The Literary Worlds of Workers: Narratives of Art from the Margins
28 Apr 2019-pp 113-134
TL;DR: The authors argue that workers are reflective beings who narrate their life worlds using literary tropes to outline their resistance and compromise with the extractive economy of organizations, and uncover two literary tropes of jokes and horror to outline how workers yearn for agency to reimagine material worlds in which they are immersed.
Abstract: In this study, we engage with marginal workers who are employed as security guards and janitors in India to understand how they re-enact stories of artefacts of the culture industry. We engage with workers using a narrative methodological frame to understand how literary tropes of workers could provide insights about the politics of disobedience and consent in which they may be implicated. We argue that workers are reflective beings who narrate their life worlds using literary tropes to outline their resistance and compromise with the extractive economy of organizations. We uncover two literary tropes of jokes and horror to outline how workers yearn for agency to reimagine material worlds in which they are immersed. At the same time, we outline how limits of the discursive vocabulary of workers limit their literary challenges to prevailing genres of inequality.
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TL;DR: The authors divide narrative inquiries 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 common elements across the database.
Abstract: 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.
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TL;DR: The authors argue that stories open valuable windows into the emotional and symbolic lives of organizations, enabling researchers to understand, identify, and communicate the character of the organization - its ambitions, conflicts, and peculiarities.
Abstract: Myths, stories, and folklore are part of the fabric and life of all organizations, enabling us to understand, identify, and communicate the character of the organization - its ambitions, conflicts, and peculiarities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork of storytelling in five organizations, this book argues that stories open valuable windows into the emotional and symbolic lives of organizations. By collecting stoires in different organizations, by listening and comparing different accounts, by investigating how narratives are constructed around specific events, by examining which events in an organization's history generate stories and which ones fail to do so, researchers can gain access to deeper organizational realities, closely linked to their members' experiences. In this way, stories enable researchers to study organizational politics, culture, and change in uniquely illuminating ways, revealing how wider organizational issues are viewed, commented upon, and worked upon by their members. The book's first part develops the theory of storytelling by building on various approaches, including narrative, folkloric, ethnographic, symbolic, social constructionist, and psychoanalytic, while the second offers a set of four studies which make use of stories in exploring particular aspects of organizational life.
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Abstract: Qualitative research using unstructured interviews is frequently reviewed by institutional review boards using criteria developed for biomedical research. Unlike biomedical studies, unstructured interactive interviews provide participants considerable control over the interview process, thereby creating a different risk profile. This article examines the interview process and literature for evidence of benefit and harm. Although there is evidence that qualitative interviews may cause some emotional distress, there is no indication that this distress is any greater than in everyday life or that it requires follow-up counseling, although the authors acknowledge distress is always a possibility. Essential to preventing participant distress is the researcher's interviewing skills and a code of ethics. When research is conducted with sensitivity and guided by ethics, it becomes a process with benefits to both participants and researchers. The authors conclude that qualitative research using unstructured interv...
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