Search results

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a social ontology pioneered by Dorothy Smith, the Canadian feminist-sociologist. Conceptualizing discourse as social relations that are organized by the activities of people and are empirically investigable, IE has been increasingly employed by researchers outside of sociology in fields such as education and health. The goal in these cases has often been to explicate the effects of power flowing through textually mediated discourses that work to reconfigure local practices to align with official policy mandates. Yet the discourse analysis performed in much IE to date has not paid close linguistic attention to the way specific actors utilize texts in an active appropriation of what Smith calls the “ruling relations” constituting official discourses. Using data from an IE of student equity practices in Australian higher education, this chapter illustrates how a Fairclough-inspired critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the “orders of discourse” assembled within a relay of university and government texts is able to provide useful analytical purchase on how equity policies are actively appropriated within a university outreach practice. It demonstrates how the accomplishment of student equity outreach involves the hybridizing of equity and excellence discourses in ways that bolster the dominant position of an Australian university. This working together of distinct IE and CDA approaches offers possibilities for more nuanced accounts of individual and collective agency in the process of semiotic and social change.

Purpose – The crime of child sex offending or child sexual abuse is a serious social problem. Since the 1990s, it has been popularly conceptualised as a ‘paedophile threat’ and has become one of the most high-profile crimes of our times. This chapter examines the social construction of paedophiles in UK newspapers and its impact on official regulation of child sex offenders.

Methodology/approach – Discourse analysis is used to establish how newspaper language produces common discourses around child sex offenders. Documentary research of government legislation and law enforcement helps analyse the ways in which official regulation is informed by media discourses.

Findings – Newspaper discourses around child sex offenders construct the paedophile as a distinct and dangerous category of person. This media figure informs government legislation and law enforcement in several ways. For example, discourses around paedophiles necessitate and legitimate punitive legal trends regarding child sex offenders and facilitate the conceptualisation of specific laws.

The conceptual shift towards understanding child sexual abuse through the figure of the paedophile has several detrimental consequences. This chapter offers a critique of contemporary media and governmental/legal discourses, pointing to misrepresentation, sensationalism, demonisation and insufficient child protection.

Value – This research indicates that discourses and conceptual shifts around child sex offenders are driven by the media but have come to be accepted and perpetuated by the government and the law. This dynamic not only illustrates the power of the media to set agendas but raises questions regarding the adequacy of official governance informed by media discourses.

This chapter explores how “discourse,” as a process concerned with the production and consumption of talk and text, has been embraced within the field of organizational change and development (OCD). We present six ways of thinking about the role of discourse in OCD (namely: “discourse as component,” “discourse as process,” “discourse as analysis,” “discourse as method,” “discourse as mindset,” and “discourse as style”). Although the advent of dialogic OD has raised awareness of discourse, we demonstrate that it remains a marginal and under-utilized area of interest. We conclude by making a case for a more expansive role for discursive modes of analysis and engagement within OCD.

Although we have seen a proliferation of studies examining the discursive aspects of strategy, the full potential of the linguistic turn has not yet been realized. This paper argues for a multifaceted interdiscursive approach that can help to go beyond simplistic views on strategy as unified discourse and pave the way for new research efforts. At the metalevel, it is important to focus attention on struggles over competing conceptions of strategy in this body of knowledge. At the mesolevel it is interesting to examine alternative strategy narratives to better understand the polyphony and dialogicality in organizational strategizing. At the microlevel, it is useful to reflect on the rhetorical tactics and skills that are used in strategy conversations to promote or resist specific views. This paper calls for new focused analyses at these different levels of analysis, but also for studies of the processes linking these levels.

Over the past two decades, scholars have noted an increasing global convergence in the policy and practice of education that predominantly contains Western ideals of mass schooling serving as a model for national school systems (Bieber & Martens, 2011; Goldthorpe, 1997; Spring, 2008). A number of transnational organizations contribute disproportionately to global educational discourse, particularly the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) through its international comparative performance measure, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This study conducted a critical discourse analysis of the OECD document PISA 2012 Results: Excellence through Equity (OECD, 2013) to examine the ways that PISA and the OECD conceive of educational equity in a global context. Given the growing convergence of global educational policy, the way that transnational educational organizations address equity has crucial implications for the ways that the world intervenes in schooling to promote or diminish equitable outcomes. Analysis revealed that the OECD and the PISA foreground economistic notions of educational equity, which diminishes the role of other factors (i.e., race/ethnicity, gender, immigration status, language) that mediate equity in schools. Findings and implications are discussed.

The paper examines two discourses of bereavement that crystallized simultaneously in Israel as the third millennium began. One is “the economic discourse of bereavement,” with which official organizations dealing with bereavement sought to “free themselves” from the state's directives on entitlement to compensation. Army widows argued that compensation should not depend on their refraining from remarriage, while bereaved parents demanded it would not be contingent on a means test. They urge for liberation from “role demands” and for presenting entitlement to compensation as entitlement to personal rehabilitation, without using it to support pro-establishment behavior or unending interactions with establishment supervision. Those claims express the linkage of bereavement to globalization and individuation, and the desire to rebel against the republican equation conditioning entitlement to welfare on “proper” establishment-compliant behavior. A second discourse is the “hierarchy of bereavement discourse” – which was placed on the agenda together with the first one, and by the same organizations. Unlike the economic discourse, this one acted to replicate the monopoly held by families of IDF dead in the Israeli pantheon, with attempts to bring into it a group of families of civilian bereavement (families of terror victims). The discourse relies on purely republican underpinnings, complying with the spirit of the local–national period. Exploring the two discourses, that were promoted simultaneously by the same agents, assists an analysis of the Israeli discourse of bereavement that results in its definition as “glocal.” This transpires from a review of the literature showing that – even in the face of globalization processes – national–local foundations remained stable. The paper first engages with the concept of glocalization, the ethos of republican citizenship, and, as a facet of it, the identification of social policy as an agent of the social hierarchy, as well as changes in citizenship during globalization. The second section reviews the status of bereaved families, and the central discourses they have promoted in Israeli society. The third and major part contains an analysis of both discourses – the economic discourse of bereavement, and the hierarchy of bereavement discourse. Finally, we attempt to analyze and explain how apparently antithetical discourses took shape in tandem, drawing on the term “glocalism” and the impact of citizenship models.