discursive essay on identity

Discourse and Identity Construction

• First Online: 01 January 2011

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• Michael Bamberg 4 ,
• Anna De Fina 5 &
• Deborah Schiffrin 6  

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We describe and discuss discursive approaches emerging over the last 50 years that in one way or another have contributed to identity studies. Approaching identities as constructed in and through discourse, we start by differentiating between two competing views of construction: one that moves progressively from existing “capital-D” social discourses to the domain of identity and sense of self and the other working its way up from “small-d” discursive practices to identities and sense of self as emerging in interaction. We take this tension as our point of departure for a discussion of different theoretical and analytical lenses, focusing on how they have emerged as productive tools for theorizing the construction of identity and for doing empirical work. Three dimensions of identity construction are distinguished and highlighted as dilemmatic but deserving prominence in the discursive construction of identity: (a) the navigation of agency in terms of a person-to-world versus a world-to-person directionality; (b) the differentiation between self and other as a way to navigate between uniqueness and a communal sense of belonging and being the same as others; and (c) the navigation of sameness and change across one’s biography or parts thereof. The navigation of these three identity dilemmas is exemplified in the analysis of a stretch of conversational data, in which we bring together different analytic lenses (such as narrative, performative, conversation analytic, and positioning analysis), before concluding this chapter with a brief discussion of some of the merits and potential shortcomings of discursive approaches to identity construction.

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Department of Psychology, Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA

Michael Bamberg

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Bamberg, M., De Fina, A., Schiffrin, D. (2011). Discourse and Identity Construction. In: Schwartz, S., Luyckx, K., Vignoles, V. (eds) Handbook of Identity Theory and Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7988-9_8

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9 Discourse, Communication, and Identity

Timothy Kuhn is a Professor at the Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder.

Jayne Simpson is a Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder.

• Published: 05 February 2020
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Across theories of identity and subjectivity, discourse and communication are central, constitutive elements. This chapter clarifies conceptions of these notions and portrays them as separate yet connected. It then reviews four broad lines of theorizing identity in which discourse and communication are prominent: Social Identity Theory (SIT), narrative theorizing, critical/poststructural approaches, and emerging relational ontologies. In addition to drawing out contrasting conceptions of agency marking the four perspectives, the chapter shows how discourse and communication are central to the existence, persistence, and transformation of identities. To do so, the chapter employs illustrations from sports fandom, branding, and peer bullying. The key insight of the chapter is that, across these four traditions, discourse and communication are increasingly understood not as representational, but as constitutive: identities do not draw upon discourse and communication to express or represent themselves, but instead are generated, sustained, and altered exclusively in and through discursive and communicative practices.

Introduction

Accompanying social theory’s turn to language in the early decades of the twentieth century was an interrogation of dominant models of the person. Pragmatists, in response to seventeenth-century philosophers who depicted the self 1 as a cognitive construct transcending experiences (Taylor, 1989 ), overhauled our conceptions of personhood by suggesting that theorizing personhood ought to address how selves experience everyday life. In so doing, they relocated the source of the self from inside (cognition) to outside (the social surround) and, thus, portrayed the experiencing subject as irredeemably bound up in communication processes (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000 ). Mead ( 1934 : 233) represents this stance well: ‘the individual reaches his [ sic ] self only through a process of communication with others, only through the elaboration of social processes by means of significant communication’. Pragmatist thinking, therefore, argued for the primacy of communication and discourse in the emergence and ongoing accomplishment of the self; a transcendent consciousness took a back seat.

This chapter explores the legacy of this ontological shift for contemporary conceptions of personal identity (see also Alvesson, 2010 ; Brown, 2017 ; Kenny et al., 2011 ). We argue that scholars who have inherited a pragmatist conception of the centrality of discourse and communication nevertheless operate from contrasting definitions of these notions, which lead their claims about identity and its significance in organizing in rather different directions. To review these streams of thought, our discussion considers Social Identity Theory (SIT), narrative theorizing, critical and poststructuralist thought, and relational ontologies. Before engaging with these literatures, however, we describe and differentiate ‘discourse’ and ‘communication’, the twin notions upon which our review is based.

Conceptualizing Discourse and Communication

The aforementioned attention to discourse and communication has occasioned great interest in the power of these concepts, but—perhaps unsurprisingly—also generated a surfeit of conceptualizations. As Kuhn and Putnam ( 2014 ) note, these notions—like those guiding any vibrant field—have no single canonical definition; instead, they are multiple, contested, and shifting. In other words, there is no simple and stable answer to what discourse and communication ‘are’: it is important to review these, however, to provide some basic claims with which the chapter’s presentation of theories of personal identity can engage.

In organization studies, discourse is typically understood in terms of language, talk, and text. Some consider discourse to be a verbal structure, some see it as action and interaction in society akin to conversation (‘language in use’), some render it as cognition, and others define it as the social context surrounding action. These distinctions are seen in Alvesson and Kärreman ( 2000 ), who build on Gee’s ( 1999 ) division of the notion into lowercase ( d iscourse) and uppercase ( D iscourse), to portray four levels of discourse analysis in organization studies: (a) a micro- d iscourse approach, which examines how language is used in specific localized practices; (b) a meso- d iscourse approach (later called text-focused studies), where analysts seek broader patterns of talk and text across related contexts and activities; (c) a grand D iscourse approach, where the aim is to understand how sets of discourses produce organizational reality, as in studies of organizational culture or corporate colonization of the lifeworld; and (d) a mega- D iscourse approach, where the goal is to uncover institutionalized or ideological frames like those associated with globalization, neoliberalism, enterprise, or managerialism. Taking these together, discourse can be understood as manifest in texts and linguistic tokens that are formed and deployed interactively, cognitively, or as background context in the conduct of organizing.

Recently, several authors have expressed misgivings about d/D distinctions. Some hold that the framework reinforces belief in the ontological reality of ‘levels’ of analysis, an assumption that not only reproduces disciplinary hierarchies, but which also violates the disruption of subject/object divisions central to the linguistic turn (Kuhn et al., 2017 ; Mumby, 2011 ). Others, like Phillips and Oswick ( 2012 ), argue for the need to develop multi-level discourse analysis, which would connect local practices with broader discursive formations—where analyses would move beyond simply naming forces that appear to be driving local texts. Criticisms such as these indicate that the d/D classification may have outlived its usefulness; nevertheless, we continue to draw on it here because it has characterized a good deal of scholarship on identity over the past two decades.

Communication

If the notion of discourse is difficult to pin down, communication is yet more slippery, both because of its disciplinary diversity and the ubiquity of the notion across fields. Seeking to reduce the complexity, Putnam and colleagues (Putnam et al., 1996 ; Putnam and Boys, 2006 ) present four dominant models of communication: (a) as media or channels for transmitting information; (b) messages that connect individuals into networks, (c) the jointly produced sequences of messages that comprise a practice, including how they unfold over time and space; and (d) the construction of meanings through negotiation and social interaction. Although the conceptions of communication in common parlance tend to emphasize the first two senses of the term, the lion’s share of thinking in the academic field of communication studies falls in the latter two categories.

Contemporary thinking, as portrayed by (c) and (d), starts by arguing strongly against renderings of communication as epiphenomenal, as a mere surface manifestation of deeper psychological or sociological forces. Communication is understood as a causal and generative process on its own, one that can be neither reduced to structural mechanisms nor seen as occurring only within organizational ‘containers’. Instead, communication is portrayed as ‘ the ongoing, dynamic, interactive process of manipulating symbols toward the creation, maintenance, destruction, and/or transformation of meanings, which are axial—not peripheral—to organizational existence and organizing phenomena’ (Ashcraft et al., 2009 : 22; emphasis in original). Such a definition aligns with ontological commitments that understand organizations and persons as ongoing processes of meaning creation.

Ashcraft et al. ( 2009 ) offered their definition as an ‘elastic consensus’ that, at a basic level, unites organizational communication scholars. They then pursued the conception further, engaging with theorizing that sees communication as exceeding the realm of the symbolic/ideational and, thus, to implicate bodies, sites, and artefacts (as categories of what is often taken to be the material domain). They reframed communication as ‘the ongoing, situated, and embodied process whereby human and non-human agencies interpenetrate ideation and materiality toward realities that are tangible and axial to organizational existence and organizing phenomena’ (Ashcraft et al., 2009 : 26). Though this is a far less elegant definition, it shows how current visions of communication seek to both transcend taken-for-granted ontological distinctions between the social and material and to embrace claims of constitutive force, a move manifest explicitly in the relational ontologies described below.

