ABSTRACT
Human beings are storytellers (Fisher, 1984, 1987) and recent work in organizational communication has examined how stories are used to understand, explain, and manage corporate life (Feldman, 1990; Hart, Willihnganz, & Leichty, 1995; Gabriel, 1998; Martin & Powers, 1983; O’Connor, 1997; Peters & Waterman, 1982; Wilkins, 1983). Within this line of work, organizations are “storytelling systems” (Boje, 1991, 1995), where the meaning of organizational life is created and recreated through the telling and retelling of stories. Narratives form the basis of organizational culture–“an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions … the interplay and struggle of regional dialects, professional jargons, generic commonplaces, the speech of different age groups, individuals and so forth” (Clifford, 1983, pp. 136–137).
