Sage Research Methods

Discourse Analysis

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Author: Nelson Phillips, Cynthia Hardy

Pub. Date: 2011
Product: Sage Research Methods
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412983921
Methods: Discourse analysis, Naturally occurring data, Research questions
Keywords: discourse, identity, organizations, refugees, Social Construction Theory, collaboration, HIV/AIDS
Disciplines: Communication and Media Studies, Education, Psychology, Sociology
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Access Date: February 25, 2025

Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Online ISBN: 9781412983921

© 2011 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Front Matter

• Copyright
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Preface

Chapters

• What Is Discourse Analysis?

• The Variety of Discourse Analysis
• Our Research Program
• The Challenges of Discourse Analysis
• Conclusions

Back Matter

• References
• About the Author
• Qualitative Research Methods

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Copyright

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Series Editors’ Introduction

How do our notions of a “nation,” the “individual,” or even the “social” come about, solidify, shift, reemerge,
and guide our thought and action? How do such taken-for-granted ideas concerning work, family, freedom,
and authority become seemingly natural, objective, autonomous features of the world? How do these
presuppositions influence, for example, the way we judge refugees as attractive and welcome or disruptive
and dangerous? Or more critically, what is a refugee anyway? What constitutes the definitional character of
such a label, and when do we apply it to specific people and groups? What are the consequences of our talk
(and application)?

These questions (and more) are bedrock dilemmas associated with any investigation of the social world. They
are messy matters to say the least, but they cut to the core of social science and raise quite serious empirical,
epistemological, and philosophical questions about what is “real.” They are subversive questions to be sure.
When taken seriously, they undermine our often too confident sense that language and representation are
unproblematic. To examine discourse requires an investigator to ask—in highly specified contexts—just how
particular ideas, concepts, and perspectives come into being and are sustained. Moreover, it asks what the
consequences are of a specified discourse for particular parties (some of whom may not have had much to
do with the forming of a set discourse but must nonetheless live with the results).

Nelson Phillips and Cynthia Hardy, in this the 50th volume of the Sage Series on Qualitative Research
Methods, provide a crisp, elegant, and quite practical introduction to this growing field. Discourse Analysis,
as the authors make clear, is more than a simple method of discovery. It rests on a powerful theory detailing
and explaining how the social world is understood. The empirical materials of discourse consist of sets of
texts and the practices that surround their production, dissemination, and reception. As a domain of study,
discourse analysis concerns not only selected texts but the history and context associated with these texts.
How such texts can be unpacked and understood as “reality constructors” is the point and purpose of this
volume. Both are worthy, timely, and well served.

J.V. M.
P.K. M.
M.L. M.

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Preface

What is discourse analysis? How do I do it? These two questions, asked in different ways by a variety of
students and colleagues, have led us to write this book. The recent interest in discourse analysis as a method
has led to a growing number of books and articles on the topic. However, no book has appeared that provides
a concise, straightforward guide to the practice of discourse analysis combined with a discussion of the
philosophy that underlies it. We have tried to fill this gap in the literature by providing a concise practical
guide for researchers who are interested in understanding and using discourse analysis. The book has been
written with a broad and diverse audience in mind: doctoral students who are starting out their careers
by embarking on discourse analysis; more seasoned researchers who are turning to discourse analysis to
complement other modes of inquiry; experienced discourse analysts who are interested in seeing how other
researchers have used this methodology; and finally to academics who want to learn about discourse analysis
to understand other authors’ work even if they do not intend to use it themselves.

How successful we are in providing a guide that motivates and helps aspiring discourse analysts we leave
to our readers to judge. We do know that, from our perspective, it has been a rewarding experience to
reflect on how discourse analysts have begun to create their own discourse of organizations through the
growing number of conferences, workshops, books, special issues, and articles on the topic and how our own
approach has developed within the context of these broader events. Although we find the growth of discourse
analysis encouraging, at the same time, we would not want this methodology to become so institutionalized
that it loses its highly reflexive nature. As methods become formalized, they run the risk of being reified into
a sort of research machine where researchers are reduced to technicians who simply turn a methodological
handle and produce “truth.” A major advantage of working in a new area is the constant pressure to think
about your own role in the research process and to be aware of how you have “made it all up.” We have found
that the benefits of such regular reflection on the nature of research and the role of the researcher have far
outweighed the difficulties of using a relatively undeveloped methodology.

Like all academic work, this book only exists because of the help and creative insights of a number of other
people. We are particularly indebted to two friends and colleagues with whom many of the ideas that appear
in this book were first developed. Tom Lawrence and Steve Maguire have been our coauthors in a stimulating
and productive collaboration that has formed the foundation of our understanding of discourse analysis. Over
the course of several research projects, and a number of books and articles, we have learned to apply and
explain discourse analysis by working with them. Thanks, guys—we owe you a beer.

