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A post-social conceptual framework for exploring object narratives in sport organisations

journal contribution
posted on 2018-04-09, 14:28 authored by Aaron SmithAaron Smith, Clare Humphries
In this article we propose a theoretical framework for narrative analysis that gives voice to objects in sport organisations. Despite considerable interest in the symbolic and mnemonic potency of some sporting objects – most notably memorabilia – many organisational objects go unnoticed, whilst little attention has been paid to methods for gathering stories from inanimate objects. We suggest that material objects in sport organisations participate in narrative production and therefore constitute a rich investigative site. We adopt a post-social approach to narrative methodology where objects are recognised as non-human actors in organisational sense-making, not as narrative repositories that ‘contain’ stories and memories. A three-domain research framework is developed recommending an approach to eliciting an object narrative within a sport organisation. First, object materiality exposes the significant networks of forces, materials and people – and therefore episodes and actors – that engage with and through objects. Second, since people and objects are enmeshed in sequenced, workplace activities, object practice allows organisational agents to define what stories objects can tell whilst objects reciprocally bound the scope of human performance. Third, object biography provides a strategy to map the connections and transitions that occur over the lifecourse of an object, which reveals a changing web of organisational relations.

History

School

  • Loughborough University London

Published in

Sport Management Review

Volume

20

Issue

1

Pages

20 - 32

Citation

SMITH, A.C. and HUMPHRIES, C., 2017. A post-social conceptual framework for exploring object narratives in sport organisations. Sport Management Review, 20 (1), pp.20-32.

Publisher

Elsevier © Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-09-14

Publication date

2016-10-21

Notes

This paper is in closed access.

ISSN

1441-3523

Language

  • en

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