Critical Discourse Analysis

The Critical Study of Language

Norman Fairclough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317864646
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Bringing together papers written by Norman Fairclough over a 25 year period, Critical Discourse Analysis represents a comprehensive and important contribution to the development of this popular field.

The book is divided into seven sections covering the following themes:

• language in relation to ideology and power
• discourse in processes of social and cultural change
• dialectics of discourse, dialectical relations between discourse and other moments of social life
• methodology of critical discourse analysis research
• analysis of political discourse
• discourse in globalisation and transition
• critical language awareness in education

The new edition has been extensively revised and enlarged to include a total of twenty two papers. It will be of value to researchers in the subject and should prove essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in Linguistics and other areas of social science.

Section D

Methodology in CDA research

Introduction

I use methodology in preference to method. Settling on a methodology for a particular research project is not just a matter of selecting from an existing repertoire of methods. It is a theoretical process which constructs an object of research (a researchable object, a set of researchable questions) for the research topic by bringing to bear on it relevant theoretical perspectives and frameworks. Methods (e.g., of data collection and analysis) are selected according to how the research object is constructed. So one cannot neatly separate and oppose theory and method in the conventional way. This is more fully explained and illustrated in the first paper (‘A dialectical–relational approach to critical discourse analysis in social research’).

The five papers in this section were published between 2002 and 2009. They are all concerned with issues of methodology in CDA research, but they differ in how they approach these issues. The first is a systematic presentation and illustration of a methodology for the version of CDA I am working with at the time of writing (2008). The second (‘Understanding the new management ideology. A transdisciplinary contribution from critical discourse analysis and the new sociology of capitalism’) is an exploration of how a transdisciplinary research methodology might be developed between CDA and an approach to analysing changes in capitalism developed by French sociologists, ‘New Sociology of Capitalism’. It was written with Eve Chiapello, the co-author of a major study using that approach. The third (‘Critical discourse analysis in researching language in the new capitalism: overdetermination, transdisciplinarity and textual analysis’) focuses on the implications of a transdisciplinary research methodology for methods of analysing texts, and discusses common ground and differences between CDA and systemic functional linguistics. The fourth (‘Marx as a critical discourse analyst: the genesis of a critical method and its relevance to the critique of global capital’) is a study with Phil Graham of Marx’s analytical method, focusing on the ways in which it foreshadowed and might inform CDA. The fifth (‘Critical discourse analysis, organisational discourse and organisational change’) is an invited contribution to the journal Organization Studies on developments in research on organisational discourse, which advocates a CDA methodology based upon critical realism in preference to the postmodernist and extreme social constructivist approaches often adopted.

The first paper (‘A dialectical–relational approach to critical discourse analysis in social research’) presents a methodology which is a form of what Bhaskar (1986) calls ‘explanatory critique’. The same methodology in essence was proposed in the book I co-authored with Lilie Chouliaraki, Discourse in Late Modernity (1999), though I have modified it here. The methodology can be formulated in four ‘stages’ (which can be further elaborated into a number of ‘steps’):

Stage 1: Focus upon a social wrong, in its semiotic aspect.

Stage 2: Identify obstacles to addressing the social wrong.

Stage 3: Consider whether the social order ‘needs’ the social wrong.

Stage 4: Identify possible ways past the obstacles.

The methodology follows the practice in critical research of focusing research on wrongs, a term I use here in preference to problems, which Chouliaraki and I used, for reasons explained in the paper. Wrongs include injustices and inequalities which people experience, but which are not necessary wrongs in the sense that, given certain social conditions, they could be righted or at least mitigated. These might be, for instance, matters of inequalities in access to material resources, lack of political rights, inequalities before the law or on the basis of differences in ethnic or cultural identity. Stage 1 also indicates a focus on wrongs which can be productively researched in terms of relations between semiotic and extra-semiotic elements, and one ‘step’ within Stage 1 is constructing a research object for researching the wrong in a transdisciplinary way. Stage 2 asks: what is it about the nature of the social order in which this wrong exists that makes it difficult to right it? Since the ‘point of entry’ in CDA research is semiotic, we need to consider particularly semiotic aspects of the obstacles, and to answer this question we need to analyse dialectical relations between semiotic and extra-semiotic elements in relevant practices, institutions and events, which entails collecting and analysing relevant texts. Stage 3 asks: is this social wrong inherent to the social order so that it can’t be righted without changing the social order (though perhaps it can be mitigated), or something that can be righted without such radical change? Stage 4 asks how the obstacles identified in Stage 2 might be overcome, and since these obstacles are partly semiotic in character, it focuses on how people actually deal or might deal with the obstacles in part by contesting and changing discourse. The social wrong I take as an example to illustrate this methodology is a political one: suppression of political differences over how to respond nationally to major international economic changes (‘the global economy’, as many construe it) in favour of creating a consensus, which is a social wrong in that it undermines democracy but also poses the danger that dissent which cannot be politically articulated may emerge in nationalist or xenophobic forms. The problem is one of depoliticisation, keeping issues and people out of political debate and dialogue, and the research object is: semiotic aspects of depoliticisation and politicisation (the latter because we are also concerned – Stage 4 – in how they may be brought back in).

