Preparing for the deployment of ready-made stories in social interaction: reflexivity and narrative practices in professional communication

1 Narrative practices in professional communication

The idea that narratives are vital for an efficient communication began to spread widely in the 1990s, at first in the United States and then on a global scale (Salmon 2010). This idea, of course, is not new: classical rhetoric theorized the use of narratives as an argumentative tool (Danblon et al. 2008), with concepts such as exemplum (type of argument) and narratio (part of the discourse structure). But professional training and lifelong learning programs, supported by the profuse publication of storytelling guides, have made this rhetorical conception of narratives particularly prominent in business and political communication (Salmon 2010). While the structure and functions of narratives in professional communication have garnered much attention (e.g., Gotti and Sancha Guinda 2013), little is known about how reflexive activities specific to professional communication – such as handbooks, training sessions, etc. – contribute to the visibility and solidification of particular ways of conceiving and using narratives. As a consequence, this article analyzes a storytelling guide to gain a deeper understanding of how reflexive activities contribute to constructing specific conceptions about what narratives are and the role they play in professional communication.

In linguistics and cognate fields, narratives have been widely studied, from the groundbreaking analysis of narrative structure (Hymes 1981; Labov and Waletsky 1967) to the development of studies on narrative competence (Bamberg 1997; Berman and Slobin 1994) and the blossoming of sociodiscursive perspectives on narrative practices (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2020; Ochs and Capps 2001). Even if much of what is known about narratives has been based on literary works, artful oral performances, ordinary conversations and research interviews, the study of narratives in professional settings has not been forgotten, and has been carried out in two directions: on the one hand, narratives have been studied as professional genres, produced for specific purposes; on the other hand, narratives have been studied as a communicative practice in the workplace.

The studies on narratives as professional genres have encompassed all sorts of domains in which language is used as a means of doing work (Gotti and Sancha Guinda 2013; Resche 2016). Various studies have focused on professions that have language at their core, such as journalism, politics or corporate communication. These studies have shown how and why the stories’ structures and performances are affected by the specific purposes of a given setting, such as, for instance: informing and entertaining in journalism (e.g., Cotter 2010; Merminod and Burger 2020), constructing identity and establishing authority in politics (e.g., Jones 2021; Norrick 2013) or convincing an audience and legitimizing a stance in corporate communication (e.g., Catenaccio et al. 2021; Declercq and Jacobs 2019). These studies on narratives as professional genres have deepened our understanding of how the people who have to produce narratives as a part of their daily work structure and perform stories, and why they do it that way.

As for the studies on narratives as a communicative practice in the workplace, they have mainly been based on ethnographies in private companies (Wasson 2009) and on the analysis of social interaction between colleagues (Ladegaard 2018). Ethnographies in companies have shown that stories are resources that help workers to fulfill their tasks in a way that fits in with the expectations of their community (Linde 2009; Orr 1996). These studies have also insisted on the fact that narratives – either written or spoken – play a pivotal role in reproducing the institution’s identity and building social relations between its members (Linde 2001). Similarly, studies based on the analysis of social interaction between colleagues have underlined that “stories are used to entertain, educate, socialize, and inform, and to express individual employees’ preoccupations, perspectives and feelings” (Ladegaard 2018: 245, drawing on Holmes 2006; Holmes and Marra 2005). They have shown that workplace narratives, in addition to reinforcing ingroup cohesion, workplace culture and corporate values, also have an argumentative function, in their capacity to support a position or explain a given choice or course of action (Ladegaard 2018). Studies on workplace narratives have observed that some types of stories, such as anecdotes, are often seen as off-record work: “they are generally regarded as dispensable, irrelevant, or peripheral, and in some cases even distracting in the workplace context” (Holmes 2006: 184). This indicates that narratives do not emerge in a social vacuum, but relate to shared conceptions about what they are and what they do.

Conceptions about what narratives are and what they do correspond with specific ideologies of communication (Spitzmüller 2022), namely narrative ideologies (Merminod 2020a, 2020b). These ideologies are metapragmatic models that link specific ways of telling with types of social situations and thus regiment the telling of stories in a domain of social life. Narrative ideologies have been described in terms of reportability (Labov 1972), tellability (Sacks 1992), storyability (Shuman 1986) or narratability (Linde 1993). Such related notions were used initially to describe the story’s content and its appropriateness to contextual exigencies: for instance, an event may be considered as worth telling because it is not known to the audience, because it breaches the frame of expectations, or because its telling enables social coordination (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012; Norrick 2005; Ochs and Capps 2001). These notions have then allowed researchers to analyze what is worth telling by whom and to whom, through what means, where, when, why and to what purposes (for an overview: Georgakopoulou 2007; Holmes 1998; Thornborrow and Coates 2005). Most of the studies dealing with these cognate notions have started from the analysis of local evaluations emerging in social interaction and have then associated them with broader concerns (such as the functions of stories in social life or the weight that social structures and cultures bring to their telling). But, except for Georgakopoulou’s work on story curation in social media (Georgakopoulou 2021a, 2021b), few studies have looked at how ‘generic’ metapragmatic practices – that is, reflexive activities that do not appear in the immediate context of a specific telling – contribute to the shape of shared narrative ideologies.

