Analysing Narratives as Practices

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DOI: 10.1177/1468794106093634 2008; 8; 379 Qualitative Research

Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou Analysing narratives as practices

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ABSTRACT Departing from a critique of the conventional paradigm ofnarrative analysis, inspired by Labov and the narrative turn in socialsciences, we propose an alternative framework, recommendingcombining a focus on the local occasioning of narratives in interactionwith the analysis of their participation in a variety of macro-processes,through mobilizing the notions of social practice, genre and communityof practice.

KEYWORDS: community of practice, genre, narrative analysis, small stories, social practice

IntroductionWithin narrative analysis, there are debates around two different ways ofdefining and doing narrative: one inspired by a conventional and largelycanonical paradigm; the other, based on an interactionally focused view ofnarrative. We draw on this dialogue to articulate an alternative approach,which we call the social interactional approach (henceforth SIA). This encom-passes a view of narrative as talk-in-interaction and as social practice, teas-ing out the analysis of interaction as a fundamental aspect of any study ofnarrative, and the investigation of the intimate links of narrative-interactionalprocesses with larger social processes as a prerequisite for socially mindedresearch.

What we are calling the conventional paradigm was inspired by Labov andWaletzkys (1967) foundational model of narrative analysis, but also byassumptions about the role and nature of narrative as an archetypal mode ofcommunication derived from the narrative turn in the social sciences. Notably,Labov and Waletzky (1967: 13) defined narrative in functional terms as oneverbal technique for recapitulating past experience, in particular a techniqueof constructing narrative units which match the temporal sequence of thatexperience. In their model, a narrative text was characterized in structuralterms through the presence of temporal ordering between event clauses, and

A RT I C L E 379

Analysing narratives as practices

DOI: 10.1177/1468794106093634

Qualitative ResearchCopyright 2008SAGE Publications(Los Angeles,London, New Delhiand Singapore)vol. 8(3) 379387

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A N N A D E F I N A Georgetown University, USAA L E X A N D R A G E O R G A K O P O U L O UKings College London, UK


through its organization into structural components (such as complicatingaction and resolution). Evaluation (i.e. the expression of the narrators point ofview on the events) was postulated as a structural component and a diffusemechanism for conveying a story point. Labov and Waletzkys model wasbased on stories told in interviews and, in principle, was meant as a descriptionof narratives of personal experience, not all types of narratives. That said, ithas had a profound influence in narrative work and paved the way for seeingnarrative as a privileged site for the study of a wide range of aspects relevantto the study of language in society (see contributions in Bamberg, 1997). Thefrequent use of the Labovian approach as the basis of empirical studies hashad profound implications for the direction of narrative analysis, creatingnotions of a narrative canon and orthodoxy, i.e. presuppositions on what con-stitutes a story, a good story, a story worth analysing, etc., that have in turndictated a specific analytic vocabulary and an interpretive idiom. More specifi-cally, Labovs structural definition of narrative has resulted in a tendency torecognize as narratives only texts that appear to be well organized, with abeginning, a middle and an end, that are teller-led and largely monological,and that occur as responses to (an interviewers) questions. In addition, hisfocus on story point and evaluation has inadvertently privileged the teller asthe main producer of meaning. Finally, his reliance on interview data has ledto the neglect of the role of the storytelling activity in the local context inwhich it is generated.

Labovs model coincided with, and surely benefited from, the insights of thenarrative turn in social sciences. Since then, studies of autobiographical narra-tives that have focused on the construction of identity have proliferated. Thereis, however, a tendency to see narrative as a fundamental mode for construct-ing realities and so as a privileged structure/system/mode for tapping into iden-tities, particularly constructions of self (for a critique, see Georgakopoulou,2006a). The guiding assumption has thus been that, by bringing the coordi-nates of time, space and personhood into a unitary frame, narrative can afforda point of entry into the sources behind these representations (such as author,teller and narrator), and that it can make them empirically visible for analyticalscrutiny in the form of identity analysis.1

These two trends together, Labovian narrative analysis and identity focusedapproaches related to the narrative turn, have informed what we have labeledhere as the conventional paradigm for narrative analysis. The stories that havebeen marginalized or excluded from this paradigm are those that do not con-form to the schema of an active teller, highly tellable account, relativelydetached from surrounding talk and activity, linear temporal and causal orga-nization, and certain, constant moral stance (Ochs and Capps, 2001: 20). Putdifferently, the neglected stories include a gamut of under-represented narra-tive activities, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events,shared (known) events, but also allusions to tellings, deferrals of tellings, andrefusals to tell (Georgakopoulou, 2006b: 130). Alongside the privileging of a

380 Qualitative Research 8(3)


specific type of narrative (and partly because of that), the impact of differentaspects of a storytelling event (such as time, place, relations between inter-locutors, events in which the storytelling is inserted, salient topics discussedbefore and after the narrative, etc.) has been downplayed, as have narrativeinteractional dynamics (such as telling roles and telling rights, audience reac-tions, etc.).

