The Sociology of Storytelling

In contrast to the antistructuralist and antipositivist agenda that has animated the “narrative turn” in the social sciences since the 1980s, a more uniquely sociological approach has studied stories in the interactional, institutional, and political contexts of their telling. Scholars working in this vein have seen narrative as powerful, but as variably so, and they have focused on the ways in which narrative competence is socially organized and unevenly distributed. We show how this approach, or cluster of approaches, rooted variously in conversational analysis, symbolic interactionism, network analysis, and structuralist cultural sociologies, has both responded to problems associated with the narrative turn…