Using Narratives and Portraits to Foster Reflexivity and Learning from Experience in Healthcare Organizations in Italy and Norway

This chapter positions the narrative approach as consolidated practice in the field of organizational studies, and explores and expands its potential to detect the interpretations that practitioners make of the realities in which they live, thus to grasp their cultural, social, personal, practical features. The use of ad hoc narratives as an art-based method is discussed as a way to foster reflexivity and learning from experience. Narratives are presented with illustrative examples from two different healthcare fields as a means for detecting material and symbolic dimensions, the weaving of roles, objects, critical incidents, shifting points, routine in use, which can be elaborated on, developing negotiation and relational processes. The distinctive feature of this approach is the relational texture that develops around a narrative and reflexive space, which is a basic condition in our proposal of art-based intervention.