This paper appeared in a collection of papers which presented a variety of ‘methods’ in CDA (Wodak and Meyer 2001). Labelling different approaches to CDA (as ‘dialectical–relational’, ‘discourse–historical’ etc.) has the advantage of showing that there are in indeed differences in approach, but also the substantial disadvantage of potentially ossifying different tendencies and emphases into mutually exclusive territories. I think it is misleading to overemphasise, and especially to institutionalise, these differences – which amounts to advising readers not to make too much of the title of this paper. For instance, my approach to CDA is, like the approach labelled ‘discourse– historical’ in the collection of papers, discourse–historical, and dialectical relations are a focus for all the approaches in the book, though my treatment of both these facets of CDA is different and sometimes markedly different from others.

The second paper (‘Understanding the new management ideology. A transdisciplinary contribution from critical discourse analysis and the new sociology of capitalism’) begins from the concept of and analysis of the ‘spirit of capitalism’ in the book of that title by Luc Boltanski and my co-author, Eve Chiapello (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999). The book offers an account of changes in capitalism since 1960, focusing upon one aspect of the new ‘spirit of capitalism’ associated with the new form of capitalism which began to emerge in the 1980s, an ideology which justifies people’s commitment to this form of capitalism: new management ideology. The book includes analysis of two bodies of texts, management literature from the 1960s and from the 1990s. Given this textual dimension of the book’s analytical method, our paper seeks to develop a transdisciplinary methodology which brings together the new sociology of capitalism and my version of CDA, and to assess what it can add to research on transformations in capitalism. To make this methodological endeavour more concrete we include an analysis of part of a book by an influential management ‘guru’ Rosabeth Moss Kanter who was one of the authors included in Boltanski and Chiapello’s corpus of texts from the 1990s.

The third paper (‘Critical discourse analysis in researching language in the new capitalism: overdetermination, transdisciplinarity and textual analysis’) focuses upon textual analysis, and how discourse analysts and linguists can make a strong case to social scientists for textual analysis as a significant element in social research, specifically research on current transformations of capitalism. This is a theme I addressed in an earlier paper in the journal Discourse & Society (Fairclough 1992e) and more extensively in my book Analyzing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research (2003). A central claim both of that book and of this paper is that although there is much in existing forms of textual analysis which can be drawn upon in this regard (and I emphasise particularly the contribution of systemic functional linguistics (SFL)), working in the transdisciplinary way I am proposing for CDA also entails developing a transdisciplinary way of approaching textual analysis. This means seeking to operationalise categories and perspectives in other theories in ways of analysing texts, as I also sought to do for categories from Bernstein’s sociological theory and Laclau and Mouffe’s political theory in the paper ‘Discourse, social theory and social research: the discourse of welfare reform’ in Section C (pages 167–201). The paper also takes up what I see to be the main difference between my version of CDA and SFL with respect to textual analysis: for CDA, textual analysis includes interdiscursive analysis of how genres, discourses and styles are articulated in texts, for SFL it does not.

The fourth paper (‘Marx as a critical discourse analyst: the genesis of a critical method and its relevance to the critique of global capital’), co-authored with Phil Graham, is a study of the development of Marx’s method in a range of his economic, political and historical texts. We show that it was based upon a view of language as an element of material social processes which is dialectically related to other elements, that critique of language was therefore part of Marx’s critical method, that one can see the latter as in part a form of CDA avant la lettre, and that applications of CDA in transdisciplinary critical research on contemporary capitalism may gain from a study of Marx’s method. The paper argues that his method drew not only from the philosophy of his day and especially from Hegel but also from the classical tradition, Aristotle in particular. We trace these influences and the ways in which he transformed them with respect to the theory of abstraction, the dialectical method, and ideology. We then analyse extracts from six texts (Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Capital, Critique of the Gotha Programme, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and the Grundrisse). We suggest that critique of texts (the texts of the political economists, of Hegel, and of others) was a crucial element and stage in Marx’s method, and that the central focus of this critique, and the basis for the development of his own analyses, was, as he put it in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, failure ‘to grasp the interconnections within the movement’ of social history and social reality. It is a critique of relations, or of what we call ‘connectivity’, in texts. We suggest that what it points to for CDA is ‘a critical analysis of the whole formal and conceptual architecture of texts’ (e.g., the texts of political economy – or the texts produced around and in relation to what is emerging at the time of writing (winter 2008) as a major economic crisis) ‘focusing on texts as relational work … as producing certain relations and not producing others … as well as … being produced from within certain relations and not from within others’.

