“Who am I?”- 19
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self and work in terms of levels and contexts (Berger & Chaffee, 1987), and make suggestions
for future theory development. In addressing the scarcity of communication theory, Berger and
Chaffee (1987) claim that it will be useful to order communication phenomena in terms of levels
(intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational and societal) and contexts (family, organizations,
and nation) for the purposes of conducting research and generating innovative approaches for the
discipline. I would like to focus my concluding remarks on the interpersonal level of analysis,
specifically addressing the work conducted on narrative. Finally, I will address the adequacy of
conceptualizing the practice of work as an organizational context.
Interpersonal Level of Analysis
In taking the position that narrative is constructed through conversational interaction,
several assumptions are made. First, in terms of structure, narratives are studied within the
context of interpersonal “interaction,” or naturally occurring talk, so that analysis is focused on
the process of interacting through which narratives are co-constructed and organized, not on the
individual act of narrating, on the literary text of the story or how the story functions as folklore.
Second, as Mandelbaum (1987, in press) observes, interactive participants perform various
practical activities, such as joking, inviting, blaming, accounting, complaining, telling troubles,
defending against an accusation, dealing with issues of responsibility, and gossiping, through the
process of telling their stories. Thinking of narratives as accomplished through interaction
allows an exploration of how “…through particular ways of talking, ‘reality’ may be constructed
and reconstructed. Often these constructions and reconstructions of reality are embedded in a
social context, as part of the ongoing or relational activities that communicators are undertaking”
(Mandelbaum, in press, p. 8). Mandelbaum (in press, 1996) claims that concerns with self are
wrapped within these various practical activities, in that self is implicated in how interactants
Convention