Organizational discourse is a burgeoning area of study featuring the role of discourse and communication in organizational dynamics. While its rhetorical and literary roots date back to the ancient Greeks, a more recent impetus has been the analysis of professional talk in institutional settings, beginning in the 1970s, and the role of slogans, creeds, jokes
The concept of power, who holds it and how they use it has been of great interest to almost every field of social science. A crucial way in which power is expressed and resisted is through language. Ng and Bradac (1993) argue that language reveals power, language creates power, language reflects power, and language obscures
Scholarship on gender and discourse has a long, interdisciplinary history. Anthropologists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries documented differences between women’s and men’s speech in non-European cultures. However, gender differences within cultures have never been sufficient to constitute separate women’s and men’s languages. Around the early twentieth century, academics’ attention also turned to the English
The communicative roles of gestures during talk in interaction are partly a function of their placement within unfolding turns and action sequences. Gestures occur both as free-standing unit-acts and as components of multimodal turns. A facial gesture, usually enacted with eyebrows and/or the mouth, can occur in the role of operator on a concurrent or
Social scientists are not interested in identity in the sense of an individual’s unique name and address. They are interested in identity in the sense of the category that an individual belongs to (or is made to belong to). All languages have explicit names which allocate people to a category of person (e.g., madre in
The “truth-bias,” the expectation that, normally, one tells the truth, is proposed to be the cornerstone of humanity (Bok 1978). Yet, it is the skill of displacement – speaking of things which are not present – and thus also the ability to deceive that is the basis of human language (Aitchison 1996). A society of
The law operates primarily through language. Legislative bodies enact statutes and ordinances, judges hand down decisions, juries issue verdicts, and people enter into a wide variety of contractual relationships; in each case, a legal effect is produced through language. Nevertheless, until recently, the study of legal discourse was not well developed. Since the 1980s, however
Using language – “languaging” (Becker 1988) – is possible at two levels of discourse. Generally, when we use language, we look through it at a world we believe to exist beyond language. However, we can also use language for metalanguaging, i.e., in order to look through it at the process of using language itself. Discourse
Human emotionality is an ongoing stream that pervades every aspect of social life, talk, conversation, and discourse. Emotions are appraisals of situations; they have somatic bodily characteristics and their expressions can take nonverbal forms (facial, vocal, posture). Theoretical approaches to the emotional dimensions of discourse are found within three traditions of research: psychology of emotions
The concept of argument has a long history in communication. An argument is a concluding statement that claims legitimacy on the basis of reason. But argumentative discourse is a form of interaction in which the individuals maintain incompatible positions. More specifically, argumentative discourse directs attention to the arguments of naïve social actors engaged in intersubjective
Studies of business discourse examine how the work of a business institution gets accomplished through talk and texts. Academic and practitioner interest in business discourse has emerged in a social context where business institutions, notably corporations, have a powerful presence in the world. Close attention to business discourse is predicated on the following suppositions: that
Action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA) is an approach to analyzing talk or text in a social context. It is a relatively new method of discourse analysis, developed by Karen Tracy in 1995. AIDA views communication as composed of different practices in which communicators are problem-solvers. People reflect on what they did do (or would do) in
The “truth-bias,” the expectation that, normally, one tells the truth, is proposed to be the cornerstone of humanity (Bok 1978). Yet, it is the skill of displacement – speaking of things which are not present – and thus also the ability to deceive that is the basis of human language (Aitchison 1996). A society of
Discourse comprehension is the act of interpreting a written or spoken message by integrating the incoming information into the memory or knowledge structures of the interpreter. As such it involves social and pragmatic knowledge as well as grammatical and logical knowledge. Consider an example from Schank and Abelson (1977): (1) “John went into a restaurant.
Development discourse refers to the process of articulating knowledge and power through which particular concepts, theories, and practices for social change are created and reproduced (Escobar 1995; 1999; 2000; Crush 1996). Historically, the approach to development in terms of discourse has evolved out of debates on modernization and Marxist dependency theory rooted in social evolutionism.
As a common term in English, discourse means any extended verbal communication, such as Jesus’s discourse with the people (John 6: 22 –71) or, “The Disinherited Knight then addressed his discourse to Baldwin” (Scott, Ivanhoe). Discourse is lengthy but targeted speech between individuals or between an individual and a group. As a theoretical term, it
Like qualitative content analysis and Grounded Theory, discourse analysis can be conceived as a qualitative empirical method of analyzing mostly recorded human communication. The term itself was first introduced to the public by Zellig Harris in the early 1950s, but used rather unsystematically. In general terms, discourse analysis serves for analyzing written or spoken language
In general usage, political discourse comprises all forms of communication in and by political institutions or actors and all communication with reference to political matters. Thus, political public relations, both internal and external, news, commentary, film, talk shows, citizens’ everyday talk about politics etc. are all sites of political discourse. Different sites follow different rules
“News as discourse” marks a theoretical framework for the analysis of news. News is considered as a complex communicative event – as discourse – including the social context of news reports. Rather than exclusively focusing on text properties such as the thematic structure of news reports, the actors, and the opinions addressed in the reports