Gubrium, Holstein- Narrative Ethnography

CHAPTER 12

Narrative Ethnography

Jaber F. GubriumJames A. Holstein

Once upon a time, stories were toldand written for what they were about.The ancients wrote love stories, re-

corded histories of military campaigns, pro-duced treatises on flora and fauna, medicaltexts, and philosophical discourses, and re-counted oral histories of countless domainsof experience. Some told of the emotions,some of strategic actions, and others of theprinciples by which these operated. Somestories were written by literate members oftheir societies; others have been collected assimple yet enduring folk tales. Pictorial ren-derings, such as cave paintings and decora-tive displays, attest to narrative’s longevity.Extended accounts are a signal feature ofthe way we have shared the world.

It is one thing, however, to share accountsof battles or lost love; it is quite another tocontemplate narrativity or the storying pro-cess in its own right. This is a relatively re-cent development. Reflections on the pro-cess might foreground the general structureof battle reports as opposed to love stories,for instance. The difference between shar-

ing stories, on the one hand, and noticing,cataloguing, and analyzing the corpus ofnarratives for similarities and differences onthe other, is a leap in imagination, highlight-ing narrativity as something separate anddistinct from the stories themselves.

As a matter of practice, we do not drawa sharp distinction between stories and thestorying process. Nevertheless, somethingimportant happens when a distinction ismade between them, offering grounds forthinking about narrativity as something in-teresting on its own. The distinction mightbest be viewed as a dialogue rather than acategorical difference. This allows us to ex-plore the possibility that narratives havedifferent or similar formats and, in turn,that different formats relate to what istold, to how and where narratives takeplace, and to how they are understood.This chapter outlines recent developmentsin the study of narrative practice that takethese contextual features into account andpresent the need for narrative ethnogra-phy.

241

Handbook of Emergent Methodsedited by Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patricia Leavy. Copyright 2008 by The Guilford Press. All rights reserved.From

The Internal Organization of Narratives

The study of narrative has moved in two di-rections. The first of these “narrative turns”was launched by Vladimir Propp’s (1928/1968) trailblazing book Morphology of the FolkTale. Russian-born, Propp collected, butmore important, called attention to the un-derlying features of Russian folk tales. Hespecified the internal shape of the folk tale,something that went beyond collection andappreciation. Like the myths and folk talesof other groups and nations, Russian folktales dealt with diverse matters, from storiesof family life, childhood, motherhood, birth,and death to villainy, loss, triumph, luck, de-sire, good, and evil. It was not the specificcontents or moral twists that interestedPropp, but rather how the actors and actionsin a story functioned in the overall schemeof things.

Propp noticed similarities in otherwise di-verse stories and argued that the fairy talehad a narrative form common to all storytell-ing. Actions and characters functioned inlimited ways, despite the diverse subject mat-ter. For example, a witch or a dragon pro-vided the evil force in tales of struggle andvictory. From a functional perspective, adragon that kidnapped the king’s daughtercould serve the same function—as a force ofevil—as the witch who snatched a baby fromits mother’s arms. Although dragons are notwitches and king’s daughters are not neces-sarily babies, it could be argued that theyplayed identical roles in the accounts. AsTerence Hawkes (1977, p. 69) explains, “Theimportant thing to notice is that [Propp] isdealing with discernible and repeated struc-tures [or functions].”

Since then, analysis of the internal or-ganization of stories has flourished. Proppstarted a tradition of scholarship that nowcrosses linguistics, the humanities, and thesocial sciences, the aim of which is to theo-rize and catalogue the structures and func-tions of stories. For example, A. J. Greimas’s(1983) interest in semantics led to a view of

narrative structure modeled on Ferdinandde Saussure’s (1915/1966) understanding oflinguistic structure. In the following sec-tions, we focus on the direction this view hastaken in the social sciences. From psycholo-gist Jerome Bruner’s (1986) discussion ofthe narrative construction of mind, devel-opmental theorist James Birren and hisassociates’ (Birren, Kenyon, Ruth, Schroots,& Svensson, 1996) studies of life storiesthrough time, and gerontologist GaryKenyon and educator William Randall’s(1997) work on autobiographical reflectionto sociologist Catherine Kohler Riessman’s(1990) analysis of the gender mediations ofdivorce talk, stories of inner lives and socialworlds increasingly have been subjected tonarrative analysis.

The Personal Self and Its Stories

Exemplary texts on the internal organiza-tion of narratives have distinct disciplinaryflavors. Some deal with the personal self andits stories. Donald Polkinghorne’s (1988)book Narrative Knowing in the Human Sci-ences is written from the perspective of apracticing psychotherapist. Polkinghorne’sgoal is to solve human and social problems.His disillusion with conventional social sci-ence research turned him to what he calls“narrative knowledge” as a way to under-stand how practitioners actually relate totheir clients’ troubles. Polkinghorne ex-plains, “What I found was that practitionerswork with narrative knowledge. They areconcerned with people’s stories: they workwith case histories and use narrative expla-nations to understand why the people theywork with behave the way they do” (p. x).Polkinghorne goes on to explicate the con-ceptual history of narrative knowledge as itdeveloped in literature, psychology, and psy-chotherapy. One comes away from the bookwith a framework for orienting to personalaccounts of experience in a new way.

Continuing in this vein, Dan McAdams’s(1993) book The Stories We Live By: PersonalMyths and the Making of the Self begins with a

242 HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF EMERGENT METHODS AND INNOVATION

question: “What do we know when we knowa person?” (p. 5). As simple as the questionis, it is a key concern of personality psycholo-gists such as McAdams (see also Crossley,2000, 2003). His answer is that identity is alife story. Personal stories and selves haveparallel narrative tones and imageries. Thelife course is a developing story, riddledwith beginnings, false starts, sudden turns,reconceptualizations, recurrent themes, and“nuclear episodes.” These are the “highpoints, low points, and turning points in ournarrative accounts of the past” (p. 296). Ac-cording to McAdams, as the dramatis perso-nae, plots, and themes of our stories crys-tallize or change, our selves develop andtransform in the process. McAdams explainsthat “the story is inside of us. It is made andremade in the secrecy of our own minds,both conscious and unconscious, and forour own psychological discovery and enjoy-ment” (p. 12). The answer to the question ofwhat we know when we know a person orourselves is found in the variety and vicissi-tudes of the stories within, which we live by.

The stories we live by in today’s world areput into critical perspective in social psychol-ogist Kenneth Gergen’s (1991) book The Sat-urated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contempo-rary Life. Gergen is similarly concerned withthe personal self, but in relation to the diffi-culties posed by the plethora of ways inwhich experience is currently storied. As theback cover of the book explains, “Today’sever-expanding communications technolo-gies force us to relate to more people and in-stitutions than ever before, challenging theway we view ourselves and our relation-ships.” Gergen argues that contemporarylife floods us with so many narratives of whatwe can be that the self is saturated, unable tocenter itself on any source of meaning anddevelopment. We are headed in all direc-tions and thus in no direction at all. The selfis “under siege,” lost in a morass of possibili-ties that a teeming world of self storiespresents to us. The self within is shuffledthrough the countless stories outside, turn-ing the story inside of us into a communica-

tive whirlwind. The self is besieged by a self-storying industry, whose cinematic and tele-visual images work against definitionalclosure, leaving the self anchorless in theprocess. The personal self echoes the narra-tive “collage of postmodern life” (p. 171), asone of Gergen’s later chapters suggests.

The Relational Self and Its Stories

Not everything is this personal or this grim.Starting with George Herbert Mead’s (1934)lectures at the University of Chicago onmind, self, and society, a tradition of think-ing centered on the relational self has flour-ished alongside narrative research dealingwith the personal self. Here the focus is onthe self in relation to everyday life, in partic-ular, the social interaction and situationsthrough which self-understanding develops.Who and what we are in this context are notso much personal but relational stories;they are narratives that mirror the kinds ofaccounts we engage as we go about thebusiness of living. Charles Horton Cooley(1903/1964) likened the relational self to a“looking glass,” in which the narrative playof selfhood evolves through imagined ac-counts of who we might be (p. 184). This selfis not so much located within as it is formedin communicative relation to others. Thecourse of social interaction—both in realtime and in our imaginations—inscribes thecharacters, plots, and themes of our identi-ties.

The Chicago tradition came to early fru-ition in now classic research. W. I. Thomasand Florian Znaniecki’s (1918–1920/1927)study of the immigration experience of Pol-ish Americans in Chicago, titled The PolishPeasant in Europe and America, is a pioneer-ing text of the genre. Indeed, except for along introduction, Volume 1 of the two-volume compendium is composed solely ofletters that the authors collected from Polishfamily members, written to each other be-tween Europe and America. As the authorssuggest, the letter writers’ identities are lo-cated in the various accounts that depict

Narrative Ethnography 243

who they were and what they have becomeas they describe a world left behind in rela-tion to a world being currently lived in. Thebits and pieces of life presented in the lettersare records of attitudes within, the authorsargue, whose predispositions to act tell ofthe relational selves that construct them.

