1.

In this book, Applied Discourse Analysis (ADA), the editor assembled six chapters, in which the authors use discourse analysis to articulate critiques of contemporary social practices. These practices are related to the use of reproductive technologies, articulation of stress in the self-help literature, interviewing of suspects by police officers, sex education, cigarette smoking, and clinical diagnoses of schizophrenia. [1]

WILLIG provides an overview of discourse analysis and a critical review of issues surrounding the adjective "applied" in applied psychology, particularly the problems with the notion of "application," which, in science and technology, was used to distinguish (highly-regarded) knowledge producers from (lowly) technologists and technicians. WILLIG then proposes three ways in which discourse analysis may be applied in everyday settings—as social critique, as empowerment, and as guide to reform. In the six chapters that follow, each author provides an exemplary analysis of books, transcribed interviews (person-to-person, group setting), or transcribed interactions (police-suspects, doctor-patient). [2]

In Stress as regimen: critical readings of self-help literature, BROWN provides another cut at 22 self-help texts that have formed the basis of other articles and of his doctoral dissertation. He suggests that there are five major narrative themes that link everyday life situations and stress: a generic twentieth-century disease, primitive response syndrome, fast pace of modern life, seeing things differently, and juggling work and home. BROWN then describe four devices (metaphors, tropes and rhetorical devices) that the 22 authors rally to assist their readers in building an understanding their relationship to their bodies: heat, war, engineering and computation, and serviceable self. As far as application is concerned, BROWN proposes that his reading, that is, his critique of the self-help literature may help others in understanding the rhetoric applied. Furthermore, BROWN suggests that his categories be applied to other settings such as texts used in strategy documents or marketing reports. [3]

In 'It's your opportunity to be truthful': disbelief, mundane reasoning and the investigation of crime, AUBURN, LEA, and DRAKE provide an analysis of police interrogations, which have as their effect the production of a preferred version of the events on the part of the suspect. For someone who had never been interrogated as a suspect in a crime, this is a highly interesting piece that elucidates the question why there are continuously cases reported in the media about innocent people ending up serving for a crime they never committed. In an exemplary fashion, the authors show how disbelief—on the part of the police officers—is discursively organized, involving the phases of signaling disbelief, warranting disbelief, and reformulating the invitation to the suspect to tell the (officers') preferred version of the events. AUBURN, LEA, and DRAKE then elaborate on a variety of methods used by officers to articulate warrants for their disbelief. These include information culled from witnesses and other indisputable sources of evidence or are based on normative expectations. As the previous chapter, the authors have not actually worked with participants (police or suspects) in order to engage in the praxis of discourse analysis for bringing about change. Rather, in a way typical for academics, the use of discourse analysis as a method for emancipation and policy is being suggested rather than enacted. The need to argue for potential applications leads to somewhat farfetched proposals: "findings from this research could be taken up and developed in conjunction with a whole range of groups who are regularly in conflict with the criminal justice system and for whom a police interview is one of the many steps in their social and political regulation" (ADA, p. 62). The proposed relation between theory/research and practice is a reproduction of the ivory-tower/lowlands divide that has characterized traditional university-community relationships. [4]

