Research

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.

Actors on the periphery of an institutional field offer an important source of innovation, but risk being dismissed for lack of legitimacy. Research casts outsider identity as a liability to be overcome, suggesting that outsiders must depend on insider networks, language and techniques to make their voices heard by the mainstream, resulting in assimilation. This paper explores a case of outsider innovation in which practitioners selectively cultivate an outsider identity and distance. Using 25 interviews with activist short sellers, published reports, and a historical case study (1985–2024), we find that these actors cultivate both insider identity markers (e.g., research rigor, credentials, and record) and outsider identity markers (e.g., anonymity, masking trade partners, humorous names, moralized language). The hybrid of credibility and distance enables activist short sellers to do work that true insiders cannot, exploiting opportunities engendered by insiders’ constraints and biases—namely, to research, publish on, and profit from corporate misconduct, fraud, and mis-valuation. We characterize the position as an institutionalized stranger, and contribute to research by clarifying the conditions and mechanisms that make an outsider identity a resource rather than a liability.

Why do activist short sellers publish sprawling, theatrical reports, even though existing theory suggests that focused, conventional narratives are best suited to coordinate the actions of investors? To answer this question, our abductive study combines computational analysis of 830 reports targeting U.S.-listed firms (2008–2024) with 25 practitioner interviews, market data, and audience reception evidence. The corpus reveals that report architecture tracks the evaluative environment: tone reflects house style, but rhetorical breadth rises with evaluative uncertainty and, among broad reports, narrative integration rises with pre-campaign volatility, our indicator of active contestation. Interviews reveal the logic behind these patterns. Sellers anticipate not how “the market” will respond (third-order inference) but how specific audiences will react in sequence (second-order inference). When audiences share an evaluative standard, the two coincide and focused reports suffice. When standards diverge, modular reports make competing standards and their audiences visible; when uncertainty coincides with active contestation, integrated reports bind these lines into an overarching narrative that is easier to grasp and transmit. Both departures sacrifice genre conformity, so sellers reserve them for audiences that focus cannot coordinate. Comparing our explanation—rhetorical fit—with accepted alternatives, we develop a more general account of coordination in valuation processes: the focused signal of focal-point theory is the special case of aligned standards, and rhetorical complexity enables second-order inference where shared standards are absent.

This paper contributes to a debate about the efficacy of strategic storytelling for organizations and entrepreneurs. Leveraging qualitative analysis of 100 entrepreneur-investor interactions at three pitch events, I focus on the concrete anecdotes in pitches, analyzing the symbolic and persuasive work they accomplish, and how investors respond to them. I find that not all entrepreneurs tell stories, not all stories resonate with investors, and even resonant stories can be dismissed as irrelevant for the investment decision. Based on the lines of questions that entrepreneurs receive from investors, I hypothesize that the familiar Aha! moments and origin stories are less compelling than more distinctive, detailed, concrete stories about personal commitment, customer problems, and product trials. Building on existing research, I theorize about why stories strengthen versus undermine credibility, arguing that it depends on whether investors perceive them as complements or substitutes for data and argument claims. By unpacking the high-level concept of storytelling, and analyzing the full range of investor responses to it, I contribute to research on entrepreneurship, impression management, and narrative.