I’ll write more about papers I liked, but these three made a good session…
Knowledge Creation and Learning in Translating a Novel into a Film by Bonet Eduard, Pons Catalina, Sauquet Alfons, Bou Elena
The paper is about a story of translating a metaphoric novel into a script for a movie, use of visual artefacts on the way and differences in interpreting them.
Thinking of:
- finding the novel as it should be interesting to read (Snow by Maxence Fermine; at Amazon)
- different ways to communicate tacit knowledge and ideas that can be hardly expressed in words
- translations as a metaphor for knowledge creating and learning
Developing Organizational Narrations – A New Dimension in Knowledge Management by Schreyögg Georg, Geiger Daniel
This work looks critically at storytelling practices in KM and suggests that stories are perceived as positive when in fact they could provoke negative results.
The presenters gave an overview of the literature on narratives (re: sense-making (Weick&Browning, 1986), symbolic reproduction of culture (Czarniawska, 1996), knowledge generation and sharing (Orr, 1996; Patriotta, 2003)). I’m not an expert, but I was surprised not seeing the references to the storytelling KM literature I know (e.g. names of Dave Snowden and Steve Denning).
- Narrations
- natural non-reflexive/non-discursive
- transfer facts, recipes, emotions, values and norms, etc. of communities
- Problematic aspects of narratives (referring to the Shell story)
- various stories compete
- dysfunctional side-effects
- far reaching consequences
- Need for a transformation into a reflexive mode (re: Habermas, 1989), three steps of reflecting on a story (de-contextualisation, stripping off contexts)
- step 1. does it fit other contexts of the same community?
- step 2. could it be translated to other communities?
- step 3. evaluation of content – reflection of assumptions and claims of the story
The presentation is good for mind-stretching, but I have many questions:
- “stories always have a teller and a listener”; “stories are told in a community” – Where weblog stories with their “telling to the world” attitude fit?
- “stories are not reflective” – Is it always like that?
- I don’t think it’s a story anymore when you stripped it out of context… It loses it’s power and becomes “best practice” that has lot of problems.
- Why do you want to de-contextualise a story? Is there any other way to reflect on stories?
The bottom line
- I guess weblog stories are worth looking at: they are told to the world, reflected upon and checked without de-contextualisation (or, they are re-contextualised in new contexts :)
- I’m getting more convinced in the value of researching by experiencing rather than theorising :)))
A Narrative Aproach to Change Management by Bolin Maria, Bergquist Magnus, Ljungberg Jan
This paper is about using myths as a way to trigger changes. Just a citation: “Myth talks thought man without him knowing it” (Levi-Strauss 1995)
Tags: narratives, OKLCArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/03.html#a1151; comments are here.