Another key text of this genre is CliffordShaw’s (1930/1966) The Jack Roller, subtitled“A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story.” The sub-ject matter is the career of a young male de-linquent named Stanley. Stanley lives in apoor, crime-ridden neighborhood near theChicago stockyards, not far from downtown.His life is a career of petty crime, including“rolling Jacks,” or assaulting and stealingfrom working men, especially those drunkafter nights out on payday. Stanley’s story ispresented as an extended account in his ownwords, featuring a social world whose rela-tionships shape Stanley’s view of who he isand was and his hopes for the future.Coining the “own story” technique, Shawprovides a glimpse of the delinquent life asStanley spins his narrative. It is “one of a se-ries of 200 similar studies of repeated maleoffenders under 17 years of age, all of whomwere on parole from correctional institu-tions when the studies were made” (p. 1).Stanley’s story is portrayed as a life record,whose themes and plotline offer a genuineglimpse of the social world under consider-ation. In contrast to those who orient to thepersonal self and its stories, Shaw’s perspec-tive suggests that the self’s stories are less ar-ticulations of experience within than theyare accounts that relate significant featuresof everyday life that are widely shared. Shawexplains:

A second aspect of the problem of delinquencywhich may be studied by means of the “ownstory” is the social and cultural world in whichthe delinquent lives. It is undoubtedly true thatthe delinquent behavior of the child cannot beunderstood and explained apart from the cul-tural and social context in which it occurred.By means of personal documents it is possibleto study not only the traditions, customs, and

moral standards of neighborhoods, institu-tions, families, gangs, and play groups, but themanner in which these cultural factors becomeincorporated into the behavior trends of thechild. (p. 7)

Thus begins a tradition of narrative analy-sis centered on how stories reveal the rela-tional selves of storytellers. In this genre, sto-ries are viewed as windows on distinctivesocial worlds. As Ken Plummer (2001) mightput it, the stories are “documents of life.”Stanley’s story is about Stanley only to theextent that his experience has been shapedby the social life he has led. Although it is de-picted as his “own story,” he does not own it;rather, he conveys “in his own words” thesubjective contours of a shared environmentand experience, one centered on migration,poverty, disadvantage, crime, and incarcera-tion. The content and shape of this accountare idiosyncratic only insofar as Stanleybrings biographical particulars and individ-ual narrative habits to his report. What Stan-ley says is a story about a social world, notjust about Stanley. It is important to empha-size that, although there are individual twiststo such stories, their contents are viewed aspatterned by social experience. The ac-counts tell us how inner life relates to dis-tinctive social worlds.

This focus has been advanced in countlessethnographic case studies of social worldsdepicted in participants’ “own words” and“own stories.” From William Foote Whyte’s(1943) magnificent account of street cornerlife in an Italian American slum to ElliotLiebow’s (1967) study of “Negro street-corner men” in a poor African Americanneighborhood in Washington, D.C., to JohnIrwin’s (1970) depiction of the social worldof the felon and Elijah Anderson’s (1976)portrayal of the “regulars,” “wineheads,”and “hoodlums” who narrate the social or-der and sociability of Jelly’s bar and liquorstore on the south side of Chicago, commu-nity members represent in their own wordsthe lived features of particular social worldsand their related selves.


Catherine Kohler Riessman (1990) fur-ther develops the approach by analyzing sto-ries not only for the ways plots depict sociallife but for the ways distinctive themes andthe internal shape of accounts construct ex-perience. Her book Divorce Talk shows how“women and men make sense of personal re-lationships,” in this case divorce, throughstorytelling. The emphasis is on the way di-vorce is differentially plotted by men andwomen. The internal organization of the ac-counts Riessman discusses indicates how par-ticular social experiences are put togetherby those under consideration, not just whatthose social experiences are like. Riessmanoffers us more active relational selves, selvesthat are not only shaped by their socialworlds but that also, in turn, narrativelyinflect those worlds in their own right.Riessman is especially interested in illustrat-ing how much difference the divorcing part-ners’ gender makes in how divorced is sto-ried. As the back cover of the book pointsout:

To explain divorce, women and men constructgendered visions of what marriage should pro-vide, and at the same time they mourn genderdivisions and blame their divorces on them.Riessman examines the stories people tellabout their marriages—the protagonists, incit-ing conditions, and culminating events—andhow these narrative structures provide ways topersuade both teller and listener that divorcewas justified.

The reference to “narrative structures”echoes Propp’s pioneering functional analy-sis of Russian folk tales. The narrative turnin question is evident across the board.Stories are considered for their internal fea-tures, for their particular contents, and forthe structural differences between individ-ual accounts. Whether it is the function of awitch or a dragon, the true-to-life represen-tation of a social world, or the constructionof a form of experience by those differen-tially positioned in it, the internal featuresof stories have generalizable characteristics

that move us beyond the idiosyncrasies of in-dividual accounts. Fairy tales and reports ofneighborhood experience have discernablenarrative contours, in other words, suggest-ing that narrativity can be examined on itsown terms for the manner in which it shapeswhat is known about its subject matter.

Analyzing Internal Structures

There now are several texts offering guide-lines for conceptualizing and analyzingthe internal organization of stories (seeClandinin & Connolly, 2000; Cortazzi, 1993;Daiute & Lightfoot, 2003; Herman &Vervaeck, 2005; Kenyon & Randall, 1997;Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber, 1998;Riessman, 1993). Some are out of print andmany are heavy on theory; two are exem-plary because they are readily available andprovide practical models for, and illustra-tions of, the analysis of life stories—Lieblichand colleagues’ (1998) Narrative Researchand Riessmann’s Narrative Analysis (1993).

Lieblich and her associates distinguishthree uses of narrative in social research.One is for exploratory purposes. When notmuch is known about a particular topic,narrative inquiry can be used to identifyresearchable questions. Small or strategicsamples of narratives from focal populationsmight be collected as a prelude to the specifi-cation of variables that later can be opera-tionalized for further study. Narratives alsoprovide an in-depth view of the lifestyle of aparticular group, such as a gang or a socialmovement. Developmental psychologistshave used narratives to understand individ-ual experience through time, especially inrelation to significant life transitions. A sec-ond use is for research on stories them-selves. This approach centers more on theformal aspects of stories than on their con-tents. Propp’s contribution was pioneeringin this regard. A third use of narratives isphilosophical and methodological. Inquirycenters on what narrativity can contribute toour knowledge of individual and group ex-perience and is often juxtaposed with the


typically flat, thin contributions of posi-tivistic methods.

The bulk of Lieblich and colleagues’(1998) text is devoted to the discussion offour strategies for analyzing the internal or-ganization of life stories. The strategies stemfrom the intersection of two analytical di-mensions: whether the whole story or a part,such as an utterance or theme, is under con-sideration and whether content or form is ofprimary interest. A holistic-content readingof narrative material deals with entire storiesand their contents. For example, one mightcompare the content of stories of recent ver-sus long-time immigrants for the extent towhich they deal with adjustment or accultur-ated experiences. This is the kind of analysisthat Thomas and Znaniecki (1918–1920/1927) undertook in examining the contentsof letters written by Polish immigrants toAmerica and their family members. A sec-ond strategy involves a holistic-form read-ing. The plotlines of stories might be com-pared as to whether they progress along acontinuum, such as from scene-setting, char-acterization, and plot elaboration to climaxand wrap-up. A third strategy involves a part-content reading. In this case, specific partsof stories are considered, such as particularcategories of words, phrases, or self–otherrelationships. The fourth strategy involves apart-form reading. Here one might examinethe relationship between narrative coher-ence as a facet of stories on the one handand how coherence relates to the begin-ning, middle, and ending of stories on theother.

Riessman (1993) starts her text by notingthat we do not have direct access to experi-ence, arguing instead that because lifecomes to us in the form of stories, the analy-sis of narratives becomes a way of analyzingexperience. Inasmuch as storytellers are ac-tive and shape their accounts, in addition tocommunicating information, stories repre-sent our identities and our social worlds.However, although Riessman’s construc-tionist spin on narrativity is clear, her pre-sentation is limited to the analysis of stories’

internal organization and does not extend tostorytelling. The activeness she assigns tothe storying process focuses on the textualresults, not its practice. Still, it is valuable forthe models she presents for doing narrativeanalysis.

One model is applied in Faye Ginsburg’s(1989) study of the lives of 35 women activ-ists in Fargo, North Dakota, who were di-vided in their views on the abortion issue.Riessman (1993) describes how Ginsburg ex-plored the ways in which the women con-structed their positions narratively, compar-ing the linguistic and substantive differencesbetween pro-choice and right-to-life activists.The analysis showed that the women devel-oped plotlines in very different ways. Usingextensive excerpts from pro-choice activistKay Ballard’s story to illustrate Ginsburg’sapproach, Riessman notes in relation to sev-eral excerpts from the story:

Kay illustrates the typical pro-choice plot line[absent in right-to-life stories]: being differentin childhood (Excerpt 1); questioning the con-fines of motherhood through a particular re-productive experience (Excerpt 2); a conver-sion upon contact with feminism in the 1960sand 1970s (Excerpts 3 and 4); and a subse-quent reframing of understandings of self,women’s interests, and ideals of nurturance(Excerpts 4–7). (p. 30)

Another model is illustrated by SusanBell’s (1988) research on the stories of DES(diethylstilbestrol) daughters. Bell wished toexplore how the women understood theirrisk for reproductive tract problems, includ-ing infertility and vaginal cancer. She was es-pecially interested in what might have led totheir becoming politically active in responseto the adverse medical consequences forwomen. Bell used William Labov’s (1972)structural categories and method of tran-scription in her analysis, coding stories intoan initial abstract reference to the problem(e.g., “that sort of brought the whole issue ofDES much more to the forefront of mymind”; Riessman, 1993, p. 36); followed byorienting information (e.g., “when I was


around 19”; Riessman, 1993, p. 35); compli-cating action (e.g., a discussion of what hap-pened to the storyteller as a result;Riessman, 1993, p. 35), and finally a resolu-tion (e.g., “and that’s when I um began to ac-cept the fact, y’know, once it made sense”;Riessman, 1993, p. 36). Such stories mightbe analyzed for the point at which the voiceof medicine is incorporated into the plot orwhen and in what way resistance to medicaldiscourse develops. Alternatively, one mightask whether those who resist medical dis-course and develop counterstories set thisup narratively at the start so that a trium-phant resolution follows. Regardless of theresult, the point is not that the daughters en-gage in narrative machinations but ratherthat differences in experience have dis-cernable narrative contours.

Turning to Narrative Practice

A second narrative turn takes us outside ofstories themselves to the occasions andpractical actions associated with story con-struction and storytelling (Bauman, 1986;Cicourel, 1974; Goffman, 1959; Gubrium &Holstein, 2001; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000b;Hymes, 1964). The focus is on narrative prac-tice. Narrative practice is the broad term weuse to encompass the content of accountsand their internal organization, as well as thecommunicative conditions and resourcessurrounding how narratives are assembled,conveyed, and received in everyday life. Thecomplex and overlapping contexts of thestorying process constitute narrative environ-ments.

