红色传奇观后感/Human Relations
/content/61/8/1035The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/0018726708094858 2008 61: 1035Human Relations Andrew D. Brown, Patrick Stacey and Joe Nandhakumar Making n of nmaking narratives Published by:
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Making n of nmaking narratives Andrew D. Brown, Patrick Stacey and Joe Nandhakumar
A B S T R AC T This article analy s the agreed and discrepant nmaking of
members of a project team.Embedded in a narratological approach
to nmaking rearch,we argue that before scholars may be able
to understand in detail how agreements are reached and action
becomes coordinated,we need first to take riously the proposition
that nmaking occurs in the context of individuals’idiosy ncratic
efforts at identity construction.This,we suggest,means attending to
the narratives that actors tell about their work and lf both for
others and their lves.The key rearch contribution that we make
is to demonstrate how work on ‘impression management’and ‘attri-
butional egotism’may be employed in order to account for discrepant
nmaking.This is important in the context of a literature that has
left relatively unexplored the reasons why people interpret differently
experiences they have in common.
K E Y WO R D S attributional egotism computer game development
discour impression management narrative nmaking
Introduction
To what extent is the nmaking of members of a project team shared, and how can we explain discrepancies in participants’ understandings? One stream of theorizing practically ignores discrepant nmaking, posits that organized action is the product of connsus among organizational partici-
pants, and reprents organizations as systems of shared meanings (Louis,
1
泰国自由行攻略035Human Relations
DOI:10.1177/0018726708094858
Volume 61(8):1035–1062
Copyright © 2008
The T avistock Institute ®
SAGE Publications
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Los Angeles,London,
New Delhi,Singapore
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1980, 1983; Pfeffer, 1981; Smircich & Morgan, 1982). A cond approach recognizes that only minimal shared understanding between individuals is likely or indeed required in order to produce organized action, but has little interest in exploring why this is or how it may be accounted for (Donnellon et al., 1986; Weick, 1979, 1995; Weick et al., 2005). In conquence, why people disagree regarding their interpretation of experiences they have in common is relatively unexplored. While acknowledging the n which is shared by group members, in this article we focus in particular on the distinc-tive understandings that individuals develop in their efforts to understand and to clarify aspects of their working lives. The contribution we make is to explore and to explain the simultaneously agreed and discrepant n-making of individuals in a work team, which is a necessary first step toward understanding how the n that people make is translated into process of organizing.
Predicated on an understanding that people are reasonably described as ‘homo narrans’ (Fisher, 1984: 6) or indeed ‘homo fabulans– the tellers and interpreters of narrative’ (Currie, 1998: 2), we ana
ly the retro-spectively asmbled narrative nmaking constructions of members of a project team regarding their development of a new computer game. I n keeping with other rearch (e.g. Brown & Jones, 1998; Humphreys & Brown, 2002), we u the terms ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ interchangeably. Our understanding of the terms is derived from Ricoeur (1984: 150) who argues that:
A story describes a quence of actions and experiences done or under-
gone by a certain number of people, whether real or imaginary. The people are prented either in situations that change or as reacting to such change. In turn, the changes reveal hidden aspects of the situ-ation and the people involved, and engender a new predicament which calls for thought, action, or both. This respon to the new situation leads the story toward its conclusion.
Our decision to adopt a narrative approach has been influenced by the many claims that storytelling rearch is producing ‘a rich body of knowl-edge, unavailable through other methods of analysis’ (Stutts & Barker, 1999: 213) and is enabling organization theory ‘to reinvigorate itlf’ (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1998: 13). It has also been spurred by theorists with an interest in nmaking who have argued that narrative is ‘a primary cognitive instru-ment’ (Mink, 1978: 131; Polkinghorne, 1988) whic
h constitutes the basic organizing principle of human cognition (Boland & Tenkasi, 1995). Import-antly, it is also consistent with our understanding that subjectively conceived
identities are available to individuals in the form of narratives which position an individual in relation to the discursive resources available to him or her (Giddens, 1991; McAdams, 1996). The lf-narratives are ‘worked on’ by situated actors – formed, repaired, maintained, strengthened and revid to provide a continuing n of ‘coherence and distinctiveness’ (Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003: 1165). This is not to deny that there are other interesting and equally valid approaches to the study of nmaking using, for example, interpretive schemes (Bartunek, 1984) and cognitive mapping techniques (Bougon et al., 1977). Yet, while the are well established, despite some notable exceptions (e.g. Orr, 1990; Patriotta, 2003a), there are still relatively few empirical studies of nmaking and narrative.
Our article is an investigation of the shared and discrepant narrative nmaking of members of a work team. The principal contribution of this study is that it takes riously the idea that although nmaking is in-herently social, it is fundamentally tied to process of individual identity generatio
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n and maintenance. Drawing on established rearch (Boyce, 1986; Brown, 2000; Brown & Jones, 2000; Patriotta, 2003a, 2003b), we show how notions of impression management (Goffman, 1959; Ronfield et al., 1995) and attributional egotism (Miller & Ross, 1975; Staw et al., 1983) can be deployed to account for some of the idiosyncratic aspects of individuals’nmaking. This is important in the context of a mainstream literature on nmaking which makes few references to the concepts – they are missing from the index of Weick (1995) for example – and which has instead focud on either common collective meaning or the coordinated action that results from people’s assumptions that meaning is shared.
