Suchergebnisse

Introduction : how institutions remember -- Data for the study : the MidWest Insurance Company -- Occasions for institutional remembering -- Retold tales : repeated narratives as a resource for institutional remembering -- Multiple versions of MidWest's history -- Three versions of one story : a comparison -- Paradigmatic narratives : exemplary narratives of everyman -- Narrative and intertextuality : telling one's own story within a textual community -- Noisy silences : stories not told -- Working the past : identity and memory

Narrative has been analyzed as a way of recounting the memory of the past and negotiating current group membership. But in an institutional context, it crucially functions to project the future, in constructing a record which can serve as an institutional memory available in case of possible challenges. Using as data an extended oral narrative from a social service agency about an incident of violence by a client, this study shows that the strongest structural constraints on the discourse and syntactic structure of the narrative are the requirements for a bureaucratically adequate written record. This analysis serves as a case study of how the larger social structure of legal requirements for adequate records serves to shape the structure of oral narrative, as well as a demonstration of the work oral narrative does in producing and reproducing institutional memory. (Discourse, Narrative, Memory, Bureaucratic Language, Language of Violence)