Narrative Temporality: Implications for Organizational Research

Abstract

Our aim is to stimulate critical reflection on an issue that has received relatively little attention: how alternative presuppositions about time can lead to different narrative ways of researching and theorizing organizational life. Based on two amendments to Paul Ricoeur’s work in Time and Narrative, we re-story narrative research in organizations as Narrative Temporality (NT). Our amendments draw upon the temporality perspective of Jean-Paul Sartre in order to reframe narrative research in organizations as a fluid, dynamic, yet rigorous process open to the interpretations (negotiated) of its many participants (polyphonic) and situated in the context and point of enactment (synchronic). We believe an approach to narrative organizational research grounded in NT can open up new ways of thinking about experience and sense-making, and help us take reflexive responsibility for our research.