In the examples that follow, I show how each
aspect of narrative data has been used in organizational
theory. Not all aspects are equally relevant
to every question, and focusing attention
on one feature tends to reduce the attention paid
to others. Furthermore, adding additional features
may increase accuracy, but usually at the
cost of simplicity or generality. In this section I
explore the broad outline of these tradeoffs by
showing how certain features of narrative can
be particularly useful as indicators for certain
kinds of questions, as summarized in Table 1.
Throughout this discussion I use the bare minimum
definition of narrative as "pure event sequence"
as a baseline against which to make
tradeoffs and comparisons.