Reimagining organizational storytelling research as archeological story analysis

Abstract

PurposeWe should understand stories told in organizational settings in relation to the time, space and process of their telling. This, however, is problematic since many researchers, as a matter of habit, take organizational stories out of their context and process because they tend to collect their stories through interviews. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachIn order to accept organizational stories taken out of context and process, the author looks toward archeology and its method of interpretation of artifacts as a metaphor to guide future storytelling analysis. The author argues that storytelling researchers need the analogy of archeological interpretation of artifacts to be more convincing in their quest to discover meaning.FindingsIf one sees stories as artifacts from past utterances that are lost to the moment in which they were uttered, which the metaphor of archeology allows one to do, then the goal is to reason out a coherent narrative out of the stories collected by describing their formal attributes, their spatial attributes and their chronological inference. After which, one might fit the collected stories within the broader cultural contexts of the organization under study.Originality/valueThe author offers the idea of “archeological story analysis” as a three-step method of story analysis, which allows organizational storytelling researchers to more convincingly analyze stories collected out of their context and process. The first two steps are in the interpretation of the formal attributes and spatial attributes of the stories, while the third step (chronological inference) is an attempt to analyze storytelling intent and impact on the life of the organization.