Narrative Struggle Research Articles

Promoting public sector innovation: who does what, when and how?

A strong and prevailing innovation imperative is sweeping across the public sector and despite a growing literature on public sector innovation (PSI), the actors driving these processes tend to end up in the background of analysis. Based in an analytical framework of narrative theory and organization studies, and the efforts to introduce Social Impact Bonds (SIB) in Sweden as empirical case, the aim of this article is to unpack and analyze the neglected initial stages of PSI. Building on a 4-year qualitative study, the analysis shows that actors promoting PSI narrate the public sector as in need to “open up” for (1) new actors; (2) new services and solutions; and (3) new forms of knowledge. Our findings suggests that the initial stages of PSI are substantially more formative than previously indicated. We show how the innovation at hand function as a discursive node towards which the actors’ storylines gravitate. Despite differences, the actors involved narrate their world similarly constituting discourse coalitions that connects and aligns their interests and objectives. We argue that the early stages of PSI are to be understood as cognitive and narrative struggles, or negotiations. The potentially good news here is that change continuously takes place in processes of PSI, despite narratives of inertia. The potentially bad news is that the same change is difficult to predict, control and govern.

9·11과 3·11, 혹은 문학의 그라운드 제로(ground zero)에서

In this article, the term “disaster literature” is narrowly defined: works submitted in response to actual historical disasters. Disaster literature will reflect the factual aspects of real disasters, and of particular importance will be the patterns of human behavior in times of disaster, rather than the disaster itself. This can be divided into social solidarity and social conflict. Disaster literature is a dual response to this. It joins or creates social solidarity and intervenes in social conflict to dismantle its basis. The first type can be called ‘healing narratives’. It verbalizes the suffering of the victims, gives it a figure and allows it to exist in the public sphere. The role of the healing narrative is to mediate social solidarity. The second type of narrative can be called ‘counter-narrative’. When a particular perception/narrative of disaster takes the place of the dominant narrative and triggers social conflict, disaster literature as a counter-narrative participates in the social narrative struggle by offering a different way of thinking about disaster (alternative disaster perception). This paper examines works that fulfil their roles as healing narratives and counter-narratives by taking the September 11 attacks and the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami as symbolic cases of social and natural disasters in the 21st century. In doing so, we will test the effectiveness of the concepts presented in this paper and lay the groundwork for the development of a theory of disaster literature.

Settler memory and Indigenous counter-memories: narrative struggles over the history of colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT As with other settler colonies, Aotearoa New Zealand has seen a long-running conflict between a Euro-centric ‘master narrative’ of the historical past and Indigenous counter-narratives. Previous research on these narrative struggles adopts the ‘top-down’ perspective on collective remembering, focusing primarily on how memory entrepreneurs deploy cultural texts and practices to construct particular representations of history. To broaden the methodological scope, the analysis developed in this paper follows the ‘bottom-up’ approach, which makes it possible to map the distribution of collective memories across individuals and investigate their attitudinal effects. By means of a rigorous survey study (N = 1,066), the paper reveals three key findings about collective remembering in Aotearoa New Zealand. First, individuals in the ‘critical years’ of adolescence are more open to weaving Indigenous Māori perspectives into their understandings of history than older generations. Second, when compared to the monocultural master narrative, historical reconstructions that reflect Māori experiences promote a more inclusive understanding of national identity and generate public support for redressing historical injustices against Māori. Third, the empirical analysis finds no evidence for claims made by conservative political actors that creating space for the articulation of Māori histories perpetuates social division and weakens popular identification with the nation.

It’s the story, stupid! Timo Soini, Jussi Halla-aho and the battle for the story of the Finns Party

What role does storytelling play in right-wing populist parties? With a focus on the Finns Party and its leaders Timo Soini (1995–2017) and Jussi Halla-aho (2017–2021), this article depicts the narrative struggle that ensued when the Finns Party joined government in 2015 and exposes the challenges populist storytellers face when engaged in governing coalitions. Whereas Soini argued in favour of joining government and actively participating in broad, consensus-based policymaking, Halla-aho focused on directly challenging government by targeting migration as a key concern for party voters. These tensions culminated in the breakup of the party, where a small faction continued in government until 2019 while the mother party returned to the opposition. A storytelling perspective shows the importance of a credible truth-telling narrative in understanding far-right populist electoral success and demonstrates the challenges government responsibility presents for populist narrative credibility.

