Collins, Hilary. "Narrative." Creative Research: The Theory and Practice of Research for the Creative Industries.

London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018. 145–148. Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Web. 9 Mar. 2024. <http://
dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474247115.0043>.

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 CHAPTER 30
NARRATIVE
Social contexts can be understood as socially
constructed verbal systems: stories, discourses and
texts. Each actor within the social context has a voice
in the narrative. These voices can be loud, articulate
and powerful or silent or unheard. The differences
and possibilities are exposed when we visualize a
social context as comprising simultaneously occurring
dialogues, with each actor’s voice being the centre of
their own social context. In order to undertake research
that identifies and allows each of these voices to be
heard, a storytelling approach can be used.
SOCIAL CONTEXT STORIES
Social context stories can be defined as an exchange
between two or more actors during which a past
or anticipated experience is referred to, recounted,
interpreted or challenged. Narratives are a practical
source of information from which you can base an
inquiry into social events or interactions. Using stories
is convenient because they are easy to collect and they
reduce complexity; rather than discussing attitudes and
beliefs directly with actors, stories are said to represent
them. Stories get to the heart of actors’ meaning by
explaining the nature of an individual’s own reality. As
well as revealing individual meaning, storytelling is a
symbolic form by which actors construct the shared
meanings of a social context. Stories are a narrative
sense-making structure that link a sequence of events.
Using stories as a source of research data allows you
to conveniently access the interpretations, meaning
and order that individuals and groups place on their
organizational lives.
More important than the convenience of using
stories to gain access to individual and shared contextual
meanings, storytelling is a research technique with a
Creative Research.indb 145
pluralistic and diverse approach to social contextual
analysis. Rather than assuming that there is a single
reality expressed by one authoritative voice, stories taken
from a variety of sources can provide an opportunity to
see the inbuilt differences in how actors make sense of
their social experience.
Stories can bring subjectivity back to a platform from
where it can be observed and allow for a presentation
of the interactions of social life based on the different
personal experiences and sense-making assumptions of
actors.
THE RESEARCH PROCESS
The first step in undertaking research of this nature is
to collect stories from actors who have been involved
in events relating to your research question. This
puts the onus on you as the researcher to decide and
select whose stories to listen to. Using storytelling as a
research technique aims to give a voice to stories that
are not heard in the traditional research framework.
In particular, stories of disagreement and resistance
need to be heard alongside the legitimized stories of
power holders. The value of this approach is that it
creates opportunities for reflective discussion and
comparison of diverse story meanings and themes.
These themes can also be contrasted to theoretically
abstract models in the literature to see if the common
sense understandings of actors match up to the
prescribed preferences. Stories are available from a
number of sources. They are told face to face on a daily
basis as people at work interact with one another; and
in writing, through electronic media such as email
and blogs.
Stories which are available to each actor as they carry
out their work or social interactions may not, however,
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 be equally available to you as a researcher. Nevertheless,
it is possible to gather stories for the specific purposes
of research, providing that the researcher can gain
access to the storytellers. Researching using storytelling
can then be done by asking individuals to recount
events they perceive in social contexts. These stories
can be used to research how actors make sense of
their situations and to highlight differences between
individuals in this process. Studies of this nature are
equally applicable to inquiry into multiple perspectives
within a social context or to inquire into social contexts
across different settings.
The process of gathering this type of data is first
to select storytellers from diverse perspectives. The
researcher then needs to use story-listening skills to
be able to receive the stories effectively. These skills
are similar to active listening and involve suspending
judgements based on stereotypes, empathizing with
the storyteller and providing reflective responses to
encourage storytellers to tell their stories to the end,
then giving feedback to the storyteller to ensure that the
story has been accurately received.
REPRESENTATION OF
RESEARCH DATA
You need to pay attention to the issue of representation.
Concerns have been raised about how researchers
construct accounts of their fieldwork using epic and
heroic narratives that prioritize the author’s voice-
over that of the actors. This monological format of
the representation of data curbs the empowerment of
diverse and indigenous voices and does not allow for
ambiguity, heterogeneity and discord. This difficult
issue relates to how we can resolve a conflict between
interpretation and representation. In an attempt
to resolve this issue, we can use an analogy of the
researcher as less of a ‘lone interpreter‘ and as more of
a ‘ghostwriter’.
Research can be represented in the form of text
(stories) told by the organizational storytellers, where
the initial role of the researcher is merely to write up
the story. Research findings can be represented as they
were discovered and the stories told in the first person.
Following the recounting of these stories, the researcher
146 PART 3 MANAGING THE RESEARCH PROCESS
Creative Research.indb 146
can write up his or her own story relating to how the
stories were gathered and his or her own interpretations
of those stories. The researcher is now not ‘the lone
interpreter’ who got to the heart of a particular culture
assisted by powerful theoretical understanding, but
rather just another voice in the orchestra of social life.
