Basically
Chapter 4 of the book talks about discursive Psychology (DP). My understanding
of DP is that in DP, our ways of understanding and categorizing the world
are not universal, but historically and socially specific and contingent and
that individuals are not consistent in their talks and they might contradict
themselves in terms of what they say. In fact, these consistencies and
inconsistencies are used as rhetorical strategies in situated language use (I
am not sure what the last sentence mean? So, is the representation of these
consistencies and inconsistencies helping researchers in finding specific
patterns?)
The other
thing that I understood from reading this chapter is that epistemologically
DP is categorized in the group of social constructionism that
argues that attitudes, social groups and identities are social constructs.
These social constructs are the outcomes of social interactions among people in
their everyday lives.
Also, DP
sees subjective psychological realities as constituted through discourse,
defined as situated language use or language use in everyday texts and talk.
Discourse is said to construct our “lived reality”.DP sees people as both
producers and as products of discourses.
If I want
to take a position, I should confess that I am not a big fan of DP when it
argues that what people say does not necessarily represent what they mean and
what they think of in their minds. I think, except those instances where
there's possibility of "social Desirability", in other circumstances,
what people say could be representative of the things that are going on in
their minds.
Chapter 5
talks about the similarities and differences among the three approaches that
have been previously discussed in chapters 1-3. Reading this chapter helped to
sort of make more sense of the topics that I had read in other chapters. But
still there are lots of ambiguities for me about the topics covered in this
book. For instance, I am not yet sure about what inter-textuality and
inter-discursivity mean.
After
all, multi -perspectival research, discussed in this chapter, reminds me of
mixed method research.
Chapter 6
discusses critical social constructionist research. The first thought that
crossed my mind after reading a couple of pages of this chapter was why authors
of the book decided to discuss social constructionist research as the final
chapter. Honestly, I have no idea about it. However, after reading through the
chapter, I forgot about this and sort of overwhelmed my mind with the content
of the chapter.
Reading
about "hegemony" in this chapter, reminded me of the hegemony of
venture capitalists on entrepreneurs who are in need of financial resources.
Another issue that
crossed my mind was that social constructionists argue that
taken-for-grantedness delimits the field of possibilities for thinking
and acting. So, in resource-dependence theory (which is a well-grounded theory
in strategic management), firm's dependence on specific resources that
are under the control of an entity in the society, creates power for that
entity. So, if the mentioned firm wants to reduce the extent of power and
influence of the resource controller, it should look for other ways to get
access to those resources or look for ways that makes it independent of those
resources. This resource dependence logic makes a very good sense. Whoever
controls the valuable resources, is entitled to exert power and influence. How
does critical research want and can represent this reality in another way?
One
deconstructive argument could be that the power and influence of those who
control resources would be meaningless if nobody needs their resources.
So, this is a two-way mutual dependence and influence.
Although I am not
familiar with literacy literature, I enjoyed reading Rex (2010) paper. What I
liked about the paper is the flow of the topics which attracts the attention of
the reader to go on and on. I think, this is a good example of literature
review.
It sounds like you have taken away the highlights of DP - just one quick comment on that, "If I want to take a position, I should confess that I am not a big fan of DP when it argues that what people say does not necessarily represent what they mean and what they think of in their minds. I think, except those instances where there's possibility of "social Desirability", in other circumstances, what people say could be representative of the things that are going on in their minds." Yes,it's possible, and DP isn't saying that it doesn't represent that - only that we can never truly know. Often qualitative research is criticized in that there is no real way to "know" that what what someone tells you is true and so we should stick with experimental designs. DP is often a reaction to this belief, and they just acknowledge that it is true that we can't ever really know what goes on in someone's head, so let's just look at what their choice of language does in a particular interaction.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like resource dependence theory may be an example of a social theory that could be "translated" for use in a discursive study?
Glad that you enjoyed the Rex article even though it is a bit outside of your area of interest - I also thought it was a good example of a literature review.