In An analysis of the discursive positions of women smokers: implications for practical interventions, GILLIES provides an analysis of interviews with women smokers. In her analysis, she provides a number of dimension of the discursive construction of smoking, including the discourses of addiction, control and self-regulation, and the acceptability and medicinalization of smoking. GILLIES suggests that her analysis "may promote greater understanding of why individuals engage in a behaviour which is so obviously detrimental to health" (ADA, p. 80). In my reading, there are a number of problems with GILLIES' work. First, GILLIES assumes, somewhat tenuously, that the "discursive meanings attached to smoking" drive actual smoking behavior. Thus, and this is my second point, she assumes that by assisting female smokers in changing their discourse, they would also change their behavior—decreasing or abandoning smoking. I find such assumptions idealistic and highly problematic given what we, as a research community, know about the relationship between action and descriptions of action. For example, JORDAN (1989), who had conducted an ethnography among Mayan midwives, provided an analysis of the effects of an UNESCO course on the day-to-day practices of midwifery in native communities. JORDAN suggested that what the midwives learned was to use Western medical discourse whenever they talked to Western doctors and nurses (such as in the workshop and it follow-up) but very little or nothing changed in the everyday practices of midwifery back in their community. Thus, a change in discursive practice, enacted in a Western medical context, actually changed very little in the practices that are situated in the villages and cultures of the people. At a more abstract level, BOURDIEU (1980) provided a detailed analysis of the relationship between practice (here smoking) and talk about a practice (here provided in interview). The problem with GILLIES' analysis therefore lies in the unthematized tension between what people say in the interview situations, explicitly set up to talk about smoking with an interviewer who clearly has anti-smoking dispositions, and the everyday experience of lighting up in a variety of situations. I do not think that we can come to an understanding of smoking if we do not seek and provide a phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon, an analysis that has to be necessarily contextual. That is, context glares in its absence—yet there are almost daily media reports indicating that the real problem of "drug addicts" is the context into which they return rather than getting off the drug. [5]

To produce the chapter entitled Deconstructing and reconstructing: producing a reading on "human reproductive technologies", PUJOL had set up group interviews, which he constructs as a "form of interaction close to everyday conversation" that minimizes the interviewer role. (Of course, bringing people together in order to talk about reproductive technologies already sets up a special kind of context, one in which participants are expected and orient themselves to doing "human reproductive technology" talk.) Assuming that heterogeneous groups lead to stereotyped answers, PUJOL organized the participants according to the amount of information about (limited, some), experience with (in successful/unsuccessful treatment, as donor or through donor contact, as medical professional), or position toward the topic (religious, feminist) that they had prior to the interviews. Although the author explicitly acknowledges that interpretation is not about uncovering something that is behind a text but about constructing it through the interaction between reader and text (see the background sidebar, in which reader and text meet face to face), I do not find the reflexive moment that signals the author's own work as a construction. The definite statements that constitute his reading seem to stand in contrast to the multiple ways in which texts can be read that are implied in the reader-text interactions. (Of course, it may be my own monolingualism, "the monolingualism of the other" [DERRIDA, 1998], that ear of mine which is "the ear of the other that signs" [DERRIDA, 1985].) Furthermore, the author produced a traditional narrative, embedding participant quotes into the dominant text that constructs its object, "reproductive technologies." Contrary to other contributors, PUJOL does not even attempt to show how discourse analysis could potentially be used as a tool in his context, used by his participants, to grabble with the salient issues and thereby, hopefully, begin to empower and emancipate themselves. [6]

WILLIG draws on interview transcripts with 16 heterosexual men and women to construct her chapter entitled Discourse analysis and sex education, in which she presents an analysis of sexual risk taking in terms of marital discourse, discourse of trust and sexual activity. These interviews had been data sources for a series of articles, of which the present chapter is an extension. While this chapter is interesting in its own right, as a statement about how interviews about sexual activity can be read, I find WILLIG's chapter falling short in two related dimensions: potential applications and the relation of discourse and practice. As other authors in Applied Discourse Analysis and Critical Textwork, she presupposes that discursive constructions (made in interview settings) have implications for sexual practice, by allowing subjects to position themselves in different ways. She argues that because discourse constructs its object, subjects can change what they currently do sexually. The problematic issue, perhaps, arises from talking discourse as the domain of the individual rather than being something that is enacted collectively. Of course, analyzing interviews independent from the context that they provide, including the interviewer and her active participation in making this a "talk about sexual activity," necessarily abstracts what is being said. In this way, discourse and discursive constructions are reattributed—in classical psychological manner—to the individual rather than to individual-in-setting, as a critical, Marxist psychologist would attempt to do (e.g., HOLZKAMP, 1984). Although WILLIG is critical of her own recommendations, such as educators' use of power to reshape individual subjectivity (by changing discourses), she makes these recommendations nevertheless. Rather than allowing everyday folk to appropriate and shape discourse analysis for their own intentions, whatever the outcome, WILLIG has very specific intentions that she wants others to appropriate in unattenuated ways. [7]

