Research + Resources + Commentary

Research Landscape

Ethics of storytelling (newest to oldest)

Keywords: story economy, instrumentalized storytelling, organizational storytelling.

Ethics of narrative practice (newest to oldest)

The research landscape is dominated by narrative academics studying texts collected from an organization’s communications. (When practitioners discuss ethics they are typically concerned with whether their messages create social good.)

Practical resources for communicators are dominated by practitioners making recommendations based on their own experiences.

No research on the impact of storytelling on participants is known; it would be very difficult to conduct a true study of ethical practices, as a control group would require withholding ethical practices from some participants.

Nonprofit Quarterly, December 7, 2020.
Ethical Storytelling for Nonprofits and Philanthropy

Photographers Without Borders (living)
Code of Ethics

Social Impact Solutions, September 4, 2025.
How You Can Conduct Ethical Nonprofit Storytelling

Voice of Witness
VOW’s Ethical Storytelling Principles

Voice of Witness
VOW’s Trauma-Informed Storytelling Practices

For Clinicians Who Write Essays About Patients: Conceptual Review of Consent and Ethical Considerations
by Ashlan S. Willett, Aaron Levy and Rita Charon, 2026.
Abstract: In this essay, we reflect on the ethical dimensions that arise when a clinician-writer considers publishing a nonfiction account that describes a patient or exposes private aspects of the writer's self. More.

Small Stories in Charity Fundraising Letters
by Andrea MacRae, 2022.
Abstract: The explicit imperative to “tell a story” recently dominating UK and US fundraising discourse refers specifically to the central compelling “story” of the representative victim/beneficiary, and yet there are multiple stories at work in charity fundraising letters, with interdependent narrative trajectories. This article draws on small stories research and on scholarship on storytelling and ethics to explore the relative narrativity of the stories within charity fundraising letters and their marked contingence upon lack of resolution. More.

Dangers of Narrative: A Critical Approach to Narratives of Personal Experience in Contemporary Story Economy
by Maria Mäkelä, Samuli Björninen, Laura Karttunen, Matias Nurminen, Juha Raipola, Tytti Rantanen, May 2021.
Abstract: The current storytelling boom across various spheres of life encourages actors from individuals to businesses and institutions to instrumentalize stories of personal experience, but the search for a "compelling story" is often blind to the possible downsides of experientially and emotionally engaging narratives. More.

Personal Storytelling in Professionalized Social Movements
by Francesca Polletta, Tania DoCarmo, et. al.
Abstract: Professionalized movement organizations today rely on outside expertise in fundraising, recruitment, lobbying, management, and public messaging. We argue that the risks that accompany that development have less to do with experts’ mixed loyalties to the movement than with the tendency of expert discourse to remake political problems into technical ones, thereby obscuring the dilemmatic choices movement groups must make. More.

Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling
by Sujatha Fernandes, 2017.
Curated Stories seeks to understand the rise of this storytelling culture alongside a broader shift to neoliberal free market economies.… The book is also concerned with how we might reclaim storytelling as a craft that allows for the fullness and complexity of experience to be expressed in pursuit of transformative social change. More.

Other People's Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy
by Amy Shuman, 2010.
Abstract: Amy Shuman examines the social relations embedded in stories and the complex ethical and social tensions that surround their telling. Drawing on innovative research and contemporary theory, she describes what happens when one person's story becomes another person's source of inspiration, or when entitlement and empathy collide. More.

Harnessing Narrative Persuasion for Good
by Kirk Cheyfitz, 2023.
Towards bridging the gap between academic study and impact storytelling for political and social change. More.

Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind
by Christian Salmon, 2007.
In Storytelling Christian Salmon looks at the twenty-first century hijacking of creative imagination, anatomizing the timeless human desire for narrative form, and how this desire is abused by the marketing mechanisms that bolster politicians and their products. More.