Narratives and stories in organizational life

Organizing has always been a part of human life, but many scholars approach organizations as relatively recent historical figures. They view the rise of organizations as coinciding with the onset of modernity, urbanization, industrialization, and scientific modes of thinking and reasoning. The neglect of narrative by organizational scholarship until the 1970s was consistent with the view that modernity, with its emphasis on information, science and facts, had sounded the death-knell for storytelling. Consistent with social constructionist orientations, an increasing number of scholars have since come to view narrative not as something that happens “inside” a given box called organization, but as something that serves to construct the box itself. Related to the increasing acceptance of narrative-based methodologies in organizational research has been a realization that researchers are themselves narrators and that a substantial part of social science research has a narrative character.