“Who am I?”- 20
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joke, invite, blame, etc. and that attempts at self-construction, as a result of identity threats, are
managed at the local level of talk. These findings point to a contradiction with Goffman’s claim
that identity and identity concerns are always relevant within interaction.
However, by focusing on the intricacies within talk, the complexity between what is
happening within talk and larger discourses that exist “in the common repertoire” (Gergen &
Gergen, 1997, p. 172), and how individuals relate their current experience to those that came
before is obscured. Narratives are “nested” in that they not only refer to metanarratives, but to
past and present narratives and to future narrative possibilities for individuals to organize their
experiences and construct meaning (Gergen & Gergen, 1997; Langellier, 1989). Mandelbaum
(1987, 1996) notes that through constructing narratives, relational work gets accomplished
through co-narration, but relationships, constructed through roles, norms and rules, can constrain
what gets talked about in talk. Also, the embeddedness of narratives as temporally constructed is
important to consider when developing theory about the ongoing process of identity
construction.
From some scholars’ perspective (Hedge, 1996, 1998; Morkos & Deetz, 1996; Mumby,
1988, 1993; Weedon, 1987), understanding narrative as constructed through discourse assumes
that narrative functions as a mechanism for (re)producing power and control through multiple
dominant and subordinate positions. However, similar to a modernistic understanding of
corporations as stable entities, in today’s postmodern world, the notion of metanarratives needs
to be expanded to account for the tensions within multiple contested and contestable discursive
spaces. Telling personal narratives may legitimate or resist dominant meanings by transforming
them (Langellier, 1989). While narratives do have a positional stance in that they require the
Convention