Analysing Discourse. An Approach From the Sociology of Knowledge Reiner Keller Abstract : The contribution outlines a research programme which I have coined the "sociology of knowledge approach to discourse" (Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse ). This approach to dis-course integrates important insights of FOUCAULT's theory of discourse into the interpretative paradigm in the social sciences, especially the "German" approach of hermeneutic sociology of knowledge (Hermeneutische Wissenssoziologie ). Accordingly, in this approach discourses are con-sidered as "structured and structuring structures" which shape social practices of enunciation. Un-like some Foucauldian approaches, this form of discourse analysis recognises the importance of socially constituted actors in the social production and circulation of knowledge. Furthermore, it combines research questions related to the concept of "discourse" with the methodical toolbox of qualitative social research. Going beyond questions of language in use, "the sociology of knowl-edge approach to discourse" (Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse ) addresses sociological inter-ests, the analyses of social relations and politics of knowledge as well as the discursive construction of reality as an empirical ("material") process. For empirical research on discourse the
approach proposes the use of analytical concepts from the sociology of knowledge tradition, such
as interpretative schemes or frames (Deutungsmuster ), "classifications", "phenomenal structure"
(Phänomenstruktur ), "narrative structure", "dispositif" etc., and the use of the methodological strategies
of "grounded theory".
Table of Contents 1. Discourse and the Sociology of Knowledge 2. The Research Programme of Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse 3. Methods and Practice of Discourse Research 4. Conclusion: Beginnings References Author Citation
Since the impressive work of Michel FOUCAULT in the 1960s and 1970s,
discourse research in the social sciences has been oscillating between the
comprehensive theoretical interpretation of social macro-discourses (e.g. the
Foucauldian tradition, work inspired by LACLAU and MOUFFE, Cultural and
Postcolonial Studies) and the analysis of concrete "language in use" in the field of
discourse analysis (including linguistic pragmatics and ethnomethodologically
rooted conversation analysis). Recent attempts to build bridges between these
rather heterogeneous paradigms have aimed to reduce problems localised on
both sides, either in an "all too abstract macro analysis in discourse theory" not
really fitted to reach the level of empirical research, or in an "all to micro
perspective" on discourse unable to go beyond local micro-data analysis.
Although I agree with this diagnosis, I suggest a different strategy for discourse
research in order to bring the latter "down to earth" in empirical sociology: Rather
than focusing on the analysis of "language in use", it is preferable—and possible
Volume 6, No. 3, Art. 32 September 2005Key words :
sociology of
knowledge,
discourse, politics
of knowledge,
symbolic
interactionism,
frame,
classification,
narrative structure,
grounded theory,
Foucault, Berger, Luckmann FORUM : QUALITATIVE S O C IA L R ES E A R C H S OZIALFORS CHUN G
—to translate some Foucauldian insights on discourse into sociological theory building. With this move, it is possible to elaborate a sociology of knowledge approach to discourse based on the social c
onstructionist tradition of Peter L. BERGER and Thomas LUCKMANN, and to adopt and adapt interpretative or qualitative traditions of data analysis. As an analysis of knowledge production and circulation, this approach is closer to the original Foucauldian programme of analysing discourses as "practices of power/knowledge" and meaning production, than the established focus on "language in use" research. But going beyond FOUCAULT, such an approach introduces a more sociological conception of actors and practices in discourse theory and research. The empirical practice of discourse research can thus reclaim modifications of qualitative data analysis in order to meet the necessities of discourse perspectives. In the following, I will first discuss the relation between discourse theory and sociology of knowledge. Then I present some basic assumptions of the sociology of knowledge regarding discourse. The third part of the article discusses some devices, methodological concepts and qualitative strategies for analysing "discourse data" (texts, visual data, ethnographic data) which draw on concepts such as the reconstruction of interpretative schemes or frames (Deutungsmuster), classifications, phenomenal structures, narrative structures, dispositifs, theoretical sampling or "coding". I argue that these concepts are well suited to provide a qualitative sociological perspective of discourse (see KELLER 2004, 2005). [1]
1. Discourse and the Sociology of Knowledge
