A Narrative View of Curiosity in Organizations

How can managers be curious and incurious at the same time? This question emerged as a puzzling anomaly from interview data collected with operational managers and supervisors confronting early signals of platform-economy disruption. Rather than stable differences across respondents, we observed rapid within-interview oscillation, sometimes within seconds, between curiosity toward novelty and judgmental rejection of it. This pattern sits uneasily with both trait- and state-based accounts of curiosity, which assume individuals are either curious or not in a given situation. Engaging in abductive analysis to find the best explanation for this anomaly, we develop a narrative perspective on curiosity grounded in the concept of narrative affordances. Drawing on antenarrative analysis of interview data, we show how managers draw on a repertoire of narrative genres that carry positive or negative valence toward novelty, thereby socially constructing curiosity or incuriosity in the flow of storytelling. Our findings suggest that curiosity is not simply located in an individual's personality or mental state, but rather accomplished in the transient subject positions enacted through ongoing narrative work. We contribute a narrative affordance perspective that reframes curiosity as socially constructed and genre-mediated, extending our understanding of how language and narrative structure shape epistemic openness in organizational life.