Promoting Interpretive Paradigm in Organizational Theory: A Reflection on Organizational Storytelling Approach

Burrell and Morgan offered an analysis of paradigms in terms of four broad worldviews, characterized as functionalist, interpretive, radical humanist and radical structuralist. Recently, interpretive paradigm has received major attention in the academic fields. The interpretive paradigm rests on a precarious, socially-constructed web of symbolic relationships. The interpretive theorist’s difficulty is to understand the meaning and significance of this web of relationships and how it exists as such. Stories are one of the components of organizational web. Stories transfer the meanings. They also form and facilitate social transactions. In this paper, storytelling is considered as one of the approaches of generating knowledge and its evolution, importance, functions and benefits will be discussed.