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This paper contends that the central question in understanding consumers' experiences is not what is said (lexical analysis) or why (ideological analysis), but how consumers relate these experiences. The purpose is to present a method called discourse analysis (DA) to examine consumers' narratives. This interdisciplinary perspective advantageously complements the lexical, content analytic or semiotic approaches traditionally used in marketing.

In order to show the potential of DA as a method to analyze qualitative data, the paper reports on a research concerning consumers' shopping experiences. Data used stemmed from in‐depth interviews that are analyzed through a critical DA informed by discursive psychology and foucauldian approaches.

DA allows marketers grasping the experiential value of shopping activities by depicting these experiences as ongoing constructions which meaning is constantly reinterpreted. DA also gives access to the various ways informants' manage their identity through narration. Hence, it challenges the simplistic dichotomy between consumers and producers and allows marketers to look at consumers as co‐producers of their lived experience. Given the scope of the study, the obtained results are situated and further researches should be conducted to critically analyze various types of discourses, produced by different actors. This paper shows the potential of DA in analyzing qualitative material. DA could be usefully employed to grasp the thoughts and feelings of the consumers. Rather than solely conducting lexical and/or semiotic analyses, marketers could use DA as a complementary investigation tool.

Through DA, this paper suggests new ways for seeking knowledge about the consumers and the market. To this end, it presents DA principles and shows that it is too often neglected by marketers trying to analyze consumers' narratives.

The basic thesis espoused in this chapter is that a discourse analytic approach, that explores managers’ stories, is equally valid as a more typical case study approach that seeks confirmatory data. Depth interviews with industrial network participants are conducted and described; interviews where managers are encouraged to talk of their lived experiences, beliefs, attitudes, and intentions. Specifically, this case study presents a qualitative exploration of identity processes in industrial networks, in particular social constructions of Indian modernity. The analysis suggests what these constructions mean for the management of buyer–seller relationships (cf. Bagozzi, 1995). The study also reflects calls for more empirical research to be undertaken to improve understanding of contemporary marketing practices, especially in large emerging market economies such as India and Brazil (Dadzie, Johnston, & Pels, 2008). Discursive data were collected in the form of transcripts from semi-structured interviews with a variety of managerial participants involved in trade between New Zealand (NZ) and India. All the participants are Indian, with interviews taking place in 2006 in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai. Interviews were conducted in English; with 23 individuals representing organizations operating in the lumber, wool, horticulture, dairy, engineering, IT, tourism, and education industries, they lasted between 45 and 90 minutes, and were recorded on audio and video media. The study goes some way toward addressing the dominant Western perspective prevalent in most studies of business relationships, and shows how discourse analysis can provide a rich analytical perspective on business-to-business relationships.

Nurses working in acute mental-health services are vulnerable to occupational stress. One stressor identified is the challenging behaviour of some service users (Jenkins and Elliott, 2004). The purpose of this paper is to discuss the discourses drawn on by nurses to understand challenging behaviour and talk about its management.

Nurses working on acute and psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU) wards were interviewed, and data were analysed using discourse analysis.

Biomedical and systemic discourses were found to be dominant. Alternative psychosocial and emotional discourses were drawn on by some participants but marginalised by the dominant biomedical construction of challenging behaviour.

Existing studies have not considered how discourses socially construct challenging behaviour and its management in inpatient mental-health services.

Knowledge management (KM) is a global organizational practice that focuses on core questions around knowledge sharing and creation, and which is characterized by definitional issues and a schism over the nature of knowledge. Against this by definition problematic background, this study aims to investigate how KM practitioners construct identities as expert in an online discussion forum, showing how knowledge sharing is inextricably linked to identity construction.

The study adopts a discourse analytic approach, grounded in the discourse psychology paradigm, and its underlying theory that all language, including both talk and text, is situated action in social interaction, marked by variation, function and consequences.

Analysis demonstrates how forum contributors deploy discursive devices constructively, actively and relationally to formulate membership of an expert elite group, and that group membership is marked by inter‐group competitive rivalry. This has synergies with the theory of creative abrasion.

The study has implications for KM theories and practice in showing how attention to the social‐interaction practices of talk and text can reveal deeper understanding of how people share knowledge, and in demonstrating the important and consequential relationship between identity construction and knowledge.

This is among the first studies to take a discursive approach to the study of language in the KM domain, and demonstrates the rich potential for future studies.

