Narratives and Performance - The Case of Stock-broking

The performance of individual stockbrokers differs. This paper aims at explaining these differences, or at least at making some sense of them. In a study of fourteen stockbrokers, the high performing brokers described their working life in a systematically different way, compared to the low performing brokers. The high and low performing brokers gave fundamentally different accounts of what, from an outsider’s viewpoint, seemed to be very similar work and working conditions. <p> The brokers’ different accounts are interpreted and reconstructed into two opposing narratives of stockbrokers’ world of working. In an ideal typical sense these two narratives explain, or at least make sense of, the stockbrokers’ different levels of performance.