because they convey some form of meaningful information which the analyst can identify and interpret in terms of the operation of discourses, or other
theoretical concerns, but because they have been designed to perform sequen- tially relevant actions. Those features of the respondent’s talk which are initially
taken to be evidence of a discourse, then, may be more intimately tied to imme- diate sequential and interactional context in which that talk was produced.
The dangers of discourses and repertoires
In this section I want to examine more broadly the nature of discourses, and their role in empirical analysis, as indicated in the methodological writings of
researchers who work in the Foucauldian or post-structuralist traditions and related critical approaches.
The analysis of discourses offers an impoverished view of human conduct
As we have seen throughout this book, conversation analytic studies have
revealed that talk-in-interaction is extraordinarily intricate. People attend to and manage their verbal activities at a hitherto unimagined level of detail. In
the world exposed and explored in conversation analysis, human social inter- action is a living tapestry of complex and sophisticated activities, the micro-
sociological accomplishment of which is informed by socially organised webs of normative and interpretative practices.
Discourse studies which seek to identify the operation of discourses and repertoires invariably offer a much more shallow image of human conduct.
We have already seen in earlier sections that the attempt to identify discourses or repertoires invites the analyst to disattend to the interactional frameworks
in which such discourses, etc., are claimed to be present. But there is a more direct indication of the impoverished view of human conduct fostered by
Foucauldian discourse analysis and related critical approaches.
In their analysis of the way scientists characterise a debate in biochemistry, Gilbert and Mulkay found the use of
two repertoires: the empiricist repertoire, in which scientific knowledge claims are depicted as the consequence of proper
scientific procedures; and the contingent repertoire, in which the validity of scientific claims were interpreted in terms of the social factors, such as the
scientists’ biography, friendships or personality Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984. Billig’s account of the methodology of rhetorical and discursive psychology
which he treats as related approaches illustrates some methodological steps by discussing some of his work on how members of the public talk about the
Royal Family in research interviews. Specifically he discussed how the respon- dents formulated the importance of history in their reflections on the Royal
Family. Following from the broader argument in rhetorical psychology that discourse is inherently oppositonal, Billig claims that the interviewees’ talk
is constructed around
two competing narratives: History as National Decline, in which contemporary attitudes to the Royals, or their own actions, are
METHODOLOGICAL DISPUTES 179
interpreted as indicating falling standards of public behaviour; and History as National Progress, in which contemporary attitudes to the Royals, and heredi-
tary privilege more generally, are seen as an advance on earlier expectations of servility and unquestioning deference Billig, 1997: 49–50. And in his account
of the analysis of repertoires in discourse analysis, Edley draws on interview data collected as part of his and Wetherell’s project on masculine identities. He
illustrates the analysis of repertoires by considering interview data in which the topic of men’s discussion was feminism. In these data, Edley identifies
two repertoires: in the first, feminists are depicted as ‘simply wanting equality’; and
in the second, more negative repertoire, feminists’ appearance, sexual orienta- tion and hostile attitudes to men were invoked Edley, 2001: 201.
Of course, not all studies which focus on discourses and repertoires find only two. Hollway 1995 reports how in her earlier work on sexuality she identi-
fied three discourses; Phillips and Jørgensen illustrate Laclau and Mouffe’s post-structuralist position by examining data from an interview with young
people about environmental issues, and find three discourses Phillips and Jørgensen, 2002: 166–7; Edley and Wetherell 1999 identify three discursive
strategies in their analysis of young men’s talk about their imagined futures; and Parker’s 1994 introductory account of the analysis of discourses finds four
discourses, although these are not generated from an analysis of interactional data, but are found to inhabit the packaging for a tube of toothpaste.
But there is clear pattern emerging here. In the analysis of interview data informed by a focus on discourse or repertoires, participants’ conduct seems to
be organised around a highly limited set of interactional and interpretative rel- evances; in many cases, only two: this or that discourse; this or that repertoire.
