ANALYSE DES SYSTEMES DE PRODUCTION PAR TYPE DE STRUCTURE DES FACTEURS DE PRODUCTION

Discourse practice is employed to answer the second research question, and is thus concerned with investigating what relations organisations at the Show construct between themselves and the bodies emerging from text analysis.

Specifically, discourse practice has to do with “processes of text production, distribution, and consumption” (Fairclough, 1992:

78), and is an interpretative, analytical step. It can also represent an indirect link between the text level of analysis and the social practice one (Fairclough, 1995b: 60; 1989/2001).

This second level of analysis has to do with the concept of intertextuality, which refers to “how texts can transform prior texts and restructure existing conventions (genres, discourses) to generate new ones” (Fairclough, 1992: 103). Thus the texts examined in text analysis can be employed by actors to reorganise existing discourses, or to create new ones.

To be clear, discourse practice can be analytically applied in different ways: in a text I can explicitly look for elements from other pre-existing texts by, for instance, looking at references or citations; or I can look at how certain discourses are used to build relations. I here use the latter approach, and examine how the discourses of the body emerging in text analysis are used by organisations to construct relations. This is particularly important as to understanding how organisations use the discourses they draw upon to maintain legitimacy. By

using certain discourses of the body, organisations might construct themselves in different relations to the body depending on the legitimacy they might want to maintain in relation to the female non-reproductive body.

Within organisation studies concerned with the critical analysis of discourse, so far scholars following Fairclough’s approach to CDA have implemented his three-level framework (text analysis, discourse practice, social practice) very similarly; in their analyses, they particularly conceive intertextuality as the relations between different physical texts and mostly examine references and citations. In this thesis, I follow a second interpretation of intertextuality: while still connecting the text to pre-existing discourses, I remain within the same text and look for relations between text producers and text consumers that have been created through the pre-existing discourses emerging from that same text. In brief, the pre-existing discourses which I use to analyse discourse practice are the ones emerging from the text analysis of the same text.

I hold that this interpretation of discourse practice, which to my knowledge is seldom found within organisation studies concerned with CDA, is valuable to organisation scholars interested in critical aspects of discourse particularly with regards to issues of power, because it allows for imbalanced relations of power to explicitly emerge between the text producer and the text consumer. This, in turn, shows us those power relations that CDA notoriously aims to unveil and challenge. In sum, I think this interpretation of discourse practice makes power more visible because it makes relations very visible, before proceeding to contextualise them socially, historically, and/or politically (at the social practice level of analysis).

Building on text analysis, at the discourse practice level I analyse texts from five organisations where the discourses emerged. Then, I analyse intertextuality within those texts to understand what relations such discourses engender. As mentioned before, this part of the analysis focuses on five organisations attending the Show: one per each type of exhibiting organisation. This level of analysis includes entire texts or sets of texts. controlling and constraining the contributions of non-powerful participants.” (1989/2001: 38). These constraints take place in three ways: through contents (“what is said or done”, which is the focus of text analysis), relations (“the social relations people enter into discourse”), and subjects (“the ‘subject positions’

people can occupy”) (Fairclough, 1989/2001: 39). All three are tightly connected, and in practice they co-exist and co-occur.

My focus here is on organisations as text producers, and on how they construct the text consumers’ subject positions.

Therefore, I approach discourse practice keeping these three constraints in mind: having examined how contents construct subjects (through the discourses of the body emerging from text analysis), this second level of analysis focuses on relations and subjects and aims to understand how organisations use the discourses they construct (contents) to create relations and position subjects (relations and subjects).

There are three guiding questions I answer when carrying out discourse practice analysis, namely:

-! What’s going on? This includes taking into account the activity type and topic in the text (Fairclough, 1989/2001: 123);

-! Who’s involved? Here I look for the subjects involved in the activity type, which can vary depending on the activity that is being described.

-! In what relations? This is where what’s going on and who’s involved are examined together to understand how they relate with each other through the text.

These questions are answered through intertextuality, which in turn entails the analysis of modality and presuppositions. These two features allow me to identify subject positions, which are the positions of organisations and of the prospective patients attending the FCE. Specifically, the analytical question I answer is the following:

Through the texts they produce, how do organisations at the Fertility Show construct their own subject position

and that of the prospective patient?

Subject positions are thus constructed through text (how they construct the body) and intertextual context (how they employ constructions of the body to construct relations between themselves and the prospective patient). To do so, organisations presuppose the subjects will be positioned in a certain way, based on the discursive constructions identified in the first level of analysis (text analysis). However, these discursive constructions are placed in an intertextual context:

they are linked to previous texts and this link can be seen by looking at formal features in language related to modality (subjective/objective, use of auxiliaries) and presuppositions (negative sentences and negations, emphatic assertions, etc.).

In this regard, Fairclough specifies that: 1) because discourse and text happen in history, their interpretation requires the researcher to understand what participants share as ‘common ground’ in such a historical context, and is thus presupposed; that 2) presuppositions might be imposed by more powerful participants upon less powerful ones; and that 3) by doing so, powerful participants can decide what in the historical context of discourse is to be taken as common ground by all participants, thus presupposed (Fairclough, 1989/2001:

127). In this sense, discourse practice can never really be sealed off from social practice, or text analysis. Nonetheless, the three levels are here distinguished and examined separately for analytical purposes.