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We would also like to acknowledge Davide Ravasi, Ian Palmer, and Stewart Clegg, with whom we have
written papers we refer to in this book, as well as Susan Ainsworth, André Spicer, David Grant, and Cliff
Oswick, who reviewed an early draft of the manuscript. Reading a first draft is never an easy task, and we
appreciate the time and effort you all put into reading and commenting on this book. We would also like
to thank the editors of Sage's Qualitative Research Methods series, especially John Van Maanen, for their
encouragement and insight. On a pragmatic note, this book was written while Nelson Phillips was a Dyason
Universitas 21 Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne. We would like to acknowledge the University of
Melbourne's support, which made the writing of this book possible. Finally, on a more personal note, Nelson
would like to thank Deana for her consistent good humor and support despite missed dinners and curtailed
vacations. He promises not to write another one for a while. Cynthia would like to thank Jerry for missing that
bus—who knows what would have happened to the book otherwise.

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What Is Discourse Analysis?

Her knowledge of me was so deep, her version so compelling, that it held together my miscellany
of identities. To be sane, we choose between the diverse warring descriptions of our selves; I chose
hers. I took the name she gave me, and the criticism, and the love, and I called the discourse me.

SalmanRushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000, p. 510)

This book is about discourse. More specifically, it is about the power of incomplete, ambiguous, and contra-
dictory discourses to produce a social reality that we experience as solid and real. We understand discourse
in the radical, constitutive way of Rushdie's character: The things that make up the social world—including
our very identities—appear out of discourse. To put it another way, our talk, and what we are, are one and
the same. But we differ from Rushdie's character in that we do not believe individuals always have the luxury
of choosing their identity, their truth, and their reality. We think our experience is largely written for us by the
multitude of conflicting discourses of which we are a part. This is not to say that we do not strategically draw
upon these discourses. We obviously do. But our ability to act strategically is limited by the discourses that
accompany our intervention and the complex processes of social construction that precede it. Our view of
discourse can be summarized in a sentence: Without discourse, there is no social reality, and without under-
standing discourse, we cannot understand our reality, our experiences, or ourselves.

Recognizing the profound role of talk and texts in everyday life is only the beginning. This book is also about
the process of analyzing discourse and the potential of this methodology for revealing the processes of so-
cial construction that constitute social and organizational life. Discourse analysis offers new opportunities for
researchers to explore the empirical ramifications of the linguistic turn that has worked its way through the so-
cial sciences and humanities in the last 20 years. Whereas other qualitative methods provide well-developed
approaches for understanding the social world and the meaning it has for the people in it, discourse analysis
goes one step further in embracing a strong social constructivist epistemology (Berger & Luckmann, 1967;
Gergen, 1999). It focuses attention on the processes whereby the social world is constructed and maintained.
It also includes the academic project itself within its analysis; with its emphasis on reflexivity, discourse analy-
sis aims to remind readers that in using language, producing texts, and drawing on discourses, researchers
and the research community are part and parcel of the constructive effects of discourse.

We wrote this book for three reasons. First and foremost, we find discourse analysis to be a compelling the-
oretical frame for observing social reality. This book represents our attempt to clarify the contribution that dis-
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course analysis can make to the study of individuals, organizations, and societies. Second, we have found
discourse analysis to be a useful method in a number of empirical studies and have increasingly adopted
it over the last 10 years. We want to encourage other researchers to adopt this approach and believe that
a short, simple introduction will help in this regard. Third, we have spent considerable time over the last 10
years struggling with the difficulties of applying discourse analysis to different contexts. By writing this book,
we hope to save other researchers from having to go through the same struggles. By providing a general
framework for understanding different forms of discourse analysis and applying them to empirical studies of
organizational, interorganizational, and societal phenomena, we hope to save other researchers from having
to “reinvent the wheel.”

Defining Discourse Analysis

There are many definitions of discourse and discourse analysis in the literature. In fact, in his introduction,
van Dijk suggested that the entire 700 pages of the recent two-volume set on discourse (1997a, 1997b) is
really an “elaborate answer” to a deceptively simple question: What is discourse? Yet, despite the difficulty of
the task, we need some general idea of what we are referring to when we use discourse analysis and related
terms. We also need to differentiate between discourse analysis and other qualitative methods that explain
the meaning of social phenomena. In this section, we present some of the important terms that relate to dis-
course analysis. We also describe its status as a methodology rather than just a method, that is, an episte-
mology that explains how we know the social world, as well as a set of methods for studying it. In this way,
we differentiate discourse analysis from other qualitative research methods, such as ethnography (Erickson &
Stull, 1997; Schwartzman, 1993), ethnomethodology (Coulon, 1995), conversation analysis (Psathas, 1995),
and narrative analysis (Czarniawska, 1998; Riessman, 1993).

Defining Our Terms

Discourse, in general terms, refers to actual practices of talking and writing (Woodilla, 1998). Our use of the
term is somewhat more specific: We define a discourse as an interrelated set of texts, and the practices of
their production, dissemination, and reception, that brings an object into being (Parker, 1992). For example,
the collection of texts of various kinds that make up the discourse of psychiatry brought the idea of an un-
conscious into existence in the 19th century (Foucault, 1965). In other words, social reality is produced and

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made real through discourses, and social interactions cannot be fully understood without reference to the dis-
courses that give them meaning. As discourse analysts, then, our task is to explore the relationship between
discourse and reality.

