Assignment 47 for practical work in media lab: How to use discourse analysis For the Departments of Media Studies by Prof Dr Sohail Ansari

Dua when waking up

الحَمْدُ لِلهِ الَّذِي أَحْيَانَا بَعْدَ مَا أَمَاتَنَا وَإِلَيْهِ النُّشُور

ُ All praise is for Allah who gave us life after causing us to die, and unto Him is the resurrection.

Before sleeping 

اللَّهُمَّ بِاسْـمِكَ أَمُوتُ وَأَحْيَا

Bismikal-lahumma amootu wa-ahya.

In Your name O Allah, I live and die.

Al-Bukhari 11:113, Muslim 4:2083

 

How to... use discourse analysis

By Margaret Adolphus

What is discourse analysis?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines discourse analysis as:

"Linguistics, a method of analysing the structure of texts or utterances longer than one sentence, taking into account both their linguistic content and their sociolinguistic context; analysis performed using this method."

There is a problem, however, not with the wording of this definition, but with the concept itself, which implies that language can have a fixed meaning as the very ethos of discourse analysis is that language and discourse (in the sense of a speech communication) is not a fixed, immutable reality, but one that is moulded by a social context, and can in turn build up a picture of the world which is unique to the author of the discourse.

Discourse analysis as a research technique involves the analysis of language with the above framework in mind, and has become increasingly popular in recent years in the social and management sciences.

More definitions of discourse analysis

According to Snape and Spencer (2003, p. 200), discourse analysis originates from the discipline of sociology and is about:

"Examining the way knowledge is produced within different discourses and the performances, linguistic styles and rhetorical devices used in particular accounts."

According to Jankowicz (2005, p.229), discourse analysis is of particular relevance when listening to people's own narratives of a situation – the biographical approach.

"Discourse analysis ... [focuses] on the way in which your respondents draw on differing interpretive repertoires depending on their interpretation of the context in which your interview takes place. The technique focuses on the way in which language is used in given settings, and in a discourse analysis, your task is to identify the context; the various interpretive repertoires; and attempt a matching of one to the other, to arrive at an understanding of the function, from the point of view of your respondent, of the different stories being told."

Exercise:

Read or listen interviews of different political figures of different political parties to identify the various interpretive repertoires

In a guest editorial from the Journal of Organizational Change Management which looked at the contribution of discourse analysis to an understanding of organizational change, Grant et al. (2005) quote Fairclough and Wodak (1997, p. 277):

"Discourse is not produced without context and cannot be understood without taking context into consideration ... Discourses are always connected to other discourses which were produced earlier, as well as those which are produced synchronically and subsequently."

In other words, language does not have a fixed, objective meaning, but is coloured by a whole range of situational factors: the author's belief system, the surrounding political, economic and social context, any professional community to which the person belongs – which will have its own jargon (as in medical or legal) – as well as the immediate situation in which the words were uttered.

Exercise:

Give examples of language that is colored.

Herasymovych and Nørreklit (2006) provide a case study of ideological assumptions of Ukrainian managers, in which they use discourse analysis to reveal how attitudes change as a result of the transformation from communism to market liberalism.

Exercise:

Use discourse analysis to reveal how attitudes change as a result of the transformation from one party to another.

The authors found several discourses of:

• anti communism ("From Soviet times, there is a common psychology: the best job is the one with the higher salary and doing nothing");
• The influence of religion, which is very strong in the Ukraine. Thus although the managers wanted to distance themselves from religion, they still used a discourse of pastoral authority – the image of the good shepherd – to describe their management style.
• Liberalism, of a certain kind: motivation of the individual to succeed, but based not on desire to do one's best, but fear of the consequences of failure.

Where does discourse analysis fit?

