“All the World's a Stage” and Sociologists Its Storytellers: Contemporary Sociology and the Art of Telling a Good Story

Introduction

It is not by chance that Jaques’ words in William Shakespeare’s As You Like it are so often quoted, nor is it a coincidence that in a scientific article focusing on sociology, Shakespeare’s words are an inspirational motto. As a matter of fact, literature was at the basis of the changes leading to the so called “narrative turn” (Hyvärinen, 2016), which could explain the current interest in storytelling and story-related concepts.

In recent years, there has been an amazing range of initiatives under the umbrella of “storytelling”. Informed mainly by media communication, marketing and branding fields, the word is all around us, crossing disciplines, professions and practices. Small and large companies, travelers and tourists, Chefs and artists, “vulnerable” and “successful” people, but also politicians, policymakers and scientists, many use stories and related metaphors. Sociology is no exception from this trend. As Berger and Quinney (2004) advocate, professional storytellers have become more visible and “sociologists have become storytellers” (p. 8).

In a 1984 New York Times’ article titled “Why Scholars Become Storytellers”, Frederika Randall noted an increasing interest of scholars working in the social sciences, namely anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and historians, in an expanding literary dimension. By that time, it was said that “the enthusiasm for a literary model of social inquiry is less evident among sociologists and psychologists than it is among historians and anthropologists” (Randall, 1984, §13). However, recently, such an interest has become more and more visible. At the beginning of 2019, “Storytelling: Sociological Methods, Motives, and Mantras” was the title of the Annual Meeting of the North Central Sociological Association, held on March 29 & 30, Hyatt Regency, Cincinnati, OH. The program heralded that “A consistent theme throughout the program is the power of stories” (NCSA, 2019, p. 4). What is, after all, the power of stories and storytelling?

Across different fields, stories offer a way of presenting and understanding the complexity of social life while using familiar conventions. A story “is a form of knowledge that is readily retained and recalled” and it “goes beyond the medium in which it is delivered, recognisable in written, spoken, sung, acted, danced and pictorial representations” (Bradby, 2017, p. 8). Using macro-structures with beginnings, middles, and ends, and micro-structures entailing specific characters, scenarios and plots, stories include a universal language, which is easily recognised and reproduced (Polletta, Chen, Gardner & Motes, 2011). Stories somehow “assign order where there seems to be chaos and confusion” (Erasga, 2010, p. 22). Through stories, what seems to be a personal daily experience is perceived as a social problem or it allows exercising the sociological imagination, i.e., understanding “the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals” (Mills, 1959, p. 5). The relationship between storytelling and the sociological imagination is obvious and has already been recognized by authors working in related fields. According to Erasga, “[s]ociological imagination is an open invitation to theorize via the stories we tell ourselves and others” (Erasga, 2010, p. 21). Bradby (2017) says that “[t]aking story seriously as a method and a medium for representing aspects of human experience in social context responds to the call to exercise sociological imagination (Mills, 1959)” (p. 14).