Brenton Faber Chapter 4 Summary

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Throughout the third and fourth chapters of Brenton Faber's Community Action and Organizational Change: Image, Narrative, Identity, Faber describes the effects of habits and narratives on change within an organization. Chapter three of the 2002 narrative chronicles Faber's experience with habits in his personal and professional lives in which he surmises that "habits and routines … help us interpret and structure daily life" (51). He goes on to conclude that the underlying connector his stories of change and discourse are habits and routines (67). The author transitions into chapter four by linking habits, culture, and narrative. Faber acknowledges "to change the ways we behave, think, or learn requires a change in the structures we use to …show more content…

However, I am unsure how these procedures could be used by students and am further confused as to the purpose of most of his narratives. He somehow uses habits to tie together his personal stories of living in the American west with his professional experience helping a bank change its structure. In chapter two he devotes twenty-four pages to telling readers the problems faced by a massage school followed by the solutions he implemented, I understand this was done to show how narratives and objectives are important but the amount of detail was unnecessary. Faber takes multiple unrelated personal anecdotes, research from other professionals, and his arguments and mashes them together in an attempt to further his points. This large amount of information, inserted for both informative and entertainment reasons, makes it hard to find the key sections backing up his argument. Similar to the first two chapters of his book, Faber continually makes points only to tell us they will be described again in upcoming chapters or that they were described previously. This makes his work seem disorganized and furthers the feeling that I am not understanding the key points of the reading. While I recognize the use of anecdotes to entertain the reader, the amount of unrelated stories frustrates me as a reader. As Faber's book continues I must now become better at

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