CRAFTING A STORY: REPRESENTATION OF DATA
2. EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL DIMENSION OF STORIES Stories provide a way of coming to know (epistemological function) how a
complementary, are irreducible to one another. A story and an argument have operating principles of their own; their own structure and type of causality and their own procedures of verification. Argument convinces one of truth and verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. Stories convince one by their lifelikeness and establish not truth but verisimilitude (appearance of being true).
An example of this is the term then. Then' functions differently in the logical proposition "if x, then y" and in the narrative "the king died, and then the queen died."
One leads to a search for universal truth conditions, and the other for likely and possible particular connections between two events.
Bruner characterises these two modes of thought as the paradigmatic and the narrative. The paradigmatic or logico-scientific mode attempts to fulfill the ideal of a formal, mathematical system of description and explanation. The purpose of the explanation is to show causality with dependent and independent variables.
Bruner(1985: 13) contends that the narrative mode deals in human intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. Itstrives to put events into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place. Bruner, a psychologist, focuses on the individual and human intention and action. Narrative psychologists have used the telling of stories to understand how individuals interpret and give meaning to their lives. Krog (1998) sees narrative understanding as our most primitive form of explanation. "When events fall into a pattern which we can describe in a way that is satisfying as a narrative then we think we have some grasp of why they occurred" (1998: 196-197). Sacks (1985: viii) uses stories in medicine "to bring us to the very intersection of mechanism and life, to the relation of physiological processes to biography." Sacks further contends that in neurology the patient's personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined. In the social sciences, Becker (1992: 108) describes the work of Abbott, who advocates the use of stories to explain why a phenomenon occurred. Stories are used in research to focus on process, on the temporal dimension in which the phenomena occur. Stories treat the phenomena to be explained as something that comes through a series of steps. This type of analysis focuses on discovering the sequence of steps involved in the process under study. Causal analysis takes the form of a tree diagram, showing how a case progresses from step-to-step. Causes for the action operate in different ways at different times.
What is explained is more complex than dependent and independent variables. Instead of the outcome being described as a value of a variable, the outcome is described as a
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different form of organisational or individual activity, a different way of putting together a number of common and interdependent activities. Becker (1992:209) cites Cressey's study of embezzlement which "describes and explains the genesis of the commission as an act of violation of financial trust" as an example which uses this approach.
The analysis of causes leads to a probabilistic statement of what might happen.
Narrative analysis leads to the statement of a sequence in which the outcome is known.
2.2. The political dimension of narratives
The telling and documenting of stories has political importance. Traditionally, knowledge has been constructed in ways that have often not incorporated all experiences. Stories provide a way of bringing other voices into the centre of the public discourse. Featherstone (1989: 376) calls this "a people's scholarship," a scholarship in which "scientific facts gathered in the field give voice to a people's experience."
Lawrence-Lightfoot (1997) considers the narratives produced (which she calls portraits) as both documents of inquiry leading to new understandings as well as interventions to instigate change. Stories can broaden the audience beyond the walls of the academy to a wider, more eclectic audience. A wider audience's understanding of a situation then affords a way to bring about change.
Stories were very important during the days of apartheid in South Africa. Stories provided a tool to illuminate the conditions of oppressed people and workers. Stories generated from oral history projects have been used to tell the story of the "underclass";
provided an interpretation that is different from the existing interpretation and used to educate the masses. Paul la Hausse (1990) documents the different oral history projects in South Africa in 'Oral History and South African Historians' in Radical History Review. These projects, which contribute to telling a different history of South Africa, cover areas like mining, agriculture, sharecroppers, mass movements, migrations and working class communities destroyed by the apartheid state. Luli Callinicos (1990), also in Radical History Review, documents the popular history movement in the 1980's. The dominant influence of this has been the labour movement who writes mostly for working class people. Some universities attempted writing popular history and saw the process of rewriting history as a political resistance. "People's Education" was an important movement in South Africa in the 1980's. The movement attempted to present an 'alternative history' to be used in schoolrooms. Post 1994, as South Africa strives
towards reconciliation, stories have been used to document the past as well as provide a therapeutic mechanism to come to terms with its past. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has documented the apartheid stories of individuals and organisations.
The stories that have been written have, understandably, been those of the most marginalised groups. There are stories about workers, poor people and women. This review does not include stories about academics. But the stories of people who have succeeded and stories about middle class people also need to be written.