The paradox from within: research participants doing-being-observed

This article analyses a collection of cases from video recordings of naturally occurring interaction in institutional settings, where members display an orientation to the presence of the recording equipment. Such instances have been treated elsewhere as evidence of contamination of the ecology of the setting. The findings suggest that participants do remain aware of the recording activity, but that they publicly display when they are attending to it. Indeed, it is used as one resource to occasion identity work as competent, knowledgeable members of a particular institutional community, displaying to one another their understanding of the research aims, and their knowledge of how these kinds of data are constituted. Investigating how observational research is oriented to and constituted by the observed allows for a better understanding of what at that moment and in that setting is deemed recording-appropriate or -inappropriate conduct, and offers a more nuanced perspective on how data are co-constituted

Critical discourse studies: Where to from here?

This paper surveys critical discourse studies to the present and claims that, to avoid lapsing into comfortable orthodoxy in its mature phase, CDS needs to reassert its transformative radical teleology. The initial part of the paper reasserts the need for a strong social theory given the materialist and context-bound nature of discourse in daily activity. From this basis, the paper then characterizes the “new times” in which contemporary discourse occurs, and briefly surveys those issues typically analyzed, namely political economy, race and gender, and critical literacy. By considering people's ordinary lives, the paper then suggests that subject and agency, and calculative technologies of management deserve, and new modalities need, more research. Transdisciplinarity is encouraged, particularly with social psychology and critical management studies

Swimming against the stream: investigating psychosocial flows through mindful awareness

In this paper, we extend psychosocial research methodology by integrating a breaching experiment, influenced by ethnomethodological sociology, with aspects of mindfulness practice, influenced by Buddhist traditions. We offer an empirical investigation of what happens when researcher-participants subtly ‘swim against the stream’ of normative public social conduct in a capital city setting. Our qualitative analysis explores a single case from a corpus of 172 first-person retrospective accounts of standing still and ‘doing nothing’ in a busy, public place. We investigate the qualitative aspects of how one researcher-participant arguably adopted a mindful, ‘beginner’s mind’ orientation toward the flow of psychosocial consciousness. We empirically investigate this psychosocial orientation of mindfulness by integrating Wetherell’s concept of affective-discursive practice with James’ stream of consciousness. Mindfulness offers a specific, embodied reorientation toward psychosocial flows. We discuss the methodological implications and limitations of this reorientation for psychosocial research

Legitimating a Chinese takeover of an Australian iconic firm: revisiting models of media discourse of legitimacy

Although increasing research attention has been given to the discourse of legitimacy in assisting mergers and acquisitions in Scandinavian countries, scarce research has been done on this topic in different geopolitical contexts. This study therefore aims to investigate the discursive struggle of delegitimizing a Chinese state-owned company investment in the Australian mining sector. We used a historical critical approach to further develop the theoretical and empirical capacity for analysing legitimacy discourses. Specifically, we have extended the research on the discourse of legitimacy research in three aspects. First, we have identified political-ideological discourse as a prominent discourse in addition to the commonly acknowledged rationalistic and nationalistic discourse. Second, we have found that the use of legitimation strategies is purposive and deliberate. Moralization strategy, in particular, was extensively used in a range of discourses (rationalistic, nationalistic and political-ideological) to delegitimize the proposed merger as not being aligned with the national interest. As a result, the legitimacy discourse failed and the deal collapsed