Transforming evidence: A discursive evaluation of narrative therapy case studies

A recent shift in American Psychological Association policy for what constitutes as evidence in psychotherapy has resulted in the inclusion of qualitative methodologies. Narrative therapy is a discursive therapy that is theoretically incongruent with the prevailing gold standard of experimental methodology in psychotherapy outcome evaluation. By using a discursive evaluation methodology that is congruent with narrative therapy this study of six peer-reviewed narrative therapy case articles found shifts in client positioning in the transformation from medical pathology discourses to strength-based discourses. It is concluded that five out of six case studies coherently demonstrated the effectiveness of narrative therapy with positive outcomes for clients and that a discursive evaluation has utility in producing a thick description of therapeutic outcome

‘In the name of capability’: a critical discursive evaluation of competency-based management development

This paper illustrates a number of ways in which competency or capability-based management development (CBMD) can work simultaneously both for and against the interests of organizational agents. It does so by demonstrating how CBMD might usefully be understood as both ideological and quasi-religiously faith-based. These features are shown to provide opportunities for resistance and micro-emancipation alongside those for repression and subordination. The study employs a combination of ‘middle range’ discourse analytical techniques. In the first instance, critical discourse analysis is applied to company documentation to distil the ideological stance of an international organization’s CBMD programme. Critical discursive psychology is then used to assess the ways in which employees’ evaluative accounts both support and resist such stance. The analysis builds upon previous insights from Foucauldian studies of CBMD by foregrounding processes of discursive agency. It also renders more visible and discussible the assumptions and dilemmas that CBMD might imply

A Discursive Evaluation of Therapeutic Interactions Between Therapists and Service User During Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Sessions For Depression

The aim of the thesis is to discursively examine therapeutic interactions between service users and therapists during Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) sessions for depression. It is argued that the discursive psychological approach is the most appropriate to explore this aim. The thesis provides a unique perspective regarding the construction of depression because it is the first discursive research to look at how service users and therapists jointly construct depression, how identities are constructed, how CBT principles are constructed in interaction and how cognitive behavioural strategies are implemented and attended to during therapeutic interactions. In total four research questions are addressed in this thesis: (1) How is therapeutic dialogue in CBT constructed and what does it accomplish? (2) How is depression constructed in CBT sessions? (3) What do the constructions of depression accomplish within therapeutic interactions? and (4) How is identity constructed and attended to during therapeutic interactions for depression? Recordings of sixteen, one-­‐ hour CBT sessions were transcribed and analysed using discourse analysis. The analysis of how depression is jointly constructed by service users and therapists in CBT sessions demonstrates that during therapeutic interactions depression is oriented to and talked about but the terms “depressed” and “depression” are often absent from the dialogue. In the unusual cases where the terms are present, it is used by speakers to demonstrate a lack of control, manage accountability and emphasise distress and the seriousness of depression. The analysis shows that the terms “depressed” and “depression” are used differently and were found to have different implications regarding aetiology, prognosis, trajectory and identity. This thesis identified five key discursive strategies that are used to construct the self and identities in CBT sessions for depression. The thesis assessed how CBT strategies work in interaction, and identified the extent to which they ‘work’ by identifying the discursive features of effective and ineffective implementation of CBT strategies. It is shown that while the therapist does accomplish the therapeutic aim, this can be done without displays of understanding and empathy which is incongruent with the ethos of CBT. These findings highlighted inconsistencies in CBT and that therapists are potentially being assessed on how well they can do contradictory things. In addition to adding to the current literature, the thesis identified two new conceptual issues which contribute to wider discussions. The first is that the terms “depressed” and “depression” are largely absent in CBT for depression and the second is the varied meanings of depression. The thesis could aid clinical practice because it provides an insight into how therapeutic dialogue is constructed and what is accomplishes

The fascination of authority and the authority of fascination : rationalization and legal theory in Habermas revised

The requalification of Habermas’ discussions on political philosophy and legal theory after the publication of Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion (2005), and his most recent texts and debates on religion and the public sphere, suggest a revision of the Habermasian theory of rationalization as it was firstly presented in Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (1982), especially on what concerns the processes of dessacralization and the linguistification of religious authority. In search of contributing to this revision, this paper intends to focus on the problem of a supposedly “lost” aesthetic-expressive understanding of religious authority in Habermas’s theory of rationalization, which may have contributed to a theory of law in Faktizität und Geltung (1992) that does not give satisfactory account to the aesthetical-expressive character of the modern understanding of legal authority. A better understanding of this special character, however, may contribute not only to the avoidance of fundamentalisms and new attempts of “aesthetization of politics”, but also to a rational strengthening of the solidarity of the citizens of democratic constitutional states

