Narrative Productions of Meanings Exploring the Work of Stories in Social Life

In Narrative Productions of Meanings: Exploring the Work of Stories in Social Life, Donileen Loseke examines the importance of stories in an anti-science, anti-fact era where heterogeneity, rapid change, complexity, and moral fragmentation combine to create a multitude of personal, social, and political problems surrounding meaning. The book’s basic argument is that, within such a world, narrative productions of meaning are particularly important because stories can appeal simultaneously to thinking and feeling and moral evaluation, and because they can do this in ways that have cultural, interactional, and personal dimensions. Narrative Productions of Meaning develops a framework for social science examinations of narrative; it outlines relationships between stories, storytelling, and culture, and it explores the characteristics of several types of stories including self stories that create coherence from the chaos of personal experience, stories that persuade mass audiences that public resources are required to resolve intolerable conditions, and stories that justify the contents of public policy and the organization of social services. It concludes with issues about relationships between stories and the processes of democratic politics. Narrative Productions of Meaning demonstrates the ways in which stories create meaning and how this meaning shapes both subjective understandings and material realities. In multiple ways, this analysis crosses common divides: It draws from literature spanning multiple disciplines; it treats thinking, feeling, and moral evaluation as inseparable; it bridges cultural and social psychological perspectives; it demonstrates relationships between story structure and the work people do with stories.