Discourses are embodied and enacted in a variety of texts, although they exist beyond the individual texts that
compose them. Texts can thus be considered a discursive “unit” and a material manifestation of discourse
(Chalaby, 1996). Texts may take a variety of forms, including written texts, spoken words, pictures, symbols,
artifacts, and so forth (Grant, Keenoy, & Oswick, 1998).

Texts are the sites of the emergence of complexes of social meanings, produced in the particular
history of the situation of production, that record in partial ways the histories of both the participants
in the production of the text and of the institutions that are “invoked” or brought into play, indeed a
partial history of the language and the social system, a partiality due to the structurings of relations
of power of the participants. (Kress, 1995, p. 122)

Texts are not meaningful individually; it is only through their interconnection with other texts, the different dis-
courses on which they draw, and the nature of their production, dissemination, and consumption that they are
made meaningful. Discourse analysis explores how texts are made meaningful through these processes and
also how they contribute to the constitution of social reality by making meaning (Phillips & Brown, 1993).

Discourse analysis is thus interested in ascertaining the constructive effects of discourse through the struc-
tured and systematic study of texts (Hardy, 2001). Discursive activity does not occur in a vacuum, however,
and discourses do not “possess” meaning. Instead, discourses are shared and social, emanating out of inter-
actions between social groups and the complex societal structures in which the discourse is embedded. Ac-
cordingly, if we are to understand discourses and their effects, we must also understand the context in which
they arise (Sherzer, 1987; van Dijk, 1997a).

Discourse is not produced without context and cannot be understood without taking context into con-
sideration…. Discourses are always connected to other discourses which were produced earlier, as
well as those which are produced synchronically and subsequently. (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997, p.
277)

Our approach to the study of discourse is therefore “three-dimensional” (Fairclough, 1992), in the sense that

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it connects texts to discourses, locating them in a historical and social context, by which we refer to the par-
ticular actors, relationships, and practices that characterize the situation under study.

Consider an example: To understand from a discourse analytic perspective why a particular person is a
refugee, we need to explore how discourses such as asylum, immigration, humanitarianism, and sovereignty,
among others, serve to make sense of the concept of a refugee. To learn how such discourses have evolved
over time, we can study texts such as cartoons, newspaper articles, and international conventions. We must
also examine the social context—wars, natural disaster, court decisions, international agreements, the gov-
ernment of the day, political events in other countries—to see how they are brought into play in particular
discursive events. This interplay between text, discourse, and context helps us to understand not only how an
individual comes to be a refugee, but also how the broader “reality” of refugee policy and refugee determina-
tion procedures is constructed and experienced.

In summary, our interest in the relation between discourse and social reality requires us to study individual
texts for clues to the nature of the discourse because we can never find discourses in their entirety. We must
therefore examine selections of the texts that embody and produce them (Parker, 1992). We cannot simply
focus on an individual text, however; rather, we must refer to bodies of texts because it is the interrelations
between texts, changes in texts, new textual forms, and new systems of distributing texts that constitute a
discourse over time. Similarly, we must also make reference to the social context in which the texts are found
and the discourses are produced. It is this connection between discourses and the social reality that they
constitute that makes discourse analysis a powerful method for studying social phenomena.

Discourse Analysis as Method and Methodology

The reason discourse analysis tries to include a concern with text, discourse, and context relates to the fact
that it represents a methodology—not just a method—that embodies a “strong” social constructivist view of
the social world (Gergen, 1999). Discourse analytic approaches share an interest in the constructive effects
of language and are a reflexive—as well as an interpretive—style of analysis (Parker & Burman, 1993). In this
regard, discourse analysis does not simply comprise a set of techniques for conducting structured, qualitative
investigations of texts; it also involves a set of assumptions concerning the constructive effects of language.

[Discourse analysis] is not only about method; it is also a perspective on the nature of language

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and its relationship to the central issues of the social sciences. More specifically, we see discourse
analysis as a related collection of approaches to discourse, approaches that entail not only practices
of data collection and analysis, but also a set of metatheoretical and theoretical assumptions and a
body of research claims and studies. (Wood & Kroger, 2000, p. x)

Discourse analysis shares the concern of all qualitative approaches with the meaningfulness of social life
(Winch, 1958), but it attempts to provide a more profound interrogation of the precarious status of meaning.
Traditional qualitative approaches often assume a social world and then seek to understand the meaning of
this world for participants. Discourse analysis, on the other hand, tries to explore how the socially produced
ideas and objects that populate the world were created in the first place and how they are maintained and
held in place over time. Whereas other qualitative methodologies work to understand or interpret social reality
as it exists, discourse analysis endeavors to uncover the way in which it is produced. This is the most impor-
tant contribution of discourse analysis: It examines how language constructs phenomena, not how it reflects
and reveals it. In other words, discourse analysis views discourse as constitutive of the social world—not a
route to it—and assumes that the world cannot be known separately from discourse.

