Organization

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Organizational Discourse Analysis: Avoiding the Determinism– Voluntarism

Trap
Charles Conrad
Organization 2004; 11; 427
DOI: 10.1177/1350508404042001

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 Volume 11(3): 427–439
ISSN 1350–5084
Copyright © 2004 SAGE
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)

Organizational Discourse Analysis:

Avoiding the Determinism–
Voluntarism Trap
commentaries

Charles Conrad
Texas A&M University, USA

Abstract. Drawing on Alvesson and Karreman’s (2000) analysis of the

methodological problems facing organizational discourse analysis, this
commentary examines the four primary essays in this special issue in
terms of their ability to deal adequately with micro-discourse, meso-
discourse, grand discourse, and mega-discourse. Key words. discourse;
discourse analysis; material structure; postmodern

It is ironic that, at precisely the moment when organizational theorists

have embraced discourse analysis, its demise is being celebrated by
critics in the disciplines from which it emerged. In After Theory (2004:
1), Terry Eagleton proclaims that
. . . the golden age of cultural theory is long past. The pioneering work of
Jacques Lacan, Claude Levi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and
Michel Foucault are several decades behind us. . . . Structuralism, Marx-
ism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics they
were. . . . Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some
fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been
shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love,
biology, religion, and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about
death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations,
and superficial about truth, objectivity, and disinterestedness. This, on any
estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down upon.

Others are less optimistic about the death of discourse studies in the
humanities, but clearly hope that Eagleton is either correct or at least
prophetic (e.g. Palmer, 1990). Although each critic has her or his own

DOI: 10.1177/1350508404042001 www.sagepublications.com

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 Organization 11(3)
Commentaries

complaints about the discourse turn, a common theme is the loss of a

sense of ‘material reality.’

Descent into Discourse?

Even the staunchest of critics of discourse perspectives applaud the
linguistic/symbolic/interpretive turn in the social sciences on which it is
based. The problem, they argue, is that, in rejecting the excesses of
positivism/economism (Bottomore et al., 1991), interpretivists in general
and discoursists in particular sometimes have merely substituted an
equally deterministic discoursism (Gergen, 2003): ‘the problem of lan-
guage as the “mirror of nature” that preoccupied the positivists was
replaced by simply focusing on the mirror as an object’ (Deetz, 2003:
425). Of course, the argument that cultural analysis tends to ‘descend’
toward a voluntarist, subjectivist extreme is not new. In The German
Ideology, Marx and Engels decried a ‘sham’ socialism, which, in the guise
of Enlightenment liberalism, championed ‘not the interests of the prolet-
ariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs
to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of
philosophical fantasy’ (Palmer, 1990: 238; also see Meiksins Wood, 1986).
Marx and Engels continue, ‘on the basis of the philosophical belief in the
power of concepts to make or destroy the world, they . . . continually mix
up literary history and real history as equally effective’ (1947; see Muller,
1995, for an excellent analysis of the role that liberalism played in the
development of free market ideology).
Contemporary critiques assert that these voluntarist/subjectivist tend-
encies are common, perhaps inherent, in discourse-centered perspectives
(Conrad and Haynes, 2001). For example, historiographer Bryan Palmer
concludes that ‘in the current fixation on language a materialist under-
standing of the past is all too often sacrificed on the altar of an idealized
reading of discourse and its influence’ (1990: 5; also see Walkowitz et al.,
1989). Rhetorical theorist James Arnt Aune similarly despaired about
communication theory in his comment:
. . . at times in recent years I have wished that the term ‘hegemony’ had
never been imported into the field of Communication . . . [where] the term
has accompanied an ideological overemphasis on communication pro-
cesses as opposed to political, legal, and economic force. And in general, a
term that originated in socialist politics has come to be used in contexts
that have very little to do with real politics, as opposed to academic self
congratulation, and nothing at all to do with class. (2000: 1; also see Cloud,
1994)

In trying to avoid the deterministic excesses of traditional (‘vulgar’)

Marxism, Aune argues, social scientists have abandoned any capacity to
explain either system or struggle. We have constructed a society that is
devoid of actors (defined as agents acting with intent to fulfill their self-
perceived interests);

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Organizational Discourse Analysis
Charles Conrad

