ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the narrative conception of identity has many points of connection with existentialist philosophy and provides an alternative to the somewhat polarised debate that has characterised identity within organisation studies. It deploys three modes of interpretation that treat the stories as historical' narratives. The first mode is based on seeing the narratives as referential of a particular historical context. The second and third modes are both concerned with interrogating the stories as performances and analysing how and why different narrators produce distinctive stories from a common pool of available narrative resources. One of the keys to the self-identity of the group under consideration is that many of the narrative resources they draw on to define themselves are based, in turn, on narratives that precede their direct remembered experiences. For younger interviewees with perhaps younger parents, class may have simply been a disappearing narrative resource with which to build their identity.