Distinguishing Discourse from Communication

Based on the preceding discussion, one might reasonably ask whether there are significant differences separating ‘discourse’ and ‘communication’. Indeed, many scholars render these notions equivalent and interchangeable. Jian et al. ( 2008 ), however, offer a useful distinction, construing discourse as one part of more encompassing communication processes. For them, discourse is a noun deployed in the action of the verb communication. Ashcraft’s ( 2007 : 11) study of occupational identity illustrates this stance well: it envisions discourse ‘as a (semi-)coherent system of representation that crafts a context for language use’, whereas communication is ‘the basic human activity of struggling over discursive possibilities amid the material circumstances of everyday life’. Locating a history of discursive gender coding associated with the occupational identity of commercial pilots, Ashcraft showed how communicative practices utilize that discursive coding to shape the meaning(s) of pilot work (including making particular logical and emotional responses more or less permissible), frame the captain as a mythic hero, and diminish belief in the constructed character of pilot identity. This approach, then, renders d/Discourse not as interaction, but as a set of resources available for appropriation in the meaning-making process of communication. In the next section, we explore how this vision of the discourse–communication relationship appears in key theories of identity.

Discourse and Communication in Theories of Identity

Social identity theory.

Since its inception in the 1970s and 1980s, SIT has become a dominant approach to conceptualizing identity and identification in organization studies (Ashforth and Mael, 1989 ; Brown, 2017 ). Beginning with Tajfel and Turner’s ( 1979 ) efforts to understand intergroup relations and conflict, SIT (and its conceptual extension, Self-Categorization Theory) has become an established way to explain how individuals incorporate group characteristics into their self-conceptions and cognitive processes.

Social identity is a representation of how people define themselves in relation to the various groups with which they are affiliated. Identity , in SIT, is ‘an individual’s knowledge that he [ sic ] belongs to certain social groups, together with some emotion and value significance to him of this group membership’ (Tajfel, 1972 : 292). As individuals connect themselves with particular groups, they incorporate assumed values, characteristics, and behaviours associated with that group into their own sense of self. This is a process of identification , and for SIT it explains both the construction of the person’s social identity and the shaping of the characteristics of a group. Identification begins with social categorizations, the grouping of persons by socially relevant attributes; people recognize similarities between one another in the groupings that result. These groups induce social comparisons, where the formation of differences across groups—as well as the rejection of particular groups—emerge. Importantly, SIT assumes that people are motivated to secure self-esteem through their group memberships. That drive leads them to depersonalize out-groups as they portray their in-group as superior; it also works to counteract group and organizational change because people seek stable sources of the self (Jenkins, 1996 ).

As Brown ( 2017 ) notes, however, there are competing conceptions of identification in SIT theorizing. Some restrict the notion to the cognitive domain, where an individual’s perception of belonging to a group, a sense of unity, is central (Ashforth and Mael, 1989 ; Pratt, 1998 ). Others see the connection with a collective as a foundation upon which the individual enacts the values, goals, knowledge, and prototypical member profile as his or her own (Oakes et al., 1994 ). These more behaviourally focused definitions portray strongly identified individuals as desiring ‘to choose the alternative that best promotes the perceived interests of that organization’ (Tompkins and Cheney, 1985 : 194). In these formulations, however, identification can be difficult to distinguish from notions like commitment and loyalty (Pratt, 1998 ), leading Scott et al. ( 1998 : 303) to extend SIT thinking beyond the cognitive realm. Scott et al. ( 1998 ) frame identification as communicative because it occurs in the interactions and behaviours that illustrate one’s attachment to a collective; identity, in turn, becomes ‘a set of rules and resources that function as an anchor for who we are’. Echoing the distinction between discourse and communication introduced above, what they call the ‘identification process’ is the ongoing enactment of the relationship between identity (as structure, or noun) and identification (as action, or verb).

Others have argued that regarding identification only as attachment over-simplifies actors’ relationships with groups and organizations. For instance, disidentification is a separation of the self from the perceived organizational identity, often based on a rejection of the organization’s values and a desire to maintain the aforementioned self-esteem by creating distance (Elsbach and Bhattacharya, 2001 ). Schizo-identification occurs when actors split their identities to affiliate with some elements of the collective while rejecting others (Gutierrez et al., 2010 ). Communication scholars have noted that people can have multiple targets of identification within and beyond a given organization, and, responding to concerns that SIT’s socio-cognitive focus produces a static version of the self (see Larson and Gill, 2017 ), show how those identifications shift in response to organizational changes (Kuhn and Nelson, 2002 ; Scott, 1997 ). A key question for SIT is whether identification should be understood as cognitive or communicative—whether it occurs within the person or in interactive processes. Discerning the ‘location’ of identification is important in that it guides attention to outcomes such as decision-making (Tompkins and Cheney, 1983 ), conflict (Glynn, 2000 ), and job performance (Carmeli et al., 2007 ).

One potent illustration of SIT’s claims can be seen in research on sports and fandom. Fandom is a clear-cut site of intergroup interaction, characterized by rivalries between spectator groups; between coaches, athletes, and management; between passionate fans, supporters, and those who are indifferent. It is no surprise that high levels of identification can produce ethically dubious actions like aggression and violence, often based on the categorization-based depersonalization that displays and creates in-group unity (Toder-Alon et al., 2019 ). At the same time, however, sports can create valuable bonds between fans, and this can even occur within other organizations, such as when employees’ process last weekend’s game at the proverbial water cooler (Swanson and Kent, 2015 ). Importantly, a heightened sense of social identification produces outcomes of value to a team’s management: spectators (fans) develop emotional ties to teams and athletes because those fans perceive a shared social identity, and ‘spectators high in team identification are more likely to attend games, pay more for tickets, spend more money on merchandise, and stay loyal to the team during periods of poor performance’ (Mehus and Kolstad, 2011 : 833). Fans seek discursive resources, such as those found in broadcasts and social media, to provide them information to support their attachments (as well as their oppositions); they also engage in communicative practices that augment their identifications, such as including conversations about the team, rituals (e.g. songs sung collectively at matches), conflicts with fans of other teams, and shared expressions of anger at officials (Giles and Stohl, 2017 ).

SIT provides a framework for examining the discourse centred on the creation and maintaining of identities within and between organizations through identification (see Table 9.1 ). Through the creation of a sense of identity generated by identifying with (or against) in- and out-groups, scholars can further examine the discursive and communicative influences on social identities (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006 ). There is, accordingly, a relatively strong sense of agency in SIT. By this we do not mean that individuals’ intentionality and choice-making capacity is either unconstrained or held ontologically prior to group influence, nor that actors are fully knowledgeable about the antecedents and consequences of their identifications, nor that strong attachments are controllable by the person. Instead, SIT portrays individuals as engaging with, responding to, and often rejecting the social categories that discursively appeal for their identification (Alvesson, 2010 ; Scott et al., 1998 ). Moreover, individuals evaluate the identifications that comprise their identities, often with an eye to reducing uncertainty in the self-concept and to creating distance between their own self-concept and the depersonalized prototype of group membership, especially if they seek positions of leadership (Hogg and Reid, 2006 ). In other words, they do not merely inhabit group stereotypes, but often practice what van Veelen et al. ( 2016 ) call self-anchoring : cognitively projecting a vision of the personal self onto the in-group. Across these, neither Discourse nor communication are understood as being the primary drivers of social identity and identification processes (though they are clearly important); rather, SIT’s social-psychological foundations position agents’ cognition as the primary device driving navigation through Discourses.

Narrative Theory

Narratives, ongoing processes of creating, using, and arranging symbols to generate accounts for events, organize our experiences (Somers, 1994 ). Narrative approaches to identity assume humans are predisposed, through consistent social conditioning, to organize thoughts and experiences in a storied form—we are homo narrans . Narratives of the self, as accounts of the self that we tell to others (as well as to ourselves), are both expressive and constitutive of identity. In his touchstone work, Giddens ( 1991 : 54) theorizes that ‘a person’s identity…is to be found…in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going ’. Narratives integrate a person’s reconstructed past, perceived present, and imagined future, often taking the form of what we could recognize as a story, with origins, episodes, and a trajectory. The creation and maintenance of these narratives are motivated, says Giddens, by a search for ontological security : a sense of consistency and orderliness, produced in part when actors develop relatively coherent narratives (i.e. those exhibiting continuity over time and across situations). The narratives we construct, in other words, aid the reconciliation of the multiplicity of identity alternatives. For instance, Bresnen et al. (2019) found that managers in healthcare contexts who developed an overarching narrative of the self as a hybrid actor were able to reconcile competing discourses of identity; this narrative was especially useful in organizations characterized by permeable boundaries between occupational groups.

