Narratives without meaning?

Abstract

I will proceed from my reading of Abell's paper to discuss one key issue in the new approach to sociological analysis that Abell calls comparative narratives, that Andrew Abbott (in press) calls narrative positivism, and that I (1989) call event structure analysis. Lest I give the impression that I do not like Abell's contribution, I begin by noting that I appreciate his work practically as a fan. I routinely think of abstractions in terms of homomorphisms since reading Abell's earlier works. An abstract narrative must preserve some of the orderings present in the parent (more concrete) narratives in order to be sensible, therefore orderings in the parent narratives constrain the abstraction, and homomorphisms provide an elegant way of dealing with such constraints. Moreover, I think that the relaxed binary operation that Abell has introduced in this article advances the formal description of narratives in a way that corresponds to common sense, at least in some applications. Additionally, Abell's new definition seems to deal with abstract actions of different durations—a befuddling problem of real importance, as Abbott (in press) emphasized. That said, my agenda is to suggest that Abell inappropriately slights semantic analysis in his approach, that so do others who are developing technology in this area—despite the potential consequence of encouraging “mindless methodology”, and that help in dealing with the problem might be attained by turning to other disciplines that focus on qualitative materials, especially linguistics.