. . . dominated by ideological apparatuses of the State or by omnipresent

powers symbolized by Bentham’s Panopticon or identified with its mech-
anisms of reproduction . . . The necessary critique of a declining or
corrupted type of social movement ended up arbitrarily in the image of a
society without actors. (Aune, 2000: 1)
Among organizational theorists, Reed’s analysis of the potential of
discourse-centered perspectives as well as the potential problems of
discoursism is exemplary (1998, 2000, 2001; Reed and Rosemary, forth-
coming). In a 2001 conference paper, Reed contends that the tendencies
in discourse perspectives include: (1) totally collapsing the non-
discursive or natural/material realm into the discursive domain, (2)
analytically reducing social structures to ‘the discursive practices and
forms through which they are constituted and interpreted,’ and (3) a
‘problem of “explanatory elision” whereby the assertion of fundamental
ontological interdependence and circularity necessarily precludes any
consideration, much less possibility, of causal explanation and the “inter-
play between separateness” on which it rests (Sayer, 2000; Archer, 2000:
6)’ (Reed, 2001: 1). Unless exceptional care is taken, Reed (2001: 8)
argues, discourse perspectives always run the risk of ‘descending into an
infinite regressive and reflexive solipsism (O’Doherty and Willmott,
2001)’.
These tendencies, Reed argues (2001: 8), are illustrated in what Mumby
and Clair (1997) call ‘hard constructionism’ in which the assertion that
the ‘very structuring of organisations is constituted through discourse’
makes it impossible to either identify or analyze larger connections
among everyday sensemaking practices, social structures, and the enact-
ment of power relationships. In the process, two things are lost: (1) a
meaningful sense of agency, including the ability to analyze intention-
ality and interests; and (2) an analysis of the influence that previous
constitutive processes (‘history,’ for lack of a better term) have on ongoing
discourse. Foucauldian conceptions of power as diffused and decentered
can add much to our understanding of the dynamics of domination,
resistance, response, and counter-resistance. But, if these notions are
extended too far, there is no agency and there are no oppressors
(Walkowitz et al., 1989; also see Fairclough, 1992).
Collinson (2003: 529), Jones (2003: 515), and Alvesson and Karreman
(2000: 1126), among others, have drawn similar conclusions about dis-
coursism in organizational studies. The key distinction is between lin-
guistic and rhetorical views of discourse. The former versions highlight
the ‘talked’ and ‘textual’ nature of everyday interaction in organizations.
The latter would focus on the symbolic processes through which social
and organizational actors draw upon existing social-linguistic structures
to produce, reproduce, and legitimize systems of privilege and domina-
tion: ‘rather than the discourse-driven subject, the subject may be a
politically conscious language user, telling the right kind of stories to the
right audiences at the right moment’ (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000:

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 Organization 11(3)
Commentaries

1132). Indeed, citing Jackall (1988), Alvesson and Karreman conclude

that the essence of contemporary management is the mastery of ‘provi-
sional language,’ that is, ‘the ability to manipulate a whole variety of
symbols without becoming tied to or identified with any of them’ (2000:
1132). Rhetorical perspectives invite an analysis of organizational/
managerial persuasion, including ‘lies, and the lying liars who tell them,’
to coin a phrase (Elliott and Schroth, 2002; for a broader analysis, see
Corn, 2003). Discoursism may well preclude that kind of analysis.
Substituting discoursism for rhetorical/material analysis has important
political consequences. The late Edward Said concluded that ‘the emer-
gence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality and critical
noninterference has coincided with the ascendancy of Reaganism, or for
that matter with a new cold war, increased militarism and defense
spending, and a massive turn to the right on matters touching the
economy, social services, and organized labor’ (1978: 23–4). Jones offers a
similar assessment of discoursism in organizational studies: ‘it is com-
plicit with a more general denial in organization studies of a set of
concepts that includes justice, judgment, ethics, politics and capitalism’
(2003: 515). The political and organizational processes combined to
foster the ascendancy of ‘free market fundamentalism’ in the West during
the 1980s and 1990s. Aune (2001) has persuasively argued that the
dominance of this ideology resulted from a conscious, self-interested,
systematic, and extensive persuasive campaign by economic and organ-
izational elites to articulate and legitimize a particular ideology and to
develop a group of supporting political, economic, and organizational
institutions (Lounsbury and Ventresca, 2003; for case analyses, see
Fligstein, 1990, 2001; Greider, 1992; Perrow, 2002). Recent analyses of the
Enron-related scandals in US corporate governance reveal a concerted,
intentional, interested manipulation of political, economic, and social
structures via discourse (see, for example, Management Communication
Quarterly, 2003; Organization, 2003), with audiences both ‘inside’ and
‘outside’ of formal organizations. Unfortunately, discoursism focuses
attention in different directions, so that ‘there has sometimes been little
attempt to think through the ultimate compatibility of progressive polit-
ical commitments with the dissolution of the subject, or a totalizing
suspicion of the concept’ (Dews, 1987: xv).