For narrative thinkers, discourse and communication are central concerns. Discourse, first, has a dual manifestation. On the one hand, the life scripts, lifestyle choices, and genres of story plots from which individuals craft identity narratives can be understood as drawn from encompassing Discourses that make particular possibilities for narrative construction (im)possible (Ricoeur, 1991 ). On the other hand, those narratives that actors live out are also understood as discourses that can be externalized from any given situation and, separated this way, are eligible for authoring, reproduction, and alteration. Kuhn’s ( 2006 ) conception of discursive resources can be a useful illustration of this model of discourse. Drawing on Bourdieu, Kuhn sees discursive resources as concepts, tropes, expressions, or other linguistic devices, appropriated from situated practice, which actors employ in accounting for past and/or future activity. Discursive resources are thus a vehicle to understand how the shaping of identity narratives can occur, allowing analysts to locate intersections between micro- and macro-discourses.

Second, communication is a moment of ongoing narrative (re)negotiation: the process by which personal narratives are tested, where audiences confirm or repudiate their authenticity (McAdams et al., 2001 ). Another way of saying this is to note that communication is where identity work occurs. In contrast to acts of identification as conceived by SIT, the notion of identity work indexes ‘people being engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions that are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003 : 1165). Identity work, then, refers to the ways narratives get (re)formed and managed in social practice. By way of example, Ibarra and Barbulescu ( 2010 ) portray narratives as a way to understand employees’ identities during transitions like entries, exits, promotions, or job loss. Such changes require identity work on the part of the employee, and identifying the sorts of narratives actors deploy during career transitions can shed light on how they retain ontological security in situations that might otherwise foster anxiety.

If individuals create a sense of coherence between life experiences by organizing them as stories, it should be no surprise that they do the same as they engage in organizational practices to make their work lives meaningful. Wieland ( 2010 : 511), in a study of a Swedish branch of a large multinational corporation, found that identity work responded to two ideal selves —culturally situated and discursively constructed expectations for whom one should be—that simultaneously encouraged workers to devote themselves to organizational performance and to well-being. Though much of the identity literature emphasizes individuals’ drive for narrative coherence, Wieland argued that her participants lived with the inconsistent and contradictory demands of these ideal selves; they kept these discursive resources available so they could produce personal well-being in the face of work-oriented tensions.

A second illustration is Brown and Coupland’s ( 2015 ) analysis of how athletes on a professional rugby team used what they found to be threats to their (masculine) identities to create and recreate their self-narratives. Identity threats, ‘any discursively constituted thought or feeling that challenges one of an individual or group’s preferred identity narratives’ (2015: 1318), were discourses upon which rugby players drew in navigating their present and future within their sport. The players created narratives that, by dint of ‘focus, hard work, self-reliance, toughness and professionalism’ (2015: 1330), presented them as persevering, overcoming multiple threats in an epic quest to play top-tier rugby. Their narratives intersected with Discourses of masculinity, and also with the Discourses about the hazards of their work: the athletes had only a short window to achieve their dreams by displaying their talent. Brown and Coupland show that these players’ narratives, as well as the identity work players accomplished through them, were constructed, maintained, and reproduced through available discourses circulating in practices of organizing.

Narrative approaches have grown significantly in recent years because they provide a valuable way to apprehend lived experiences and, in particular, for tracing how individuals pursue identity work as a response to identity threats. Moreover, the discursive resources and communicative practices associated with formal organizations are excellent sites to examine the processes of narrative (re)construction; those sites encourage analysts to recognize the multiplicity of forces that enable and constrain individuals’ agency in developing coherent and compelling narratives.

Critical and Poststructural Theory

One of the key problems of the preceding schools of thought is that their version of the social world tends to be relatively restricted. They evince limited interest in addressing relations of power embedded in (macro-level) Discursive factors, as well as the relationships between d/Discourse and everyday communication (du Gay, 1996 ). Several theorists, however, have presented models for analysing the ‘Uppercase D’ discourses such as globalization, neoliberalism, enterprise, and managerialism; in this section, we combine these under the label ‘critical and poststructural’ theorizing. There are several significant differences between critical and poststructural approaches, but they are united in asking questions about how persons become enrolled in the exercise of social and organizational power.

Louis Althusser ( 1971 ) foregrounded ideology as a discursive force that operates through institutions, producing particular sorts of subjects who become willing contributors to the reproduction of capitalism. Stuart Hall ( 1996 : 6) summarizes this stance, highlighting power as productive of the person: ‘“Identity” refers to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses which attempt to “interpellate”, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be “spoken”.’ In Hall’s thinking, identities are points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us. For Althusser and Hall, then, it is impossible to exist outside ideology, and a capitalist ideology positions us as free subjects who knowingly accept our subjection.

As Hall noted, identities are outcomes of attachment to subject positions; as a result, critical and poststructural approaches tend to favour the term subjectivity over identity to signal that the self is simultaneously subject to discourses of personhood and, simultaneously, is positioned as the subject of the experiences in which it is implicated. The term ‘identity’ fails to capture the sense of social and cultural entanglement that ‘subject’ implies: the way our immediate daily life is always already caught up in complex political and social concerns found in Discourses (Mansfield, 2000 ).

The key inheritor of the Althusserian position was his former student, Michel Foucault. Foucault ( 1970 , 1982 ) theorized that historically specific discursive formations created subjectivity. Once the person is constructed as the primary source of experience and responsibility, subjects can be classified and regulated—governed—within particular regimes of knowledge and power. Yet power, for Foucault, does not arise from a centre of the discursive formation, as a sovereign rules over subjects; it is ‘capillary’ in the sense of being distributed across the innumerable micro-practices through which all actors come to constitute one another’s (and their own) subjectivities. Foucault’s argument, then, is not that a monolithic mega-Discourse determines subjectivity, but that communication practices, informed by specific discursive formations, discipline subjects’ bodies and minds (Deetz, 1998 ).

A related movement of scholars interested in the production of subjects through linguistic systems of knowledge and power is captured under the label poststructuralism . Though there is diversity across poststructuralists, this movement began as a reaction to structuralism’s assertion that Discourses and the binary oppositions coded into them determine social action. Poststructuralists regard subjects as positioned not by a single dominant discursive formation, but by many simultaneously. Consequently, a single, independent, and coherent self becomes impossible when acknowledging the conflicting pulls of contrasting Discursively-shaped subject positions (e.g. gender, occupation, age, class). Poststructuralists thus portray subjectivity as a process, one that sees both discourse and the experience of communication as fragmented, multifaceted, and polysemic (du Gay, 2007 ). A poststructural stance on language and experience implies an ever-present excess of meanings, characterized by antagonisms and ruptures that can open up either a generative ‘space of action’ (Holmer Nadesan, 1996 ) or, depending on the connections across available discursive resources, constrain possibilities for self-formation (Costas and Fleming, 2009 ; Kuhn, 2009 ). Normatively, poststructuralists thus urge subjects to embrace (rather than suppress) fluidity and multiplicity in their experience of working and organizing (Holmer Nadesan and Trethewey, 2000 ).

Critical and poststructuralist thinking thus shares an interest in showing how subjectivities are created by a variety of discursive forces and involvement in an array of communicative practices. One important upshot of this position is a recognition that if d/Discourse and communication powerfully shape experience, subjectivity cannot be controlled by the person. Yet our social worlds foster belief in persons’ skills and careers as achievements of autonomous, self-directed selves. The disconnect between the subjectifying influence of discourse and communication on the one hand, and a belief in the self as strongly ‘in control’ on the other, exist in dialectical fashion, creating a sense of insecurity or anxiety (e.g. Collinson, 2003). Accordingly, as individuals are subject to disciplinary regimes, they simultaneously ‘engage with, resist, accommodate, reproduce, and transform the interpretive possibilities and meaning systems that constitute daily organizational life’ (Mumby, 2005 : 22).

