Measuring which stories circulate

Research in the UK Ministry of Defence examined attitudes to emissions reduction and the challenge of incorporating climate concern into an institutional culture organised historically around operational effectiveness. It was submitted as evidence to the UK Parliament's Environmental Audit Committee.

The design combined a quantitative survey establishing the distribution of attitudes with forty interviews built around the storytelling halo: rituals, rites, legends, myths, sagas, heroes and villains, jargon, jokes, norms, and what is sacred or taboo.

This is the methodology behind the site's Narrative Landscape Mapper. A survey established the distribution of attitudes; forty interviews built around the storytelling halo reached the legends, jokes, sagas and jargon that sustain them. Four discourses emerged, each of them a story about identity rather than a position on a factual question.

From Chapter Five: Method

There were aphoristic nuggets and jargon that could act as circuit breakers, cutting through longer arguments: 'Risk to Life' (signalling basic, incontestable danger) and 'pointy end' (a shorthand for operational realities and risk) featured in the “discourse of exceptionalism” by emphasising unavoidable operational realities.

Method · Application

1. What are the jokes here, and what do they make it impossible to say seriously?
2. Who are the legends, and what does the organisation authorise by retelling them?
3. What shorthand exists for a problem — and what does its existence tell you?
4. Which of your circulating discourses could be amplified rather than argued with?

Chapter Five: Method — the chapter carries the evidence and the close reading this page only points at.

Status: the passage from the book above is quoted verbatim and checked against the source · surrounding context is site-written · author review required · no case facts introduced from outside the manuscript