Psychology After Discourse Analysis

Concepts, methods, critique

Ian Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848722101
• eBook ISBN: 9781317683322
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area.

Psychology After Discourse Analysis is the third volume in the series and addresses three central questions:

• How did discourse analysis develop inside psychology?
• How does discursive psychology address concerns about the traditional 'laboratory experiment' paradigm in psychology?
• What is the future for discourse analysis?

The book provides a clear account of the various forms of discourse analysis that have been used within psychology, and provides a review of their significance for a new generation of psychologists. The early chapters present a framework for understanding the origins of these various forms, as well as the differences between them. Emphasizing the gap between discursive psychology and mainstream psychology, Parker then explores relations between discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, social constructionism and the postmodern turn in the social sciences. The final chapters describe the limitations of discourse analysis and explore its flaws as a framework and as a practice, questioning its future within academia and in political and social contexts beyond psychology.

Psychology After Discourse Analysis is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and for discourse analysts of different traditions. It will also introduce key ideas and debates within critical psychology to undergraduates and postgraduate students across the social sciences.

1 Discourse analysis

Dimensions of critique in psychology

In the early years of the Discourse Unit we spent many hours discussing with students and colleagues how to make sense of the different ‘introductions’ to discourse analysis that were each giving competing accounts of what the approach was. In many cases these introductions were from different disciplinary contexts – linguists, literary theory, philosophy, sociology and political theory – and as time went on the appearance of a tradition of discourse analysis in psychology helped matters a bit. But not much, because there are now still many versions of discourse analysis in psychology that carry with them assumptions from the host discipline from which they were gathered.

This chapter tackles that confusion by providing a map by which researchers might at least be able to identify where the different accounts of discourse analysis are coming from. It provides a systematic account of eight different forms of discourse analysis organized into four different levels of approach, ranging from the micro-interpersonal level to historical-political level. This is a longer version of a paper that was eventually cut to size for publication in a qualitative research in psychology journal.

Discourse analysis in psychology provides a range of conceptual and methodological resources for thinking critically about the discipline of psychology. These conceptual and methodological resources also reorient researchers in the discipline away from a search for causes of behaviour inside the heads of individuals to social contexts in which human beings construct and challenge what has been presented to them as ‘facts’ about their nature or possibilities for change. Discourse analysis has sometimes even been treated as synonymous with ‘critical psychology’, and enabled politically progressive alternative approaches to subjectivity, so this paper also reviews connections with ‘critical psychological’ approaches and more broadly with dimensions of critique in research.

Research that aims to connect discourse analysis with critical psychology faces at least two problems. The first is that, as is the case for the forms of language it studies, ‘discourse analysis’ itself poses a choice for researchers who use it to describe or change the world, a choice which hinges on the idea that we always either reproduce or transform phenomena when we describe them. There are forms of discourse analysis that aim to merely describe forms of language, and so they ‘reproduce’ what they find. Against this politically conservative choice, we are concerned here with discourse analysis that transforms the world, the kind of analysis that connects interpretation with change. The phrase ‘reproduction or transformation’ is borrowed from a ‘realist’ tradition of inquiry (Bhaskar, 1986). That tradition is sometimes pitted against discourse analysis, and it does draw attention to the importance of ‘structure’ as a condition for or constraint upon human agency (Parker, 1988).

The second problem is that there is a host of different approaches to discourse analysis, and each approach is governed by a series of conceptual and methodological terms which themselves orient the researcher to attend to specific delimited aspects of language. This array of different approaches causes much confusion to a researcher beginning to learn to notice the structuring force of language and wanting to study it. Our response to this diversity in the field of discourse analysis is to treat this as an opportunity, and to clarify the role of different approaches in order to map the field. A critical psychologist could then make use of different elements of the approach and formulate their own research questions and possible ways of answering them.

I will focus on eight different approaches to discourse analysis, and our journey through these approaches, described in such a way as to emphasize choices about ‘levels’ of analysis, will take us through dimensions of research that connect in different ways with political and ideological questions. One reason there are so many varieties of discourse analysis is that there has been a focus on language in research that has taken different forms in different disciplines. This disciplinary separation can serve as an obstacle for those wanting to carry out interdisciplinary or, as we would prefer to say, ‘trans-disciplinary’ research (Curt, 1994). We are concerned with discourse analysis in psychology here, and so that also immediately brings us to the question of ‘reproduction and transformation’. Then we are able to focus on how the discipline reproduces certain assumptions about method and how critical psychology needs to transform those assumptions (Parker, 2007a).

We will move up through four different ‘levels’ of analysis, beginning with the smallest-scale level that is usually treated as the domain of ‘psychology’, and at each level we will notice the way that a particular approach either attends to the dimension of time or space. We begin with the lowest-order conceptions of time and space that define how individuals relate to one another moment by moment and in small self-contained interaction, and trace our way up to include study of larger temporal sequences and social activity. We will oscillate between an attention to time and attention to space in this account in which we designate each approach by a two-or three-letter acronym (TLA).

