Accidental By-Product

So, are stories an interesting and accidental by-product of your qualitative research or could you ­ should you ­ make them central to your design and delivery of the work?

Let’s go back a bit and track this emerging trend, when this interest in narrative appeared. We might think of it as quite recent, but in academia, it’s been dated back to as early as 1895 (Hevern 2004). In the first half of the twentieth century writers like Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell and Vladimir Propp popularized the idea of myth, folklore and archetypes in society.

Then W.J.T. Mitchell’s book, On Narrative, published in 1981, was hailed as a landmark event. It’s a collection of articles by leading historians, psychoanalysts, philosophers and literary critics, all of them preoccupied with what they see as the importance of narrative.

Until recently, these developments had little impact upon mainstream management or research thinking, but organisations have become more open to the use of story and narrative in the context of communication. They are also recognising the wider opportunities provided by narrative in the fields of marketing, market research and strategy development.

In the last decade a number of management books have emerged with titles like Sensemaking in Organisations (Weick 1995), Tell Me A Story (Schank and Morson 1995), The Story Factor (Simmons 2000), The Springboard (Denning 2001) and Organisational Storytelling (Gabriel 2000). A current strand of postmodern academic work, too, views organisations as a pluralistic construction of stories, storytellers, and story performance events in which every story implies its opposite. For example, David Boje (2001) shows the relationship between competing storytelling efforts of Nike and the anti-Nike activists. He argues that we should not accept any one set of narratives alone as ‘reality’ but rather embrace all viewpoints as part of the totality of Nike.

Mark and Pearson (2001) also apply narrative theory ­ specifically cross-cultural elemental archetypes ­ to brand building. They identify a series of archetypes like Creator; Caregiver; Ruler and Jester, before translating these into a branding context.

You might be thinking this all sounds a bit flaky. Maybe, but the serious business press, too, has begun to highlight the importance of storytelling, with articles in the Harvard Business Review (Denning 2004, McKee 2003), Wall Street Journal (Bennett 2003) and Financial Times (Denning 2004 and Kellaway 2004).

What does this mean to qualitative researchers? The attractions of narrative as a research method are obvious. Storytelling is natural and easy, entertaining and energizing. Stories help us understand complexity. Stories can enhance or change perceptions. Stories are easy to remember. They bypass normal defence mechanisms and engage our feelings. They are a great tool for exploring ideas, stretching our thinking, and communicating.