Paper title: Narrative Construction as Sensemaking: How a Central Bank Thinks
Abstract: How do elite policy-making groups make sense of complex and ambiguous environments while remaining consistent with the group’s institutionalized operating model? This paper identifies a sensemaking process based in shared narrative construction. It is a social process of pattern recognition involving abduction, the comparison of culturally approved models to the current conditions to establish relevant facts and events; plotting, the reordering of those facts and events into a plausible narrative; and selective retention, the collective negotiation of a policy choice that fits the emerging narrative. This paper uses verbatim transcripts of meetings at the Federal Reserve to explore how policy makers use a logic of appropriateness to identify relevant cues and integrate them with existing models by weaving sensible plots. These plots are designed to control the supply of money and credit and maintain the legitimacy of the central bank.
Main link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0170840609357380
Aux link: https://sci-hub.ru/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0170840609357380
Also: https://enchanted.network/reflections/discursive-landscapes
Reminds me of Conversation Theory
> My decision to focus on narrative construction is meant to convey that narrative is understood here not so much as a structure as an action. This action includes the identification of events from the past and the use of a plot that confers context, agency, and a temporal ordering on those events (Polkinghorne 1988; Gergen and Gergen 1986; Maines 1993). Narrative helps organizational actors make sense of their successes or failures because it contains indicators of who and what are causing the observed outcomes (Martin et al. 1983; Pentland 1999; Vaara 2002). In the process of assembling the component parts of narrative, the narrators express evaluative standards that give the outcome meaning.
> In shifting attention away from the narrative product, we are putting it on the narrators. But it is not the cognition, or ‘narrative imagining’ (Turner 1996), of the narrators with which will we be concerned. Rather, our interest is in the social construction of narrative. It is through interaction and negotiation that a policy group ‘thinks’ and narrative is constructed. Czarniawska (1997: 49) explains that this is a social process between the narrators and that a shared narrative emerges only after ‘formulating, editing, applauding, and refusing various elements of the ever-produced narrative’