OF STORIES PARTLY TOLD AND PARTIALLY HEARD:An Exploration of Presentations of Practice

The practice of inviting managers and leaders to make formal presentations telling the story of their experience to others is widespread. In this paper we explore these as one manifestation of the transfer of management practices. We include among those considered, a range of speakers from high profile “circuit speakers” to unknown “experience sharers”. A conceptualization of the nature of practice transfer between speaker and audience is developed. Initial theoretical expectations were that successful transfer stories would appear as “factual description” with causal connections, attributed agency and intentional acts. Our investigation, however, found stories that were rich...