Discourse Research and Religion

Disciplinary Use and Interdisciplinary Dialogues

Jay Johnston, Kocku von Stuckrad

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110472646
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The discursive study of religion is a growing field that attracts increasing numbers of students and researchers from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds. This volume is the first systematic presentation of the research into religion and discourse. Written by experts from various disciplines, each chapter offers an integrative overview of theory, method, and contextual studies by focusing on a specific approach, interdisciplinary relationship, controversy, or theme in the field. Taking the discursive dimension in the production of knowledge seriously, the book also provides a critical analysis of academic practice and explores new forms of scholarly communication, including open peer-review. The collected volume will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students across a variety of disciplines, including religious studies, history of religion, sociology of religion, discourse studies, cultural studies, and area studies.

Entering Discourses: A New Agenda for Qualitative Research and the Sociology of Knowledge

Reiner Keller

Updated reprint of Keller, Reiner. 2012. “Entering Discourses: A New Agenda for Qualitative Research and Sociology of Knowledge.” Qualitative Sociology Review 8, no. 2: 46–75, http://www.qualitativesociologyreview.org/ENG/archive_eng.php. Reprinted with the kind permission of the Qualitative Sociology Review.

1 Introduction

The following text argues for a new agenda in qualitative research and the sociology of knowledge. Taking up the concept of discourse and embedding it in the social constructivist approach – itself largely anchored in the interpretive paradigm and sociological pragmatism – I present theoretical foundations, methodological implications, and some practical tools for a sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD). This qualitative approach to discourse has been established in German sociology since the late 1990s and has been presented in several books (for example, Keller [2005] 2021; [2003] 2013; for additional recent presentations, see Keller 2011; Keller, Hornidge, and Schünemann 2018). Since then, it has influenced research across the social sciences.¹ This chapter first sets up the arguments for entering discourses from sociology of knowledge perspectives; it then presents theoretical grounds for and methodological reflections on SKAD, discusses some knowledge-orientated tools for doing SKAD research, and concludes with reflections on methods of discourse research.

2 Entering Discourses

For some decades now, sociology has broadly acknowledged the ascendancy of knowledge societies. According to Anthony Giddens’ diagnosis of reflexive modernity, these kinds of societies are special in the way they rely on expert knowledge (Giddens 1991, 36–44). Such knowledge, gained through organized procedures, shapes every detail of everyday life as well as organizational processes and institutions, from the way we ‘do orgasm’ to the daily practices of education, sports, food, and drink; to our ways of working and organizing production and consumption; all the way to the higher spheres of political governance at national or global levels of action in a “world risk society” (to borrow Ulrich Beck’s phrase; see Beck 1999). As Stuart Hall and his colleagues in the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies argued in the 1990s, we are living in a period of “circuits of culture” – a phrase Hall used to indicate that meaning-making activities and the social construction of realities have become effects of the organized production, representation, marketing, regulation, and adaption of meaning (Hall 1997a). In making this statement, the Birmingham School was heavily influenced by the interpretive tradition in sociology, primarily by symbolic interactionist and Weberian theorizing and research (see, for example, Blumer 1969; Weber [1904] 1949). However, in their insistence on organized or structured means of processing circuits of culture, the Birmingham School referred to rather different theoretical traditions as well, including some of Michel Foucault’s concepts:

[r]ecent commentators have begun to recognize not only the real breaks and paradigm-shifts, but also some of the affinities and continuities, between older and newer traditions of work: for example between Weber’s classical interpretive “sociology of meaning” and Foucault’s emphasis of the role of the “discursive.”

(Hall 1997b, 224)

Here it is interesting to see Hall arguing for an integrated perspective on meaning-making, including both Weberian and Foucauldian thinking – bearing in mind that common sociological (and poststructuralist) debates seem to draw a sharp line between these two authors. However, if we look more closely, we can indeed assert that Max Weber’s work on The Protestant Ethic (Weber [1905] 2002) is no less and no more than an avant la lettre discourse study of religious discourse and its power effects in capitalist societies. In making his claim regarding the connection between The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber analyzed several kinds of texts: religious books, advice books, and sermons. It was from such textual data that he developed his ideas on “worldly asceticism” (Weber [1905] 2002, 53–125) and deeply structured ways of living everyday life, whether at home or at work. While Weber insisted on the subject’s role in meaning-making, for him this never denoted individual or idiosyncratic activities. The Protestant Ethic delivered a deeply social “vocabulary of motives” (to borrow Charles W. Mills’ phrase) and an institutionally preconfigured “definition of the situation” (in William I. Thomas’ and Dorothy Thomas’ sense). Mills (1940) was well aware of this implication of Weber’s sociology when he argued, with strong references to Weber and the sociology of knowledge, for a sociological analysis of vocabularies of motives and situated actions. And Thomas and Thomas (1928) – together with George Herbert Mead (1934) and others in the Chicago tradition – were at least familiar with the German context of verstehen and meaning(-making), to which Weber was deeply committed.