Discourse analysis is thus distinguished by its commitment to a strong social constructivist view and in the
way it tries to explore the relationships between text, discourse, and context. Although studies vary in the de-
gree to which they combine text and context (as we discuss in Chapter 2), discourse analysis presupposes
that it is impossible to strip discourse from its broader context and uses different techniques to analyze texts
for clues to the discourses within which they are embedded. In this regard, discourse analysis is different from
other forms of qualitative research. For example, approaches such as narrative analysis and conversational
analysis typically study text or talk. They take context into account to ascertain meaning, but usually without
reference to broader discourses or the accumulated bodies of texts that constitute them. Although interested
in how narratives and conversations are constructed, these approaches devote less explicit attention to the
construction of a broader social reality. Similarly, ethnographies often aim at uncovering the meaning of a so-
cial reality for participants but are less concerned with how that social reality came into existence through the
constructive effects of various discourses and associated texts. Ethnomethodology focuses on the generative
rules that make social interrelationships possible, but its focus is on the observation of actions rather than on
the study of texts. In Box 1.1, we provide an example to show the ways in which quantitative and qualitative
researchers might approach a phenomenon and contrast them with how discourse analysts would study it.

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Box 1.1 Example: The Analysis of Globalization

A quantitative study of globalization might involve collecting information on the degree to which globalization
activities are evident in a particular setting. Researchers might collect statistics on foreign direct investment,
the number of strategic alliances with overseas companies, decisions of the World Trade Organization, the
use of technology in developing countries, the size and nature of trade flows, or indicators concerning the
prevalence of a global pop culture. Such studies would attempt to connect the degree of globalization, as
denoted by these quantitative indicators, with particular outcome measures such as profitability, poverty, de-
mographic trends, and so forth. Such research takes the concept of globalization for granted and seeks to
ascertain relationships among particular practices and outcomes to draw conclusions about the prevalence
or effectiveness of globalization.

Qualitative studies of globalization can take a number of forms. For example, an ethnography might involve a
researcher living in a small village in a developing country to ascertain the meaning and impact of new Inter-
net connections for villagers; how the presence of multinational companies affects family life; or how global
calls for bans on child labor influence economic and social well-being. A researcher could also undertake
an ethnographic study of an Indian-based call center, in which he or she observes how employees present
themselves—via telephone—to callers from around the world and what this means for the employees of the
organization. One could use narrative analysis to uncover the stories that people tell to explain new global
practices, using devices such as plot, narrator, and characters to ascertain how they make sense of a new
Internet café, an international merger, or the sudden disappearance of an overseas market. One might use
conversation analysis to study teenagers in different countries talking among themselves about what MTV
means to them and what they consider important about their dress style. One could conduct interviews with
key actors in the World Trade Organization or the United Nations to ascertain their views on the North-South
divide and compare their comments with the opinions of officials in governments of southern counties. A re-
searcher's political analysis might use unstructured interviews and participant observation to uncover the pol-
itics and cultural dislocation involved in a takeover of a local firm by a U.S. multinational corporation and to
highlight any actions—covert or overt—by unions, employees, and community members to resist or influence
the changes. Such qualitative studies are all, in different ways, interested in the social and political dynamics
associated with globalization practices and in what those practices mean to individuals who are affected by

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them. These researchers are interested in the meaning, rather than the “facts,” of globalization, but they still
take the concept of globalization as “given.”

Discourse analysis is interested in how the concept of globalization came about—why it has a particular
meaning today when, 60 years ago, it had none. Researchers might explore how globalization discourse
draws from and influences other discourses—such as free trade discourse and liberalism, discourse around
new technology, poverty and democracy, and even health and terrorism—and how it is constructed through di-
verse texts that range from academic articles to CNN newscasts. They might then investigate how this broad
discourse of globalization gives meaning and substance to disjointed and contradictory patterns of econom-
ic, social, geographic, and cultural activities. At the local level, researchers might explore how the discourse
of globalization makes certain practices possible or inevitable— such as the business operations of multina-
tional companies, restrictions on refugees, or trade patterns between countries—and how it empowers and
disempowers different identities. They may also investigate how particular actors draw on the globalization
discourse to legitimate their positions and actions. In exploring different texts pertaining to globalization and
relating them to the broader economic, social, and political context, as well as to more specific practices, dis-
course analysts are able to draw conclusions that undermine the very notion of globalization, showing how it
is neither inevitable nor complete but, in fact, a confluence of discourses, texts, and practices that make up a
particular reality.

