Discourse Analysis

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Approaches to social science research claiming to be discursive in a specifically methodological and/or epistemological sense began to appear in social science theorizing in the 1980s, usually in scholarship claiming either to be deconstructive, with reference to the work of Jacques Derrida, or genealogical or archaeological, with reference to the scholarship of Michel Foucault. Derrida and Foucault do not stand alone, but they, far more than their colleagues (including Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva, Spivak, Baudrillard, and others) have become popular in the English-language social sciences. Much of this discursive work has claimed to be, or has been labeled by others, poststructuralist or postmodernist. Such work can be understood to represent one variety of anti-essentialist, or social constructionist, thought.

Conceptually, such work is grounded in Saussurian linguistics.

From this perspective, one can speak meaningfully of discursive systems as an object of analysis. When used this way, a discursive system has much in common with a paradigm as described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In both cases, the reference is to a system of interlinked assumptions, values, beliefs, and interpretations forming a specific common sense about what is real, true, good, and important. The main difference between these terms would be that calling such common sense a discursive system directs one to look at this system through a linguistic lens, considering text as the data for analysis that will yield information about the underlying beliefs and their consequences. One must be careful not to automatically assume that the term discourse is being used in this way when one encounters it because, like the term paradigm, it has been used in a plethora of ways, some incompatible with each other, some questionable in their own right.

Broadly speaking, these approaches to scholarship are all heirs to the phenomenological philosophical tradition. One broad cluster of positions within this tradition, a cluster primarily indebted to Hegel, attempts to derive from interpretive reality an underlying, hermeneutic truth. Recent heirs to this tradition would include Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas. Another, perhaps broader cluster emerging from this tradition abandons the idea of objective truth for more constructionist/anti-essentialist assumptions within which reality is treated less as an objective thing to be discovered and more as a complex, multiply determined entity whose meanings are socially produced. The distinctive quality of discursive approaches to research would be reliance on the root metaphor of textuality.

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