Narrative and the Culture of Obedience at the Workplace

Witten, Marsha G.

doi:10.4135/9781483345277.n5

Cited by 68 publications

(48 citation statements)

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“…Most importantly, our narrative approach recognizes that, in organizations, language is 'the primary medium of social control and power' (Fairclough 1989, p. 3) and that narratives are hegemonically important political 'tools' that can be utilised by employee groups to control others, hide truth claims from testing and debate, and engender belief, often without exciting challenge (Brown 1985, Witten 1993. In short, organizational narratives have a political role as a means by which asymmetric power relationships and boundary markers between various groups are initiated and maintained.…”

Section: With Recent History Of Blood-borne and Bacterial-borne Infecmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narratives of professional regulation and patient safety: The case of medical devices in anaesthetics

Currie¹,

Humpreys²,

Waring³

et al. 2009

Health, Risk & Society

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Government prescription for the management of clinical risk and patient safety relies upon the development of a shared perspective between stakeholders engaged in the delivery of healthcare about what constitutes clinical risk and what mechanisms are suitable to manage such risk to ensure patient safety. However, there are tensions arising from notions of clinical risk and its management, specifically between healthcare professionals and those managers given responsibility for implementation of policy. Central to these tensions are issues of legitimacy, power and identity in claims about how risk should be managed. Aligned with an emerging body of literature that takes a narrative approach to change in healthcare systems (e.g. Currie and Brown 2003), including patient safety (e.g. McDonald et al. 2005McDonald et al. , 2006, our paper examines how healthcare professionals make sense of the regulation of single use medical devices (SUDs) in anaesthesia. Our study indicates that there is considerable resistance to detailed surveillance of SUDs. It appears that doctors author a narrative that privileges clinical judgement over managerial control in the use of SUDs, and this has come to be adopted by other healthcare professionals and managers. This may undermine future policy aspirations for the tighter regulation of clinical autonomy.

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Section: With Recent History Of Blood-borne and Bacterial-borne Infecmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narratives of professional regulation and patient safety: The case of medical devices in anaesthetics

Currie¹,

Humpreys²,

Waring³

et al. 2009

Health, Risk & Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Gabriel also suggests that in recent years the concept of stories in particular has become 'too comfortable' to the extent that what once seemed a provocative and innovative approach to the study of organizational phenomena seems to have become an unquestioned truth and accepted norm. Thus, part of the purpose of this chapter is to 'reproblematize' the idea of stories by pointing out that they can be vehicles of oppression and can lead to dissimulation and oppression (Helmer, 1993;Mumby, 1987;Witten, 1993). Moreover, stories do not deny the importance or existence of facts; rather they allow them to be re-interpreted and embellished.…”

Section: Discourses and Organizingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Organizational Discourse: Exploring the Field

Grant¹,

Hardy²,

Oswick³

et al. 2004

The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Discourse

168

163

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“…Certainly, by the time they are in high school, students describe themselves in evaluative terminology and also turn an evaluative eye on fellow students. Evaluative discourse extends beyond the classroom to shape interactions in the lunch room, the social clique, and eventually, the work world (Nicholls, 1989;Witten, 1993).…”

Section: Evaluation Discourse and Motivation 39mentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluative Discourse and Achievement Motivation: Students' Perceptions and Theories

Lapadat¹

2000

Language and Education

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Schools are places where students and teachers alike are immersed in an ongoing evaluative discourse. Obligatory participants in this discourse throughout the length of their schooling, students internalise, reconstruct, and reproduce school's evaluative gaze. This study traced four Canadian Grade 10 students' descriptions and interpretations of evaluative discourse in their junior high school, especially focusing on the use of effort and ability attributions to explain successes and failures. Each student participated individually in five semi-structured interviews with the researcher that were audiotaped, then transcribed and coded exhaustively for descriptors of effort, ability, and performance. In a sixth session, each student inductively sorted the descriptors he/she had used into categories,and explainedthe rationale for this arrangement. Thus, each student created an elaborated conceptual map of his/her perceptions of evaluative terminology used by him/herself, peers, and teachers across a range of school situations. These meta-maps provide individualised profiles of four students' conceptions of school evaluative language and how it relates to their own and peers' achievement motivation, thus contextualising and providing support for attribution theory. Examined across the four students, the meta-maps present an insight into a particular school's accepted discourse, its subtexts and social implications, and the relationships between evaluative language and motivation for school learning.

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Narrative and the Culture of Obedience at the Workplace

Cited by 68 publications

References 0 publications

Narratives of professional regulation and patient safety: The case of medical devices in anaesthetics

Narratives of professional regulation and patient safety: The case of medical devices in anaesthetics

Introduction: Organizational Discourse: Exploring the Field

Evaluative Discourse and Achievement Motivation: Students' Perceptions and Theories

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