The transcript of a story provides limitedinformation about the occasions on whichthe story was told. Certainly, chance utter-ances in a transcript might indeed refer tooccasion, such as the question posed to theinterviewer by the interviewee: “Is that thekind of thing you want to know?” But signifi-cant details about the setting are often miss-ing. For example, the transcript may not re-veal a setting’s discursive conventions, such

as what is usually talked about, avoided, orfrowned on when it is mentioned. It doesnot disclose the consequences of telling sto-ries in particular ways. Although there is nostrict line of demarcation between, in thiscase, stories and storytelling, we need toknow the details and working conditions ofnarrative occasions if we are to understandnarrative practice. These details, in turn, canonly be discerned from direct considerationof narrative environments.

Stories are assembled and told to some-one, somewhere, at some time, with a varietyof consequences for those concerned. All ofthis has a discernible impact on what is com-municated and how that unfolds. A life storymight be told to a spouse, to a lover, to adrinking buddy, to an employer, to a clergy-person, to a therapist, to a son or daughter,or to a fellow team member, among thehuge variety of audiences to which narra-tives are conveyed. The occasion might be ajob interview, part of a pickup line, a confes-sion, or a recovery tale. The consequencesmight be amusing or life threatening. As wenoted at the start, the environments of story-telling shape the content and internal orga-nization of accounts, just as internal matterscan have an impact on one’s role as a story-teller.

Let us revisit Shaw’s (1930/1966) presen-tation of Stanley’s story in this regard. Refer-ences to storytelling do appear in the text asStanley describes his world, but Shaw’s focuson the content of the story eclipses what istextually in view. Shaw is concerned withwhat accounts such as Stanley’s can providein the way of practical information about de-linquents’ social worlds and what that, inturn, can tell us about delinquency and howto deal with it. Shaw is not interested in nar-rative structure, plot development, or the-matic organization; his focus is on sheer in-formation for its worth in understanding thedelinquent life. As he explains, case studies,especially in the form of subjects’ own sto-ries, are ideal for getting beyond the surfacefacts provided by official statistics to revealsocial worlds on their own terms.


In considering what Shaw understandablyoverlooks, it is important to keep in mindthat Stanley conveys some of his story in thecontext of his experiences in the IllinoisState Reformatory, to which he was commit-ted when he was 15 years old. Shaw pointsout that this “institution receives commit-ments of youthful male offenders betweenthe ages of 16 and 26” (p. 103), so Stanleyhad many other delinquent youths to lookup to. Status, apparently, was an importantfactor in their social ties, something that be-comes glaringly obvious as Stanley tells hisstory. It raises questions about narrativeownership and the experiential fidelity of in-dividualized accounts, even of those forwhich it is assumed that the self in questionis not personal but relational. If Shaw arguesthat the delinquent boy’s own story revealshis social world, he fails to notice that thatsocial world is variegated and that Stanley ac-tively shapes his story to fit its circum-stances.

Describing the daily round of life in the in-stitution, Stanley refers to his first days in acell, which make him “heartsick,” along withthe part his cell mate plays in helping him“get used to things”: “When the whistle blewfor breakfast the next morning I was heart-sick and weak, but after visiting with my cellmate, who took prison life with a smile andas a matter of course, I felt better. He said,‘You must as well get used to things here;you’re a “convict” now, and tears won’t meltthose iron bars’ ” (pp. 103–104).

Stanley looks up to his cell mate Bill and,interestingly enough, virtually steps out ofhis story to inform the listener–reader thatwhat he says about himself is narratively oc-casioned. Referring to his cell mate, Stanleyexplains:

He was only seventeen, but older than me, andwas in for one to ten years for burglaries. Hedelighted in telling about his exploits in crime,to impress me with this bravery and daring,and made me look up to him as a hero. Almostall young crooks like to tell about their accom-plishments in crime. Older crooks are not soglib. They are hardened, and crime has lost its

glamour and become a matter of business.Also, they have learned the dangers of talkingtoo much and keep their mouths shut exceptto trusted friends. But Bill (my cell partner)talked all the time about himself and hiscrimes. I talked, too, and told wild stories of ad-venture, some true and some lies, for I could-n’t let Bill outdo me just for lack of a few lies onmy part. (p. 104)

Given the situated nature of this account—which narratively orients to Stanley’s rela-tionship with other inmates and what thatmeans for his status in the setting—it is ap-parent that this is far from simply beingStanley’s “own” story. Stanley actively shapesthe account to enhance his standing with Billand other inmates. The content and thetheme of the story are as much a matter ofhis position under the circumstances as thestory is a faithful rendition of his life. At thispoint in his narrative, Stanley virtually tellsus that he occasionally does status workwhen he recounts his experience. Hisbiographical work (Holstein & Gubrium,2000a) cannot be separated from the cir-cumstances of storytelling. We might figurein this regard that a particular narrative envi-ronment (the reformatory) and narrative oc-casion (a recollection within an interview)mediate the shape of the story being told.And there is reason to believe that other nar-rative environments and narrative occasionswould do the same. The storytelling re-sponds as much to the practical contingen-cies of storytelling as it reflects Stanley’s os-tensible experience. Stanley seems to knowthat the internal organization of his storyand his role and circumstances as a story-teller are reflexively intertwined

There is other evidence of how Stanley’spresence in the reformatory affects what hesays about himself. In the following excerptfrom the book, notice this time how Stanleylaments his lack of narrative resources:

So I listened with open ears to what was said inthese groups of prisoners. Often I stood awe-struck as tales of adventure in crime were re-lated, and I took it in with interest. Somehow Iwanted to go out and do the same thing myself.


To myself I thought I was somebody to be do-ing a year at Pontiac, but in these groups ofolder prisoners I felt ashamed because I could-n’t tell tales of daring exploits about mycrimes. I hadn’t done anything of conse-quence. I compared myself with the oldercrooks and saw how little and insignificant Iwas in the criminal line. But deep in my heart Iknew that I was only a kid and couldn’t be ex-pected to have a reputation yet. I couldn’t tellabout my charge, for it savored of petty thiev-ery, and everybody looked down on a pettythief in Pontiac. I felt humiliated in the ex-treme, so I only listened. (pp. 108–109)

The lament is doubly charged in that Stanleyhas not yet acquired the experience to fash-ion “tales of adventure” and “daring ex-ploits,” as he knew only petty thievery. Hedid not have these in his experiential reper-toire to report. So he only listened, the ideabeing that experience and narrative gohand-in-hand in telling one’s story. Neitheris a simple by-product of the other.

Stanley broaches a different narrative en-vironment a bit later. The occasion no lon-ger involves storytelling between reforma-tory inmates, but rather among those whogather at an urban street corner, as Whyte’s(1943), Liebow’s (1967), and Anderson’s(1976) protagonists do. Stanley now puts hisstory to work for a different purpose, onealigned with the representational needs ofthis occasion. What he does with words thistime is a combination of status work andmasculinity work:

I went out to look for work, but it was scarce atthe time. After a week of fruitless effort, I be-gan to loaf around with the corner gang. Thesefellows were all working and doing well, butthey had the habit of hanging around the cor-ner and telling dirty stories about women. Wetook pride in telling about our exploits withsuch and such a girl, and tried to outdo eachother in the number of women that we hadconquered. (p. 118)

Storytelling and its occasions, then, are asimportant as the content of what is commu-nicated. Both reflexively enter into the artic-ulation of Stanley’s inner life and social

world, linking the fidelity of Stanley’s storyto the complex practices of narrativity.

The Need for Narrative Ethnography

We are fortunate that Shaw’s (1930/1966)book reveals some of the narrative circum-stances that shape Stanley’s life story. Butthese come to us by way of Stanley, andShaw, of course. What would we havelearned had we been present in the reforma-tory or on the street corner in question?How might others’ accounts have affectedwhat Stanley talked about and how Stanleytold his story? We do know from what Stan-ley says in Shaw’s text that he was occasion-ally encouraged to enter conversations andeven embellish his story; we also know thatthere were other occasions when he was re-luctant to do so. His story apparently playeda communicative role in some social worldsand was unheard in others. It is evident, too,that Stanley’s feelings about himself and hisidentity as a young male delinquent andhanger-on were affected by these differ-ences. All of this suggests that we might use-fully turn directly to narrative environ-ments—their occasions and practices—tounderstand the everyday contours of thestorying process, as well as what is and is notput into words for communicating to others.Our analytical method needs to take ac-count of not only what Stanley says and howhe says it but also the narratively contingentconditions of assembling a story. In this par-ticular case, it would include stories told byothers about themselves, about Stanley, andabout their common social worlds.

A word of caution is warranted at thispoint. We want to avoid judging Stanley’sand others’ accounts simply on the basis ofindividual memory, rationality, and commu-nicative fidelity. Certainly, these characteris-tics affect what we know about people’s lives.Some people remember very little, whereasothers appear to communicate from photo-graphic memories. Some seem eminentlyreasonable and straightforward in their ac-counts, detailing step-by-step what they have


been through or what life has meant to themthrough time. Others’ life stories meander.There are those whose stories hardly con-form to what is otherwise known to be true,which might prompt us to figure that theyare, perhaps, lying or “denying” experience,as some might put it. But evaluating storieson individual grounds fails to take accountof the profoundly social configurations ofnarrativity, which, if known, might cast an al-together different light on ostensible short-comings.

It is the social dimensions of narrativesthat we highlight in this chapter and that callfor an emergent method that takes us out-side of stories and their veridical relation-ship to storytellers and experience. Broadly,that method is narrative ethnography, that is,the ethnographic study of narrativity. Theneed for such an approach is clear. Eventhough ethnography has taken on so manymeanings and usages in recent years that it isalmost synonymous with qualitative inquiry(see Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994), wehave something more specific in view. It is amethod of procedure and analysis aimed atclose scrutiny of social situations, their ac-tors, and actions in relation to narratives.This involves direct, intensive observation ofthe field of study—in this case, the multifac-eted field of narrative practice.

