductive thesis, let us say a thesis written in the spirit of 

the grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), might look as follows: 

1 There is something strange going on in the world... (Exordium). 

2 Has somebody else explained it? (Literature review). If not: 

3 I’d better go and learn more about it. But how? (Method). 

4 Now that I have understood it, I will try to explain it to others. So, let 

me tell you a story ... (Narration). 

5 Now, what does it remind me of? Is there somebody else who thinks 

similarly? (Proof). 

6 This is the end (and the point) of my story (Peroration). 

Clearly another variation of both classical oration plus the modern addenda. 

Like their classical predecessors, these structures hope for the persuasion effect. 

Like their classical predecessors, however, they also follow chronology – not of 

the oration, but of research itself. 

This kind of temporal structuring produces as many problems as it solves. 

First of all, novices in the craft of research (Booth et al., 1995) often suffer from 

its insincerity. It is well known that research seldom goes as planned.What to 

do? Report all moves back and forth, hesitations, and mistakes? This can be 

turned into an art, but most often it is not. Lie, therefore, and suffer? 

This problem (fact or fiction of research?) is nevertheless secondary. The 

main question is still the classic one: will it persuade? And although it is not a 

question that can ever be answered once and for all, the suggestion can be 

made that this kind of mechanical structuring is usually inferior to a successful 

emplotment.What is, then, a successful emplotment? I suggest that plot can 

be fruitfully considered to be the work’s theory, which can then serve to structure 

a monograph substantially rather than formally. 

Plots 


Aristotle already differentiated between a simple story (‘a narrative of events 

arranged in their time sequence’) and a plot that arranges them according to a 

sense of causality (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1989: 523). 

As mentioned in Chapter 1, Donald Polkinghorne (1987) dedicated much 

attention to the role of the plot and its possible uses in the human sciences: 

‘The plot functions to transform a chronicle or listing of events into a schematic


whole by highlighting and recognizing the contribution that certain events 

make to the development of the whole’ (pp. 18–19). But not only that: a plot 

can weave into the story the historical and social context, information about 

physical laws, and thoughts and feelings reported by people. ‘A plot has the 

capacity to articulate and consolidate complex threads of multiple activities by 

means of the overlay of subplots’ (p. 19).This is an important property from the 

point of view of social scientists, faced often with the fact that, as many things 

happen simultaneously, a simple chronology is not sufficient to tell a story. 

Consequently, most social science texts – but also novels, for that matter – 

contain more than one plot, which must be connected to one another. Such a 

combination of plots is usually achieved, says Todorov (1971/1977), by one of 

two strategies: linking (coordination), i.e. adding simple plots to one another so 

they fit, and embedding (subordination), i.e. setting one plot inside the other. 

One can add, after Hayden White (1973), that, like a historian, a social scientist 

confronts ‘a veritable chaos of events already constituted, out of which he 

must choose the elements of the story he would tell’ (p. 6, footnote 5). Thus 

the necessity for two additional tactics: exclusion and emphasis (also, embedding 

can serve both combination and selection). Outcome-embedded stories have 

plots subordinated to one another in a sequence (the outcome of one episode 

determines the plot of the next), whereas the ending-embedded stories have 

all plots subordinated to the one that is revealed at the end (Mandler, 1984). 

Temporal connections are not enough: a narrative whose elements are connected 

by succession only (‘It rained on Monday, I bought a car on Tuesday’), is 

not a story. To become a plotted story, the elements, or episodes, need also to 

be related by transformation (Todorov, 1978/1990). This can be achieved by 

adding a third episode (‘I have had enough of for ever getting wet when biking’).The 

episodes are still sequential but chronology now also stands for causality.An 

emplotted narrative thus involves not only a syntagmatic dimension but 

also a paradigmatic one: actions and events are not only connected but also 

transformed (substituted). Adding new elements is an exercise in mimesis; it 

does not make a narrative into a story. This is the meaning of the traditional 

criticism of scientific texts that are ‘only descriptive’. Theory is the plot of a 

thesis. 

Marie-Laure Ryan (1993; see Chapter 1) made a useful list of steps to be 

taken in the work of emplotment: 

• Constructing characters (which, in social science texts, are often non-human: an 

economic decline, growing unemployment, a new computer technology). 

• Attributing functions to single events and actions. 

• Finding an interpretative theme. 

The chronology of this list is somewhat convoluted: while an interpretative 

theme is found via construction of characters and attributing functions to 

events and actions, once found it rules over the other two. In other words, an

126 

interpretative theme emerges while the writer is trying out characters and 

functions but, once it has been decided upon, the text needs a tighter adjustment: 

thus the saying that, after having written the last chapter, one has to go 

back and rewrite the rest. 

As I said before, there is a tendency in social science texts, not only in economics, 

for ending-embedded plots. All the text is supposed to be geared 

toward ‘the conclusions’. Yet there is a possibility that the outcome of one 

episode will change the structure – of the next episode or of the whole text. 

The writer might admit to the readers that the first hypothesis had not worked 

and that the whole study had to change accordingly. In the next section I shall 

quote an example of such a complex and unexpected plot. 

A story rich in plots 


I shall now examine a monograph that contains several plots, uses both temporal 

connections (sequentiality) and causal connections (both causality and 

intentionality), and joins succession and transformation. It has three main characters 

– Aramis, the Master, and his Pupil – and its interpretative theme (a thesis 

of a thesis) is that when humans fail to love machines properly, the machines 

die. All the events and actions are subordinated to this theme. 

Aramis or the Love of Technology (Latour, 1996) is a story of an automated 

train system that was tried in Paris and then abandoned. It begins, innocently 

enough, as a combination of two classic plots, one a detective story (who 

killed Aramis?) and the other a Bildungsroman, a story of a pupil learning from 

the master.The first plot depends for its pull on curiosity – the readers know 

the effects, Aramis is dead and buried in the Museum of Technology, and the 

cause is looked for – who did it? The second plot, embedded in the first, 

depends on the push of (mild) suspense: given Pupil’s hunger for knowledge 

and Master’s abundance of it, the readers might fairly surely expect an enlightened 

Pupil in the end, but they may count on various complications in his 

way. 

Complications, when they arrive, are not of the manageable kind that is the 

stuff of fairytales.The obstacles stand in the way, not only of the heroes or their 

action programs but also of the plots. The main plot, that of detecting those 

guilty of killing an innovation, proves to be unfeasible.At a certain point there 

are twenty contradictory interpretations offered for the demise of the Aramis 

project (Latour himself counts them elsewhere), all of them correct. Just before 

the final report has to be produced, the Master vanishes, not because the Pupil 

has to learn autonomy but because the Master has more important things to 

think about. 

