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Narrative inquiry

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Narrative Inquiry, emerged as a discipline within the broader field of Knowledge Management. It is an approach to understanding behavior (markets, employees, citizens) through large collections of anecdotal material. It should be clearly distinguished from storytelling. Narrative Inquiry is a fairly recent movement in social science qualitative research. It has been employed as a tool for analysis in the fields of cognitive science, organizational studies, knowledge theory, and education studies, among others. Other recent developments include the development of quantitative methods and tools based on large volume capture of fragmented anecdotal material, self signified or indexed at the point of capture.

Background

Clandinin and Connelly define it as a method that uses the following field texts as data sources: stories, autobiography, journals, field notes, letters, conversations, interviews, family stories, photos (and other artifacts), and life experience.[1] Narrative Inquiry emerged not just as a form of qualitative inquiry, but from the field of Knowledge Management, which shares the sphere of Information Management.[2] Thus Narrative Inquiry focuses on the organization of human knowledge more than merely the collection of processing of data. It also implies that knowledge itself is considered valuable and noteworthy even when known by only one person. Knowledge Management was coined as a discipline in the 1990s as a method of identifying, representing, sharing, and communicating knowledge.[3] Knowledge Management and Narrative Inquiry share the idea of Knowledge transfer, a theory which seeks to transfer the unquantifiable elements of knowledge, including experience. If knowledge is not communicated it becomes arguably useless, literally unused. Philosopher Andy Clark speculates that the ways in which minds deal with narrative (second-hand information) and memory (first-hand perception) are cognitively indistinguishable. Narrative, then, becomes an effective and powerful method of transferring knowledge.

Narrative Inquiry and Narrative Knowledge

Whereas Knowledge transfer and Knowledge Management seek to organize, or capture, tacit knowledge and preserve it for future users, Narrative Inquiry plays a role in how thisknowledge is stored and perceived. Narrative is a powerful tool in the transfer, or sharing of knowledge; one that is bound to cognitive issues of memory, constructed memory, and perceived memory. Jerome S. Bruner discusses this issue in his 1990 book, Acts of Meaning, where he considers the narrative form as a non-neutral rhetorical account that aims at “illocutionary intentions,” or the desire to communicate meaning.[4] This technique might be called “narrative” or defined as a particular branch of storytelling within the narrative method. Bruner’s approach places the narrative in time, to “assume an experience of time”rather than just making reference to historical time.[5] This narrative approach captures the emotion of the moment described, rendering the event active rather than passive, infused with the latent meaning being communicated by the teller. Two concepts are thus tied to narrative storytelling: memory and notions of time, both as time as found in the past and time as re-lived in the present.[6]

A narrative method accepts the idea that knowledge can be held in stories that can be relayed, stored, and retrieved.[7]

References

  1. ^ D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000), 98-115.
  2. ^ See Harlan Cleveland, The Knowledge Executive: Leadership in an Information Society (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989).
  3. ^ See Nico Stehr and Richard V. Ericson, eds., The Culture and Power of Knowledge: Inquiries into Contemporary Societies (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992); and, Fritz Machlup, Knowledge and Knowledge Production (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
  4. ^ Jerome S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 85.
  5. ^ Donald Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 132.
  6. ^ See Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
  7. ^ Ronald E. Fry, Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Transformation: Reports from the Field (Westport: CN: Quorum Books, 2002), 166.

Bibliography

  • David M. Boje, Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001).
  • D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000).
  • D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, “Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry.” Educational Researcher 19, no. 5 (June-July 1990): 2-14.
  • C. Conle, “Narrative Inquiry: Research Tool and Medium for Professional Development,” European Journal of Teacher Education 23, no.1 (March 2000): 49-63.
  • Donald F. Hones, “Known in Part: The Transformational Power of Narrative Inquiry,” Qualitative Inquiry 4, no. 2 (1998): 225-248.
  • G. Lucius-Hoene and A. Deppermann, “Narrative Identity Empiricized: A Dialogical and Positioning Approach to Autobiographical Research,” Narrative Inquiry 10, no. 1 (2000): 199-222.
  • Nona Lyons and Vicki Kubler LaBoskey, Narrative Inquiry in Practice: Advancing the Knowledge of Teaching (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002).
  • Gary Oliver and Dave Snowden, "Patterns of Narrative in Organizational Knowledge Sharing," in Knowledge Management and Narratives: Organizational Effectiveness Through Storytelling, Georg Schreyogg and Joch Koch, eds. (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2005).
  • Donald Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988).
  • Dave Snowden, “Complex Acts of Knowing: Paradox and Descriptive Self-Awareness,” Journal of Knowledge Management 6, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 100-111.
  • Dave Snowden, “Narrative Patterns: the perils and possibilities of using story in organisations,” in Creating Value With Knowledge, Eric Lesser and Laurence Prusak, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

See also

David Pollard's writing on Knowledge Management and Narrative Inquiry

Open source methods can be downloaded from Cognitive Edge

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