Following a strand of narrative studies pointing to the living conditions of storytelling and the micro-level implications of working within fragmented narrative perspectives, this article contributes to narrative research on work stories by focusing on how meaning is created from fragmented stories. We argue that meaning by story making is not always created by coherence and causality; meaning is created by different types of fragmentation: discontinuities, tensions and editing. The objective of this article is to develop and advance antenarrative practice analysis of work stories by exploring how different types of fragmentation create meanings. This is done by studying the work stories of job and personnel consultants and by drawing on the results of a narrative, ethnographic study of a consultancy. The analysis demonstrates how work stories are social practices negotiated, retold, edited and performed by the storyteller in an ongoing process allowing tensions, discontinuities and editing between failures and achievements, between dreams and work realities and between home and work life. We argue that by including different types of fragmentation, we offer a new type of antenarrative practice approach that offers a contemporary method for exploring meaning creation in work stories.

This article contributes to the current debate among organizational and work-life researchers on the double-sided nature of knowledge work, which offers great freedom and satisfaction on the one hand and the potential to be overly demanding and stressful on the other. This contribution involves drawing on the results of an ethnographic case study of a consultancy house; more specifically, it comprises an exploration of the narrative identity work of consultants as they perform work practice stories of self, work, and the organization negotiating why the work they do is both challenging and rewarding. The type of knowledge work explored is characterized by its immaterial nature in the sense that the primary input is the competences, knowledge, and commitment of the consultants and the output is the joy, success, and satisfaction of candidates, clients, and collaborators. The article contributes by showing that some of the elements perceived to make the work meaningful and rewarding are the same ones also described as potentially demanding and challenging. Furthermore, the article contributes by arguing that studying work practice stories as (ante)narrative identity work provides a rich source of empirical material in the examination of how we create meaning in relationship to the work we do and the organizations by which we are employed.

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Conflict in organizations takes many forms. However, most existing literature on organizational conflict focuses on overt forms of conflict expression and handling. While covert conflict exists and shapes the collective organizing of conflict in organizations, the relationship between overt and covert forms of conflict has not yet been well explicated. This article offers a novel perspective on the dynamics of overt and covert conflict in organizations by examining why some forms of conflict gain legitimacy over others. We present an ethnographic study of how the staff and management experienced everyday conflict at a Nordic aid agency that highly prized harmony and collaboration in the workplace and had therefore adopted a deliberate and logical approach to conflict. An affective underside of the organization, marked by subtle and suppressed conflict expression, however, alluded to an acknowledged organizational order that guided conflict interaction among members and kept the production together. To explain these organizational dynamics, we use narrative theory as an original and fertile perspective for studying both overt and covert forms of conflict and their interaction. This reveals an important feature of their relationship: they are intertextually linked through their relationship to the dominant organizational identity, which hegemonizes what is and what is not allowed to get into conflict over. From these findings, we develop a model of the structuring of overt and covert conflict through organizational identity, thus contributing to the organizational conflict literature.

I artiklen stiller vi skarpt på det følelsesmæssigt krævende identitetsarbejde, der er forbundet med at performe succes og fiasko i konsulentarbejde. Konsulentfortællinger om fiasko er ofte følelsesmæssigt krævende og fragmenterede fortællinger om det personligt utilfredsstillende i ikke at kunne udføre arbejdet tilfredsstillende. Succesfortællingerne handler derimod om det meningsfulde og tilfredsstilende i gennem arbejdet at gøre en reel forskel for andre mennesker. Den meningsskabelse, der er knyttet til succes og fiaskofortællinger, er helt central for konsulenters arbejdsforståelse og deres opfattelse af overensstemmelse mellem selvdefinition og arbejdssituation. Men fortællingerne skabes ofte 'backstage', og får derfor aldrig den opmærksomhed i virksomhedens sociale liv, som kunne bidrage til en bedre forståelse af medarbejdernes følelsesliv og arbejdsliv.