At present, various notions of discourse are in circulation in the humanities. They can be grouped into six categories (see KELLER 2004): (1) In Germany, Jürgen HABERMAS contributed extensively to the dissemination of the term "discourse". But in the Habermasian tradition, discourse is hardly an object of inquiry, to be empirically analysed. Instead, it is regarded as an organised and ordered deliberative process to which a normative ethics of discourse is applied. This use, which is current today primarily in the political sciences, has created—and still creates—some confusion in German debates on discourse research. The traditional political science approach to discourse is mainly interested in the relationship between arguments (ideas) and interests: in short, discourse matters if the better argument wins. However, this argumentative approach to discourse up to date rarely analyses the politics of knowledge. (2) Discourse analysis is a master frame for the micro-orientated analysis of language in use, which is based on pragmatic linguistics and conversation analysis. (3) Corpus linguistics builds up enormous corpuses of text data around selected themes (such as political issues) in order to look for statistical correlations. (4) Critical Discourse Analysis (Norman FAIRCLOUGH) and its German counterpart Kritische Diskursanalyse (Siegfried JÄGER) are both based in linguistics, but with slightly different discourse-theoretical elaborations; they direct discourse research to the ideological functions of language in use. (5) Discourse theories—like those of Michel FOUCAULT or Ernesto LACLAU and Chantal MOUFFE—are designed to analyse the social macro-levels of power/kn
owledge relationships or the articulation of collective identities. (6) Culturalist discourse research could be the label for a field of research derived from three different traditions: Symbolic
Interactionism (i.e. the analysis of the construction of social problems in public discourses), the investigation of language use and symbolic power inspired by BOURDIEU, or the analysis of "circuits of representation/culture" in Cultural Studies. While approaches 2 and 3 are interested in questions of micro/macro processes of language use, and 4 is directed towards ideology, approaches 5 and 6 are closely related to questions of knowledge production, circulation and transformation, or in more general terms: they are related to questions of symbolic structuring of meaning and the generation of symbolic orders including their material groundings and effects. The main difference between the two strands seems to be that the latter approach gives greater importance to social actors. [2]
Recent years have seen an increasing interest in discourse research in the social sciences as well (see KELLER 1997, 2004). Yet, current research still faces one major problem: How to enter the practice of discourse research? Once the theoretical grounds are prepared, building on FOUCAULT or thediscourse
LACLAU/MOUFFE tradition, how to do, step by step, the concrete empirical research? Methodological
devices offered by traditional discourse analysis—the analysis of "talk and text in action" (Teun van DIJK)—do not serve well to address the interests of social sciences (sociological) discourse research at more comprehensive or meso/macro levels. This constellation has given rise to attempts to bring together the best of both worlds of discourse research: theoretical groundings offered by discourse theory, and empirical concepts and strategies from the toolbox of discourse analysis (WETHERELL 1998;
JØRGENSEN & PHILIPPS 2002). Nonetheless, as I suggest, this attempt to ground discourse research is not as new as it claims to be—it has been present for more than fifteen years now in approaches such as the already mentioned "Critical Discourse Analysis" or "Kritische Diskursanalyse" (FAIRCLOUGH 1995; JÄGER 1999). Considering empirical research presented by both critical approaches I currently see two main problems: [3]
The first problem is closely tied to the interest in ideological functions of language which all to often results in a rather reductionist "proof" of the presence of ideological notions and functions in a concrete set of spoken or written language (discourse). There is no place for any surprising results or insights to be derived from such empirical research, because the discourse theorist always knows how ideology works in advance. [4]
The second problem is closer to the solution proposed for problems of discourse research mentioned above. The methodological devices which are offered by Critical Discourse Analysis and Kritische Diskursanalyse stem from linguistics and may be well suited for questions of linguistic research (including linguistic pragmatics and conversation analysis). But they are hardly suitable to grasp the larger dimensions of knowledge and knowledge/power which FOUCAULT was interested in.1 An approach to discourse informed by the sociology of knowledge promises to grasp these latter dimensions. [5]
1KELLER (2005) contains an extended discussion of discourse theories from FOUCAULT to Cultural Studies, including LACLAU and MOUFFE.
