The majority of the existing studies on the entrepreneurship tend to adopt the quantitative approaches to explore the effect of the preset variables and/or to examine the relationships between different variables. However, such an approach is too static and neglects the dynamics and complexity of the environment. Therefore this research tempts to analyze the entrepreneurship story by the narrative inquiry method in the hope to explain a different landscape of entrepreneurship researches and entrepreneurial organizations. The case of this research is a chain cram school. Based on the experiences and stories from the cram school¡¦s founder, managers and teachers, accompanying with the points of view adopted from ¡§Human Playful Entrepreneuning¡¨ as well as the explanation and introspection of the author, five features of an entrepreneurial organization are uncovered. That is, an entrepreneurial organization is an ever-changing organization; an organization playing with boundaries; a changing organization with regularity; a ¡§Gong-ho¡¨ organization; and an organization with a group of knowledge workers who are organizationally assimilated. An entrepreneurial organization could only survive and accommodate to a dynamic environment by attracting new employees with various knowledge, by accumulating and exploiting internal resources, and by continuous interaction with the external environment. An entrepreneurial organization is able to keep some principles despite of its continuous changes, and to keep its entrepreneurship from the faculty¡¦s partnership. When it assimilates the faculty it helps them attract each other but still maintain an innovative thinking and the ability of execution at the same time.

A manager¡¦s growth can reflect the type of culture, environment, and institution of an organization. In addition, great career progresses contribute to a positive growth of both the company and the manager. In the past, most research focuses on how to build up a succession planning and some studies investigate how a manager¡¦s behavior, personnel traits, and style of leadership can influence the organization. With Narrative Inquiry, this article focuses on career development of some senior managers to investigate their learning progress to help researchers remodel (review) the managers¡¦ career experiences. This research expects to reveal the managers¡¦ roles and styles. Besides, the findings will lay bare their behavior and cognition with the organization through their own narratives. The environment and opportunities created by the organization motivate the managers to keep learning in their careers. Furthermore, the managers usually make good use of the challenges they have faced to experiment their concepts in action so as to obtain experiences for transforming their opinions and action. The managers¡¦ learning progresses, which have a great impact on their cognition and construction of the roles they play, also shows that learning behavior and construction of role will be interactive. The research purports to illustrate the forces and factors that will impact the managers in their careers in the organization and help the organization to build an appropriate environment beneficial both to the managers and the companies they work for.

Abstract Sales work is an occupation which constantly is available for people. Salespeople are always wanted, but only few of them can reach exquisite performance. For most people, selling is easy. However, it also brings the harshest challenge to human nature. Sales representatives could easily lose their resolution of achieving goals when they are encountered customers¡¦ endless problems and sales resistance. They always face tremendous achievement pressure, which could destroy their strong will in no time. In most people¡¦s impression, a professional sales manager has to be a person and a rich speaker. However, holding the same position, and having close observation toward numberless business chargers, I possess different opinion. A successful sales manager is usually prudent, self-disciplined, and achieves goals through effort of the whole team members. He learns humbly, and accumulates wisdom through his team group, as well as foster excellent ability, and great fortitude from failure experience. Thus, he becomes a top manager in his field. This paper discusses the resulted problems and their processing strategies when a sales manager confronts his customer. The author takes his past work experience as a sales manager in a British lubricant oil company as examples. Using the narrative analysis and participant observation method, this paper illustrates living challenges and work experiences on the managements of business and sales. Moreover, the great wisdom and excellent experience from above mentioned cases are respectively verified by the strategic problems solution models of Mckinsey and Company. Keywords: Qualitative Research¡BNarrative Analysis¡BParticipant Observation Method

