A RT I C L E

Q 379

Analysing narratives as practices

R
Qualitative Research
Copyright © 2008
SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles,
ANNA DE FINA London, New Delhi
and Singapore)
Georgetown University, USA vol. 8(3) 379–387
A L E X A N D R A G E O RG A KO P O U L O U
King’s College London, UK

ABSTRACT Departing from a critique of the conventional paradigm of

narrative analysis, inspired by Labov and the narrative turn in social
sciences, we propose an alternative framework, recommending
combining a focus on the local occasioning of narratives in interaction
with the analysis of their participation in a variety of macro-processes,
through mobilizing the notions of social practice, genre and community
of practice.
KEYWORDS: community of practice, genre, narrative analysis, small stories, social practice

Introduction
Within narrative analysis, there are debates around two different ways of
defining and doing narrative: one inspired by a conventional and largely
canonical paradigm; the other, based on an interactionally focused view of
narrative. We draw on this dialogue to articulate an alternative approach,
which we call the social interactional approach (henceforth SIA). This encom-
passes a view of narrative as talk-in-interaction and as social practice, teas-
ing out the analysis of interaction as a fundamental aspect of any study of
narrative, and the investigation of the intimate links of narrative-interactional
processes with larger social processes as a prerequisite for socially minded
research.
What we are calling the conventional paradigm was inspired by Labov and
Waletzky’s (1967) foundational model of narrative analysis, but also by
assumptions about the role and nature of narrative as an archetypal mode of
communication derived from the narrative turn in the social sciences. Notably,
Labov and Waletzky (1967: 13) defined narrative in functional terms as ‘one
verbal technique for recapitulating past experience, in particular a technique
of constructing narrative units which match the temporal sequence of that
experience’. In their model, a narrative text was characterized in structural
terms through the presence of temporal ordering between event clauses, and

DOI: 10.1177/1468794106093634

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380 Qualitative Research 8(3)

through its organization into structural components (such as complicating

action and resolution). Evaluation (i.e. the expression of the narrator’s point of
view on the events) was postulated as a structural component and a diffuse
mechanism for conveying a story point. Labov and Waletzky’s model was
based on stories told in interviews and, in principle, was meant as a description
of narratives of personal experience, not all types of narratives. That said, it
has had a profound influence in narrative work and paved the way for seeing
narrative as a privileged site for the study of a wide range of aspects relevant
to the study of language in society (see contributions in Bamberg, 1997). The
frequent use of the Labovian approach as the basis of empirical studies has
had profound implications for the direction of narrative analysis, creating
notions of a narrative canon and orthodoxy, i.e. presuppositions on what con-
stitutes a story, a good story, a story worth analysing, etc., that have in turn
dictated a specific analytic vocabulary and an interpretive idiom. More specifi-
cally, Labov’s structural definition of narrative has resulted in a tendency to
recognize as narratives only texts that appear to be well organized, with a
beginning, a middle and an end, that are teller-led and largely monological,
and that occur as responses to (an interviewer’s) questions. In addition, his
focus on story point and evaluation has inadvertently privileged the teller as
the main producer of meaning. Finally, his reliance on interview data has led
to the neglect of the role of the storytelling activity in the local context in
which it is generated.
Labov’s model coincided with, and surely benefited from, the insights of the
narrative turn in social sciences. Since then, studies of autobiographical narra-
tives that have focused on the construction of identity have proliferated. There
is, however, a tendency to see narrative as a fundamental mode for construct-
ing realities and so as a privileged structure/system/mode for tapping into iden-
tities, particularly constructions of self (for a critique, see Georgakopoulou,
2006a). The guiding assumption has thus been that, by bringing the coordi-
nates of time, space and personhood into a unitary frame, narrative can afford
a point of entry into the sources behind these representations (such as author,
teller and narrator), and that it can make them empirically visible for analytical
scrutiny in the form of identity analysis.1
These two trends together, Labovian narrative analysis and identity focused
approaches related to the narrative turn, have informed what we have labeled
here as the conventional paradigm for narrative analysis. The stories that have
been marginalized or excluded from this paradigm are those that do not con-
form to the schema of ‘an active teller, highly tellable account, relatively
detached from surrounding talk and activity, linear temporal and causal orga-
nization, and certain, constant moral stance’ (Ochs and Capps, 2001: 20). Put
differently, the neglected stories include ‘a gamut of under-represented narra-
tive activities, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events,
shared (known) events, but also allusions to tellings, deferrals of tellings, and
refusals to tell’ (Georgakopoulou, 2006b: 130). Alongside the privileging of a

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 De Fina and Georgakopoulou: Analysing narratives as practices 381

specific type of narrative (and partly because of that), the impact of different
aspects of a storytelling event (such as time, place, relations between inter-
locutors, events in which the storytelling is inserted, salient topics discussed
before and after the narrative, etc.) has been downplayed, as have narrative
interactional dynamics (such as telling roles and telling rights, audience reac-
tions, etc.).

