ABSTRACT
The empirical study of stories in and around organizations is very rich, yet it is also fundamentally limited. Researchers either try to identify and build upon stories told by organizational members in the context of research interviews to explore members’ experiences and understanding, or use “composite stories,” that is build their own stories based on variety of data, and contemplate how those stories affect organizational dynamics. Still missing are stories told spontaneously in everyday organizational lives, and thus we lack a deep understanding of what stories do in organizations, not merely what they mean for organizational members. Building on the distinction between “big” and “small” stories in narrative psychology, I call for a “strong” approach for understanding narratives as social action. I examine in some detail a few examples of the study of stories as action, and use them to chart some paradigmatic, theoretical and methodological concerns for a “strong” narrative approach, the study of naturally occurring stories in interaction, and their action in organizations.
