NARRATIVE AUTHORITY What Is Narrative Authority?

Narrative authority means that the reader of a qualitative study believes the text’s narrator or sees the narrator as believable; this authority is im-portant because it is a source of power in your relationship with readers.

The narrator can write against the reader’s common sense, can take a point of view that challenges a reader’s deeply held beliefs, or can even reaffirm what the reader already knows. Whatever the strategy or strategies used to gain authority, some of which we address here, the narrative cannot have authority outside of a relationship with the reading audience.

We might expect narrative authority in the qualitative study to be in-dependent of fashion and fad. But narrative authority is very much related to cultural currency because we are talking about writing for a public. And publics have ideas about what is in style or what is important for this his-torical moment. Certain kinds of narrative styles and particular represen-tations of the field carry currency at different historical moments, and these must be taken into account when discussing authority.

It is more important now than ever before, for example, for narra-tors of qualitative studies to describe their own cultural and social loca-tions, to discuss their personal experiences in the field, to communicate to readers what about themselves is relevant to a particular project in order to counteract the “view from nowhere” kind of science writing (see Haraway, 1991). Although writing with a presence counters this objecti-fying view that the omniscient narrator represents, telling readers things about yourself—your emotions, failings, and so on—does not necessar-ily improve your study, your findings, or the significance of your project.

To use Van Maanen’s (1988) vocabulary here, the “confessional” or “im-pressionist” narrator does not necessarily have greater authority or be-lievability than the realist one. Always ask yourself what difference it will make for the reader to know personal things about you. Telling things about yourself to your audience is a narrative strategy that may work at particular times to help you gain authority with readers. There are ways

of doing studies that make one better than another, but there need to be multiple forms of quality.

While we may associate authority with authoritarianism or patriarchy (since patriarchal authority is a common phrase), authority takes many forms, including casual and assertive, direct and indirect. As dissertation writers, you also need to establish narrative authority, as mentioned earlier. You need to show your readers, specifically your dissertation committee, that you have a certain authority to speak about your subject. In this next section we offer you some resources to draw on for establishing narrative authority.

The six narrative strategies that we describe include physicality, tem-porality, theory, rhetoric, authentication, and timeliness.

Physicality and Temporality

“Being there” is central to the qualitative approach. Qualitative method-ologists spend significant time in the field, and this time makes their work more than just a series of impressions. Narrators who can effectively com-municate how experience with informants over a significant period of time benefited their research gain authority. What makes your approach effec-tive is how it demonstrates your continuity in the field and your account’s dependence on the time you spent there. This means that you need to show that someone who participated in “blitzkrieg ethnography” (Rist, 1980) would not have the same depth of understanding that you do. It means that you need to demonstrate an intimate familiarity with the lives of your informants or the geographic site where you observed. You should not just know your informants’ views on things; you should know how their views relate to their lives. There are many collections that discuss fieldwork, and you can take advantage of these for examples (e.g., Lareau & Shultz, 1996;

Watson, 1999; Wolf, 1996). You do not need to put all your knowledge in the methods section; in fact, you probably could not contain it there.

Certain ways of narrating your data emphasize physicality and tem-porality. Some examples show how you can create some authority with-out directly addressing it:

Jennifer walked into the classroom, dressed in her usual outfit of black pants and a colorful shirt. Sometimes the shirt was magenta or emerald. Today’s choice was pumpkin.

These small details communicate knowledge over time.

Jack Johnson blew the whistle, and began his after-game routine. He gathered the soccer team together under the oak tree at the corner

of the playground, turned to the captain first, and asked for her take on the day’s plays. “How d’ya think it went today, Jen?” he asked.

He listened to her comments, nodding his head now and then, looking at her the entire time. When she finished, it was silent for a while. Then, as he always did, he looked around the group and said, “OK, gang. What do the rest of you think?” Since most of the players generally wanted to say something, their hands would fly up. Today, he called on Bernice first, pointing his finger at her and saying, “Bern?”

Using the phrase as he always did and referring to players who generally are anxious to talk shows your familiarity with a setting over time.

This narrative form is not a sophisticated strategy, but it is effective because it shows rather than announces your authority.

Theoretical Sophistication

Although important, “being there” is not enough. One’s orientation, val-ues, subject position, and identities influence what you see and how you interpret the meanings that you argue your informants make. You also gain narrative authority through the thoughtfulness with which you can describe those theories that explain your perspectives on your subjects and that account for how you see the world.

Rhetoric

Narrators can gain authority through their rhetoric. By rhetoric, we mean

“the putting to work of language in order to influence other people, either in terms of their future actions or their beliefs” (Edgar & Sedgwick, 1999, p. 340). Tropes, or figures of speech, that authors use are part of a piece’s rhetoric. Another part can be the style of language. And still another as-pect can be the portrait you construct for the reader of your learning the culture you study. Doug Foley (1990) gained authority by representing himself in Learning Capitalist Culture as at home with his informants. The researcher felt at home and could rely on knowledge from his childhood experiences to develop rapport. He collapsed differences between these different time periods (his youth and the time of his fieldwork) to repre-sent his comfort in rural surroundings and privilege his view as narrator.

Annette Lareau (1989), in Home Advantage, her study of schooling and so-cial class, gained authority by showing not how much she already knew about school systems but by writing about how much she had to learn. This description of her vulnerability also established her authority. It showed

that she was confident enough to share her mistakes and lack of clarity because the work she produced demonstrated how she successfully worked through the problems. She also contributed to helping others work through problems by showing how fieldwork always involves shifting grounds.

Clearly, there may be some gendered strategies at work here, with women showing vulnerability and men demonstrating competence, but there is the inverse as well in other examples. So narrators can gain authority when they describe not only their effectiveness but also their errors. The reader can come to know narrators as analysts in this way and gain more trust for them.

This narrative strategy says: You can trust me. I’ll show you my weak-nesses as well as my strengths, my failings as well as my successes. You’ll get the whole picture. I’m not covering anything up. You’ll know then that you can trust me. This is an alternative way of being authoritative, and its strengths are sometimes overlooked. The issue is, however, that it must be read as a narrative strategy rather than as a signifier of “truth” or the worth of the study.

Authentication

Narrators in ethnographic studies also use strategies to authenticate their particular view of things. Researchers “know” the world they have studied, and narrators work to authenticate for readers why they know these things well. Again, we work to gain the reader’s respect for our authority to tell a story a particular way. “Trouble on Memory Lane” (Biklen, 2004), for ex-ample, examines one specific authentication strategy that qualitative re-searchers frequently use when they are studying young people:

It is a common practice for narrators in ethnographies of youth to describe their own adolescence in relation to the youth they study. Most of the narra-tors illustrate how these memories increase their access to the youth, their knowledge of the culture, and their abilities to relate to or accurately under-stand their informants. (p. 716)

This strategy says: Because I used to be one of them, I know them. While the article critiques this use of memory, the strategy is frequently used to authenticate the narrator’s authority.

Timeliness

Are you writing on a topic that people want to read about? You gain nar-rative authority when you tackle issues that are hot, or that you pioneered

when others did not, or that catch people’s interest. Sometimes timeliness is hard to predict. Sometimes the literature is a good tool to predict the time-liness of an issue, but it can also promote conventional ways of thinking.

Discussion with others is an important way to learn about the timeliness of a topic.