On becoming irrelevant: An analysis of charity workers’ untold epic stories
Abstract
While the nature, character and function of stories are variously theorized in organizational
storytelling literature, little research has tried to unpack how organizational narrative
domain may transform over time. Attending to the contextual transformation of
organizational story space can reveal how popular stories at one epoch could be
reformulated, ignored, or forgotten all together during another epoch. Drawing on
ethnographic data of a children’s charity in UK, which experienced a stage of rapid
professionalization, specialization, and bureaucratization, I examine the influence of this
restructuring initiative on the organizational narrative domain. It was shown that the
professionalization of the charity starved the old stories of the oxygen of relevance. The
memories of the old pioneers, from the days of stress and violence, became less welcome
as the organization turned increasingly managerial in character. The notion of ‘irrelevancy’
is further developed drawing on the work of Maurice Halbwachs, and its implications are
elaborated building on storytelling research.