Storyselling

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

A narrative is a type of text that has a clear time sequence. It might be a short or an extended story [Page 896]about characters and/or events, or it might be a life story spanning one's birth through death. Story is a particular type of narrative with plots and characters generating emotion in narrator and audience, through a poetic elaboration of symbolic material. A narrative might contain a story, or it might describe an organization's rules and policies and other tools of formalization. Story becomes a meaningful whole when its specific events are brought together by some form of organization. Story meaning is also influenced by the type and amount of emotion generated by the narrator in his or her narrative. Data and information gathered for case studies may describe an individual, a group, or a larger part of society and their motivations, experiences, and histories. Case studies are, at once, narratives and stories.

Much of the research and management literature that deals with stories and storytelling treats stories as though they are simply neutral objects rather than exploring the manner in which the story and dialogue are constructed to convince the listener to accept the story. Researchers who adopt a storytelling approach may assemble their case study material in a manner not just to re-present the case but to tell a story that is in keeping with how they have interpreted the case material. Some fragments of the case study are preferred to others that may lurk in the background, perhaps threatening to undermine the narrative the story contains.

Storyselling is the dialectic opposite of storytelling. Dialectic inquiry is the study of opposites or extremes to understand both positive and negative syntheses from (a) the relationship between opposites; (b) knowledge that quality generated by the relationship affects quantity, and vice versa; and (c) understanding that, to minimize negative synthesis (e.g., that of the master–slave relationship), there is to be a negation of the negated. Storytelling evokes positive emotions or emotions that will allow story listeners to reflexively engage in that narrative without feeling forced to bend toward the narrator's views. Storyselling, however, is the process of using a story to make listeners feel guilty or shameful so they also feel they must act in ways to please the storyteller. Storyselling uses negative emotional control to sway listeners to act in ways that mostly benefit the storyteller at the expense of the audience. Because storytelling and storyselling are dialectic opposites, they occur at the same time but to varying degrees. The more storyselling is used, or the higher the quantity, the lower the individual and social reflexivity or quality of the storytelling. And the lower the reflexivity, the more storyselling is tolerated and used at the expense of storytelling.

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