{"id":2698,"date":"2019-10-15T08:00:57","date_gmt":"2019-10-15T13:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/?p=2698"},"modified":"2019-10-17T15:05:39","modified_gmt":"2019-10-17T20:05:39","slug":"what-makes-a-good-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/2019\/10\/15\/what-makes-a-good-story\/","title":{"rendered":"What Makes a Good Story?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Illustration of Game of Thrones<\/em> characters who are unimpressed while watching the show. By Silueta Production House<\/a> via Vimeo.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s face it: lots of fans<\/a> despised the final season of Game of Thrones<\/em>. Earlier this year, Scientific American<\/em> suggested<\/a> that\u2019s because the storytelling style changed from sociological to psychological. When the storytelling was sociological, the characters evolved often in dramatic, unpredictable ways in response to the broader institutional settings, and the countervailing incentives and norms that surrounded them. When the style switched to psychological, viewers had to identify with the characters on a personal level and become invested in them for the story to work. Within this individualistic framing, characters\u2019 unexpectedly evil actions and untimely deaths stopped making sense. As it happens, not only is sociological storytelling an important driver in keeping audiences devoted, it can also be a powerful tool in crafting a persuasive research article.
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Research suggests that storytelling is powerful precisely because it gives human faces to abstract social forces, emplotting them as combatants over the very problems which social theory endeavors to understand — conflict, inequality, and modernization, to name but a few. Andrew Abbott thus argues for a lyrical sociology that recreates the experience of social discovery in the reader. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffmann Davis similarly suggest that to capture the complexity, dynamics, and subtlety of human experience and organizational life, one must document the voices and visions of the people they are studying.
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