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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge base on the ways in which assistant principals view their roles, and on the potential challenges involved in a distributed leadership model.

The study employed a narrative capture method, in which assistant principals from two large urban school districts were asked to relate and self-interpret two leadership stories through a web-based narrative capture form. A total of 90 stories were collected from 45 assistant principals. Participants rated their stories based on a set of leadership indicators (including method of decision making and type of teacher interaction present in the story, among others); the results were analyzed statistically.

Overall, participants tended to view their roles in terms of instructionally focussed leadership. However, leadership challenges emerged in several areas of leadership practice, including operational management and teacher professional development (PD). Demographic factors were found to influence leadership perceptions and practices.

This study begins to fill the empirical gap on assistant principal leadership roles, practices, and perceptions. Further research, using other methods (e.g. observation), is needed to collect evidence of in situ leadership practices of assistant principals, and how those practices impact and relate to school objectives for teaching and learning.

The study sheds light on the leadership development needs of assistant principals and on the importance of ongoing, tailored PD, based on factors including where leaders are in their careers and how they envision their roles.

This paper contributes to nascent scholarship regarding assistant principal school leadership.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a visual perspective to the narrative management research by exploring the potential of drawings to construct organizational space. This study is explorative in nature and aims to open up a discussion on the importance of visuality within the narrative research. Visual narratives combined with written ones are constructed and analyzed in the paper.

The empirical illustrations of visual narratives outline students’ first-time encounters of the university campus. Their drawings and stories are used to describe and analyze their personal and subjective experiences of how they relate to the campus space. The students were asked to recall the moment they encountered the university campus for the first time and to draw their memories on a paper. Furthermore, they were asked to describe the drawings in a written narrative. Following that, the storyline was identified through a content analysis of both the drawings and the written narratives. This participatory research approach considers informants as co-researchers in producing data and emphasizes the inter-subjective nature of the study.

The study points out valuable aspects in visual narrative organization research. The drawings and written narratives were found to complement each other revealing different things of the experiences. The drawings were very rich and detailed. They captured and revealed emotions, symbolic meanings and interpretations that were not explicated in the written stories. Finally, categories of visual narratives on organizational space were developed.

This study contributes to the development of visual methodology in narrative management research. Moreover, this paper provides a methodological contribution to study organizational space. It sheds light on the potential of using visual narrative materials, especially self-produced drawings to construct organizational space. The study develops and illustrates a visual research method that combines written narratives with drawings. The study points out the importance to involve the informants as co-creators of a narrative study to capture the emotional richness of visual narratives. The authors envision that visual aspects of narratives will be a future direction in the narrative research, because visuality may capture hidden emotional aspects, symbols and artifacts that are not easily revealed in the told or written stories.

Purpose – This chapter explores the complexity and tensions inherent in the question of how story becomes research with particular attention to the use of narrative research in studying teacher education.

Approach – To do this, we begin each section with a narrative fragment from earlier published research in which we collaborated (Hamilton, 1995). Then, we use narrative research analysis tools to explore the meaning of each fragment, lay that understanding alongside research accounts and wonderings about research in and by teacher educators, and consider the fragment in terms of specific understandings of narrative inquiry as research methodology for studying teacher education.

Findings – This chapter examines when story moves to research while probing the tensions between knowledge and living as teachers, teacher educators, and teacher educator researchers. Using the first fragment, we explore fulfilling roles as a teacher educator by using a narrative analysis tool that teases apart the author's role of narrator, actor, and character. In the second fragment, we consider the contexts that influence a teacher educator researcher by examining the fragment to determine the levels of narrative. In the third fragment, we utilize the tools of plotlines and tensions to unpack the competing plotlines of epistemology (modernist vs. narrative) ending with an examination of the importance of ontology in narrative work. In our fourth fragment, we unpack nine approaches to narrative by examining the essential role of story for each element of the research process.

Research implications – As teacher educator researchers, we always stand in the midst – in the midst of the story where we may be simultaneously narrator, character, and actor, in the midst of living the research we are most interested in studying. Within a single moment, we can act as teacher, teacher educator, and teacher educator researcher when our research focuses on our own practice. Our experience as we live it represents the tension between arrival and arriving.

Value – The value of this chapter is the way in which it demonstrates narrative analysis and distinguishes among various approaches to narrative research.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the articulation of the affordances of two qualitative methodologies when used within one study to address the multi-dimensional nature of the research phenomena.

This paper considers one example of combining narrative inquiry and phenomenological inquiry to construct new understandings of teacher learning from an Australian study.

The author draws on the individual meaning-making and shared social phenomena of professional learning explored for five secondary school teachers. Findings are accessed in two ways: narrative inquiry enables the construction of unique professional learning narratives and phenomenological inquiry proposes commonalities in the teachers’ experiences.

Selected examples from the study are used to explore what may be learnt from combining two interpretative methodologies within one study with limited references to the overall research findings.