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It is important to note, however, that some traditional qualitative approaches do lend themselves to discourse
analysis. For example, conversation analysis and narrative analysis can be used to connect “microevents”
to broader discourses as a way to show how narratives and conversations construct social experience (e.g.,
O'Connor, 1995; Stokoe, 1998; van Dijk, 1993). Similarly, ethnographies have been an important component
of discourse analytic studies in showing how discourses are enacted in particular practices (e.g., Covales-
ki, Dirsmith, Heian, & Sajay, 1998; Fletcher, 1998 Jackall, 1988; Orr, 1996). Content analysis, not in terms
of a mechanistic counting but in a more interpretive form, can be used to connect textual content to broad-
er discursive contexts. For example, Ellingson (1995) carried out a content analysis of newspaper articles
and editorials by identifying themes and rhetorical strategies and connecting them to the speaker and the
audience; Holmes (1998) conducted a content analysis of women's language use by linking it to power and
status. Although the philosophy underpinning discourse analysis differentiates it from other forms of analysis,
when it comes to actual studies, the boundaries between discourse analysis and other qualitative methods
are sometimes blurred. Researchers have consequently employed a range of interpretive techniques—from
microanalyses of individual utterances to macroanalyses of a corpus of texts—to undertake discourse analy-
sis and, as Table 1.1 shows, they have borrowed from traditional qualitative methods to do so.

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What makes a research technique discursive is not the method itself but the use of that method to carry out
an interpretive analysis of some form of text with a view to providing an understanding of discourse and its
role in constituting social reality. To the extent that they are used within a discourse analytic ontology and
epistemology, many qualitative techniques can become discourse methods.

One final characteristic of discourse analysis is also worth noting: Discourse analytic methods are unavoid-
ably reflexive because the strong social constructivist epistemology that forms its foundation applies equally
to the work of academic researchers. Academic discourse also constitutes a particular reality, and we are con-
tinuously challenged to retain a sensitivity to our role in the constitution of categories and frames that produce
a reality of a particular sort (see Marcus, 1994). Whereas other approaches tend to take analytic categories
for granted and allocate data to them, discourse analysts are interested in the socially constructed nature of
the research categories themselves.

Thus the task of discourse analysis is not to apply categories to participants’ talk, but rather to iden-
tify the ways in which participants themselves actively construct and employ categories in their talks.
Further, all categorization is provisional; analysis requires constant reflexive attention to the process
of categorization of both the participant and the analyst. (Wood & Kroger, 2000, pp. 29–30)

Even grounded theory, although it seeks to generate categories from empirical findings, does not problema-
tize them in the way that discourse analysis does. It accepts the researcher's “reading” of the data (subject
to carrying out the necessary research protocols). Discourse analysts, on the other hand, are attuned to the
co-construction of the theoretical categories at multiple levels, including researcher, research subject, acad-
emic community, and even society, and they attempt to design and present their research in ways that ac-
knowledge these complex relationships (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2000; Clegg & Hardy, 1996a; Hardy, Phillips,
& Clegg, 2001).

The need to link text, context, and discourse, and to incorporate a highly subjective and reflexive use of re-
search methods, poses a major challenge for researchers: How do we cope with all this complexity? We can
never study all aspects of discourse, and we inevitably have to select a subset of texts for the purpose of man-
ageability. Nonetheless, as discourse analysts we must still make reference to broader discourses, acknowl-
edge the location of individual texts in larger bodies of texts, and pay some attention to three-dimensionality.
We are also faced with the prospects of learning by doing as we employ a particular analytical technique,
interpreting meanings as we go along and giving voice to multiple meanings. And, having incorporated all this
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into our study, we have to explain our work within the confines of the normal avenues and arenas of academic
publication. It is this complexity and ambiguity that makes discourse analysis such a challenge—and also one
of the reasons why we wrote this book, although by this stage, the reader may be left thinking, why bother
with discourse analysis at all?

Reasons for Using Discourse Analysis

In this section, we discuss some of the reasons for using discourse analysis. Given the plethora of other more
established methodologies and the difficulties noted above in doing discourse analysis, why should anyone
consider using this methodology for his or her empirical research? The reasons not to adopt a discourse
analytic approach are obvious. First, any new method requires substantial investments of time and energy
to master. Discourse analysis is certainly no exception to this rule, especially with the relative shortage of
methodological writings and established exemplars to guide newcomers to the field. Second, and even more
important, by definition new methods are not institutionalized. Researchers therefore face substantial barriers
as they attempt to publish or present work that their colleagues find unfamiliar and that can be difficult to relate
to existing work in the field. Researchers who adopt the method face additional risks when their work is eval-
uated for tenure or promotion because the relative rarity of discourse analytic studies makes their evaluation
difficult, and unfamiliar reviewers may not appreciate their value. Third, discourse analysis is a labor-intensive
and time-consuming method of analysis. Given the ever-ticking tenure clock and pervasive “publish or perish”
culture in academia, there are easier and quicker alternatives for carrying out research.

Despite these problems, we believe that there are many good reasons why discourse analysis has an impor-
tant role to play in the future of social science. These reasons outweigh the disadvantages of adopting a new
and relatively unproven research method and, at a personal level, they have convinced us to use discourse
analysis in our own research and led us to write this book to assist others who might want to use the method.

