ABSTRACT
One of the defining characteristics of being human is telling stories. People tell stories as a way of making sense of, communicating and sharing their experience of life. In the past, social scientists and psychologists have largely ignored the ‘storied’ aspect of human conduct in the search for variables and causal factors considered to be theoretically important. Only in recent years has there emerged a movement within social science in the direction of taking stories seriously. Within psychology, some of the landmark contributions to this debate are to be found in the work of Gergen (1988), Howard (1991), Polkinghorne (1988), Sarbin (1986) and their colleagues. Probably the single most influential writer on this topic has been the social and developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner. For Bruner (1986,1991) there are two distinct ways of knowing. Paradigmatic knowing consists of abstract, theoretical models. By contrast, narrative knowing comprises the stories people tell about events and experiences. In concentrating their energies on creating paradigmatic ways of knowing, Bruner argues, psychologists and social scientists have not given sufficient attention to understanding the processes of story-telling through which most human experience is transmitted on an everyday basis.
