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Department of Linguistics

Communication in Professions and Organisations

THE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

 

What is Discourse?

In one sense, discourseis simply language in use. As such, discourse reflects our social practices and strategic actions - but it also makes them possible, and to a significant degree shapes them. In a broader sense, discourse includes all forms of meaning-making and sense-taking, nowadays mediated by a wide range of semiotic systems and technologies based on text-based, graphic, aural, and multimodal symbolism.

In this broad sense, discourse as the negotiation of meaning mediates and shapes all human interaction, our institutional systems of knowledge production (academic disciplines, sciences, ). Less obviously, it mediates systems of social regulation and underlies the exercise of power or control by individuals, organizations, and institutions.

 

What is Discourse Analysis?

There are many versions of discourse analysis. A major division can be made between those approaches that include detailed analysis of texts and those that do not. Discourse analysis as it is practiced in the social sciences is often strongly influenced by the work of Michel Foucault (see Foucault 1972, Fairclough 1992). Researchers working in this tradition typically pay little attention to actual texts (written or oral), their linguistic features and their content. Linguists have traditionally leant in the other direction, but more recently they are complementing their linguistic analyses of authentic documents and transcripts of spoken interactions with a concern for social-psychological and social issues, as well as other dimensions of context.

Norman Fairclough (1992) stated that Discourse Analysis operates on empirical data at three levels of abstraction:

Texts      language, linguistic structure, other semiotic structures, genre
Discursive practices   ask who produces texts, and how, when and why; the production of texts, and the uses made of texts
Social practices the interactional and/or institutional (i.e. social) behaviours that are mediated by language and discursive practices

What is a Discourse?

[Note: We are here using the term in its countable meaning!]

Some definitions:

‘By a “Discourse,” with a capital “D” (Gee, 1990, 1992a), I mean people coordinating and being coordinated by (Knorr Cetina, 1992) - in thought, word, deed, feeling, values, interactions - other people, things, technologies, as well as material, symbolic, and institutional resources, at certain times and places, so as to assume certain “recognizable” identities (e.g. as a Los Angeles African-American street gang member, urban tagger, Chomskian theoretical linguist, particle physicist, a feminist of a given type, a regular at the local bar, or a member of the bar, or “just one of us” where “us” may have many, few, or no formal labels).’

Discourses are ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes. (Gee, 1996, p. 127)

Discourses can be defined as "connected sets of statements, concepts, terms and expressions,
which constitute a way of talking about or writing about a particular issue, thus framing the way people understand and act with respect to that issue" (Foucault, 1980; Watson, 1994).

Are there other key terms that need definition? Suggestions gratefully received – along with any suggested definitions.

Students are invited to submit candidate definitions that add to those above or which are more specific, i.e. relate to their own workplace. In other word, try to contextualize your definition. Send suggestions to Alan.Jones@ling.mq.edu.au  The published form may be the result of a negotiation (or editing).

On the contentious link between discourse and ideology, here is an intriguing passage from Pete Thomas (1998) 'Ideology and Discourse of Strategic Management: A Critical Research Framework.'

The strength of ideological control lies in the fact that subjects regard themselves as in control of the meaning of the discourse they speak; that they are the origin of meaning not the product of it. However, such a relationship is imaginary and involves a misrecognition on the part of the individual who assumes she is the author of the ideology that constructs her subjectivity (Weedon 1987). In the context of organization, Alvesson and Willmott (1996) discuss the identity of managers and suggests that corporate life (especially, I would argue, discourse) encourages managers to identify themselves primarily as managers (as opposed to alternatives such as, family member, female or employee). Thus, the ideological structures and discourses of organizations allow individuals to construct themselves as subjects called managers, who believe themselves to be self-made and who voluntarily hold dear values of, "... responsibility, loyalty, work morale, result orientation" (Alvesson & Willmott 1996:173).

 

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