Discourse and narrative

In an article in the Annual Review of Sociology, Roberto Franzosi (1998) asked why sociologists should be concerned with narrative. His answer stressed that social scientists regularly use some form of narrative as data and that narrators’ stories possess rich accounts of action and social relations as embedded in linguistic practice. In contrast to variable-based approaches that impose researchers’ pre-defined categories on subjects’ responses and actions, analyses of narrative and other discursive forms provide clues to a more dynamic understanding of the mechanisms that transmit, maintain, and transform cultural frameworks through which actors derive meaning. Both the general category of discourse and its more particular variant, narrative, denote

a collection of communicative practices. Actors articulate their beliefs and thoughts, and conceive of appropriate actions to accompany those thoughts either through the deployment of speech acts and symbols in the back and forth of conversation or by the telling of a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Through these expressions, actors come to understand and construct their world, and their place within it. Because of this connection with knowledge or truth, discourse and narrative both offer

means to probe the micro-interactions of communicative processes between individuals, as well as broader macro-or institutional-level processes of meaning-making. Echoing C. Wright Mills’s distinction between history and biography, an understanding of discourse and narrative in which actors emplot themselves and their experiences is crucial for observing the dynamics of historical change (Sewell 1992). Within research paradigms, however, examinations of discourse versus narrative typically yield different kinds of analyses. Whereas discourse may expose the interplay of power relations through conversation partners’ utterances as they unfold, narrative reveals power through analysis of its structure and content: what gets mentioned and how it is mentioned are products of prefigured repertoires purposefully employed by narrators toward some communicative end that is known before a narrator begins his or her story. Though displaying these differences, both discourse and narrative analyses, with their attention to meaning through techniques that are semantic, pragmatic, or structural, have offered analysts a means of investigating social processes of mobilization, representations about the past, and especially identity formation, expression, and transmission.