One line of critical/poststructural scholarship on subjectivity analyses the power of branding. Certainly, organizations have branded products for decades, but analysts increasingly recognize that the logic of branding extends to individuals as well as firms (Vásquez et al., 2013 ). Late capitalism is fully saturated by branding, making it a part of our Discursive worlds and everyday communicative practices (Arvidsson and Peiterson, 2013 ; Mumby, 2016 ). Critical and poststructural scholarship shows how subjectivities are the (un)intended targets of firms’ branding activity. For instance, Land and Taylor’s ( 2010 ) study of a clothing company that built an image of itself as small merchant of ‘activewear’ noted that the company’s externally focused messages capitalized on the lives of its workers. Its marketing materials included humorous stories about employees skipping work to kayak and t-shirt slogans developed to reflect workers’ ‘authenticity’ (‘tattoos have to be bought; scars have to be earned’). Employees’ lives outside of work were claimed in the organization’s interest; those employees, however, saw this not as an unjustified expropriation of their private selves, but as a desirable demonstration of the brand. Subjectivity was, in other words, intimately branded.

Critical/poststructural analyses of subjectivity formation extend beyond the traditional workplace to the ‘social factory’, where the production of the brand is an accomplishment of consumers, users, and observers, as well as employees (Gill and Pratt 2008 ). Brand management, in other words, requires sophisticated conceptions of discourse and communication as sites of meaning generation. Here, branding is not simply about the muscular power of a Discourse over (or upon) workers, but is about the array of communicative practices that capitalize on the very subjectivities those Discourses generate (Banet-Weiser, 2012 ). These examples show that identities are sites where varied interests battle to inscribe individuals in ways that serve entrenched interests (see Table 9.1 ), but critical/poststructural scholars insist that individuals retain the agency to resist efforts at subjectification, to exploit Discursive overdetermination, and engage in identity work. Discourses, from this stance, are tools and contextual configurations that guide the unfolding practices of communication, making identity (or subjectivity) itself a nexus at which power-oriented struggles over meanings intersect.

Relational Ontologies

A recent entry in the discourse and communication literature alters dramatically the conception of personal identity (but, because this perspective is still in its intellectual infancy, empirical work is relatively meagre). Building on the aforementioned linguistic turn, two contemporary movements—the practice (Schatzki et al., 2001 ) and ontological turns (Coole and Frost, 2010 )—have created interest in reframing organizational phenomena as ongoing socio-material accomplishments. Taken together, these movements comprise relational ontologies 2 (or relationality , along with its terminological cousin, new materialisms ). As overviews that detail their tenets are available elsewhere (e.g. Fox and Alldred, 2017 ; Kuhn et al., 2017 ; Orlikowski and Scott, 2008 ), this section only skims the surface.

An abstraction from several bodies of thought, including actor-network theory, affect theory, performativity, agential realism, and socio-materiality, relational ontologies argue that the lessons of the linguistic turn have too often been distorted, taken to mean that the material elements of the social and organizational worlds are relevant only to the extent that actors speak them into existence. In response, relationality begins by reframing the ‘things’ of our analyses as always multiple and in process, such that the elements we conceptualize as coherent entities with relatively clear boundaries— substances —are understood as nothing more (nor less) than the relations that produce them (Emirbayer, 1997 ). In other words, the a priori separation of subject and object is no longer presumed; if a separation exists, it must be performed into existence. Accordingly, the unit of analysis shifts from substances (e.g. individuals, identifications, or narratives) to practices . 3 The important question for analysts is to ascertain what forces, which extend agency beyond merely human capacities (Bennett, 2010 ), come to matter —what makes a difference, and how—in the conduct of a given practice.

Relationality’s conception of agency thus differs markedly from the preceding perspectives. Agency is no longer restricted to humans—but, to correct a common misconception, it is likewise not ‘granted’ to non-human things either. Instead, agency is hybrid and distributed. If ‘things’ are relational accomplishments, so is agency: humans never act apart from a wealth of other elements, and our intentions, desires, and passions depend on sites, technologies, representations, hormones, and the like to become significant (i.e. to matter ).

What, then, does a relational ontology have to say about identity? Given the decentring associated with the rejection of individuals as units of analysis and the hybridization of agency, the understanding of identity shifts in three ways. First, relationality situates identity squarely within practice. Regarding identity as manifest in practices has been key to several literatures in organization studies but, under relationality, there can no longer be an assumption that persons and their identities are independent elements that participate in organizing. The image is not one of several pre-existing components coming together to produce a practice; instead, the practice is that which generates the participants through what Barad ( 2007 ) calls agential cuts . Analysts can only say identity is relevant in a given practice when it is made to matter in practice—when that practice centres identity as a concern. Analysts must therefore defer their conceptualization of identity until (and if) the notion emerges as a figure. An example of this is in Paring et al.’s ( 2017 ) ethnography of a project management team. Rather than assuming that (human) members possessed identities, they examined how the identity of ‘internal consultant’ was the outcome of management’s introduction of a technology into ongoing practices, when it became inserted into work routines in a way that ‘afford[ed] the performativity of the “internal consultant” identity, that is, the constitution of this social identity through the entwinement of discourses and public and repetitive sets of actions and behaviours’ (2017: 845). Paring et al.’s study illustrates the ways relationality studies make identity a question rather than the font of action.

Second, a relational ontology recognizes that discourse, human capacities, and non-human elements are always simultaneously enacted and enacting forces. But their productivity, as indicated above, is always rendered as a hybrid, an agglomeration of agencies (forces) that hang together as a result of the practice in question (Cooren, 2018 ). For instance, Højgaard and Søndergaard’s ( 2011 : 350) discussion of peer bullying in schools demonstrated both enacted and enacting forces by showing how the practice brought together several forms of agency:

Peer bullying enacts subjects, gendered ethnicities, as well as school walls and management technologies in particular ways.…subjectivities and their components as well as materialities and their components may enact and be enacted in many different, moving, and shifting ways.

Acknowledging the presence of multiple interrelated forces, a key task in research is to investigate how the configuration enacts identity as a key contributor to a given practice.

Third, for analysts to grasp the modes by which identities matter in practice, looking to what individuals believe and how they report their intentions is of limited utility. Instead, as in literature on symbolic legacies (Hunter, 2008 ), identities are carried forward through time and space by the myriad components of a practice (i.e. not simply individuals). For example, writing about young men’s sexual identities, Fox and Alldred ( 2017 : 108) draw attention to the many forces amassed in an assemblage : ‘body and sexuality capacities are specified by myriad affects in the sexuality-assemblage deriving variously from physiology, from social interactions with peers or sexual partners, with institutions such as schools or clubs, and by things such as cars, condoms, and alcohol’. Identity is incorporated in, and transported by, multiple elements of that assemblage—not merely by an individual’s cognitions or narratives.

Returning to our overriding interest in discourse and communication, relationality thus positions identity as a force participating in (organizing) practices. Communication is a name for the practice that brings the assemblage of forces together; it is the linking and connecting accomplished in meaning-making activity that accomplishes a given practice. Discourse, in turn, is one among many elements that might engage in signification (and thus become part of hybrid agency) by establishing frames for, or representations of, a given practice, as in Højgaard and Søndergaard’s ( 2011 ) aforementioned consideration of how Discourses of gender and ethnicity were bound up with several other elements in the conduct of peer bullying (see Table 9.1 ). As a relatively new participant in efforts to theorize identity, relationality cuts against the grain of the preceding schools of thought, but enables us to ask novel questions about the import of identity in organizing.

Conclusions

Following the trail blazed by the pragmatists, the linguistic turn (along with the associated practice and ontological turns) led scholars in several fields to understand discourse and communication as fundamental to organizing. These intellectual movements reframed identities as inherently made by the social practices in which they are implicated. In this chapter, we overviewed four approaches to understanding the relationships between discourse, communication, and identity that build on that theme: SIT, narrative, critical/poststructuralist, and relationality. Across these, we showed that discourse and communication are malleable categories that permit multiple conceptualizations and underwrite models of identity that move in very different directions. This chapter is an attempt to capture this diversity in foundations and trajectories.

Across the four broad perspectives, the contribution of discourse and communication scholarship is constitutive rather than representational . By this we mean that scholars increasingly understand that personal identities do not simply use discourse and communication to express (i.e. represent) pre-existing interiorities; instead, discourse and communication are axial to the very existence, persistence, and metamorphosis of identities.

