My reflections on Chapter 1-3 of Jorgensen & Philips and Roger's (2005) paper + Ideas for data collection

I read the first two chapters of the book first. The first chapter was an easy read for me. It clarified the concepts of discourse and discourse analysis, and briefly discussed the different approaches to DA including 1) Laclau & Mouffe's  discourse theory; 2) critical DA; 3) D. Psychology and that they all agree that our ways of talking do not neutrally reflect our worlds, identities, etc. but rather play an active role in creating and changing them. Also, they aim to carry out critical research to investigate power relations in society and to formulate possibilities for social change. In other words, similarities across all DA approaches include:

1. They are all based on social constructionism

2. They see knowledge not as an objective truth out there but as the product of our discourses

3. We are historical and cultural beings and that our knowledge of the world is the product of historically situated interchanges among people.

4. There’s a link between knowledge and social action--> Different social understandings of the world lead to different social actions and therefore the social construction of knowledge and truth has social consequences.

Briefly said, in Laclau & Mouffe's D. theory, discourse constructs the social world in meaning and meaning can never be fixed. Discourse is constantly being transformed through contact with discourses. Fairclough’s  critical discourse analysis focuses on investigation of change  and that concrete language use  always draws on earlier discursive structures as already established meanings + Intertextuality: How an individual's text draws on elements and discourses of other texts and finally, discursive psychology stresses on individual both as product of discourse and as producers of discourse in specific contexts of interactions.

In chapter one where they talk about the differences across the three approaches, authors distinguish between different types of "social practice" including economic logic and discursive practice. This made a question mark in my mind because up to this page, my understanding of the book implied that everything including economic logic is a kind of discourse whereas the book said something different. However, in a few pages further, I realized that assuming everything as a “discourse” is related to Laclau & Mouffe’s and not necessarily to all the three approaches.  

In chapter two, where Laclau & Mouffe’s discourse theory is discussed, I have an easy read to a point of the book in which they talk about “representation & contingency” and from that point on, I was sort of confused and my mind was hanging out from one concept to the other without really being able to distinguish between them. I tried hard to keep myself motivated for persisting to read when my eyes caught the example about that girl who has talked about how she left her religious beliefs to be able to hold the new identity that involved loving her atheist boyfriend which was both interesting to me and it made some of the concepts more clear.

However, what I like about discourse theory is that it assumes social phenomena are never finished or total and that meaning can never be fixed. This reminded me of the piece I read about Miley Cyrus’s video in which according to a critique she has tried to highlight the cliché beauty and sexiness of her whiteness by putting herself in the middle of a circle of women of other colors. According to a critique, she has offended the beauty of black women but who knows what her original intentions have been. Nobody knows. To me this cliques with the incompleteness of social phenomena.

I think the authors have done a good job in crystal clearing the definitions of relevant terms in DT such as nodal points, articulation, floating signifiers, expressions, etc. To me, these words seem very fancy but authors have provided readers with good examples to clarify the meanings.

I actually found lots of overlap between chapter 3 of the book and Roger’s (2005) paper because the focal point in chapter 3 and the paper is critical discourse analysis. While chapter 3, goes into detail of what constitutes CDA, Roger’s (2005) paper, discusses the previous applications of CDA in education research. To be honest, by the time I got to the middle of chapter 3, I was almost lost by various terms and the amount of new information that authors attempts to throw at readers. At this point, I tried to keep calm and get whatever I understand from this chapter instead of fighting with myself into what each and every term used in this chapter means. So, in general, my understanding of chapter 3 is that CDA, is both a theory and method that doesn’t consider all social practices as discourse, instead it specifies discourse as semiotic systems such as language and images Also, apparently, CDA provides theories and methods for the empirical study of relations between discourse and social and cultural developments in different social domains. However, I really like that part of CDA that listen to the voices of never-heard or marginalized classes in the society and tries to make some changes in this regard to improve their situation and free them from the hegemony of the most powerful.

Out of curiosity, I looked up for the applications of CDA in organizational research and to my surprise my search ended up to a few.

For instance, in one of them CDA has been used to distinguish between distinctive discourse types that are initiated by media in mergers & Acquisitions across Finnish banks (Vaara & Tienari, 2009). For the research purposes, the authors have used media texts including news covered in newspapers, content analyzing the texts and extracting themes out of the news texts.

The focus of CDA in organizational research has been on organizational change (Fairclough, 2005) with mostly focusing on written texts like corporate reports, news covered by the media, letters to shareholders, etc.

My ideas for data collection:

I read about this research which has been initiated in University of Manchester a month ago. This is the link the research:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/2013/04/29/mrs-dalloway-in-new-york-documenting-how-people-talk-to-themselves-in-their-heads/

which is about how people talk to themselves in their heads. I hope I can do a discourse analysis on the three videos (each is 13 minutes long) for my class project.

For my text analysis, I would like to focus on the vision and mission statements of a few organizations to see if I can find any patterns across them. 

My Reflections on Mercer's Words & Minds

I enjoyed reading Mercer's book for two reasons: 1) as I am a phd student in Organization & Strategy, I could connect different topics covered in the book with the topic areas of interest in organization and management; 2) as a non-native English speaker who lives in an English-speaking country, many of the cases that were brought up in the book regarding the role of language as "culture", conflicts that might occur due to misunderstandings across communicators, etc. sounded very familiar to me.

