ABSTRACT
Combining critical management studies and narrative ethnography, this chapter investigates the role of organizational discourse in shaping caseworker subjectivity at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SIA). Each management shift in this welfare state bureaucracy has been accompanied by changes in the legitimating organizational narratives. These stories circulate in the organization at all levels and, it is argued, shaping caseworker subjectivity by ‘storying’ their experience. The ethnographic observations of ‘narrative occasions’, such as staff meetings and organized teamwork, in combination with individual interviews allow for the analysis of the collective processes of ‘storying’ individual experience. The analysis shows that organizational discourse may be highly effective in producing the ‘appropriate’ caseworker, also in a bureaucratic setting. The chapter finally identifies some conditions under which such resonance between organizational narratives and individual experience is achieved and respectively, fails.
