Reading :: Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research

Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research
By David M. Boje

I've been meaning to read this book for a while, but finally scheduled time for it when some collaborators and I began analyzing stories from a community research project. Fortunately, the book is slim (137pp without the bibliography and notes) and pretty direct.

Boje's focus here is on laying out different traditions for analyzing stories and narrative. The two are different:

Narrative requires plot, as well as coherence. To narrative theory, story is folksy, without emplotment, a simple telling of chronology. I propose 'antenarrative.' Antenarrative is the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted and pre-narrative speculation, a bet. (p.1). 

He connects antenarrative to the crisis of postmodernism and outlines ways to analyze antenarratives (as opposed to narrative in the classic sense): "eight antenarrative analysis options that can deal with the prevalence of fragmented and polyphonic storytelling in complex organizations and to provide teaching examples of these methods that are applicable to organization studies" (p.1). These options are treated in separate chapters:

• Deconstruction analysis
• Grand narrative analysis
• Microstoria analysis
• Story network analysis
• Intertextuality analysis
• Causality analysis 
• Plot analysis
• Theme analysis

Before getting into these options, Boje establishes five dimensions of antenarrative:

• Pre-plot: Antenarrative precedes emplotment (p.3)
• Ambiguity: "Antenarrative is constituted out of the flow of living experience" and is thus speculative, oriented toward meaning-making (p.3)
• Flow as sensemaking: Antenarrative is "a sensemaking to lived experience" (p.4)
• Fragmentary: It precedes closure and thus involves multiple interpretations (p.4)
• Collective before consensual: "It is before the plots have been agreed to" (p.4)

In the subsequent chapters, Boje examines each of the eight options, which are grounded in different sets of literature and different research traditions. He gives considerable attention to each. In this review, I won't: I'll skip to two that I think are most relevant for my work.

One is causality analysis (Ch.6), in which antenarratives advance tentative causal links. Boje quotes Nietzsche's question of whether causes lead to effects or whether effects lead to a search for causes. In antenarratives, people nominate causes for the effects they see around them. Examples include origin stories and stories of praise or blame. To explore these, Boje catalogs different processes:

• identifying temporal language in antenarratives
• the relation between microstories and macrostories
• tracing intertextual linkages of assertions across stories
• developing a narrative mapping of causal assertions (p.102)

The second chapter I focus on is the one on thematic analysis (Ch.8), which (Boje notes) is not strictly associated with stories (p.122). In fact, whereas "taxonomy cells in narrative theory are little theme cages to entrap stories," Boje emphasizes how antenarratives move in between and outside taxonomic classification (p.122). In an antenarrative approach, then, Boje exhorts us to ask: 

• What gets left out of themes?
• What goes on between the cells of themes? (p.125)

I found this book helpful in terms of thinking through how to analyze antenarratives (perhaps not narratives, although that is what the title implies). Chapter 6 was especially helpful along these lines, cataloging different approaches to causality analysis and providing methodological cites so we can study them further. 

On the other hand, I was not a fan of the prose, which is a little too pomo for me. That is, sometimes things that I think are fairly banal and unsurprising (e.g., people try to make sense through stories, those stories aren't necessarily internally coherent and are usually not coherent with others', a lot of causal links are post-hoc rationalizations) are presented as being shockingly revealed, often through highly figurative language. That figurative language could, in many places, be replaced by simple illustrations from concrete studies. In fact, doing so would have really helped me to understand how to apply these techniques in my own work -- techniques that seem to get lost in the shuffle sometimes.

Despite this drawback, I found the book helpful both in its advice and its bibliography. If you do qualitative research and have been thinking about analyzing narratives or antenarratives, definitely take a look.