Author Archives: KatHansen

Seth Kahan this year has started a blog on collaboration: collaboratioNation, a look at how people work together across boundaries.

I was very close to the finish line of my dissertation when I suddenly started seeing a source pop up in virtually everything I read. It’s not like he was someone new on the scene; on the contrary, Jerome Bruner’s work is seminal in the storytelling world. As pointed out by a member of the Working Stories group, Bruner, in his Acts of Meaning suggests that stories are hard-wired into humans – that they are the primary symbolic activities that human beings employ in sense- and meaning-making. “There are certain classes of meaning to which human beings are innately tuned and for which they actively search.” Narrative, he says, organizes experience and “specializes in the forging of links between the exceptional and the ordinary.”

Odd that I didn’t come across his work till so close to the end of my research. So close in fact that I ended up not citing Bruner. I have nightmares that someone reviewing my dissertation will gasp, “I can’t believe you didn’t cite Bruner!”

This concept of people being hard-wired to think in narrative is important for my work, though, because it suggests that hiring managers are more receptive to job-search communications in narrative form.

Another member of the Working Stories group suggested a number of additional works that address narrative as a way of thinking. See those in the continuation of this entry. Continue reading →