Recognition of discourse and communication’s centrality in the production of identities produces an assortment of research questions that have driven the fruitful lines of inquiry reviewed above. These questions concern how groups foster identifications among members, how people manage the multiple identifications that comprise their identities, how individuals respond to threats to their self-narratives, how (managerial) efforts to control identities engender resistance, and how identities are the contingent and mutable outcomes of a practice’s assemblage of interconnected elements. Tracing theories of identity and organizing, as we have done in this chapter, also suggests future developments: because discourse and communication are persistent concerns of philosophers, social theorists, and social scientists, and because discourse and communication are responsive to constant social and technological changes, theories are unrelentingly malleable. It should be no surprise, then, that visions of identity and subjectivity will be responsively mutable as well.

Self, in this early philosophical thought, was a conception of the person as a subject of consciousness (Taylor, 1989 ). This chapter, however, is interested in (personal) identity, an answer to the ‘who am I’ question, which involves qualities and characteristics that an individual understands as defining the person’s position in, and trajectory through, the social world.

We use the plural ontologies here to recognize the multiplicity of perspectives that fall under this broad banner; we also highlight the ontological turn involved here because the conception of relationality we develop departs strongly from routine uses of ‘relational’ in organization studies, where attention to relationships between persons is said to be key to making the phenomenon of interest operate well, as is seen in research on relational leadership.

One upshot of this is that what we take to be discursive and material elements are fully indivisible until they are made to appear detached in and through specific practices. In relationality, the notion of distinct symbolic and material domains shrivels, even if they are said to be ‘braided’ or ‘intertwined’, because both metaphors retain the notion that these components are distinct. Instead, relationality theorists see the discursive and material as two sides of the same coin.

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Discourse and Identity

• Bethan Benwell and Elizabeth Stokoe
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Copyright year: 2006
• Audience: College/higher education;
• Main content: 328
• Keywords: Language & Linguistics
• Published: March 15, 2006
• ISBN: 9780748626533

Introduction

Research on language and identity has experienced an unprecedented growth in the last ten years. The time when scholars in the field needed to advocate for the centrality of language in the study of identity (see for example, Benveniste 1971 in linguistics or Bruner 1990 in social psychology) seems far away indeed. Research in fields as diverse as anthropology, linguistics, psychology, sociology, history, literature, gender studies, and social theory, among others, has now firmly established the fundamental role of linguistic processes and strategies in the creation, negotiation and establishment of identities. It is impossible to give a comprehensive view of the theoretical work in all of these areas and of how it has shaped identity studies. Our aim with this introduction is more modest: we want to briefly discuss some of the approaches and concepts that have had the greatest impact on current visions of identity, beginning with background perspectives and then turning to central constructs underlying the chapters in the volume. We then present an overview of the volume and a conclusion recapitulating some of the common ground among the contributors.

Background perspectives

Here we describe several approaches to the study of discourse and identity that pervade the chapters in the volume. We begin with those that have become widely accepted in research on discourse and identity and conclude with some that produce potential divisions in the ways scholars examine discourse and identity.

Perhaps the most general perspective, one that provides a very basic way of thinking about identity, is social constructionism (e.g. Berger and Luckman 1967; Hall 1966; Kroskrity 2000): the assumption that identity is neither a given nor a product. Rather, identity is a process that (1) takes place in concrete and specific interactional occasions, (2) yields constellations of identities instead of individual, monolithic constructs, (3) does not simply emanate from the individual, but results from processes of negotiation, and entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990) that are eminently social, and (4) entails “discursive work” (Zimmerman and Wieder 1970).

Social constructionism has generated a great deal of research on the use of linguistic strategies in discursive work to convey and build identities, on the emergence in interaction of conflicting versions of the self, and therefore on the existence of “repertoires of identities” (Kroskrity 1993), and on the effects of interlocutors, audiences and other social actors on the unfolding of identities in concrete social occasions. In brief, social constructionism has contributed to dissipating transcendentalist conceptions of identity and to directing the attention of researchers to social action rather than to psychological constructs.

Recent scholarship has also emphasized that identity is a process that is always embedded in social practices (Foucault 1984) within which discourse practices (Fairclough 1989) have a central role. Both social and discourse practices frame, and in many ways define, the way individuals and groups present themselves to others, negotiate roles, and conceptualize themselves. Taking the concept of practice as central to processes of identity formation and expression entails looking more closely at ways in which definitions of identity change and evolve in time and space, ways in which membership is established and negotiated within new boundaries and social locations, and ways in which activity systems (Goodwin 1999) impact on processes of identity construction.

Another defining trend in recent research has been the analysis of processes of categorization and membership definition . Taking inspiration from early work by Sacks on category bound activities and processes (1972, 1995), scholars in the Membership Categorization Analysis movement (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998b) have drawn attention to the fact that identity construction is often related to the definition of categories for inclusion or exclusion of self and others, and to their identification with typical activities and routines. This, in turn, has prompted a reflection on the nature of identification categories and on the relationship between individual identity and group membership.

Recent approaches to categorization have highlighted the limitations of applying pre-established categorizations, emphasizing instead the locally occasioned, fluid and ever-changing nature of identity claims. Identity claims are seen as “acts” through which people create new definitions of who they are. Such a conception defies traditional sociolinguistic approaches that link already established social categories with language variables, regarding instead “the very fact of selecting from a variety of possibilities a particular variant (on a given occasion) as a way of actively symbolizing one's affiliations” (Auer 2002: 4). Thus identities are seen not as merely represented in discourse, but rather as performed, enacted and embodied through a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic means.

A third important trend in identity studies has been the development of an anti-essentialist vision of the ‘self.’ Work in gender studies and discursive psychology has been crucial in this respect. Gender studies have greatly contributed to our postmodern rejection of the self as something that people possess and that represents some kind of core essence of the person (Bucholtz et al . 1999). Gender scholars have shown that people can display “polyphonous” identities, i.e. simultaneously assume voices that are associated with different identity categories, and that they can “perform” identities, i.e. represent themselves as different from what their personal “visible” characteristics would suggest (Barrett 1999), therefore concluding that there is nothing given or “natural” about being part of a social category or group. The inadequacy of an essentialist notion of identity as being embodied in the ‘self’ has also been noted by discursive psychologists who move away from a “predefined model of the human actor” (Potter 2003) towards the investigation of how the psychological categories used to describe or define the ‘self’ are themselves configured according to specific social practices and relationships.

Work in these perspectives has also stressed the centrality of processes of indexicality in the creation, performance and attribution of identities. Indexicality is thus a fourth overarching concept subsuming many of the theoretical constructs used to study identities: it connects utterances to extra-linguistic reality via the ability of linguistic signs to point to aspects of the social context. The connection between indexicality and identity has been a focus of attention in linguistics and anthropology since early work on deixis, particularly on shifters (see Benveniste 1971; Silverstein 1976) pointed to the indissoluble nexus established by these linguistic elements between the speaker and the utterance act.

Both linguists and anthropologists recognize the importance of pronouns in anchoring language to specific speakers in specific contexts and in signaling the reciprocal changes in the roles of interactants through their performance of, and engagement in, communicative acts. For example, linguistic signs at this referential level (Silverstein 1976) identify speakers not only in terms of their conversational roles or gender identity, but also in terms of how they orient to elements of the speech situation such as time and place. By using locatives and time expressions – as well as personal pronouns – language users point to their roles not only as speakers or addressees, but also to their location in time and space and to their relationship to others (present or absent).

Incorporation of the context is in itself a dynamic process through which speakers build their positions within what Hanks (1992) has named “the indexical ground.” By carrying out acts of reference, interactants continuously constitute and reconstitute their positions with respect to each other, to objects, places and times. Thus, indexing aspects of the context can never be reduced to a simple act of orientation in physical space or to the mere signaling of alternations in speech roles. Indexicality is a layered, creative, interactive process that lies at the heart of the symbolic workings of language. The idea that signs are indexical goes beyond simple referential anchoring to encompass the ability of linguistic expressions to evoke, and relate to, complex systems of meaning such as socially shared conceptualizations of space and place, ideologies, social representations about group membership, social roles and attributes, presuppositions about all aspects of social reality, individual and collective stances, practices and organization structures.

The approaches and concepts briefly outlined above rest on basic, and generally accepted, assumptions about the relationships between discourse, identity and social processes. However, scholars of identity are also deeply divided on several theoretical and methodological issues.

