Organizational Discourse

Conceptual Overview

Organizational discourse, as David Grant and colleagues have noted, operates as an umbrella term for a rich array of methods, approaches, and perspectives. Various commentators, including Grant and colleagues, have suggested that the primary methods deployed to examine discursive aspects of organizations and organizing are conversation analysis and ethnomethodology (the examination of situated real-time interaction), narrative analysis (the consideration of stories and other temporally organized accounts of events), rhetorical analysis (the exploration of processes of persuasion), deconstruction (the problematizing of the meaning and the reading of a text), critical discourse analysis (the connecting of language use with wider issues of power and ideology), and intertextual analysis (the investigation of the genealogy of a given text in relation to other texts). These approaches have been applied to access a variety of spoken and written phenomena, including metaphor and other tropes; language games; stories, tales, and sagas; plots, scripts, and narratives; rites, rituals, and myths; texts and inscribed artifacts; rhetoric; conversations; dialogue; dramaturgy; and sensemaking. Furthermore, organizational discourse has been applied to a number of areas of organizing, such as the empirical interrogation and theoretical extension of charismatic leadership, group dynamics, corporate strategy, organizational change, disasters and crises, professional and corporate identity, knowledge management, entrepreneurship, globalization, and management fads and fashions.

Beyond issues of method and points of application, David Boje and colleagues have written that organizational discourse can be thought of in terms of levels and modes of engagement. Levels of discourse, in relation to organizations, range from the microanalysis of specific utterances and words to the macroanalysis of complete paradigms and perspectives as metadiscursive [Page 1053]formations, as noted by Mats Alvesson and Dan Karreman. Different modes of engagement are informed and determined by the contrasting epistemological and ontological commitments of different stakeholders, commentators, and researchers. For some, discourse is deployed to prove phenomena and resolve conundrums, while for others, it acts as a means of revealing the complexity, ambiguity, and indeterminacy of objects, subjects, and concepts. It is worthwhile exploring the question of levels and modes of engagement in more detail and with regard to methods of undertaking organizational discourse analysis, as noted by Cliff Oswick and David Richards.

Micro approaches to organizational discourse are concerned with a narrow and discrete unit of languagebased analysis. More specifically, this entails interrogating bounded episodes of real-time interaction (e.g., audiotape recordings or video clips) or discrete written passages (e.g., transcripts or short documents). Micro-oriented approaches tend to be localized and to focus on situated talk through the use of conversationanalytic techniques and ethnomethodology. As Gail Fairhurst and François Cooren have noted, these approaches are used to reveal a variety of localized phenomena, such as turn-taking, which indicates dominance; membership categories such as senior manager and worker, which confer relative status; and speech forms (e.g., interruptions, hesitations, and modes of address).

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