Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method by Marianne J. And Philips L.

This Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method is a must read for researchers in socio-historical and linguistic disciplines. Below is a sample of the contents of this book. If you need it, just give us a message and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Our email address is much available to receive your message. 

1 The Field of Discourse Analysis 

For at least ten years now, ‘discourse’ has been a fashionable term. In scientific texts and debates, it is used indiscriminately, often without being defined. The concept has become vague, either meaning almost nothing, or being used with more precise, but rather different, meanings in different contexts. But, in many cases, underlying the word ‘discourse’ is the general idea that language is structured according to different patterns that people’s utterances follow when they take part in different domains of social life, familiar examples being ‘medical discourse’ and ‘political discourse’. ‘Discourse analysis’ is the analysis of these patterns. But this common sense definition is not of much help in clarifying what discourses are, how they function, or how to analyse them. Here, more developed theories and methods of discourse analysis have to be sought out. And, in the search, one quickly finds out that discourse analysis is not just one approach, but a series of interdisciplinary approaches that can be used to explore many different social domains in many different types of studies. And there is no clear consensus as to what discourses are or how to analyse them. Different perspectives offer their own suggestions and, to some extent, compete to appropriate the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘discourse analysis’ for their own definitions. Let us begin, however, by proposing the preliminary definition of a discourse as a particular way of talking about and understanding the world (or an aspect of the world). In this chapter, three different approaches to social constructionist discourse analysis will be introduced – Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory, critical discourse analysis, and discursive psychology. In the three following chapters, we will present the approaches individually. All three approaches share the starting point that our ways of talking do not neutrally reflect our world, identities and social relations but, rather, play an active role in creating and changing them. We have selected these approaches from the range of different perspectives within discourse analysis on the grounds that we think that they represent particularly fruitful theories and methods for research in communication, culture and society. They can be applied in analysis of many different social domains, including organisations and institutions, and in exploration of the role of language use in broad societal and cultural developments such as globalisation and the spread of mass mediated communication. Let us give a few examples of possible applications of discourse analysis. For instance, it can be used as a framework for analysis of national identity. How can we understand national identities and what consequences does the division of the world into nation states have? Many different forms of text and talk could be selected for analysis. The focus could be, for instance, the discursive construction of national identity in textbooks about British history. Alternatively, one could choose to explore the significance of national identity for interaction between people in an organisational context such as a workplace. Another research topic could be the ways in which expert knowledge is conveyed in the mass media and the implications for questions of power and democracy. How are claims to expert knowledge constructed and contested in the mass media and how are competing knowledge claims ‘consumed’ by media audiences? The struggle between different knowledge claims could be understood and empirically explored as a struggle between different discourses which represent different ways of understanding aspects of the world and construct different identities for speakers (such as ‘expert’ or ‘layperson’). The three approaches on which we have chosen to focus as frameworks for discourse analysis share certain key premises about how entities such as ‘language’ and ‘the subject’ are to be understood. They also have in common the aim of carrying out critical research, that is, to investigate and analyse power relations in society and to formulate normative perspectives from which a critique of such relations can be made with an eye on the possibilities for social change. At the same time, though, each perspective has a range of distinctive philosophical and theoretical premises, including particular understandings of discourse, social practice and critique, which lead to particular aims, methods and empirical focal points. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to outline the field to which social constructionist approaches to discourse analysis belong.1We are interested both in those aspects which are common to all approaches – and, in particular, to our three approaches – and in those aspects in relation to which the approaches diverge.