In a fast-paced office setting, information workers inevitably experience expected and unexpected interruptions daily. As the volume and the diversity of information and application types grow, the impact of frequent interruptions on their task performance gets more severe. To manage the negative effects of interruptions on work performance, workers often engage in task management activities to ensure they are better prepared to resume suspended task less stressfully. However, managing tasks causes additional cognitive burden and a time cost to users who already are experiencing the tight attention and time economies. This dissertation presents an approach to augmenting users' task performance by allowing them to manage and retrieve desired work contexts with ease. The Context Browser, the implementation of the proposed approach, is designed to help the users to explore narratives of their workspace manner and restore their previous work contexts. The goals of implementing the Context Browser are to 1) unload the users? burden of taking care of their task-related or task status information promptly and thus help them focus solely on executing a given task, 2) allow them to browse their previous workspace intuitively, and 3) enhance continuity of their tasks by supporting them to retrieve desired work context more quickly and easily. In order to validate the proposed approach, a user study comparing task performances of the group with the Context Browser to the one without the Context Browser was conducted. The study produced both quantitative and qualitative results. The study confirmed that with the Context Browser subjects expressed better quantitative numbers than the ones without. Subjects using the Context Browser were able to restore and retrieve their desired work setting and task-related information more quickly and correctly. Qualitative results showed that the subjects using the Context Browser found that various contextual cues and the interfaces responsible for providing the cues offered effective artifacts to help them recover both cognitive and work contexts, while the other subjects experienced a difficult time in restoring the desired contexts that were necessary to perform their assigned tasks. In addition, we re-invited 6 subjects from the group without the Context Browser 6 weeks after the study. We asked them to perform the same tasks as the ones they did 6 weeks before with the Context Browser. It showed that with the Context Browser they outperformed their previous performance even after a lengthy period.

The purpose of the present study aimed to develop a comprehensive model that measures the autoethnographic/biographic relevance of dreams, memories, and reflections as they relate to understanding the self and others. A dream, memory, and reflection (DMR) ten item questionnaire was constructed using aspects of Freudian, Jungian, and Lacanian Theory of Dream Interpretation. Fifteen dreams, five memories, and five reflections were collected from the participant at the waking episode or during a moment of deep thought. The DMR analysis was used as the prime matter for creating a narrative document that uses autoethnography and autobiography to deliver a philosophical story about the unconscious reality of the participant. The results of the dissertation study produced a ten section narrative document titled The Shadow of Joaquin that portrayed the benchmarks of the life of the participant that led him to the completion of a doctoral degree in curriculum and instruction. At the final section of the narrative document the postmodern philosophical theory of Labor Percolation is proposed by the researcher as a direct result of the DMR analysis.

My thesis is an attempt to approach Anna¡¦s predicament in Doris Lessing¡¦s The Golden Notebook from the angle of identity crisis. Charles Taylor maintains that in configuring the picture of self-identity, we actually answer the questions of existence. Identity crisis thus expresses the feeling of disorientation and uncertainty about the meaning of life. In The Golden Notebook, Anna is strained under her identity crisis which culminates in the mental collapse. In order to recover from the breakdown, Anna must re-answer the questions of her existence. In the introductory chapter, I give a brief sketch on the concept of the self, focusing on its transition from the Romanticism to the postmodernism. In the postmodern world, the romantic vocabulary of wholeness and personal significance gives way to the postmodern expressions of fragmentation and meaninglessness. Against these two poles, I try to analyze Lessing¡¦s attitudes. This chapter aims to offer the background against which the heroine¡¦s struggle and solution can be better realized. In Chapter One, I survey the concept of self as narrative and elucidate the three dimensions¡Xtemporal, moral, and social¡Xof the self. The main point is that the self is produced in the narrative, and in daily routines the textual identity is confirmed and reinforced. Thus the daily performance serves as the most solid prop to uphold the picture of self-identity. In Chapter Two, I trace the sources of Anna¡¦ identity crisis in light of the collapse of the practical involvements and highlight her syndrome of identity crisis with the aids of the theoretical discussion of the three dimensions. Chapter Tree deals with Anna¡¦s search for the true self, the presence of which presumably can solve her identity problem. The quest for the true self takes the route of her sessions with the therapist Mrs. Marks and the scribbling in the four notebooks. Both fail to produce the true self-narrative. If the self is created in the narrative as the concept of self as narrative suggests, the failure to produce the true self-narrative announces the absence of the true self. In Chapter Four, I examine Saul Green¡¦s features and Anna¡¦s intercourse with him to bring out the hazards of her situation and her reconciliation with the inaccessibility of the true self. By invoking the figure of the boulder-pusher, Anna substitutes the responsible self for the true self. She finally breaks out of the shackle of despair and recovers from her mental breakdown. In conclusion, I emphasize that Lessing is a strongly committed writer. Therefore, Anna¡¦s salvation can be considered as Lessing¡¦s suggestion for those who suffer out of a similar cause how to maintain themselves in the postmodern fragmentary world.