So, What’s a Devotee of Discourse to Do?

Of course, no critic of discoursism wants to see a return to the days
of simple-minded positivism/economism/vulgar Marxism. Following
Reed’s lead:
We need a much more ontologically and analytically robust conception of
discourse and discourse analysis as materially-grounded social practices
located within structured social contexts before we can hope to overcome
the debilitating explanatory weaknesses of post-structuralist forms of dis-
course analysis. (2001: 11)

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Organizational Discourse Analysis
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Fortunately, some have explained how a materially grounded discourse

analysis might be accomplished. I will mention only one exemplar:
Alvesson and Karreman’s (2000) critique of Fournier’s study of the
discourse of ‘new careers.’
Alvesson and Karreman begin by differentiating between views in
which discourse is determined by ‘structural’ factors/processes and those
in which it operates autonomously. Their second continuum, based on
the work of Potter and Wetherell (1987), extends from micro discourse
analysis (involving detailed studies of language in specific micro con-
texts) to meso discourse analysis (which is sensitive to language use in
particular contexts but also seeks broader patterns that go beyond
immediate textual details and generalize to similar local contexts) to
Grand Discourse approaches (which analyze the processes through
which an integrated assembly of discourses are taken to reflect/constitute
organizational reality) to a Mega Discourse approach (which examines
patterns of discourse over extended time and space). As I read Alvesson
and Karreman, analysis can begin at any point on the second continuum.
Regardless of the chosen ‘entry point,’ any analysis that remains at that
level is partial and incomplete, and consequently invites a ‘slide’ to
either an excessively deterministic or an excessively autonomous view of
discourse. Because discourse research tends to be conducted from a
close-range interest rather than from a long-range interest, the most likely
‘slide’ is toward an excessively ‘grandiose and muscular’ (2000: 1147)
view of discourse; ‘as Hardy, et al. (1998) argue, the study of talk also
needs to consider the social context and the participants: to just hear the
story—focus on the talk—is insufficient. There is the trap of linguistic
reductionism and/or a rather narrow focus on details of language use that
may lead discourse studies to a somewhat peripheral position seen as
esoteric by organizational participants’ (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000:
1145). It is through moving from level to level, which entails a shift from
one perspective to another (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000: 1146), and
especially from close-range to long-range perspectives, that both tenden-
cies can be avoided. Although Alvesson and Kärreman leave open the
question of how a critic moves ‘from discourses to Discourse(s)’ (2000:
1146), their critique of Fournier’s study suggests that, through multiple
iterations, the critic should explore the multiple tensions among the
various perspectives (2000, 1134; also see Fairclough, 1993). In some
cases, the analysis will converge toward a synthesis of text and context,
action and structure; in others it will remain disconnected and frag-
mented, but not partial and incomplete. The strength of Fournier’s
analysis is its movement ‘from “discourse” to “Discourse” and back
again’ (2000: 1139); its weakness is that it does not move far enough, to
analyze ‘expressions of meanings (intentions, beliefs, standpoints) out-
side of the situation of language use’ (2000: 1143).
In the remainder of this essay I shall examine the perspectives devel-
oped by Fairhurst, Cooren, Taylor and Robichaud, and McPhee in terms

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 Organization 11(3)
Commentaries

of the multi-level analytical model described by Alvesson and Karreman.

As Hardy points out in her response, each essay focuses on discourse, not
Discourse. Consequently, appropriate questions involve the degree to
which each perspective invites, enables, or encourages a more compre-
hensive treatment of organizational D/discourse, or frustrates or pre-
cludes a comprehensive treatment of action and structure, materiality
and symbolicity.