What was a detective story turns into a tragic love story.Aramis has not been 

killed; it is just that nobody loved him enough to keep him alive. His less attractive

ival, the metro system VAL, is loved and lives happily in Lille; a new Aramis is 

being born in San Diego – will it live? 

The Bildungsroman turns into its opposite, a tormented inner journey of the 

Master into self-reflection, doubt, and fear.The Pupil gets his grade and tries 

to ignore the ramblings of his former Master, whose excessive reflection makes 

him turn against the sacred values of science. Hardly a conventional ending for 

a social science study. 

The device of changing horses in the middle of the river (that is, transforming 

the main plots of the story) is a tricky business. One danger is obvious: 

the author might drown. Aramis, Master, and their author survive the 

journey very well, but it does take a masterly driver.Another danger is with the 

readers: they may not like the play of plots as demonstrated in Bronwyn 

Davies’ study (1989; see Chapter 6). Readers might resort to murder in order 

to save ‘their’ plots, at least symbolically. 

Latour saved himself by doing a revolutionary transformation of plots but 

landing with another set of recognizable and legitimate plots. His text assumes 

a reader well familiar with all the variety of plots in both fiction and sociology. 

Such tricks may well be lost on some readers, but the main trick – emplotment – 

is exemplary even if not easily imitated. 

How can this emplotment be characterized? The text is coherent (actions 

and events have functions consistent with its interpretative scheme). At no 

point does the reader need to ask him or herself:‘Why does he tell me this?’ It 

has a basic plot structure and then plays around it: by complicating it, by introducing 

subplots and counter-plots. In other words, a rich plot equals a well 

thought-out theory, which in social science monographs, unlike in novels, is 

explicitly articulated (at the end or at the beginning). 

Does this mean that the conventional structure needs to be abandoned? Not 

necessarily. My plea is that writers understand the purpose of the conventional 

structure and cease to treat it mechanically. Once understood, it can be followed, 

abandoned, or circumvented: it may become a frame within which a 

well plotted story is inserted. 

A simple plot that works 


While Latour’s text is a monograph reporting a field study, the other text I 

chose as an exemplar is usually classified as an essay in the history of ideas. 

This is Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests (1977/1997). But 

it could be claimed that it is also a field study – a monograph in the history 

of economic thought. I perceive such blurring of genres as very fruitful: 

indeed, from the point of view of crafting the research text, there is no 

crucial difference between a field of practice and a field of theory, when the 

latter is considered a practice. An enunciation by a French engineer in

128 


Latour’s story can be analyzed in the same way as one by Montesquieu in 

Hirschman’s. 

Hirschman’s book proposes a striking thesis (interpretative scheme) which it 

then proves: contrary to most contemporary thinking, ‘interests’ are not the 

opposite of ‘passions’. Self-interest, that founding stone of capitalism, was 

chosen as the least wicked passion, able to curb others. His characters are 

basically schools of thought, represented by, but not identical to, their spokesmen 

(no woman among them), famous writers. 

The structure of the book is simplicity itself. It contains three parts: (1) How 

the Interests were Called Upon to Counteract the Passions; (2) How Economic 

Expansion was Expected to Improve the Political Order; and (3) Reflections 

on Episode in Intellectual History (observe how the titles practically tell the 

story). 

The first part is located in the Renaissance, as the epoch characterized by a 

new turn in the theory of the state. It had been felt that religion was no longer 

capable of restraining the destructive passions of human beings. Three alternatives 

have been considered: coercion and repression, education (socialization, 

indoctrination), and fighting passions with passions. Hirschman examines 

various circumstances that helped to establish the dominance of the last alternative 

in the seventeenth century. Machiavelli is an important source in this 

context. The attention moves to defining a passion that would have such a 

benevolent effect, with the well-known result that ‘One set of passions, hitherto 

known variously as greed, avarice, or love of lucre, could be usefully 

employed to oppose and bridle such other passions as ambition, lust for power, 

or sexual lust’ (Hirschman, 1977/1997: 41). 

The second part explains why this thesis attracted so little attention in 

political sciences and economic thought of later ages. Hirschman shows that 

while Montesquieu in France, for example, developed the thought that economic 

pursuits will improve political governance, Adam Smith disconnected 

the two, giving an economic, no longer political, justification to the pursuit of 

self-interest. In his view, ‘politics is the province of the “folly of men” while 

economic progress, like Candide’s garden, can be cultivated with success provided 

such folly does not exceed some fairly ample and flexible limits’ 

(1977/1997: 104). 

In the third part, Hirschman briefly takes up the developments in economic 

and political thought that followed (he then extended his analysis to the 

nineteenth and twentieth centuries in his Rival Views of Market Society, 1992). 

He shows how different are the present views of market and economy from 

those that are claimed to be their antecedents. His reflection concerns, most of 

all, a phenomenon rarely focused by other scholars: the intended but unrealized 

effects of ideas and decisions.

WRITING SOCIAL SCIENCE 

129 

Several aspects of Hirschman’s way of emplotment can be brought to 

light.To begin with, although chronology is obviously an element in a historical 

essay, it does not have a structuring function here.The essay is structured 

by an outcome-bounded causality: the first part presents the first 

episode in political thought, which is the basis of the second episode. The 

second episode, however, changes the outcome and therefore the future 

plot.The second episode ends up in a transformation: what started as a way 

of solving a political problem ended by being a justification for the autonomy 

of economy.The third part makes this transformation obvious and ironic:‘In 

sum, capitalism was supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon to be 

denounced as its worst feature’ (p. 132). 

How are the two first parts composed internally, if not sequentially? As 

Hirschman says himself, in the first part he puts his thesis together in ‘the laborious 

way … from bits and pieces of intellectual evidence’ (p. 69). Once it has 

been assembled, he sets it against various later schools of thought in the second 

part, to look for its traces.The plot tends toward Satire. 

There are several reasons for my choosing Hirschman’s book as an example 

here. The most obvious is that Hirschman is a superb writer (an expression 

used by Amarthya Sen in a preface to the 1997 edition), and all his books can 

be recommended as models for aspiring social scientists.The second reason is 

that Hirschman is truly a social scientist – while practically all disciplines claim 

his belongingness, he himself does not see much reason to observe disciplinary 

borders.Thirdly, Passions and Interests reacquired an uncanny relevance in times 

when it has become painfully clear that greed does not harness violence.After 

coercion and indoctrination failed as well, are there any alternatives left? Are 

there any new ones emerging? Hirschman’s text is important because of its 

contents and because of its form. Paying attention to the latter will only 

enhance the former. 

While the readers of this book might not be aiming at the stylistic heights 

of Hirschman and Latour (although why not?), my hope is to persuade them 

to develop a habit of semiotic reading. After having admired a scientific text 

for what it says, it is useful to ask how it says it.When habitual, such reflection 

may pay off generously in one’s own work. 