In this respect, the metapragmatic practices which, since the nineties, have popularized the conception that narratives are key for an efficient communication in business and politics, are a case in point. In the French-speaking world, this ideology has crystallized in the expression ‘storytelling’ (Bonnet et al. 2021; Marti and Pelissier 2012), directly borrowed from the English language. It refers to communicative practices that serve to captivate and convince an audience through emotion and the sharing of inspiring stories (Baroni 2016). The second decade of the 21st century saw numerous French-speaking publications devoted to storytelling and aimed at developing their readers’ communication skills (Dufour 2021; Merminod 2015). These guides are a valuable locus to study the metapragmatic practices that contribute to the shape of shared narrative ideologies. They are informative about the contextual appropriateness of some ways of telling stories (Silverstein 1993; Verschueren 2000) while they assign social meaning to them (Jaworski et al. 2004). By doing so, they reflexively take part in the construction, visibilisation and possibly the stabilization of shared conceptions about narratives for a given community, in the same way that etiquette manuals and handbooks on elocution partook in the emergence and dissemination of ‘Received Pronunciation’ in British English (Agha 2003).

My article carries out a single case study on one of these storytelling guides and aims at analyzing how it contributes to the construction of a specific narrative ideology. The storytelling guide under analysis has been selected from a collection of guides published in French-speaking Europe over a period of ten years (see below). Even if published in French-speaking Switzerland – a place on the periphery of French-speaking Europe – this guide is quite illustrative of the others. It has been analyzed following an abductive process in which data are coded in iterative cycles to the point of theoretical saturation (Tavory and Timmermans 2009, 2014). In this process, I combined narrative analysis with studies on talk-in-interaction and semiotic inspired works in linguistic anthropology. Narrative analysis enabled me to describe the stories provided by the guide and, in particular, the worlds they represent and the events they sequence (Herman 2009). Studies on talk-in-interaction helped me to understand the type of social situations and communicative processes depicted in the guide when one tells a story (Georgakopoulou 2007; Goffman 1981). Semiotic inspired works in linguistic anthropology allowed me to describe the indexical processes at play in the guide (Silverstein 2003) and how they feed into a specific metapragmatic model (Agha 2007).

2 Providing ready-made stories

The French-speaking publishing industry has seen the release of many guides devoted to storytelling, probably stimulated by the editorial success of Salmon’s first book on the subject (in 2007, for the French edition, translated in English in 2010). My collection of guides includes the following items (Table 1):

These storytelling guides are generally written by people working in communication and consulting, and they mainly focus on narrative practices in the domains of marketing, management and politics. They usually advocate the use of narrative practices in (internal and external) professional communication while describing and exemplifying the rules that govern the telling of stories. These rules concern linguistic (lexicon, syntax, prosody) and multimodal (gaze, gesture, body movement) resources as much as discursive (deictic shift management, climactotelic story structure), interactional (story preface, participants’ roles) and social (appropriateness) issues. In addition, these guides generally provide a number of examples of successful storytelling, with the aim of circulating best practices and helping their readers to prepare future communicative events.

My analysis focuses on one of the abovementioned guides: Storytelling: l’art de convaincre par le récit. Like the others, this guide formulates a number of rules that govern the telling of stories (Merminod 2015), and it provides a series of examples – 64 stories – that aim at illustrating how and why telling stories matters. In the remainder of this article, I specifically focus on how these stories prepare the ground for future communicative events and reproduce a specific narrative ideology.

The guide provides 64 stories, which come from diverse sources: storybooks, English-speaking training resources in marketing and communication, history books, personal experience, and the news. The topics are nevertheless fairly limited: apart from some tales, they focus on business challenges and successes (almost half of the stories), historic events (especially in military history), sporting feats, and the unique lives of famous people. These stories are of different sizes (ranging from about thirty words to a thousand), but most of them share the common feature of presenting a transformation that results from the actions of an agentive character “who constructs the world the way it is” rather than being “constructed by the way the world is” (Bamberg 2011: 7). Example 1 illustrates this point.

