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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.

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 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.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that narrative methodology is increasingly caught in an ideological deadlock set in terms of a false choice between meaning (an unconditional respect for the voice of experience) and truth (the scientific validation of stories), which has led to an increasing dismissal of analysis in narrative research. Inadvertently, however, this development has also heightened vulnerability to ideological deception in storytelling.

Through the lens of Žižek's theory of ideology, this paper offers a reflection on narrative analysis that proposes a renewed critical perspective on “writing responsibly” about organizations by repositioning narrative analysis and its purpose vis‐à‐vis science, storytelling and ideology.

Žižek's conception of ideological fantasy highlights the impotence of cognitive forms of ideology critique in this age. He stresses how this reality is pervaded as deeply by fetishistic illusions as is thought. These illusions, disseminated through narrative, serve as the backbone of everyday practices in organizations and society, based on a process of symbolic “quilting” that is designed to cover up the traumatic emptiness of central signifiers used to make sense of experience. Semiotic analysis enables people to recognize how they constantly “re‐write” this experience in organizational narratives and science to erase from view the structural impossibility of social fantasies.

Three areas for the semiotic analysis of narratives are identified that merit special attention for the recognition of this ideological deception in stories: the entwinement of fact and fiction, the interplay of form and content and the use of perspective and voice.

Žižek's theory has not been systematically applied yet as a methodological tool in narrative research and analysis, while it affords a promising way to critically negotiate the pitfalls of representation in organization and business research.

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.

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.

The aim of this paper is to give an empirical illustration of value co-creation and to argue for narrative methodology as a fruitful analytical strategy when exploring the processes of value co-creation.

Through an in-depth case study in the non-profit housing sector in Denmark, the research explored how residents perceive and co-create value in a long-term service relationship. The point of departure is an understanding of value co-creation as a phenomenological construct determined by the beneficiary, and the research is based primarily on the perspectives of service-dominant logic and customer-dominant logic.

The research elucidated how value is both socially created and deconstructed through stories. Moreover, narrative analysis revealed how residents’ perceptions of services are deeply embedded in context and time. In this way, the study highlighted that the co-creation of value is inherently social and temporal.

Understanding how value is perceived and negotiated by customers might assist practitioners to refine their understanding of value co-creation and lead them to address customers in more nuanced ways.

Prevailing streams in service research on value co-creation argue for more studies and empirically grounded examples of value co-creation processes, especially those based in the customer sphere. This paper contributes to such an enhanced understanding of the process of value co-creation and gives the outline of a new methodology for studies in this specific area of service research.

Libraries are increasingly trying to communicate the library's contributions and telling the library stories. Stories can be a component of impact assessment and thus add nuance to an assessment. Evaluations of libraries can include collecting and presenting stories of change, which can serve as evidence in impact assessments. The narrative field allows for many different approaches to a narrative perspective in the study of libraries, but the existing literature provides little overview of these studies. The purpose of this study is to introduce the narrative field and present a systematic review of the existing studies of libraries that use narrative approaches.

The methods in this study comprise of a systematic review of publications reporting narrative approaches to studying libraries. To retrieve the relevant studies, Library and Information Science Abstracts, Scopus, Web of Science and Proquest Dissertation were searched. Furthermore, the authors examined reference lists and performed citation searches. Study selection was performed by two reviewers independently. Using designed templates, data from the included studies were extracted by one author and confirmed by another.

The database searches retrieved 2,096 records across the four databases which were screened in two steps, resulting in 35 included studies. The authors identify studies that introduce narrative enquiries in library studies as well as studies using narrative approaches to the study of libraries.

Exploring narratives and stories for understanding and evaluating the library's worth is a promising field. More work is needed, though, to develop theoretical and methodological frameworks. Several of the included studies can serve as examples of the potential of a narrative perspective in the study of libraries.