Given the complexity of the organisation of social interaction revealed in con- versation analytic studies – the discovery of which is acknowledged even by
critics of CA – one is forced to ask: is this really all there is to say about those stretches of talk in which these repertoires or discourses were said to have some
influence? Is that
it? It seems unlikely. A more likely explanation is that the very nature of the analytic enterprise – the analysis of discourses and repertoires, and
the exploration of theoretically derived positions on the oppositional or con- tested nature of social life – establishes at the outset a set of expectations about
what might be uncovered in whatever data the analyst might be examining.
Discourses and the slide to ascriptivism In our critical assessment of
Foucauldian discourse analysis, Widdicombe and I noted how empirical claims routinely lapsed into a form of ascriptivism. We described ascriptivism and its
dangers in the following way: it involves
… imputing a discourse to texts or bits of speech and writing without explicating the basis for that imputation. Consequently, empirical analyses
tend to gloss the social functions of language use, rather than describing them. Widdicombe and Wooffitt, 1995: 62
180 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
To illustrate why this important, we can discuss Widdicombe’s 1995 paper on the relationship between identity, politics and talk. In this paper, she con-
siders Gavey’s 1989 study of interview talk about sexuality, and re-examines some data in which Gavey claims to have identified the mobilisation of vari-
ous discourses. It is worth reproducing Gavey’s data and then Widdicombe’s subsequent reassessment in full.
8.5 From Gavey, 1989: 469. ‘I’ is the interviewer, ‘Sue’ is the inteviewee,
and this is Gavey’s transcription. Cited in Widdicombe, 1995: 108–9.
36 I: What, if any, were some of the initial consequences of this event?
gap of half a line 37
Sue: Um pause Well, he must have gone away with a fairly disillusioned attitude towards sex as far
38 as his first encounter had gone. I um felt depressed about the
whole incident. I didn’t like it. I hadn’t 39
wanted it, and I’d simply done it because I didn’t want pause I seemed to have sex a lot at that time
40 because I didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. As though I was
strong and they were not. Um, and I 41
know my feeling in those days was that sexual activity by itself isn’t important, it was how I felt about
42 someone that made it important or not important. I still feel that way a
bit. You know, it’s pause 43
although I’ve been study with one person for many years it’s pause sex without the love is just pause it’s
44 no different from wiping your bottom after you’ve gone to the toilet,
or brushing your hair. It’s a physical 45
act. It’s an enjoyable one, um, well it can be an enjoyable one.
These are Widdicombe’s observations on Gavey’s analysis of this extract.
The reader is informed that the discourse of permissive sexuality can be found on lines 39, 41, and 43 to 45, and that within this discourse Sue is
positioned as a liberated woman. Lines 37 and 39 to 40 illustrate the male sexual needs discourse, through which is constituted her identity as a
person who is responsive to male needs. But what exactly is it about the words or phrases found on these lines that substantiates the claim that they
are informed by or illustrate particular discourses? Without some indication of the empirical grounding of these discourses, there is little to inspire con-
fidence that Sue’s experiences are permeated with these discourses. Indeed, the primary warrant for the identification of these discourses lies not in the
analysis of the account, but through Gavey’s reference to Hollway’s 1984, 1989 prior identification of their existence. But Hollway 1984: 231
simply tells us that she delineated three discourses through a combination of her own knowledge and what was suggested by the data; we are not given
access to how exactly the data suggested these discourses. The reader is left
METHODOLOGICAL DISPUTES 181
all the more in the dark since ‘I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings’ line 40 does not seem to be entirely synonymous with satisfying men’s need to
have sex; yet this statement is the most obvious candidate for the male sexual needs discourse which we are assured is located on line 40 … it
seems that the ways discourses are manifested in talk are less important than the political claims which can be made having ascribed discourses to
a piece of text. Widdicombe, 1995: 109
Numerous problems spring from the ‘analytic rush’ Widdicombe, 1995: 108 to impute the presence and relevance of discourses to people’s utterances.
