The Acquisition of a Speaker by a Story: How History Becomes Memory and Identity

This paper investigates narrative induction as one central means by which institutions acquire new members, and new members acquire a new identity. Narrative induction is the process by which people take on an existing set of stories as relevant to the shaping of their own story. Nonparticipant narratives (narratives told by speakers not present at the events narrated) are used to reproduce collective memory and induct new participants into this memory. The process has three parts: how a person comes to take on someone else's story as centrally relevant to their own; how a person comes to tell their own story in a way shaped by the stories of others, and how a person's story may come to be told and heard by others within an institution as an instance of a normative pattern. This paper demonstrates each phase of the process, using as data an ethnographic study of a major American insurance company.