Four Approaches to Organizational D/discourse Analysis

I begin with Fairhurst’s discussion of interaction analysis, in part because
it makes the least grandiose/muscular claims (to use Alvesson and
Karreman’s preferred metaphors). Fairhurst posits that the strength of an
interactional form of discourse analysis is its ability systematically to
examine patterns of discourse over interactional time in an effort to
delineate the ways in which language use simultaneously reflects/enacts
organizational relationships and constitutes those relationships. Inter-
action analysis relies on an a priori coding schema to transform symbolic
action (or ‘organizational performances’) into an ‘entity’ that is fixed in
time and space. Coding creates a map, a representation of communicative
performances that implicitly contains an observer’s culturally influenced
choice among the range of perspectives that can be legitimized in a
particular social and intellectual milieu. As such, it reveals the processes
through which organizational actors guide and constrain one another’s
behavior. In doing so, schemes simplify and reduce the complexity of
interaction to a simpler set of attributes that is more tractable. But does
that reduction necessarily imply that interaction analysis is reductionist?
Perhaps Kenneth Burke’s (1945) most enduring legacy was his argument
that all interpretive frames (all transformations of action into texts) are
reductions—they all involve the selection and deflection of the details of
symbolic acts. But some frames—and some applications of a given
frame—are more reductionist than others (in Burke’s terms, some frames
are more ‘comic’ than ‘tragic’ and others are more ‘tragic’ than ‘comic’).
The differentia is the extent to which a particular frame allows inter-
preters to remain cognizant of the ways in which their perspectives
‘reduce’ symbolic action, remain open with their audience about the
reductionist tendencies of their frames of reference, and encourage them
to carefully condition their conclusions about the ‘reality’ of symbolic
action.
Fairhurst confesses that her preferred reduction—interaction analysis—
is reductionist in the sense that it fixes action in a particular time and place.
She admits that applying a coding scheme transforms inherently poly-
semic action into a single and unitary ‘text’; agrees that that transforma-
tional process guides and constrains subsequent interpretations of the text;
makes no claims that interaction analysis can construct a ‘collective
memory’ or constitute an organization; and recognizes the sequential

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Organizational Discourse Analysis
Charles Conrad

nature of textuality. Consequently, it can, at most, provide what Alvesson

and Karreman called ‘micro’ and ‘meso’ discourse analysis.
However, Fairhurst’s depiction of interaction analysis is also ironic in
that her disclaimers focus attention on patterns and sequence, thereby
stressing the considerations that she suggests are sacrificed by the
approach. Consider her exemplars. Holmes and Sykes describe the pro-
cesses through which a particular meaning system is imbedded in and
subsequently imposed upon negotiators via the rhetoric of ‘simulation.’
Courtright et al. and Fairhurst examine the ways in which local history
and organizationally preferred managerial style influence and are influ-
enced by patterns of interaction. Komaki’s study encompassed seven
months of observations and focused on complex relationships between
temporality and various dimensions of managerial discourse. In all three
cases, a purported weakness of interaction analysis is offset by the way in
which interaction analysis is implemented. The first study provides
insight into the processes through which a particular meaning system is
enacted via a structure, is legitimized by reference to that structure, and
has unintended consequences for the ‘organizational’ situation; in the
other two studies, ‘text,’ previously defined as something ‘frozen in time,’
is part of a process located in (organizational) historical and interactional
time. When taken together, these three studies do admit that coding
systems used in interactional analysis do not appear ex nihilo because
they are grounded in previous research/theory. However, they also sug-
gest that interaction analysis can be processual, can incorporate group- or
organization-level contextual factors, and can (and often do) emerge
through researchers’ encounters with organizational texts. Interaction
analysis cannot in itself constitute ‘mega discourse,’ but it can anchor
grand- and mega-level analyses in interpretations to micro processes.
Cooren also defines ‘texts’ as both ‘frozen’ in time and space—discrete,
completed, and separated from the agents who created them—and able to
transcend the bounds of time and space (see the quotation from Smith,
2001, on p. 374, for example). I will avoid the overall issue of whether or
not concrete ‘texts’ can be ‘agents,’ but Cooren makes an excellent case
that members of organizations often respond to them as if they are. In this
sense, when texts become de-authored, the original intent of their authors
is both crucial, because at various points in the text’s ‘lifetime’ that intent
will become contested terrain, and irrelevant, because ‘original intent’ is
necessarily constructed and reconstructed discursively.
Unfortunately, I think, Cooren’s analysis de-emphasizes the processes
through which organizational members can use the ‘textual’ character of
inanimate objects rhetorically and strategically. Regardless of their
creators’ intent, documents such as mission statements can be—and often
are—used to justify virtually any organizational policy or action, and
eventually can take on a ‘life of their own’ that can ensnare even their
creators (Cheney et al., in press; Langelar, 1992). For example, US airline
pilots have often used ‘checklists’ as a form of resistance, a version of