In the sixth study, Tablet talk and depot discourse: discourse analysis and psychiatric medication, HARPER draws on interviews with 9 users of psychiatric services and 12 psychiatric services professionals to provide a rather brief analysis of the rhetorical strategies accounting for apparent drug failure. HARPER suggests that talk about drug treatment failure shares a number of rhetorical features and effects, which need to be challenged in a variety of contexts. He then constructs potential implications for a variety of interest groups, including users of and workers in mental health services, people associated with users, health professionals, academic researchers, and political activists. The model is one of transfer of knowledge and skill from those who know, here practitioners of discourse analysis, to those who do not know, that is, the members of interest groups. Rather than being an example of applied discourse analysis, this chapter provides us with an academic reading of interview material, specifically set up to produce drug treatment talk, and then suggests that others should model themselves and their work on the (deconstructive) methods and their results presented. [8]

In her concluding chapter, WILLIG writes about the opportunities and limitations of applied discourse analysis. From my perspective, having done discourse analysis as a practicing high school teacher (e.g., ROTH & LUCAS, 1997), Applied Discourse Analysis provides an interesting collection of analysis. What it does not provide are examples of applied discourse analysis. WILLIG acknowledges these shortcomings but nevertheless does not question the approach chosen with this book—she suggests that doing discourse analysis constitutes a challenge to the status quo, and therefore already constitutes a form of political action. I tend to disagree because WILLIG does not acknowledge the difference HABERMAS (1971) articulated between practical interests, and emancipatory interests. Rather, I hold it with HABERMAS or MARX and ENGELS (1970) that the problem with the philosophers was in understanding the world (deconstructing it in the sense of "Abbau," taking it apart) rather than in changing it. Only change through emancipatory action embodies human agency as determined and determining, thereby forming a basis for theorizing praxis. WILLIG and her co-contributors have formulated a practice, discourse analysis, at a theoretical level and now promote its transfer to contexts other than the academe. In my view, we need to theorize "application" the other way around (e.g., ROTH, LAWLESS, & TOBIN, 2000). We need to begin in the midst of everyday life affairs, such as teaching, and then see how we can work out with others, resident practitioners, ways of critical analysis. In this, our work may well be informed by discourse analyses conducted in and for academic settings. However, we theorize these activities out of the praxis in which we are involved; theory then emerges as a talk about praxis, or, as I prefer to call it, praxeology. [9]

2.

One complaint I have concerns the lack of reflexivity. (See how the sidebar juxtaposes reader and text [Applied Discourse Analysis] thereby making a statement about their relation and introducing the reader, now turned writer, into his own text.) One might assume an author collective, writing about the discursive construction of the world, ought to use one or more techniques to relativize their own discourse. This is particularly astonishing given that there are examples from different domains, including The Reflexive Thesis (ASHMORE, 1989), Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge, or my own Lifeworlds and the 'w/ri(gh)ting' of classroom research (ROTH & McROBBIE, 1999). Readers who want to experience a reflexive argument immediately, may want to go to the penultimate version of the article Four dialogues and metalogues about the nature of science (ROTH, McROBBIE, & LUCAS, 1998). Such a reflexive stance appears to me rather important given the amount of constructive work (see ASHMORE & REED, 2000) that goes into the setting up and recording of interviews, transcribing and therefore translating lived conversations, and analyzing written transcripts. Furthermore, by writing themselves out of their narratives, the authors produce texts that I read as claims to truth rather than as evidence for the constructed nature of texts. [10]