On the Nature of the Traumatogenic Event

Historical events, however terrible, are not in and of themselves traumatic.‎ For a trauma to emerge at the level of a collectivity, ‘social crises must become ‎cultural crises’ (Alexander et al., 2004, p. 10). For an historical event ‎to become a cultural trauma, it must be socially mediated and represented, a ‎trauma narrative must be constructed. Consequently, there is always a gap‎ between the traumatogenic event and its representation, this gap creates the‎ space for the ‘trauma process’. Unlike trauma theory, therefore, cultural trauma ‎places the weight of analysis not on the historical event as such but on the ‎narrative struggle that constitutes and sustains that event as a cultural trauma.‎ Thus, we have a series of interrelated terms: history, trauma, narrative and‎ memory, that pivot around an absent presence, a traumatogenic event. It is the‎ nature of that traumatogenic event that I explore in this paper. First, I will set ‎out my theoretical differences from trauma theory and then attempt to square‎ the circle between a non-pathological conception of trauma in cultural trauma‎ theory and my own commitment to psychoanalysis. In conclusion I will put‎ forward a number of claims that I hope will be consistent with cultural trauma‎ theory. That is to say, the traumatogenic event is not given but is retrospectively‎ constructed and in this sense is ahistorical and non-narrative.‎

Servants and Allocation of Narrative Space in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Narrative struggles in the eighteenth-century English novel can be traced to the allocation of narrative space to a multiplicity of characters. The narrative positioning of the servant comes to embody the anxieties of the author and of the age. As servants are associated with the transmission of stories with varying degrees of reliability, they easily turn into stand-ins for authorial performance, especially in eighteenth-century novels, where the performance of reliability is a crucial aspect of authorial selffashioning. Servants make up a large portion of the reading public in the period and their desire for upward social mobility inevitably finds both narrative and characterological representation. However, as exemplified by the “Pamela controversy,” famously sparked by Samuel Richardson’s novel, open depictions of the possibility of social mobility also engendered unease. This article studies the allocation of narrative space to servants in three novels: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is an epistolary novel narrated by the letters of a servant character. Therefore, the servant character is established as the center of narrative attention; however, it is this very centrality that unsettles her position and turns her into a figure in “service” of the novel’s moral purpose. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews presents a more convoluted struggle over the claiming of narrative space since Joseph’s ambivalent release from the servant position is continuously challenged by other servants. Finally, servants in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy are situated at the margins of narrative space as parodical embodiments of the desire to rise to the level of narrative and public visibility.

The limitations of strategic narratives: The Sino-American struggle over the meaning of COVID-19

ABSTRACT Recent research has explored how the Sino-American narrative struggle around COVID-19 might affect power shift dynamics and world order. An underlying assumption is that states craft strategic narratives in attempts to gain international support for their understandings of reality. This article evaluates such claims taking a mixed-methods approach. It analyzes American and Chinese strategic narratives about the pandemic, and their global diffusion and resonance in regional states that are important to the U.S.-led world order: Australia, India, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. While the article confirms that strategic narratives remain a highly popular policy instrument, it argues that their efficacy appears limited. Overall, the five states in question either ignored the Sino-American narrative power battle by disseminating their own strategic narratives, or they engaged in “narrative hedging.” Moreover, even China’s narrative entrepreneurship was enabled and constrained by pre-existing master narratives integral to the current U.S.-led world order.

Narrating organisational identity

AbstractOrganisational identity may be understood as the result of communication processes, e.g. in the form of narratives and stories, that continuously intertwine and compete for the right to define the organisation (Boje, 1995;Humle & Frandsen, 2017). This understanding forms the background of the article which analyses the narrative struggles in a local Danish airport whose collective identity was challenged in light of organisational changes that led to a large and dispersed organisation. Combining positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990,1999) with close linguistic analysis, data from a focus group interview are analysed, showing that through stories and narratives, top-management and staff members construct several positions along a cline that make it possible to achieve consensus across organisational levels and divisions. Furthermore, the article argues for analysing participants’ linguistic choices in detail to come closer to how participants do positioning work.

