Organizational Discourse: Domains, Debates, and Directions

Interest in the analysis of organizational discourse has expanded rapidly over the last two decades. In this article, we reflect critically on organizational discourse analysis as an approach to the study of organizations and management, highlighting both its strengths and areas of challenge. We begin with an explanation of the nature of organizational discourse analysis and outline some of the more significant contributions made to date. We then discuss existing classifications of approaches to the study of organizational discourse and suggest that they fall into two main categories: classifications by level of analysis and classifications by type of method. We argue that both of these approaches are inherently problematic and present an alternative way to understand the varieties of approaches to the analysis of organizational discourse based on within domain and across domain characterizations. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges that remain in the development of organizational discourse as an area of study and point to some of the opportunities for important and unique contributions to our understanding of organizations and management that this family of methods brings. © 2012 Copyright Academy of Management

Organizational context and the discursive construction of organizing

Organizational discourse has very little meaning outside its context. To understand any discourse's meaning, we must theorize about both the discourse's possibility and the circumstances of its constitution. Otherwise, we abstract text, sundering it from context. The present article asks what is context and what types of discourse structures and discourse strategies construct context? The author develops four distinct dimensions of context: when, where, as whom, and why people speak. To collaboratively construct meaning, an organization's members use several discursive means whereby a discourse from one context can be inserted, reframed, appropriated, and recursively placed into a discourse from another context-to achieve cross-contextual organizing of their accounts. Through such cross-contextual discursive work, members strive to balance these four (sometimes conflicting) contextual dimensions

The constitution of organzational legitimacy: a narrative perspective

This article recognizes a major dichotomy in the study of legitimacy construction at the organizational level. Scholars have either focused on agent-centred explanations of organizational legitimation, which favour its evaluative dimension, or on structural explanations, which highlight the isomorphic pressures imposed on individual organizations in order to become and remain intelligible to stakeholders. By applying a discursive methodology, we propose a new approach for the study of organizational legitimacy construction that incorporates both its evaluative and cognitive dimensions. Drawing on a structurational model of narrative recursivity, inspired by Greimas (1987), we argue that the construction of organizational legitimacy is dependent on both the persuasiveness of organizational storytelling and on the realization of a taken-for-granted narrative structure. We explicate the processes by which legitimacy is narratively constructed through empirical data associated with the founding of an HIV/AIDS organization