At opposite extremes are two approaches: the one sustained by scholars working within the frame of Conversation Analysis and the one advocated by scholars working within the frame of Critical Discourse Analysis. The division is not exclusive to the study of identity. Rather, it derives from different conceptions of the relationship between language and social life, of the role of the researcher, and of the methodology to be followed in data collection and analysis. Scholars in the field of Conversation Analysis advocate methodological restraint, according to which analysts need to “hold off from using all sorts of identities which one might want to use in, say, a political or cultural frame of analysis” (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998a: 5) and look exclusively for categories of identity membership that are made relevant in the local context by participants. In this view, identities are locally occasioned in talk-in-interaction, they are consequential for the interaction at hand, and therefore participants clearly “orient” to them. The researcher's task is then to reconstruct the processes of adscription and negotiation of identities as they are manifested within the activity in which participants are engaged. These arguments echo Schegloff's polemic stance against the imposition of ad hoc interpretive categories by “politically informed” analysts. Schegloff (1997: 168) argued that only after analyzing the interactional event “in its endogenous constitution, what it was for the parties involved in it, in its course, as embodied and displayed in the very details of its realization – can we even begin to explore what forms a critical approach to it might take, and what political issue, if any, it allows us to address.” Accordingly, within this approach, the only relevant context to understand the emergence of identities in interaction is the local context.

At the other extreme of the spectrum are scholars who identify with Critical Discourse Analysis (Billig 1999). In their view, the contexts that are relevant to the expression, negotiation and perpetuation of identities are much wider, since identities are, in many ways, produced and often imposed upon individuals and groups through dominant discourse practices and ideologies. From their perspective, keeping the analysis at the level of the local interaction only means ignoring how power struggles and wider social circumstances constrain and frame the way identities are perceived and projected in specific interactions. The consequence of such a stance is that Critical Discourse Analysts tend to privilege the analysis of political and ideological contexts in the formation of identities and concentrate on the representation of identities much more than on their projection or negotiation in interaction.

Our aim in this volume is not to argue for one position against the other, or to promote a particular agenda, but to offer analyses and reflections that can be taken as a basis for discussion by scholars who endorse different perspectives. In this sense, the volume differs from other collections in its inclusion of a range of approaches and its coverage of a variety of identities and texts/contexts: rather than share a single theoretical orientation, contributors come from different traditions and fields and use varying methodological tools. As we describe in the next section , however, several constructs re-appear throughout the volume, thus providing some overarching theoretical and methodological frameworks for the volume as a whole.

Overarching themes, underlying constructs and persistent questions

Contributors to Discourse and Identity employ a variety of specific theoretical approaches and methodological orientations, including Narrative Analysis, Conversation Analysis, Interactional Sociolinguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis. Yet all share an anti-essentialist orientation, a discourse and practice centered approach to identity, and a close focus on the interactional and local management of social categories and language along with consideration of the effects of global processes on the management of local identities. Before turning to an overview of the volume, then, we highlight some of the overarching themes and underlying constructs that find application in the volume and discuss their relevance to the linguistic analysis of identity. We present each construct as a general question that is answered through the concepts and methods (the tools, the “nuts and bolts”) comprised through each construct.

Positioning: How do the relationships we “take up” through (a) linguistically realized action and (b) interactions with different facets of our social, cultural and ideological worlds contribute to “who we are”?

Analyses of positioning build on the insight that identity is socially constructed at several levels: through relationships between the speaker and what is being said (including both means of production and evaluative or epistemic stance); through relationships between self and other, or speaker and hearer, in face-to-face occasions of talk and interaction; through relationships represented in the propositional content of talk (what is one textual character doing to another textual character?); through relationships to the dominant ideologies, widespread social practices and underlying power structures drawn together as Discourse (Gee 1996). One of the goals of positioning theory is to more clearly identify the mechanisms through which linguistic and social processes become reified as observable products that may be glossed by others as “identities.”

If the practices in which we routinely engage are viewed as central to processes of identity formation, what kind of personal agency is inscribed in these practices? While some researchers focus more strongly on social and institutional factors that constrain and delineate the radius of agency for individuals and groups of individuals, others credit groups and individuals with an agency that enables them to more than comply with such societal forces. This latter orientation is particularly interested in the agentive role of participants in interactions as being able to counter dominant practices, discourses and master narratives.

Scholars who have developed positioning theory (e.g. Bamberg 1997b, 2005; Davies and Harré 1990; Harré and van Langenhove 1999; Hollway 1984) investigate agency as bi-directional. On the one hand, historical, sociocultural forces in the form of dominant discourses or master narratives position speakers in their situated practices and construct who they are without their agentive involvement. On the other hand, speakers position themselves as constructive and interactive agents and choose the means by which they construct their identities vis-à-vis others as well as vis-à-vis dominant discourses and master narratives.

Positioning provides a central theoretical construct and valuable tool for analyzing identity in this volume. Authors investigate the linguistic mechanisms and discourse strategies that allow individual speakers to place themselves in positions of acceptance or rejection, for example, of ideologies of race, gender, or widely held conceptions about family roles and relationships (Bell, Moita-Lopes, Wortham and Gadsden). Linguistic strategies for projecting and constructing particular personas include modalization, constructed dialogue, meta-pragmatic descriptors and pronouns. Authors also suggest that speakers build positions vis-à-vis their former selves through the management of time categories in the reconstruction of their life experiences, since they look back at what happened in the past through the vantage point of their present experiences, therefore engaging in an ever evolving interpretation of their roles and lives (Bell, Mishler).

Authors also address the theoretical ramifications of the concept of positioning through discussion of the many facets of identity that can be the object of discursive work. Interlocutors can assume stances not only towards ideologies, but also towards absent others (e.g. characters and their actions in stories), and towards each other. Thus, in different chapters, interviewers and interviewees are shown using strategies such as the application of labels, the use of discourse responses or even silence after questions, to position each other in particular ways (Baynham, Bell, Johnson).

Investigating levels of identity construction as a process of positioning, and discovering the means adopted to enact various positions, leads to reflecting on the many ways of doing identity, ranging from the proclamation and open assignment of membership into social categories to the enactment of different kinds of selves, to indirect conveying of alignments and disalignments, to the implicit placement of social agents into pre-assigned roles. Analyses of positioning can thus productively connect the local focus of conversation analytic and the more global focus of critical discourse analytic approaches. They can also help elucidate the embrace of, or resistance to, imposed identities through narrative, as well as through other discourse genres, discursive practices and Discourse writ large. While positioning thus constitutes a sort of umbrella for different ways of constructing identity in discourse, other more specific constructs are also used by contributors in this volume to account for particular aspects of identity work.

Interaction order: “Who are we” when we are interacting with one another in face-to-face talk?

The investigation of the interaction order as a central site for the construction of identities provides a significant site of analysis, and area of reflection, in the chapters collected in this volume. Many authors illustrate how a multiplicity of identities are managed through social interactions by building upon Goffman's work as a fundamental point of departure because of his insights on the importance of reciprocity in communication and on the fundamental presence of the ‘other’ in the public management of the self. This relational view of communication has an immediate relevance for the analysis of identity work through the constructs of footing (“the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance” (1981: 128)), and “face” (the positive social attributes that a person claims for him or herself in the course of social interaction (1967a)).

The management of this relational level underlies a great deal of identity work in private and public exchanges and conversations (Bastos and Oliveira, Holmes, Ribeiro). Authors illustrate how the presentation of a positive face to others underlies the choice of referring terms or the telling of stories or anecdotes and the provision of details within them: both can depict the self as a “figure” whose actions, interactions and relationships within specific story-worlds have potential relevance for the interaction. Also shown is how the identities presented by clients of public services, or by people in the work place, are shaped by the need to preserve an image of oneself which is consistent with the requirements and exigencies of the situation, the interaction, and the needs of the interlocutors. Problematizing and deconstructing face work, then, leads analysts to interpret the presentation and enactment of particular identities not so much as expressions of the ‘self,’ but rather as constructions that take into account both the objectives of interactional practices, and the constraints of institutional structures, that are “in play” when people communicate with each other.

