NARRATIVE ANALYSIS Chapter 16 MYERS © 2008 Michael D. Myers

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
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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
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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)
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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 ...)
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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
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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
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