In the remainder of this section, we outline five reasons why researchers should consider using discourse
analysis. Some of these reasons are specific to discourse analysis and theory itself, whereas others reflect
the changing nature of our particular field of study—organization and management theory. The changing na-
ture of the “organization” has resulted in a growing need to find new ways of studying old topics, as well as
effective approaches to studying new topics. At this point, it is worth adding a small disclaimer. Although we
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have written this book to be as general as possible, and although we feel that the problems and solutions we
discuss relate to a number of disciplines, many of our examples are organizational in nature. Yet insofar as
organizational studies involves the study of individuals and societies, as well as organizations, the motivation
behind the use of discourse analysis in our field is not dissimilar to the reasons driving discourse analysis in
other fields.

The “Linguistic Turn”

Over the last 30 years, a revolution of sorts has swept across the humanities and social sciences. Beginning
with the work of linguistic philosophers such as Wittgenstein (1967) and Winch (1958), the idea that language
is much more than a simple reflection of reality—that, in fact, it is constitutive of social reality—has become
commonly accepted. This early work heavily influenced sociologists such as Berger and Luckmann (1967)
and anthropologists such as Geertz (1973), whose work formed the foundation of a constructionist view of
social phenomena. This view has permeated the social sciences and become well accepted as many dis-
ciplines are, in Gergen's (1999, p. 16) terms, “pulsing toward the postmodern” and wrestling with crises of
representation and legitimation (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994; Rosenau, 1992).

The recognition of the constructive role of language problematizes the very nature of research as the objec-
tivity, neutrality, and independence of the researcher are called into question, as the nature of what passes
for truth and knowledge is scrutinized, and as the question of how things work is replaced by questions about
what things mean (Winch, 1958). The social sciences are not only about counting—defining and measuring
variables and the relationships between them—they are also about interpreting what social relationships sig-
nify, to which a long history of qualitative research bears witness. With the linguistic turn, however, the de-
mands of interpretative research are multiplied. As researchers, we are no longer interested simply in what
the social world means to the subjects who populate it; we are interested in how and why the social world
comes to have the meanings that it does. We are also interested in how we, as researchers, are implicated
in that process (Clegg & Hardy, 1996a; Hardy et al., 2001). Discourse analysis, as one method for studying
these more reflexive processes of social construction, is therefore attracting increasing attention (Alvesson &
Kärreman, 2000a).

As the linguistic turn has swept through disciplines, researchers have turned to discourse analysis to study its
implications for empirical research. Although somewhat late in adopting this view compared with the human-
ities and other areas of social science, researchers in organization and management theory are also begin-

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ning to see language as increasingly important (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000a).1 The idea that organizations
are socially constructed and exist primarily in language (broadly defined) is becoming widely accepted. As a
result, researchers are increasingly open to and interested in finding new ways to examine these processes.
Discourse analysis provides such a methodology because it is grounded in an explicitly constructionist epis-
temology that sees language as constitutive and constructive rather than reflective and representative (Wood
& Kroger, 2000).

New and Reconceptualized Topics of Study

Broader changes in society have led to the emergence of new topics for study, which has reinforced the role
of discourse analysis as a viable and useful research methodology. For example, the natural environment,
globalization, and cultural studies have, relatively recently, captured the interest of researchers in a number of
disciplines who have made effective use of discourse analysis. Within the narrower confines of organization
and management theory, the study of emotion (e.g., Fineman, 1996; Mumby & Putnam, 1992) is one example
of a relatively new area in which discursive approaches have been applied to great effect. New topics of study
raise new challenges for researchers by creating new categories and drawing our attention to how boundaries
are constructed and held in place. Traditional qualitative approaches may provide insight into the nature of
these categories, whereas quantitative research often allows generalizable claims to be made about the rela-
tions between categories but neither helps us to understand how these categories came to be nor what holds
them in place. In fact, traditional methodologies often reify categories, making them seem natural and endur-
ing. Discourse analysis, on the other hand, provides a way of analyzing the dynamics of social construction
that produce these categories and hold the boundaries around them in place.

Other subjects have been reconceptualized by researchers and now require completely different approaches
from those used in previous work. For example, identity has long been a subject of study in a number of
disciplines, but primarily from an orientation in which researchers attempt to reveal or understand an individ-
ual's “true” or essential identity (see Nkomo & Cox, 1996). More recently, discursive approaches are gaining
ground in such disciplines as psychology (e.g., Condor & Antaki, 1997; Potter & Wetherell, 1987), gender
studies (e.g., Tannen, 1994), organization and management theory (e.g., Calás & Smircich, 1991; Mumby &
Stohl, 1991; Wilson, 1996), and social movement theory (e.g., Gamson, 1995) because of the insights pro-
vided by an understanding of how identities are constructed on a continuous, interactive, discursive basis.