Being on the scenes of story constructionand storytelling and considering how storiesare shaped by the contingencies of commu-nication is not simply window dressing fornarrative analysis. Settings are integral partsof narrativity. Whoever heard of a story be-ing told nowhere, at no time? Even storiestold to researchers such as Shaw—or to ther-apists or in job interviews—are occasionedand conditioned by the narrative endeavorin place. Erving Goffman (1961) put this suc-cinctly when he wrote of the need forethnographic access to experience in hisown work. Writing about the seemingly irra-tional, even the mad, he noted:

My immediate objective in doing fieldwork atSt. Elizabeth’s [psychiatric hospital] was to tryto learn about the world of the hospital inmate,

as this world is subjectively experienced byhim. . . . It was then and still is my belief thatany group of persons—prisoners, primitives, pi-lots, or patients—develop a life [story] of theirown that becomes meaningful, reasonable,and normal once you get close to it, and that agood way to learn about any of these worlds isto submit oneself in the company of the mem-bers to the daily round of petty contingenciesto which they are subject. (pp. ix–x)

Concern with the production, distribu-tion, and circulation of stories in society re-quires that we step outside of narrative ma-terial and consider questions such as whoproduces particular kinds of stories, wherethey are likely to be encountered, what theirconsequences are, under what circum-stances particular narratives are more or lessaccountable, what interests publicize them,how they gain popularity, and how they arechallenged. In this regard, we might ask howStanley’s story is told in relation to the in-mate banter at Pontiac as opposed to theconviviality of the street corners he fre-quents. We might wonder how the “dailyround of petty contingencies” of each set-ting and occasion for storytelling shapesStanley’s accounts. This would require us toexamine the scenes of these occasions, toturn to stories as they are being put togetheror told (or not told, as the case might be oncertain occasions), to listen to and take ac-count of how they are received, to considerwhat might be preferred tellings in particu-lar circumstances, and to explore the conse-quences of storying experience in confor-mity with or out of line with what ispreferred. It requires that we give serious at-tention to the possibility that narrative envi-ronments and their occasions have pre-ferred stories. In short, we need to examinenarratives in full social context.

Narratives are not simply reflections of ex-perience, nor are they descriptive free-for-alls. Not just anything goes when it comesto storying experience. Rather, narrativescomprise the interplay between experience,storying practices, descriptive resources,purposes at hand, audiences, and the envi-ronments that condition storytelling. Nar-


rative ethnography provides the analyticalplatform, tools, and sensibilities for captur-ing the rich and variegated contours of ev-eryday narrative practice.

A growing collection of studies groundedin narrative ethnography has emerged in thepast decade or so, although researchershave not necessarily adopted the rubric for-mally. Gale Miller’s book, Becoming MiracleWorkers: Language and Meaning in Brief Ther-apy (1997), is a rich, historical account of theshift in institutional discourse that led to al-tered ways of conceptualizing selves anddoing therapy in an individual and familycounseling clinic. Miller’s approach to theethnography of institutional discourse(Miller, 1994) has clear affinities with narra-tive ethnography as we portray it. His bookis a powerful demonstration of how a com-parative ethnographic approach provides in-sight into how lives, troubles, and their solu-tions are storied. Darin Weinberg’s Of OthersInside: Insanity, Addiction, and Belonging inAmerica (2005) pursues a similar theme.Whereas Miller discusses how therapeuticnarratives changed over time in the same in-stitution, Weinberg compares how two pur-portedly identical programs became dissimi-lar narrative environments to accommodatedifferent residential treatment circum-stances. Organizational differences are fur-ther highlighted in Out of Control: FamilyTherapy and Domestic Disorder (Gubrium,1992), which describes narratives of familytroubles in distinctly different therapeuticvenues. Susan Chase’s Ambiguous Empower-ment: The Work Narratives of Women School Su-perintendents (1995) and Amir Marvasti’sBeing Homeless: Textual and Narrative Con-structions (2003) offer nuanced examinationsof the narratives of some of society’s mostand least successful members, accenting thecontextually sensitive narrative work that isdone to construct vastly different accountsof life and its challenges.

Before moving ahead, it is important todistinguish the version of narrative ethnog-raphy depicted in this chapter from anotherusage that focuses critically on the repre-sentational practices through which ethno-

graphic reports emerge, a usage that espe-cially works against the objectifying prac-tices of ethnographic description. Somefieldworkers have used the term narrativeethnography to highlight researchers’ narra-tive practices as they craft ethnographic ac-counts. This usage features the vibrant inter-play between the ethnographer’s ownsubjectivity and the subjectivities of thosewhose lives and worlds are in view. Theseethnographic texts are typically derivedfrom participant observation, but they aredistinctive because they take special noticeof the researcher’s own participation, per-spective, voice, and especially of his orher emotional experience in relation to theexperiences of those being studied. Anthro-pologists Barbara Tedlock (1991, 1992,2004), Ruth Behar (1993, 1996), and KirinNarayan (1989) and sociologists CarolynEllis (1991), Laurel Richardson (1990a,1990b), and others (Ellis & Bochner, 1996;Ellis & Flaherty, 1992) refer to “narrativeethnography” as their attempt to convey thereflexive, representational engagements offield encounters. H. L. Goodall’s (2000)book Writing the New Ethnography is an exem-plary rendition of this form of narrative eth-nography.

In contrast, the narrative ethnography de-scribed in this chapter is less immediatelyself-conscious about researchers’ represen-tational practices. Accommodating natural-istic, constructionist, and ethnomethodo-logical impulses and concerns, the approachfocuses on the everyday narrative activitythat unfolds within circumstantially situatedsocial interaction, with an acute awarenessof the myriad layers of social context thatcondition narrative production. The ap-proach, although aware of the narrativepractices of ethnographers, is more centrallyconcerned with the narrative practices ofthose whose experiences and lives are underconsideration. We use the term narrativeethnography to signal the combination ofepistemological, methodological, proce-dural, and analytical sensibilities that mustbe brought to bear to understand narrativityin social context.


Narrative Environments

Narrative ethnographers by trade, we havebeen in the habit of both listening to and tak-ing systematic note of actual and possiblestories in various settings. The methods ofprocedure have varied from in-depth lifehistory interviews in nursing homes (seeGubrium, 1993) to courtroom observationsthat completely eschewed interviewing (seeHolstein, 1993) to studies that combined ob-servation, interviewing, and discourse analy-sis (see Gubrium, 1992). In systematicallyobserving narratives-in-production, attend-ing to the construction, use, and receptionof accounts and textual material such as liferecords, we have found that the internal or-ganization of narratives, although importantto understand in its own right, does not tellus very much about the relation of stories tothe worlds in which they circulate. Althoughthe themes of stories such as accounts of sex-ual abuse or narratives of childhood sexual-ity might be identified and documented, dis-cerning how these relate to particular socialcontexts requires an understanding of whatpeople do with words in varied circum-stances. As we noted in discussing Stanley’sstory, the same account might be appreci-ated in one setting or at one time and placebut be disparaged, ignored, or unarticulatedin others. The meanings of stories are poorlyunderstood without careful consideration ofthe circumstances of their production andreception, which we broadly call their narra-tive environments.

Local Contingencies of Storytelling

Research reported in the book Caretakers(Buckholdt & Gubrium, 1979) is instructive.The ethnographic fieldwork centered on thesocial construction of children’s emotionaldisturbance in a residential treatment facil-ity called Cedarview. Through systematicparticipant observation, the study showedthat narratives of children’s inner lives, al-though available and occasionally communi-

cated, were marginalized in a therapeuticenvironment that featured behaviorist inter-pretations and interventions. At Cedarview,an official token economy and behaviormodification programming valorized nar-ratives of visible behaviors and “conse-quences.” This was the privileged, if notexclusive, discourse of problems and solu-tions—the master narrative in place, so tospeak. The working rule was “stay out of chil-dren’s heads,” which served to caution allconcerned to honor behavioristic principles.

Still, occasional consultations with a childpsychiatrist rather than a behavioral psychol-ogist provided communicative space forcompeting narratives, encouraging staffmembers and treatment teams to tempo-rarily peek inside for understanding and ex-planation. On such occasions, encouragedby the consultant’s deep psychiatric gaze,narratives that thematized early childhooddisturbances, deep feelings, and hidden mo-tives were taken to be more consequentialfor treatment decisions than were behavior-ized accounts of children’s activities. Thiscomplex narrative environment sometimeselicited accounts quite at odds with officialtherapeutic commitments. On such occa-sions, particular communicative niches gavevoice to what otherwise were institutionallydiscredited narratives.

The value of these local contingencies wasnot lost on the staff, as they periodicallyfound it helpful to account for children’sconduct and progress in treatment, espe-cially to one another, in deep psychologicalterms. These insights, however, were notconveyed to funding agencies; those storiesreflected, instead, the facility’s official treat-ment philosophy. Audiences, in otherwords, were important ingredients in theproduction, editing, distribution, and cir-culation of stories (also see Gubrium &Buckholdt, 1982). Questions of “how to putit” and what themes to highlight for particu-lar purposes were noteworthy in the every-day formulation of stories about the chil-dren. Just as Stanley aligned the content andtone of his story with the local contingencies


of narrativity in his social world, Cedarviewstaff members shaped their accounts in rela-tion to the communicative contours of thecircumstances they engaged in the process.

We should note that these actions werepart of the local contingencies of storytellingand did not reflect a peculiar or cynical qual-ity of Cedarview storytellers. Although theattitudes of individual staff members mightindeed have been viewed as cynical by some,the systematic quality of narrative editing(Holstein & Gubrium, 2000b) throughoutthe facility—and, indeed, of any storytellinglocated in time and space—suggests that sto-rytellers naturally attend to narrative cir-cumstance in assembling their accounts. Ex-cept for biographical and institutionalparticulars, the stories of children’s lives atCedarview took shape in much the same waythey would in similar narrative environ-ments (see Goffman, 1961; Gubrium & Hol-stein, 2001). Such locally contingent fea-tures of storytelling are best capturedethnographically, a method that offers aview of the actual circumstances of narra-tivity. Without circumstantial knowledge, itwould be too easy to turn, reductively, to themachinations or personal deficits of individ-uals or to a defective society for explanation.As the earlier quotation from Goffman(1961) reminds us, a significant share of the“meaningful, reasonable, and normal” is lostwhen we overlook “the daily round of pettycontingencies” in everyday life.

