What is narrative? How does it work and how does it shape our lives? H. Porter Abbott emphasizes that narrative is found not just in literature, film, and theatre, but everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives. This widely used introduction, now revised and expanded in its third edition, is informed throughout by recent developments in the field and includes one new chapter. The glossary and bibliography have been expanded, and new sections explore unnatural narrative, retrograde narrative, reader-resistant narratives, intermedial narrative, narrativity, and multiple interpretation. With its lucid exposition of concepts, and suggestions for further reading, this book is not only an excellent introduction for courses focused on narrative but also an invaluable resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including literature and drama, film and media, society and politics, journalism, autobiography, history, and still others throughout the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

Narrative is especially relevant to the analysis of organizational processes because people do not simply tell stories—they enact them. Narrative data have surface features that are useful for description, but explanatory process theories must be based on deeper structures that are not directly observable. To address this problem and to facilitate better process theory, in this article I use concepts from narrative theory to create a framework for analyzing structural features in narrative data.

Building Process Theory with Narrative: from Description to Explanation

Scholars hold different views about whether organizations consist of things or processes and about variance or process methods for conducting research. By combining these two dimensions, we develop a typology of four approaches for studying organizational change. Although the four approaches may be viewed as opposing or competing views, we see them as being complementary. Each approach focuses on different questions and provides a different — but partial — understanding of organizational change. We argue that coordinating the pluralistic insights from the four approaches provides a richer understanding of organization change than any one approach provides by itself.

Alternative Approaches for Studying Organizational Change

Self-narratives—stories that make a point about the narrator—help people revise and reconstruct identities during work role transitions. We propose a process model in which people draw on narrative repertoires to engage in narrative identity work in role-related interactions. Using feedback from their interactions, they revise both the stories and repertoires. Successful completion of the transition is facilitated by enduring and coherent repertoire changes to express the new role identity.

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Identity As Narrative: Prevalence, Effectiveness, and Consequences of Narrative Identity Work in Macro Work Role Transitions

a summary of the subject of the narrative); the orientation (time, place, situation, participants); the complicating action (what actually happened); the evaluation (the meaning and significance of the action); the resolution (what finally happened); and lastly the coda, which returns the perspective to the present. Labov and Waletzky (1997) argued that these structures are typically used by the teller to construct a story out of past experiences, and to make sense of those experiences both for himor herself and for the audience.Although not all narratives necessarily include all of these six elements, at a minimum a narrative must include the complicating action, i.e. a temporal component, while it is the evaluation that has been highlighted as crucial for establishing the point or the meaning of the story. A number of authors have argued that the evaluation is socially the most important component of the narrative (Linde, 1993; Polanyi, 1985). In a conversational setting, for example, the narrator must guard against the ‘so what?’ response to a story. This is accomplished by providing an adequate evaluation of the events that have been recounted (Polanyi, 1985). It is the evaluation that conveys to an audience how they are to understand the meaning of the events that constitute the narrative, and simultaneously indicates what type of response is required.The evaluation should not therefore be understood as simply provided by the narrator; rather the achievement of agreement on the evaluation of a narrative is the product of a process of negotiation. While the speaker can be understood as responsible for producing a narrative with an acceptable evaluation, the addressee or audience must collaborate by demonstrating that the evaluation has been understood. Labov and Waletzky (1997) have suggested that the evaluation is typically placed between the complicating action and the resolution, and in this position creates an element of tension and suspense in a well-formed narrative, as the audience wait to hear ‘what happened next’. However, subsequent writers have underlined that the structural analysis of narrative provided by Labov and Waletzky is in many respects too rigid. The evaluation may in some cases be explicit, and may be located prior to the resolution, but the expression of the evaluation within a narrative need not take this form. A narrator may communicate evaluative elements more implicitly.As Tannen (1980) has argued, not only do narratives make explicit evaluations of actions and characters but judgements can be communicated in more subtle ways as well. She suggested that lexical choice (i.e. the use of specific words) within the other components of the narrative is a clear example of this type of implicit evaluation. In addition, it could be argued that the very telling of a narrative represents an evaluative act. It suggests that certain events and decisions are reportable by virtue of their significance or their unusual or unexpected qualities. Obvious examples here would be stories about the death of a parent, or the birth of a child.Within modern culture, these events are understood to have an emotional significance for the individual that makes them worthy of recounting.Alternatively many conversational stories are centred upon a coincidence, which while relatively trivial is seen as sufficiently unexpected to make it interesting to relate. NARRATIVE AND NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 9 Elliot-01.qxd 4/8/2005 11:57 AM Page 9

Using Narrative in Social Research

1. Introduction 2. Story: events 3. Story: characters 4. Text: time 5. Text: characterization 6. Text: focalization 7. Narration: levels and voices 8. Narration: speech representation 9. The text and its reading 10. Conclusion 11. Towards...:afterthoughts, almost twenty years later

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

Papers

Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics

A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity

Narration: levels and voices

The text and its reading