   The main idea presented in chapter 1 is that language is a tool for thinking together and making sense of the experience, as nicely referred to by Mercer as "inter-thinking". This is something of crucial importance in organization literature because, almost everything in organizations go around communication, exchange of information and negotiation of meaning which all involve interpretation. A piece of information disseminated in a meeting, does not necessarily invoke the same interpretations in the meeting participants and this might cause problems afterwards. So a big challenge in organizational settings is to convey information to members in a way that at least invoke similar interpretations in members which is easy to say but hard to execute.
This even becomes harder when participants try to influence each other and compete with each other in controlling the flow and outcomes of information exchanges. This has been nicely elaborated by Mercer in Chapter 4 when he talks about persuasion, control and influence.
The main idea discussed in chapter 4 is that shared knowledge and understanding is achieved through conflict and debate as well as through cooperation. This is also a controversial topic in organization literature especially in areas of negotiation, power and influence. Organizational behavior text books are filled with prescriptions presented by organizational scholars about the processes of negotiation, winning the negotiations, compromising some advantages in negotiations and conflict resolution techniques. A point of contrast that I can see between what I read in Mercer's book and what I know about organizational literature is that negotiations in organizations do not necessarily end up to "shared knowledge and understanding" because there are many instances in which the more powerful party - which is usually the one with more valuable resources- dominates the weaker party to come to some reconciliations or even to accept  its loss and this does not necessarily involve the development of shared knowledge and understanding. 
         While I was reading Mercer's chapter 2 in which he talks about the importance of "context" as necessary for understanding, I recalled many instances in organizations where people use communication techniques regardless of the context and how problematic it could be. Also, in this chapter, Mercer talks about "shared knowledge" as a a "context" which reminds me of all the research in organization and management that addresses the challenges posed when employees from various organizational departments try to communicate with each other with the same "technical jargon" used in their departments and how this makes misunderstandings (Marschan- Piekkari, et al., 1999). This people ignore the fact that they are using their department context - specialized language- to communicate with people who don't know that language and this is problematic and makes them seem as if they are not on the same page. Another point brought up in chapter 2 that resonates with what occurs in organizational settings is the use of  gestures and drawings in conjunction with language to convey meaning. That's very true. We are always expected to behave in a certain way in organizations which is indicative of the importance of gestures and also, every organization has a "chart" that develops a shared understanding in organizational members in terms of their positions in the organizational hierarchy, the line of authority, etc. This chart is nothing more than a bunch of boxes and arrows; however, they together have a vital role in organizations. 
           I loved this part of Mercer's book in chapter 3 in which he argues that we have to take calculated risk about how much “context”- shared knowledge- to provide. This leads me to think that communication is all about the "risk" and "language" is a tool we use to bear the risk. Some techniques introduced in Mercer's book about the ways to more thoughtfully bear this risk  - this is just my interpretation- are elicitation, recaps, repetition, reformulation and exhortation. 

   An interesting point presented in chapter 4, is the prevalence of "metaphors" as providers of the frames of reference for sharing thoughts among human beings. Organizations have been metaphorically described as machines, brains, cultures, organisms, psychic prisons and instruments of domination (Morgan, 1997). 

      The main idea presented in Mercer's chapter 5 is how language for collective thinking depends on shared continuing activities of established groups with common interests and goals. In this chapter he talks in detail about communities of practice which were used to be a hot topic in organizational literature in 2000s. As wisely elaborated by Mercer, members of communities can organize language into particular, specialized tools- the genres- that make up the repertoires of the discourses of the communities. This is relevant to communities of practice within and across organizations (Brown & Duguid, 1991). These genres differ from one community of practice to the other. For instance, the community of practice developed across a group of firms in a high-tech industry might be dominated with "product innovation" genres where as in a community of practice including NGOs, the dominant genre might be human well-being.  

In addition, in this chapter Mercer argues that language enables members to construct an identity for their group and to develop roles and identities for themselves within it. Th identity clashes in organizations is another topic of controversy because organizational members are usually members of more than one community within and across the firm. Any of these communities has its own language and identity and bearing all these identities and languages at the same time for one individual is challenging (Wenger, 1998). 

       And finally, chapter 6 of Mercer's book reminds me of myself when he argues that in societies, young people are expected to discover or infer important cultural knowledge for themselves or to live their social lives without it. I think to some extent, new comers to a society are very similar to "young people" in that they should figure out the majority of cultural knowledge on their own which is adventurous but at the same challenging. I would never forget the feeling of embarrassment and detachment when I was sitting on a dinner table with some American friends. They kept talking about the movies and TV shows that were popular in their teens and I, feeling like a "stranger" in their conversations,  was thinking: "Should I watch ALL these movies and TV shows to be able to be part of their conversations?". 

References:

Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation.Organization science, 2(1), 40-57.

Marschan-Piekkari, R., Welch, D., & Welch, L. (1999). In the shadow: the impact of language on structure, power and communication in the multinational.International Business Review, 8(4), 421-440.

Morgan, G. (1997). Images of Organization. NY: SAGE Publications. 

 Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge university press.