Negotiating a Project Request: Narrative and Intersubjective Understanding at Work

Abstract

This article engages with an extended ethnographic vignette that centers on negotiations between a Moroccan educational association and a UN agency over a possible future project collaboration. After a phase of meandering in the conversation, a “polished” story told by the NGO team leader marks a turning point in negotiations and manages to convince agency representatives. The article discusses the use of such polished stories in relation to other, less polished and arguably more authentic narrative practices, that is, stories that gradually emerge when collaborators make sense of the past or coconstruct visions of the future. It adopts the concept of the community of practice with its focus on social learning and the constant negotiation of meaning among participants in combination with recent approaches in the interdisciplinary study of narrative practices that argue for the productive coexistence of different narrative activities in the same event. In the case at hand, different narrative practices in concert served the sharing of knowledge and ultimately persuasion, while increasing intersubjective understanding between participants in the meeting.