In example 1, the main character, Johnny, is depicted as someone who finds a solution despite the adverse circumstances. His story is organized as a canonical Labovian narrative (1972), with an orientation, a complication and a resolution. Unsurprisingly, such a structure is recurrent in the storytelling guide, which explicitly favors fully fledged narratives over other formats. Nevertheless, there are also smaller formats, such as the simple mentions of past events or sorts of before-and-after comparisons. Example 2 (below), for instance, does not delve into the experience or the actions of the story’s characters.

Regardless of how they are structured, most of the 64 stories depict a transformation from a dysphoric world into a euphoric one, namely a thymic trajectory (Greimas and Courtés 1979). Associated with the portrait of agentive characters, this positive transformation results in what are sometimes called inspirational stories. As a matter of fact, storying a problem and a way of solving it provides models that have the ability to orient people when they are facing unexpected, unknown or undesirable situations (Bruner 1991; Herman 2003). Such use of a recurrent story pattern – typical in French-speaking storytelling guides (see also Dufour 2021) – meets practical purposes: the storytelling guide aims at developing the readers’ communication skills and giving them communicative resources to solve problems they could face at work. In this respect, the 64 stories are conceived as ready-made resources, designed to be reusable in professional communication.

3 Preparing for future tellings

The guide has a layout that helps, and even encourages, readers to use the 64 stories it provides. On the one hand, the stories are delimited from the rest of the text by a grey frame and are preceded by a title in capital letters categorizing them each time as a story (histoire) and specifying their content. On the other hand, the stories are listed at the end of the book, with their title, keywords specifying their content or the problems they can address, and the page number where they can be found. Their extraction from the guide and their reuse in new situations is thus facilitated.

The preparation for future activities is also ensured by attaching the stories to social situations, with a given participation framework, a specific organization of talk and a shared orientation towards a purpose (Goffman 1981). This can take either the form of narratives that depict the types of social situations in which the telling of stories is relevant, or the form of metanarrative formulations that recontextualize the unfolding social situation as one where a story is told.

4 Pre-indexing and enregistering narrative practices

The 64 stories in the guide – even if presented as resources for talk in professional communication – are written texts; that is, traces of an entextualisation process (Bauman and Briggs 1990). As a result, each story provided by the storytelling guide can be conceived as an indexical sign, which « refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that object » (Peirce: CP 2.248 in Hartshorne et al. 1931–1958). In this respect, these stories, as written texts, are what remains of past narrative activities and of the situations in which they were performed. That said, the analysis has shown that these stories are not just traces of past activities, they also project future activities, the tellings that the readers will be able to perform if they decide to communicate with storytelling techniques.

Silverstein’s linguistic anthropology insists on the indexical inscription of language activities, through a twofold process of “appropriateness to context” (indexical presupposition) and “effectiveness in context” (indexical entailment) (Silverstein 2003). This means that language activities can only be understood with reference to the past, present, potential or future situations in which they are performed. This has at least two consequences for the text as a sign of a language activity: (i.) as a trace-of, texts archive language activities and are affected by their context of emergence; (ii.) as a trace-for, texts potentiate language activities, either by enabling interpreters to reconstruct the activities from which they originate, or by instructing them on how to carry out an activity in the future. In our data, the potentiation of language activities is supported by two pre-indexation devices: narratives framing ready-made stories and metanarrative formulations. Both devices project the subsequent use of ready-made stories in situations specific to professional communication and, by doing so, script future performances in a realm of productivity and maximum efficiency (Cameron 2000; Gong this volume; Urciuoli and LaDousa 2013).

The pre-indexation of ready-made stories for future social situations is entirely oriented towards a given purpose: to be persuasive in contexts that are assumed to be typical of professional communication and public speaking. But, comparable with the entextualization of oral traditions, the storytelling guide “not only potentiates the situated reiteration of texts, but also conditions the canonization of cultural texts, in other words the objectification of stretches of discourse into texts that can serve as an image of the durability and sharedness of a culture” (Giaxoglou 2009: 420). To speak of canonization might at first sight seem excessive in relation to the storytelling guide. Such a guide is first and foremost motivated by economic reasons and supports a training program in business communication (Merminod 2015). But to speak of canonization underlines the fact that the narrative ideologies promoted by the guide are part of a wider socio-historical process, that of the constitution of storytelling as a recognizable semiotic register in the French-speaking world and even globally, knowing that “registers are cultural models of action that link diverse behavioral signs to enactable effects, including images of persona, interpersonal relationship, and type of conduct” (Agha 2007: 145).

