Project Narratives That Potentially Perform and Change the Future

This article develops a framework for applying organizational narrative theory to understand project narratives that potentially perform and change the future. Project narratives are temporal but often get repeated throughout the project life cycle to stabilize meaning, and could be about project mission, vision, identity, value creation, and so forth. Project narratives have important implications for organizational identity and image crafting. This article differentiates among different types of project narratives in relation to a project life cycle, providing case studies of project narratives on three major UK rail projects. We then set out the future research agenda into project narrative work.