Methodology and Methods

As I said before, it is interesting noticing, talking about story reconstruction, that this work is written in slightly reverse order compared to the actual chronological flow of the work. There are rules in writing for academic research, as well as a genre. The first two chapters were developed during the third year of my PhD in Lugano, while the second and most of the third part of the work were developed in New Mexico and in the months that immediately followed by return. The first part of the work was then shaped after my return from New Mexico in order to give importance to the aspects that were more closely related to the research. Nevertheless, when I left for New Mexico I knew I wanted to use Boje’s narrative understanding and methodology and I was fascinated by the idea of applying such an intriguing concept in the empirical work, but I had no idea of how and where this could have been possible. The idea was that of investigating the relationship between decision-making and organizational narratives. It was an idea conceived in the first two years of my PhD when I was involved in a project on knowledge communication in decision-making context: unsatisfied by the lack of social and relational understanding of many knowledge communication approaches, I started to investigate on my own alternative paradigms that could shed light on such a complex matter. The initial idea of investigating decision-making is still present in this book although it does not hold a primary role. As will be discussed in this chapter, the empirical research itself has shaped and readdressed the object of the research.