QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT

NARRATIVE ANALYSIS

Chapter 16

Sage Publications Limited

2008 Michael D. Myers

All Rights Reserved

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT

Introduction

There are many

different ways to
analyse qualitative
data

Narrative analysis is
one approach to
analysing and
interpreting qualitative
data

Narrative analysis

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT

Narrative

Narrative is defined by the Concise Oxford

English Dictionary as a a spoken or written
account of connected events; a story (Soanes &
Stevenson, 2004)

Traditionally, a narrative requires a plot, as well

as some coherence. It has some sort of ordered
sequence, often in linear form, with a beginning,
middle, and end

Narratives also usually have a theme and a main

point, or a moral, to the story

Narrative analysis

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT

Personal and organizational narratives

A narrative can refer to the life history of a

person you have interviewed, a story about a
significant aspect of their life, or a specific event.
A personal narrative might refer to their diaries,
journals or letters (Chase, 2005)

Organizational narratives refer to the history or

stories about organizations. Organizational
narratives are the main mode of knowing and
communicating in organizations
(Czarniawska,1998)

Narrative analysis

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT

Approaches to narrative analysis

Writing versus reading narrative

Top-down versus bottom-up

Realist, constructivist and critical

Genres (adventure story, fairytale, romance,

tragedy ...)

Voice (authoritative, supportive, joint voice)

Postmodern narrative and ante-narrative

approaches (deconstruction, grand narrative,
microstoria ...)

Narrative analysis

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT

How to use narrative analysis

If you are planning to collect narratives during

interviews (and hence narratives will be your main
source of data), then you need to work at inviting
stories from your informants

If you are planning to write a narrative of an

organization, then the typical form in management
and organization studies is to write it up as a case
study. Case studies usually use chronology as the
main organizing device (Czarniawska, 1998)

The Labov/Cortazzi model suggests six elements to

every narrative: abstract, orientation, complication,
evaluation, result, and conclusion

Narrative analysis

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT

Critique of narrative analysis

Narrative analysis is very useful in the creation

or critique of organizational narratives. It is an
in-depth approach to analyzing qualitative data

Narrative analysis is potentially an excellent way

in which we can enter into a dialogue with
managers and business people in organizations
(Czarniawska, 1998). It is one way of making our
research more relevant to practice

One disadvantage is that it can be very time

consuming to collect life histories of people, and
even more time consuming to analyse them

Narrative analysis