Paper info

WHERE IS THE ACTION?

Hans Kjellberg and Per Andersson

The paper was published at the 17th IMP-conference in Oslo, Norway in 2001.

Taking a set of narratives told about business action as the empirical starting-point, thepaper looks at the different ways in which action is reconstructed. The overall researchquestion asked is: How is business action reconstructed in our business narratives? Thenarratives analysed are collected from research on exchange relationships in the field ofmarketing, but also from other social sciences, using texts from e.g economist, rationalchoice approaches, anthropological approaches, historical aproaches, sociology ofscience, and more. To analyse how business actions are depicted in these different typesof narratives, four narrative constructions are focused: plots, actors, time and space. Thecategorizations and analyses are summarized and followed by a set of concludingimplications and suggestions for the use of narratives aiming to reconstruct businessaction in the making.