The fifth paper (‘Critical discourse analysis, organisational discourse and organisational change’) is a polemical comment piece on the analysis of organisational discourse within the field of organisation studies, which takes issue with postmodernist and extreme social constructivist positions. I argue against the reductions that characterise the latter: the reduction of organisations to organisational discourse, and the reduction of organisational analysis to the ‘organising’ that goes on in organisational processes. I suggest by contrast that discourse analysis is consistent with a realist approach to organisational research which distinguishes organisational process and agency from organisational structures, and focuses research on the relations and tensions between them. Incorporating discourse analysis into a realist approach both ensures that questions of discourse are properly attended to in organisational studies, and avoids these forms of reduction. Within such a realist approach, discourse analysis can make a significant contribution to researching organisational change, and addressing such general concerns as the following: When organisations change, what is it that changes? What makes organisations resilient in the face of change, resistant to change, or open to change? How are external pressures for organisational change internalised in organisations, how may organisational members respond to them, and what outcomes are possible? Such questions cannot, of course, be addressed by discourse analysts alone, but my argument is that effectively researching them does depend on a substantive element of discourse analysis in transdisciplinary research on organisational change.

9. A dialectical–relational approach to critical discourse analysis in social research¹

In this paper, I introduce and illustrate a methodology for using a dialectical–relational version of CDA in transdisciplinary social research (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, Fairclough 2003, 2006). I begin with a theoretical section explaining the dialectical–relational approach, including my view of discourse, of critical analysis, and of transdisciplinary research. In the second section, I explain the methodology, presenting it as a series of stages and steps, and identify a number of core analytical categories. In the third section, I present an example, showing the application of this methodology in researching a political topic, and I illustrate the approach to political analysis in the fourth section with respect to particular texts. The sixth section summarises what can be achieved with this methodology and discusses possible limitations.

1 Theory and concepts

First, a terminological point. Discourse is commonly used in various senses including (a) meaning-making as an element of the social process, (b) the language associated with a particular social field or practice (e.g., ‘political discourse’), and (c) a way of construing aspects of the world associated with a particular social perspective (e.g., a ‘neo-liberal discourse of globalisation’). It is easy to confuse them, so to at least partially reduce the scope for confusion, I prefer to use semiosis for the first, most abstract and general sense (following Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer 2004), which has the further advantage of suggesting that discourse analysis is concerned with various ‘semiotic modalities’ of which language is only one (others are visual images and ‘body language’). Semiosis is viewed here as an element of the social process which is dialectically related to others – hence a ‘dialectical–relational’ approach. Relations between elements are dialectical in the sense of being different but not ‘discrete’, i.e., not fully separate. We might say that each ‘internalises’ the others without being reducible to them (Harvey 1996) – e.g., social relations, power, institutions, beliefs and cultural values are in part semiotic; they ‘internalise’ semiosis without being reducible to it. For example, although we should analyse political institutions or business organisations as partly semiotic objects, it would be a mistake to treat them as purely semiotic, because then we couldn’t ask the key question: what is the relationship between semiotic and other elements? CDA focuses not just upon semiosis as such, but on the relations between semiotic and other social elements. The nature of this relationship varies between institutions and organisations, and according to time and place, and it needs to be established through analysis.

This requires CDA to be integrated within frameworks for transdisciplinary research, such as the framework I have used in recent publications, cultural political economy, which combines elements from three disciplines: a form of economic analysis (the ‘Regulation Approach’), a neo-Gramscian theory of the state, and a form of CDA (Jessop 2004, Fairclough 2006). Transdisciplinary research is a particular form of interdisciplinary research (Fairclough 2005b). What distinguishes it is that in bringing disciplines and theories together to address research issues, it sees ‘dialogue’ between them as a source for the theoretical and methodological development of each of them. For example, recontextualisation was introduced as a concept and category within CDA through a dialogue with Basil Bernstein’s sociology of pedagogy, where it originated (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999).

In what sense is CDA critical? Critical social research aims to contribute to addressing the social ‘wrongs’ of the day (in a broad sense – injustice, inequality, lack of freedom etc.) by analysing their sources and causes, resistance to them and possibilities of overcoming them. We can say that it has both a ‘negative’ and a ‘positive’ character. On the one hand...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• General introduction
• Section A Language, ideology and power
• Section B Discourse and sociocultural change
• Section C Dialectics of discourse: theoretical developments
• Section D Methodology in CDA research
• Section E Political discourse
• Section F Globalisation and ‘transition’
• Section G Language and education
• Bibliography and references
• Index