Terminology
Organizational storytelling uses terminology from multiple disciplines.
Ethical storytelling is of interest to communicators as a practice and to narrative scholars as an area of study. Sometimes the same terms have different meaning — sometimes different terms are used for the same meaning. In general, Literature & Narrative scholars have more differentiated terms for types of texts, and Communications terms are more aligned with journalism.
Learn about the background to this interdisciplinary practice here.
Literature & Narrative
Ethical storytelling
Organizational storytelling
Corporate storytelling
Instrumentalized storytelling
The practice of sharing personal stories to build support or influence.
Producing and publishing a personal story as an instrument towards a strategic goal, such as public relations, political or communications goal. The story can be instrumentalized by an organization or an individual.
The story that is produced — whether in written or video format.
Instrumentalized stories (an impact story is a subset of instrumentalized stories).
The practice of producing communications narrated by an organization or its spokesperson. Living Handbook of Narratology has published a definition of corporate storytelling.
Text
True
Story economy
Organizational storytelling
Universal and unchanging.
Journalism , Media & Communications
Generally refers to narrative ethics when used by a narrative academic. The Living Handbook of Narratology has published a definition of narrative ethics.
Just “storytelling”:
The practice of telling impact stories to communicate an organization’s impact.
Verifiable through fact-checking
Impact stories
Impact storytelling
True
Just “storytelling”:
Generally refers to the ethical production of impact storytelling, including consent and power dynamics.
Content or Copy
Would be considered a subset of public relations.
A piece of text for a communication e.g. website content, newsletter content, social media content.
Stories that describe the impact created by a nonprofit or social change organization.