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An Introduction To Discourse Analysis Theory And Method

Charlotte Linde. Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xiv and 242 pp. $49.95 cloth. This book takes a broadly sociolinguistic approach to the life story, which the author characterizes as a discourse unit crucial for the presentation of self in everyday life. Life Stories is a richly innovative study, packed with insights into the way we use stories to create and maintain an identity over time. Like other groundbreaking works, the book outlines problems that warrant further investigation, sometimes raising as many questions as it resolves. Describing the life story as a social unit exchanged between people, an oral unit that can be contrasted with written autobiographies, and a discontinuous unit shaped through a series of tellings over an extended duration (4), Charlotte Linde goes on to offer a more precise definition of life stories: A life story consists of all the stories and associated discourse units, such as explanations and chronicles, and the connections between them, told by an individual during the course of his/her lifetime that satisfy the following two criteria: 1. The stories and associated discourse units contained in the life story have as their primary evaluation a point about the speaker, not a general point about the way the world is. 2. The stories and associated discourse units have extended reportability; that is, they are tellable and are told and retold over the course of a long period of time. (21) Linde's study focuses on life stories in which issues of profession play a preeminent role (53-57), but her more particular concern is the creation of coherence by tellers as well as listeners of such stories. For Linde, coherence is not only a property of texts, deriving from the way the parts of the text relate to the whole and from the way the text relates to other texts of its type, but also a "cooperative achievement" of the speaker and the addressee (12). In her account of how we build up coherent discourse units in telling the story of our lives, the author draws on a number of subfields within (socio)linguistics, including discourse analysis, the lexicogrammatical study of discourse cohesion initiated by M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, and the ethnomethodological school of conversation analysis. As Life Stories proceeds, the book displays a special indebtedness to the method of narrative analysis developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by William Labov and Joshua Waletzky. Following an overview of the problems connected with the life story in chapter 1, chapter 2 ("What is a Life Story") spells out the technical definition of life stories quoted above and contrasts this discourse unit with other modes of self-presentation in other research contexts, including autobiography and biography, journals and diaries, and the life history in psychology and anthropology (37-50). In discussing extended reportability as a criterion for the life story, Linde makes the point that The reportability of a given event or sequence of events is not fixed; it depends not only on the nature of the events, but on the relation of the speaker and addressee(s), the amount of time that has passed between the event and the telling of the story, and the personal skills of the speaker as narrator. (22) Hence the life story is at once structurally and interpretively open; it is subject to expansion and contraction by the addition of new stories and the loss of old ones, and furthermore the reinterpretation of old stories continually produces new evaluations of self (31). Such considerations prompt Linde to pose a question that may already have occurred to the reader at this stage of the analysis: namely, "whether it is meaningful to treat as a unit an entity that is so fluid, and so subject to constant reinterpretation and revision, that it can never be completed" (35-36). Unfortunately, Linde fails to address this problem adequately here, using only the analogy of a cloud of butterflies to suggest that the life story, too, is a sort of composite entity (36). …

Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence

Managing Cultural Differences: Strategies for Competitive Advantage

This paper explores discursive narratives as inextricably linked to the construction of identity, place and history by a number of interviewed individuals. From an interactional sociolinguistics (cf. De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012) perspective, the study explores the context of the East African diaspora (Georgiou, 2006; Manger & Assal, 2006 among many others) as the interviewed participants are all Zanzibar-born individuals for whom the relationship with the island and its history is crucial to their construction of selfhood. The study analyses the narrative voices (De Fina & Georgakopolou, 2008) of those individuals who decided to leave Zanzibar at the time of the 1964 violent political upheaval never to return and those who, on the contrary, decided to go back after a lengthy period abroad. However, more than establishing a division between these two groups, the paper highlights how these individuals take a different positioning (Bamberg, 1997) towards Zanzibar and its history and construct a range of identities in the context of the interview. 

Keywords: Identity, diaspora, liminality, hegemonic, narrative.

