Peter Brophy, Professor of Information Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, and author of seminal books such as The Library in the Twenty‐first Century (2001), The Academic Library (2005) and Measuring Library Performance: Principles and Techniques (2006) sets out to transcend information science applications beyond the walls of the library or rational boundaries, into the realm of their natural social context. Narrative‐based practice (NBP) proposes old and new theoretical premises and a vision for the adoption of narration and storytelling as a qualitative process in organisational and research practices.
This tour de force sweeps the reader into a gradation of arguments and investigations leading to NBP as a method which “values narrative, in its many forms, as one of the richest means of developing understanding, of informing decision making, of creating and sharing knowledge and of acting widely” (p. 132) and which “offers opportunities to enhance professional practice to the benefit of practitioners and clients alike” (p. 148). The first chapter on evidence‐based practice exposes the shortcomings of this quantitative method and leads into an outline of human behavior theories and approaches. A core chapter on the nature of narrative explores its socio‐historical context together with its structural characteristics and intrinsic components. Here, Brophy limits his research to contemporary sources of narrative theories, leaving out the long‐forgotten discipline of rhetoric. This leads into a discussion on learning and pedagogy. So prepared, the reader is able to grasp a new framework of wisdom. Ethics and holistic perspectives feature prominently in this framework as hitherto excluded significant components. A chapter on narrative in virtual worlds renders the book worthy of a twenty‐first century discourse and uncovers new forms of digital storytelling idiomatic tools. The final two chapters propose applications of NBP to organisational knowledge management. Three appendixes exemplify how NBP could be put into practice.
It takes an imaginative narrator to compose a discourse where each chapter is a scholarly essay on its topic, creditable of being compulsory course reading for many a tertiary disciplines, while persuasively enriching the reader's understanding of NBP. The narrative is erudite yet imaginative: “Stories possess subtle, half‐hidden rhythms of what it is like to be human, to live in this crazy, frustrating, fascinating, exciting world” (p. 34). There are few scholarly books that could contribute so much to knowledge in such a compelling way.