Little things in context

As we begin with a focus on the kinds of discourse analysis that concentrates on little sequences of interaction in little spaces, it should be emphasized that we do not assume that bigger is better, that larger-scales of analysis are more politically progressive. There are implications here for our understanding of psychology and for the development of critical psychology in work at a micro-level as much as that at a macro-level of research. We begin with the dimension of time.

1 In time: CA

The first approach, Conversation Analysis (CA), is extremely small-scale in its temporal scope, and has found its way into psychology from across the disciplinary borders with what is sometimes known as ‘micro-sociology’.

Conversation Analysis is devoted to detailed description of formal properties of talk, and builds upon the lectures of Harvey Sacks (1992). In the apparently most simple formulations that Sacks analyses – such as ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.’ – Sacks (1972) teases apart the mutual implication of subjects ordered around social categories. Attention to ‘membership categorization devices’ has spawned a separate ‘Membership Categorization Analysis’ (MCA) strand of work that already begins to show us how micro-interaction replicates social structures (Hester and Eglin, 1997).

In CA, talk, in conversations or in other sequences that maintain or ‘repair’ the orderliness of everyday interaction, is unpicked and marked in a close reading of transcripts using a specific vocabulary (Sacks et al., 1974); this includes ‘pre-sequencing’ to initiate a conversation or new topic, ‘adjacency pairs’ to describe how participants arrange their turns to speak, and ‘preference organization’ to describe how some responses which agree with or accept the action performed before it are apparently more smoothly undertaken (Atkinson and Heritage, 1984).

The orderliness and repair of what is sometimes called ‘naturally occurring’ conversation can be used to show how emotion that seems to disrupt talk is managed in therapy (Peräkylä et al., 2008). In forms of CA treated as a version of discourse analysis in psychology there has been an extension of the approach to include detailed transcription of non-verbal interaction, such as crying (Hepburn, 2004).

CA is not behaviourist as such, but it is concerned with the form of talk rather than content, and this is something that separates it from other approaches to discourse analysis. It is precisely this behaviourally oriented aspect of the approach, to the forms of order that can be observed and described in extremely detailed transcription of behaviour that has set the battle lines between CA as such and those who have tried to extend it to account for wider structural issues, of the organization of power between men and women, for example. Hence complaints that so-called ‘Feminist Conversation Analysis’ (FCA) (Kitzinger, 2000) enables the leakage into the analysis of illicit content, of interpretation that is theoretically or politically informed (Wowk, 2007). FCA does allow for connections between the micro-level of interaction and societal processes, for analysis of the reproduction and transformation of the social order (Whelan, 2012). Anecdotal accounts mingled in with the analysis are thus particularly vexing for those who want to keep the analysis strictly in line with Sacks’ prescriptions (Kitzinger, 2000).

Methodologically, Conversation Analysis in psychology fits very neatly with the empiricist tradition in the discipline in the English-speaking world and so this means that it is also quite conservative. An emphasis on ‘transcription’ as part of the method is evidence of this (Potter, 1998). However, apart from FCA (which, probably for tactical reasons, insists that it is also a rigorous empirical analysis that does not inject its own content into its readings of interaction), CA does connect with critical perspectives in ‘respecifying’, at least, what are usually taken to be internal ‘cognitive’ procedures in psychology as properties of publically accountable shared interaction (Edwards, 1997).

We can make use of this, and alongside the already existing analyses of the ordering of gender and sexuality in this tradition of work, there is the basis of something that is almost already ‘critical psychology’ (Gough and McFadden, 2001). However, the aversion of Conversation Analysis to theory means that it cannot take this respecification to the level of critique of psychology as such, and here it is as trapped in its own level of analysis as the actual empirical work it carries out. CA also guards its own expertise, in production and reading of transcription, and has no interest in engaging those it studies in interpretation of their own lives. There is also effectively a strict line of sub-disciplinary separation between its approach to linear ordered interaction and more phenomenologically oriented approaches in micro-sociology that are concerned with how people inhabit space with others as mutually recognized subjects, to which we turn next.

2 In space: EM

The second approach, ethnomethodology (EM), was developed by Harold Garfinkel (1967) as an approach to the question of order in the social world that already insisted, as a first principle, that the specification of this order was not the task of some putative expert who was able to divine the rules that were being followed from the outside, but was a task that was ‘accomplished’ by the members of the group concerned themselves. This approach actually preceded CA, and sometimes in psychology the two approaches are run together, as if CA enables a formalization of EM (Rapley, 2012). As we would expect from an approach more indebted to phenomenology, there is a concern in this approach with content rather than simply with form (Heritage, 1984); and unlike CA, Garfinkel was interested in how order could be revealed by ‘insiders’ refusing to conform to taken-for-granted behavior and by such ‘garfinkeling’, revealing what rules were operating to hold a little social world in place (Filmer, 1972). The three elements compressed into this term ‘ethnomethodology’ function as a demand that ‘sociologists’ who want to privilege their own accounts of an overarching social order back off from everyday life-worlds.