Penanganan Covid-19 Dan Pengembangan Hukum Ham Konteks Indonesia

In dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, the Indonesian government uses Large-Scale Social Restrictions (PSBB) as an option to accelerate the handling of Covid-19. There is a narrative struggle regarding the limitation of human rights behind the policy of implementing the PSBB. The research uses a form of normative juridical legal research. Retrieving data through documentation, and data analysis through reduction, data presentation and conclusion. The narrative struggle that occurs regarding the protection of rights in handling Covid-19 is shown by the tug-of-war between the interests of health and the rights of community activities, where the policy of limitation has implications for the fulfillment of life's needs. The implementation of PSBB in Indonesia must be done optimally by improving domestic human rights legal instruments by incorporating public health and safety factors as the legality of human rights restrictions.

God Bothering Beckett

Abstract In this article I consider the bearing of theology on Samuel Beckett’s work in terms of what he called ‘the shape’ of the idea. At the heart of Beckett’s negative aesthetic program is the relation of art to truth. The Beckettian subject and object are the remnants of a denarration that foregrounds the pains his narrators endure on their quest for aseity or inexistence. The narrative struggle to tell a story that cannot be told without falsifying it entails a relation to the absolute centring on the experience of incomprehensibility and pain. In Beckett, God can no more come to expression than the self, making the connection between the two impossibilities all but inescapable.

Cross-Sector Collaboration in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs): A Critical Analysis of an Urban Sustainability Development Program

In the last years, a shift in the promotion of sustainable development in Higher Education from a focus on universities’ core areas of teaching and research to “whole institution approaches” with an emphasis on the operational management of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) can be observed in different countries. With the aim to foster sustainability, HEIs have increasingly built cross-sectoral networks, involving not only academics but also practitioners in order to relate sustainability not only to research but also to outreach activities. Although there is an increasing body of literature evaluating such initiatives according to supposedly objective management criteria and indicators, there is still a lack of studies that investigate how the social meaning of knowledge production is (re-)negotiated in and through these partnerships. In this article, we analyze how individuals engaged in a cross-sector partnership make sense of the organizational dilemmas and ambiguities that stem from the complexity of working together across sectors in pursuit of an integrative approach to knowledge production. With the term “sector” we refer to the professional affiliations of the individuals involved in the partnerships, e.g., higher education, administration, formal education or non-governmental organizations. We focus on an illustrative cross-sectoral partnership: The Institute for Sustainable Urban Development (ISU), a collaborative project between Malmö University and Malmö’s city administration to facilitate research and planning collaborations between both organizations in respect to furthering sustainable urban (re-)development and higher education in Malmö, Sweden. By employing a constant comparative approach based on Grounded Theory to analyze data collected with focus groups, semi-structured qualitative interviews and document analysis, we claim that rather than entering a partnership with predefined identities, values and sectoral or professional preferences, individuals engage in a narrative struggle about the organizational character of their partnership. Accordingly, an important avenue for investigating cross-sector partnerships is to explore the constructive dilemma of different organizing principles in a cross-sector partnership, and the way people negotiate the boundaries between them. For the cross-sector partnership studied the constructive dilemma for those engaging in it was to separate and link project, organizational and network organizing principles in their work. Implementing whole institutions approaches in order to promote sustainable development in and through HEIs, would accordingly profit much from a deeper analytical investigation of the process of navigating professional identities and organizational narrative(s) in boundary-spanning, cross-sector partnerships.

Narrative struggles in online arenas: the Facebook feminist sex wars on the Israeli sex industry

ABSTRACT In this article, I analyze the role of the Israeli online arena in attempts to challenge attitudes toward sex work and the sex industry. By exploring the short history of the “feminist sex wars” that are being conducted on public feminist Facebook pages, I ask whether online activism can really avoid being drawn into the realm of conventional offline politics. The article argues that while the various Facebook pages aimed to alter the landscape of political and public discourse around sex work and the sex industry, they were in fact sucked into the vortex of the existing public discourse surrounding sex work in Israel, forcing them to choose sides in the dialectic sex wars. I conclude that they nonetheless succeeded in establishing a “narrative of influence” which should be analyzed beyond the disappointment of specific policy outcomes. Online activism thus becomes a key platform for both the construction and contestation between different narratives within the sex industry.

