Modern and postmodern approaches
On this page it will become clear that narrative approaches can include both “modernist” and “postmodern” variants.
Why Narrative Change Works
Given a critical constructionist thought style as the context, all inquiry can be considered as narrative - whether reporting an experiment, a survey, or making narrative interviews. The ‘inquirer’ engaged in ‘finding out’ is engaged in relational processes - making self as an inquirer in relation to Other (e.g., Howard, 1991), and in relation to narratives of science, mathematics, professional practice, organization development and so on. Many approaches to inquiry explicitly use the language of story telling or “narrative” and these approaches have become increasingly popular in recent years (e.g., Calas & Smircich, 1991; Sarbin, 1986; Boje, 1995). Work of this sort includes narrative interviews and narrative analysis of the same, but also narrative analysis of written and spoken texts: documents, archive materials, emails, telephone calls, films, magazines… However it should be stressed that narrative approaches include both “modernist” and “postmodern” variants. Here I am focusing on the latter since this fits with my critical constructionist discourses. Critical constructionist discourses position texts as more or less local, embedded in inter-textual relations with multiple con-texts. “Local” therefore includes the particular relations in which the text was produced e.g., in an interview, in relation to a particular question. Other local-cultural con-texts might, for example, be “local” to a particular organization or department, local to Western Europe, and/or local to a certain historical period. The embedded, situated, or local-relational quality of actions/texts has two important implications. First, narratives are regarded as social and not ‘individual’, constructions and so e.g., interview transcripts are not treated as representations of a person’s subjective knowledge. Second, the purpose of inquiry now may be thought of as being to “articulate local and practical concerns” (Gergen and Thatchenkerry, 1996). This means articulating multiplicity, what some call ‘plurivocality’, and in this way ‘giving voice’ to practices and possibilities that usually are muted, suppressed or silenced. Inquiry is not to discover one ‘truth’ or to reproduce a mono-logical construction of change (Dunford and Jones, 2000). Further, viewing inquiry as a process of construction blurs the inquiry-intervention duality and, as we shall see, opens up new possibilities for change work.
Boje on modern and postmodern approaches
David Boje has also written quite a lot on narrative from a modern and postmodern approach. Click here to take a look at his homepage. This homepage contains a folder on postmodernism. If you go to that folder you can read what Boje means with postmodern and you can also find a table in which modern and postmodern principles of management are compared. Furthermore, Boje also distinguishes a 'critical postmodern approach', which relates to my version of 'critical constructionism'.Especially relevant in this context is his article Toward a narrative ethics for modern and postmodern organization science.
You also have free access to Boje's book Managing the Postmodern World.
Other pages that inform you about (the difference between) modernism and postmodernism
- Postmodernism
- Approaches to Postmodernism.
- Storytelling and post-modernism.
- Schematic differences between modernism and postmoderism.