A first element ‘ethno’ characterizes the particular little social world in which subjects constitute themselves in relation to others they recognize as like themselves. So even at this level of definition of a community and its boundaries there are epistemological and ontological stakes as to who will be responsible for and implement such a definition. Knowledge and being are woven together, and it is here that ‘Membership Categorization Analysis’ (MCA) raises a question for the discourse analyst about how understanding of this or that ‘ethnographic’ category should be elaborated, and MCA itself begins to attach itself more to EM than to CA (Hansen, 2005).

The ‘method’ element of ethnomethodology concerns the ways in which members of the particular space they inhabit bring it into being and maintain it through particular practices. All of the kinds of procedures described by CA, for example, will serve to initiate new members and render meaningful to them the order that they themselves must also take responsibility for keeping going. The jargon terms that CA uses are elaborated by outsiders, and EM is concerned, instead, with the accomplishment of sense through the practical reasoning of those inside the space they focus upon in any particular study.

The third element, which is made visible by the ‘ology’ part of the term, concerns the way in which everyday life needs to be theoretically elaborated by participants in order for it to be made meaningful to them. This ‘ology’ does not refer to what the micro-sociologist does in their application of ‘ethnomethodology’, but to how the micro-social order is achieved and reflected upon, and reconstituted by that very process of reflection, by those who must be accorded the status of subjects rather than objects of inquiry. It is their ‘ology’ that is at stake here, not that of the psychologist.

This defence of the ‘ethnomethodology’ of those who inhabit what they themselves take to be their own social space entails a refusal of terms of description given by outsiders, such as sociologists or psychologists, but it does force the question as to what domain the ‘ology’ that ‘psychology’ is concerned with actually applies to. This is where EM has become a conceptual resource for the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, and the work of Bruno Latour (2012) which bore fruit in Actor Network Theory, for example, was influenced by Garfinkel. Scientific sense-making procedures in laboratory life are viewed as exactly that, the production of an ‘ethnomethodology’ by those concerned in the community of scientists, and, by the same token, the ‘psychologists’ accomplishments pertain to their own life-worlds rather than those operating in what they imagine to be the ‘real world’ outside (Woolgar, 1988).

There is a connection here again with specific attempts by feminist researchers to open this analysis to broader social processes; for example, to make intelligible the procedures by which someone might be marked out as ‘mentally ill’, making this intelligible without endorsing those procedures (Smith, 1978). Here there is a concern with something very like the giving of ‘voice’ to those who use mental health services, valuing their own terms of description rather than imposing another set of categories. This chimes with the feminist ‘standpoint’ perspective, the argument that those who suffer power see its operations more clearly (Harding, 2003). At the same time, this phenomenological defence of the life-world of those subject to academic redescription, which we could see as a first step to valuing the forms of discourse analysis that are carried out by people themselves as part of their everyday activities of making sense, also raises the same problems as those in the mental health system survivor literature. A ‘voice’ may not be enough without a theoretical grasp of the nature of the oppression it may really be speaking of (Cresswell and Spandler, 2009).

EM typically avoids this next step, from voice to theory because of its methodological emphasis on ‘description’, just as CA tries to avoid the use of theory in its own translation of experience into the particular format employed in transcripts of naturally occurring conversation. In this way, the micro-level of sequences of interaction or the shape of a life-world is maintained, sealed off from anything larger than can be empirically captured or phenomenologically grasped by subjects as an accomplishment. Discourse analysts who want to move up a scale to comprehend the structuring of the grounds of experience need to turn to ideas from other approaches.

Grounds of experience

The classic example puzzled over by Sacks (1972) – ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.’ – is not actually embedded in a ‘conversation’ at all, but it does already have the structure of narrative, posing a question about what is happening, what should be done, and what kinds of subjects participate in such activities. As such, the statement is a story that also performs normative patterns and dominant themes in contemporary child-rearing practices (Burman, 2008a). When ‘discourse analysis’ was first introduced to British social psychology, the notion that there is something beyond immediate interaction in discourse was configured in terms of ‘interpretative repertoires’ (Potter and Wetherell, 1987). Two complementary approaches to discourse, one tracking the narrative dimension as a temporal structure and the other exploring the space of possible available meanings in which such stories could be told, are Narrative Analysis and Thematic Analysis.

3 In time: NA

In its simplest form, Narrative Analysis (NA) aims to produce a form of account of individual life experience in which there is a linear sequence so that the reader can recognize the structuring of life events as being rather like that of a book. This sequence may even be anticipated in the research process itself so that the interviewee is invited to structure their story with a beginning, a middle and an end (Crossley, 2000).

The way this sequence is conceptualized, for the participants in the research as much as for the researchers themselves, will affect the kinds of accounts that appear. For example, if the research is aiming to produce a life-story, then the account is likely to draw upon and then map itself into normative developmental patterns, perhaps with the interviewee being given space to talk about how his or her own life departs from those patterns. If the research is focusing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series foreword
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: psychology after discourse analysis
• 1 Discourse analysis: dimensions of critique in psychology
• 2 Four story-theories about and against postmodernism in psychology
• 3 Discourse analysis and psycho-analysis
• 4 Discursive complexes in material culture
• 5 Against discursive imperialism, empiricism and constructionism
• 6 Discourse analysis and micronations of the self in times of war
• References
• Index