This paper seeks to explore corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Brazil through the “evolution” of the sustainability concept in one of the country's leading specialist business publications – the Exame Magazine. The idea is to understand how Exame portrays sustainable development and corporate sustainability in its Sustainable Corporation Guide.

The authors collected material covering five years of the Exame Sustainable Corporation Guide, from 2005 to 2009. The data were analyzed using discourse analysis.

The authors consider that the “evolution” promoted in this particular business media discourse on CSR and sustainability assumes, and stands for the economically dominant paradigm. In this sense, it cannot be viewed as an alternative that can realistically protect local environments. Despite the idea of a neutral journalistic approach, the concerns depicted in the publication still rely on profits and the chase for business opportunities. The authors also discuss to what extent this particular publication supports a specific hegemonic discourse. The different sustainability indexes adopted only reproduce practices that are desired and that align with the realities of the so-called developed nations.

The paper focuses on what kind of sustainability discourse is propagated by the business media, and more specifically, by a well-known Guide published by a popular Brazilian business magazine. Through this method of diffusion, a specific kind of CSR and sustainability are drawn up that support the capitalist business model. This analysis can raise issues, such as the existence of a “dark side” of sustainability. Further investigation of the diffusion of the CSR and sustainability relationship in business media discourse, as well as of the uncritical adoption of western CSR models, might invigorate the discussion and provide valuable insights.

There is a distinct lack of studies on sustainability and CSR in emergent economies. Such initiatives can be developed in different ways because emergent countries' contexts may differ. Since Brazil is currently an important player in the economic and political arenas, understanding how the notion of sustainability is being discussed in the Brazilian business media can lead to important implications for corporate practices and organizational relationships with stakeholders, both internally as well as externally.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the discursive resources used to sustain and legitimize the reputation of the mining company Samarco Mineração regarding sustainability, before the environmental accident occurred in 2015.

The sustainability reports from 2005 to 2014 were accessed for the analysis of the presentation texts, and the discourse analysis method was applied to access the discursive resources employed.

From the classical concepts of rhetoric, ethos, pathos and logos, it was found that they reinforced the reputation and legitimacy of the company. The ethos is responsible for the company’s image, while pathos triggers the emotional reception of that image, provoking positive expectations. The logos relate the built image and its emotional reception to a rational discourse that values the company’s expertise. The analysis, in the light of the new rhetoric, exposes the strategies to lead the public to accept the image of solidity and confidence given by a reputation respected nationally and internationally.

As a limitation, the quantitative data of the report were not analyzed, since the objective was to analyze the discourse construction, understanding that the research was adequate for the established purposes. For the future, it is suggested to analyze the discourse of the company after the environmental accident in order to verify the strategies used in the same theme; analyze the discourses in other reports published in the Global Reporting Initiative model; investigate how the logic of sustainability report construction based on a standard model can interfere in the formation of reputation and legitimacy of the companies; and analyze the impact of CSR on the strategy of the companies.

The knowledge about the functioning of the language and discourse as an indicative of subjectivity provides a more critical reading and reveals elements implicit in the discourse of the organization. It was verified that the sustainability reports in encapsulated formats allow some stability in the discourse, since companies tend to follow the same line of previous years, even with changes in the organizational structure.

Discourses built by the companies do not always reflect the true operational and engineering situation practiced by them, and that successful and reputed companies can surprise their stakeholders with events of great magnitude that cause significant losses, be they monetary or human lives.

This paper describes the ideas related to forensic practice with people with learning disabilities through a study that explores the apparent ‘truths’ about people with learning disabilities who are detained in forensic settings (referred to here as ‘the men’) and the staff who work with them by an analysis the dialogue contained in retrospective data from interviews and focus groups.The men in these settings are subject to intense stigma and disadvantage; socially and legally. Not only are they categorised as having a learning disability, but also have the added stigma of being offenders, and commonly having mental health issues that expose them to the worst of myths surrounding learning disability; such as the possibility of being viewed as ‘dangerous monsters and sex fiends’ (French & Swain, 2008). Similarly, but to a lesser degree, forensic nurses are stigmatised and subject to strict laws, policies and practices and stereotyped as prison wardens and ‘tough guys’. These ideas may be exposed and challenged through studying the discourses in the dialogue. Therefore, the general research questions included the following.• What are the discourses related to learning disability and forensic practice?• What ideologies underpin and justify forensic practice?This paper is primarily concerned with the way that the staff and the men experience the medium secure unit (MSU) and their views as to the advantages and disadvantages of secure care.The findings generally suggest that the men and the staff are very positive about their lives.They report that the men have many attributes and talents, and view having a learning disability as an advantage at times; the staff enjoy their work and have good relationships with the men. Paradoxically1, there are also negative discourses identified, some of which permeate from macro ideologies into policy and practice to justify the men's treatment in the MSU.The analysis showed that despite the certainty that many feel about the justifications for holding men with learning disabilities in secure settings, many paradoxes exist in the discourses in this setting, which question the validity of official knowledge in this area ‐ this is essentially a Foucauldian idea (Foucault, 1975). Foucault's ideas on the way that knowledge and practice may be challenged are important to this paper.

