Shaping the Future through Narrative

Abstract

Throughout his scholarly career, Andrew Isserman made bold calls for vision, storytelling, and narrative construction in regional science and planning. The necessity to plan and make infrastructure and development decisions with incomplete evidence often requires narratives—gists, insights, and ideas that are shorthand for an amalgam of reasoning, evidence, and feedback from practice. Narratives play a large role in planning practice and education, but their premises and implications must be subjected to evidence and compared with alternatives. From their respective work on the third sector, the authors explore a powerful narrative that bigger organizations are better: due to economies of scale, more professional personnel, more sustainable operations, and better measurement, they deliver superior services and greater public value for resources spent. The authors compare this with a competing narrative that smaller organizations generate superior social returns due to flexibility, innovativeness, and community-embeddedness. Using evidence on nonprofit arts and cultural organizations, the authors show that the superiority of large organizations is questionable and further, that the “bigger is better” narrative serves particular interests. In concluding, the authors underscore Isserman’s argument that planners and regional scientists must consciously and deliberately claim their roles in the creation of narratives that shape debate, planning process, and, ultimately, the future. In teaching and research, the authors must both acknowledge whose interests are served and harness evidence to compelling visions, explicit theories of causality, and story arcs—the tools that planners, regional scientists, designers, and social scientists use in defining, shaping, and imagining our regional worlds.