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Organization 11(3)
Commentaries

‘working to rule.’ By following checklists ‘to the letter’ at major hubs (for
example, American Airlines’ Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX, operation) they are
able quickly to disrupt the airlines’ worldwide operations. The sub-
sequent debate about this tactic, particularly in legal venues, explicitly
focused on the issues that Cooren raises: pilots argued that the text is
responsible for their actions, whereas management argued that agency
(and thus responsibility) lies with the pilots and that the text is merely a
tool that they use to legitimize their actions.
Similarly, almost all of the recent scandals involving corporate govern-
ance in US firms have turned on the publication of email messages or
other forms of ‘frozen’ texts. The paradigm case may be the infamous
1996 audio-tape recording of Texaco’s upper management discussing the
company’s racist promotion practices, which culminated (at least rhetor-
ically) in treasurer Robert Ulrich’s joking metaphor that ‘all of the black
jellybeans seem to be stuck in the bottom of the bag’ (Eichenwald, 1996).
In each of these cases, the discourse surrounding the revelations was
couched in terms of what the ‘texts mean,’ which would seem to support
Cooren’s analysis. Of course, Cooren recognizes this in his discussion of
the ‘ghosting’ of authors/texts. However, his analysis foregrounds ‘text’
and de-emphasizes the rhetorical appropriation of those texts. Because
the ‘meaning’ of textual objects always is contested terrain, reversing that
prioritization could substantially enrich this form of textual analysis.
Having said this, I would like to focus briefly on two research projects
that avoid the problems I have discussed regarding Fairhurst’s and
Cooren’s perspectives, and illustrate the potential of these two ‘micro’
perspectives. The first is Cooren’s analysis of the ‘Great Whale River’
controversy (2001). The controversy surrounded a proposal to construct a
road through the land of Cree and Inuit peoples in Quebec as part of a
hydroelectric development project. Opponents of the project were able to
use existing legal requirements mandating a review of the environmental
impact of the project (a ‘text’ in Cooren’s sense of the term) as a basis for
opposing it and as a medium for conducting a public relations campaign
against it. Cooren focuses on the ways in which the various sides in the
dispute were able to use the review and related ‘texts’ (documents)
rhetorically, and examines the ways in which those strategic uses
changed in response to changing public opinion and the changing
strategies used by the other parties.
The second exemplar is Fairhurst et al.’s (2002) effort to grapple with a
voluminous text involving managerial discourse during a multi-year
downsizing of a nuclear energy facility. Although the study does not
explicitly employ interaction analysis or Cooren’s ‘textual agency’
approach, it clearly employs an analytical scheme that was grounded in
micro processes of interaction and that changed in fundamental ways as
the authors confronted the text(s) that they were interpreting. A central
part of that transformation involved a recursive process in which the
authors created text(s), analyzed them through an initial frame of refer-

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Organizational Discourse Analysis
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ence, reflected on the role that their own experiences/biases/beliefs/

feelings play in their interpretations, modified their interpretive frame,
felt constrained in varying ways by the texts they previously had created,
re-created text(s) from symbolic actions, and so on. In short, they engaged
in the kind of iterative/dialectical process that is envisioned in Alvesson
and Karreman’s model.
The other essays in this issue explicitly focus on what Alvesson and
Karreman call the ‘macro-system context.’ McPhee begins with a view of
texts and textual analysis that is consistent with (and perhaps implicit in)
structuration theory. On the one hand, structuration has been viewed as
excessively macro, with minimal treatment of communicative (as
opposed to linguistic) interaction (for a summary, see Conrad, 1993).
Alternatively, micro-level applications of structuration, even in versions
such as Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) and Group Decision Sup-
port System (GDSS), have been criticized as too ‘external’ in that ‘they
eschew actors’ meanings in favor of the researchers’’ (Fairhurst, this
volume, p. 344). McPhee attempts to bridge this gap via a conceptualiza-
tion of ‘text’ as ‘a relatively permanently inscribed symbolic formulation’
composed of signs and symbols in a coherent structure. His goal is to use
‘hermeneutics and interpretive methods’ to produce analyses that are
simultaneously sensitive to symbolic content and not dependent on
‘understanding and interpretation.’
McPhee then applies textual analysis as a way to expand and deepen
the treatment of organizations/institutions in structuration theory. Organ-
izations dominate late modernity by bracketing/separating space and
time and by disembedding traditional institutions through a reflexive
relationship with other social institutions. Both his discussion of texts
and their implication for organizations are important responses to com-
mon critiques of structuration theory. Of course, the proof of this integrat-
ive perspective will come in its application. But it is clear that McPhee’s
goal is to adapt structuration in ways that allow analyses that integrate all
levels of the Alvesson–Karreman model.
Taylor and Robichaud are even more explicit than McPhee about the
need for integrated Discourse/discourse analyses. They do this by
embracing the intentional, rhetorical nature of language use that allows
the critic to view actors/agents as capable of a great many things: they can
employ language to achieve personal/individual goals; act to produce or
reproduce the language community of which they are members (or the
preferred aspects of that community); strive to create patterned social
relations that meet their assumed needs and/or fulfill their desires; or
interact in concert with others to construct social structures, including
organizations. Presumably, although Taylor and Robichaud do not
develop this explicitly, individuals also use language to influence the
macro context within which they act, to engage in strategic discourse at
the levels of ‘grand discourse’ and ‘mega discourse.’ For example, the
‘outsiders’ in the documentary they examine produce discourse that both

