Living in Narrative: Commentary on Fiore and McDaniel

Abstract

In their article, Fiore and McDaniel rightly note the challenges of working at a distance due to the lack of the visual, auditory, and verbal cues humans routinely and expertly use in face-to-face situations to convey and interpret messages (Clark & Brennan, 1991; Olson & Olson, 2000). They raise many salient issues and questions about the potential of narrative to improve distributed work. Because narrative is a thinking tool (Herman, 2003) and can broadly encompass cognitive, affective, social, and cultural dimensions, we agree that narrative has potential to support intersubjective understanding among distributed work teams. Our commentary focuses on how this potential may be realized.