These qualitative methodological designs and their implementation within one study have positive influences on the multifaceted nature of the construction of meaning-making in teacher professional learning. Furthermore, using two qualitative methodologies together provide insights on the study phenomena, in this instance, highlighting the personal aspect of expert teachers’ professional learning needs and the disruptive dissonance of ongoing problematics as central for the teachers throughout their professional learning.

This study offers one possibility for combining methodologies to access the meaning-making in teacher learning and one avenue for creating hermeneutic understanding in using the methods within this approach.

This paper aims to argue that, while destination benchmarking and visitor surveys seek to measure the visitor experience, they privilege the destination manager or researcher rather than taking the visitor's viewpoint. It seeks to suggest that capturing and analysing visitor stories while in the destination can facilitate understanding of how destination image changes with actual experience, and what factors or attributes are important, thereby offering a deeper insight into the process through which destination experience is transformed (sense making) and transmitted (sense giving) via those stories, that all important word of mouth publicity.

Unstructured interviews were recorded with visitors in Edinburgh and Greenwich. An interpretive approach was employed in analysing the interview data to uncover facets of visitor experience affecting the image conveyed through the narrative.

The research reveals three elements involved in the sense making and sense giving process and sets out the three categories of visitor consumption characteristics which are implicated in the process.

Although the outcomes of the sense making and sense giving process are mediated by the incidents, interactions and characteristics of the individual visitor, the process itself is common to all visitors. Analysing visitor narratives to uncover the mediating factors illuminates the visitor's actual destination experience and its impact on their understanding or image of a destination. Narratives proved to be a useful research tool.

The interview and analysis techniques used could be readily adapted for use alongside existing standardised visitor survey tools to provide destination managers and marketers a greater understanding of the impact of customer care and visitor management programmes and how narrative may be useful in tailoring destination marketing to meet the requirements of specific visitor groups.

The paper demonstrates the utility of capturing and analysing visitor narratives at the point of destination consumption for understanding actual destination experience and the way in which it is transmitted as word of mouth information to others.

The paper discusses some of the central features of IMP and industrial network research. Different types of empirical phenomena that are in focus of this research are presented. The paper also comments on epistemology, acknowledging some of the underpinnings of industrial network research and how they affect the use of case studies. Examples of case or narrative methodology are provided, taking a starting point in a set of chosen doctoral theses. In addition, a condensed version of the author’s own experiences from a case research and case-writing process covering a period of more than five years is provided (Andersson, 1996a, b). Literature support is brought in for the fact that case writing and the creation of narratives is often a long and ambiguous process of finding a final plot which merges the theoretical with the empirical. The conclusions and comments summarize some of the main implications and ideas emerging from the text, and points also to some emerging discussions in social science on the importance and status of narrative knowledge.

This paper aims to develop a holistic measure for analysing impression management and for detecting bias introduced into corporate narratives as a result of impression management.

Prior research on the seven impression management methods in the literature is summarised. Four of the less‐researched methods are described in detail, and are illustrated with examples from UK annual results' press releases (ARPRs). A method of computing a holistic composite impression management score based on these four impression management methods is developed, based on both quantitative and qualitative data in corporate narrative disclosures. An impression management bias score is devised to capture the extent to which impression management introduces bias into corporate narratives. An example of the application of the composite impression management score and impression management bias score methodology is provided.

While not amounting to systematic evidence, the 21 illustrative examples suggest that impression management is pervasive in corporate financial communications using multiple impression management methods, such that positive information is exaggerated, while negative information is either ignored or is underplayed.

Four impression management methods are described in detail, illustrated by 21 examples. These four methods are examined together. New impression management methods are studied in this paper for the first time. This paper extends prior impression management measures in two ways. First, a composite impression management score based on four impression management techniques is articulated. Second, the composite impression management score methodology is extended to capture a measure for bias, in the form of an impression management bias score. This is the first time outside the USA that narrative disclosures in press releases have been studied.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the appropriate method, demonstrating with a prototype model, of how knowledge in reliability management can be elicited from individuals as well as a team.

The approach is to elicit the tacit knowledge of the reliability engineers through narratives and cognitive mapping. With a sufficient number of cognitive maps, patterns are revealed and an aggregate cognitive map for all participating members is produced, which helps to summarize various approaches and procedures that can be taken in handling different reliability management issues.

The work provides a real‐life example to support the stages of learning from the individual, the group to the organizational level as described in the theoretical Learning Framework.

Many knowledge management programs failed for various reasons. One common pitfall is that they are either too ambitious or too vague in the scope, methodology of their deliverables. To be successful, the project objectives should be linked to the business needs that lead to solving their business problems.

A prototype is developed in the organization of expertise knowledge in a bottom‐up manner in the building of a corporate memory from individuals to team level in the reliability management in an airline company.

This is the first study in the airline industry to capture the know‐how and experience of its reliability engineers in the form of congregate cognitive maps so as to facilitate team learning and the building of organizational memory. It is the first in the airline industry to adopt this methodology for developing its own procedure manuals. The model was implemented successfully in the Engineering Division of an airline business in order to handle their reliability management issues.