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The article presents a historical narrative model designed to encourage analytical thinking. My historical narrative inquiry model (a) teaches procedural knowledge (the process of “doing” history); (b) enhances interpretative skills; (c) cultivates historical perspectives based upon evidentiary history; and (d) encourages student authorship of historical narratives. The instructional model emphasizes small- and large-group activities, including oral presentations, discussions about primary documents, and considerations relative to the creation of written history. Students generate their own historical narratives in order to articulate their perspectives. The purpose of the model is to facilitate students’ historical understandings by developing more empathetic perceptions of the people of the past.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate employees’ conflicting perspectives on the business strategy in a Danish housing association through a narrative approach, in order to gain insight into the relation between master- and counter-narratives. The authors discuss the possibility of integrating counter-narratives as a resource in strategy processes. Finally, the usefulness and challenges of the applied narrative approach are addressed.

The study was undertaken as a case study of strategy communication in a private housing association. The empirical material consists of 16 qualitative interviews from all levels of the organization as well as recordings of meetings where management presents a new strategy to the employees. The study adopts a mixed methods interpretivist approach using focus groups and interviews as data and with a focus on narratives as sense-making resources. The applied method of analysis is based on narratology, sociological action analysis and the concept of “framing.”

Employees’ counter-narratives focus on practical problems regarding the implementation of the business strategy. They materialize through temporal structures and framing strategies through which employees’ perspectives are presented indirectly and with great care. In spite of their oppositional content, these counter-perspectives cannot be considered to be resistance; on the contrary, employees take great interest in solving the reported problems. Counter-narratives are seemingly useful resources in a form of “reality check” in the organization, in order to elucidate the implementation of the business strategy and make necessary adjustments. The research furthermore points to a more dialogical strategy communication where employees are involved earlier in the process rather than marginalized to “resistant bystanders.”

These findings give insight into the use of narratives as practical meaning construction in an organizational context, and in relation to strategy communication and change.

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.

This paper aims to assess the effect of narrative transportation, portrayed action and photographic style on viewers’ likelihood to comment on posted consumer photos.

Integrating visual semiotics and experiments, this research examines the influence of consumer photos on viewers’ likelihood to comment on the visualised narrative. One pilot, three experimental and a content analysis involve photos varying in their narrative perspective (selfie vs elsie) and portrayed content (no product, no action or directed action). The authors also test for the boundary condition of the role of the photographic style (snapshot, professional and “parody” selfie) on the likelihood to comment on consumer photos.

Viewers are more likely to comment on photos displaying action. When these photos are selfies, the effect is exacerbated. The experience of narrative transportation – a feeling of entering a world evoked by the narrative – underlies this effect. However, if a snapshot style is used (primed or manipulated) – namely, the photographic style appears genuine, unconstructed and natural – the superior effect of selfies disappears because of greater perceived silliness of the visualised narrative.

Managers should try to motivate consumers to take selfies portraying action if their aim is to encourage electronic word-of-mouth.

Organisations can effectively use consumer photos portraying consumption for educational purpose (e.g. eating healthfully and reducing alcohol use).

This research links consumer photos and electronic word-of-mouth and extends the marketing literature on visual narratives, which is mainly focused on company rather than user-generated content.

This paper aims to develop a methodology of business knowledge creation based on a synthesis between the perspective of reality informed by pragmatic constructionism (PC) and critical approaches to narrative analysis informed by antenarrative concepts.

The paper identifies commonalities and contrasts between narrative and PC. Interpreting an original case study of a hotel by deploying both methodologies, the paper shows how a synthesis of the two approaches can help to construct management control knowledge.

PC and narrative have many overlaps and complementarities. Practitioners like stories both to make sense of their own roles and to develop personal strategic agendas. Antenarrative concepts demonstrate the potentially generative properties of organizational storytelling. The PC approach also constructs corporate narratives but, additionally, provides a set of criteria against which we can evaluate the stories of practitioners on the basis of “does it work?”.

More interpretive field study processes are called for as a way of testing the robustness of the research design developed in the paper.

A successful management control topos has to be business-specific and co-authored with contributions from participants both inside and outside the organization. Narrative and PC research methodologies both encourage reflexivity, in which the researchers explicitly explore not just the positions of their interviewees, but also their own position and reactions. The creation of business knowledge is seen as a co-production between the researchers and the researched, as they share concepts and reflections during the fieldwork process.

The paper compares and contrasts two interpretive research methodologies, narrative and a pragmatic constructivist perspective. Especially when the concept of antenarrative is deployed, the two methodologies offer fruitful possibilities for dialogical conversation, as they espouse slightly different views on the nature of actor reality.

