The narrative approach in investigating organizational processes: linguistic tools to reveal "the story in the making".

This study uses organizational data in order to investigate how far a qualitative narrative approach can illuminate fast-changing corporate realities. The data is a set of management-leadership communications derived from a multinational semiconductor industry based in Italy facing a major crisis in trust among its stakeholders. An original conceptual model is proposed for the identification and analysis of storytelling in this context. The multi-factor linguistic analysis applied to the data enables us to describe a variety of story types and to see what they have in common. Methodologies from discourse analysis link overarching narrative parameters (including temporal framing, subjectivisation, symbolic value and causality) with their pragmatic, persuasive purposes. The identification of key linguistic resources (lexico-grammatical choices and patterns, and pragmatic-semiotic strategies) constitute the building blocks for these stories. It is argues that a narrative approach to organizational discourse analysis provides a unique window onto how organizations become "storied into being", and together with a much-needed conceptual model for narration, this represents a significant shift in research paradigms, both in discourse analysis and business studies.