Article published in:
Narratives as Social Practice in Organisational Contexts
Edited by Dorien Van De Mieroop, Jonathan Clifton and Stephanie Schnurr
[Narrative Inquiry 32:1] 2022
► pp. 66–85

Storying selves and others at work

Story ownership, tellership and functions of narratives in a workplace domain

| University of Nottingham

This paper engages with the relationship between story ownership – so who owns a story, tellership – so who has the right to tell it, and functions of workplace narratives as well as the broader social practices at work. Drawing upon discourse and narrative analyses, the paper investigates specifically how the negotiation of meaning visible in the often incomplete and fragmented but naturally-occurring narratives points to the discursive struggle over the construction of self within the specific parameters of the notion of professionalism. The paper identifies the facets of story ownership and discusses how each one can be affected by such regulatory forces of the social practices of work.

Keywords: workplace discourse, linguistic ethnography, conversational narrative, metadiscourse, story ownership, tellership, social practice
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background
    • Storytelling as interactional achievement
    • Story ownership and tellership
    • Storytelling in workplace settings
  • Data and methods
  • Analysis
  • Discussion and conclusions
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20047.cha
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