In this chapter, we inquire into our ever-unfolding experiences as teachers and with teacher research participants in order to explore the complexities of curriculum making in teacher education. In doing so, we lay the foundation for understanding narrative inquiry as both theory and method as such, frame our work in this volume. Curriculum making, a term introduced by Joseph Schwab, reflects the dynamic process of learning in which the teacher, learner, subject matter, and milieu interact. Moreover, we think about the ways people make sense of themselves, identity-making, in the process of curriculum making. Through Derek’s experiences with Lee, a previous Grade five student, and Cindy’s work with Jesse, a research participant, we inquire into their curriculum making and identity-making. We argue that in schools, there are multiple curricula in the making, going beyond the formal notions of curriculum as grade-level standards or classroom objectives. In our inquiry process, we consider experiences in schools through Aoki’s understanding of curriculum-as-plan and lived curriculum. In his writing, Aoki noted that the lived experience of curriculum in schools is much more complex and varied than the planned curriculum that is meant for a generalized audience; students and teachers bring their lives with them into particular contexts that indelibly shape the ways that curriculum is lived out. As well, we think about the ways experiences and places shape teachers and researchers and the ways we see the world.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework of external accounting communication in the form of a typology based on perspectives, traditions, and theories from the discipline of communication studies. The focus is accounting communication with external audiences via public written documents outside the audited financial statements, i.e., annual reports, press releases, CSR reports, websites, conference calls, etc.

The theoretical framework is based on two broad research perspectives on accounting communication: (A) a functionalist-behavioural transmission perspective and (B) a symbolic-interpretive narrative perspective. Eight traditions of communication research are introduced which provide alternative ways of conceptualising accounting communication, namely (1) mathematical tradition, (2) socio-psychological tradition, (3) cybernetic/systems-oriented tradition, (4) semiotic tradition, (5) rhetorical tradition, (6) phenomenological tradition, (7) socio-cultural tradition, and (8) critical tradition. Exemplars of each tradition from prior accounting research, to the extent they have been adopted, are discussed. Finally, a typology is developed, which serves as a heuristic device for viewing similarities and differences between research traditions.

Prior accounting studies predominantly focus on the role of discretionary disclosures in accounting communication in the functioning of the relationship between organisations and their audiences. Research is predominantly located in the mathematical, the socio-psychological, and the cybernetic/systems-oriented tradition. Accounting communication is primarily viewed as the transmission of messages about financial, environmental, and social information to external audiences. Prior research is mainly concerned with the communicator (e.g. CEO personality) and the message (e.g. intentions and effects of accounting communication). Research from alternative traditions is encouraged, which explores how organisations and their audiences engage in a dialogue and interactively create, sustain, and manage meaning concerning accounting and accountability issues.

The paper identifies, organises, and synthesises research perspectives, traditions, and associated theories from the communication studies literature in the form of a typology. The paper concludes with an extensive agenda for future research on accounting communication.

In this chapter, I explicate the engagement of poetic expression as research analysis to understand more deeply and to represent more rigorously the experience of research participants within educational research. As a tool of analysis, poetry has the strength to disrupt expectations and invite multiple interpretations of research. Here, I articulate a methodology for engaging poetic expression fully as a tool of narrative research to reach beyond textual analysis and representation of participants’ conversations into a deeper expression of their stories to live by. Poetic expression of narrative research is the particular emphasized, which is to say that meaning-making facilitated by poetic expression relies on a consistent and minute focus on the particular. Through poetic expression of research, thoroughly member-checked by participants, I surface and make evident my position as a researcher within the research. This chapter identifies ways in which poetic expression of research invites voice on multiple levels. The poetic expression of research within a narrative inquiry makes visible the experience of the research as an unfolding experience itself for the participant, the researcher, and the reader. I demonstrate the ways in which infusing a narrative inquiry with the poetic expression of research provokes the researcher as well as the reader to draw deeply on personal experience to make sense of the research. Furthermore, poetic expression of research invites participation from readers to engage poetically with the research and become a subsequent co-participant/researcher as they make sense, themselves, of the poetic expressions of research.

The purpose of this article is to present and revisit the role of rhetoric and narratives in management research and practice.

The authors revisit the insights from previous work on the role of rhetoric and narratives in management research and introduce new perspectives based on the original contributions included in this special issue.

There is an ongoing need to stress the importance of narrative and rhetorical perspectives in management research, specifically for exploring the managing of meanings, the coaching of virtues and the mediating of rhetoric.

The paper revisits and provides new insights on the role of rhetoric and narratives in management research and emphasizes the interrelationship between both, specifically by focusing on the conceptual framework of Kenneth Burke, whose work can be situated at the intersection of rhetoric and narrative.