Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service

3. Story Worlds, Narratives, and Research

3. Story Worlds, Narratives, and Research So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happen, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent— absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. . . . Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely the problem of how to translate knowing into telling. —Hayden White Storytelling and understanding are functionally the same thing. —Roger Schank Convincing narratives have a kind of weight that mathematical formulas do not. They allow us to revive moral argumentation in disciplines that, since the eighteenth century, had aimed at value neutrality. —Stephen Toulmin The purpose of our research is simple, even elemental: to collect and examine street-level workers’ everyday work stories to uncover their judgments as they see them. This simple goal belies the challenge of the interpretive task because these stories are often ambiguous and multilayered : they reference both rules and morality to defend decisions, reveal internalized as well as interactive con›icts, and document shifting positions over time. These stories are not philosophical discourses on law or fairness. They are pragmatic expressions about acts and identities and assertions of dominant yet jumbled societal views of good and bad behavior and worthy and unworthy individuals. At times these stories provide detailed cognitive maps about decision making; at other times they offer only faint clues. Nevertheless, they do 25 enable an interpretation of how law and morality intersect with identities and conduct to bring meaning to street-level judgments and actions. Details about our methods—gaining entry to our ‹eld sites, collecting stories and other data, and organizing and conducting analysis and interpretation—are described in appendix A. This chapter explores the more general issues of narrative analysis in social research. Hearing, transcribing, reading, and rereading stories is not standard social research, although interest in narrative analysis has grown in recent years. If the root question is not how much or how many but rather how do people (in our case, street-level workers) comprehend and act in their work lives, then stories are perhaps our most powerful research instrument. We regard stories and narrative analysis as a tool that is at once a microscope for examining minute details and a telescope for scanning the intellectual horizon for themes and patterns. Even the words knowledge and narrative have shared linguistic roots, leading Joshua Foa Dienstag to observe, “This common lineage suggests that at one time to know something or someone was closely linked to the ability to tell a story.”1 Like shoe-box dioramas, narratives create miniature worlds. Viewing the scene from a cutout window will offer a perspective that differs from looking down from the top as well as from the imagined perspective of those inside the box looking out. Storytelling, like the diorama, is an act of “world-building” and “world-populating.”2 Hearing a story, we enter, if only for a moment, this created world and interact with its characters. Street-level workers’ stories re-create their world as they see it and as they want to present it to outsiders. These re-creations are not photographically accurate. It is not possible to separate the storytellers’ interpretations and their decisions of what and how to present the story from the events recounted (or invented) and the characters described (or imagined). Stories are not facts or evidence waiting for interpretation; from the moment they are conceived through the many tellings and retellings, they are the embodiment of the storyteller ’s interpretation. This is their power; this is their limit.3 The words narrative and story are often used interchangeably; they are synonyms but for our purposes have different connotations. Narrative is the broader category: all stories are narratives, but not all narratives are stories.4 The various textual forms of qualitative social science, such as ethnographies, folk tales, case studies, observations, and other similar accounts, are forms of narratives. Broadly speaking, all of these forms Cops, Teachers, Counselors 26 describe events and exist within a time span, characteristics they share with narrative art forms such as ‹lm, ballet, opera, ‹ction, and representational painting and sculpture. Even quantitative data and formal models are meaningless until put into some narrative structure; quantitative researchers, just like their...