As far as I know, Weber never used the term discourse, but the Chicago pragmatists did. They argued that social collectivities produced and lived in ‘universes of discourse’ – systems or horizons of meaning and processes of establishing and transforming such systems. In the 1930s, George Herbert Mead stated: “This universe of discourse is constituted by a group of individuals […] A universe of discourse is simply a system of common or social meanings” (Mead [1934] 1963, 89).

Alfred Schütz, the main proponent of social phenomenology, also referred to this notion – for example in the 1940s, when he considered the conditions of possibility for scientific work:

[a]ll this, however, does not mean that the decision of the scientist in stating the problem is an arbitrary one or that he has the same “freedom of discretion” in choosing and solving his problems which the phantasying self has in filling out its anticipations. This is by no means the case. Of course, the theoretical thinker may choose at his discretion [a particular scientific field.] But, as soon as he has made up his mind in this respect, the scientist enters a preconstituted world of scientific contemplation handed down to him by the historical tradition of his science. Henceforth, he will participate in a universe of discourse embracing the results obtained by others, methods worked out by others. This theoretical universe of the special science is itself a finite province of meaning, having its peculiar cognitive style with peculiar implications and horizons to be explicated. The regulative principle of constitution of such a province of meaning, called a special branch of science, can be formulated as follows: Any problem emerging within the scientific field has to partake of the universal style of this field and has to be compatible with the preconstituted problems and their solution by either accepting or refuting them. Thus, the latitude for the discretion of the scientist in stating the problem is in fact a very small one.

(Schütz 1973, 250)

And a few pages later, he writes: “[t]heorizing [ … ] is, first, possible only within a universe of discourse that is pregiven to the scientist as the outcome of other people’s theorizing acts” (Schütz 1973, 256).

While later work in the tradition of Alfred Schütz – as well as of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), who built on Schütz’s work – only marginally took up this concept (if at all), the symbolic interactionist perspective has indeed informed several research agendas which turned to discourse-related subjects and questions, whether implicitly or explicitly. Without offering an exhaustive list, one could mention Joseph Gusfield’s study on the Culture of Public Problems (1981), Anselm Strauss’ attention to “ongoing negotiated orderings in social worlds/arenas” (1979; 1991; 1993), or broader work on the social construction and careers of social problems. Stephen Hilgartner and Charles L. Bosk have presented certain essential assumptions involved in the latter:

In its most schematic form, our model has six main elements:

1. a dynamic process of competition among the members of a very large ‘population’ of social problem claims;
2. the institutional arenas that serve as ‘environments’ where social problems compete for attention and grow;
3. the ‘carrying capacities’ of these arenas, which limit the number of problems that can gain widespread attention at one time;
4. the ‘principles of selection’ or institutional, political, and cultural factors that influence the probability of survival of competing problem formulations;
5. patterns of interaction among the different arenas, such as feedback and synergy, through which activities in each arena spread throughout the others; and
6. the networks of operatives who promote and attempt to control particular problems and whose channels of communication crisscross the different arenas. (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988, 56)

In the context of the symbolic interactionists’ social movements research in the 1980s and 1990s, such ideas were closely linked to a concept of public discourse, referring to the issue-framing activities of competing collective actors in public struggles for the collectivities’ “definition of the situation” (see Gamson 1988). However, despite these efforts and multiple studies, it seems that this interpretive paradigm’s analysis of discourses did not succeed in establishing an approach of its own – one that would integrate the different usages and elaborate on the proposed initial frameworks. Nor did cultural studies in the Birmingham tradition succeed in this arena; concrete research in this tradition made use of social semiotics or argued for critical discourse analysis, as established by Norman Fairclough and others (see Hall 1997a; Barker 2000; Barker and Galasinski 2001).

Discourse research in today’s social sciences is mostly attributed to the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (see Keller 2008; 2018b). Such a diagnosis might be sustained by Norman Denzin’s ongoing insistence on the importance of pos...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Discourse Analysis as an Anthropology of the Mundane: An Interview
• Entering Discourses: A New Agenda for Qualitative Research and the Sociology of Knowledge
• Religious Discourse and Its Modules
• Historical Discourse Analysis: The Entanglement of Past and Present
• Whose Voice Is This? The Multicultural Drama from CDA and DST Perspectives
• Some Important Conceptual Lines of Discourse Theories in Cultural Studies of Religion
• The Power Politics of ‘Religion’: Discursive Analysis of Religion in Political Science and International Relations
• Religion, Discourse, and the Economy Question: Fraught Issues in Market Societies
• Dynamics of the Human Rights Discourse on Freedom of Religion – Observed from the Religious Studies Angle
• Gender and Its Vicissitudes
• ‘Beyond’ Language? Ecology, Ontology, and Aesthetics
• Index of Key Terms
• Index of Places
• Index of People