Volume 28, Issue 3

The point of departure for this special issue is the recent shift within discourse and sociolinguistic narrative analysis from a long-standing conception of (oral, cf. natural, nonliterary) narrative as a well-defined and delineated genre with an identifiable structure toward the exploration of the multiplicity, fragmentation, and irreducible situatedness of its forms and functions in a wide range of social arenas. We can refer to this shift as a move away from narrative as text (i.e., defined on the basis of textual criteria and primarily studied for its textual make-up) to narrative as practice within social interaction. For a lot of the work here, context remains a key concept and although there is an undeniably long-standing tradition of contextualized studies of narrative (e.g., ethnography of communication in studies such as Bauman 1986 and Hymes 1981, among others) there are distinct elements in this latest shift that in our view qualify it as a ‘new’ turn to narrative: 1. An increasing acceptance of narrative as talk-in-social interaction informed by conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. This has had profound implications for the definition of narrative, its exigencies, and the analytical tools deemed appropriate for its investigation (e.g., De Fina and Georgakopoulou forthcoming; Georgakopoulou 2007; chapters in Quasthoff and Becker 2004; Schegloff 1997). 2. An emphasis, derived from recent theories of context and genre (e.g., Bauman 2001), not just on the contextualized but also on the contextualizing aspects of narrative. In this sense, narrative is being studied both for the ways in which its tellings are shaped by larger sociocultural processes at work and for how it provides organization for the interactive occasions on which it occurs. Furthermore, although the notion of context remains elusive, contested, and indeterminate, there is now consensus on the view of context not as a static surrounding frame but as a set of multiple and intersecting processes that are mutually feeding with talk. The move away from context as a pre-existing ‘setting’ toward dynamic notions of social spaces that may be conventionally associated with certain kinds of language use and norms, but also prone to heterogeneity and fragmentation, has been instrumental in looking at both narrative tellings in situ and at ways in which space is more or less subtly referred to, reworked, and constructed anew within narrative plots (see contributions in Baynham and De Fina 2005). 3. An increasing commitment to social theoretical concerns (mainly within the framework of cultural studies). This is particularly evident in proliferating work on narrative and identities (e.g., De Fina 2003; Georgakopoulou 2002, 2007; De Fina et al. 2006) that has variously problematized, de-essentialized, or added nuance to the widely held view that narrative is a privileged communication mode for making sense of the self. Research in this area has also blurred the boundaries between narrative analysis and narrative inquiry, thus shifting the emphasis of the former from narrative as an end to narrative as a means to an end.

This paper deals with clients' personal narratives in psychotherapy. Using the method of conversation analysis, we focus on actions and tasks accomplished through clients' narratives. We identify, within the overall structural organization of therapeutic talk in our corpus, two different sequential placements of clients' narratives and describe some of their distinctive features. When they are placed within an inquiry phase of the session and are solicited by therapists' questions, the clients' narratives mainly provide information for therapists in the service of their inquiring agenda. When placed within an elaboration phase of the session, personal narratives are regularly volunteered by clients and produced as responses to therapists' reinterpretations, i.e., statements working up clients' circumstances as previously described by clients. In this latter placement, they mainly offer further evidence relevant to the therapists' reinterpretations, and thus show how clients understand therapists' reinterpretations and what they make of them. The import of these findings, for both an explication of therapeutic techniques and a better understanding of the therapeutic process, is also discussed.

This article explores narratives as an interactional resource to manage disagreement. On the basis of a detailed analysis of parents' meetings with three educators, three conversational phenomena were found to be particularly relevant to manage disagreement in narratives. The first phenomenon is the participants' manner of negotiating meaning in the narrative. It is demonstrated that the teller (a professional) and not the recipient (the mother) is the one who initiates the display of understanding the told events. In this kind of informal institutional talk, it emphasizes the asymmetry of the encounter. The second phenomenon is the primary speaker's accounting for and providing evidence in an attempt to obtain mutual understanding and to establish professional accountability. However, alignment is not achieved, and therefore the teller's assessments are constructed in a dispreferred format. The third phenomenon is the recipient's responding actions, which are minimal or absent and are used as a strategy for communicating disagreement indirectly. Finally, the relationship between narrative description and sequential and institutional contexts is addressed, and narratives are considered as contextualized as well as contextualizing resources of communication.

