Fragmented work stories: Developing an antenarrative approach by discontinuity, tensions and editing

Abstract

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.

The agency role of simulation models in model-building groups

“…The process is prone to "counterfeit coherence," where order amongst (fragments of) stories is imposed inappropriately and explanations are shaped by multi-layered experiences and desires (Boje, 1991). Humle and Pedersen (2015) proposed an antenarrative approach to make sense of fragmented stories using discontinuity, tensions and editing.…”

Dynamics of Overt and Covert Conflict in Organizations: The Power of Organizational Identity

“…The notion of everyday story work covers the emotionally demanding, performative processes of meaningfully constructing self, others, work, and the organization (Boje, 1991(Boje, , 1995(Boje, , 2001Cunliffe & Coupland, 2012;Cunliffe, Luhman, & Boje, 2004;Mishler, 1999). Everyday story work acknowledges that individuals and collectives can balance many and sometimes opposing organizational stories (Humle & Pedersen, 2015), enabling the exploring of how we individually and collectively handle tension and contradictions when balancing demands and expectations at work while striving to present positive self-representations (Goffman, 1959). We should therefore explore both the storytelling performances that reproduce dominant and official narratives and the opposing understandings and experiences, conceptualized as counternarratives.…”

Exploring resistance in collaborative forms of governance: Meaning negotiations and counter-narratives in a case from the Danish education sector

“…Counternarratives, meanwhile, can be defined as "stories which people tell and live which offer resistance, either implicitly or explicitly, to dominant cultural narratives" (Frandsen et al, 2016, p. 2). These are often more fragmented and polyphonic, voiced in less structured everyday communication that helps to negotiate meanings, and to alter and resist a dominant narrative (Humle & Pedersen, 2015;Vaara et al, 2016). Narratives, then, can communicate dominant, strategic goals and future directions; however, they can also counter and oppose such goals and directions by expressing alternative meanings, and it is therefore apt to examine counter-narratives when studying resistance.…”

“…Based on this, we ask how resistance emerges in discursive struggles of collaborative forms of governance in a case from the Danish education sector. To explore such struggles in everyday communication, we develop an analytical approach that combines the concepts of meaning negotiation (Plotnikof, 2015;Thomas, Sargent, & Hardy, 2011) and counter-narrative (Frandsen, Kuhn, & Lundholt, 2016;Humle & Pedersen, 2015).…”