Analysis of interactional processes is also based on a fundamental principle of intersubjectivity that allows identities to be achieved and built through reciprocal moves between interactants (Schiffrin). Partners in storytelling events may build dominant positions within close knit groups by consistently taking up roles as co-narrators or evaluators of the narratives told by others (Georgakopoulou). Interactants can project identifications or rejections towards their partners through cooperative or uncooperative management of conversation (Johnson, Holmes). They can also confirm and fine tune local identities that place them in relationships with others (such as “expert” versus “novice”) through the use of repair in referring sequences (Schiffrin). Many chapters in this volume show how the management of interactional resources, such as those described above, can become central to people's intersubjective construction of identities.

Footing, multivocality and intertextuality: “Who” is speaking “whose” words and what role are they taking in the “speech”?

The question of “who” is speaking “whose” words – and the incorporation of other voices and texts in the here and now – has been examined from sociological, linguistic and literary perspectives, many of which underlie the chapters in this volume.

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Displacing place-identity: A discursive approach to locating self and other

2000, British Journal of Social Psychology

Questions of`who we are ' are often intimately related to questions of`where we are ', an idea captured in the environmental psychological concept of place-identity. The value of this concept is that it attends to the located nature of subjectivity, challenging the disembodied notions of identity preferred by social psychologists. The topic of place-identity would thus seem to be a productive point around which the sub-disciplines of social and environmental psychology might meet, answering calls for greater disciplinary cross-fertilization. This study contributes to this project by presenting a sympathetic but critical evaluation of research on place-identity. It argues that such research is valuable in that it has established the importance of place for creating and sustaining a sense of self. However, drawing on recent developments in discursive approaches to social psychology, the authors identify several limitations with existing work on place-identity. This critique is then developed through analysis of an ongoing research programme located in the changing landscapes of the new South Africa.

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Place identity studies have attracted considerable interest in South Africa because of its history of separate racial development. However, there is a paucity of studies that have reviewed such studies in the country. This article, therefore, aims to present a selective review of place identity studies in post-apartheid South Africa. A literature search was conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses. Studies published in English between 1994 and 2020, relating to changing place identities as a result of apartheid in South Africa, were included in our search. The search yielded studies from which four key themes were identified – these being identity and belonging, social identity and discursive practice, cultural symbolism and group identity, and social inclusion and exclusion. These themes attest to the social construction of place identity, with people forming cognitive and affective bonds within groups. In addition, these themes show th...

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For some years, the writers and their colleagues have employed the concept of 'place-identity' in their conceptualization of selected problems of the physical environment (Proshansky, 1978; Proshansky et al., 1979; Proshansky and Kaminoff, 1982). Because of its derivation from self-theory, its meaning was relatively easy to establish and use in analyzing person/physical setting problems. Later on in this paper we will provide a more formal definition of place-identity and its properties. At this point, however, what is needed is a brief review of the social and cultural processes involved in the development of self-identity. From this discussion, the theoretical significance of physical settings and their properties regarding self-identity will clearly emerge. Paradoxically, what will also emerge is the realization of an almost complete neglect of the role of places and spaces in this aspect of human psychological development.

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How to Write a Discursive Essay: Tips to Succeed & Examples

So, you need to accomplish your discursive essay writing. The typical questions most students ask are: How do you write it? What is discursive essay?

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A discursive essay is an academic paper that involves a discussion on a particular topic. It is usually assigned to college students. You may be required to write a paper wherein you have to do one of the following:

• argue for the issue or against it;
• present your points of view on both sides;
• provide your unprejudiced opinion on that matter.

Don’t panic!

Check out the tips from  Custom-writing.org  experts below. They will assist you in discursive writing and encourage you to examine essay examples. Moreover, in this article, you’ll also learn about different types of discursive essay, and its introduction, main body, and conclusion structure.

• ❓ What Is It?
• 🏁 Main Types

Introduction

• Basic Don’Ts
• ✏️ Frequent Questions

❓ What Is a Discursive Essay?

First of all, let’s figure out what the discursive essay is.

You may think it’s similar to the argumentative essay. Yes, but there’s a difference between them in the structure and purpose of these two types of assignments:

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We will take a detailed look at how to structure a discursive essay later, and now let’s find out what are the types of this assignment.

Keep reading!

🏁 Discursive Essay: Main Types

You have to think more critically and more in-depth when reviewing all viewpoints and aspects of discursive writing. Check these three main types of essay writing:

• Opinion Essay  requires the author’s opinion on an issue which is stated in the introductory paragraph. It should be clearly presented and followed by reasons and supporting examples. Also, this essay paper should contain an opposing argument that comes before the conclusion. The writer must explain to readers why the mentioned argument is considered to be unconvincing. The writer’s opinion should be restated/summarized in the conclusion.
• For and Against Essay  provides readers with a thorough debate on the topic with the help of opposing points of view. Each point should be discussed objectively and described in details. The introductory paragraph puts the issue under consideration. The main body of this essay paper should present examples, reasons, and arguments supported by justifications. The author’s own opinion with balanced reflections on the topic should be stated only in conclusion.
• Essay Suggesting Solution to a Problem  discusses problems and finds the main solutions. The introduction paragraph explicitly declares a problem and analyses its causes and consequences. The main body of the essay should offer some suggestions for a possible solution to the problem and potential state consequences or expected results. In conclusion, author’s opinion should be distinctly summarized.

📑 How to Write a Discursive Essay

Well, it’s time to talk about the structure of a discursive essay. Like most of the assignments, a discursive paper starts with an introduction and ends with a conclusion:

The first question you may ask is how to start a discursive essay introduction. Simple!

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• Give your readers a hook – something that would sound interesting to them.
• Provide a short explanation of the problem. You may use quotations, as well as rhetorical questions.
• Show your readers both sides of the arguments and sum up.

You may be wondering…

Is there something I should avoid in my discursive essay introduction?

Yes. No stereotypes and generalizations, please!

The next step under formal essay writing you should take is to compose the body.

There are a few points you should remember:

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• First and foremost: stay unprejudiced . Assess all of the aspects of an issue. Leave your feelings behind or for another essay type.
• Second: build your argumentation . If you have several arguments for your viewpoint—provide them in separate paragraphs. This will help you to keep your essay comprehensible and distinct. Don’t forget to submit supporting evidence.
• Third: write the body of an essay in an alternate manner. What does it mean? If your first paragraph supports the paper’s argument, then in the second paragraph you should write something in the opposite of it. Such a combination of supporting and opposite paragraphs will make your essay look apparent, and well researched. Besides, it will help you to remain neutral.
• Fourth: include topic sentences and evidence . Write a summary of the argument at the beginning of the paragraph. It will allow the reader to easier understand what the paragraph is about. Provide evidence to show that you’re not making the facts up.

Well, you’ve almost finished your writing. Now you should focus on the last section. Keep reading, and you will learn how to write a conclusion for a discursive essay.

• In the last section, you should summarize your article including the main points, specified in the body paragraphs.
• You may also logically express your opinion. Remember: it should resonate with your evidence stated in the body paragraphs.
• Don’t repeat findings, just summarize them.

Keep it short. Your conclusion length should not exceed one paragraph.

👍 Do’s and Don’ts

Do you want more discursive essay writing tips? Fine! Just check them below:

Basic Do’s of a Discursive Essay

• Write in formal, impersonal style.
• Introduce each point in a separate paragraph
• Use topic sentences for each paragraph
• Write well-developed paragraphs
• Give reasons and examples for each point
• Use sequencing
• Use linking words and phrases
• Make references to other sources and make sure that you follow proper citation style
• Identify used sources

Basic Don’Ts of a Discursive Essay

• Don’t use short forms, like I’ll, don’t, they’ve
• Don’t use informal/colloquial language, for example: old as the hills, ain’t, gonna, etc.
• Don’t use very emotional language, since it might make your discursive article look prejudiced
• Don’t use over-generalizations. Extending the features of some elements from a group more than it is reasonable will lead to generous and inaccurate conclusions.
• Don’t express your personal opinion too insistently
• Don’t refer to statistics without proper referencing (check our citation guides )
• Don’t use personal examples, leave it for a personal experience essay

Well, now you know what discursive essay means, what are its main types, and how to structure it.

