Discourse Analytic Research

Repertoires and readings of texts in action

Bonnie Lynn Webber, Erica Burman, Ian Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138224087
• eBook ISBN: 9781315403045
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First published in 1993, this book provides clear illustrations of discourse analytic work and empirical critiques of the traditional psychological approaches. Drawing on a range of examples, the contributors argue that identity, deeply felt emotions, prejudice, and attitudes to social issues are created by the language that describes them rather than being intrinsic to the individual. In illustrating the variety of methods available through their studies of punk identity, sexual jealousy, images of nature, political talk, sexism in radio, education case conferences and occupational choice, the contributors provide a challenging presentation of discourse analysis in a psychological context.

Chapter 1
Introduction - discourse analysis: the turn to the text

Erica Burman and Ian Parker

This book is part of a new wave of research sweeping across social psychology, and breaking down boundaries between social psychology and other parts of the discipline. The chapters collected here illustrate the way that discourse analysis can help us reformulate what it is that developmental and social psychologists, personality theorists and cognitive scientists think they are doing when they try to study what goes on 'inside' the individual. We argue that personality profiles for different jobs (Moir, Chapter 2, this volume), attitudes towards social issues (Marshall and Raabe, Chapter 3, this volume; Macnaghten, Chapter 4, this volume), prejudice towards women (Gill, Chapter 5, this volume), personal identity (Widdicombe,Chapter 6, this volume) and even deeply felt emotions like jealousy (Stenner, Chapter 7, this volume) are not things hiding inside the person which a psychologist can then 'discover' but are created by the language that is used to describe them. Psychological phenomena have a public and collective reality, and we are mistaken if we think that they have their origin in the private space of the individual.

Language organized into discourses (what some contributors here call interpretative repertoires) has an immense power to shape the way that people, including psychologists, experience and behave in the world. Language contains the most basic categories that we use to understand ourselves; affecting the way we act as women or as men (in, for example, the sets of arguments that are given about the nature of gender difference deployed to justify inequality), and reproducing the way we define our cultural identity (in, for example, the problems and solutions we negotiate when we try and define who we are as a member of a minority group). When we talk about any phenomenon (our personality, attitudes, emotions), we draw on shared meanings (so we know that the listener will know what we are saying). Many discourse analysts in psychology now would say that we draw on shared patterns of meaning and contrasting ways of speaking they would call repertoires (Potter and Wetherell, 1987) or discourses (Hollway, 1989; Parker, 1992) or ideological dilemmas (Billig et al., 1988). Instead of studying the mind as if it were outside language, we study the spoken and written texts (and other types of text) – the conversations, debates, discussions where images of the mind are reproduced and transformed.

The traditional methods used by psychology are not going to get us very far in identifying the semantic processes going on in language as people recreate the phenomena psychologists usually want to understand (and measure). The 'experimental discourse' (a set of statements, terms, metaphors and turns of phrase which include 'subjects', 'control conditions', 'variables' and 'results') is quite inappropriate here. Our problem now, a series of dilemmas we have to negotiate in the course of this book, is how to develop alternative methods as part of discourse analytic work. Although there have been attempts to set out 'how to do' discourse analysis (Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Fairclough, 1989; Parker, 1992), there is a danger of pretending that there is a simple method for gathering discourses (as if they could appear like the rest of the data psychologists collect) and of glossing over the differences between discourse analysts. Some contributors in this book are happy to talk about 'repertoires' (Moir, Chapter 2; Marshall and Raabe, Chapter 3), 'discourses' (Macnaghten, Chapter 4; Marks, Chapter 8) or 'practical ideologies' (Gill, Chapter 5), while others prefer to avoid reifying these meanings (treating them as if they were 'things') and talk about focusing on 'dynamic and pragmatic aspects of language use' (Widdicombe, Chapter 6) or a 'thematic decomposition' which identifies 'subject positions' (Stenner, Chapter 7).

This refocusing of research in psychology, both in terms of the substantive issues we can address, and in terms of the variety of methods we could use, is the most important and complex contribution of discourse analysis to the discipline. In the rest of this chapter we want to outline key reference points for the development of discourse analysis, explore further how the turn to the text is useful for those who wish to transform rather than simply reproduce psychology, and then briefly raise some questions about the nature of this research, issues that will be picked up inChapter 9.