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The Revitalization of Critical Management Studies

An important reason for the growing appeal of discourse analysis in organization and management theory
derives from the renewed interest in critical management studies. Critiques of managerialism have a long-
standing tradition in organization and management theory as a result of early Marxist traditions and more rad-
ical readings of Weber (Hardy & Clegg, 1996). They appear in a variety of theoretical streams such as labor
process theory (e.g., Braverman, 1974; Burawoy, 1979; Edwards, 1979), work on power (e.g., Benton 1981;
Clegg, 1975; Hardy, 1985; Lukes, 1974), and studies of culture and ideology (e.g., Smircich, 1983; Weiss and
Miller, 1987; Willmott, 1993), to name but a few. The advent of postmodernism in organization and manage-
ment theory initially challenged this line of thinking (e.g., Burrell, 1988; Cooper & Burrell, 1988). Over time,
however, the integration of postmodern and poststructuralist insights has reinvigorated critical management
studies and attracted a number of researchers to what is a revitalized agenda in critical management studies

(Alvesson & Deetz, 2000; Alvesson & Willmott, 1992a, 1992b; Fournier & Grey, 2000).2

Much of the renewed research attention has focused on the intersection between critical and postmodern the-
ory (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996; Mumby, 1992) and, specifically, on the connection between power and mean-
ing— the way in which knowledge is bound up in the dynamics of power (e.g., Knights & Morgan, 1991).
Building particularly on the work of Foucault, researchers have become interested in how processes of social
construction lead to a social reality that is taken for granted and that advantages some participants at the
expense of others (e.g., Clegg, 1989). At the same time, researchers have sought to examine these political
dynamics without falling into the critical trap of “standing outside” the power relations they are studying (Hardy
& Clegg, 1996). These new challenges facing critical management studies have created a need for new meth-
ods that expose the dynamics on which power distributions in organizations—and in research—depend.

This new and renewed concern with power has not only been confined to organization and management the-
ory. Researchers in areas such as social movement theory, communications, psychology, and gender studies
are also increasingly attuned to the dynamics of power. As a result, there are significant opportunities for the
application of such methods as critical discourse analysis and critical linguistic analysis (Fairclough, 1992,
1995; Mumby, 2000; Mumby & Stohl, 1991; Parker, 1992) to a variety of settings, in addition to those related
to organizations.

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The Development of Postbureaucratic Organizational Forms

Another reason specific to the increased use of discourse analysis in organization and management theory
is the changing nature of organizational and management practice over the last few decades. In reflecting
on the last 30 years of organization and management theory, Clegg and Hardy (1996b, p. 2) noted that in
the 1960s, “hierarchies were the norm, personal computers had not been invented, and the only mode of
instantaneous communication was the telephone. The new technologies that were to challenge radically ac-
cepted organization designs seemed unthinkable.” Today, we witness an array of new organizational forms;
the widespread acceptance of new information technologies; the increasing globalization of business, trade,
and culture, as well as resistance to it; and the increasing importance of knowledge- and symbol-intensive
firms.

These changes in practice have led to a growing need to study the more ephemeral aspects of organizations.
It is increasingly difficult to study organizations as if they were solid, fixed material objects when we are aware
of their fluid and contradictory dynamics. As a result, we search for the stories, narratives, and symbols—the
discourses—that hold together these contradictory flows and make them “real” for us (Chia, 2000). Discourse
analysis provides a powerful way to study these slippery, ephemeral phenomena and, as such, is vital if we
are to inform and be informed by organizational and management practice.

The Limits of Traditional Methods and Theories

The final reason we believe that discourse analysis is important grows out of the increasing calls for pluralism
that can be heard across the social sciences (e.g., Kaghan & Phillips, 1998). The idea of “one best method”
has been challenged more and more frequently; in fact, it has largely been replaced by the idea that research
is best served by a plurality of methods and theories (Clegg & Hardy, 1996b). Many researchers have begun
to find traditional approaches to research too limiting and repetitive. Rather than using the same method to
study the same phenomenon more intensively, the use of a very different method can provide far more in-
sight (Alvesson & Deetz, 2000). Using a nontraditional method provides a way to see things that have been
obscured by the repeated application of traditional methods— all ways of seeing are also ways of not seeing.
Using a discursive approach can allow researchers to build on and complement other bodies of theoretical
work by introducing new ideas, new concepts, and new challenges. There is also the fact that it can be more

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interesting to use less traditional methods to study the world of organizations. They are, by definition, less
institutionalized, which allows researchers to use more creativity in their application and more innovation in
their interpretation.

In summary, we see discourse analysis as an important contribution to increasing plurality in research, a way
to incorporate the linguistic turn and to study new phenomena and practices, as well as to reinvigorate agen-
das of critical theory. It may pose problems, and old certainties may well disappear but, as Clegg and Hardy
(1996b, p. 8) pointed out, “It is in the struggle between different approaches that we learn, and from the di-
versity and ambiguity of meaning; not through the recitation of a presumed uniformity, consensus, and unity,
given in a way that requires unquestioning acceptance.”

What Lies Ahead

This book sets out to help aspiring discourse analysts in four ways. First, we provide a coherent framework
for understanding the different forms of discourse analysis that currently appear in the literature. Second, we
present a wide range of empirical studies that have been conducted across a range of literatures and show
some of the different ways in which discourse analysis can be used. Third, we have used the writing of this
book to reflect in some depth on our own work and identify a number of challenges that researchers face as
they adopt this method. Finally, we hope to offer some suggestions, based on our own experiences, of how
to tackle these challenges.

