MYERS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT NARRATIVE ANALYSIS Chapter 16 Sage Publications Limited © 2008 Michael D. Myers All Rights Reserved Introduction QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT Written Record Data Analysis Approach Data Collection Technique  There are many different ways to analyse qualitative data  Narrative analysis is one approach to analysing and interpreting qualitative data Research Method Philosophical Assumptions Narrative analysis 2 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT Narrative  Narrative is defined by the Concise Oxford English Dictionary 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 3 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT 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 4 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT 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 5 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT 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 6 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT 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 7