Ethical Storytelling

Telling stories about people — narrated by organizations — ethically.

Ethical storytelling is practicing organizational storytelling with consideration to ethical principles.

The practice of telling stories as communication presents new ethical concerns for communicators:

  • Telling a person’s life story — narrated by an organization — can impact their narrative agency (the ability to make independent decisions about how they see the world and their place in it)

  • A power dynamic is always present between a nonprofit and someone who benefits from the nonprofit, creating the potential for unintended exploitation

  • When certain types of stories can translate to financial gain (e.g. donations), an organization can find its operational needs in opposition to ethical storytelling practices

Organizational storytelling sits at the intersection of communications: creating narrative text, but using it to benefit an organization. The best practices communicators borrowed from journalism and media don’t extend to the ethical issues that are raised by this specific practice, including narrative agency, identity and exploitation.

Narrative theory provides informative critique and modeling & simulation practices reveal a path forward.

Ethical storytelling requires investment in internal systems and processes to establish ethical practices — and protect them when there is pressure to produce stories.

Ethical Production
How should communicators produce personal stories within organizational communications in a way that ethically engages with story participants? When digital media and Web 2.0 created demand for storytelling from organizations, there were no best practices to follow. There is no known study on the impacts of different practices; it would be nearly impossible to conduct a scientific study as it would be unethical to create a control group.

Resource: Voice of Witness’ Ethical Storytelling Principles

Social Impact
What is the social impact created by telling this story? Does it reinforce negative stereotypes? Does it encourage people to support social change “for good”? This area focuses on the meaning of the story, and whether the story is instrumentalized for social good. Tension exists between critique and practice, particularly on the topic of ethical storytelling. Little has been published about this tension.

Resource: Better Conversations about Ethical Storytelling and Harnessing Narrative Persuasion for Good.

Narrative Ethics
Narrative scholars have shown interest in this new type of text — personal stories told by organizations — and conducted research by studying texts organizations have published. Criticism mostly considers the relationship between the teller and the audience, has examined ethical issues including instrumentalized storytelling, the story economy, and authorship. As most narrative scholars do not have access to the production process, criticism has been restricted to the texts. Story-critical.

Resource: Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling and Personal Storytelling in Professionalized Social Movements.