ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a framework of multiple narrative theories and present the possibilities of working with narratives in studies of organizational change and innovation. It presents narratives as sensemaking conditions in organizational change processes. The chapter also presents the threefold narrative framework and discusses the possibilities of using this framework in everyday ethnographic studies of organizational change. Barbara Czarniawska, Yiannis Gabriel, and David Boje are three of the early scholars of narrative studies in organizations. Czarniawska points out that organizing is intertwined with narratives, as people in organizations make interpretations of what is going on through narratives. Instead of analyzing general sensemaking processes, the pragmatic narrative framework has the ability to explain which participants become involved in creating locally situated sensemaking of change processes. Fragmented narrative studies direct attention to the storyteller and the narrative practice with which the narratives are made.
