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p.8 It is narrative... that allows all of us to learn.
p.9 Always, for learning to occur, the inquirer in this ambiguous, shifting, participant observation role is meeting difference; allowing difference to challenge assumptions, values, and beliefs; improvising and adapting to the difference; and thereby learning as the narrative anthropologist.
p.10 For Czarniawska, narrative is a heuristic device, a metaphor useful for understanding organizations.
p.17 if we understand the world narratively, as we do, then it makes sense to study the world narratively. For us, life... is filled with narrative fragments, enacted in storied moments of time and space, and reflected upon and understood in terms of narrative unities and discontinuities.
p.50 our terms for thinking about narrative inquiry are closely associated with Dewey's theory of experience, specifically with his notions of situation, continuity, and interaction... our terms are personal and social (interaction); past, present, and future (continuity); combined with the notion of place (situation)... any particular inquiry is defined by this three-dimensional space: studies have temporal dimensions and address temporal matters; they focus on the personal and the social in a balance appropriate to the inquiry; and they occur in specific places or sequences of places.
p.54 We earlier created a metaphor of a three-dimensional space, in which narrative inquirers would find themselves, using a set of terms that pointed them backward and forward, inward and outward, and located them in place. We saw these three dimensions as directions or avenues to be pursued in a narrative inquiry... In terms of the grand narrative, we might imagine the terms as an analytic frame for reducing the stories to a set of understandings.
p.55 the ambiguity, complexity, difficulty, and uncertainties associated with the doing of the inquiry... the "stuff" of narrative inquiry, can only be sensed and understood from a reading of the full-blown inquiry.
p.70 What do narrative inquirers do? They make themselves as aware as possible of the many, layered narratives at work in their inquiry space. They imagine narrative intersections, and they anticipate possible narrative threads emerging.
p.73 one of the things narrative inquirers do is continually negotiate their relationships... Part of the negotiating is explaining ourselves. We found ourselves continually explaining what we were trying to do... not only does explaining ourselves to others help us get clear but also working with participants shapes what is interesting and possible under the field circumstances. [JLJ - one way of thinking about playing a complex game of strategy is in terms of negotiating and re-negotiating relationships]
p.78 Narrative inquiry... is one of trying to make sense of life as lived. To begin with, it is trying to figure out the taken-for-grantedness.
p.124 Narrative inquiries are always composed around a particular wonder, a research puzzle... Narrative inquiry carries more of a sense of continual reformulation of an inquiry than it does a sense of problem definition and solution. As we think about the phenomena in a narrative inquiry, we think about responding to the questions: What is your narrative inquiry about? or What is the experience of interest to you as a narrative inquirer? [JLJ - When constructing a diagnostic test of the adaptive capacity to mobilize coercion, in a complex social game of strategy, we are continually reformulating our inquiry as we proceed.]
p.125 being able to say what phenomenon a narrative inquiry is about is not an easily answered question. It is not one that is answered with finality at the beginning of an inquiry
p.125 As inquirers, we tend to define our phenomenon as if life stood still and did not get in our way. But life does not stand still; it is always getting in the way, always making what may appear static and not changing into a shifting, moving, interacting complexity.
p.130 our field texts... as researchers... our inquiry task is to discover and construct meaning in those texts. Field texts need to be reconstructed as research texts.
p.130-131 In our own work, we have begun to use Non-numerical Unstructured Data Indexing Searching and Theorizing (NUDIST). However, this is not a program that works without some adaptation [JLJ - yes I see - it might be uncomfortable getting used to at first, especially if others are watching]
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