First, as the quote from Widdicombe illustrates, analytic claims about the pres- ence of discourses may be advanced without clear explication of how the
relevant data support those claims. Second, there is no attempt to trace how the interview as a form of social interaction impacts upon the those utterances
which are deemed to bear the imprint of discourses. A third issue is this: are empirical claims
descriptions of some real discursive processes, or are they attri- butions which merely reflect the analyst’s theoretical perspective, and which
are motivated by a desire to interpret the world in terms of the analysts’ theoretical or political orientation? This point is also made by Kitzinger,
2000a, in her analysis of strategies by which idioms can be resisted. As long as analysts in the Foucauldian and critical traditions continue to resist ground-
ing empirical claims by reference to close description of participants’ actual conduct, then analysis is at risk of a slide into ascription, and the subsequent
‘discovery’ of discourses or repertoires which does not illuminate the subtle organisation of talk-in-interaction, but which merely reflects the theoretical
perspective of the analyst and the immediate concerns of their project.
Identifying discourses
Much is claimed about the importance of investigat- ing the influence of discourses in people’s talk. But how do we go about iden-
tifying discourses? What is it about a stretch of talk which indicates the presence of a discourse? Ian Parker is a long-standing advocate of the analyses
of discourses as a method in critical social psychology, and in an introductory account of Foucauldian discourse analysis discussed in the previous chapter,
he offers some clues.
Three unlikely examples may serve to illustrate the operation of single dis- courses: if you say ‘my head hurts so I must be ill’, you will be employing
a medical discourse; if you say ‘my head hurts so I cannot really want to go to that party’, you will be employing some sort of psychodynamic dis-
course; and if you say ‘my head hurts but not in the way that yours does when you are trying it on in the way women do’, you will be employing a
sort of sexist discourse. Parker, 1994: 94
What is common to these three hypothetical discourses are the words ‘my head hurts’, which means that what follows must be the crucial items by
182 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
which the different discourses are identified. So, as ‘my head hurts so I must be ill’ is a medical discourse, then we can assume that what is consequential
here is the word ‘ill’. Thus a single word can identify the presence of a dis- course. But as ’my head hurts so I cannot really want to go to that party’ is a
psychodynamic discourse, then a longer stretch of talk like ‘so I cannot really want to go to that party’ can also be crucial. And in the final instance, the
phrase ‘but not in the way that yours does when you are trying it on in the way women do’ indicates yet another discourse.
But this illustration captures some significant problems. How do we know which word is crucial in identifying a discourse? For example, with respect to
‘my head hurts so I must be ill’, what is the warrant for identifying this as a medical discourse? Why is it not a ‘head discourse’? Or a ‘body discourse’? Or
a ‘pain discourse’? Or a ‘possessive discourse’? Or a ‘complaining discourse’? Or a ‘causal discourse’? Or an ‘inference about one’s health discourse’? And of
course, the problems multiply when we try to understand the warrant for iden- tifying the presence of discourses in larger, more complex stretches of talk.
There seems to be little consistency in the way that the term discourse is used to identify a patterned feature of verbal data or language use more gen-
erally. Some discourses seem to index a wide range of meanings and positions, or identify broad dimensions of language use. For example, Burman 1995
refers to general ‘discourses of childhood’; and Hepworth and Griffin 1995 write of ‘the discourse of femininity’. But in other writings, discourses seem to
be more closely derived from inspection of specific features of the data being assessed. Thus in Phillips and Jørgensen 2002: 166–7, the ‘cynical, sceptical
discourse’ is derived from analysis of just a few lines of interview data; simi- larly Marks 1993 identifies the presence of a ‘humanistic therapeutic dis-
course’ from inspection of a series of shorter extracts from a recording of a meeting; and according to Widdicombe 1995, Gavey 1989 finds the ‘dis-
course of permissive sexuality’ in particular lines of a transcript.
