Microstoria: reducing the pro-elite bias in management research

Much management research, more than perhaps any other neighbouring social science, and especially in recent times, has been organised around elites – founders, CEOs, top management teams, and board members – as the privileged locus and production site of meaningful knowledge. We propose microstoria as a methodological frame which could contribute to reducing that pro-elite bias by shedding light on how organisational and working life is experienced by significantly under-represented groups – non-elite workers, contingent labour, and others on the periphery of the firm – who are often overlooked (or even rejected) by traditional management research programmes. We give some examples of microstoria methodology in use, including an illustration of strategy-as-practice (SaP). The approach debunks wrongly positioned views that a focus on the smaller stories is insignificant and lacks impact. Instead, considering them includes the much-neglected stories: placing small units of research within the bigger context, microstoria prioritises the creation and sharing of contemporaneous storylines of people or groups whose polyphonic voices are often subjugated in objective discourse. We present a frame for conducting microstoria research and argue that its conduct helps researchers look in newer and more impactful places than in traditional top-down methods only.