The remainder of this article is structured into five major ctions. First, we review briefly the literature on how people ek to structure their experi-ences (Waterman, 1990), ‘... by placing stimuli into cognitive frameworks (Ring & Rands, 1989; Starbuck & Milliken, 1988) in order to make n of occurrences while maintaining a consistent, positive lf-conception’(Weick, 1995: 23). The performance of stories, we argue, ‘is a key part of [organization] members’ nmaking’ (Boje, 1995: 1000) the analysis of which permits us to identify and to analy what people agree on and where understandings differ. Second, an account of our interpretive, inductive rearch design and methods is prented. We pay particular regard to the argument that language is ‘a reprentational
technology that actively organizes, constructs and sustains social realit[ies]’ (Chia & King, 2001: 312), and that ‘realities’ are fluid discursive constructions being constantly made and re-made in the conversations between insiders and between insiders and outsiders. Third, we prent our ca data in the form of a single connsually agreed story, and then proceed to analy it highlighting points
of divergence between the key project team members. Fourth, we discuss how we may plausibly account for discrepant nmaking with reference to notions of impression management and attributional egotism, before finally drawing some brief conclusions.
Senmaking and narrative
Senmaking is a generic phra that refers to process of interpretation and meaning production whereby individuals and groups interpret and reflect on phenomena (Bean & Hamilton, 2006; Leiter, 1980; Stein, 2004; Weick et al., 2005). Through process of nmaking people enact (create) the social world, constituting it through verbal descriptions which are communicated to and negotiated with others (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Garfinkel, 1967).
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有创意的环保口号A wealth of rearch on, for example, policy making (Feldman, 1989; Janis, 1972), newcomer socialization (Louis, 1980), and decision-making in crisis situations (Weick, 1993) has revealed nmaking as a kind of creative authoring on the part of individuals and groups who construct meaning from initially puzzling and sometimes troubling data (Shotter, 1993; Weick, 1995). Senmaking is a arch for plausibility and coherence, that is reasonable and memorable, which embodies past experience and expectations, and main-tains the lf while resonating with others. It can be constructed retrospec-tively yet ud prospectively, and captures thoughts and emotions: ‘To engage in nmaking is to construct, filter, frame, create facticity ... and render the subjective into something more tangible’ (Weick, 1995: 14).
One strand of the literature on nmaking suggests that groups of people tend generally to e and to understand actions and events in similar ways (Brown, 1978; Louis, 1980, 1983; Pfeffer, 1981; Sackman, 1991; Smircich, 1983; Smircich & Morgan, 1982). Canteril’s (1941: 20) u of the phra ‘frame of reference’ to refer to a generalized point of view that directs interpretations has been the spur for others to argue that social actors locate perceptions in shared frameworks that enable groups to collectively ‘... comprehend, understand, explain, attribute, extrapolate, and predict’(Starbuck & Milliken, 1988: 51). The idea that n is collectively pooled is fundamental to c
onceptions of organizations as networks of ‘intersubjec-tively shared meanings’ (Walsh & Ungson, 1991: 60), mutually engaged paradigms (Brown, 1978) and ts of generic routines and habituated patterns of action which ‘fix’ community understandings (e.g. Schall, 1983). Complementarily, much work on nmaking is premid on the assump-tion that work teams are often characterized by an emergent connsus in thinking, variously described as ‘intersubjectivity’ (Linell & Markova, 1993),
thought collective (Fleck, 1935), thought world (Douglas, 1986), shared interpretive scheme (Ranson et al., 1980) or collective knowledge structure (Walsh, 1995).
A cond thread in the nmaking literature recognizes the differences in nmaking between individuals and between groups in organizations (Brown, 2000; Brown & Jones, 2000; Starbuck & Milliken, 1988; Weick, 1979, 1995). Weick (1995: 188) argues that ‘shared meaning is difficult to attain’, Van Maanen (1979: 35) suggests that ‘there is no guarantee that the meanings we produce will be coincident ones’, and Brown (1994: 97) empha-sizes that among organizational participants ‘... as a matter of fact there is often lack of actual agreement, which is ignored or assumed away’. One reason that people make n differently is that their interpretive activities are prone to multipl
e distortions that result from incomplete or inaccurate information processing that is individually specific (Dearborn & Simon, 1958; Hedberg, 1981). Heterogeneity in nmaking is also introduced through the operation of people’s ego-defences (Argyris, 1982; Laughlin, 1970) – such as denial, rationalization and fantasy – which symptomize the fact that ‘... indi-viduals attempt to make n of ambiguous stimuli in ways that respond to their own identity needs’ (Coopey et al., 1997: 312). However, this literature has tended to focus on notions of ‘equifinality’, that is, the various means by which different individual-level interpretations have similar behavioural implications through the development of common scripts and action routines, etc. (e Donnellon et al., 1986; Weick, 1995), rather than to explore dis-crepancies in nmaking.
An understanding that nmaking involves process of narrativiz-ation (narrative-making) permits nuanced investigation of the extent to which individuals in a work team agree, share, disagree and contest under-standings. Our argument that nmaking is a narrative process is predi-cated on the view that ‘man is in his actions and practice, as well as his fictions, esntially a story-telling animal’ (MacIntyre, 1981: 201; cf. Bruner, 1990; Fisher, 1984). As Polkinghorne (1988: 1) has argued, narrative is ‘the primary form by which human experience is made meaningful’. The insights have been incorporated into organization studies by a range of authors who have vari
ously suggested that ‘Narratives provide members with accounts of the process of organizing’ (Mumby, 1987: 113) and even that ‘The basic technology of organization ... is a technology of narrative’(March, 1996: 286). The utility of the narrative form stems from its emplot-ment of quences of actions and events in a chronological and generally logically consistent manner in ways that explain equivocal happenings and outcomes (Patriotta, 2003a: 353). While narratives are filtered, edited and re-sorted bad on hindsight, and thus ‘inventions rather than discoveries’
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