Narrative Inquiry - Volume 27, Issue 1, 2017

Building on recent investigations of the role of gendered discourses in constructing and maintaining sex-segregated professions this article highlights the significance of small story analysis for the identification of positioning acts which function as rhetorical warrants for career choices and trajectories. It analyses small stories told by Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs) and investigates the tensions expressed in the negotiation and performance of their gendered professional identities. Small stories act as a medium of professional identity construction, rapport-building and as a site of contestation, employed to (re)appraise the social order, particularly with respect to 'women's' and 'men's' work. Gendered discourses are shown to impact not only on the amount of men entering the SLT profession but also the specialisms and progression routes that men and women pursue. The analysis points to the reproductive and regulatory power of gendered discourses on individuals' experience of their gendered subjectivity and professional identity.

On the basis of the September 1944 Moscow Armistice agreement between Finland, the Soviet Union and the UK, the Finnish government was obliged to intern German and Hungarian citizens in Finland. Applying the concepts of “tellability” and “frame”, I examine how individuals (most of them children of German fathers and Finnish mothers) who were interned as minors and young people in Finland in 1944–1946 describe silence and the rupture of silence. In order to understand the interaction and dynamics between individuals’ remembering and public memory, I analyze oral history interviews of ex-internees in relation to public discussion. I argue that bringing together viewpoints of narrative analysis, oral history research and memory studies facilitates understanding of the link between the individual, private and public dimensions of memory construction. Furthermore, I suggest that the analytical concepts of tellability and frame are highly useful in understanding why some experiences and events of the past are narrated and remembered while others are forgotten or silenced.

Success stories are a frequently investigated genre of shared cultural narratives. This paper will pay particular attention to success stories in sports and investigate how young participants in selection camps in soccer and hockey are using a set of shared narratives in order to produce their personal stories of success. By looking at narratives-in-interaction in this specific context, these interviews are investigated as a narrative genre. The analysis shows how a set of shared narratives are used in storylines in order to legitimize the personal story of success and how a number of dilemmatic spaces are addressed. This study shows how personal success stories are intimately tied to “discursively shared narratives” and how this context constitutes a specific narrative framework.

Trials are touchstones, which highlight rationalities of narrative identity construction. This study seeks to explore these rationalities from the perspective of young defendants. Predicated on narrative interviews before and after trials as well as on participant observations of the respective trials, we reconstruct identity-related categorizations of young defendants. Based on “Membership Categorization Analysis”, our focus is on the young defendants’ narrative depiction of their biographical criminal history and their self-presentation as subjects that have been (un)fairly treated and sentenced by penal professionals. Empirically, we use a case study to elaborate on the intricate challenge of identity construction when a severe punishment is imminent. Our results indicate a strategic form of narration, which mirrors the complexities and uncertainties of a trial.

Over the last decade, sometimes violent conflicts have erupted between generations in China over who should have a seat on a crowded bus. Through a small story approach to an extended sequence of Chinese bus stories, this study examines how elder-blaming comes to be instantiated in talk-in-interaction. The analysis elaborates Deppermann's finding that cooperative in-group bonding is not the sole reason that out-group stereotypes are instantiated: competition among interactants as they “top” one another’s stories also plays an important part. We nuance this, first, by pointing to actions that are simultaneously cooperative and competitive. Second, we foreground how the interactional troubles of our storytellers fundamentally revolve around issues of epistemic accountability and, in turn, are assuaged by cooperative epistemic acts, in which stereotyping and story "topping" entwine.

I draw together multimodal and creative art practices with sociological and discursive research frameworks to detail how multimodal interviewing facilitates communication of individual narratives. I offer a route for researching how embodied self-production emerges by asking: What can be learnt from analysing the context and process of narrative accounts rather than the content? Consideration is given to how a drawn visual line influences the narrative progress by inviting diverse, active and embodied engagement, while highlighting issues that participants prioritise. Attention is also given to how self-recognition and the production of identity become apparent in moments that punctuate a narrator’s story-telling. These moments are identified as discursive transitions and include switches in style or topic of conversation, expressions of emotion, pauses and extended silences. These transitions are conceptualised as examples of a ‘structuring presence’ within a narrative, and I explore how these are central to the embodied production of self-identity.

The present study explores how former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who are often referred to as Mormons, construct their identities. Framed in an interpretive narrative approach, 150 online exit stories of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that voluntarily left the Church were qualitatively analyzed. Findings reveal five prominent identities: (1) the disenfranchised victim, (2) the redeemed spiritualist, (3) the liberated self, (4) the (wo)men of science, and (5) the Mormon in name only. Results suggest that membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is inextricably connected to individual identity. Thus, exiting the Church is much more than leaving an organization. Future implications for research will be discussed.

This article deals with user involvement in mental health care and emerges from interviews with four service users at a community mental health center in northern Norway. The stories told by the participants were related to an impending closure of the center following a new health care reform. The aim of this article is to take a closer look at how user involvement was performed by the participants in the storytelling context. We explore the stories told using narrative contextualization analysis. Through our analysis, we find that narrative environments demands our attention to turn to storytelling as stories play out in the here and now of everyday life in mental health care.

In this paper, we describe a method for performing structural narrative analysis that draws on narratology and literary studies, moving structural narrative analysis from a focus on examining linguistic parts of narratives to understanding thematic structures that make up the whole narrative. We explore the possibility of constructing participant narratives using Campbell’s monomyth as a coding and structuralizing scheme. The method we describe is the response to the question, “How might we find a reliable way to construct ‘smooth’ stories (with attention to the structures of stories) so that we might compare trajectories of student experiences?” To answer this question, we use narrative interviews from a larger study to show how this method can make sense of interviews and construct accessible and useful participant narratives. We close by providing an example narrative constructed using the monomyth coding scheme and discussing benefits and difficulties associated with this method.

In this article, we examine how executives in Italian family-owned firms use their corporations’ histories to associate particular moral discourses of cultural values, responsibility, and authenticity with the “Made in Italy” brand. These links render Made in Italy a national brand – a brand representing all goods produced in Italy and an “authentic” national treasure. Through an analysis of Italian executives’ oral narratives, this article explores how collective identities are constructed in interview settings and how Made in Italy emerges through the various stances that these managers take regarding certain topics. We focus on the ways Italian executives align their corporate narratives, family histories, and brand identities with circulating ideologies on the significance of Made in Italy. By looking at how Italian managers enact Made in Italy as a national brand with collective responsibilities, this article contributes to recent research on narrative discursive practices in the corporate world.