Narrative as talk-in-interactionImportant challenges to the methodological tendencies and assumptions ofconventional narrative analysis have been derived from research on conver-sational storytelling, most of which broadly aligns itself with ConversationAnalysis (henceforth CA). The main premise of the CA critique is the ideathat (oral) narrative in any context is and should be explicitly seen as talk-in-interaction. Narrative is an embedded unit, enmeshed in local business,not free-standing or detached/detachable. Viewing narratives as more or lessself-contained texts that can be abstracted from their original context ofoccurrence thus misses the fact that both the telling of a story, and the waysin which it is told, are shaped by previous talk and action. A related premiseof CA is that recognizing structure in narrative cannot be disassociated froman engagement with surrounding discourse activity, and some kind of devel-opment and an exit (Sacks, 1974; Jefferson, 1978). As such, narratives aresequentially managed; their tellings unfold on-line, moment-by-moment inthe here-and-now of interactions. Thus, they can be expected to raise differ-ent types of action and tasks for different interlocutors (Goodwin, 1984).This brings into sharp focus the need to distinguish between different par-ticipant roles while moving beyond the restrictive dyadic scheme of teller-lis-tener. The exploration of co-construction is at the heart of our SIA. Thestory recipients, far from being a passive audience, may reject, modify, orunder-cut tellings and narrative points (Goodwin, 1984; Goodwin, 1986;Cedeborg and Aronsson, 1994; Ochs and Capps, 2001); they may be instru-mental in how the teller designs their story in the first place, particularly incases in which there are differentiated roles among storytelling participants(e.g. some may know of the events of the story, others not, some may becharacters in the story, etc.) that have to be managed through the story-telling process.

As this suggests, narratives are emergent, a joint venture and the outcome ofnegotiation by interlocutors. Allowing for interactional contingency is the hall-mark of a sufficiently process-oriented and elastic model of narrative thatopens up rather than closes off the investigation of talks business (Edwards,1997: 142) and that accounts for the consequentiality and local relevance ofstories. This alerts analysts to the dangers of attributing one sole purpose to thetelling of a story that is, doing self. Tellers perform numerous social actionswhile telling a story and do rhetorical work through stories: they put forth

381De Fina and Georgakopoulou: Analysing narratives as practices


arguments, challenge their interlocutors views and generally attune their stories to various local, interpersonal purposes, sequentially orienting them toprior and upcoming talk. It is important to place any representations of self andany questions of storys content in the context of this type of relational andessentially discursive activity as opposed to reading them only referentially.

The CA view of narrative as talk-in-interaction presents important implica-tions not just for the analysis of narrative, but also for the processes and meth-ods of data collection and transcription. The narrative data that form themainstay of CA research arise naturally in conversations (be they in everyday,informal or institutional contexts). There is thus a clear privileging of conver-sational sites as the main event under scrutiny, and in that respect narrativebecomes another format of telling (Edwards, 1997). By extension, narrativeinterviews are ultimately interactional data in which the researcher is verymuch part of the narrative telling, and his/her role should be not just reflectedupon but also all contributions by the researcher, whether verbal or non-ver-bal, should be fully transcribed. As Potter and Hepburn (2005: 295) argue inrelation to interview extracts in general, they should be transcribed to a levelthat allows interactional features to be appreciated even if interactional fea-tures are not the topic of study. Identifying and subsequently analysing close-up interactional features and language details in narrative tellings is central tothe social-interactional project and, as discussed below, it constitutes the sinequa non toolkit for our style of narrative research.

