‘Whose Story is it?’: Co-production and Psychological Ownership of Narrative Reports

Abstract

The paper examines the co-production of narrative reports in the context of a non-profit innovation network. Prior research on narrative reporting suggests that corporate reports and similar organizational narratives are likely the product of collective efforts of different actors in the backstage. The actual process of (re-)writing such narratives has received little attention, however. In our paper, we examine how the inputs of different individual actors are translated into an organizational narrative. Mobilizing Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology as our main lens of analysis, we highlight different mechanisms of dramaturgical guidance in backstage interactions, and we show how such guidance can have repercussions on the original authors of narratives when they feel like they are losing ownership of ‘their’ stories. Overall, our paper adds to our understanding of the backstage-frontstage dynamics in narrative reporting.

Keywords:

• Narratives
• Reporting
• Success stories
• Dramaturgical guidance
• Psychological ownership

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the participants in this study for their time and support of the project. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the Assembly of the Swedish Research School in Accounting 2018 (Sigtuna), the EDEN Doctoral Colloquium 2018 (Brussels), and the Doctoral Colloquium at ACMAR 2019 (Vallendar). We would like to thank participants at these events for their valuable comments and suggestions. We particularly thank Carlos Larrinaga (editor) and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments throughout the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that, while we present our theoretical perspective upfront, this perspective emerged in an abductive manner (i.e. in interaction with our reading of the empirical material), as is typical for many qualitative studies (see Ahrens & Chapman, 2006; Lukka, 2014).