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This article addresses recent contestations of the role of narrative inquiry in the field of identity analysis and in qualitative inquiry more generally. In contrast to essentializing tendencies in the field of narrative inquiry (which have been contested under the headers of narrative exceptionalism, narrative imperialism, and narrative necessity), I am reiterating my proposal to theorize narrative inquiry as narrative practice (formerly 'small story approach') within which narratives and narrative inquiry present a more modest but thoroughly viable contribution.

This article is a pledge that we actually should care about the differences between what has recently been coined 'small' versus 'big' stories because they represent very different approaches to narrative inquiry. In the attempt to pull other contributions of this special issue into the debate between small and big, I argue that the small story approach is able to theoretically and methodologically enrich traditional narrative inquiry — not in a peaceful, complementary fashion, but by more radically re-positioning big story approaches as grounded in dialogical/discursive approaches such as small story research.

In this article I discuss an excerpt from a group discussion between five 15-year-old boys who, in the presence of an adult moderator, engaged in the act of 'slut bashing' while telling a minimal story about an incident of female promiscuity. The analysis proceeds microanalytically in a three-step procedure that details the positions taken by the young participants during the interaction. First, I analyze how the story characters are positioned in story time and story space. Next, I analyze how the interactants draw up their positions in relation to one another during the interaction. Finally, in the third step, I discuss how the first two levels are used to develop positions in relation to any preexisting normative discourses (master narratives). My observations focus on the role of narrative and interaction in the microgenetic construal of identity and self, and reveal how positioning becomes part of the identity construction of the five male adolescents.

Die Bedeutung des narrativen Diskurses für die sprachliche Verfassung von Identität wird erörtert. Dabei werden zwei Argumentationsstränge entfaltet. Zum einen wird dem Erzählen im Unterschied zu anderen Diskurstätigkeiten des alltäglichen Sprechens eine privilegierte Rolle der Ordnungsstiftung zugeschrieben. Diese gesonderte Stellung wird damit begründet, dass im Erzählen Relationen zwischen einer temporalen, einer räumlichen und einer personalen Ordnung hergestellt werden, die in anderen Diskurstätigkeiten nicht vorhanden sind. In einer Art Gegenzug wird dann jedoch diese Sonderstellung des Erzählens weitgehend relativiert und zurückgenommen, und zwar insofern, als den kontextuellen Bedingungen, unter denen erzählt wird, eine weit wesentlichere Rolle in der Sinnstiftung zukommt. Abschließend wird versucht, aus dem Verhältnis der beiden Argumentationsstränge den Begriff der Identität erzähl- und diskurstheoretisch neu zu verorten.