Discourse analysis is an analytic technique rather than a theory, and its popularity has arisen from the growing interest, starting late in the last century, in qualitative research and ways of analysing the data it produces. There are a number of similar methods, for example,

• content analysis, which analyses content according to key variables,
• narrative analysis, which looks at the patterns people find in their lives and situations, and
• conversational analysis, which looks at the structure of dialogue (for more information,

Discourse analysis has multiple disciplinary origins – sociology, socio-psychology, anthropology, linguistics and philosophy, communications studies, and literature (Grant et al., 2005). It thus brings a multidisciplinary perspective.

Its regard for context sets it slightly apart from ethnographic methods, which, according to Lee and Roth (2006) tend to approach participants' talk and actions at face value. Participant observation often involves the researcher having a relatively "invisible" role, as an observer. In the collection of data for discourse analysis, however, the researcher has a more active role and may "co-construct" the interview process.

Exercise:

Co-construct the interview process or an interview.

It can also be contrasted with behaviourist and cognitivist approaches: discourse is not just a product of a person's cognitive and mental state. Thinking makes use of concepts, and concepts are by definition in the public domain, influenced by a broad range of social and intellectual factors. discourse analysis is also influenced by social constructionism: people and their doings are not "natural observable facts", but are constantly shaped by the society around them.

Some prominent thinkers in discourse analysis

Many writers have contributed to the field of discourse analysis, but two of the most prominent are Norman Fairclough and Michel Foucauld.

Norman Fairclough is the father of critical discourse analysis. He comes to discourse analysis from a linguistics and language perspective; he is emeritus professor in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Lancaster, UK.

Fairclough sees discourse as:

"a social practice which constructs social identities, social relations and the knowledge and meaning systems of the social world ... [which] both reflects and produces the ideas and assumptions relating to the ways in which personal identities, social relations, and knowledge systems are constituted through social practice" (Nielson and Nørreklit, 2009; p. 204).

In other words, critical discourse analysis sees the language of discourse as a kind of two-way mirror: it both reflects and contributes to the social world, its knowledge systems and its social relationships.

There are two dimensions to critical discourse analysis: the "communicative event", or the specific incident of language use, and that which Fairclough terms "discourse order", which is the "discourse practices" or the way language is used within a particular social institution (for example, the particular vocabulary used within an organization) or domain area (for example, linguistics, sociology, or medicine).

Critical discourse analysis uses three levels of analysis (Nielson and Nørreklit, 2009; p. 205):

1.  The text of the communicative event itself, with reference to its vocabulary, its use of metaphor and rhetorical forms, its grammar and the relationship between sentences, the types of argument used.

2.  The discourse practice – i.e. how the particular communicative event changes or copies existing practice within that particular discourse.

3.  The wider social practice of which the communicative event forms part.

Exercise:

How the communicative event changes in the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini 

Critical discourse analysis combines an "internal" study of language with "external" study of its context – how the text is affected by social practices and relations (Cheng, 2009). The term "intertextuality" is often used – which means the need for one text to be read in the light of its allusions to and differences from the content or structure of other texts. Critical discourse analysis can often be used to reveal power relationships, and how certain groups can be marginalized.

Nielson and Nørreklit (2009) apply critical discourse analysis to the field of management coaching, which they depict diagrammatically in Figure 1 as follows:

Figure 1. Model of critical discourse analysis as applied to management coaching

The approach of Michel Foucauld, the French philosopher, sociologist and historian, is more abstract and less linguistically based than that of Fairclough. Although he acknowledged the role of language in the creation and formation of knowledge, he was not concerned with the analysis of spoken and written language and texts. He was more interested in the rules that determine which statements are accepted as meaningful, and the links between power and knowledge: expert knowledge in a particular domain can act as a system of control, and knowledge is institutionally contingent (Haider and Bawden, 2007).

What can discourse analysis contribute to research?

The big advantage of discourse analysis is that it challenges "the taken-for-granted nature of language" (Sitz, 2008). Thus it can probe the way in which organizational language displays subtle shifts in values and priorities, disclose how documents may appear to present a positive agenda to the reader, but in fact have a much darker purpose, and encourage a more qualitative, interpretative perspective on an area such as company reports, which have previously only been subjected to quantitative approaches.

