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The website for business and organizational storytelling |
the huge impact of organizational & business storytelling in the news |
| Are these really stories?
What the heck is a story?
In this website, “narrative” and “story” are used as synonyms in a broad sense to include an account, or anything narrated. In practice, the use of the word "story" is very broad. Traditionalists sometimes question whether some examples are "genuine stories" or merely ideas for possible stories. If we adopt a narrower, predetermined idea of what a "real story" is, we may end up missing the most useful forms of organizational and business narratives. As an example of this phenomenon, see Gabriel, Yannis: Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies. Oxford, 2001. (For more information about accepting a broad usage of "story," see Polkinghorne, Donald E.: Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. NY: SUNY, 1988.) Thus I don't see the possibility of any viable distinction between "straight news" and "stories". After all, what is "straight news" but a journalist or a newscaster telling a story about something that has happened? And very often: a journalist or newscaster telling a story about someone else's storytelling? e.g. the example on January 9 where "the news" is a story about the story being told by the statistics-ridden IMF, whom most people wouldn't think of as a storyteller. But there we are. The statistics themselves aren't news. It's the story that is told about the statistics that is news. If the IMF had stuck to its statistics, its report would be gathering dust on a shelf somewhere, instead of being covered on the front page of the New York Times. Some may baulk at the proposition that straight news is storytelling, perhaps because we have been told for so long that there are hard solid objective facts out there, which are different from soft squishy emotional stories, and that we should stick to the former and avoid the latter. But when we think about it just a bit, we can see that we are living in a sea of the soft squishy emotional stuff on a continuing basis: there's no getting away from it. You'll see that some examples of the soft squishy emotional stuff on this website are more honest and truthful and stick closer to what is supported by evidence than others, but their basic nature doesn't change whether they're truthful or not - they're still stories. What the website is trying to do is to point out the most notorious examples in the business world on a daily basis and the massive financial implications of the phenomenon. Got comments or feedback? Steve would love to hear from you. Write to him here. |