Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

In a formal way a narrative is to describe as a story in which the narrator makes sense
of his experiences related to incidents and events (Boje, 2001; Cunliffe and Coupland,
2012). To be different from a story a narrative presents a plot line, coherence, and
actions connected to history and biography. The narrative offers a basis for the evaluation
of actions and intentions of the narrator; the narrator might learn from it by
making sense of what he or she is doing.
To understand what an organization is, is to understand what we are doing, is to
understand ongoing processes of responding to each other. The emphasis on conversation
elucidates the dynamics of an organization, and points to the need to use
narratives as the basis for analysis and reflection in the research. In my narratives my
‘personal’ daily experiences are taken as the point of departure for the research.
Narratives offer possibilities of contextuality and reflexivity, to express purposes and
motives and to be sensitive to temporality (Tsoukas and Hatch, 2012). Narratives can
be understood as the ante-narratives (Boje, 2001) of the rather idealized version of
tools and facts in literature about planned organizational development, or the antenarratives
of the many spreadsheets which to my idea function as the tarot cards of
modern organizations. Narratives inspire to find language for the darkness and obscurity
of experience (Bochner, 2001).
An iterative research process: movement of thought
Working into the unknown is multilateral and multidimensional: learning to do research
from a complex responsive process-perspective and learning from your experiences,
experiencing how interpretations change and evolve during the research process
expresses a movement of thought, which is an eye-catching characteristic of this
way of doing research.
In this iterative research process themes emerge, your reflection and understanding
move. The emergence of themes is an expression of your learning process and the way
your thoughts move. These are the themes which bother you in your work and thus
themes which are worth researching. ‘Catching’ this movement of thought is done in
the narratives, analyses and the reflections. Practically for me this came down to write
– including the analyses and reflections - 4 versions of narrative 1, 6 versions for
narrative 2, 4 versions for narratives 3 and 5 for narrative 4. In this thesis the ‘final’
versions of the narratives are presented, scrutinized with hindsight on relevance,
coherence, privacy and discretion. Apart from that, an assessment for being allowed to
enter the PhD-school, the defending of a research proposal, being assessed in a semiviva
based on a progression report (4 versions) and intensive discussions with an
external co-supervisor are all part of the game. The way people implicated in the
narratives are involved regarding what is narrated about them, will be accounted for in
the ethical paragraph in chapter 2.
The narratives and their analyses and reflections, are the building blocks of my research,
finalized by a synopsis in which I look back and reflect on what emerged as
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