Semiotic registers do not consist of static repertoires but are models that circulate in society while they are undergoing change (Agha 2005), and they are enregistered through “processes and practices whereby performable signs become recognized (and regrouped) as belonging to distinct, differentially valorized semiotic registers by a population” (Agha 2007: 81). The enregisterment of storytelling as a recognizable semiotic register in professional communication could be analyzed through a comparative analysis of storytelling guides and performances in many languages and parts of the world: first, by documenting the register’s composition (what forms and rules does it feature? is there any variation in its composition? and if so, how and why?); then, by analyzing the register’s functions and contrasting the guides’ prescriptions for use with actual performances (for what aims is such a register used? in which situations? and under what conditions?); finally, by tracking the publication of storytelling guides and other teaching material through time and space and thus mapping the register’s circulation (what is the register’s course of diffusion? and what are the factors contributing to its circulation?).

Such an analysis is beyond the scope of this article, but the analysis of one storytelling guide has enabled us to grasp a segment of this process. Enregisterment proceeds from the fact of visibilizing indexical links between signs and a context against which they can be indexed (Johnstone 2016: 632–634), including situations, roles, effects, etc. In the storytelling guide, telling stories is primarily connected with communicators who succeed in capturing the attention of their audience and convincing them. In so doing, the storytelling guide connects a social persona (the persuasive communicator) with a practice (storytelling) and a set of semiotic features and conducts (stories and metanarrative formulations) (Figure 1). This results in the construction of a figure of personhood (Agha 2007; Park 2021; Spitzmüller 2015), a set of indexicals that make identifiable, enactable and performable a given social persona, here that of a persuasive communicator in relation to a persuaded audience.

Figure 1:

Providing readers with a figure of personhood.

Beyond this figure of personhood, the very act of making visible indexical links between signs, social personae and practices results in building up a cultural model that is both archiving past situations (a model-of) and (with the potential of) generating new situations (a model-for). The storytelling guide provides its readers with a complete metapragmatic model, (i.) in which co-occurring variables both presuppose and implicate each other (double arrows in Figure 2), and (ii.) that is based on a set of binaries that differentiates those who make use of storytelling techniques from others (distinctive attributes in Figure 2).

Figure 2:

Differentiating storytelling from other communicative practices.

As do popular handbooks on speech and accent studied by Agha (2007: 209–213), the guide associates semiotic registers with social differences. It illustrates that “registers are products of contrast” (Gal 2016: 121). On the one hand, through the repeated depiction of similar narrative events, in which the storyteller succeeds in persuading an audience, the guide dissociates storytelling practices from other already enregistered narrative practices, such as bedtime stories read at home (Heath 1982) or novels studied at school (Gordon 2020). On the other hand, storytelling practices are differentiated from other communicative practices in professional settings and public-speaking situations: telling stories enables those who do so to harmonize social relations by captivating and convincing an audience, supposedly in contrast to other practices in professional communication. By extension, the storytelling guide divides the social world into two groups: those who succeed in communicating by telling stories versus those who do not. At the top of the group defined by communicative success are the accomplished storytellers whom the guide cites as examples. The storytelling guide presents itself as the means by which one can move up this communicative hierarchy, and therefore readers are positioned as wannabe storytellers, ready to climb the hierarchical ladder. Such an observation echoes the studies carried out on skills discourses in late capitalism, which have shown that “communication skills, in particular, are fetishized as surefire techniques that can transform users and […] credited with the capacity to bring about measurable outcomes” (Urciuoli 2008: 213). In the guide, the use of storytelling techniques becomes a synonym for communicative and social empowerment, giving a euphoric depiction of a given communicative practice.

Disseminated through mass media, this metapragmatic model is not only likely to reach many people on a large scale, but also to have a greater remanence. This does not mean, however, that it will unilaterally regiment future individual performances as “the ‘uptake’ of [mass media depictions] by audiences involves processes of evaluative response that permit many degrees of freedom” (Agha 2007: 202). In fact, one may even wonder if the spread of this metapragmatic model, through storytelling guides and other reflexive activities, as well as the repeated use of inspirational stories and metanarrative formulations in some domains of social life (in particular political and corporate communication), may lead to a backlash. For the wider audience, the use of inspirational stories may well become, above all, a backfired emblem: the sign of the attempts made by professional communicators to influence people’s opinions. To support this claim, it would be helpful, and this is a limitation of this article, to carry out a study that investigates storytelling’s indexicalities through linguistic ethnography and metapragmatic analysis (see Militello as well as Vitorio, this volume). Storytelling guides result from ex-post rationalizations while language ideologies are both brought along and brought about by participants (Spitzmüller et al. 2021), in a materially and socially situated moment-to-moment process. This, however, should not prevent us from studying what is occurring on other scales (Busch and Spitzmüller 2021; Carr and Lempert 2016). On the contrary, it should remind us of the pressing need, and the relevance, to cross the micro/macro divide with ethnographic approaches (Blackledge et al. 2014; Wortham and Reyes 2015) if we want to understand how and why specific ideologies of communication are coming into being.