Taking the Narrative Turn

This entry marks a major turn in the theme of this blog. Hitherto, my main focus has been the nexus between IT and government, defined to include both politics and public service. Now I will be shifting to narrative, and I’ll explain why.

I began the blog in April 2007, a few months after the publication of Digital State at the Leading Edge, and was using it to observe, on a week by week basis, the continuing transformational impact of IT on politics and government. A lot has happened, particularly in the political arena (especially the Obama campaign) and in Web 2.0 applications to politics. I brought together my conclusions after almost three years of commenting and observing in a paper entitled Digital State 2.0, which will be published in a festschrift in honour of Carleton University public administration scholar Bruce Doern. When the manuscript has completed editorial review and before its official publication, I will post it on this website. It marks, at least for now, the end-point of a line of research that I’ve been working on since early in the decade.

As I was finishing Digital State, I applied for and received funding from SSHRC for a new and radically different research project on narrative and government. The research intends to show how the analysis, creation, and manipulation of narratives is a valuable skill for managers in both the public and private sectors. The research project grew out of courses on narrative and management that I have been teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The courses started out some years ago, rather naively in retrospect, along the lines of “management lessons from the movies and books.” This approach was naïve first because movies and books are instances of the broader phenomenon of narrative and second because I now see the narrative project as a management skill in itself. The research is of sufficient breadth that I’ve decided to break it into two parts, first narratives dealing with the public sector, which I’m working on now, and then narratives dealing with the private sector, which will come later.

My main project now is a book on narrative and government. I’m mid-way through, with a target completion date of the end of the calendar year. What will be the relationship between the blog and the book? Previously, I was using the blog to continue observing the phenomenon that was the subject of the book. Now, the book is in progress, not a finished product.

In my view, a blog should consist of posts that are short, self-contained, and of general interest. The alternative - theory - can be dreary. Therefore, I’ll post comments about some of the narratives I am writing about in book. They might come out as mini-reviews. (Tangentially, my monthly page view totals indicated that my review of the film “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29″ last September received lots of visits for several months thereafter). They might also come out as comments about forgotten classics that I encourage the reader to read or see. So that’s the narrative turn I’ll be taking.