Social science texts, as a family of subgenres, might thus make skillful use of 

narratives (although not only); it might also use the insights of literary theory as 

help in self-reflection. This can ease the escape from the inherited image of 

social science as a (still) defective natural science. I do not suggest that it should 

become a fiction instead. I argue for a conscious and reflective creation of a family 

of genres which recognizes its tradition without being paralyzed by it, which 

seeks inspiration in other genres without imitating them, and which derives 

confidence from the importance of its topic and from its own growing skills.

130 

Exercise 9.1: write your thesis! 


EXERCISE 

Atkinson, Paul (1990) The Ethnographic Imagination. Textual 

Construction of Reality. London: Routledge. 

Booth, Wayne C., Colomb, Gregory G., and Williams, Joseph M. (1995) 

The Craft of Research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 

Golden-Biddle, Karen, and Locke, Karen D. (1997) Composing 

Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 

Hart, Chris (1998) Doing a Literature Review. Releasing the Social 

Science Research Imagination. London: Sage. 

Van Maanen, John (1988) Tales of the Field. On Writing Ethnography. 

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 

Notes 


1 This chapter is partly based on my ‘Writing a social science monograph’, in Clive 

Seale, et al. (eds) Qualitative Research Practice (Czarniawska, 2003c). 

2 There exist excellent sources that treat them separately: Becker (1986), Clifford and 

Marcus (1986), Hart (1998). 

3 In his ‘Del rigor en la ciencia’ (Historia universal de la infamia, 1935/1967) Borges 

tells a story of cartographers who created a map that was identical to the empire it 

represented.The next generation threw away the map and forgot cartography. 

4 Three volumes that are especially recommended to an interested reader are Levine 

(1993), R.H. Brown (1995),Van Maanen (1995). 

5 This is also relevant for pictorial representations of the world. 

6 I review these in A Narrative Approach to Organization Studies (1998). 

7 I am not suggesting that the field of theory isn’t politically structured, but it is usually 

easier to grasp its structure and choose one’s strategy (joining the mainstream, 

joining the avant-garde, opposing the mainstream, etc.). 

8 I develop this theme in Narrating the Organization (1997) and in Writing Management 

(1999).

10 

Narrativizing Social Sciences 

The dangerous stories from the field 131 

The worrisome stories of the field 132 

The hopeful narratives 134 

Notes 137 

The social sciences are talking sciences, and achieve in texts, not elsewhere, the observability 

and practical objectivity of their phenomena.This is done in literary enterprises 

through the arts of reading and writing texts, … and by ‘shoving words around’. 

(Garfinkel et al., 1981: 133) 

Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston should know: they have watched laboratory 

science long enough to see how it differs from the social sciences – and 

how it is similar, too. But not everybody is so matter of fact in the question of 

‘talking sciences’. Although the attraction of narrative devices seems to be 

growing among social scientists, there are plenty of qualms about their use. Let 

me review some of the most common. 

The dangerous stories from the field 

One of the common worries, even among authors devoted to a narrative 

approach, is the status of narrative material collected in the field.‘Facts, fictions, 

and fantasies’ runs the subtitle of Gabriel’s book on organizational storytelling, 

and he warns his readers, potential story collectors, of the danger 

of allowing our current fascination with text and narrative to occlude deeper issues 

of justice, politics, and human suffering … Treating a story simply as text, disregarding 

the extent to which it deviates from or distorts facts and ignoring the effort and 

ingenuity that it demands, does grave injustice to story and storyteller alike. (Gabriel, 

2000: 241)

132 


There are several worries in this warning and I will try to unpack them one 

by one.The first is that fictive stories do not inform the readers of the state of 

the world.This criticism becomes especially relevant in the face of the fact that 

many promoters of a narrative approach point out that there exist a great variety 

of fictive narratives about various fields of practice (Waldo, 1968; Coser, 

1963/1972; Czarniawska-Joerges and Guillet de Monthoux, 1994). The critique 

of fiction in scientific work is often grounded in a confusion of two ways 

of understanding fiction: as that which does not exist and that which is not true 

(Lamarque, 1990). If we separate these two, it becomes obvious that Kafka’s 

Castle did not exist, and yet everything that was said about it may be true in 

the sense that it appears as insightful and credible in light of other texts on the 

absurdities of impersonal bureaucracy. 

But Gabriel’s (2000) worry concerns the impossibility of telling facts from 

fictions in stories from the field. He agrees that fictive stories are interesting and 

worth analyzing, but he is afraid that they will be taken for facts. Indeed, it has 

been pointed out that there are no structural differences between fictional and 

factual narratives (Veyne, 1988; see Chapter 1). How can a field researcher 

know which is which? 

A social science researcher knows that facts are fabricated (Latour, 1993b; 

Knorr Cetina, 1994) and wishes to know how they are fabricated. It is therefore 

up to the researcher to check the production certificate (by many a well-known 

method, like comparing stories, checking written documents, doing source 

analysis, etc.) or else take part in the production – that is, making this checking 

process part of the research results. ‘Buying tall tales’ is not a requirement 

of a narrative approach. 

Yet another possibility is that of shifting the focus from ‘what does a text 

say?’ to ‘what does a text do?’ (‘how does a text say what it says?’), thus eliminating 

the question: fact or fiction? But such ‘treating a story simply as a text’ 

seems to Gabriel to do injustice to the story and to the storyteller – that is, to 

the social world. This danger is hard to understand, however. Looking for 

‘worlds in texts’ is not an expression of disinterest in justice, politics, and human 

suffering; it is founded in the ideas shared by ethnomethodologists and poststructuralists 

that texts are part of the world and need to be analyzed as such. 

One may think that text analysis is a good way of approaching the world or 

not, but it must not be mistaken for indifference toward the world. 

The worrisome stories of the field 

But worries about the status of the narrative material are relatively small compared 

to the worries about a ‘narrativized’ social science. Does anything go in 

social science writing? 

The first worry reflects the one formulated above, except that this time it 

concerns ‘the stories of the field’. How does one know whether a research

NARRATIVIZING SOCIAL SCIENCES 133 

report is ‘true’ if it openly admits to a use of narrative devices, of employing 

metaphors and concocting stories? 

To argue … that the writing of ethnography involves telling stories, making pictures, 

concocting symbolisms, and deploying tropes is commonly resisted, often fiercely, 

because of a confusion, endemic in the West since Plato at least, of the imagined with 

the imaginary, the fictional with the false, making things out with making them up. 

(Geertz, 1988: 140) 

Traditionally, a social science text was expected to demonstrate its ‘validity’ 

(that is, its correspondence to the world) and ‘reliability’ (the guarantee that the 

same method will bring the same results). Alas, the correspondence theory of 

truth is untenable because the only things with which we can compare statements 

are other statements (Rorty, 1980). Whether one claims to speak of a 

reality or a fantasy, the value of utterances cannot be established by comparing 

them to their object but only by comparing them to other utterances.Words 

cannot be compared to worlds, and a look into actual validation practices 

reveals that they always consist in checking texts against other texts. 