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 Organization 11(3)
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reflects ongoing trends of replacing family structures with managerial

(‘professional’) ones, and helps legitimize those trends. The same is true
of the film itself.
Of course, I do not mean to suggest that the fictional actors in the film
(or its producers) are consciously and intentionally attempting to influ-
ence macro context, although that well may be the case. But the strength
of Taylor and Robichaud’s perspective is that it could focus on the
intentional efforts to do so. The fundamental socioeconomic changes that
took place in the USA, UK, and Australia during the 1980s and 1990s (as
well as in much more communitarian sites such as Canada, Northern and
Western Europe, and New Zealand, each of which have experienced their
own Reagan/Thatcher/Bush experiments) could be the unintended con-
sequences of linguistic action, but they also could be the outcome of a
careful, systematic, planned campaign to persuasively articulate an ideo-
logy that serves to solidify elite dominance of the political-economic
system (Aune, 2001). In either case, Taylor and Robichaud’s model could
provide distinctive insights.

On the Destiny of Acceptance Frames

Throughout his career, symbolic theorist Kenneth Burke differentiated
between ‘dialectical’ and ‘positive’ terms/concepts/perspectives. The
meanings of the former are constructed through opposition and contrast:
the meaning of ‘black’ is influenced by the meaning of ‘white’ and its
relationship to ‘black’ (and vice versa); ‘male’ is defined by its relation-
ship to ‘female’ (and vice versa); and so on. As social constructions of the
meaning of one term develop and change, the meaning of the other
changes as well—they are ever connected. The resulting tensions and
contradictions can be managed in a number of ways—through psycho-
logical repression, the development of hierarchies among the terms,
oscillating from one pole to the other, or, in rare cases, momentary
synthesis—but they never can be resolved.
Contemporary organizational and organizational communication
theory is replete with dialectical terms: action and structure; micro and
macro; determinism and autonomy; modernism and postmodernism.
Organizational discourse perspectives are immersed in each of these
dialectical relationships. Different versions position discourse differ-
ently. Some place it in the middle, and propose that ‘mid-range’ analyses
can best capture the dialectical relationships via a Janus-like perspective
(Taylor and Robichaud, this issue); others put discourse in a similar
‘place’ but see discourse as mediating the multiple dialectics (Hardy, this
issue); others posit that individual items of discourse analysis are
‘moments’ in an ongoing iterative process of striving to understand each
relationship and each dimension (e.g. Putnam and Cooren, this issue;
Alvesson and Karreman, 2000); still others, like many of the authors of
the recent ‘W(h)ither Organizational Theory’ symposium in Organization
(2003), see discourse perspectives as one apex of a theoretical pendulum

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 Organizational Discourse Analysis
Charles Conrad

that now is swinging away from individualist/voluntaristic forms of

determinism. As each of the essays in the collection demonstrates, the
meaning and the significance of organizational discourse research lie in
the potential for managing that conceptual dialectic.

References
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Charles Conrad is Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University and editor of

Management Communication Quarterly. He teaches classes in organizational
communication, organizational rhetoric, and communication, power, and pol-
itics. His research focuses on the symbolic processes through which organizations
influence popular attitudes and public policies. His work appears in communica-
tion and management journals. Address: Department of Communication, Mail
Stop 4234, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843–4234, USA. [email:
c-conrad@tamu.edu]

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