Narrative as social practiceThe view of narrative as talk-in-interaction is a necessary but not sufficientaspect of our SIA to narrative. It affords an intimate view of what is going onin the here-and-now of any narrative interaction firmly locating us in the flowof everyday lived experience. Nonetheless, the limitations of CA for the explo-ration of how any strip of activity is configured on the momentary-quotidian-biographical-historical frames and across socio-spatial arenas are by now wellrehearsed (see Wetherell, 1998). Within the SIA to narrative, we can gobeyond the local level of interaction and find articulations between the micro-and the macro-levels of social action and relationships (De Fina, 2003a:2630; 2006). This navigation between a nose-to-data and a socio-culturallygrounded project rests on the notions of social practice, genre and communi-ties of practice as central to a new understanding of narrative.

The SIA attempts to synthesize the local occasioning of narratives in con-versations with their role in a variety of macro-processes, such as the sanctionof modes of knowledge accumulation and transmission, the exclusion andinclusion of social groups, the enactment of institutional routines, the perpe-tration of social roles, etc. In this process of synthesis, narratives take differentshapes and generic forms that are intimately related to those macro-processesand practices that constitute them. Thus, a major task of narrative analysis for



us is to unravel and account for the ways in which storytelling reflects andshapes these different levels of context, as opposed to e.g. focusing on storycontent and the goings-on within a story referentially and taking them as arelatively unmediated and transparent record (see Atkinson and Delamont,2006: 17381).

The process of contextualization of a narrative within the SIA involves link-ing it with the social practices it is part of. Practice captures habituality andregularity in discourse in the sense of recurrent evolving responses to givensituations, while allowing for emergence and situational contingency. Thus, itallows for an oscillation between relatively stable, prefabricated, typifiedaspects of communication and emergent, in-process aspects.

In our view, an important tool for bringing together narratives and socialpractices, for linking ways of speaking with the production of social life in thesemiotic world, is the systematic investigation of narrative genres. We use thenotion of genre not as the formal features of types of text, but rather, in tunewith recent linguistic anthropology (Hanks, 1996; Bauman, 2001), as a modeof action, a key part of our habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) that comprises the routineand repeated ways of acting and expressing particular orders of knowledge andexperience. As orienting frameworks of conventionalized expectations, genresshift the analytical attention to routine and socioculturally shaped ways oftelling (Hymes, 1996) in specific settings and for specific purposes. Instead oftreating narrative as a supra-genre with fixed structural characteristics,emphasis is placed on narrative structures as dynamic and evolving responsesto recurring rhetorical situations, as resources more or less strategically andagentively drawn upon, negotiated and reconstructed anew in local contexts.Emphasis is also on the strategies that speakers use to deal with the gap betweenwhat may be expected (e.g. generic representations) and what is actually beingdone in specific instances of communication. At the same time, the incom-pleteness or smallness of narrative instances, be it in the sense of possibilities forrevision and reinterpretation (Hanks, 1996: 244) or simply in the sense of nar-rative accounts in which nothing much happens, is firmly integrated into theanalysis, as opposed to being seen as an analytic nuisance.

The move to such a practice-oriented view of narrative genres also requiresthat we firmly locate narratives in place and time and scrutinize the social anddiscourse activities they are habitually associated with. In particular, it focusesattention on the social values of space as inscribed upon the practices(Hanks, 1996: 246) that take place within narrative tellings. The idea of nar-rative as part of social practices inevitably leads to pluralized and fragmentednotions and also to new directions in the study of the way narratives functionwithin groups. This link between groups and narrative activity has often beenseen in sociolinguistics in terms of culture and social variables such as nation-ality or gender (e.g. Polanyi, 1985; Johnstone, 1990). However, the emphasison practice brings to the forefront that people participate in multiple, overlap-ping and intersecting communities, so problematizing mainstay notions such



as that of a homogeneous speech community (cf. Rampton, 1999). There hasthus been a definite move from large and all-encompassing notions of societyand culture to micro, shrunk down, more manageable in size, communities ofpeople who, through regular interaction and participation in an activitysystem, share language and social practices/norms as well as understandingsof them with a community of practice seen as an aggregate of people whocome together around a mutual engagement in an endeavour (Eckert andMcConnell-Ginet, 1999: 191).

When viewed as part of communities of practice, narratives can be expectedto act as other shared resources, be they discourses or activities. In particular,they often form an integral part of a communitys shared culture as well asbeing instrumental in negotiating and (re)generating it (Goodwin, 1990;Georgakopoulou, 2006c). Put differently, they can be inflected, nuanced,reworked and strategically adapted to perform acts of group identity, to reaf-firm roles and group-related goals, expertise, shared interests, etc. At the sametime, they are also potentially contestable resources, prone to recontextualiza-tion, transposition across contexts and recycling, thus leading to other kinds ofdiscourses (Silverstein and Urban, 1996; Shuman, 2005). In this respect, it isimportant to recognize the place of narratives in a trajectory of interactions astemporalized activities (De Fina, 2003b; Baynham and De Fina, 2005), andalso in networks of practices which they are part of, represent and reflect on.

