This article seeks to contribute to discussions about how narrative analysis might be undertaken. I do this by exploring one method of narrative approach to analyse personal stories. Before considering some of the issues associated with narrative research, I comment on the rise of the ‘narrative moment’. I then provide ways to conceptualize narrative research. In the final part of the discussion, I discuss ways to conduct narrative research. In so doing, I provide concrete details about how personal stories might be analysed line by line.

Apetheker (1989) argues that people resist in the ways they have open to them and the tactics and storylines available in often constricted contexts. Focusing on the voluntary social services sector, this article suggests that workplace participation operates in the same way-strategies and tactics used in workplace participation reflect people's perceptions of the possibilities available to them in any given context or regime and their calculations of constraints and risks. In general, workplace participation in the public and private sectors is thought to be based on a combination of self-and collective interests (Marchington, 1992). In the voluntary social services sector, participation also draws strongly on notions of care, which involves a values-based, emotionally laden form of other-directed interests. Though workplace participation in the form of militant unionism is often associated with maleness and generally begins and ends in the workplace itself, participation in the form of values and affinity are associated with naturalized caring roles for women and leak out of the workplace to the larger community and home life (Author A, 2006). In the voluntary sector, care is a highly gendered and contested terrain in which the workforce and service users demand greater participation in all aspects of care provision (Van Til, 2001; Weeks, 1994). Participation in the predominantly female voluntary social services is assumed the norm that most workers expect, but little is known about how participation plays out in the circumscribed realities of managerialism and outsourcing. This article asserts that three kinds of overlapping participative processes exist in the voluntary social services including: 1) procedural-formal; 2) practice-professional; and 3) affinity-processes that

This paper explores some of the politics of community work by examining four basic community participation approaches. Moving from the right of politics to the left, it overviews some of the different theoretical orientations, goals, processes and recruitment practices that are commonly used but not always recognized to constitute different forms of community participation. Offered primarily to 'lay' community members, students and beginning practitioners, the paper is intended to clarify some of the differences that emerge when participation projects are designed, and to stimulate discussion about community participation more generally.