Narrative as talk-in-interaction
Important challenges to the methodological tendencies and assumptions of
conventional narrative analysis have been derived from research on conver-
sational storytelling, most of which broadly aligns itself with Conversation
Analysis (henceforth CA). The main premise of the CA critique is the idea
that (oral) narrative in any context is and should be explicitly seen as talk-
in-interaction. Narrative is an embedded unit, enmeshed in local business,
not free-standing or detached/detachable. Viewing narratives as more or less
self-contained texts that can be abstracted from their original context of
occurrence thus misses the fact that both the telling of a story, and the ways
in which it is told, are shaped by previous talk and action. A related premise
of CA is that recognizing structure in narrative cannot be disassociated from
an engagement with surrounding discourse activity, and some kind of devel-
opment and an exit (Sacks, 1974; Jefferson, 1978). As such, narratives are
sequentially managed; their tellings unfold on-line, moment-by-moment in
the here-and-now of interactions. Thus, they can be expected to raise differ-
ent types of action and tasks for different interlocutors (Goodwin, 1984).
This brings into sharp focus the need to distinguish between different par-
ticipant roles while moving beyond the restrictive dyadic scheme of teller-lis-
tener. The exploration of co-construction is at the heart of our SIA. The
story recipients, far from being a passive audience, may reject, modify, or
under-cut tellings and narrative points (Goodwin, 1984; Goodwin, 1986;
Cedeborg and Aronsson, 1994; Ochs and Capps, 2001); they may be instru-
mental in how the teller designs their story in the first place, particularly in
cases in which there are differentiated roles among storytelling participants
(e.g. some may know of the events of the story, others not, some may be
characters in the story, etc.) that have to be managed through the story-
telling process.
As this suggests, narratives are emergent, a joint venture and the outcome of
negotiation by interlocutors. Allowing for interactional contingency is the hall-
mark of a sufficiently process-oriented and elastic model of narrative that
‘opens up rather than closes off the investigation of talk’s business’ (Edwards,
1997: 142) and that accounts for the consequentiality and local relevance of
stories. This alerts analysts to the dangers of attributing one sole purpose to the
telling of a story – that is, doing self. Tellers perform numerous social actions
while telling a story and do rhetorical work through stories: they put forth

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382 Qualitative Research 8(3)

arguments, challenge their interlocutors’ views and generally attune their

stories to various local, interpersonal purposes, sequentially orienting them to
prior and upcoming talk. It is important to place any representations of self and
any questions of story’s content in the context of this type of relational and
essentially discursive activity as opposed to reading them only referentially.
The CA view of narrative as talk-in-interaction presents important implica-
tions not just for the analysis of narrative, but also for the processes and meth-
ods of data collection and transcription. The narrative data that form the
mainstay of CA research arise naturally in conversations (be they in everyday,
informal or institutional contexts). There is thus a clear privileging of conver-
sational sites as the main event under scrutiny, and in that respect narrative
becomes another format of telling (Edwards, 1997). By extension, narrative
interviews are ultimately interactional data in which the researcher is very
much part of the narrative telling, and his/her role should be not just reflected
upon but also all contributions by the researcher, whether verbal or non-ver-
bal, should be fully transcribed. As Potter and Hepburn (2005: 295) argue in
relation to interview extracts in general, ‘they should be transcribed to a level
that allows interactional features to be appreciated even if interactional fea-
tures are not the topic of study’. Identifying and subsequently analysing close-
up interactional features and language details in narrative tellings is central to
the social-interactional project and, as discussed below, it constitutes the sine
qua non toolkit for our style of narrative research.