There is a clear lack of consistency as to what counts as evidence for the presence of discourse: it could be a single world, or a short stretch of talk, or
a slightly longer account or narrative. This lack of consistency is problematic: what value is the concept of discourses as an analytic tool if there is no clear
method by which to establish the presence of any particular discourse in any specific sequence of talk-in-interaction?
Summary
• The critique of CA from the perspective of Foucauldian discourse analysis
centres on CA’s claimed reluctance or inability to attend to the implications of broader political, social and historical contexts in which talk occurs.
• However, there is little to suggest that the alternatives on offer, particularly
the analytic focus on discourses and, relatedly, repertoires and subject positions, are coherent or methodologically sound.
METHODOLOGICAL DISPUTES 183
• Moreover, the analytic focus on discourses etc. systematically encourages
a premature rush to ascribe the presence of discourses at the expense of more systematic analysis of the complex interactional organisation of talk.
The rhetorical psychological critique of CA has two main strands. First, there is the claim that CA’s own rhetoric is inappropriate and misleading, in that it
does not accurately convey what CA researchers actually do; and that in various ways it presents an uncritical and overly optimistic view of everyday social
interaction, thereby avoiding and obscuring investigation of oppression and injustices which occur in talk. Second, it is argued that CA’s focus on the tech-
nical aspects of interaction, such as turn-taking and sequence organisation, is inadequate because it fails to capture the argumentative and oppositional
character of everyday discourse. However, both sets of arguments have been found to be weak. The critique of CA’s rhetoric is based on an idiosyncratic
and occasionally inaccurate reading of CA. Moreover, there are numerous CA studies of the sequential underpinnings of argumentative talk; and CA’s atten-
tion to the detail of interaction, and its reluctance to engage with data in terms of pre-formed theoretically conceived analytic priorities, means that, com-
pared to those approaches in which analysis is restricted to the level of mean- ing, it is
better equipped to expose the resources through which arguments and discursive contests are actually managed.
The Foucauldian or post-structuralist critique of CA claims that its focus on the interactional and sequential organisation of interaction needs to be supple-
mented by an appreciation of the discourses which inhabit talk and the subject positions which these make available to participants. In this way it will be able
to accommodate and take account of the broader historical, cultural and polit- ical influences which inform talk, thereby affording a more rounded and satis-
factory analysis of the ideological concerns which inform everyday communication. However, there are serious problems with this position, and the concept of dis-
courses more generally. There is little clarity in the literature as to how to iden- tify a discourse; or what constitutes evidence of the presence of a discourse in
any stretch of talk. Analyses influenced by Foucauldian discourse analysis, and related approaches which investigate repertoires or the argumentative charac-
ter of discourse, overwhelmingly tend to identify two or three discourses or repertoires, or rhetorical positions. Given the sheer complexity of interaction,
this consistency suggests that Foucauldian discourse analyses are circumscribed more by the analysts’ common theoretical or political positions than the nature
of the data. Finally, Foucauldian discourse analyses largely disattend to the detail of talk in favour of the ascription of discourses and subject positions.
Indeed, the ascription of discourses and subject positions is often offered with- out a detailed analysis of the activities of the participants whose conduct is rep-
resented in the data. This means that the interactional contexts of utterances are rarely explored; moreover, interactional considerations which have an
184 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
impact on the very composition of the utterances people produce – utterances which in turn become data for analysts’ empirical endeavours – are not ade-
quately explored. And this raises a broader concern with Foucauldian and post- structuralist discourse analyses of talk: that utterances whose design is claimed
to bear the imprint of discourses, or reflect the relevance of subject positions, may in fact be shaped by the participants’ orientation to interactional contin-
gencies generated out of the turn-by-turn unfolding of talk-in-interaction.
METHODOLOGICAL DISPUTES 185
