A so-called literary turn in social sciences in general and in organization studies in particular has resulted in re-discovering the narrative knowledge in organization theory and practice. Organization researchers watching the stories being made and distributed collect organizational stories and provoke story telling in their contacts with the field of practice. This paper takes up the variety of ways of reading such narratives, classifying them into the three steps delineated in the hermeneutic triad: explication, explanation, and exploration. Explication raises the issues of interpretation and overinterpretation; and finds different solutions in pragmatist vs. traditional hermeneutic theory of interpretation. Explanation has a wide range of techniques and approaches to offer, from structuralism through poststructuralism to deconstruction. Narratology is of help also in the last stage, exploration, offering reflection concerning the construction of the researcher's own story by genre analysis etc. The paper ends in a review of most common attitudes towards text analysis: text as the key to the world, text-as-world, texts in the world (science as conversation). The ever-present narrative The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances -- as though any material were fit to receive man's stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting . . . stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite dive...
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