It could be argued that the same observation shows that there exists reliability 

understood as replication. From the perspective held here, however, it 

could be claimed that results are repeated not because the correct method has 

repeatedly been applied to the same object of study but because institutionalized 

research practices tend to produce similar results. One can go even further 

and claim that results are as much part of practice as methods are. It is perhaps 

more accurate to speak of ‘conformity’ rather than reliability; it is not the results 

that are reliable but the researchers – who are conforming to dominant rules. 

Dissatisfaction with positivist criteria for ‘good scientific texts’ and a wish for 

alternative guidelines led to a search for a new set of criteria – within the 

interpretive tradition.Thus Guba (1981) spoke of ‘trustworthiness’ of naturalist 

studies (composed of truth value, applicability, consistency, and neutrality); 

Fisher (1987) spoke of ‘narrative probability’ (coherence) and ‘narrative fidelity’ 

(truth value), constituting ‘narrative rationality’; while Golden-Biddle and 

Locke (1993) suggested authenticity, plausibility, and criticality as the ways in 

which ethnographic texts convince their audiences. Unfortunately, like the 

positivist criteria they criticize, these are again ostensive criteria of a text’s success 

(i.e. the attributes of a text that can be demonstrated and therefore applied a 

priori to determine a text’s success). 

Reader-response theory has counteracted such objectivist reading theories 

(Iser, 1978) but, in turn, it subjectivized the act of reading, neglecting the institutional 

effect.Yet there is a limited repertoire of texts and responses at any given 

time and place, there are more and less legitimate responses, and there is fashion 

as a selection mechanism.The pragmatist theory of reading to which I am committed 

(Rorty, 1992) gives preference to performative criteria.These are not rules 

which, when observed by a writer, will guarantee the positive reception of his or 

her work, but descriptions that summarize typical justifications given when a

134 


positive reception occurs. Such descriptions do not concern the text but, rather, 

the responses of the readers as reported in the legitimate vocabulary of the day. 

But the worries do not end. How is the reader to tell that he or she is reading 

social science and not fiction? It is perhaps not by accident that it is another 

anthropologist, Margery Wolf, who worries about ‘how one is to differentiate 

ethnography from fiction, other than in preface, footnotes, and other authorial 

devices’ (1992: 56).What can be said to be specific to social science writing – 

at least in terms of frequent use if not of intrinsic characteristics? Is there any 

‘core’ to this genre? 

As pointed out by McCloskey (1990a), social sciences use the whole tetrad of 

literary devices: facts and metaphors, logic and stories.While the methods of association 

tend toward logic without ever reaching it (one could speak of a ‘logical 

stylization’), the methods of substitution are contained between metaphor and 

analogy. However, in genre analysis, the methods of substitution attract far greater 

attention than the methods of association. One reason could be that the 

eighteenth-century ideal of science landed the social sciences in a country of things, 

where nouns (names) matter most. It has been assumed that, once you get your 

metaphors right, the story will tell itself. If the ‘sociology of verbs’ as postulated by 

John Law (1994) ever takes hold, however, the obscure arrows standing for vague 

connections, as in ‘it causes’,‘it influences’, or ‘it relates to’, will become the focus 

of social science. Causes how? Influences by what means? As Dvora Yanow (1996) 

provocatively asked, ‘How does a policy mean?’ Reflection upon the modes of 

association has yet to be developed in the texts of the social sciences. 

Thus, the danger of social science being taken for literary fiction seems rather 

distant (the known cases were the other way around, that is, works suspected of 

being a fiction presenting themselves as social science, like it was the case with 

Castaneda 1 ). Consequently, the worry that by engaging in literary work, social 

scientists will become literary critics, thus problematizing the legitimacy of their 

own endeavor and/or losing out in competition with literary theorists, is not very 

substantial. This concern is a historical echo of a similar concern voiced when 

social sciences quite unreflectively imitated natural sciences, an imitation that, like 

every process of translation, brought about some very interesting and some less 

interesting results. No scientific discipline is, or has ever been, autarchic, so the 

question is not whether to imitate but whom and how.It is therefore time to consider 

the promises and hopes that a narrative approach, and the rapprochement 

with literature and literary theory it implies, might bring to social sciences. 

The hopeful narratives 

To me, a narrative approach to social sciences opens at least three opportunities.The 

first is the extended use of texts as field material, connected to a variety


of techniques permitting a text analysis. Factual or fictional, texts are the daily 

bread of social scientists, and the traditional preference for fabricating texts 

rather than collecting them might have been partly caused by an uncertainty 

about what to do with them.The typical solution to this problem was to count 

the texts (or anything in them that could be counted), and afterwards proceed 

as usual in social sciences (content analysis is, after all, an early example of the 

use of structuralism in social sciences).While quantification of texts and texts’ 

elements might make perfect sense in many a context, it does not solve 

the problem of interpretation. A ‘counted text’ is a new text that must be 

interpreted. 

Here the question ‘how to imitate’ reappears. I signaled my stance while 

ironizing the ideas of ‘proper deconstruction’ and ‘correctly applied structural 

analysis’. Here is actually the ground for a differentiation between a theory of 

literature and a theory of society.While students of literature must show themselves 

worthy apprentices of such craftsmen as Derrida and Barthes, students of 

society must be able to say something interesting about society. In order to 

accomplish that, they need to move like all other readers, who, in de Certeau’s 

metaphor, ‘move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching 

their way across the fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of 

Egypt to enjoy it themselves’ (1984/1988: 174). Poaching the other field’s 

methods and techniques but setting them to their own use. I do not think that 

there exists anything that must, should, or ought to ‘be done’ to narratives. 

Every reading is an interpretation, and every interpretation is an association: 

tying the text that is interpreted to other texts, other voices, other times and 

places. Much more important than a specific interpretative or analytical technique 

is the result: an interesting recontextualization. 

The second opportunity is creative borrowing of writing itself.‘Hybridizing 

the genre’ would perhaps be a fitting expression: 

To the few wooden tongues developed in academic journals, we should add the many 

genres and styles of narration invented by novelists, journalists, artists, cartoonists, scientists 

and philosophers.The reflexive character of our domain will be recognized in the 

future by the multiplicity of genres, not by the tedious presence of ‘reflexive loops’. 

(Latour, 1988: 173) 

What Margery Wolf said of anthropology could be applied to all social 

sciences. Each of them ‘is a discipline with very permeable borders, picking up 

methodologies, theories, and data from any source whatever that can provide 

the answers to our questions’ (Wolf, 1992: 51). All these ‘loans’ arrive in packages 

typical of the genre from which they have come.Traditionally, however, 

social scientists tended to ignore ‘the form’, insisting that it is the ‘pure contents’ 

that are being tapped. Latour’s advice amounts to suggesting making a 

virtue out of a vice, an art out of an unreflective behavior.