Affirming Environments

Social settings vary as narrative environ-ments. In our own work on narrativity with-in institutional settings, we have viewedthem in terms of what Everett Hughes(1984) called going concerns. This wasHughes’s way of emphasizing the work ofmaintaining particular ways of framing anddoing matters of relevance to participants,including the work of formulating accounts.Such concerns vary in size, from families andfriendship, support, and recovery groups toschools, courtrooms, correctional facilities,

nursing homes, and therapeutic enterprises.A going concern such as a recovered-memory therapy group, for example, is anorganized activity with the goal of recollect-ing the lost or otherwise hidden memoriesof adult survivors of sexual abuse. JosephDavis (2005) found that, in the therapeuticsettings he studied, memory enhancementand retrieval techniques were applied; survi-vors were encouraged to recall stories ofchildhood sexual contacts. They were urgedto relive these experiences narratively andeventually to emplot them in relation to cur-rent psychological difficulties. In a muchdifferent context, sexuality education pro-grams such as Teach Abstinence Until Mar-riage deploy other orienting stories, whichare racialized when applied to EuropeanAmerican, as opposed to African American,children. As Jessica Fields (2005) explains,the emplotment of sexual misbehavioramong European Americans typically re-lates to the theme of childhood innocence,whereas parallel stories for African Ameri-can youths rest on the theme of innate sexu-ality. The meanings of the substantive elabo-ration and themes of any particular accountcannot be separated from socially situatednarrative practice.

Each narrative environment affirms cer-tain established stories and ways of narratingexperience; they are going concerns thatnarratively construct, reproduce, and privi-lege particular accounts for institutionalpurposes. Conversely, one would expectcounternarratives to be marginalized, “re-paired,” or otherwise challenged, if not keptin tolerable spaces. Across therapeutic con-cerns especially, the widely applied and well-recognized rhetoric of denial can be highlyeffective in both suppressing unacceptablestories and affirming the articulation of ac-ceptable ones. Because the affirmed storiesof such going concerns are often larded withglobalized narratives such as therapeutic—asopposed to fatalistic or cosmic—discourses,the layered interplay between the local, thenational, and the transnational can becomea confluence of narrative affirmation. Narra-


tive ethnography is necessary to capture thisinterplay in its full contextual richness.

Environments That Challenge

Common Narratives

Narrative environments challenge, as well asaffirm, various stories. Indeed, to theorizeenvironments as either affirming or chal-lenging particular narratives shortchangesthe complex interplay between artful in-terpretation, institutional practices, and aconstantly changing stock of narrative re-sources. It is unfortunate that so much the-ory building on these fronts is compartmen-talized and specialized when many of theissues parallel one another. For example, thenarration of selves and personal identity ininstitutional context is mediated by both offi-cial and unofficial structures and contingen-cies (see Gubrium & Holstein, 2001). Butidentity work (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000a)and biographical work (Gubrium & Hol-stein, 1995) are also abetted and sponsoredby social movements that publicize rhetoricsof preferred and disparaged frames of un-derstanding (see Benford, 1993, 1997;Benford & Snow, 2000; Snow, 2003). IfHughes (1984) applies the term “going con-cerns” to institutions, then the applicationcan be extended to the going concerns ofmovements toward change as well.

The empirical linkages between the narra-tively affirmed and the narratively challeng-ing can be amazingly transformative. Re-search on the start of the Alzheimer’sdisease movement in the 1980s (Gubrium,1986), for example, showed that marked dif-ferences in both local and global under-standings of senile dementia formed in lessthan 5 years. The (re)discovery of Alzhei-mer’s disease in 1979 quickly became a med-ical and experiential story affirming both anew subject with a diseased, as opposed to anaturally aging, brain and the research activ-ities of a soon-to-be-hugely-successful medi-cal and psychological enterprise. The Alzhei-mer’s disease movement transformed,virtually overnight, the way professionals,

families, the senile, and significant othersnarrated their relationship to the agingbrain and its associated cognitive functions.As the senile became victims of a disease asopposed to aging, parties concerned withthe aging enterprise—from the new NationalInstitute of Aging to local caregivers—wentinto high gear to construct a social problemthat became an issue of national and interna-tional importance (see Fox, 2000). It becameevident that what was new and what was be-ing affirmed were interwoven.

The application of these ideas to the con-struction of subjectivity is full of possibili-ties. Selves are not straightforwardly obviousin society. They must be identified as a mat-ter of communicative practice. This is notconstructive magic, in which new narrativesfor identity are conjured up out of thin airand absorbed into the social worlds and in-ner lives of those concerned. The process ofidentification and rhetorics of persuasionare practical and take place in lived circum-stances—in narrative environments whosevaried stock of accounts differentially serveto affirm or challenge both old and new sto-ries about social worlds and their identities.Self stories come from somewhere, relate tolarger stories, are shaped by other stories,and are affirmed and challenged throughtime by yet different and transformed narra-tives. Stories are relentlessly drawn throughthe gamut of contingent interests that bearon their particular content and shape. Nar-rative ethnography provides an encompass-ing sensitivity to the fluid contingencies, inthis case the challenges, of narrative produc-tion.

Narrative Embeddedness

Narrative ethnography provides analyticalaccess to the multilayered embeddedness ofstories in relation to other stories. The anal-ogy of nesting dolls is useful in considering astory’s complex relation to its narrative envi-ronment. The smallest doll is embedded ornested in all the larger ones; each doll nextin size both contains a smaller doll and is en-


veloped by several bigger ones. Similarly, alife story such as Stanley’s (Shaw, 1930/1966) is fully understood only when we takeaccount of the other stories to which it re-lates and the occasions on which it is com-municated. As Stanley almost glibly explainsin passing, what he says or, in some settings,does not dare to say about himself is embed-ded in other stories that inform his own, aswell as that inform him of the consequencesof narrating his life in particular ways.

Stanley’s story and the other narratives towhich Stanley refers exist in complex rela-tionship to similar accounts centered on“the” delinquent or “the” jack roller. This re-lationship has affirming and disconfirmingfacets. Stanley’s own story is fueled by thebravado, status, and gender work of localstorytelling. Shaw’s (1930/1966) interest inunderstanding the lived experience of thedelinquent and how this informs rehabilita-tion policy also tells us that Stanley’s story isembedded in an environment of preferrednarratives for wayward youths. WhereasStanley’s own story is deftly assembled,sharply thematized, and intriguingly devel-oped through time, Shaw’s, Stanley’s, andour own reading of the account is nested in avariety of other stories, both local and moreglobal. Indeed, a narrative of penal welfareand reform is the larger story in which Stan-ley’s account and Shaw’s narrative aims arenested. It is a story bound to a particularsense of criminal justice, told at a particulartime and place (see Garland, 2001). Stanley’sis hardly the singular narrative of a punk andsmall-time operator; its significance, al-though partially local, reverberates with thelarger stories and circumstances in which itis embedded.

The idea of narrative embeddedness sug-gests that, in aiming to understand thebroader meaning of accounts, it is useful todistinguish story from voice. As we rereadStanley’s story, we can ask, Whose voice dowe hear? The subtitle of Shaw’s book—A De-linquent Boy’s Own Story—implies that the textreflects Stanley’s personal experience. As weread along, we ostensibly hear Stanley’s

voice. And, indeed, it is colorful, often na-tively elegant. It is both hopeful anddepressing. But we do not hear cell mateBill’s voice, Shaw’s voice, or the voices ofcountless other storytellers in Stanley’sworld, not to mention the voice that reso-nates with the scientific and policyundergirdings of the text. So then, we mightask, whose voice do we hear when Stanleygives voice to the jack roller? Featuring itsnarrative embeddedness, Stanley’s story canbe viewed as multivocal, voicing experiencein the varied ways in which he has learnedhow to tell and not to tell his life, which arereflexively related to the unfolding life hedescribes. All the nesting narrative dolls,Stanley’s included, vocalize together to con-struct his identity.

An ethnographic focus on narrativepractice helps to avoid the reductionistand often romanticized aim of seeking toobtain the lived subject’s “own” story, tohear it in his or her “own” voice, or to de-rive texts that convey accounts in individ-ual subjects’ “own” words. Although it isimportant in studying narrative practice toground research in the vernacular and theeveryday organization of accounts, it isequally important not to valorize what isindividually conveyed as somehow unaf-fected by the environments in which isembedded. There are no narrative heroesor antiheroes who stand outside of, or riseabove, their circumstances. Stanley addsflavor to his story, and his individual expe-riences provide the spice, but the resultingnarrative stew is simmered in a more com-plex stock of ingredients.

There is another reductionist tendencythat narrative ethnography helps us toavoid—societal reductionism. If an aware-ness of narrative embeddedness steers usclear of a romanticized concept of narrativeownership, it also helps us to contain thetendency to read stories as straightforwardreflections of social structures or society atlarge. There are many phenomenal layersbetween the individual on the one hand andsociety on the other. These include what


Goffman (1983) once called the “interactionorder” and what Hughes (1984), as we de-scribed, refers to as the worlds of going con-cerns, or the institutional order. Individualstories are embedded in both orders; theyare not spun as whole cloth out of either per-sonal or societal narratives. The lesson inthis instance is that we do well not to figurethat the sympathetic understanding andpublication of Stanley’s story, for example,simply reflects a discourse of reform. Thestory evidently has wended its way throughdiverse narrative environments, stretchingfrom interpersonal claims to institutionalimperatives, something far more complexthan a totalized societal discourse would sug-gest.

Pursuing a narrative ethnographic ap-proach to life stories in this regard leads usto consider the interactive and institutionalmediations of accounts. It cautions againstseeking to document “the” life story of a par-ticular subject. It is a caveat against framingexperience and its narrative contours interms of master narratives, dominant dis-courses, or other totalized ways of framingnarrativity. Rather, the leading concerns di-rect us to the multifaceted social contexts inwhich a story is embedded and how thesecontexts reflexively relate to stories and sto-rytelling.

Narrative Control

Narrative ethnography opens to empiricalinspection the social processes and circum-stances through which narratives are con-structed, promoted, and resisted. We can ac-tually see and hear how those concernedactively call on or otherwise respond to thecontexts, contingencies, and resources ofnarration to fashion their accounts. In otherwords, we can actually witness narrative con-trol being exercised as ongoing social inter-action and competing going concerns comeinto play. Such control is hardly straightfor-ward and takes myriad forms. Here, we fea-ture the ways in which interactional and in-

stitutional forms of control make their markon narrative practice.