A summaryOur approach as outlined above has the following implications for doing nar-rative analysis:

1) It implies a close attention to both micro- and macro-levels, but always taking thelocal level of interaction as the place of articulation of phenomena that may findtheir explanation beyond it. Detailed transcription of the data, emphasis on thecommunicative how, the sequential mechanisms, and the telling roles and rights inthe course of a narrative, are some of the hallmarks of the micro-analytic toolkitwe are proposing.

2) It requires a careful examination of the way narrative tellings function as socialpractices and also within other social practices. This necessitates looking into gen-res as interconnections between social expectations about narrative form andemergence of meanings in concrete events.

3) It points to the historicity of narratives and their interconnections with practices.In this sense, narratives need to be studied as texts that get transposed in time andspace, that (re)produce and modify current discourses, thus establishing intertex-tual ties with other narratives and other genres. An important methodologicalimplication is the need to tap into trajectories of storytelling events that may takethe form of either longitudinal studies or revisiting the same data with the reflex-ive distance of time (Riessman Kohler, 2002: 193214).

4) It indicates the need to be open to variability in narrative and to abandon pre-defined ideas about what narrative is, paying attention to non-canonical narratives



and narrative formats and genres that have been neglected in mainstream researchand understanding how they function in specific social contexts. Small storyresearch (Bamberg, 2004; Georgakopoulou, 2006a, 2006b, 2007) is an importantstep in this direction and one that is compatible with the social-interactional para-digm. By employing small stories as an umbrella term for underrepresented nar-rative activities, small stories research has begun to chart the interactional andtextual features of such activities and to document their links with their sites ofoccurrence, mapping out contextual factors that engender or prohibit the telling ofsmall stories. Finally, its aim, as that of the SIA, is to work through the implicationsfor identity research of including non-canonical stories in the focal concerns ofnarrative analysis.

5) It places emphasis on reflexivity in processes of data collection and analysis.

This means that, for example, transcription and translation are not seen astransparent processes, but as choices with strong implications for data analy-sis. Equally, it sees dichotomies such as natural versus elicited data as funda-mentally flawed because it is committed to exploring how any setting in whichnarratives occur brings about, and is shaped by, different norms and historiesof associations, participant frameworks and relations, etc. From a method-ological point of view, the SIA does not set out to sanction or prescribe certainways of working at the expense of others. However, its epistemological frame-work lends itself better to ethnographic kinds of methods that allow for local,reflexive and situated understandings of narratives as more or less partial andvalid accounts within systems of production and articulation.

N O T E S

1. Space limitations do not allow us to discuss and do justice to the counter-discoursesto this canon, voiced by various prominent scholars within narrative inquiry (e.g.Catherine Riessman, Liz Stanley, Chris Weedon, to mention only three), who haveput issues of researcher position and co-construction in the narrative process veryfirmly on the map.

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ANNA DE FINAS research interests focus on narrative, identity, the discourse ofimmigrants and language contact phenomena. Her publications include Identity inNarrative (2003), Dislocations, Relocations, Narratives of Displacement, co-edited withMike Baynham (2005), Discourse and Identity (2006) and Selves and Identities inNarrative and Discourse (2007) both co-edited with Deborah Schiffrin and MichaelBamberg. Address: Italian Department, ICC 307J, Georgetown University, 37th andO Streets NW, Washington DC 20015, USA. [email: [email protected]]

ALEXANDRA GEORGAKOPOULOUS publications include Narrative Performances (1997),Discourse Analysis (co-authored with D. Goutsos, 2004) and Discourse Constructions ofYouth Identities (co-edited with J. Androutsopoulos, 2003). She has recently explored thesignificance of everyday conversational stories for the sort of narrative and identity analy-sis that interview researchers do. This line of inquiry forms the subject of her latest book,Small Stories, Interaction and Identities (2007). Address: Department of Byzantine andModern Greek Studies/Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication, School ofHumanities, Kings College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK. [email: [email protected]]



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Analysing Narratives as Practices