With and without Zanzibar: liminal diaspora voices and the memory of the revolution

This paper reviews the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics jointly awarded to Oliver Williamson for his work on governance in organizations and the boundaries of the firm, and to Elinor Ostrom for her work on the governance of common pool resources. We review the careers and the research contributions of Williamson and Ostrom to the theory and analysis of economic institutions of governance. Both winners of this Prize for 'economic governance' are thoroughly deserved, yet like the Hayek- Myrdal Prize of 1974 their respective approaches, methods and findings are almost diametrically opposed. Williamson offers a top-down contracts-based solution to the incentive problems of opportunism in corporate governance, whereas Ostrom offers a bottom-up communication-based solution to the governance opportunities of community resources. We offer some critical comments on Williamson's analytic work and discussion of the potential for further application of Ostrom's case-study based experimental methodology. We conclude with a suggested third nominee to make better sense of how these two great scholars' works fit together, namely George Richardson'

A Nobel Prize for governance and institutions : Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) enable innovative ways of carrying on routine organizational tasks via the power of virtual work environment. Piggy -backing on the success of E -commerce systems, organizations are in creasingly making use of Web -based Human Resource Management (e -HR) systems. These systems offer organizations the promise of huge performance improvement as well as of overhauling the entire HR function itself. This latter possibility is expected to offe r competitive advantage to organizations. However, it is not known (a) at what level of sophistication should organizations pitch their e -HR systems and (b) what contextual factors moderate the relationship between e -HR systems implementation and their be nefits. In this research -in -progress paper we offer a conceptual framework and a research plan to develop a theory of e -HR systems implementation.

e-HR Systems Implementation: A Conceptual Framework

In research interviews, interviewees are usually well aware of why they were selected, and in their narratives they often construct ‘default identities’ in line with the interviewers’ expectations....

/pdf/mobilizing-master-narratives-through-categorical-narratives-jsv9bjjieq.pdf

Mobilizing master narratives through categorical narratives and categorical statements when default identities are at stake

Purpose




This paper aims to develop conceptual arguments questioning the efficacy of administration by the transaction cost economics (TCE) approach in an organization undergoing a major change.




Design/methodology/approach




The focus is on three distinct dimensions of organizational life where, as per prior research, TCE is likely to be inadequate: interdependence across transactions, high reliance on managerial foresight and inseparability of administrative decisions made at different points in time.




Findings




The climate of coercion and surveillance engendered by administration based on TCE approaches – that punishes deviation from goals, even when they are framed on inadequate knowledge – forestalls creative problem-solving that is necessary to address unforeseen developments that arise during change implementation. Fiat accomplishes within-group compliance in the change project sub-teams, but between-group interdependencies tend to be neglected, hampering organizational effectiveness. Moreover, attempts to create independent spheres of accountability for concurrent fiats regarding pre-existing and new commitments breed inefficiency and wastage.




Research limitations/implications




The malevolent aspects of TCE-based administration contribute to organizational dysfunctions like escalation of commitment and developing of silos in organizations.




Practical implications




To succeed in effecting a major organizational change, meaningful relaxation of demands for delivering on prior goals is required, along with forbearance of errors made during trial-and-error learning.




Originality/value




TCE-based administration is deleterious to an organization attempting a major change. Supremacy accorded to resolution of conflicts in distinct hierarchical relationships by the mechanism of fiat fails to address the needs of an organizational reality where multiple groups are engaged in a set of interdependent activities and where multiple, interdependent organizational imperatives need to be concurrently served.

Administration of an organization undergoing change: Some limitations of the transaction cost economics approach

Abstract Existing research on women’s construction of professional identities and, more specifically, on leader identities in the workplace, has traditionally focused mainly on western contexts. This article aims to extend this focus by investigating the position of women in the workplace in India. We do this by discursively analyzing audio-taped semi-structured interviews with women who are working in the corporate sector in India. The aim of these analyses is to present a number of case studies about the unique challenges that women face at the workplace in the urban Indian context, especially when they take up leadership positions. The issues they grapple with are the collision of the traditional dominant discourses on appropriate female behavior and the new professional identities that these women wish to embrace. The paper discusses how these female professionals mainly construct two quite diverging identities: either as nurturing mentors or as aggressive professionals who are involved in activities traditionally viewed as “a man’s domain”. Conclusions are then drawn regarding how these professional identities acquiesce to, counter, or — as is the case in one interview — carefully mould, hegemonic discourses of femininity in India.

/pdf/negotiating-professional-and-leader-identities-in-interviews-4p5bec82nl.pdf

Abha Chatterjee

Papers

e-HR Systems Implementation: A Conceptual Framework

Mobilizing master narratives through categorical narratives and categorical statements when default identities are at stake

Administration of an organization undergoing change: Some limitations of the transaction cost economics approach

Negotiating professional and leader identities in interviews with female Indian professionals

Indian women at work