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A context sensitive approach to analysing talk in management meetings: The Discourse Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Ian Clarke

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Abstract

The talk of managers in meetings is central to organizational life and crucial to research in strategic management, as well as managerial and organizational cognition, sensemaking, and decision-making. To achieve full understanding both the text and context of discussion require systematic analysis, but most approaches treat context as everything that is known and observed beyond the immediate text. This obscures different readings of the text of meetings. To resolve this problem, the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is outlined as a framework within which researchers can analyse the text and context of talk in meetings. The primary contribution of this paper is to isolate four ‘levels of context’ as a heuristic framework within which discursive practices, strategies and texts can be located. By making explicit the levels of contextual analysis that are implicit in other methods, and illustrating the DHA using an episode of strategic discussion from a multinational company, we show how researchers can use the approach to analyse naturally occurring talk of senior managers in meetings, which is arguably the most important but yet under-explored venue for strategizing.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Clarke I, Kwon W, Wodak R

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: British Journal of Management

Year: 2012

Volume: 23

Issue: 4

Pages: 455-473

Print publication date: 27/09/2011

ISSN (print): 1045-3172

ISSN (electronic): 1467-8551

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00759.x

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00759.x

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