Reference Points in the Development of Discourse Analytic Research

The variety of debates in discourse research can be bewildering for a researcher new to the area who may simply be out to pick up a useful set of analytic and theoretical tools. In part this is due to the proliferation of brands of discourse analysis and their multiple origins, each of which involve different emphases or levels and styles of analysis. Indeed, it is very difficult to speak of 'discourse' or even 'discourse analysis' as a single unitary entity, since this would blur together approaches subscribing to specific and different philosophical frameworks. In so far as there could be said to be commonality, these approaches are united by a common attention to the significance and structuring effects of language, and are associated with interpretive and reflexive styles of analysis.

What the different theoretical models used by the contributors to this book share is a concern with the ways language produces and constrains meaning, where meaning does not, or does not only, reside within individuals' heads, and where social conditions give rise to the forms of talk available. In its various forms, discourse analysis offers a social account of subjectivity by attending to the linguistic resources by which the sociopolitical realm is produced and reproduced. Such a characterization places discourse analysis as the latest successor to, or version of, approaches such as hermeneutics (Gauld and Shotter, 1977) and social semiotics (Hodge and Kress, 1988). All involve an attention to the ways in which language (as with other representational systems) does more than reflect what it represents, with the corresponding implication that meanings are multiple and shifting, rather than unitary and fixed. Not only is the relationship between what is 'inside' and 'outside' language problematized by these approaches, but the very terms and tools of our inquiry and evaluation become matters of interpretation and debate.

It is possible to identify three reference points in discourse analytic research in psychology now. These reference points are not coherent, unitary theoretical positions or types of method. They are, rather, the clusters of writers and examples of research that are used as references to support the description and commentary on a report. Often in journals, the use of particular writers as references is a better guide to the framework being adopted than the explicit statement made by the author. In many cases, more than one reference point is used by contributors to this book in order to highlight particular sets of issues.

Repertoires and dilemmas

The first reference point is that around the writers who have popularized discourse analysis in social psychology in Britain from the end of the 1980s (Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Billig et al, 1988). Four of the chapters look to these writers. Moir (Chapter 2, this volume) takes up one of the issues explored in Discourse and Social Psychology (Potter and Wetherell, 1987), that of 'personality', and, in a careful analysis of the attempts at personality profiling used in psychological models of occupational career choice, shows how the talk both confirms and disconfirms just as strongly the idea that people in different career paths have certain personalities. Identifying what he calls 'linguistic repertoires', Moir uses Potter and Wetherell as one of his reference points to the power of conversational context on what people say about themselves from moment to moment. The lesson here is not only that the personality typing does not work, but that the phenomenon of personality itself is something which is a function of talk: it is as variable as talk. There is a short step from this point to the idea that questionnaire and interview responses are not tapping something outside language (or inside the head). As Moir points out: 'interview responses are therefore viewed as discursive practices and nothing more'.

Like Moir in his analysis of career interviews, Marshall and Raabe (Chapter 3, this volume) use the notion of interpretative repertoire, and look, as Potter and We there11 (1987) do, to three crucial aspects of language. These aspects are that: (i) There is always a variation in the accounts that people give which is more important than the 'consistency' that psychologists usually fetishize; (ii) talk has a variety of functions other than that of simply transmitting information; and (iii) our talk and writing is constructed out of existing resources. These resources are the repertoires, repertoires we do not create anew when we speak, but which we have to borrow and refashion for our own purposes. A problem is that when we borrow a repertoire it always carries more with it than we (could) think. The second key issue that Potter and Wetherell home in on is attacked again by Marshall and Raabe, that of 'attitudes'. In their analysis of political talk, they show that the functions of the discourse are more important than underlying stable dispositions. As with the notion of 'personality', we are led to suspect that 'attitudes' are not fixed things inside the person but are a function of context and of repertoires.

