Narratives and Interpretation

In this chapter, we delve deeper into the realm of stories, or narratives. This endeavor is particularly worthwhile if we acknowledge that our knowledge of the world is largely shaped by narratives. We discuss several functions of narrative which are relevant to our study of sustainability leadership, in and through governance. Narratives create meaning, they define problems, solution and methods and they connect values, feelings and ideas. Even more fundamentally, narratives create community, which involves patterns of openness and closure, of inclusion and exclusion. We develop a succinct theory of interpretation to extend our understanding of stories and their roles in governance and community, with special emphasis on the concepts of genre, audience and medium, the structuring of time through stories and the position of stories that select other stories and keep them in place: master narratives.