SIDES OF THE STORY
One popular metaphor for storytelling is to look
at the ‘sides’ of a story. This metaphor is unsuitably
related to the material world. To see stories in this way
draws a parallel between social reality as a physical
geometric object with many sides. Each actor has a
‘side’ of his or her own and the role of the researcher
is to reveal each of the sides in order to expose the
totality of the social situation. But in a social world,
any series of events has as many sides as there are
individuals to interpret it. The representation of these
interpretations again has as many sides as there are
further interpretations. We therefore cannot see the
object as a whole, as it has become too complex. It
is an object with innumerable sides, each side itself
having innumerable sides, and so it goes on. There
will be no definite social reality.
One approach to researching within social
contexts is based on the assumption that social
groups are characterized by this indefinite difference
and diversity among their members. Based on this
diversity, different actors construct different ‘realities’
about their situations. If you research using this
tool, you will not be seeking to develop a consensus
about the criteria as legitimate or representing the
whole, but rather to expose a part of the multiplicity
of perspectives available in the given setting. In
doing this, particular attention is placed on those
perspectives or ‘voices’ that are suppressed by the
process of becoming legitimate and the unprincipled
tendencies of performance and efficiency. Researching
in this way uses a storytelling technique through
which the researcher seeks to gather stories from a
range of organizational actors, with a focus on diverse
and oppositional accounts. Stories are represented as
first-person narratives, with the implicit recognition
that the writer has only one voice.
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 PROBLEMS WITH STORIES
As discussed earlier, stories used as accounts of actors’
experience can be seen to be the embodiment of their
beliefs, which get to the heart of an individual’s reality
and represent actors’ symbolically constructed and
shared meanings. But do they restore subjectivity to the
platform from which they can be observed? Storytelling
is a seductive approach that can lead us to believe
that we are doing research that is pluralistic, multi-
vocal, non-discriminatory and non-privileging. But is
asserting that this statement of stories is unproblematic
an illusion that is equally as idealistic and unsound
as the search for quantitatively represented empirical
social truths?
There is no way we can actually place a real-life
actor and their experiences between the pages. Stories
are not real life; they are reconstructed representations
of an actor’s experience. They are always subject to
further and different undocumented reconstructions
by the storyteller and deconstruction by whoever reads
or hears them. They can always be seen in potential
contrast to the undocumented stories of other people
who experienced the events in the story. If we assume
that there is no theoretically neutral language of
observation that can describe the supposedly fixed
properties of the physical world, then stories cannot
provide any factual accuracy, but can only highlight the
problems of representation.
This can be partially addressed by suggesting the
presentation of stories as first-person narratives,
which would then allow for the presence of multiple
voices. It seems that problems of representation
cannot be ultimately resolved in research, but can
only be recognized. Acknowledging this is a step away
from the misleading assumptions and conclusions
that can only result from a purely denotative view of
language. This perspective sees interpretation and
representation as being problematic. It calls for a
more self-reflective approach that pays attention to
how stories are produced and read. The story should
be more open and should reflect ambiguities in the
social world and in language. It must be recognized
that the product of the research is not knowledge,
but the written text itself. The production of this text
is merely a means by which social actors define and
Creative Research.indb 147
reflect on their environments. By looking at research
from multiple perspectives and producing a narrative
that contains diverse voices, we attempt to write in a
way that does not determine reality, but which rather
imagines different possibilities.
TYPES AND FORMS OF
STORIES
Writer David M. Boje defines a story as any ‘oral or
written performance involving two or more people
interpreting past or anticipated experience’. He further
asserts that stories are ‘the preferred sense-making
currency of human relationships among internal and
external stakeholders in organizations’. We can say that
design itself is an act of storytelling and that designers
are storytellers. Here are a few of the main types of
stories:
●● Hero stories feature characters who show skill and
achieve great things.
●● Survivor stories talk about how things go wrong
but are put right. It is the opposite of the hero story,
which often sends a message that the organization
and its leaders are incompetent, but that ‘we found
a way around them’.
●● ‘Steam valve’ stories reduce stress and build
friendship and loyalty, often in a humorous,
dramatic and irreverent manner.
●● ‘Learn from mistakes’ stories tell of pending or
present threats that we should change to avoid; or
of lessons we learned because of past threats gone
unheeded.
●● ‘Trust’ stories build affinity, heal conflict and
facilitate change.
Apart from written and oral narratives that we hear
every day, stories can come in other, often abstract,
forms such as
●● Rites (events), which re-enact important narratives
in cultures. Examples include rites of passage,
which denote promotion or progression; political
rites, in which people or practices are validated
or invalidated; calendar rites, which call on us to
remember; rites of exchange, which accompany
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 important transactions; rites of communion, which
solidify alliances and partnerships; and rites of
affliction, which commemorate loss.
●● Physical objects, in the form of logos, symbols, art
objects, buildings, and so on, are abstract stories
that express the underlying character, ideology or
values of an organization.
●● People, particularly leaders, are stories when they
embody and live out a narrative that inspires
148 PART 3 MANAGING THE RESEARCH PROCESS
Creative Research.indb 148
admiration and imitation or warns against a way of
being.
●● Games, in the form of simulations, role plays
and exercises are also abstract stories that teach
lessons and allow experimentation with actual or
alternative realities.
It is important to note that any story form can carry any
particular story type.
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