We use the concept narrative control as away to foreground the ways in which thecontent and internal organization of storiesare mediated by the complex environmentsin which they are embedded. But we need tobe clear that we do not conceive of controlin any deterministic or totally constrainingway. Rather, we view it in terms of factorsthat work to shape and condition, ratherthan permit or prevent. A degree of narra-tive control was evident in many of our pre-vious illustrations, in which locally preferrednarrative themes and forms were eitheradopted or contested. We highlight relatedaspects of control in the following sections,which focus, respectively, on interactionaland institutional forms of control. Theseforms of control reflexively enter into narra-tive accounts; neither form operates apartfrom the other.

Interactional Control

People seldom just “burst out” in stories. Ittakes work. For a narrative to emerge, theteller must be able to string together multi-ple sentences while retaining the attentionof listeners without having them intrudeinto the conversation with anything morethan signals that they are being attentive. Anarrative space must be established in thegive-and-take of social interaction. For thenarrative to run its course, the speaker mustsustain the line of talk—in cooperation withthose listening to the narrative. In otherwords, in one way or another, narrativesmust be invited, incited, or initiated.

Perhaps the simplest way to introduce anarrative into a conversation is by way of adirect invitation or a question. This virtuallysolicits storytelling, inviting an extended re-sponse. We can see this most clearly in situa-tions in which one party formally requestsinformation from another. Interviews are aprime example. Whereas some interviewformats (e.g., the survey interview) inten-tionally constrain and truncate responses,


other formats (e.g., qualitative or life historyinterviews) intentionally activate or inciteextended accounts (Gubrium & Holstein,1995). The same is true of informal ques-tioning in everyday conversation.

Stories, of course, are not always directlyor explicitly invited. When they are not, theymust be methodically introduced by the sto-ryteller to be recognized as stories. Other-wise, they are likely to be viewed as gibberishor outbursts, so to speak. Harvey Sacks(1992a, 1992b) has noted that stories takemore than a sentence to tell and that the ini-tial challenge to storytelling is extending anaccount beyond that first sentence. Sacksand other conversation analysts have docu-mented the range of conversational devicesthat may be used to secure the conversa-tional “right” and “space” to extend a turn attalk, thus building it into a full-blown narra-tive production. Similarly, devices are avail-able for continuing a story, staving off inter-ruption, and sustaining a coherent line oftalk across occasions at which the turn at talkmight otherwise be brought to an end. Suchcontinuations are artfully accomplishedin concert between narrators and thoseattending to the narrative. Control, then, isnot a property of one party to the conver-sation or the other but resides in the waythat conversational partners cooperate inthe emergence and development of a narra-tive.

Sometimes, complicity in actions that“keep the story going” also contributes towhere the story is going. Listeners to storiescan virtually induce the elaboration of par-ticular dimensions of experience throughtheir own story-facilitating actions. Considerthe following instance taken from a nursinghome interview. Grace Wheeler is a 70-year-old nursing home resident who shares aroom with her 93-year-old mother, Lucy. Al-though Grace is the designated interviewee,in the following extract we can see how herstory is guided, if not directed, by Lucy’scontributions to the conversation, as Lucyvigilantly attends to Grace’s telling of her lifestory.

INTERVIEWER: Why don’t we start by your tell-ing me about your life?

GRACE: Well that was quite a many years ago. Iwas born in Brinton Station, Ohio.

LUCY: She was a seven-month baby.GRACE: I was a seven-month baby. That’s what

I was. [Elaborates story of growing up withher sisters and brother.] They’ve all beenwonderful.

LUCY: They taught her. . . .GRACE: And they taught me as well as my mom

and dad. And then when radio and televi-sion came to the farm, why I learned fromthem. I love the quiz shows. (Gubrium,1993, pp. 152–153)

It is clear that Lucy points the way forGrace’s life story. But it is too simple to sug-gest that Lucy controlled Grace’s story.Rather, Lucy offered resources and direc-tions for Grace’s narrative, but Grace herselfpicked up on Lucy’s “suggestions” to elabo-rate and enrich her own account. They pointhere is not that the narrative is not reallyGrace’s but that the narrative was jointly for-mulated out of this particular interactionalenvironment.

Narrative ethnography allows us to see thesequence and circumstances from whichGrace’s ostensible life emerges. Such a viewwould not be available were we to simplytrack—by means of a transcript perhaps—thecontours of Grace’s story without noting thecollaborative circumstances of its telling.Narrative ethnography gives us access to themyriad interactional practices that culmi-nate in the production of narrative.

Institutional Control

Narrative control is not simply interactional.Indeed, many of its most profound manifes-tations are hardly visible because they derivefrom the most taken-for-granted aspects of ascene or setting. These features of control—preferred discursive regimes, for example—supply local accountability structures andconditions of possibility (Foucault, 1979) forhow experience can be recounted. Inspec-


tion of narratives alone may not fully revealthe extent of control, but a comparative nar-rative ethnography can demonstrate hownarrative environments figuratively speakthe stories of their participants.

Consider, for instance, narratives of alco-holic lives that emerge under distinctly dif-ferent organizational auspices. AlcoholicsAnonymous (AA) is certainly the most widelyrecognized alcoholism treatment institutionof our time. It is an especially ubiquitous andencapsulating narrative environment. InAA, alcoholism is construed as a spiritualand moral failure, not just a physical or men-tal disease. It is compounded by the victim’srefusal to recognize that one’s actions arenot self-governed. Recovery comes aboutonly when the victim accepts his or her weak-ness in the face of alcohol, turns over his orher fate to a “higher power,” and takes theproper steps toward spiritual awakening andhealing (see Denzin, 1987). This discourse ofalcoholism provides an institutionally sanc-tioned way of understanding, and storying,drinking problems. Within the confines ofAA, there is no other legitimate way of con-struing and talking about the problem of al-cohol. The now-familiar “12 Steps” outlinethe institutionalized parameters of the prob-lem and its solution. They provide a distinc-tive interpretive vocabulary for narrating al-coholism and recovery.

Within this narrative environment, alco-holism stories take distinctive shape. AAterminology offers familiar and availablenarrative resources that are available for ac-countable use in the countless contexts inwhich AA becomes salient. Although thelanguage may not be formally imposed, itsuse is so pervasive that lives and experiencestypically come to be storied in AA terms, asthose terms are artfully applied by partici-pants. This is evident, for example, in the fol-lowing narrative conveyed by Jack, a mem-ber of an AA recovery group. Asked to sharethe meaning of his AA experiences with theentire group of recovering alcoholics, Jackstories his experience in this fashion:

Step One. I know I’m powerless over alcohol. Itake one drink and I can’t stop. My life must beunmanageable. I have bills up to the ceilingand the family is about to leave and I’ve beenput on notice at work. Step Two. I want to be-lieve in God. I used to but I got away from theChurch. But this isn’t the God of my church.It’s different. I want a God of love and caring. Iknow I was crazy when I drank. The last time Iwent out, I ended up in a motel room acrosstown under a different name. Now that’s notsane! Step Three. I want somebody else to runmy life. AA and treatment seem to be doing apretty good job right now, I hope I can staywith it. (Denzin, 1987, p. 70)

This narrative explicitly offers the AAsteps as interpretive guides for understand-ing the alcoholism experience. AA princi-ples shape the way the alcoholic’s story is for-mulated; they are a veritable set of rules fornarrating alcoholism. All testimonials arenot this formulaic, but they pervade nearlyall AA-related discussions. Regardless ofvenue, the narratives that emerge underAA’s auspices draw on a shared stock of nar-rative resources from which stories may becrafted. Although narration is always artful,it invariably reflects AA’s narrative environ-ment.

Consider another alcoholic narrative thatreconstructs the experience of being hospi-talized for intoxication:

I lay there on that hospital bed and went backover and reviewed my life. I thought of what li-quor had done to me, the opportunities that Ihad discarded, the abilities that had been givenme and how I had wasted them. . . . I was will-ing to admit to myself that I had hit bottom,that I had gotten hold of something that I did-n’t know how to handle by myself. So, after re-viewing these things and realizing what liquorhad cost me, I went to this Higher Power whichto me, was God, without any reservation, andadmitted that I was completely powerless overalcohol, and that I was willing to do anything inthe world to get rid of the problem. In fact, Iadmitted that from now on I was willing to letGod take over, instead of me. Each day I wouldtry to find out what His will was, and try to fol-


low that, rather than trying to get Him to al-ways agree that the things I thought of myselfwere the things best for me. (Alcoholics Anon-ymous, 1976, pp. 186–187)

This classic AA narrative draws on AAthemes, idioms, and vocabularies. Indeed, itis a virtual recitation—in AA language—ofthe prototype alcoholic’s story. The lan-guage of the 12 Steps is apparent at everynarrative turn, serving as the detailed build-ing blocks of the story depicting the de-scending alcoholic, his self-realization, andhis eventual recovery. Of course, in practice,available resources alone do not determinehow experience is narrated, but it is equallyclear that AA stories are adroitly craftedfrom a common stock of narrative buildingblocks.

Now consider how alcoholism narrativesare distinctively constructed in a Secular So-briety Group (SSG; see Christopher, 1988).The following extract recounts a conversa-tion between an SSG member and somefriends. Note how the narrator assembles as-pects of self out of the particular set of re-sources and in relation to the specific institu-tional orientations that his SSG membershipprovides for him.

“As you know,” I said, “I’ve never kept my alco-holism a secret. I’m proud of my sobriety.Some other things in my life I’m not so pleasedwith, but sobriety is my most precious asset, mypriority, my life-and-death necessity. . . . Now,from a factual perspective, I am just as alco-holic as I was prior to achieving sobriety; thatis, I must reaffirm my priority of staying soberno matter what! I go to the market, work, seemovies, make love, eat, sleep—all as a sober al-coholic. I’m a person with an arrested but life-long disease. I place my sobriety and the neces-sity of staying sober before anything else in mylife. . . . Alcoholism results in the inability tocontrol one’s drinking. Sobriety requires theacknowledgment of one’s alcoholism on adaily basis, and it is never to be taken forgranted. I must endure all my feelings and ex-periences, including injustices, failures, andwhatever this uncertain life doles out. . . .