Urgency for safety in construction: narrative struggles of carpe diem, carpe pecunia and memento mori

This study on safety culture focuses on the way people make sense of safety in urgency narratives in small–medium construction enterprises in the northeastern Netherlands, the so-called “earthquake region.” Three composite narratives are frequently revisited in the conversations among the employees, managers, and Vlink team. Employees turn to a carpe diem narrative, regarding safety as not a real problem, while appreciating the freedom of that comes with this type of work. In this practice, safety is predominantly the responsibility of the employee—incidents and unsafety are accepted as part of the job. Managers narrate a carpe pecunia narrative, supporting the carpe diem narrative through the logic that employees are responsible for safety while the project budget and satisfying the client carries much weight. Thereby, safety is negotiated on a constant basis and often outpaced by other concerns. These narratives create a cultural practice that demoralizes construction workers to work safely. The memento-narrative, developed by a team of consultants, is a narrated change attempting to influence this cultural practice and stresses the moral obligation of leaders to evaluate the risks of the work they assign to their (or external) employees. The logic of the narrative is that safety should be the main concern and not part of a negotiation. This study shows how the memento-narrative cannot always gain a foothold when narrators adopt certain narrative techniques, like blocking and reframing. Only in small remarks and specific moments during conversations are there opportunities for further conversation on and sharing of the memento-narrative.

New York City: Struggles over the narrative of the Solidarity Economy

The solidarity economy in North America has received growing attention at multiple scales in the past ten years. As worker cooperatives in New York City enjoy newfound municipal support, narrative struggles emerge between actors within the solidarity economy space. The solidarity economy may be theorized as capitalism’s feminized ‘other’: malleable, unfixed, local, and difficult to quantify. This feminization extends to both its workforce, a majority of whom are women, and the labor it produces, primarily domestic work. It is for these reasons that solidarity economy work is often overlooked as a political economy capable of structural transformation, and the discomfort with its breadth has lead movement leaders to uphold and advocate for more ‘formal’ models like cooperatives and deploy ‘poverty alleviation’ and entrepreneurship narratives to stabilize the fluid field. I argue that this project blanches the radical edges of a movement, minimizing not only those whose labor accounts for the majority of solidarity economy work, but ignoring the transformative potential of sites where such work happens. Based on a series of qualitative interviews with solidarity economy practitioners, this paper argues that the dominant narrative of solidarity economy work in New York City ignores where most of this work occurs and by whom, erasing and undermining those efforts. Counter-narratives emerge in those ‘forgotten’ spaces and thus transform them into sites of radical, anti-capitalist organizing. In so doing, this paper poses a question for geographers about how movements may continue to challenge our assumptions about space.

Opposing Views on the Urgency for Healthcare Changes in the Netherlands: A Temporal Narrative Struggle

This paper illuminates the way multiple narratives concerning urgency for change dynamically interact on different levels and influence change processes in healthcare organizations. It explores the processes of sensemaking and opposing urgency narratives during a period of implementation for new legislation within the Dutch healthcare sector. Building on recent debates on process theory, narratives, and temporality, a new perspective on change urgency is presented, which shows how urgency is not unilaterally created from one position but is produced and reproduced by different editors in a narrative struggle. A temporal framework for change urgency was developed to study these narrative dynamics. Three urgency narratives contested the dominant narrative in the public discourse. The article shows how directors of healthcare organizations, dominated by these narratives, also hold narrative power. Managing change processes implies managing discourse.

Posthuman Narration as a Test Bed for Experientiality: The Case of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos

Storytelling is not just a human practice, but a practice that reflects the physical and cognitive make-up of human beings. This is the intuition at the core of Monika Fludernik’s notion of “experientiality.” One of the upshots of this idea is that narrative struggles to come to terms with realities (such as natural evolution or geological history) that are not human-scale. In light of recent discussions in posthumanism and ecocriticism, one may ask if and how narrative can overcome this anthropocentric bias. This essay addresses this question through a close reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985), a novel set a million years into the future, when humanity has evolved into a radically different species. The essay explores formal strategies and affective impact of Vonnegut’s novel, using it as a springboard to rethink narrative’s experientiality in the face of a more-than-human vantage point.