136 


The third opportunity is therefore genre reflection and analysis.The debate 

on what is good and bad writing can be replaced or at least aided by a discussion 

of genres (i.e. institutionalized forms of writing). A genre analysis will reveal 

how institutional classifications are made and will thus render the works of 

science more comprehensible. 

But genre analysis is also a genre construction, an institution building, and 

as such it invites policing attempts: somebody must ‘protect the core’.As genre 

analysis in literature has shown, however, such protective policing leads to the 

suffocation of a genre in the worst case, to nothing in many cases, and to a 

development of a genre in the best case, as happened to the detective story 

(Czarniawska, 1999a). Neither paradoxicality nor conflict weakens a genre; on 

the contrary, they enhance its controlling power.And among the authors who 

operate in the gray zones are innovators: those who rejuvenate and reform the 

genre. 

Achieving an inventory and a description of genres not only allows for 

probabilistic estimates of success but also allows us to understand deviations. 

Every avant-garde, every vibrant fringe, every edifying discourse feeds on the 

mainstream, on normal science, on systematizing discourse. By the same token, 

the ‘canonical tradition’ (MacIntyre, 1988) depends on deviations for its survival, 

and also owes its eventual demise to them. 

In my rendition, the narrative approach to social sciences does not offer a 

‘method’; neither does it have a ‘paradigm’, a set of procedures to check the 

correctness of its results. It gives access to an ample bag of tricks – from traditional 

criticism through formalists to deconstruction – but it steers away from 

the idea that a ‘rigorously’ applied procedure would render ‘testable’ results.The 

use of narrative devices in social sciences should lead to more inspired reading, 

as Rorty (1992) calls it, and an inspired – and inspiring – writing. 

This book, as should be obvious by now, is grounded in a belief that social 

science, in order to matter more in the life of contemporary societies, 2 needs 

to reach readers outside its own circles. While the texts of disciplinary selfreflection 

will remain interesting and relevant for social scientists only (which 

does not mean that they should abandon any literary pretensions – social 

scientists love beautiful texts, too), the bulk of social science needs to be skillfully 

crafted.And the questions – from inside and outside – such as:‘is it valid?’ 

‘is it reliable?’‘is it Science?’ should be replaced by such questions as: is it interesting? 

Is it relevant? Is it beautiful? In other words, I suggest that social scientists 

enter into a double contract with their readers, fictional and referential: 

suspend disbelief, as I intend to please you, but also activate disbelief, as I intend 

to instruct you. I have no doubts that the readers will manage both: after all, 

they are doing it all the time.


Boje, David (2001) Narrative Methods for Organizational and 

Communication Research. London: Sage. 

Brown, Richard Harvey (1998) Toward a Democratic Science. Scientific 

Narration and Civic Communication. New Haven, CT: Yale University 


Czarniawska, Barbara and Gagliardi, Pasquale (eds) (2003) Narratives 

We Organize by. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Flyvbjerg, Bent (2001) Making Social Science Matter: Why Social 

Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again. Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press. 

Gabriel, Yiannis (ed.) (2004) Myths, Stories, and Organizations: 

Premodern Narratives of Our Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Notes 


1 Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan (1968) is a dissertation on the sociology 

of knowledge where Don Juan, the ‘native informant’, introduces Castaneda to 

a system of knowledge alternative to the Western one (and mediated by hallucinogenic 

drugs). 

2 See also Flyvbjerg’s impassionate call for ‘a social science that matters’ (2001).

Glossary 

Actant 

A central notion in Algirdas Greimas’ version of structural analysis. Actant is ‘that 

which accomplishes or undergoes an act’ (Greimas and Courtés, 1982: 5). It has 

been introduced to replace the terms ‘character’ and dramatis persona as it 

applies not only to human beings but also to animals, objects, and concepts. 

Apology (also apologia) 

A speech or a text presenting a defense or a justification (of somebody or something) 

against an actual or potential accusation. For example, it is sometimes 

claimed that social sciences are apologetic about the use of power. It is different 

from eulogy in that it admits the potentiality of a critique. 

Bildungsroman 

A novel describing the protagonist’s formative years, spiritual education, or a quest 

for knowledge. It is about education but its intention is to educate the reader. 

Dramatist analysis 

An analytic scheme proposed by Kenneth Burke (1945/1969) that checks the 

congruence between five aspects of a story: Scene, Act, Agent, Agency, and 

Purpose (the so-called Burke’s Pentad). 

Emplotment (also plotting) 

A term coined by Hegel in his ‘theory of historical emplotment’, popularized by 

Hayden White (1973). Originally used in the context of historical works, it meant 

an introduction of a literary structure into a chronological account, thus turning it 

into a ‘history’. 

Ending-embedded plot 

A story in which the logical connection between various episodes becomes visible 

in the end; the end justifies the structure of the story (see also outcome-embedded 

plot). 

Eulogy (also eulogia) 

A speech or a text filled with praise and commendation for a person or a thing; 

opposite of critique (see also apology). 

Exegesis 

A thorough exposition complete with glosses and explanations. Originally, the critical 

interpretation of a biblical text to discover its intended meaning. 

Formalism 

The term comes from mathematics and denotes a view that mathematics concerns 

manipulation of symbols according to prescribed structural rules. Applied to arts,

GLOSSARY 139 

it is a view that in interactions with works of art, form should be given primacy. This 

view was espoused by a Russian group of literary theorists in the 1920s. 

Hermeneutic circle (also hermeneutic spiral, hermeneutic arc) 

The assumption, in the theory of interpretation, that the unknown can only be comprehended 

via the mediation of what is already known. 

Hermeneutics 

Originally denoting the theory of interpretation of the Scriptures, it is now used 

more generally to signify the philosophy and theory of interpretation. 

Hyperbole 

A rhetorical device consisting in using exaggerated or extravagant terms – for 

emphasis. 

Hypothyposis 

A visually powerful, vivid description. 

Intentio auctoris 

A theory of interpretation that assumes that the purpose of reading is to deduce 

the author’s intentions (originally, God’s intentions in the Scriptures). 

Intentio lectoris 

A theory of interpretation that suggests looking for the reader’s intentions (that is, 

the reader’s reception of a text). 

Intentio operis 

A term coined by Umberto Eco (1992) in opposition to an idea of a ‘unlimited semiosis’ 

– that is, the idea that each text can be interpreted in unlimited numbers of 

ways. While the text says both more and less than its author intended, its readers 

rarely interpret it whimsically or randomly. 

