TO TEXT OR CONTEXT? COMPARING ENDOTEXTUAL AND EXOTEXTUAL APPROACHES TO NARRATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH.

Abstract

This paper compares two largely opposed approaches to narrative organizational research: the Endotextual, which considers a text without knowledge of authorial intent or other contextual data, and the Exotextual, which does the opposite. A comparison of endo and exotextual readings of an organizational theater script is used to inform our discussion of this schism. One of the authors, adopting the endotextual approaches of the new critics, reader-response theorists, and deconstructionists, conducted a relatively context-blind analysis of an organizational skit which was co-written by management and to be performed to an audience of employees. The other author, adopting an exotextual approach (e.g., ethnography, naturalistic inquiry, historiography, Faircloughian discourse analysis), conducted a contextually-oriented analysis of the same skit. Our findings are then used to frame a discussion about how narrative researchers might conduct future studies.