I have uploaded a draft of my dissertation. It’s the one that also went to my faculty adviser last week. I’ve had very little feedback on it, so I can’t vouch for the quality, and it may end up changing a lot depending on what my committee says.
The download is on my password-protected PhD site. If you’d like to see the dissertation, Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling That Propels Careers, e-mail me at mailto:kathy@astoriedcareer.com, and I will give you the username, password, and link.
From an appendix to my dissertation, a collection (that I plan to add to) of consulting firms that focus on organizational storytelling:
Thanks to my wonderful blog/Movable Type guru, Chris Dixson of Brandego, this blog can again take comments — as long as the commenter registers (to avoid spam).
Found this wonderful quote on one of the articles on the Avalon Web site (see preceding entry):
“Stories are alchemy. They are medicine, healing, mystery, paradox, power, and many other things, allowing us to feel, taste, touch, hear and see the stories around us. They are chaos, order, complexity. Stories are fractals. They are necessary, basic and dangerous in that they can’t be controlled by our striving intellects. They are the container, the elements, the process and the trigger of transformation.”
~ Learning Organizations, p. 129
Arrrggghhh! Why didn’t I know about this rich site and consulting firm while working on my dissertation?!
Glory Ressler was one of the presenters at this year’s Storytelling Weekend in Washington, DC. I didn’t attend but am, in the spirit of sharing exemplified in the storytelling community, sharing the resources from the weekend here.
The site offers a trove of stories, and my favorite area so far is the library section. Great stuff!
A source of consternation during my dissertation research was the lukewarm reception that focus-group participants gave story-based job-search media, such as resumes (especially resumes), cover letters, and interview responses.
Perhaps, as Seth Kahan posits below, my focus-group participants were reacting in a “conventional” way — as opposed to a storied way. These terms come from a taxonomy of explanations proposed by Charles Tilly in his book Why?, which has gotten some buzz this year.
Here’s Kahan’s take on focus-group responses:
I think, as I gather you do, that how we feel about a brand, and which products and services we choose, is usually explained by a fantastically complex set of factors: the brands our parents used, the brands we see people around us use, the image of the brand, our personal experience with it, a sale, a half-remembered ad from 10 years ago, and so on. This is probably best explained as a story – we may both buy Tide, but there’s a different narrative that brought each of us to pick it up.
But in market research, the answers people give sound more like
conventions: “It’s a good value”, “my family likes it”, “it tastes
good.” And it seems that because of the artificiality of the situation, the perils of introspection, etc, most market research actually encourages people to answer in conventions, and doesn’t encourage the telling of stories. Many of these stories are probably complex and deeply buried such that they are hard to consciously access anyway.
Now, I’m not sure there is as much of a story behind a focus-group participant’s choice of, say, laundry detergent, compared to a resume, but it’s still an interesting point to ponder.
At some point, I would like to compile a master bibliography here (if I’m not reinventing the wheel), bringing together my overall bibliography for this blog, as well as previous postings and this new entry with suggestions from Brian McKenzie and Sandy Schuman, who posted them to the Working Stories group. They’re listed in the continuation of this entry. McKenzie’s work is of interest to me because he teaches entrepreneurship, which I also teach. I’m also adding other resources as I come across them.
Boje, D. M. (1991). The storytelling organization: A study of story performance in an office-supply firm. Administrative Science Quarterly, 36(1), 106-126.
Boje, D. M. (1995). Stories of the storytelling organization: A postmodern analysis of disney as “tamara-land”. Academy of Management Journal, 38(4), 997-1035.
Boje, D. M., Luhman, J. T., & Baack, D. E. (1999). Hegemonic stories and encounters between storytelling organizations. Journal of Management Inquiry, 8(4), 340-360.
Organizations through Language by, Susanne Tietze, Laurie Cohen and Gill Musson. London: SAGE Publications, 2003. (Reviewed in Organization Studies 26(2): 311-317, 2005.)
The Resilience of Language, by Susan Goldin-Meadow. Psychology Press, 2003.
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, by Steven Pinker. HarperCollins, 2000.
The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, by Terrence Deacon.New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
The Narrative Construction of Reality, by Jerome Bruner. Critical Inquiry, 1991, 18(1), 1-21.
Acts of Meaning, by Jerome Bruner. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990.
Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13(4): 707-784.
Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action, by Walter Fisher. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 1987.
Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, by Donald E. Polkinghorne. SUNY Press, 1988.
Culture tales: A narrative approach to thinking, cross-cultural psychology, and psychotherapy. by Howard, George S. American Psychologist. 1991 Mar Vol 46(3) 187-197.
Thinking in Story: Preaching in a Post-Literate Age, by Richard Jensen.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.
From Seth Kahan:
Walter Fisher’s “Narrative Paradigm” in which, according to a couple of web resources, he indicates that “…narrative is what makes reason and values meaningful. Man becomes Homo Narrans.” These resources also point to his book, Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 1987).
The question came up on the Working Stories list — how do you define “narrative practitioner?”
Seth Kahan offered this definintion:
For me a narrative practitioner is someone who applies the notion that human beings deal with their experience by constructing stories and listening to the stories of others. As practitioners our day-to-day lives, including our work, are informed by this approach. We see human activity and experience as meaningful and recognize that stories are a primary vehicle by which this meaning is relayed, shared, and constructed.
Madelyn Blair added:
I think I’ll build on Seth’s points to say that there is another dimension to a narrative practitioner. Knowing and understanding the role and power that story (narrative) plays in our lives, we use that understanding with a keen sense of humility and respect for others.
Glory Ressler chimed in with:
For me, a narrative practitioner is a person who professionally and responsibly uses story-based concepts and tools and promotes an understanding of the important influence story plays in our individual, organizational and communal lives.
I also believe that the values the individual practitioner brings to his/her practice significantly impact the quality and outcomes of the work.
Steve Denning offers another chapter from his upcoming book, The Secret Language of Leadership, to be published by Jossey-Bass in September 2007. The chapter is relevant to my work because my dissertation particularly looks at the value of telling change stories in the job search and includes a review of the literature on storytelling and change. And, of course, eleiciting a desire for change is another form of persuasion.
Lori Silverman, author of Wake Me When the Data Is Over, who was a huge help in my disseration writing, very kindly sent me advance pages of her book before it was published this month. The book is fantastic because it gives more story examples than most books of its kind. More to come about this terrific book….