“So,” I continued, “in answer to your ques-tions: I have my alcohol problem licked onlyon a daily basis and I continue to stay alive byprotecting my conscious mind, by staying so-ber and avoiding the muddy waters of religion.I can’t deal with reality by way of fantasy. . . .That’s too scary for me. The more I stay in real-ity, in rationality, the better my chances. So,yes, my sobriety is a state of mind rather thanmindlessness.” (Christopher, 1988, pp. 87–88,original emphasis)

Clearly, the SSG has a different view ofpersonal control than that offered by AA.Most prominently, of course, are differenceswith respect to spirituality. The SSG, how-ever, also offers a distinct set of resourcesfor conceptualizing and narrating the “alco-holic self.” In practice, this translates intopersonal stories quite different from thoseassembled under the auspices of AA. As wecan see in the SSG narrative, the alcoholicself is storied in terms of personal responsi-bility, unlike the AA self, which comes intoits own only by surrendering to a higherpower. The “conscious mind” is the centerof self-control, in contrast with the AA self,which abandons personal control in favor ofdivine guidance. In SSG culture, the self isfirmly grounded in secular reality, as op-posed to the AA self, which centers itself inspirituality. The two recovery organizationsprovide sharply contrasting narrative re-sources and descriptive vocabularies, which,in turn, contribute to the production of dis-tinctly different narratives of the alcoholismexperience. Comparative ethnography al-lows us to view these differences in bold re-lief.

The Interplay of Interactional

and Institutional Control

Institutional conventions constrain, pro-mote, and otherwise shape narratives, butthey alone do not determine how stories areformulated or what they are about. Nor doesinteractional control proceed in an institu-tional vacuum. Rather, it is the interplay be-


tween the artful exertions of interactionalcontrol and the organized narrative re-sources and restraints that ultimately shapesnarrative practice.

For example, courtrooms and other “le-galistic” settings would seem to be the quint-essential constraining narrative environ-ment. Rules and procedures virtually dictatewho can speak, when one can speak, andwhat can be said. Yet, without the court-room or hearing actors such as attorneys,judges, and hearings officers taking the ini-tiative to implement the rules of the courts,proceedings would not take an institution-ally “legal” cast. Rules must be invoked, butwhen they are, they constitute a controllingdiscursive environment for all practical pur-poses, one that can forcefully promote cer-tain kinds of narratives or even altogethereliminate narrative production (see Miller &Holstein, 1996).

Similarly, less formal narrative environ-ments provide narrative resources and pa-rameters, but they do not dictate applica-tion. An element of interactional artfulnessis always necessary. Consider, for example,how even a strictly defined set of narrativeresources must be interactionally mobilizedin the formulation of narratives in a treat-ment program for sufferers of posttraumat-ic stress disorder. As we shall see, the use ofinstitutional discourse is subject to directmanagement with respect to prevailing nar-rative conventions. The means of controlmay be less formally asserted than in a court-room, say, but they nevertheless conditionnarrative practice, suggesting if not impos-ing locally preferred narratives in the pro-cess.

Allan Young’s (1995) study of a psychiat-ric unit of a Veterans Administration centerproviding inpatient treatment for victims ofposttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is illus-trative. In this facility, individual and grouppsychotherapy is aimed at addressing the eti-ology and symptoms of psychic distress. Thepsychotherapeutic philosophy guiding thePTSD program is fundamentally psychoana-lytic, so the keys to recovery are said to be lo-

cated in the victim’s past. Problems mustfirst be uncovered before they can be thera-peutically addressed. The approach relies ontwo assumptions about PTSD: (1) the psy-chodynamic core of PTSD is a repetitivecompulsion; the victim is psychologicallycompelled to reenact the behavior that pre-cipitated the disorder in a futile attempt togain mastery over the circumstances thatoriginally overwhelmed him, and (2) to re-cover, the patient must recall his traumaticmemory, disclose it to his therapist and fel-low patients during group psychotherapy,and subject the memory and its narrative totherapeutic scrutiny. The facility thus has awell-articulated model of the disease, whichprovides staff and patients with a way of con-ceptualizing and characterizing PTSD(Young, 1995, p. 183).

The use of the center’s model is obviousto participants and develops quite naturallyas each displays his or her command of thelanguage of the model and its application.But narrative control can sometimes be-come quite explicit in relation to the localpriority of the model. When narrativesemerge in ways that do not accord with themodel, group participants may be remindedto “use the model,” to rethink or “re-story”experience in line with the center’s thera-peutic discourse. In such instances, we liter-ally hear the narrative environment beingimposed in ongoing interaction. Considerthe following exchange in a psychotherapysession involving Carol, the therapist, and agroup of patients:

CAROL: Say to yourself, I’ve been punishingmyself and people around me for twentyyears. Say Jack, you can choose to stop.

JACK: Listen, Carol. On some nights, I feel anx-iety going through my body like electricity.It started in Vietnam. It wasn’t just a feeling.It was anxiety together with terrible chestpains and difficulty breathing. . . . And I’mstill getting them.

CAROL: What would you call it?

JACK: Well, I know that it’s called a “panic at-tack.” But I didn’t know it then.


CAROL: No, I mean what would you call it us-ing the terms of the model—the model thatyou learned about during orientationphase?

JACK: I don’t really know, Carol. My mind isconfused right now.

CAROL: The model says that we’re dominatedby two drives, aggression and sex, and that—

JACK: Listen, Carol. When I got these attacks, Isure didn’t want to get fucked, and I can’tbelieve it was my aggression.

CAROL: We’ve got to think of these events,your difficulty breathing, we’ve got to thinkof them in terms of guilt, of your wanting topunish yourself. We need to get in touchwith your conflict. . . . (Young, 1995, p. 245,emphasis in the original)

Jack’s short initial story about his anxietycalls on a commonplace clinical vocabu-lary for describing the psychic distress thatstarted in Vietnam. His use of “panic attack”to portray his experience is neither clinicallyincorrect nor commonsensically unfamiliar.Nonetheless, Carol moves to bring the artic-ulation of the problem under the narrativepurview of the model, asking Jack to thinkback to how he had originally been taught toconceptualize his problem “using the termsof the model.” She continues to specify justwhat the model might say in relation toJack’s problems, only to be interrupted byJack’s assertion that the model did not seemto apply in this case. Insisting that he feltthat neither his libidinal drives (“I sure did-n’t want to get fucked”) nor his instinct to-ward aggression (“I can’t believe it was myaggression”) were behind his condition, Jackresists the application of the model. Carol,however, perseveres, insisting that “we’vegot to think of them” in terms specified bythe model. Although resistance is alwayspossible, the model as a narrative resourcewas a constant presence, a source of controlavailable to be asserted in practice. Jack’sstory emerges in relation to the narrativecontrols in place, which are visible onlythrough ethnographic examination of thetherapy setting.

Conclusion

Herbert Blumer (1969) once argued thatconcepts are as much procedural as they aretheoretical. They not only provide under-standing but also sensitize us to ways of em-bracing the empirical world. Such is the casewith narrative ethnography. The concept istheoretical in that it specifies a field and anobject of inquiry—narrative practice. It isprocedural in that it recommends methodsthat are necessary to capture the empiricalmaterial of narrative practice in its contex-tual complexity.

By framing our interest in stories in termsof narrative practice—the whats, hows,wheres, and whens of narrative production—our approach to narrative ethnography ex-pands research concerns beyond the inter-nal themes, structures, and structuring ofstories to simultaneously and reflexively in-clude narrative’s external, contextual orga-nization. It is no longer sufficient to seek themeaning of narratives by examining onlytheir internal organization. Instead, we needto consider the social organization of thestorying process as meaning-making activityin its own right. Following Goffman and oth-ers, narrative ethnography orients towardthe situated character of accounts and turnsto the interaction and institutional order tobetter understand the relation between nar-rative, experience, and meaning.

Narrative ethnography is an emergentmethod in that it requires the researcher torecombine and reconfigure tried-and-truetechnical approaches to data collection andmanagement with new analytical sensibili-ties and emphases. Traditional narrativeanalysis has profitably focused on the inter-nal organization of stories and has devel-oped effective ways of discerning and de-scribing narrative structures. Narrativeethnography encourages the combinationof these methods with the tools of the ethno-graphic trade—close observation and inter-viewing, to name the most prominent. Thisexpands the research purview beyond the


narrative itself to the context of its produc-tion.

Narrative ethnography calls for new ana-lytical sensitivities and emphases. The focusis on the contexts, conditions, and resourcesof the storying process. Narrative ethnogra-phy casts a wider net in an effort to describeand explicate the storying of experience ineveryday life. The goal is to capture—through multifocal analysis—the contextualinfluences and dynamics that shape narra-tive. Narrative ethnography asks the re-searcher to be more inclusive in thinkingabout what constitutes appropriate data andhow they should be analyzed. It promptsnew questions about the storying process,directing attention textually outward asmuch as textually inward, so to speak. Ex-isting analytical tools from conventionalnarrative analysis, conversation analysis, dis-course analysis, textual analysis, ethno-methodology, deconstructionism, and othercutting-edge orientations to the dynamics ofinteraction provide a solid stock of analyticresources, but they need to be incorporatedinto the field of narrative analysis.

Narrative ethnography is informed andguided by an emergent stock of conceptsand terms that describe narrative practice.This chapter has presented a number ofthese terms: narrative resources, narrativeenvironments, narrative embeddedness,and narrative control. The challenge for thefuture is to expand the vocabulary to ac-count for the widest possible range of analyt-ical possibilities. Each new term or conceptprompts new research questions. For exam-ple, the concept of narrative control leads usto ask what the mechanisms and sources ofcontrol might possibly be. This, in turn,points us to both interactional and institu-tional realms for possible answers. Theterms narrative horizons, narrative composi-tion, and narrative linkage (see Gubrium,1993; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000b) point re-searchers to questions about possible realmsof understanding and how they are com-bined into meaningful constellations by vir-tue of the procedural connections that are

asserted in the process. Like all ethnogra-phy, the new questions for narrativeethnographers are open-ended. The re-search enterprise is exploratory and explan-atory, aiming to shed light on the narrativeprocess as much as on narrative products.