Narrative as social practice

The view of narrative as talk-in-interaction is a necessary but not sufficient
aspect of our SIA to narrative. It affords an intimate view of what is going on
in the here-and-now of any narrative interaction firmly locating us in the flow
of everyday lived experience. Nonetheless, the limitations of CA for the explo-
ration of how any strip of activity is configured on the momentary-quotidian-
biographical-historical frames and across socio-spatial arenas are by now well
rehearsed (see Wetherell, 1998). Within the SIA to narrative, we can go
beyond the local level of interaction and find articulations between the micro-
and the macro-levels of social action and relationships (De Fina, 2003a:
26–30; 2006). This navigation between a nose-to-data and a socio-culturally
grounded project rests on the notions of social practice, genre and communi-
ties of practice as central to a new understanding of narrative.
The SIA attempts to synthesize the local occasioning of narratives in con-
versations with their role in a variety of macro-processes, such as the sanction
of modes of knowledge accumulation and transmission, the exclusion and
inclusion of social groups, the enactment of institutional routines, the perpe-
tration of social roles, etc. In this process of synthesis, narratives take different
shapes and generic forms that are intimately related to those macro-processes
and practices that constitute them. Thus, a major task of narrative analysis for

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 De Fina and Georgakopoulou: Analysing narratives as practices 383

us is to unravel and account for the ways in which storytelling reflects and
shapes these different levels of context, as opposed to e.g. focusing on story
content and the goings-on within a story referentially and taking them as a
relatively unmediated and transparent record (see Atkinson and Delamont,
2006: 173–81).
The process of contextualization of a narrative within the SIA involves link-
ing it with the social practices it is part of. Practice captures habituality and
regularity in discourse in the sense of recurrent evolving responses to given
situations, while allowing for emergence and situational contingency. Thus, it
allows for an oscillation between relatively stable, prefabricated, typified
aspects of communication and emergent, in-process aspects.
In our view, an important tool for bringing together narratives and social
practices, for linking ways of speaking with the production of social life in the
semiotic world, is the systematic investigation of narrative genres. We use the
notion of genre not as the formal features of types of text, but rather, in tune
with recent linguistic anthropology (Hanks, 1996; Bauman, 2001), as a mode
of action, a key part of our habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) that comprises the routine
and repeated ways of acting and expressing particular orders of knowledge and
experience. As orienting frameworks of conventionalized expectations, genres
shift the analytical attention to routine and socioculturally shaped ways of
telling (Hymes, 1996) in specific settings and for specific purposes. Instead of
treating narrative as a supra-genre with fixed structural characteristics,
emphasis is placed on narrative structures as dynamic and evolving responses
to recurring rhetorical situations, as resources more or less strategically and
agentively drawn upon, negotiated and reconstructed anew in local contexts.
Emphasis is also on the strategies that speakers use to deal with the gap between
what may be expected (e.g. generic representations) and what is actually being
done in specific instances of communication. At the same time, the incom-
pleteness or smallness of narrative instances, be it in the sense of possibilities for
revision and reinterpretation (Hanks, 1996: 244) or simply in the sense of nar-
rative accounts in which nothing much happens, is firmly integrated into the
analysis, as opposed to being seen as an analytic nuisance.
The move to such a practice-oriented view of narrative genres also requires
that we firmly locate narratives in place and time and scrutinize the social and
discourse activities they are habitually associated with. In particular, it focuses
attention on the ‘social values of space as inscribed upon the practices’
(Hanks, 1996: 246) that take place within narrative tellings. The idea of nar-
rative as part of social practices inevitably leads to pluralized and fragmented
notions and also to new directions in the study of the way narratives function
within groups. This link between groups and narrative activity has often been
seen in sociolinguistics in terms of culture and social variables such as nation-
ality or gender (e.g. Polanyi, 1985; Johnstone, 1990). However, the emphasis
on practice brings to the forefront that people participate in multiple, overlap-
ping and intersecting communities, so problematizing mainstay notions such

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384 Qualitative Research 8(3)

as that of a homogeneous speech community (cf. Rampton, 1999). There has

thus been a definite move from large and all-encompassing notions of society
and culture to micro, shrunk down, more manageable in size, communities of
people who, through regular interaction and participation in an activity
system, share language and social practices/norms as well as understandings
of them with a community of practice seen as ‘an aggregate of people who
come together around a mutual engagement in an endeavour’ (Eckert and
McConnell-Ginet, 1999: 191).
When viewed as part of communities of practice, narratives can be expected
to act as other shared resources, be they discourses or activities. In particular,
they often form an integral part of a community’s shared culture as well as
being instrumental in negotiating and (re)generating it (Goodwin, 1990;
Georgakopoulou, 2006c). Put differently, they can be inflected, nuanced,
reworked and strategically adapted to perform acts of group identity, to reaf-
firm roles and group-related goals, expertise, shared interests, etc. At the same
time, they are also potentially contestable resources, prone to recontextualiza-
tion, transposition across contexts and recycling, thus leading to other kinds of
discourses (Silverstein and Urban, 1996; Shuman, 2005). In this respect, it is
important to recognize the place of narratives in a trajectory of interactions as
temporalized activities (De Fina, 2003b; Baynham and De Fina, 2005), and
also in networks of practices which they are part of, represent and reflect on.

