family legacies - Wisconsin School of Business - University of ...

Family Legacies
family members both modified and sustained their family legacies, enacting some of their family
legacies in their everyday lives. Collectively, then, the results of this study both support and
extend narrative research.
Initially, the stories family members told during the interviews illustrate the importance of
context in the storytelling process (Nelson, 2004; Stanley & Billig, 2004) Who tells the stories
and when they are told represent key contextual factors in the storytelling process. Two specific
contextual factors merit discussion. First, the interviews themselves represented the conditions of
storytelling (Archakis & Tzanne, 2005). As narrative scholars have argued, the interview process
constrains the narrative process (Archakis & Tzanne, 2005; Bamberg, 2006; Watson, 2007). In
this study, the interview context affected the storytelling process as participants constructed
family stories in response to the questions we posed, offering them as evidence to support the
legacies they listed rather than telling the stories within the family context. This offers one
explanation as to why participants struggled in many instances to come up with and tell family
stories. Narrative scholars should take note of the difficulty that participants can display in
telling stories in the interview context and to fully understand what constitutes a story. The
interview context may have also influenced the predominance of positive legacies, as
participants made efforts to portray their family (and themselves) in a positive nature. As
narrative scholars suggest, in the interview context storytellers can be particularly selective in
how they tell their family stories and try to portray them in social and culturally acceptable ways
(Archakis & Tzanne, 2005). Researchers must be careful in taking participants’ responses about
their individual and family identity at face value (Archakis & Tzanne, 2005; Bamberg, 2004;
Kraus, 2006; Watson, 2007), which was especially important in this research in light of the
influence cultural upbringing appears to have had in the legacies third generation family
31