The sociology of knowledge approach of discourse analysis in innovation research: evaluation of innovations in contemporary fine art

"The empirical question in this paper addresses problems of institutionalizing inventories of knowledge under conditions of uncertainty. As a focus, negotiations of discursive evaluation of the new or of inventions as innovations lead the empirical approach. This determines the empirical approach to understanding the process of legitimation, and makes patterns as well as variations intelligible. What characterizes this research project is an unconventional theoretically based setting by the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse analysis (from now on SKAD) (Keller 2008) that will be discussed in this paper. An extended comprehension of social innovation is tied to the field of contemporary art where the assembly of novelty is conventional and actors are mainly engaged with the selection and valuation of novelty. In the first section of the article I introduce my methodological and theoretical framework and relate them to questions of how to conduct empirical research on innovations. The case study explores the question how contemporary art is legitimized with reference to Howard S. Becker's theory of art worlds. It builds a bridge between a semantic level of discourse and the level of discursive practices. Section two introduces the field and the case of the study, and how the study is arranged. Section three describes the methods used, discussing the relevant aspects of the study for innovation research, and leads into the conclusion." (author's abstract

Control in childbirth. A material-discursive evaluation with primiparous women and their midwives

Current moves to give childbearing women more control over the birth process provided the impetus to explore the ways in which both midwives and their clients represented various aspects of control in childbirth. After an exploratory pilot study, two longitudinal studies were run in parallel. Both involved contact with primiparous women at 36 weeks antenatally and at 1 and 16 weeks postnatally. The first involved postal questionnaires sent to 126 women, and the second involved one-to-ne semi-structured interviews with 15 women. In both studies the woman's midwife was also contacted shortly after the birth. Taking a material-discursive approach, background, demographic and birth related issues which predispose to expectations and experiences of control or its lack were explored as was the relationship between control expectations, experiences and postnatal psychological wellbeing; and how midwives and their clients' assessments of the childbearing woman's control and satisfaction compare. Although the questionnaire study demonstrated a relationship between high external locus of control beliefs and low expectations of control in childbirth, the interview study highlighted the importance of other birth-related issues, such as concerns for safety, in women's control expectations. Although neither study found any effects of social class (as measured by educational achievement) on general expectations of control in childbirth, interview participants with fewer educational qualifications were likely to have more specific birth plans. There were strong relationships between antenatal and postnatal control scores, although the interviews represented control-related issues as complex. The midwives' and the childbearing women's assessments of the women's satisfaction with the birth correlated significantly, but in terms of the women's expectations and experiences of control the midwives appeared to be assessing related variables, such as mood, rather than verbal reports of control. No relationship was found between unfulfi1led expectations of control in childbirth and postnatal mood disturbance. High levels of control were associated with low levels of mood disturbance. Mood scores correlated across time, and although women's accounts of the birth became more coherent and detailed, they did not become more negative

Bridging diversity: a deliberative approach to organizing and application of usability guidelines

Designing interaction for the global society entails addressing multiple issues and challenges, ranging from the technical and economic to the legal and ethical. Usability guidelines recommend or prescribe courses of action and thus play a significant role in designing universally usable systems. Approaches to organizing and applying usability guidelines need to support processes of deliberation and tradeoff, especially when designing for bridging diversity in shared interaction contexts. This paper describes a deliberative approach to addressing some of these design challenges in a rational way. It argues for organizing guidelines by using concepts from Habermas’s discourse theory and Toulmin’s model of argumentation. Application of the approach is illustrated through a set of research-based Web design and usability guidelines. This paper contributes to the HCI literature by providing a theory-based approach to managing and deliberating on many usability guidelines and related usability issues

Theories in the Light of Contingency and Change: Possible Future Worlds and Well-Grounded Hope as a Supplement to Truth

Based on a critical account of the dominant concept of theory, the paper presents an alterna-tive, wider notion of theory. It is motivated by the need to cope with a contingent research subject and the assumption that IS should provide an orientation for managing the digital transfor-mation. Unlike neo-positivistic notions of theory, the proposed conception is not restricted to de-scriptions of the factual, but may be aimed at de-signing possible future worlds. Conceiving of possible future worlds requires overcoming the barriers created by language that constitutes our idea of the present world. The paper discusses the resulting methodological challenges and outlines how they might be addressed