Future Trends: Stories are Narrative Inquiry

Future Trends: Stories are Narrative Inquiry

As we have seen, failures, in common with other organisational activities, are based on stories. The verbal medium is crucial to understanding behaviour within organisations and systems, and researchers are thus required to collect stories, grounded in practice, about what takes place (Easterby-Smith, Thorpe, & Lowe, 2002; Gabriel, 2000). The result is the transformative plotting of scattered events to uncover hidden patterns and unexplored meanings (Denning, 2001; Kearney, 2002). Similarly, understanding failures often entails the retrospective untangling of complicated webs of actions and events and emergent interaction patterns. Failure storytelling can thus be understood as a combination of narrative recounting of empirical events with the purposeful unlocking of meaningful patterns or a plot.

Historically, storytelling has been an acceptable form of conveying ideas, experience, and knowledge of context. It plays a key role in communicating the cultural, moral, or historical context to the listener. Indeed, Arendt (1958) argued that the chief characteristic of human life is that it is always full of events, which ultimately can be told as a story. There are even strong claims that the narrative is the main mode of human knowledge (Bruner, 1986, 1990; Schank, 1990), as well as the main mode of communication (Boje, 1991; Denning, 2001; Fisher, 1984, 1987; Schank). Moreover, children are often initiated into culture (and its boundaries) through the medium of storytelling, offering models for emulation or avoidance.

In practice, the essence of any good case study revolves around the ability to generate an effective story line, normally with a unique style, plot, or perspective. In a large case, a general theme can be obtained from selected excerpts weaved together to illustrate a particular story. Personal stories that form part of a case study can thus be viewed as a valid source of data, organised to make sense of a theme or problem. This is particularly useful when the researcher is trying to portray a personal account of a participant, a stakeholder, or an observer in an incident, accident, or failure. The implication is that the need to address personal aspects of interaction and story (that remains a problem in IS research) is fulfilled by the development of a research-valid narrative. Indeed, Remenyi et al. (1998) contend that a story, or a narrative description, is valid if the resulting narrative adds some knowledge. Furthermore, White (1973, p. 27) describes a story as "the process of selection and arrangement of data from the unprocessed historical record in the interest of rendering the record more comprehensible to an audience of a particular kind" by inserting a sense of perspective and purpose.

A narrative can be structured to give a voice to the researcher, to the narrator, to the participants, to the stakeholders, or to cultural groups, traditions, or ideas. In the context of research it is not concerned with the development of a reflective autobiography or life story but rather with the analysis and devolvement of themes that emerge from a medley of events (Bell, 1999; Carr, 2001; Polkinghorne, 1987; White, 1973). Researchers are thus concerned with how information interpreted from a story can be structured in such a way as to produce valid research findings. This form of narration can be particularly useful in uncovering motives and rationales and linking them to the actual consequences and their impact on stakeholder groups. It also suggests an understanding of implied causes and emergent interactions.

Understanding IS failures is therefore more complicated than the discovery of a simplistic chronology of events. Failure researchers collect subjective accounts extracted from participants and observers. Developing narratives relies on trust between the researcher and the storyteller. Storytellers reveal personal feelings and motivations which may compromise their position or interests. Sharing the information and making it public suggest that the storyteller is prepared to release certain details about themselves and their position publicly. This may have ethical research implications (as well as the potential for organisational, or even legal, complications). Shared stories imply shared concepts, shared vocabularies, and shared perceptions (or as a minimum, the ability to see where the sharing stops).

Narratives are neither discovered nor found: they are constructed. Narrative inquiry is evolving into an acceptable research approach in its own right in the social sciences and in management research circles (Bell, 1999; Boje, 2001; Czarniawska, 1998; Easterby-Smith et al., 2002; Gabriel, 2000). The story format provides a powerful way of knowing and linking disparate accounts and perspectives. The main pitfall with this approach revolves around the narrative structure which is developed by the storyteller. If the initial storyteller is not the researcher, care should be taken to eliminate personal biases in terms of outcomes and actions (but these should remain as descriptions of feelings, reactions, and motivation). Follow-up questions can thus provide the mechanism for clarifying context, background, rationale, or sequence or, more generally, for "objectifying" and "time sequencing" the events. When different accounts are combined, the story line benefits from the richness of multifaceted insights.

Developing a narrative requires plot as well as coherence, as a story is made out of events and the plot mediates between the events and the story (Boje, 2001; Carr, 2001; Kearney, 2002). In failure stories, the plot often emanates from the actions and perceptions of participants emerging out of the flux of events, in (direct) contradiction with expectations. The storyteller is concerned with the perspective and purpose of participants as well as with the plausibility of the emerging plot. The combination of plot, purpose, and perspective dictates the selection of elements, the filling in of links, and the removal of "irrelevant" noise.

Postmodern interpretation contends that most real-life stories are fragmented, nonlinear, multivariate, and incoherent. This has already been highlighted as a feature of failure stories. Such stories also tend to be dynamic, polyphonic (multi-voiced), and collectively produced, as they occur in asymmetrical, random, and turbulent environments. The stories are not plotted as such and they appear to flow, emerge, and network, offering complex clustering of events, emergent phenomena, causes, and effects. Moreover, the accounts are often subjective, counterintuitive, and contradictory. This leads to interacting, and conflicting webs of narratives, characterised by coincidences, predicaments, and crises.

Generally, stories appear to be improperly told, as a story is an "ante" state of affairs, existing previously to a carefully constructed narrative (Boje, 2001). The antenarrative, or the "real" story, is the fragmented, messy and dynamic, multi-vocal, multi-plotted, multi-version, and complex tale. Indeed, modern storytellers look for new ways and mediums for weaving and depicting a multi-vocal reality, as exemplified by Mike Finggis's digitally shot film Time's Arrow, where the screen is split in four to allow for four separate perspectives and sub-stories that occasionally intersect or overlap. In the tradition of postmodern inquiry, a real-life researcher is often faced with fragments rather than a whole story to tell, and many of the fragments may reflect contrary versions of reality. This is potentially more acute when the accounts attempt to justify roles of participants in the lead-up to disaster. It would also appear from past analysis that there are hierarchies of stories and stories that exist within or interact with other stories. Using the terminology provided by Boje, the purpose of narrative methods is to take a complex situation characterised by collective (yet often conflicting) memory and an antenarrative and construct the plot and coherence that can be used to narrate the story of interest.

The reality in failure stories is of multistranded stories of experiences and reactions that lack collective consensus. Indeed the discipline of decision making has also recognised that making choices is about forming and selecting interpretations from a mosaic of possibilities (March, 1994, 1997; Weick, 1995). Not surprisingly, disasters or traumatic stories are hard to narrate, understand, and justify. Stories have three basic properties: time, place, and mind (Boje, 2001), which interact and build up as the story evolves. In forensic case histories, these are further clarified through the identification of the background and context, which clarify and justify the interpretation in the context of the emerging phenomena.

Boje (1991, 2001) and Kearney (2002) contend that the current view is of sequential single voice stories and implies excessive reliance on the hypothetical-deductive approach (akin to simplistic causal pairings). The answer is not to develop Harvard case studies but to rewrite stories as polyvocal tapestries enabling different perceptions and interpretations to exist, thereby explaining webs of actions and interactions. What is new in this approach is the antenarrative reading, which enables narrative analysis methods to be supplemented by antenarrative methods, allowing previously fragmented and personal storytelling to be interpreted as a unified whole. This focus offers alternative discourse analysis strategies that can be applied where qualitative story analyses can help to assess subjective, yet "insightful" knowledge in order to obtain "true" understanding of complex interactions.