essential-guide-to-qualitative-in-organizational-research

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– STORIES IN ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH––––––––– 115He accordingly defines stories asnarratives with plots and characters, generating emotion in narrator and audience,through a poetic elaboration of symbolic material. This material may be a product offantasy or experience, including an experience of earlier narratives. Story plots entailconflicts, predicaments, trials and crises which call for choices, decisions, actions andinteractions, whose actual outcomes are often at odds with the characters’ intentionsand purposes. (2000: 239)Thus, stories are seen as emotionally and symbolically charged narratives; they do not presentinformation or facts about ‘events’, but they enrich, enhance and infuse facts with meaning.This is both their strength and a potential weakness. For stories will often compromiseaccuracy in the interest of making a point or generating an emotion; they may focus on theincidental details, remaining stubbornly silent about what a researcher may regard as vital clues;they may contain inconsistencies, imprecisions, lacunae, non-sequiturs, illogicalities andambiguities. Ultimately, the truth of a story lies not in its accuracy but in its meaning.In this chapter, we shall argue that researchers who want to use stories as a researchinstrument must be prepared to sacrifice at least temporarily some of the core values of theirtrade and adopt instead a rather alien attitude towards their respondents and their texts. Theymust rid themselves of the assumption that quality data are objective, reliable, accurate andso on and must be prepared to engage with the emotions and the meanings which reside inthe text. The very recognition that a narrative constitutes or is moving towards becoming astory rather than being a factual account depends on such an emotional engagement. Facedwith distortions and ambiguities, researchers must resist the temptation of ‘setting the recordstraight’; instead, they must learn to relish the text, seeking to establish the narrative needs,and through them the psychological and organizational needs, which distortions, ambiguitiesand inaccuracies serve. We shall argue that this is not merely a valid and useful way of doingresearch, but also a highly enjoyable one. We will also point out some of the ethical andepistemological difficulties which it raises.The research strategy offered here is that of the researcher as a fellow-traveller on thenarrative, engaging with it emotionally, displaying interest, empathy and pleasure in thestorytelling process. The researcher does not risk alienating the storyteller by seeming to doubtthe narrative or by placing him/her under cross-examination, but conspires to detach thenarrative from the narrowness of the discourse of facts, guiding it instead in the direction offree-association, reverie and fantasy. Contradictions and ambiguities in the narrative areaccepted with no embarrassment. Ambiguity lies at the heart of many stories, displaying anindividual’s ambivalent feelings or partial knowledge or understanding. While the researchermay ask for clarification of particular aspects of the story, the storyteller must feel that suchclarification is asked in the interest of increased pleasure and empathy rather than in the formof pedantic inquiry.THE USES OF STORIES IN SOCIAL RESEARCH ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Compared to research based on more conventional methods, research using stories is still inits infancy; yet it is clear that there is no one dominant way of using them. In fact, existingresearch indicates a bewildering variety of possibilities and a multiplicity of inter-related