The remainder of this book is organized in the following way. In Chapter 2, we provide a framework for un-
derstanding the different forms of discourse analysis that currently appear in the literature in a variety of dis-
ciplines. We begin by focusing on the theoretical assumptions underlying different approaches to discourse
analysis and then discuss some of the range of empirical topics that have been explored using discourse
analysis. Our intention in Chapter 2 is to provide the reader with a frame for understanding approaches to
discourse and an appreciation of the range of potential topics that can be studied using discourse analysis.
In Chapter 3, we introduce the reader to our own work in this area. We outline a number of studies we have
conducted and explain the types of choices we made in terms of data, data analysis, and general theoretical
orientation. We also discuss the contributions that discourse analysis made to our understanding of the phe-
nomena that we studied. In Chapter 4, we explore the question of how to do discourse analysis. Drawing on
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our experience in carrying out the research program outlined in preceding chapters, we identify some of the
key challenges facing researchers embarking on a research project and discuss some of the ways in which
they might be addressed. In our final chapter, we sum up our current thoughts on discourse analysis as a field
and point to some of the major hurdles that we still need to clear.

Notes

1. The degree to which social constructivism is accepted in organization and management theory varies geo-
graphically. In Europe, few researchers would have difficulty with the basic premises of social constructivism.
In North America, it is less accepted, although this is changing rapidly.

2. For example, critical management studies has been established as an integral part of the preconference
professional development workshops at the Academy of Management in the United States, and plans exist to
apply for interest group status. In the United Kingdom, the first critical management studies conference was
held in 1999.

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https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412983921

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About the Author

Nelson Phillips is the Beckwith Professor of Management Studies at the Judge Institute of Management
at the University of Cambridge. Before joining the Judge Institute, he was an Associate Professor in the
Faculty of Management of McGill University. His research interests include discourse analysis, organizational
collaboration, and a general interest in the intersection of cultural studies and organizational analysis. He has
published a number of articles and book chapters, including articles in the Academy of Management Journal,
Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Management Inquiry, Business & Society, Journal of Business
Ethics, Business Ethics Quarterly, Organization Science, Organization, and Organization Studies.

Cynthia Hardy has been Professor of Management in the Department of Management, University of
Melbourne, Australia, since 1998. Before 1998, she was a Professor in the Faculty of Management at McGill
University in Canada. Her current research interests focus on organizational discourse theory and discourse
analysis, and power and politics in organizations, especially with regard to interorganizational collaboration
and strategy making. In total, she has published 12 books and edited volumes, including the Handbook of
Organization Studies, published by Sage, which won the 1997 George R. Terry Book Award at the Academy
of Management. She has written more than 60 journal articles and book chapters. Her work has appeared
in many leading international journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies,
Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, Organization Science, California Management Review,
and Journal of Applied Behavioral Studies.

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Qualitative Research Methods

Series Editor

JOHN VAN MAANEN

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Associate Editors:

Peter K. Manning, Michigan State University& Marc L. Miller, University of Washington

1.
RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH Kirk / Miller
2.
SPEAKING OF ETHNOGRAPHY Agar
3.
THE POLITICS AND ETHICS OF FIELDWORK Punch
4.
LINKING DATA Fielding / Fielding
5.
THE CLINICAL PERSPECTIVE IN FIELDWORK Schein
6.
MEMBERSHIP ROLES IN FIELD RESEARCH Adler / Adler
7.
SEMIOTICS AND FIELDWORK Manning
8.
ANALYZING FIELD REALITY Gubrium
9.
GENDER ISSUES IN FIELD RESEARCH Warren
10.
SYSTEMATIC DATA COLLECTION Weller / Romney
11.
META-ETHNOGRAPHY: Synthesizing Qualitative Studies Noblit / Hare
12.
ETHNOSTATISTICS: Qualitative Foundations for Quantitative Research Gephart
13.

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THE LONG INTERVIEW McCracken

14.
MICROCOMPUTER APPLICATIONS IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH Pfaffenberger
15.
KNOWING CHILDREN: Participant Observation with Minors Fine / Sandstrom
16.
FOCUS GROUPS AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH (Second Edition) Morgan
17.
INTERPRETIVE BIOGRAPHY Denzin
18.
PSYCHOANALYTIC ASPECTS OF FIELDWORK Hunt
19.
ETHNOGRAPHIC DECISION TREE MODELING Gladwin
20.
WRITING UP QUALITATIVE RESEARCH Wolcott
21.
WRITING STRATEGIES: Reaching Diverse Audiences Richardson
22.
SELECTING ETHNOGRAPHIC INFORMANTS Johnson
23.
LIVING THE ETHNOGRAPHIC LIFE Rose
24.
ANALYZING VISUAL DATA Ball / Smith
25.
UNDERSTANDING ETHNOGRAPHIC TEXTS Atkinson
26.
DOING CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY Thomas

Other volumes in this series listed on outside back cover

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