Narratives in the workplace: Facts, fictions, and canonicity
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Alessandra Fasulo
Abstract
Drawing on a set of workplace interaction corpora, both dyadic and multiparty, we present three narrative forms departing from the established notion of storytelling. These have been called Rewindings, collaborative reconstructions of yet-unknown past events; Fictions, the creation of imaginary scenes; and Templates, condensed versions of experience providing information on unexpected outcomes or controversial occurrences. Without denying specificity to narrative discourse, we extend its definition here to the displacement of the described actions. We propose that, similarly to what is done in other social and human sciences, conversational studies ought to take into consideration the description of events that are not fully known at the onset of narration and that are partially or entirely suggested by the narrators. The study also contributes to the field of workplace studies, providing an illustration of the functioning of distributed cognition and situated knowledge by showing how narrative is a collaborative enterprise facilitating problem solving and the dissemination of competence.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial: Narrative practice, competence, and understanding
- Introduction: Narrative analysis in the shift from texts to practices
- Different place, different action: Clients' personal narratives in psychotherapy
- Narratives as a resource to manage disagreement: Examples from a parents' meeting in an extracurricular activity center
- ‘From where we're sat …’: Negotiating narrative transformation through interaction in police interviews with suspects
- Narratives in the workplace: Facts, fictions, and canonicity
- Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis
- Constructing ethnicity in New Zealand workplace stories
- Who tells which story and why? Micro and macro contexts in narrative
- Postscript: Plurifunctional narratives
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial: Narrative practice, competence, and understanding
- Introduction: Narrative analysis in the shift from texts to practices
- Different place, different action: Clients' personal narratives in psychotherapy
- Narratives as a resource to manage disagreement: Examples from a parents' meeting in an extracurricular activity center
- ‘From where we're sat …’: Negotiating narrative transformation through interaction in police interviews with suspects
- Narratives in the workplace: Facts, fictions, and canonicity
- Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis
- Constructing ethnicity in New Zealand workplace stories
- Who tells which story and why? Micro and macro contexts in narrative
- Postscript: Plurifunctional narratives