A summary
Our approach as outlined above has the following implications for doing nar-
rative analysis:

1) It implies a close attention to both micro- and macro-levels, but always taking the
local level of interaction as the place of articulation of phenomena that may find
their explanation beyond it. Detailed transcription of the data, emphasis on the
communicative how, the sequential mechanisms, and the telling roles and rights in
the course of a narrative, are some of the hallmarks of the micro-analytic toolkit
we are proposing.
2) It requires a careful examination of the way narrative tellings function as social
practices and also within other social practices. This necessitates looking into gen-
res as interconnections between social expectations about narrative form and
emergence of meanings in concrete events.
3) It points to the historicity of narratives and their interconnections with practices.
In this sense, narratives need to be studied as texts that get transposed in time and
space, that (re)produce and modify current discourses, thus establishing intertex-
tual ties with other narratives and other genres. An important methodological
implication is the need to tap into trajectories of storytelling events that may take
the form of either longitudinal studies or revisiting the same data with the reflex-
ive distance of time (Riessman Kohler, 2002: 193–214).
4) It indicates the need to be open to variability in narrative and to abandon pre-
defined ideas about what narrative is, paying attention to non-canonical narratives

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 De Fina and Georgakopoulou: Analysing narratives as practices 385

and narrative formats and genres that have been neglected in mainstream research
and understanding how they function in specific social contexts. Small story
research (Bamberg, 2004; Georgakopoulou, 2006a, 2006b, 2007) is an important
step in this direction and one that is compatible with the social-interactional para-
digm. By employing ‘small stories’ as an umbrella term for underrepresented nar-
rative activities, small stories research has begun to chart the interactional and
textual features of such activities and to document their links with their sites of
occurrence, mapping out contextual factors that engender or prohibit the telling of
small stories. Finally, its aim, as that of the SIA, is to work through the implications
for identity research of including non-canonical stories in the focal concerns of
narrative analysis.
5) It places emphasis on reflexivity in processes of data collection and analysis.

This means that, for example, transcription and translation are not seen as
transparent processes, but as choices with strong implications for data analy-
sis. Equally, it sees dichotomies such as natural versus elicited data as funda-
mentally flawed because it is committed to exploring how any setting in which
narratives occur brings about, and is shaped by, different norms and histories
of associations, participant frameworks and relations, etc. From a method-
ological point of view, the SIA does not set out to sanction or prescribe certain
ways of working at the expense of others. However, its epistemological frame-
work lends itself better to ethnographic kinds of methods that allow for local,
reflexive and situated understandings of narratives as more or less partial and
valid accounts within systems of production and articulation.

NOTES

1. Space limitations do not allow us to discuss and do justice to the counter-discourses

to this canon, voiced by various prominent scholars within narrative inquiry (e.g.
Catherine Riessman, Liz Stanley, Chris Weedon, to mention only three), who have
put issues of researcher position and co-construction in the narrative process very
firmly on the map.

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ANNA DE FINA’S research interests focus on narrative, identity, the discourse of

immigrants and language contact phenomena. Her publications include Identity in
Narrative (2003), Dislocations, Relocations, Narratives of Displacement, co-edited with
Mike Baynham (2005), Discourse and Identity (2006) and Selves and Identities in
Narrative and Discourse (2007) both co-edited with Deborah Schiffrin and Michael
Bamberg. Address: Italian Department, ICC 307J, Georgetown University, 37th and
O Streets NW, Washington DC 20015, USA. [email: definaa@georgetown.edu]

ALEXANDRA GEORGAKOPOULOU’S publications include Narrative Performances (1997),

Discourse Analysis (co-authored with D. Goutsos, 2004) and Discourse Constructions of
Youth Identities (co-edited with J. Androutsopoulos, 2003). She has recently explored the
significance of everyday conversational stories for the sort of narrative and identity analy-
sis that interview researchers do. This line of inquiry forms the subject of her latest book,
Small Stories, Interaction and Identities (2007). Address: Department of Byzantine and
Modern Greek Studies/Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication, School of
Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK. [email: alexan-
dra.georgakopoulou@kcl.ac.uk]

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