Gill (Chapter 5, this volume) also locates her work with reference to the work on repertoires, but she augments this with a focus on the 'practical ideologies' that are called upon when people include or exclude others. The notion of 'practical ideology' is one that flows from the set of studies in the book Ideological Dilemmas (Billig et al., 1988) where the 'ideological dilemmas' are those contrasting public and collective ideas that people negotiate when they weigh up, refer to and then discount alternative accounts. Thought itself, in this view, is 'dilemmatic', and Gill shows how the different accounts that radio disc jockeys give to justify the absence of women from radio are far from straightforward. As well as being another good example of how the traditional social psychological concept of 'attitude' will not work when we examine real talk, Gill's chapter shows how an attention to the multiple and contradictory reasons people give for their prejudice allows a better understanding of ideology than of simply delusion or fixed ideas.

Conversation and the making of sense

The second reference point would contest the notion of ideology as a set of fixed ideas, and would then go further than this to say that the 'repertoires' and 'dilemmas' that discourse analysis sometimes pretends to discover are themselves only creations of the analyst. Two of the chapters look to this reference point. Moir (Chapter 2, this volume) is cautious in his use of the notion of 'linguistic repertoire' because he also uses as his reference point writers in the sociological tradition of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967). Ethnomethodology is the study of the methodologies used by the 'folk' (hence 'ethno' — 'methodology') to make sense of the world, and for a researcher to pretend that they have 'discovered' the repertoires that govern what people say would be to do violence to what people actually say (and what they say they are saying). Moir wants to recover what sense his interviewees are making of the questions, rather than sum up what they are doing with a label he, the analyst, has imposed.

A sustained example of what is entailed by this approach is provided by Widdicombe (Chapter 6, this volume), who specifies two features of the analytic stance she adopts. While traditional sociological and social psychological accounts of subcultural identity claim to identify social forces or cognitive schemas which 'cause' people to develop particular identities, Widdicombe argues that identity is negotiated through talk. To capture some sense of the identity that a speaker or writer (or artist or sculptor or musician even, if we opened up our idea of what a text is) is constructing for themselves, it is necessary first to develop 'a sensitivity to the way language is used' and then to focus on the 'inferential and interactive aspects of talk'. The question she is asking as she picks through the interview transcripts are 'What problems are presupposed by the statements made here?' and 'What are the solutions that are being posed to those problems?'. While there is a reluctance to discover things (like repertoires and suchlike) in Widdicombe's work, the analysis is systematically organized around these questions. The rules of language use and meaning making are what are being elaborated here.

Structure and subject

A third reference point is that of 'post-structuralism' (Parker, 1989; Parker and Shotter, 1990). Here, the term 'discourse' is used instead of the term 'repertoire' (Parker, 1992). Post-structuralism is the term for an array of approaches which is suspicious both of claims to reveal a world outside language and of claims that we can experience any aspect of ourselves as outside language. Macnaghten (Chapter 4, this volume) uses the notion of ideological dilemmas and of argumentation with Billig et al. (1988) as his reference point, but he also wants to show that 'discourses' (a term he prefers to 'repertoires') imply social relationships. Reality, behaviour and subjectivity (our sense of ourselves) is always in a text. This is why post-structuralism provokes a deconstruction of the 'truths' we take as given, including the 'truths' about experience that are appealed to by religions or by humanism. Some writers using post-structuralism use the term 'postmodernism' to describe what they are doing – and this is the term currently favoured in the United States by social constructionists (e.g. Hare-Mustin and Maracek, 1988; Gergen, 1991). If this perspective is adopted, then any appeals to human nature, or other non-human nature must be rejected in favour of, as Macnaghten puts it: 'a research orientation based on a post-modernist commitment to the socially constructed nature of reality, or the socially constructed reality of nature'.

The term 'post-structuralism' still carries with it positivist echoes of its history in structuralism (an attempt to discover underlying universal structures to nature and culture), and Stenner (Chapter 7, this volume) therefore prefers to adopt an approach to the jealousy talk of his interviewees, which he calls a 'thematic decomposition'. His analysis of the narratives used by two people to construct themselves and their partner involves, as he says, 'a focus on the storied ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction – discourse analysis: the turn to the text
• Part I The textual construction of psychology
• Part II The rhetorics of politics and identity
• Part III Discourse, action and the research process
• Name index
• Subject index