Narrative Affordances: What Stories Can and Cannot Do
回顾了四十年叙事研究，将叙事视为一种思维和沟通工具，提出叙事可供性概念，包括意义建构、说服、分享和协调四种行动，并探讨了叙事与其他工具（如量化）的结合，对管理学者和组织研究者有参考价值。
I review four decades of research on narrative, or story, integrating theoretical and empirical approaches that influence management, strategy, and organization theory. I conceptualize narrative as a tool of thinking and communicating that offers particular possibilities for action, or affordances. Narrative affordances derive from narrative’s formal structure and the social norms that affect its use. I inductively identify four actions or affordances that individuals and organizations advance with narrative: making meaning, persuading, sharing, and coordinating. Together, the interdependent affordances articulate a programmatic theory of narrative. Clustering by action reveals how narrative research programs fit or clash as a function of the affordances they emphasize. I also highlight how narrative can be compared to and combined with other conceptual and linguistic tools, like quantification. Overall, this review highlights canonical and cutting-edge work, finds common cause across strands of research, and concludes with promising paths forward from the knowledge frontier for both management and narrative research.