Kairos 

The Greek god of ‘right’ or ‘proper’ time, different from Chronos, who took care of 

‘linear’ time. Kairotic time is punctuated by important events, not by time units; it 

does not ‘pass’ but ‘runs forward’ or ‘stands still’. 

Metonymy 

A rhetorical trope that substitutes cause for effect or effect for cause (where 

causality is sometimes deduced from proximity in space or time), or a proper name 

for one of its qualities or vice versa. 

Mimesis 

Imitation; of another person’s words or actions but also representation of the world 

in poetry, prose, and art. 

Narrative trajectory 

One of the concepts in Algirdas Greimas’ version of structuralist analysis: a logically 

connected chain of narrative programs (changes of state produced by 

actants). 

Outcome-embedded plot 

A story in which the contents of an episode are the consequence of the outcome 

of the previous episode; the structure of the story is contingent on what happens 

in the story (see also end-embedded plot).

140 


Paradigm 

In the context of narrative, the way in which the elements in a narrative can be 

replaced by one another; the mode of substitution (see also syntagm). 

Polyphony 

Many voices speaking in a text (as opposed to monophony, where only the narrator 

has a voice). Close to it is Bakhtin’s (1928/1985) concept of variegated 

speech (heteroglossia) where there are not only many voices but where they also 

speak in different dialects. 

Poststructuralism 

A reaction to, but also a continuation of, structuralism. A deconstructive approach 

to texts, revealing their structure as imposed or constructed, often in spite of the 

author’s declared intentions. 

Reader-response theory 

The theory of interpretation according to which meaning is the product of an interaction 

between a text and a reader (Iser, 1978). Thus, the text or the author does 

not determine the text’s interpretation, but neither are readers free to interpret as 

they wish. The term is close to Eco’s intentio operis, but gives equal importance 

to the text and the reader. 

Semantics 

A theory of meaning; different from semiology/semiotics. 

Semiology; semiotics 

A theory of signs. The first term is often used in the continental context (the term 

was introduced by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure), the second in the 

Anglo-Saxon context (the term was introduced by John Locke and elaborated by 

Charles Peirce). 

Signature 

The visible presence of the author’s voice in a text, or lack of it. Geertz (1988) 

speaks of ‘author-saturated’ (visible signature) and ‘author-evacuated’ (effaced 

signature) texts. 

Structuralism 

A distinctive but varied school of thought in the social and human sciences. It is 

possible to speak about US structuralism (initiated by the linguist, Leonard 

Bloomfield, and popularized by Noam Chomsky) and European structuralism (beginning 

with the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, and continuing with Claude 

Lévi-Strauss, Algirdas Greimas, et al.). It looks for ‘deep structures’ in discourses 

and texts that are supposed to express ‘human nature’, ‘the basic structure of the 

language’, or ‘the character of a society’. 

Synecdoche 

A rhetorical trope that substitutes part for whole, genus for species, or vice versa. 

Syntagm (also syntagma) 

The way the elements in a narrative are connected to each other; the mode of 

association (see also paradigm).

Travelogue 

A text, film, or illustrated lecture about places and people encountered in the 

course of travel. 

Notes 

GLOSSARY 141 

Apart from works quoted directly, this glossary has been compiled with the help of the 

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Encyclopaedia Britannica (1989) Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

Greimas, Algirdas Julien and Courtés, Joseph (1982) Semiotics and Language. An 

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Lanham, Richard A. (1991) A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley, CA: University of 

California Press. 

Oxford English Dictionary, The New Shorter (1993) Oxford: Clarendon Press. 

Sini, Carlo (ed.) (1992) Filosofia (Dizionario). Milan: Jaca Book.

