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First published October 2001

Narrative Discourse and Management Action

Abstract

An analysis of the language used by a management team suggests that narrative discourse helped resolve conflict, influence corporate decisions, and unify the group. By collectively constructing stories, managers made sense of the past, coped with the present, and planned for the future. Managers' preference for narrative reasoning reflected their beliefs that narrative conveyed contextual complexities and helped interpret other types of evidence, such as statistics. Lack of trust between the management team and corporate headquarters derived at least partially from different beliefs about what makes stories believable. Through individual and col lective narration, managers used imagination to transform experience and knowl edge into influence and action.

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1. To illustrate the points in this article, I have chosen stories related to each of these issues (personnel: the onboarding, three-strikes, and evaluation stories; security: the late-night and Vindicator safe stories; expansion: the site-selection story).
2. The names of individuals and places have been changed throughout this article.
3. "Le temps devient temps humain dans la mesure où il est articulé sur un mode narratif, et que le récit atteint sa signification plèniere quand il devient une condition de l'existence temporelle" (p. 85).

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Published In

Article first published: October 2001
Issue published: October 2001

Keywords

  1. Narrative
  2. Story
  3. Management
  4. Reasoning
  5. Discourse

Authors

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Daphne A. Jameson
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

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