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The Role of Storytelling and Narrative in a Modernisation Initiative

This article addresses the significance of storytelling and narrative in a modernisation initiative. It examines how storytelling enabled a certain 'thrust' to be maintained in the project work. Shared stories of bureaucratic failings are analysed. These served a number of functions, one of which was to enable a clear sense of progress or modernisation to be established in the present. To maintain this sense of progress and modernisation individuals had to smooth over potential discontinuities, such as the re-emergence of cross-departmental conflict, in stories that stressed growth and learning. The article examines these narrative accomplishments and shows how they played an active role in sustaining the authority's self-image as a 'modernising council'. By examining the inter-relationship between the political project of modernisation and the individual project of constructing narrative accounts of organisational progress, the article also reveals subtle mechanisms of control operating between central and local government.