Getting the story right: A narrative-semiotic approach to conflict and crisis in organizations

Textual and linguistic research on written professional communication can be classified into four broad categories: discursive and rhetorical analyses of documents, and of the processes and decisions involved in producing these documents (for example, Flower and Ackerman 1994, Peeples 2003, Surma 2005); genre-based approaches to the structural and stylistic expectations and conventions of particular document types (for example, Swales and Rogers 1995, Bhatia 2002); critical discourse analyses of sentence structure and lexical choice (for example, Coulthard 1994, Fairclough 2003); and narrative-semiotic approaches, such as the one informing this paper, which take their cue from literary analysis, and ‘read’ organizational practices as textual structures (for example, Taylor 1993, Andersen 1993, Cooren 2000). Despite methodological differences, all four categories follow the premise that the texts produced in professional settings are examples of socially and contextually situated praxis, and all four share the epistemological framework of what has come to be known as the ‘interpretive’ approach to professional communication, which emphasizes the dynamic and negotiative nature of professional discourse.Within this research framework, the proposed paper describes a new model of analysis (first briefly described in Marsen 2007), aimed at investigating the genres and discourse patterns of written communication that deal with an organizational problem or crisis. This model is useful in identifying the narrative structure of business projects, by analyzing the different, and often conflicting, points of view, motivations and assumptions of project participants, as these manifest in their written texts. The paper proposes that business projects have an implicit narrative basis, and argues that a narrative analysis would be productive in identifying problems and risks in the communication practices of project participants. Using an eclectic approach that combines methodological tools informed mainly by narrative-semiotics and genre theory, the paper describes the theoretical and heuristic value of the model, and illustrates its application on selected examples drawn from the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster in 2003 and the BP oil disaster in 2010.