Guest Editors' Introduction

Before the printing press and the spread of the written word, we know, of course, that cultures were almost entirely oral. They relied on spoken stories, repeated ritualistically, to create a history, a sense of being, and an identity. In these cultures, storytellers preserved important knowledge, telling and retelling narratives as they helped form and reproduce a common culture. The concept of culture, then, has always been intimately connected to the concept of narrative. Today, the technology exists to record information in more permanent forms. Indeed, far more information can be recorded than people can assimilate, organize, or use meaningfully and—because of technological advances—people’s ability to experience the world has also grown exponentially. Given this information overload, we speculate that the growing interest in narrative—specifically, narratives in and about professional and public life—is, in part, a response to a human need to make meaning and to forge connections between seemingly disparate bits of knowledge and experience. Like those spoken stories in oral cultures, narratives in professional and public life bind people to one another in social groups, enabling people to continuously produce and reproduce the cultures they hold in common. Making connections for understanding and helping to create common cultures are not new objectives for scholars in professional communication and for professional communicators in the workplace. The documents they write—journal articles, organizational mission and vision statements, specifications and user manuals, newsletters— all aim to shape culture. Increasingly, however, scholars and professional communicators are becoming unabashed storytellers, listeners and supporters of others’ stories, and cultural analysts. Using ethnographic and case study methodologies, for example, scholars and professional communicators join with their participants in generating and telling stories relevant to professional communication— influencing, no doubt, the cultures studied and, potentially, the researchers’ cultures and those of their readers. In addition, exploring narrative within organizational settings, scholars and professional communicators examine the important roles it plays in the discourse