Since the early days of the sociological classics in knowledge analysis—such as Karl MARX, Emile DURKHEIM, Max WEBER, Max SCHELER, Karl MANNHEIM, Ludwig FLECK—the sociology of knowledge has seen a rather heterogeneous development. Its latest impressive manifestations appeared in social studies of science and technology. In the following, I refer to the sociology of knowledge tradition mainly the seminal book on the "Social construction of reality" by Peter L. BERGER and Thomas LUCKMANN (1980), originally published in 1966 at the same time as FOUCAULT's "Order of things" (1974). BERGER and LUCKMANN proposed a synthesis of different st
rands of sociology of knowledge approaches ranging from MARX and DURKHEIM to the phenomenological approach of Alfred SCHÜTZ. Inspired by arguments of pragmatism and symbolic interactionism (i.e. MEAD's theory of socialisation), they developed the theoretical groundings of a comprehensive sociological analysis of the social production and circulation of knowledge. This perspective ranges from processes of generating, objectifying and institutionalising knowledge as "objective reality" to the mechanisms of the individual's more or less creative adoption of knowledge patterns taken from the collective "stock of knowledge" (SCHÜTZ & LUCKMANN 1979).2 The concept of knowledge refers to everything which is supposed to "exist" (including ideas, theories, everyday assumptions, language, incorporated routines and practices). The "social construction of knowledge" is conceived as an ongoing activity, performance and process; it is not the intentional outcome of any individual effort, but rather an effect of everyday action and interaction. The collective stocks of knowledge appear as institutions (like language itself), theories and other socio-cognitive devices, organisations, archives, texts and all kinds of materialities (e.g. practices, artefacts). Together, they constitute a historical Apriori for embedded individual actors. These actors' minds constitute the world not as transcendental subjects, but by using the knowledge devices at hand or, if routine (inter)action and interpretation is disturbed, by "creating" new ones in extended processes of social interaction. [6]
The BERGER/LUCKMANN tradition in Germany at present uses the label of "Hermeneutische Wissenssoziologie" (hermeneutical sociology of knowledge) (HITZLER, REICHERTZ & SCHRÖER 1999) to mark its difference to other social science approaches to knowledge. Since it has always—and lately more and more explicitly—accorded great attention to the connection between language and knowledge, it has been presented recently by some of its proponents as the "communicative paradigm" in knowledge research (LUCKMANN 2002; KNOBLAUCH 1995). In taking up the foundational work of
BERGER/LUCKMANN, including their tenet that everyday knowledge should be the central point of reference for sociological knowledge analysis, the Hermeneutische Wissenssoziologie has unfortunately concentrated mostly on micro levels of knowledge analysis. It directed its interests to ethnographies of "small life worlds of modern man" (Benita LUCKMANN) or actors' interpretations of their everyday activities. Norbert SCHRÖER (1997) ultimately identified Hermeneutische Wissenssoziologie with this latter interest in actors' local
2See KELLER (2005) for a discussion of the sociology of knowledge tradition in relationship to discourse research; see KELLER, HIRSELAND, SCHNEIDER and VIEHÖVER (2005
forthcoming) for current dialogues between discourse theories and the sociology of knowledge.
knowledge. Against such reductionist adoptions of the BERGER/LUCKMANN tradition I propose an extension to include all social levels of institutional and organisational circulation of knowledge. This was originally proposed in their seminal work through their use of concepts such as objectification, institutionalisation, and legitimisation. The notion of discourse is well suited to analyse social processes, practices and politics of knowledge in modern societies as discourses. It helps to provide a more subtle theoretical understanding of the otherwise rather static idea of "stocks of knowledge". Before explicating further details of the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (Wissens-soziologische Diskursanalyse), let me sum up its major promises:
•Compared to other discourse theoretical approaches, the theoretical and empirical interests of Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse range from social processes of knowledge production and circulation to symbolic structure and back to actors' orientations and practices in historical worlds of knowledge and meaning.
