Persuasive Tool

Perhaps the most interesting thing about stories for organisational research, though, is that they also persuade. In this way, narrative and story research can become much more than collecting views or opinions, to be analysed and presented back to a client in a conventional way. It can be about using stories to understand, influence and persuade. It becomes what I like to call a research intervention ­ not necessarily what we are asked to do in fmcg research, but something that is a realistic objective in organisational research and management.

Many organisations now supplement their quantitative employee research with qualitative work. This is usually in the form of focus groups, but by taking this further and employing narrative techniques they begin not only to understand but also to influence their employees.

But how to do it? The first stage in any narrative project is to collect your raw material: the stories. There are several ways of doing this but the principle is to capture the material in as ‘natural’ a way as possible. It is here that narrative work overlaps with ethnography and social anthropology (see Philly Desai’s Truth, Lies and Videotape, Autumn 2004, In Depth).

Traditional focus group trappings ­ the discussion guide, the recruiting, the focus group room, the time allowed ­ can sometimes be too contrived and unnatural to get individuals to begin telling stories. So in this setting the moderator must overcome this, allowing discussion to range into unexpected areas and prompting stories to emerge. In our experience narrative groups require a particularly skilled and self-aware facilitator.

You might also want to play around with the conventions of the business ­ one technique for enhancing natural language capture is to use ‘naïve’ interviewers (adolescents are very good at this) to ask the questions that trained researchers would never ask.
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 NEXT >>