Morrison opens Paradise by constructing a black community based on a traditional, unrelenting patriarchal discourse which seems to be subverted by a rather trivial, private or ¡§feminine¡¨ talk represented by a party of outcast women. Such binary oppositions are thus surfaced continually in the novel and are further intertwined with various genres Morrison draws from myth, fairy tale, romance, biblical story, folklore, vernacular (hi)story, etc. Nevertheless, while elaborating those literary genres and antagonizing sexes, races and classes, she parodies/caricatures and ¡§molests¡¨ them with stereotyped but paradoxical, or contradictory narrative. In so doing, she complicates and revitalizes the seemingly organized but actually paralyzed, unproductive world of language. By fusing and infusing opposite elements into concepts such as stern religious beliefs and one-sided, self-righteous morality, Morrison liberates literature, or language, in a way that it ¡§is both the law and its transgression.¡¨ I quote a phrase from Morrison¡¦s Nobel lecture¡XLanguage¡¦s ¡§force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable¡¨¡Xas part of my title to suggest that her narrative politics¡X¡§stepping in¡¨¡Xis grounded on a sense of human interrelatedness. Demanding as it is, the compassion for distinct individuals, especially for those who are muffled by ¡§representational¡¨ or ¡§monumental¡¨ discourse, is what Morrison tries to gesture toward in her writing. With acute imagination and insightful compassion, she not only voices and makes the ¡§trivial,¡¨ ¡§insignificant¡¨ or ¡§negligible¡¨ things remarkable enough to be juxtaposed with ¡§the grand,¡¨ but also employs them to ¡§step in¡¨ and transform the rather rigid, unreceptive idea of conventional literary canon. Rather than founding a particular ethnic or gendered canon (or hierarchy) to counteract the already dominant, it seems that Morrison appeals to transcend those barriers by releasing the ambiguous, paradoxical and inspiring properties of language, and at the same time, paying deference to diverse, ineffable human differences and experiences.

Focusing on new-journalistic nonfiction novels by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and John Hersey, this dissertation conceptualizes the discursive practices of news-storytelling as a necessary matrix of storytelling and truthtelling activities. Despite the dominant postmodern emphasis on storytelling over truthtelling in such disciplines as literature, historiography, journalism, and legal studies, storytelling-in-the-discipline is also constrained by a set of assumptions and practices about what constitutes professional storytelling. Since news-stories report on events in a public arena where numerous competing stories abound, they are highly aware of other neighboring stories and so relate, compete, and negotiate with other stories to make their stories not merely repetitive but argumentative and re-tellable. As a socially regulated and conditioned discourse, news-storytelling in its enterprise is predicated upon different sets of discursive authorities, material conditions, and audience expectations, where various facts and interpretations are argued, tested, and judged. Chapter I briefly surveys the ways in which news-stories’ claim to referentiality is problematized and even stigmatized by the postmodern ethos of storytelling. Chapter II then explores the discursive dynamics of newsstories, which arise from the paradoxical status of being simultaneously news and a story. Particularly, this chapter highlights the discursive practice of “source marking” and “counter-storytelling” through which news-storytellers foreground their reliability as able researchers, analysts, and contenders. Chapter III discusses the issue of (inter-) textuality in the vectors of storyteller and the world, and examines how news-storytellers draw on, blend into, and counter competing and neighboring stories to situate their own stories in the web of intertextuality and to reinforce the competency, honesty, and quality of their news-stories. Chapter IV is a historical examination of a “transcript” mode, a particular discursive practice of news-storytellers, through which they try to uphold the empirical status of their news-stories. Chapter V concludes the dissertation by arguing that news-stories provide a clarifying vantage point from which to understand the transactions of historical discourse, where newsstorytelling replaces (story) knowledge with argument, poetics with rhetoric, and a story with a discourse.