Discursive Essay Topics

• Discussion of risk factors that impact human health.
• Discuss the necessity of understanding cultural heritage to provide efficient health care.
• Analyze different opinions on withdrawing patients’ treatment.
• Examine different views on the Civil War. 
• Discuss what hostile emotional states are and how they impact human life.
• Discuss the meaning of metaphors used by Virgil in Aeneid .
• Describe different opinions on telehealth in nursing homes.
• The ethicality of stem cell technology.
• Explore the effectiveness of motivational interviewing .
• Discuss how people present themselves online .
• Discuss the reasons for Coca-Cola’s marketing success.
• Analyze the food safety issues and the ways to improve the situation.
• Examine the essential meaning of sleep for people’s physical and mental health.  
• Explore various complications of working with groups. 
• Discussion of the modern issues with virtue ethics .
• Describe different views on the definition of love .
• Give the for and against arguments considering food security technologies .
• Discuss how the concept of the American dream is presented in the film The Great Gatsby.  
• Analyze the influence of family problems on children and suggest ways to improve the situation.
• Present the various points of view on the ethical concepts of Buddhism. 
• Examine the attitudes towards the problem of homelessness and the suggested ways of its solution.
• Explore different opinions on the American revolution and its consequences.  
• Discuss various policies and views around the globe on abortion .
• Discussion of the history of food foraging in different communities. 
• Multiple thoughts on civility on the Internet .
• Analyze arguments on the effectiveness of hand sanitizers. 
• Discuss the importance of visual aids in learning.
• Present and evaluate the theories of international development .
• Discuss how to prevent the spread of the West Nile Virus (WNV).
• Is embracing renewable energy sources beneficial for both environment and the global economy?
• Examine the correctness of the statement that the ideology of pleasure is the foundation of social activism.  
• Discussion of the ethical dilemma of population control. 
• Discuss the ethics of experimental studies .
• Analyze the topic of gun violence and gun control laws.  
• Explore the reasons for opioid crises in the US.  
• Give arguments for and against random drug testing. 
• Discuss the problem of endangered species .
• Express your opinion on the necessity of parents to be included in children’s education .
• Present your attitude towards working in a bureaucratic organization. 
• Discuss the issue of the nursing shortage and suggest a solution.
• Give different viewpoints on the definition of beauty .
• Analyze the problem of police misconduct .
• Discuss the description of violence of African people in literature. 
• Examine the views on Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory .
• Describe the various opinions on mysticism and express your attitude towards it.  
• Discuss the diverse standpoints on spirituality. 
• Is nature protection an urgent problem?
• Analyze different ideas on physical privacy at work. 
• Discussion on the Jewish heritage in nursing.
• Examine the views on the meaning of life .

Good luck with your discussions and discursive essays! Be sure to check out the articles on our blog for more academic wisdom. By the way, on the Custom-Writing website, you may find the best essay topics for your academic writing.

And don’t forget to share your opinion in the comments below.

You might also be interested in:

• Friendship Essay: Writing Guide & Topic Ideas about Friendship
• Teamwork Essay: Quick Guide on How to Write a Good Paper
• Compare and Contrast Essay Writing Tips and Examples
• Transportation Essay: Writing Tips and Brilliant Topics

✏️ Discursive Essay FAQ

There is no one definitely correct answer to this question. Like any other essay, the text should have a clear structure with an introduction, body, and conclusion. The most important thing is that the overall book needs to be cohesive, persuasive, and exciting to read.

An example of a step by step guide is:

1. Take a closer look at the topic, think about the points to cover.

2. Choose the most relevant points and compose the Body of the essay.

3. Add an appropriate Introduction and Conclusion.

To write a good conclusion, you need to have the rest of the essay finished. Does the body of your essay present well-structured points? Great, then see what you can conclude based on that. If possible, make a connection between the introduction and the conclusion.

To ensure that your essay has a perfect structure, start with creating an outline. Based on such a plan, you can present your points step by step. Your text should have a relevant introduction, several points in the main body (with examples), and a logical conclusion.

🔗 References

• Writing an Opinion Essay: Grace Fleming, ThoughtCo
• How to Write a Good Argumentative Essay: Easy Step-by-Step Guide: Master Class
• Ending the Essay: Conclusions: Harvard College Writing Center
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Australian identity: What does it mean to you?

Trying to define national identity is like searching for the end of a rainbow.

It isn’t something that can be found or a place we can collectively reach; it’s something that unfolds over time and through generations. It’s also something that is contested and evokes a sense of belonging individually.

“I think different groups would have different senses of national identity and I think it means different things to different people, so it’s a very slippery topic to try and pin down.”

The idea of national identity as an abstract and ever-changing concept is not lost on Monash Professor of History Alistair Thomson, who cautions that trying to define it is both problematic and self-serving.

It is also, he says, a deeply personal concept, and so if we do try to be prescriptive and define it, we run the risk of excluding people.

“As soon as you start talking about a distinctive national identity or character, you begin to exclude and you define those who are in and those who are out and that’s a problem,” he says.

“If you tried to list all the things that Australians in the street would say were archetypically Australian, you would find contradictions. You would find fair-minded and tolerant and yet exclusive and xenophobic.

“You would find egalitarianism and yet massive inequalities. You would find this notion that we’re shaped by the bush, yet this has been an urban society since early in the nineteenth century.

“There are all these contradictions in our sense of what it is to be typically Australian, so much so that it’s probably better to get rid of that notion altogether. We are too diverse.”

In trying to articulate Australia’s identity, words and phrases and values like mateship, a fair go, the Aussie battler, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, larrikinism, and the lucky country are often cited, but do they all really apply today?

Jacinta Elston doesn’t think so.

The Pro Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous) at Monash University describes Australia’s national identity as “complex and fractured”.

“I think a decade or two ago we could have said that we were the lucky country, we were the place of a fair go and I might have been able to go along with that, but from what I see now and what I have seen of things in society, that doesn’t ring true for me anymore.

“Now, we’ve got things like people walking down the street king-hitting somebody at 10 o’clock at night that they don’t even know – that’s not mateship. That’s not giving people a fair go, that’s bullying. We’ve got women in Australia suffering domestic violence and being killed by their partners.

“And we’ve still got refugees on Nauru and Manus Island. In our hearts and minds I think most people feel and believe this is wrong.

“Why is it so hard for us as a country to deal with this properly?”

The debates and discussions, and indeed the decisions we ultimately make around issues such as refugees and Australia Day and Indigenous recognition inevitably help to shape our national identity, as does our immigrant history, and even our landscape and seascape, and geographic position in the world. But it is not a static concept.

“Our national identity - such that it is – is an unfurling and becoming type of identity,” says Monash Vice-Chancellor, Professor Margaret Gardner.

“It’s shaped by what has come before, how that is incorporated, it’s shaped by the confluence of the profile of who makes us up now. And it’s also made up of the sorts of decisions we make.”

Melissa Castan, who is Deputy Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University, says one of the problems Australia continues to face is its difficulty in articulating the place of Indigenous Australians within its identity and that this can be traced back to how our legal, social and political structures were founded.

“The so-called discovery by Captain Cook and the way the British acquired the territory denied the reality of Indigenous life and culture and law and has created a fundamental flaw in our structures,” she says.

“Until we can repair those faulty foundations, we’re going to remain in this trap or this difficulty in properly relating to Indigenous identity as part of Australia’s national identity.”

Read: Celebrating and saving Indigenous Australian stories through film

She says it is possible to repair these things but that it will take good will and political willpower and “bravery on the parts of politicians”.

“Not every political leader is going to be in a position, personally or politically, where they can run with it, but eventually we’re going to get someone with a big picture kind of attitude who is capable of doing it and they’re going to drag the naysayers along with them.

“One day we will advance Australia fair, (but) we’re not quite there yet.”  

Watch: Reimagining Australia Day (Episode 10: A Different Lens)

• Australian identity
• australian culture
• a different lens
• Australia day
• Indigenous culture

Professor, Law Resources, Monash University

Jacinta Elston

Pro Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous) and Head, William Cooper Institute

Brian Martin

Associate Dean (Indigenous), MADA

Graeme Davison AO

Emeritus Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor

Melissa Castan

Professor, Law Faculty, Monash University

Alistair Thomson

Professor of History, School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies

Margaret Gardner AC

President and Vice-Chancellor, Monash University

David Bright

Lecturer, Education

CEO, Youth Activating Youth

A society shaped by discontents

The contributions of convicts to Australia's progressive political traditions have been largely and unfairly forgotten.

That's what I'm talking about

A series of animated films is future-proofing Indigenous culture, language and knowledge for generations to come.

What became of the working class?

Once seen as shapers of national identity, these days they're thought of as little more than disadvantaged. What changed?

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