近年來,敘事分析在社會學中蔚然成風,本文旨在系統梳理"敘事"的特質與理論意涵,以此提出敘事社會學"故事"與"講故事"兩種路徑,并整合已有的研究主題和方法,對敘事社會學的研究圖景進行展望。筆者首先回顧了敘事研究的多學科源流,集中論述了"敘事"的四大特征:普遍重要性、具體時間性、內在因果性與潛在反抗性,并在此基礎上展開對兩種路徑的論述。第一種路徑關注故事的構成元素、結構模型與網絡表征,發展出針對敘事網絡的結構性分析,第二種路徑關注敘事情境效應、敘事者效應以及敘事的社會效用,發展出反思性的敘事行為分析。本文對兩種方式各自存在的優缺點進行初步探索,指出糅合兩種方式的可能性,提出在豐富敘事相關概念的基礎上,以"故事形態學"切入敘事,由此增進我們對當下中國社會的理解。

Narrative analysis has recently prevailed in sociological studies as an important method. Four dimensions of the concept of narrative,i. e.,ubiquitousness,concreteness of time,internal causality,and underlying resistance,are analyzed in details in this paper,based on which story and storytelling are proposed as two main research approaches that lay the infrastructure of narrative sociology. The first approach focuses on the constitutive elements, formal models and network representation of narratives,which applies network analysis to the content of stories. The second approach focuses on the effect of context and narrator, as well as the social consequences of narration,which evolves into reflective analysis of the behavior of storytelling. Given the respective advantages of these two approaches, the author provides a tentative integrative framework for the sociological study of stories and to describe the morphology of stories as a prospective path to narrative sociology in China.