This qualitative study inquired into the personal experience of three engineering professors and one associate dean who participated in an engineering education coalition—the Foundation Coalition—a National Science Foundation-funded project which attempted to reform undergraduate engineering curricula at six U.S. institutions of higher education. Through analysis of occupational life histories, and data from a larger study of curricular change processes, two dominant social narratives emerged. Cultural attributes of academia were conceptualized as a master narrative. The reform effort emerged as a counter-narrative by calling for a “culture change” in engineering education. I describe five areas where the counter-narrative challenged the master narrative: the rationale and need for educational change, the nature of faculty work, disciplinary relationships, relationships among faculty, and the incentive and reward system. The counter-narrative of reform promoted curricular and pedagogical change, more interdisciplinary and integrated foundations for engineering education, and encouraged partnerships and community over faculty isolation and autonomy. The counter-narrative challenged faculty complicity with the master narrative and offered alternative ways of viewing their role as faculty in higher education. The master and counter-narratives clashed over the nature of faculty work in research universities, fueling the ongoing debate about the relative value of research and teaching and the associated reward system. This study found that the four participants used different strategies to navigate the conflict between the two social narratives. One participant was informed by an ideal vision of engineering education, and never relinquished the quest for an opportunity to realize that vision. Another professor, energized by the collaborative environment created by the Coalition, continued to find creative avenues to partner with others to improve engineering education. A third participant worked, through compromise and accommodation, to craft an improved curriculum that worked within the local institutional culture. And finally, an associate dean, who rejected the duality of the master/counter-narrative worldview, reframed the reform effort by encouraging faculty working in educational change to view their work as scholarship. The findings from this study support faculty engagement in the scholarship of teaching and learning and encourage faculty developers to find ways of supporting faculty in that effort.

Writing a good story requires immense patience, creativity and work from the author, and the practice of writing a story requires a good grasp of the readers' psychology to create suspense and thrills and to merge the readers' world with that of the story. In the digital writing space, authors can still adhere to these rules of thumb while being aware of the disappearance of certain constraints due to the added possibility of narrating in a nonlinear fashion. There are many overlapping approaches to interactive storytelling or authoring, but each of the approaches has its own strengths and weaknesses. The motivation for this research arises from the perceived need for a new hybrid approach that coalesces and extends existing approaches. Since each of the approaches empowers certain aspects of the storytelling and narration process, the result forces a new research direction which eliminates certain weaknesses exhibited by a single approach, due to the synergistic nature of the various approaches. We have developed: 1) a Hybrid Evolutionary-Fuzzy Time-based Interactive (HEFTI) storytellling engine that generates dynamic stories from a set of authored story constructs given by human authors; 2) a set of authoring tools that allow authors to generate the needed story constructs; and, 3) a storytelling environment for them to orchestrate a digital stage play with computer agents and scripts. We have conducted a usability study and system evaluation to evaluate the performance of the engine. Our experiments and usability study have shown that the authoring environment abstracted the complexity of authoring an interactive, dynamic story from the authors with the use of windows-based interfaces to help them visualize various aspects of a story. This reduces the amount of learning and knowledge required to start having the pleasure of authoring dynamic stories. The studies also revealed certain features and tools that may be reflected by authoring tools in the future to automate various aspects of the authoring process so that the authors may spend more time thinking rather than writing (or programming) their stories.