Discourse Analysis

Discourse is the production of meanings. Discourse analysis (DA) is the study of how meanings are produced, and of which meanings prevail in society. DA's view of meaning is different from that of other approaches to the analysis of language and culture. It does not regard meanings as propositions that people carry around in their heads. DA treats meanings as complex phenomena: They emerge from the interplay between individuals' cognitions; actions and intentions; and historical, social, and institutional resources and constraints.

The term discourse is used to underscore that meanings are processes rather than pre-given entities. Discourse derives from the Latin dis-cursus, meaning diverging, dispersing, running to and fro. With the advent of the Enlightenment, the term discourse began to be used to reflect on how people represent knowledge in a range of domains. The term has more recently served to highlight that meanings are rarely objective, neutral, and stable, and that they are frequently contested and contradictory, as well as embedded in complex social processes.

DA describes patterns in discourse by asking who has the right to produce discourse and who does not, and it describes the ways in which discourse either privileges or suppresses meanings. When deployed to study organizations, DA targets the discursive patterns and tensions that are evident in contexts where people are faced with the burden of organizing and coordinating their activities and relationships. Organizational DA (ODA) provides descriptions of organizational documentation (annual reports and the like), communication at formal meetings, the dynamics of team work, and the use of technologies. ODA also describes how dominant discourses of globalism and governance have begun to colonize organizational thinking and strategizing, and how work in general is changing from producing material artifacts to providing services involving increasing amounts of communicative, interpersonal, and affective work.

The practical importance of ODA is that it unpacks these discursive phenomena to create opportunities for reshaping them. In that sense, ODA seeks to act as an organizational learning and social change tool. Whereas ethnography and related approaches investigate how actors experience their organizational roles and processes, ODA provides a framework for asking questions about how and why organizational roles and processes have come about, and how and why they are being articulated in a particular form.