Organizational Storymaking as Narrative-Small-Story Dynamics: A Combination of Organizational Storytelling Theory and Small Story Analysis

We tap into a contemporary discussion where scholars are nuancing the conception of the narrative-counter-narrative dynamics (Bamberg, 2004a; Andrews, 2004; Bamberg & Andrews, 2004). We nuance an ongoing discussion of the relationship between organizational narratives and counter-narratives, which are presented as being in a dichotomic relationship (Bamberg, 2004a). Instead, we propose an understanding of the stories that organizational people enact as potentially being both complicit to and counter to organizational narratives simultaneously. This shifts the analytical focus on whether stories enacted by organizational members are either countering or supporting organizational narratives to an understanding that they can be both. We argue that this calls for a complex and nuanced look at how people position themselves and each other in a mix of resistive and supportive force relations when co-enacting stories and identity in organizational settings. As part of this discussion, we propose to speak of organizational narrative-small-story dynamics rather than narrative-counter-narrative dynamics.