1. NARRATIVE ANALYSIS Chapter 16

2. Introduction • There are many different ways to analyse qualitative data • Narrative analysis is one approach to analysing and interpreting qualitative data Narrative analysis

3. Narrative Narrative is defined by the Concise Oxford EnglishDictionary as a ‘a spoken or written account of connected events; a story’ (Soanes & Stevenson, 2004) Traditionally, a narrative requires a plot, as well as some coherence. It has some sort of ordered sequence, often in linear form, with a beginning, middle, and end Narratives also usually have a theme and a main point, or a moral, to the story Narrative analysis

4. Personal and organizational narratives A narrative can refer to the life history of a person you have interviewed, a story about a significant aspect of their life, or a specific event. A personal narrative might refer to their diaries, journals or letters (Chase, 2005) Organizational narratives refer to the history or stories about organizations. Organizational narratives are ‘the main mode of knowing and communicating in organizations’ (Czarniawska,1998) Narrative analysis

5. Approaches to narrative analysis Writing versus reading narrative Top-down versus bottom-up Realist, constructivist and critical Genres (adventure story, fairytale, romance, tragedy ...) Voice (authoritative, supportive, joint voice) Postmodern narrative and ante-narrative approaches (deconstruction, grand narrative, microstoria ...) Narrative analysis

6. How to use narrative analysis If you are planning to collect narratives during interviews (and hence narratives will be your main source of data), then you need to work at inviting stories from your informants If you are planning to write a narrative of an organization, then the typical form in management and organization studies is to write it up as a case study. Case studies usually use chronology as the main organizing device (Czarniawska, 1998) The Labov/Cortazzi model suggests six elements to every narrative: abstract, orientation, complication, evaluation, result, and conclusion Narrative analysis

7. Critique of narrative analysis Narrative analysis is very useful in the creation or critique of organizational narratives. It is an in-depth approach to analyzing qualitative data Narrative analysis is potentially an excellent way in which we can enter into a dialogue with managers and business people in organizations (Czarniawska, 1998). It is one way of making our research more relevant to practice One disadvantage is that it can be very time consuming to collect life histories of people, and even more time consuming to analyse them Narrative analysis