Of course, process and product are reflex-ively related. Perhaps the most innovativecontribution narrative ethnography mightmake is to help researchers rethink taken-for-granted views of narrativity. Viewing nar-rative practice as situated social actionallows the researcher to reconfigure tradi-tional understandings. Structures that haveconventionally been viewed as given and fre-quently treated as explanatory variables cannow be seen as contextually conditioned so-cial constructions—storied realities. Narra-tive ethnography provides us with the con-ceptual and methodological tool kit toempirically discern and describe narrativestructures such as the family (Gubrium &Holstein, 1990), the self (Holstein &Gubrium, 2000b), and the life course (Hol-stein & Gubrium, 2000a). It provides a wayof making visible the socially constructedand organized contours of these seeminglyobdurate realities by featuring their storiedpresence in everyday life.

References

Alcoholics Anonymous. (1976). Alcoholics Anonymous.New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services.

Anderson, E. (1976). A place on the corner. Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press.

Atkinson, P., & Hammersley, M. (1994). Ethnographyand participant observation. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S.Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp.248–261). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Bauman, R. (1986). Story, performance, and event. Cam-bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Behar, R. (1993). Translated women: Crossing the borderwith Esperanza’s story. Boston: Beacon Press.

Behar, R. (1996). The vulnerable observer: Anthropologythat breaks your heart. Boston: Beacon Press.

Bell, S. (1988). Becoming a political woman: The recon-struction and interpretation of experience throughstories. In A. D. Todd & S. Fisher (Eds.), Gender anddiscourse: The power of talk (pp. 97–123). Norwood,NJ: Ablex.


Benford, R. D. (1993). Frame disputes with the nu-clear disarmament movement. Social Forces, 71,677–701.

Benford, R. D. (1997). An insider’s critique of the socialmovement framing perspective. Sociological Inquiry,67, 409–430.

Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing pro-cesses and social movements: An overview andassessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639.

Birren, J., Kenyon, G., Ruth, K.-E., Schroots, J., & Svens-son, T. (Eds.). (1996). Aging and biography: Explora-tions in adult development. New York: Springer.

Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism. EnglewoodCliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Buckholdt, D. R., & Gubrium, J. F. (1979). Caretakers:Treating emotionally disturbed children. ThousandOaks, CA: Sage.

Chase, S. (1995). Ambiguous empowerment: The work nar-ratives of women school superintendents. Amherst: Uni-versity of Massachusetts Press.

Christopher, J. (1988). How to stay sober: Recovery withoutreligion. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Cicourel, A. V. (1974). Cognitive sociology. New York:Free Press.

Clandinin, D. J., & Connolly, F. M. (2000). Narrative in-quiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass.

Cooley, C. H. (1964). Human nature and the social order.New York: Schocken. (Original work published1903)

Cortazzi, M. (1993). Narrative analysis. London: FalmerPress.

Crossley, M. (2000). Introducing narrative psychology.Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Crossley, M. (2003). Formulating narrative psychology:The limitations of contemporary social construc-tionism. Narrative Inquiry, 13, 287–300.

Daiute, C., & Lightfoot, C. (Eds.). (2003). Narrative anal-ysis: Studying the development of individuals in society.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Davis, J. E. (2005). Victim narratives and victim selves:False memory syndrome and the power of accounts.Social Problems, 52, 529–548.

Denzin, N. K. (1987). The alcoholic self. Newbury Park,CA: Sage.

Ellis, C. (1991). Sociological introspection and emo-tional experience. Symbolic Interaction, 14, 23–50.

Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (Eds.). (1996). Composing eth-nography: Alternative forms of qualitative writing. Wal-nut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Ellis, C., & Flaherty, M. (Eds.). (1992). Investigating sub-jectivity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Fields, J. (2005). “Children having children”: Race, in-nocence, and sexuality education. Social Problems, 52,549–571.

Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish. New York:Vintage Books.

Fox, P. J. (2000). The role of the concept of Alzheimerdisease in the development of the Alzheimer’s Asso-ciation in the United States. In P. J. Whitehouse, K.Maurer, & J. F. Ballenger (Eds.), Concepts of Alzhei-mer’s disease (pp. 209–233). Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press.

Garland, D. (2001). The culture of control: Crime and socialorder in contemporary society. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Gergen, K. J. (1991). The saturated self. New York: BasicBooks.

Ginsburg, F. (1989). Contested lives: The abortion debate inan American community. Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press.

Goffman, E. (1959). Presentation of self in everyday life.New York: Doubleday.

Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums. Garden City, NY: Double-day.

Goffman, E. (1983). The interaction order. American So-ciological Review, 48, 1–17.

Goodall, H. L., Jr. (2000). Writing the new ethnography.Lanham, MD: AltaMira.

Greimas, A. J. (1983). Structural semantics. Lincoln: Uni-versity of Nebraska Press.

Gubrium, J. F. (1986). Oldtimers and Alzheimer’s: The de-scriptive organization of senility. Greenwich, CT: JAIPress.

Gubrium, J. F. (1992). Out of control: Family therapy anddomestic disorder. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Gubrium, J. F. (1993). Speaking of life: Horizons of mean-ing for nursing home residents. Hawthorne, NY: Aldinede Gruyter.

Gubrium, J. F., & Buckholdt, D. R. (1982). Describingcare: Image and practice in rehabilitation. Cambridge,MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain.

Gubrium, J. F., & Holstein, J. A. (1990). What is family?Mountain View, CA: Mayfield.

Gubrium, J. F., & Holstein, J. A. (1995). Biographicalwork and new ethnography. In R. Josselson & A.Lieblich (Eds.), Interpreting experience: The narrativestudy of lives (pp. 45–58). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Gubrium, J. F., & Holstein, J. A. (Eds.). (2001). Institu-tional selves: Troubled identities in a postmodern world.New York: Oxford University Press.

Hawkes, T. (1977). Structuralism and semiotics. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Herman, L., & Vervaeck, B. (2005). Handbook of narra-tive analysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Holstein, J. A. (1993). Court-ordered insanity: Interpretivepractice and involuntary commitment. Hawthorne, NY:Aldine de Gruyter.

Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (2000a). Constructing thelife course. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.

Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (2000b). The self we liveby: Narrative identity in a postmodern world. New York:Oxford University Press.


Hughes, E. C. (1984). The sociological eye. New Bruns-wick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Hymes, D. (1964). The ethnography of communication.American Anthropologist, 66, 6–56.

Irwin, J. (1970). The felon. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice Hall.

Kenyon, G. M., & Randall, W. L. (1997). Restorying ourlives: Personal growth through autobiographical reflec-tion. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Labov, W. (1972). The transformation of experience innarrative syntax. In W. Labov, Language in the innercity: Studies in the Black English vernacular (pp. 354–396). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lieblich, A., Tuval-Mashiach, R., & Zilber, T. (1998).Narrative research: Reading, analysis, and interpretation.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Liebow, E. (1967). Tally’s corner: A study of Negrostreetcorner men. Boston: Little, Brown.

Marvasti, A. (2003). Being homeless: Textual and narrativeconstructions. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

McAdams, D. P. (1993). The stories we live by: Personalmyths and the making of the self. New York: GuilfordPress.

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press.

Miller, G. (1994). Toward ethnographies of institu-tional discourse. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography,23, 280–306.

Miller, G. (1997). Becoming miracle workers: Language andmeaning in brief therapy. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine deGruyter.

Miller, G., & Holstein, J. A. (1996). Discupte domanis andwelfare claims: Conflict and law in public bureaucracies.Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Narayan, K. (1989). Storytellers, saints, and scoundrels:Folk narrative in Hindu religious teaching. Philadel-phia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Plummer, K. (2001). Documents of life: 2. London: Sage.Polkinghorne, D. E. (1988). Narrative knowing and the

human sciences. Albany: State University of New YorkPress.

Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the folk tale. Austin: Uni-

versity of Texas Press. (Original work published1928)

Richardson, L. (1990a). Narrative and sociology. Jour-nal of Contemporary Ethnography, 9, 116–136.

Richardson, L. (1990b). Writing strategies: Reaching di-verse audiences. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Riessman, C. K. (1990). Divorce talk. New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Riessman, C. K. (1993). Narrative analysis. ThousandOaks, CA: Sage.

Sacks, H. (1992a). Lectures on conversation: Vol. I. Ox-ford, UK: Blackwell.

Sacks, H. (1992b). Lectures on conversation: Vol. II. Ox-ford, UK: Blackwell.

Saussure, F. de. (1966). Course in general linguistics. NewYork: McGraw-Hill. (Original work published 1915)

Shaw, C. R. (1966). The jack roller: A delinquent boy’s ownstory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Originalwork published 1930)

Snow, D. A. (2003). Social movements. In L. T.Reynolds & N. J. Herman-Kinney (Eds.), Handbook ofsymbolic interactionism (pp. 811–833). Lanham, MD:AltaMira.

Tedlock, B. (1991). From participant observation to theobservation of participation: The emergence of nar-rative ethnography. Journal of Anthropological Re-search, 47, 69–94.

Tedlock, B. (1992). The beautiful and the dangerous: En-counters with the Zuni Indians. New York: Viking.

Tedlock, B. (2004). Narrative ethnography as social sci-ence discourse. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 27, 23–31.

Thomas, W. I., & Znaniecki, F. (1927). The Polish peasantin Europe and America. New York: Knopf. (Originalwork published 1918–1920)

Weinberg, D. (2005). Of others inside: Insanity, addiction,and belonging in America. Philadelphia: Temple Uni-versity Press.

Whyte, W. F. (1943). Street corner society. Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press.

Young, A. (1995). The harmony of illusions. Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press.


Copyright © 2008 The Guilford Press. All rights reserved under International CopyrightConvention. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or stored inor introduced into any information storage or retrieval system, in any form or by anymeans, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without thewritten permission of The Guilford Press.

Guilford Publications72 Spring Street

New York, NY 10012212-431-9800800-365-7006

www.guilford.com