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Author Index 

Abelson, Robert 82, 151 

Agger, Ben 115, 142 

Akins, Kathleen 75, 142 

Apolito, Paolo 33, 142 

Ashmore, Malcolm 114, 115, 142 

Atkinson, Paul 49, 120, 130, 142, 146 

Audi, Robert 141, 142 

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 2, 62, 76, 121, 140, 142 

Barnard, Chester 112–13, 115 

Barthes, Roland 1, 2, 17, 66, 76, 135, 142 

Bartlett, Frederick C. 82, 142 

Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan Niecislaw 2, 96 

Becker, Howard S. 4, 130, 142 

Benedict, Ruth 107 

Berger, Peter 4, 50, 142 

Berman, Marshall 11, 142 

Bittner, Egon 72–4, 119, 142 

Blumer, Herbert 4 

Boje, David 38–40, 42, 46, 137, 142 

Boland, Richard J. Jr 37–8, 45, 142 

Booth, Wayne C. 124, 130, 143 

Borges, Jorge Luis 122, 130 

Bourdieu, Pierre 52, 143 

Brown, Richard H. 2, 10, 14, 16, 32, 61, 

115, 116, 118, 123, 130, 137, 143 

Bruner, Jerome 3, 7–9, 15, 16, 42, 79, 

82, 143 

Bruss, Elisabeth W. 5, 6, 68–9, 143 

Buhr, Regina 37, 147 

Burke, Kenneth 3, 53, 84, 103–4, 

138, 143 

Burrell, Gibson 95, 143 

Calás, Marta B. 61, 112–15, 143 

Cappetti, Carla 115, 143 

Castaneda, Carlos 134, 137, 143 

Chomsky, Naom 2, 140 

Cicourel, Aaron 4 

Clark, Burton R. 36–7, 143 

Clifford, James 115, 121, 130, 143 

Colomb, Gregory G. 130, 143 

Connerton, Paul 33, 46, 52, 143 

Cooren, François 86, 87, 143 

Corvellec, Hervé 23, 143 

Coser, Lewis A. 132, 143 

Courtés, Joseph 79–80, 141, 146 

Culler, Jonathan 84, 143 

Curtis, Ron 3, 143 

Davies, Bronwyn 5, 88–91, 101, 111, 

127, 144 

Davis, Mike 120, 144 

de Certeau, Michel 45, 91, 121, 135, 144 

Defoe, Daniel 109–16 

Denzin, Norman K. 144 

Derrida, Jacques 96, 112, 135, 144 

de Saussure, Ferdinand 2, 76, 140, 145 

DeVault, Marjorie L. 62, 68, 145 

Dewey, John 67 

Eco, Umberto 34–5, 60, 63–4, 67–9, 

73, 75, 138, 139, 145 

Edmondson, Ricca 102, 115, 145 

Edwards, J.A. 50, 145 

Eräsaari, Leena 93–4, 145 

Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 106 

Feldman, Martha 96, 145 

Fineman, Stephen 42, 145 

Fischer, Michael M.J. 121, 149 

Fish, Stanley 68, 145 

Fisher, Walter R. 3, 10–2, 14, 15, 133, 145 

Flanagan, John C. 43–4, 55, 145 

Flyvbjerg, Bent 137, 145 

Foucault, Michel 89, 112–13, 116, 145 

Fournier, Valérie 58, 145 

Frye, Northrop 2, 60, 145 

Fukuyama, Francis 12, 145 

Gabriel, Yiannis 24, 39, 40–3, 46, 50, 

55, 62, 131–2, 137, 145 

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 2, 64–9, 75, 145 

Gagliardi, Pasquale 40, 137, 144 

Garfinkel, Harold 4, 16, 73, 131, 145 

Geertz, Clifford 3, 61, 105–8, 122, 

133, 140, 145, 146 

George, Kenneth M. 33, 149 

Gergen, Kenneth J. 31, 151 

Gherardi, Silvia 95, 146

154 


Gibson, William 70 

Gilbert, G. Nigel 54–5, 149 

Glaser, Barney 124, 146 

Glassner, Barry 50, 149 

Gobo, Giampietro 144, 151 

Goffman, Erving 107 

Golden-Biddle, Karen 130, 133, 146 

Goody, Jack 17, 33, 36, 146 

Graff, Agnieszka 92, 146 

Greimas, Algirdas Julien 66, 79–82, 84, 

87, 101, 138, 140, 141, 146 

Guba, Edwin G. 133, 146 

Gubrium, Jaber F. viii, 49, 51, 59, 144, 

146, 147, 151 

Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre 132, 144 

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 11, 146 

Gusfield, Joseph 102–4, 114, 146 

Gustavsen, Bjørn 11, 146 

Habermas, Jürgen 11, 65–6, 69, 146 

Hammersley, Martyn 49, 146 

Harari, Jose V. 146 

Haraway, Donna 71–2, 87, 146 

Harré, Rom 4, 5, 101, 144, 146 

Hart, Chris 130, 147 

Hayles, Catherine 87, 147 

Helmers, Sabine 37, 147 

Herman, Ellen 115, 147 

Hernadi, Paul 60–75, 147 

Hirschman, Albert O. 127–9, 147 

Holstein, James A. viii, 49, 51, 59, 

146, 147 

Horney, Karen 114 

Iser, Wolfgang 2, 67–8, 75, 133, 

140, 147 

Jakobson, Roman 2, 96, 147 

James, William 67 

Jameson, Fredric 66, 75, 79 

Jauss, Hans Robert 2, 67 

Johnson, Barbara 96, 147 

Johnson, Jeffrey C. 55, 147 

Jones, Jill 4, 151 

Kartvedt, Sindre 70, 147 

Kendall, Gavin 116, 147 

Kilduff, Martin 147 

Klamer, Arjo 147 

Knorr Cetina, Karin 132, 147 

Kostera, Monika 44, 147 

Kranas, Grazyna 46, 144 

Kunda, Gideon 45, 147 

Kundera, Milan 6, 147 

Kvale, Steinar 47–8, 59, 148 

Labov, William 2, 76, 148 

Lamarque, Peter 132, 148 

Lampert, Michelle D. 50, 145 

Landau, Misia 78–9, 81, 102, 148 

Lanham, Richard A. 22, 42, 123, 141, 148 

Lasch, Christopher 114 

Latour, Bruno 4, 52, 79–82, 84, 87, 91, 

102, 122, 126–7, 129, 132, 135, 148 

Law, John 134, 148 

Lejeune, Philippe 61, 148 

Lenoir, Timothy 87, 148 

Levine, George 130, 148, 152 

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 2, 76, 105–6, 140, 148 

Lincoln, Yvonne S. 144 

Linde, Charlotte 31, 148 

Livingston, Eric 131, 145 

Locke, Karen D. 130, 133, 146 

Luckmann, Benita 39, 148 

Luckmann, Thomas 4, 50, 142 

Lyman, Stanford M. 53–4, 151 

Lynch, Michael 131, 145 

Lyotard, Jean-François 6–7, 12–13, 148 

MacIntyre, Alasdair 3, 5, 11, 13–14, 

136, 148 

Malinowski, Bronislaw 106–7 

Mandler, Jean Matter 82–3, 86, 91, 

109, 111, 123, 125, 149 

Mangham, Ian L. 3, 84, 149 

Marcus, George E. 62, 115, 121, 

130, 143, 149 

Martin, Joanne 61, 96–8, 101, 149 

McCloskey, D.N. 3, 40, 102, 108–12, 

116, 134, 149 

McGregor, Douglas 113 

Megill, Allan 102, 116, 149 

Metz, Thomas 151 

Miller, Jody 50, 149 

Mintzberg, Henry 112–15, 149 

Mishler, Elliot G. 51, 59, 61, 76, 86, 149 

Mitchell, W.J.T. 15, 55, 149 

Mulkay, Michael 54–5, 102, 149 

Nagel, Thomas 71, 149 

Narayan, Kirin 33, 149 

Nash, Cristopher 15, 115, 116, 149 

Nelson, John S. 102, 115, 116, 149 

Norris, Christopher 96, 150 

Orr, Julian E. 35, 39–40, 42, 46, 150 

Overington, Michael A. 3, 84, 149, 150 

Pears, Iain 62, 121, 150 

Peirce, Charles 67, 140 

Peters, Thomas 1. 112, 114–15

Polanyi, Karl 116, 150 

Polkinghorne, Donald E. 2, 3, 7–8, 15, 

82, 124–5, 150 

Propp, Vladimir 1, 2, 76–9, 82, 84, 

