Sun-hong’s online journal

The idea of science not as an accumulating body of knowledge but as a conversation. I will return to this idea now and again in my text, but it also finds an expression on a formal level. If science is conversation, then scientific texts are voices in it. In order to follow the conversation, it is important to know who is talking to whom, who is answering whose questions. (p.8).

We cannot understand human conduct if we ignore its intentions, and we cannot understand human intentions if we ignore the settings in which they make sense (Schutz, 1973).

How can we relate individual narrative to societal ones? If we want to understand a society, or some part of a society, we have to discover its repertoire of legitimate stories and find out how this evolved (p.16).

The final relevant element in Polkinghorne’s elaboration of the notion of narrative is his triple idea of narrative presentation. The adjective narrative can refer to three different presentations. One is a presentation directed toward oneself, a story we tell to ourselves to make sense of what we are doing (I am now writing a book). By definition, this – unlike the other two – is a presentation that cannot be witnessed by anybody and is thus of no interest to organization reseasrchers. The second is the presentation of a story to others by telling, writing, or enacting it (sometimes stylized as the first type – I do not usually tell myself that I am writing a book). The third is reception – interpreting and understanding a story that is heard or read. Organization research concerns, and consists of these last two.

While it may be clear that the narrative eoffers an alternative mode of knowing, the relative adavatange of using this mode may remain obscure. (p.19)

Narrative enters organizational studies in at least three forms: Organizational research that is written in a storylikeway, organizational research that collects organizational stories, and organizational research that conceptualizes organizational life as story making and organization theorye as story reading. (p.26)

The attraction of the narrative approach, as I shall present it here, lies in its pragmatism rather than in any lofty idelogical premises. Narrative may not be the only way to approach contemporary organizations, but it does seem handy for the purpose. (p.11).

There are three ways of doing narrative in the first chapter of this book…Very very good.

Narratign the organization….by czarniawska in 1997

http://www.coe.missouri.edu/~jonassen/index.html

http://www.coe.missouri.edu/~jonassen/article.html

http://kite.missouri.edu/