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A great deal of contemporary research in education, and in the social sciences more generally, is conducted through interviews. Interview-derived accounts and narratives have been used as data for many decades. We argue that, despite their popularity and their long history, such data are not always subjected to rigorous analysis. Researchers too often treat interviews as sources of insight about informants’ experiences and feelings, but pay insufficient attention to the forms and functions of such accounts. We argue that they need to be approached through the analytic lens of accounting devices and narrative structures. We exemplify this approach through ‘academic’ narratives: scientists’ discovery accounts and accounts of doctoral supervision. We emphasise how such accounts need to be examined in terms of the discursive construction of reality. Such an approach is an important corrective to the selective reporting of ‘atrocity stories’ about postgraduate education.

Taking a set of studies about business action as the empirical starting-point, this paper looks at the various ways in which action is represented. The overall research question can be stated as follows: how is business action reconstructed in our narratives? The texts analyzed are collected from research on exchange relationships in the field of marketing. To analyze how these texts depict business action, four narrative constructions are focused: space, time, actors, and plots. The categorization and analysis are summarized and followed by a set of concluding implications and suggestions for narrative practice aiming to reconstruct business action in the making.

The purpose of this chapter is to make visible the similarities and differences among narrative, self-study of teacher education practices, and autoethnographic methodologies to generate clarity about when each methodology might be most appropriate. Using Margery Wolf’s (1992) A Thrice Told Tale as a heuristic to support our exploration, we look at a selected slice of data as if standing within each methodology. As we do that we consider ways that we might engage each methodology to push forward our thinking about powerful research. Our goal is to critically examine the processes that researchers use for the study and to explore the ways using particular methodologies in appropriate ways that can strengthen our thinking about professional knowledge.

Early career researchers are of increasing interest, regardless of national boundaries, given both policies to enhance international competitiveness, and concerns about individuals turning away from academic careers. As a result, there is a growing literature documenting how early career researchers navigate their journeys and decide to stay or leave. Our research is situated within this literature, yet is distinct in using a longitudinal qualitative team-based approach that has led to the conception of identity incorporating both the continuity of stable personhood over time and a sense of ongoing change. The scholarly contribution of this work is to articulate a contrasting perspective to the structural or systemic one common in examining early career researcher experience. Our goal in this chapter is to make transparent the decisions and actions underlying our approach and, in so doing, demonstrate the potential of researching the construction of identity in this way.

Narrative inquirers come to understand experience through story. In this way, the narrative is the primary unit of analysis rather than breaking down stories into its constituent parts, parsing particular words, ideas, or codes in the process of analysing and interpreting experience. This chapter adds complexity to understandings of the ways that narrative inquirers make meaning of experience with participants. My work with Olivia, a research participant, serves as a guide for this chapter as I further explore my process of meaning-making as a narrative inquirer. Beginning with recorded research conversations and transcriptions, the process moves to the use of word images as interim research texts. Word images are collections of participant responses, words and phrases, brought together to form storylines. The composition of word images allows for complex understandings of experience, with multiple, sometimes conflicting perspectives emerging from the participants’ words. As Maxine Greene suggested, meaning-making includes a going beyond the text that allows readers to connect with the words in new and interesting ways. Similarly, meaning-making in narrative inquiry moves beyond traditional qualitative data analysis that allows researchers and readers to think with the stories of participants, engaging with the participants’ experience(s) in new ways as the researcher and reader brings their own stories of experience to bear in the text; making meaning and imagining experience from new perspectives.

Most teaching and research in accounting ethics focuses on individuals. The presumption, therefore, is that the locus of professional ethics is the individual practitioner. This essay presents an argument for considering the profession itself as a significant locus for understanding professional ethics in accounting. Through a simple example employing the most basic thing we teach in the first accounting course, an illustration is provided that accounting techniques are rife with unexamined value judgments. Thus, accounting is itself a fundamentally ethical discourse for which the entire profession, not just individual practitioners, is responsible.