Narrative Affordances: What Stories Can and Cannot Do

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.