This book analyzes the role of narratives in institutions, showing how institutions use narratives to remember their past and project a future, and how people within institutions shape and are shaped by institutional stories. The central example provides an ethnography of the structure and use of stories in an American insurance company. Narratives within institutions are used to negotiate collective and individual identity. These identities shape the way collectivities and individuals use, change or contest presentations of the past. Identity and memory are mutually constructed through the us ... More

This book analyzes the role of narratives in institutions, showing how institutions use narratives to remember their past and project a future, and how people within institutions shape and are shaped by institutional stories. The central example provides an ethnography of the structure and use of stories in an American insurance company. Narratives within institutions are used to negotiate collective and individual identity. These identities shape the way collectivities and individuals use, change or contest presentations of the past. Identity and memory are mutually constructed through the use of narrative. This book examines not only the stories that exist within institutions, but also the ways that members use them, demonstrating the key role of proper occasions for telling them. Institutional occasions allow stories to be retold, and thus to extend their future use beyond the memories of their original participants. Analysis of multiple retellings shows both the formation of the core story stock of an institution, and the effect of the speaker's position on the form of a story as it is retold on particular occasions to particular audiences. Individuals' stories are shaped by their memberships: part of being a member is knowing how to tell one's story in relation to the institution's stories. This study also examines silences within institutions. Silences are complex: stories not told in public may have an active life in private conversations. This ethnography of narrative describes the individual and collective work of creating and maintaining narrative memory: the ongoing creation of a useable past.