Ahimsā and its Ambiguities: Reading the story of Buddha and Aṅgulimāla

AbstractThis paper focuses on the story of the Buddha’s encounter with Angulimāla, a vicious brigand who, subdued by the Buddha, renounces his outlaw ways for the monastic life, eventually attaining arahant status. The tale of Angulimāla has proven quite popular in Buddhist history and is often cited as evidence of how under the Dhamma no one is beyond salvation. Yet this story poses problems for our understanding and as such, has been repeatedly (sometimes radically) re-interpreted over the years. Taking my cue from literary theorists, I maintain that these retellings encourage us to read the story in its various incarnations as an on-going narrative struggle with issues surrounding violence, suggesting a fundamental ambivalence towards violence (and the much-touted virtue of

‘Something is Trying to Get Inside My Body’: A Gay Reception and Narrative Analysis of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

The critical understanding of horror film has traditionally been locked into a particular psychoanalytic framework concerning audience composition of the genre, as well as the identity politics operating within (Twitchell 1985; Carroll 1990; Clover 1992; Creed 1993; Grant 1996). Within this work, little attention has been paid to alternative audience demographics, especially gay and sexually non-normative viewers. This is rather surprising considering the horror film, and the monster in particular, has been understood as a material manifestation of queerness, as that which bourgeois ideology cannot accept and must therefore construct as ‘Other’ (Benshoff 1997; Wood 1986; Saunders 1998). As a result, this article looks at a gay online reception of gay audiences of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985). Such a text is important, as it fractures the established formula of the slasher film by introducing a ‘male scream queen’ – a ‘final boy’ named Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton). This article employs Janet Staiger’s (2000) work on reception studies to argue that the strategies and tactics brought by the spectator to the filmic experience are constructed by particular historical circumstances, which in turn, assist in the formation of ‘interpretive communities’. While the introduction of the final boy certainly disrupts fixed points of gendered identification, such features are only part of a holistic approach to understanding the subjective responses of gay audiences to Jesse’s characterisation. Textual subversions therefore mobilise gay audiences’ affective responses to the film – as Jesse’s narrative struggles mirror the lived experiences of gay audiences as they relate to the social context of homosexuality in the 1980s.

The Play is Now Reality: Affective Turns, Narrative Struggles, and Theorizing Emotion as Practical Experience

Discursive approaches to subjectivity have been critiqued most recently for its dismissal of a living body that moves and senses. While identity as performative has proven invaluable to contemporary cultural theory for its dynamic conceptualization of power in everyday practice, the emergence of what some scholars have named an "affective turn" has prompted calls for configuring the body as more than a complex set of significations, but also a vibrant energy field in perpetual emergence. Centered on an enacted story created by two clinical therapists and two South Asian immigrant domestic violence survivors during a therapeutic support group session, this paper brings the affective turn into dialog with narrative theory. I juxtapose two different readings of this clinical "performance." One interpretation recognizes affect theory's value for highlighting sensation and the virtual in moments of transformation. Nonetheless I argue it overlooks a lived history. Thus, using a specifically dramatistic approach to narrative, the second analysis stresses the importance of personal experience and meaning-making in strengthening the link between affect and subjectivity. In doing so, the case study also argues for emotion's critical link to practical and moral experience.

Fault Lines in Russia's Discourse of Nation: Television Coverage of the December 2010 Moscow Riots

This article analyzes Russian television news accounts of the December 2010 Manezhnaia riots that followed an ethnic Russian football fan's murder by a group of men from the North Caucasus. It focuses on the narrative struggle to reconcile official nation-building rhetoric with grassroots realities and broadcasters' own assumptions. Using the tools of media discourse analysis, Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz demonstrate that national television's conceptual apparatus consists of a multifaceted amalgam in which interpretations of the Soviet period are modified through the influences of late imperial Russian intellectual traditions and western interpretations of societal diversity. Hutchings and Tolz show how the essentialization of ethnic boundaries within this apparatus leads both to the overinterpretation of interethnic aspects of the crisis, and to their occlusion. Rather than submitting to a univocal state machine, post-Manezhnaia broadcasting reveals fault lines whose partial convergence around a single narrative reflects the restricted logic of the conceptual apparatus and a perceived need to reflect the public mood.