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.