This paper examines narratives told in police interviews through a case-study approach with three interviews from a small corpus of twenty. The interviews are conducted by different police interviewers in different parts of England. Narratives given by suspects in initial storytelling episodes are examined along with negotiating activity that develops from this start point. We see how lay narratives are transformed into institutionalized and evidential ones and how content is reshaped through negotiation that challenges and transforms narrative material. Negotiations over role, responsibility, resistance, participation, and assessment of evidential value of story elements occur. This activity sometimes recontextualizes (Sarangi 1998; Linell and Sarangi 1998; Iedema and Wodak 1999) and transforms the start-point narrative, giving it evidential value; that is, value in relation to institutional and generic goals of establishing the facts of an alleged crime, for use in any future trial. Transformation is therefore seen as a negotiated (re)construction and recontextualization of narrative detail, part of the (re)productive work of institutional talk that produces an altered reality and responsibility that orients to the institututional rather than individual perspective.

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.

In this article, we depart from our recent work on ‘small stories’, which we propose as an antidote to canonical narrative studies, and we advance our argumentation by sketching out a five-step analytical operation for tapping into small stories as sites of identity work. These steps grow out of the model of positioning (as put forward by Bamberg 1997, and elaborated in Bamberg 2004a; cf. also Georgakopoulou 2000) that succeeds in navigating between the two extreme ends of fine-grained micro analysis and macro accounts. We will work with positioning in the close analysis of a small story event (as part of a moderated group discussion involving ten-year-old boys in an American school) in which we will show how the teller's announcement of the story, the subsequent withdrawal, and the pre-telling negotiation with the interlocutors are as integral parts of our analysis as the actual telling. We will also demonstrate how viewing story content as a function of interactional engagement opens up new insights into identity constructions of sameness in the face of adversative conditions and constant change.

One important function of narratives in workplace interaction is the valuable contribution they make to the construction of complex social identities. These identities typically include a professional or workplace identity, but may also include other facets of self. In the New Zealand workplace, a mainstream ‘white’ identity can be considered the unmarked, communicative cultural norm. In this context, storytelling provides a creative and socially acceptable strategy for constructing a contrasting ethnic identity. This paper explores the ways in which ethnicity is constructed in a New Zealand Māori organization that comprises an ethnically distinct community of practice. An extended narrative sequence (extracted from a naturally occurring meeting) is analyzed in detail for this purpose. Despite the predominance of English as the language of work in this organization, there is abundant evidence of the pervasive relevance of Māori cultural principles. For these workers, ethnicity acts as a backdrop for all their workplace communication; well-established culturally based norms underpin the ways in which they interact, and the ways in which they construct their social (including ethnic) identity. In this context, the stories told at work contribute not only to the construction of the ethnic identity of individual speakers, but also provide a means for co-constructing a distinctive Māori identity for the group.

This article focuses on the inter-relations between storytelling and micro and macro contexts. It explores how narrative activity is shaped by and shapes in unique ways the local context of interaction in a community of practice, an Italian American card-playing club, but also illustrates how the storytelling events that take place within this local community relate to wider social processes. The analysis centers on a number of topically linked narratives to argue that these texts have a variety of functions linked to the roles and relationships negotiated by individuals within the club and to the construction of a collective identity for the community. However, the narrative activities that occur within the club also articulate aspects of the wider social context. It is argued that, in the case analyzed here, local meaning-making activities connect with macro social processes through the negotiation, within the constraints of local practices, of the position and roles of the ethnic group in the wider social space. In this sense, narrative activity can be seen as one of the many symbolic practices (Bourdieu 2002 [1977]) in which social groups engage to carry out struggles for legitimation and recognition in order to accumulate symbolic capital and greater social power.