ABSTRACT
It is through stories that people learn, convey knowledge, and make sense of what happens in their professional life – or at least try to, as in the scene from American Hustle . The narrative turn (Mitchell, 1981) in the social sciences has also influenced management and organisation studies and brought the focus on stories used and created in organisational contexts. Scholars study this naturally emerging cultural phenomenon, but also use storytelling as a research technique. In particular, working-life stories, as a type of life story, have recently attracted much attention and have proved very productive in career studies and in research on sense-making in organisations. In her explanation of why researchers should study the practices of storytelling within organisational settings and working-life stories, Barbara Czarniawska (2004, p. 39) refers to the concept of the ‘work-world’ inspired by Benita Luckmann (1978), ‘who pointed out that the lifeworld of modern people is divided into segments or sub-universes.’ By using the concept, Czarniawska seeks to draw attention to the genres of storytelling:
Accepting [Luckmann’s] reading means a deviation from the common viewpoint that workplaces are ruled by the rigid arm of the ‘system’ and hence stand in opposition to the ‘lifeworld’. Luckmann demonstrated two interesting traits of such ‘small
institute of philosophy and sociology, polish academy of sciences
life-worlds’: one, that they are surprisingly similar to traditional communities; and two, that the main difference between ‘the modern person’ and his or her traditional equivalent is that there are several such worlds in modernity which requires (but also permits) frequent ‘gear shifting’. The stories circulate in all, although gear shifting might also mean genre shifting.
