A Narratological Approach to Understanding Processes of Organizing in a UK Hospital

Abstract

This article outlines a narratological approach to understanding how middle managers and senior managers in a UK National Health Service (NHS) hospital made sense of the introduction of a series of interventions, led by senior managers. The research contribution this article makes is fourfold. First, it illustrates the role of individual and group narratives in processes of collective sensemaking. Second, it discusses the importance of work narratives in the efforts of individuals and groups to define their shared identities. Third, it outlines a view of organizations as storytelling milieux in which group narratives play important hegemonic and legitimatory roles. Finally, our focus on narratives, and the plurivocal understandings of actions and events they often encompass, is, we maintain, one useful means by which polysemy can be read back into case study research.