Developing a framework for analyzing organizational stories

Abstract

Stories are becoming an increasingly important knowledge management and knowledge sharing tool to communicate ideas, values and experiences both to internal organizational members and to external stakeholders. This paper reports an initial effort to develop a framework for the analysis of organizational stories. The framework has two major parts: the story framework comprising six elements, and the interaction/communication framework. A story analysis instrument was constructed based on the framework, comprising a series of questions to answer or a set of categories to select. The instrument was applied to twenty organizational stories, and was found to be easy to use and achieve good agreement across the coders. Relations between story type, knowledge embodied and story purpose were explored, and recommendations for crafting organizational stories are made.