•By bringing the actors back into focus the approach avoids the reification and ontologisation of knowledge regimes. Actors' positions and possibilities are pre-constituted by discourse. But social actors are not puppets on the strings of discourse, but (inter) active and creative agents engaged in social power plays and struggles for interpretation.
•Taking up theoretical concepts of the interpretative paradigm in sociology, Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse considers institutions as temporary
"crystallised" or "frozen processes of ordering" (Joseph GUSFIELD) which enable and constrain individual action.
•Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse takes into account the historical and collective dimensions of knowledge and knowledge-making practices. Thereby it opens up the field of sociology of knowledge to social regimes and politics of knowledge.
•It supposes that all discourse research has to be interpretative work. This insight needs to be reflected in its methodical and empirical application.
Therefore Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse builds upon the qualitative
research tradition in the social sciences.
•It is conceived as "grounded theory" (Anselm STRAUSS), which means it follows a strategy of bottom-up theory building on discourse issues rather than a top-down approach dominant in some discourse theoretical
perspectives. [7]
2. The Research Programme of Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse
We can't enter the world and see "discourses" in the way we see, for example, a piece of cake, a building, or even a concrete set of social interaction. "Discourse" is not an ontological entity. In the empirical world, we can't collect anything but disparate elements or utterances, occurring at different instances in time and social as well as geographical space. Discourse so far is nothing but a theoretical device for ordering and analysing data, a necessary hypothetical assumption to start research. The last decennia have seen a rich development of reflections on "doing discourse research" following more general interest rather than concrete language-in-use approaches (see KELLER, HIRSELAND, SCHNEIDER &
VIEHÖVER 2001, 2003; KELLER 2004). Impressive theoretical propositions have been made by LACLAU and MOUFFE on the role of practices of articulation for the constitution of collective identities, or in the Cultural Studies focus on the ways in which actors produce and actively consume circulating representations. But they remained rather silent about their methods. Therefore I still consider FOUCAULT's work to be the central source of inspiration for elaborating dis-course research. The boo
ks, articles and conversations signed by "FOUCAULT" present a delightful set of proposals and toolboxes open to various interpretations. [8]
FOUCAULT insisted on the relevance of general or "higher level" research questions to illuminate the "history of the present". He analysed the genealogy of modern configurations of the subject, the power/knowledge relationship, or processes of normalisation of bodies, sexualities and so on (bio-power). His major work on discourse theory, the "Archaeology of knowledge" (FOUCAULT 1988 [1969]), is very successful in constructing a theoretical idea of "discourse". But it neither addresses questions of relations between discourse and other social phenomena, nor does it talk about methodical devices for empirical research. Rather, FOUCAULT reflects on the guiding assumptions implicit in his previous works, without pretending that he ever followed the road map of discourse theory presented in "Archaeology". Neither did he do so later. While the "Archaeology" argued for historical snapshots of power/knowledge regimes, his later concept of "Genealogy" accentuated the diachronic intertwining of discourses, practices and dispositifs (cognitive/material infrastructures) in historical power struggles or struggles for truth (see FOUCAULT 1974b [1972], 2002
[1973/1974], 1992 [1978]). Here too FOUCAULT was rather arcane about his actual practice of "doing research". He never actually did the kind of discourse analysis for which he prepared the theoretical gr
ounds in his "Archaeology of knowledge". Nevertheless he made a few points concerning his strategy of questioning his data (see FOUCAULT 1991):

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