Exercise:

Read any of the following to disclose how books may appear to present a positive agenda to the reader, but in fact have a much darker purpose

Almond, Ian. The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard.

Bulliet, Richard W. “Orientalism and Medieval Islamic Studies.” In The Past and Future of Medieval Studies. By Richard W. Bulliet

Hughes, Aaron W. Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic discipline. London: Equinox, 2007.

Kerr, Malcolm H., ed. Islamic Studies: A Tradition and Its Problems. Malibu, CA: Undena, 1980.

Discourse analysis as a way of describing organizational change

Grant et al. (2005) provide a guest editorial to an issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management (Vol. 18 No. 1) which looks at the contribution of discourse analysis to the area. They cite a number of benefits of the method:

1.  it enables researchers to analyse the key discourses which formulate change;

2.  it shows how particular discourses can be used to shape behaviour, by way of development of a dominant meaning;

3.  it shows the importance of the overall context;

4.  it affords the advantage of a multidisciplinary perspective;

5.  all these advantages mean that discourse analysis can generate fresh insights.

Tsoukas (2005), in an afterword to the same issue, confirms the value of discourse analysis in understanding the complexity of organizational change.

Language is very subtle: new meanings can be created or subtly subverted to put a positive gloss on something, while the same events can be described in radically different ways. Some years ago, a large publishing conglomerate decided to pull all its academic journals out of one company and exchange them for another company's small division of distance learning materials. The managers described this as "portfolio realignment"; a disgruntled worker, disillusioned at the loss of a cash cow in return for a problem child, referred to the exchange as "leprosy".

Exercise:

The word ‘sex worker’ creates new meanings or subtly subvert to put a positive gloss on something. Discuss and give more examples.

Reading between the lines: analysing policy texts

Policy documents are often in fact public relations documents. In a democracy, policy has to be sold; you cannot enforce it. And policy, too, may be dictated by complex factors – free market capitalism, for example – which it may not be politic to disclose too clearly.

Discourse analysis can disentangle the different agendas of policy documents. Ocler (2009) describes how in France, corporate social responsibility became a legal requirement – but firms needed to present their corporate social responsibility policies in a positive light for the benefit of their policy holders.

Cheng (2009) discusses the introduction of the voucher scheme for pre-primary education in Hong Kong. She shows how while the policy text highlighted issues of choice, efficiency and equity, the reality is in fact more complex:

" ... notions of choice and efficiency have an obvious attraction, but the language presented masks a much more complex situation in which choice and efficiency are to be secured through the application of market principles and given this development it is by no means certain that these objectives will be secured. For example, different producers and consumers become privileged in this market context, and it is by no means certain that all will have choice. More likely, is that choice will be restricted to the more affluent, whilst efficiency may be effected by a failure to create any level playing field between not for profit and private providers" (Cheng, 2009; p. 364).

All policy documents should be read within their context, in this case, marketization, and in that referred to above, legislation. This is what Fairclough means by "discourse practice".

Exercise:

Read between the lines the pronouncement of government for CPEC

Providing greater depth to qualitative accounting research

Accountancy is an area which has recently seen a greater interest in qualitative methods; in fact, a journal was recently launched devoted to this approach (Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management). According to Ferguson (2007), the study of text can be limited if it does not look at the circumstances surrounding its production and interpretation.

Motivation is also part of the surrounding context, and Yusoff et al., (2006) use discourse analysis to probe the corporate motivation for environmental activities.

Information synthesis

Various uses have been made of discourse analysis in the field of library and information science, but Haider and Bawden (2007) make an interesting contribution when they point out that one of the key concepts of the field, information poverty, is in fact a product of information synthesis: two concepts, both with strong resonances, are put together with explosive political effect.

Exercise:

Put two concepts together for political effect.

The above are just a few of many examples which could be cited of the insights which discourse analysis can bring to research. It is a versatile technique which brings insights from many disciplines, and which uses the richness and ambiguity of language to go beyond the text into the many worlds that influence it.