86–7, 109, 150 

Psathas, George 50, 150 

Rhodes, Carl 115, 150 

Richardson, Laurel 3, 150 

Ricoeur, Paul 2, 4, 64–5, 69–71, 74, 75, 

79, 84, 123, 150, 152 

Riessman, Catherine Kohler 50, 59, 

76, 150 

Robichaud, Daniel 87, 150 

Robinson, G.D. 64, 69, 150 

Rorty, Richard 11, 12–14, 63, 67–9, 80, 

96, 118, 121, 133, 136, 150 

Ryan, Marie-Laure 23, 125, 150 

Sacks, Harvey 4, 19, 38, 46, 73, 150 

Schank, Richard C. 82, 151 

Scheytt, Tobias 44, 151 

Schleiermacher, Friedrich E.D. 64, 75 

Scholes, Robert 2 

Schütz, Alfred 3–4, 11, 46, 67, 73, 151 

Scott, Martin B. 53–4, 151 

Seale, Clive 130, 144, 151 

Selden, Raman 66, 151 

Sen, Amarthya 129 

Sennett, Richard 14, 151 

Shotter, John 31, 151 

Sigman, Jill 118, 152 

Silverman, David viii–ix, 4, 49–50, 59, 60, 

88, 91, 94–5, 101, 142, 144, 

149, 151 

Silvers, Robert B. 3, 151 

Simonen, Leila 93, 151 

Simons, Herbert 102, 115, 151 

Sini, Carlo 141, 151 

Sköldberg, Kaj 22, 31, 41, 62, 151 

Slater, Philip 114 

AUTHOR INDEX 155 

Smircich, Linda 61, 112–15, 143 

Smith, Dorothy E. 61, 66–7, 75, 94, 151 

Soin, Kim 151 

Solow, Robert 40–1, 151 

Søderberg, Anne-Marie 87, 151 

Spradley, James P. 55, 151 

Stiglitz, Joseph E. 111, 152 

Strauss, Anselm 124, 146 

ten Have, Paul 50, 152 

Tenkasi, Ramkrishnan V. 37–8, 45, 142 

Thompson, E.P. 33 

Thompson, James D. 74, 152 

Thompson, John B. 69, 74, 150, 152 

Thompson, Paul 33, 152 

Thurow, Lester 110–2 

Todorov, Tzvetan 2, 8, 19, 84, 125, 152 

Torode, Brian 4, 60, 88, 91, 94–5, 101, 152 

Turner, Victor 3, 152 

Van Fraassen, Bas C. 118, 152 

Van Maanen, John 61, 105, 118, 130, 152 

Veyne, Paul 132, 152 

Vico, Giambattista 6 

Waldo, Dwight 132, 152 

Waletzky, Joshua 2, 76, 148 

Waterman, Robert H. 112, 114–15 

Watson, Karen Ann 76, 152 

Watt, Ian 36, 146 

Weick, Karl 35, 39, 43, 152 

Weller, Susan C. 55, 147 

White, Hayden 2, 17, 22, 24, 41, 83, 

118, 122, 125, 138, 152 

Williams, Joseph M. 130, 143 

Wickham, Gary 116, 147 

Wolf, Margery 134, 135, 152 

Woolgar, Steve 122, 152 

Yanow, Dvora 134, 152

Subject Index 

accounts 4, 53–4 

actant model 79–82, 84, 86, 101, 138 

annals 17–20, 23–4 

apology 121, 138 

archetype 104–5 

author-evacuated texts 105, 108, 140 

author-saturated texts 105–8, 140 

autobiography (see also life stories) 5, 10 

Bildungsroman 126–7, 138 

Burke’s pentad 84, 103–4, 138 

comedy 21–2, 41 

chronicle 17–20, 23–4, 31, 43–4, 50, 

117, 119 

contract between the author and the reader 

fictional 8–9, 119, 120, 136 

referential 9, 119, 120, 136 

conversation analysis (CA) viii, 50 

criteria 

ostensive 11, 133 

performative 13, 133–4 

critical incident technique 43–4 

deconstruction 68, 88, 96–101, 112–15, 

135, 136 

discourse 69–71, 89, 105, 112–15 

discourse analysis (DA) viii 

distanciation 69–70 

dramatist analysis 102–4, 138 

emplotment 17, 19–31, 62, 83–5, 101, 

122–8, 138 

enacted narrative 3, 13 

epos 41 

ethnomethodology 4, 67, 83–4 

eulogy 121, 138 

evolution theories 78–9, 102 

exegesis 63–4, 121, 138 

explanation 60–1, 63–71, 73–4 

constructivist 67–9, 71 

institutionalist 68–9 

objectivist 65–7, 69, 71 

subjectivist 63–5, 67–8, 71 

explication 60–4, 73, 91, 119 

exploration 60–1, 68, 71–2 

factual narratives 8, 132, 135 

fictional narratives 8, 132, 135 

feminism 61, 66–7, 71–2, 89–91, 

92–5, 96–8 

formalism 2, 10, 76, 136, 138–9 

gender 37, 89–91, 92–6, 114 

genealogy 112–15 

genre 68–9, 129, 135, 136 

hermeneutic circle (see also hermeneutic 

spiral, hermeneutic arc) 66, 71, 139 

hermeneutic triad 60–75 

hermeneutics 2, 4, 63–6, 69, 139 

hyperbole 42, 139 

hypothyposis 120, 139 

identity switching 54 

intentio auctoris 63–4, 70, 139 

intentio lectoris 63, 68–9, 139 

intentio operis 68–9, 82, 139, 140 

interpretive community 68, 82 

interruption 60, 91–6 

interviews 47–59 

irony 20–2, 107 

life stories (see also autobiography) 

31, 50–1 

logic of representation 49, 52–4 

Marxism 65–7 

metanarratives 12–13 

metaphor 20–2, 104, 108–12, 118, 133 

metonymy 20–2, 104, 139 

mimesis 23–4, 31, 41, 117–22, 

125, 139 

mode of knowing 

logico-scientific 7–10, 24, 51 

narrative 6–10 

morality play 104–5 

morphology 76–8

mystification 54 

myth 104, 106 

narrative fidelity 10 

narrative probability 10 

narrative quest 13 

narrative rationality 10 

narrative trajectory 79–82, 101, 139 

new criticism 2, 68 

oral history 33–5, 52 

paradigm (substitution, transformation) 10, 

81, 83, 125, 126–7, 134, 140 

phenomenology 4, 64, 67, 73 

plot 7, 19–31, 62, 84–6, 101, 122–9 

ending-embedded 20, 78, 81, 83, 109, 

125, 126, 138 

outcome-embedded 81, 83, 125, 126, 

128–9, 139 

polyphony 62, 121–2, 140 

poststructuralism 70, 88–90, 140 

pragmatism 4, 63, 67–9 

reader-response theory 2, 65, 67–8, 

133, 140 

reader (implied reader) 

critical (semiotic) 60, 68, 129 

naive (semantic) 60, 68 

reading 

as poaching 121, 135 

close 88, 101, 121 

dominant 62, 68 

exegetic 63–4, 121, 138 

inspired 68, 71, 121, 136 

marginal 62, 68 

methodical 68, 71, 121 

novel 62–3 

realism 118 

SUBJECT INDEX 157 

referral 54 

reformatory tract 106 

rhetorical analysis 61, 84, 102–4, 

108–12, 123–4 

romance 21–2, 41 

saga 36–7 

satire 21–2, 129 

schema 82–3 

script 82–3 

seduction 112–15 

semantics 140 

semiology (semiotics) 2, 61, 76, 83, 

91, 140 

sensemaking 39 

signature 105, 140 

story grammar 82–3 

structural analysis 41, 61, 76–87, 

109, 135 

structuralism 2, 10, 70, 76–82, 88–9, 

105–6, 109, 140 

symbolic interactionism 4, 49 

synecdoche 20–2, 140 

syntagm (association, succession) 81, 

83, 125, 126, 134, 140 

time 

chronological 52 

cyclical 52 

kairotic 52, 139 

tragedy 21–2, 41 

travelogue 105, 141 

tropes (figures of speech) 20–2, 

104–5, 118 

variegated speech (heteroglossia) 62, 121 

work-worlds 40

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