To confront the increasingly devastating impacts of disasters and the challenges that climate change is posing to disaster risk management (DRM) there is an imperative to further develop DRM. The resilience approach is emerging as one way to do this, and in the last decade has been strongly introduced into the policy arena, although it is not new for DRM practitioners and researchers. Nevertheless, resilience is a highly contested issue, and there is no agreed definition of it, which has resulted in confusion for stakeholders when applying it to practice. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how resilience is framed by researchers and DRM practitioners.

The analytical framework used was Hajer's “social-interactive discourse theory”, combined with analysis of government documents, in-depth interviews with practitioners and observation of field and practices within the context of the Natural Disaster Resilience Program in Queensland, Australia.

One of the key findings is that the idea of “bouncing back” is central to the resilience discourse but different interpretations of this idea results in real-world implications. Three different ways (storylines) in which practitioners construct the meaning of disaster resilience emerge from this study. Importantly the divergences between these storylines reveal possibilities for reframing to occur and these could lead to different policy options and practices.

The results presented in this paper offer empirical evidence on how resilience is understood on the ground, contributing to extending resilience theory and informing DRM and resilience practice.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the activity‐based focus group as a useful method with which to generate talk‐in‐interaction among pre‐schoolers. Analytically, it aims to illustrate how transcribed talk‐in‐interaction can be subjected to a discourse analytic lens, to produce insights into how pre‐schoolers use “Coca‐Cola” as a conversational resource with which to build product‐related meanings and social selves.

Fourteen activity‐based discussion groups with pre‐schoolers aged between two and five years have been conducted in a number of settings including privately run Montessori schools and community based preschools in Dublin. The talk generated through these groups has been transcribed using the conventions of conversation analysis (CA). Passages of talk characterized by the topic of Coca‐Cola were isolated and a sub‐sample of these are analysed here using a CA‐informed discourse analytic approach.

A number of linguistic repertoires are drawn on, including health, permission and age. Coca‐Cola is constructed as something which is “bad” and has the potential to make one “mad”. It is an occasion‐based product permitted by parents for example as a treat, at the cinema or at McDonalds. It can be utilised to build “age‐based” social selves. “Big” boys or girls can drink Coca‐Cola but it is not suitable for “babies”.

This paper provides insight into the use of the activity‐based focus group as a data generation tool for use with pre‐schoolers. A discourse analytic approach to the interpretation of children's talk‐in‐interaction suggests that the preschool consumer is competent in accessing and employing a consumer artefact such as Coca‐Cola as a malleable resource with which to negotiate product meanings and social selves.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the contexts in which part‐time academics pursue their professional development practices at one Lebanese higher education institution.

A case‐study was carried out at the Western Oriental University (WOU) (a pseudonym) where 23 part‐timers and three full‐timers (ex‐part‐timers) were interviewed. To triangulate the data, four of the participants were asked to participate in diary writing. In addition, document checking was carried out. The part‐timers were chosen to represent the wider population of part‐timers at the University. Thus, they were chosen to illustrate particular factors characterizing part‐timers, such as gender, seniority, educational standing, number of work sites and type of part‐time choice. Thematic and discourse analysis were used to analyze the data and investigate the contexts and their impacts on the professional development practices carried out by the participants under study.

Analysis revealed that professional development efforts are greatly curtailed for the part‐timers under study by the unfortunate circumstances of part‐time work in general, coupled with the more specific country situation and particular university practices. Professional development practices which are essential for securing “lifetime employability” of the participants seem, as a result, to be seriously abridged, making them insecure – both in the short and long run.

Reflecting upon the practices taking place at the WOU could be used to give an idea about the difficulties encountered by other part‐timers at other universities in the region.