Narrative inquiry refers to a subset of qualitative research designs in which stories are used to describe human action. The term narrative has been employed by qualitative researchers with a variety of meanings. In the context of narrative inquiry, narrative refers to a discourse form in which events and happenings are configured into a temporal unity by means of a plot. Bruner (1985) designates two types of cognition: paradigmatic, which operates by recognizing elements as members of a category; and narrative, which operates by combining elements into an emplotted story. Narrative inquiries divide into two distinct groups based on Bruner's types of cognition. Paradigmatic‐type narrative inquiry gathers stories for its data and uses paradigmatic analytic procedures to produce taxonomies and categories out of the common elements across the database. Narrative‐type narrative inquiry gathers events and happenings as its data and uses narrative analytic procedures to produce explanatory stories.

Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Anthropology on the Move3Pt. 1An Evolving Proposal for Multi-Sited Research311Imagining the Whole: Ethnography's Contemporary Efforts to Situate Itself (1989)332Requirements for Ethnographies of Late-Twentieth-Century Modernity Worldwide (1991)573Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography (1995)794The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-en-Scene of Anthropological Fieldwork (1997)105Pt. 2Traces in Parallel Ethnographic Projects1335Power on the Extreme Periphery: The Perspective of Tongan Elites in the Modern World System (1980)1356The Problem of the Unseen World of Wealth for the Rich: Toward an Ethnography of Complex Connections (1989)1527On Eccentricity (1995)161Pt. 3The Changing Conditions of Professional Culture in the Production of Ethnography1798On Ideologies of Reflexivity in Contemporary Efforts to Remake the Human Sciences (1994)1819Critical Cultural Studies as One Power/Knowledge Like, Among, and in Engagement with Others (1997)20310Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin (1997)231Index255

Ethnography through thick and thin

In contrast to the antistructuralist and antipositivist agenda that has animated the “narrative turn” in the social sciences since the 1980s, a more uniquely sociological approach has studied stories in the interactional, institutional, and political contexts of their telling. Scholars working in this vein have seen narrative as powerful, but as variably so, and they have focused on the ways in which narrative competence is socially organized and unevenly distributed. We show how this approach, or cluster of approaches, rooted variously in conversational analysis, symbolic interactionism, network analysis, and structuralist cultural sociologies, has both responded to problems associated with the narrative turn and shed light on enduring sociological questions such as the bases of institutional authority, how inequalities are maintained and reproduced, why political challengers are sometimes able to win support, and the cultural foundations of self-interest and instrumental rationality.

The Sociology of Storytelling

Justice, Gender, and the Family

The nineteenth-century English working class bears a most peculiar burden and embodies a most peculiar paradox. Like Auden’s academic warriors who spar with “smiles and Christian names,” historians, economists, and sociologists have pushed and prodded early nineteenth-century English working people into procrustean political positions to support or disconfirm Marx’s predictions of revolutionary class conflict erupting from the contradictions of capitalism. A Manichaean concern locks the debate into an impasse. Were early nineteenth-century workers revolutionary or reformist? Was there a class struggle in the industrial revolution? The questions remain unresolved. Yet, surely it is the history of English working peoples that has suffered from this burden of praising or burying Marxism through competing interpretations of their early stories?

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Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

L'A. etudie les debats autour de l'allaitement maternel. Elle s'efforce de montrer, d'une part, que le discours scientifique et les textes d'information sanitaire isolent la question de l'alimentation du nourrisson des autres pratiques liees a la maternite et, d'autre part, que les presupposes concernant la sante de l'enfant dans ce discours et dans ces textes refletent une conception traditionnelle de la division sexuelle du travail qui tend a stigmatiser le travail feminin. Elle analyse le processus de construction de la perception du risque concernant la sante de l'enfant. Elle critique la theorie du lien maternel qui affirme que les premieres heures apres la naissance et la proximite physique entre la mere et l'enfant, induit par l'allaitement, vont determiner l'investissement dans l'education de l'enfant et la structuration psychique de ce dernier

Jules Law

Papers

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

The politics of breastfeeding: Assessing risk, dividing labor

The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I.A. Richards

The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel

Being there: Gothic violence and virtuality in Frankenstein, Dracula, and Strange Days