Another complaint I have concerns the distance between theory and practice, discourse analysis as enacted by academics rather than by practitioners operating in their everyday settings. As the adjective applied in its title indicates, this book has the noble goal of moving discourse analysis from the citadel to the city—from a life as but another academic practice to a resource in the fight for social justice. Thus, the cover statement reads, "this book seeks to identify ways in which discourse analytic research can inform recommendations for social and psychological practice." Particularly, the editor Carla WILLIG suggests that the volume goes beyond traditional uses of discourse analysis by "formulating concrete proposals for social intervention" (WILLIG, ADA, p. 9). Accordingly, discourse analysis as social and political practice may take any one of three forms: social critique, empowerment, or guide to reform. Despite these laudable intentions, none of the authors really moves into the thickets of social or political action. The concrete proposals, if they are present at all, remain but proposals. I see very little difference in proposing other research and analysis tools. As long as the authors have not shown how discourse analysis is actually used in daily practice to make a difference, the authors should not claim that they do applied discourse analysis. There are examples how discourse analysis has been used by stakeholder groups in inner-city schools to analyze their situation and, by actively changing the context of their context, make a difference to the way they learn and teach (e.g., ROTH, LAWLESS, & TOBIN, 2000). Discourse analysis can also be used by high school students to become active agents in their learning and in the construction of their learning environments (e.g., DÉSAUTELS & ROTH, 1999; ROTH & ALEXANDER, 1997). However, the contributors to Applied Discourse Analysis do not show how the different human agents in their studies use discourse analysis in their concrete situation to make a difference. As we know from a number of studies in the social studies of science, skilled practice does not easily transfer from one situation to another even if practitioners are already skilled in a number of adjacent practices (e.g., JORDAN & LYNCH, 1998). Furthermore, when a practice actually gets "out into the wild," it may change in unforeseen ways so that new forms of practices develop—when science met AIDS activists, entirely new protocols for testing drugs evolved that were previously deemed to be unscientific (e.g., EPSTEIN, 1995). That is, "application" is a problem much more prickly than the authors appear to acknowledge or assume. To make this point even more strident: the skills associated with making a particular dish are not transferred from a three-star Michelin restaurant to some novice's kitchen just because a chef writes a book about it. Whether or not the recipe is feasible and leads to something edible has to be shown through examples of practical cooking in the lowly environs of a home kitchen. [11]

Although I do not consider that the editor and authors of this volume have brought discourse analysis to the struggle of the people, who use it as a form of emancipation in the way we had done with teachers and students in inner-city classrooms, I much prefer this volume over Critical Textwork. Following the tradition of discourse analysis, the authors provide examples that I would encourage the graduate students in my seminars and classes to read. Therefore I will use this book as a reference in my upcoming Interpretive Inquiry II seminar. [12]

References

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Marx, Karl & Engels, Frederic (1970). The German ideology (C. John Arthur, Ed.; W. Lough, C. Dutt, & Charles P. Magill, Trans.). New York: International. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm

Roth, Wolff-Michael & Alexander, Todd (1997). The interaction of students' scientific and religious discourses: Two case studies. International Journal of Science Education, 19, 125-146.

Roth, Wolff-Michael, Lawless, Daniel & Tobin, Kenneth (2000). {Coteaching | cogenerative dialoguing} as praxis of dialectic method. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research [Online Journal], 1(3). Available at: http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/3-00/3-00rothetal-e.htm.

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Roth, Wolff-Michael, McRobbie, Cam & Lucas, Keith B. (1998). Four dialogues and metalogues about the nature of science. Research in Science Education, 28, 107-118.

Woolgar, Steve (Ed.) (1988). Knowledge and reflexivity: New frontiers in the sociology of knowledge. London: Sage.

Citation

Please cite this article as follows (and include paragraph numbers if necessary):

Roth, Wolff-Michael (2001, May). The Politics and Rhetoric of Conversation and Discourse Analysis. Review Essay, Supplement II: Carla Willig (Ed.) (1999). Applied discourse analysis: Social and psychological interventions [12 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 2(2). Available at: http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/2-01/roth/2-01review-roth-intro2.htm [Date of Access: Month Day, Year].