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. 86–107

Small stories in short interactions

The functions of narratives in care home worker interactions

| Vienna University of Economics and Business

The study investigates story-telling in naturally-occurring interactions in a care home for older people with dementia in England. Stories were told by a range of discourse participants and varied from more relationally-oriented anecdotes occurring as part of small talk to more transactionally-oriented narratives embedded into work routines. The main aim of the study was to explore narratives as social practice in the interactions of the care staff and to discover what functions they perform in their workplace practice and more generally in that of the care home. The analysis focused principally on two primarily work-oriented narrative types: “working stories” and “narratives of professional practice”. The findings were that such stories performed a range of key functions in the professional practice of the care givers, in particular problem-solving, knowledge-sharing and critical evaluation.

Keywords: narrative, small stories, elder care, dementia, care homes, nursing homes
Article outline
  • Introduction
    • Approaches to narrative
    • Narratives in professional practice
  • Data and methodology
  • Analysis and findings
    • Working stories
    • Narratives of professional practice
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Transcription Conventions
  • References
Published online: 23 June 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20064.koe
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