| Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools. |
To Text or Context? Endotextual, Exotextual, and Multi-textual Approaches to Narrative and Discursive Organizational StudiesUniversidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Texas Tech University, USA Organizational researchers doing narrative and discursive research have three choices in how they approach a text: an ‘endotextual’ approach where the researcher works within a text, an ‘exotextual’ approach where the researcher works outward from a text to its context(s), or a combined exo/endotextual approach which embeds a textual analysis within contextual inquiry. Although all three methods are now widely used in mainstream organizational research, the merits of combining, sequencing, or separating them have never been systematically considered. After reviewing the advantages and limitations of each perspective, we discuss an experiment in which endo and exo methods were applied to a skit co-written by management and a communications company specializing in organizational theater. The finding that using one approach creates multiple, subtle blind spots towards the other, and even more significantly affects a researcher's capacity to effectively adopt a combined method, is used to construct an alternative ‘diatextual’ framework. This is used to frame a discussion of how multi-method textual studies of organizations might be conducted in the future.
Key Words: narrative • discourse • research methods • textual methods • organizational theater
This version was published on August
1, 2006 Organization Studies, Vol. 27, No. 8,
1091-1110 (2006) This article has been cited by other articles:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
 |
|
Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