As mentioned above, when analysing discourse practice, I specifically focus on modality and presuppositions. Modality refers to the interpersonal function of language and has to do with the extent to which text producers create distance from or commit themselves to propositions (Fairclough, 1992: 142). It is associated with modal auxiliary verbs such as ‘must’, ‘may’,

‘can’, ‘should’ and adverbs such as ‘probably’, ‘possibly’, obviously’, ‘definitely’. Modality can be subjective (for example

“I think fertility treatment is a good choice”) or objective (“fertility treatment may be a good choice”).

Conversely, presuppositions are not properties of text, but are instead the text producers’ interpretations of the intertextual context. However, they are “cued in texts” and can be identified in the text by looking at formal features (Fairclough, 1989/2001: 127). Presuppositions are important because through them, the text producer assumes that what they are saying in their texts is “to be found in antecedent texts that are within readers’ experience” (1989/2001: 128). This means that organisations at the FCE will understand that their assumptions are common ground between themselves and the prospective patients.

I identify presuppositions through links to prior texts produced by others or by the text producer. An example of presupposition can be found in the following sentence on Intra-Uterine Insemination (IUI) extracted from a private clinic booklet: “This painless procedure is among the least invasive treatments”. Here we can notice two presuppositions: 1) that the prospective patient will hold a certain level of concern with regards to undergoing painful procedures, as well as a level of knowledge with regards to other fertility procedures which are, unlike IUI, painful; and 2) similarly, the invasiveness of the procedure is pre-supposed to be a matter of concern which the prospective patient is assumed to have encountered when reading of or attempting other forms of treatments.

I also identify whether the presuppositions are sincere, manipulative, or negatively phrased (polemical). When text producers’ presuppositions are manipulative or polemical, they

are also difficult to challenge. In the example I provided above, the presuppositions are partly sincere and partly manipulative:

I see them as sincere in that pain and invasiveness are legitimate concerns any prospective patient might have when it comes to medical procedures. But I also see them as manipulative, in that regardless of the comparison with other forms of fertility treatment, IUI is still an invasive procedure.

At the intertextual level, through presuppositions text producers can make resistance difficult to carry out by text consumers: they can position text consumers as already having an experience of the text, which is often difficult to realise and therefore challenge (Fairclough, 1989/2001). In sum, by analysing discourse practice I aim at showing how organisations position themselves through the use of the discourses of the body identified through text analysis. This positioning is analysed by looking at modality and presuppositions.

Table 9. Elements of Discourse Practice.

Intertextuality

Modality Presupposition

Subjective Objective Auxiliaries used

Cues in text

Sincere Manipulative Polemical

4.9.3.! Social Practice

Once the discourses of the female non-reproductive body have emerged (text analysis) and the relations in place between organisations and prospective patients have been identified (discourse practice), the research outcomes are linked to the social practice level of analysis. The aim is to answer the third research question, and thus examine how the discourses and

relations emerging in text analysis and discourse practice are employed at the FCE to maintain legitimacy.

In this regard, I understand language as socially conditioned, which means that what we say is influenced by the social context we live in. Language and society do not exist separately, but co-exist in a way that makes social phenomena to be at least in part linguistic phenomena, and vice versa. In this regard, discourse reproduces social structures while simultaneously being determined by them (Fairclough, 1989/2001).

The social practice level relates the discourses and relations emerging at the FCE to the broader social context where legitimacy needs to be maintained with respect to an organisational field that necessarily acts onto the female non-reproductive body. The aim is to unveil how organisational discourses and relations shape or reproduce social structures on the female non-reproductive in order to maintain field legitimacy.

In the analysis, I carry out social practice by historically contextualising the discourses and relations before field emergence, so as to understand how and why they are being employed today at the FCE to maintain legitimacy.

4.10. Plausibility, Validity, and Reliability of the Research The concepts of objectivity and validity traditionally employed in quantitative research need to be modified when carrying out CDA (Wodak and Meyer, 2009). This has to do with the approach to conventional scientific knowledge adopted by CDA. Particularly when analysing discourse, both social constructionism and CDA criticise the notion of objectivity and the means of production of conventional knowledge, and view the researcher’s bias as inevitably embedded in the research

process (Wodak and Meyer, 2009). The precondition of discourse is in fact the existence of a reality which is socially constructed, and where unequal relations of power take place.

Instead, what CDA is concerned with is processes of knowledge production, which is where the analyst’s work should contribute (Weiss and Wodak, 2003).

However, making sure that our work is plausible, valid and transferable within CDA is nonetheless paramount. Plausibility refers to the researcher’s ability to “convince the reader of the soundness and sense of their research” (MacPherson, 2008:187). This can be achieved through strong descriptions (Silverman, 2010) and transparency (Gephart, 2004). CDA brought me to produce thick descriptions of the data, particularly during the level of text analysis, which is descriptive by nature. I achieved transparency by regularly producing tables and step-by-step analytical frameworks and analysis samples, which also provided my supervisors with the tools to verify my analytical process.

DA suggests completeness as a criterion for validity: when applied to the purpose of CDA, a complete analysis includes

“careful systematic analysis, self-reflection at every point of one’s research and distance from the data which are being investigated” (Wodak and Meyer, 2009: 33). This approach to validity poses a clear challenge related to self-reflection and the approach to data. Fairclough (2001/1989) uses the term Members’ Resources (MR) to refer to the cultural and social resources drawn upon by analysts, and stresses the importance of critical self-reflection throughout the research process.

Reflecting on my preconceptions, biases, and cultural and social background becomes a necessary practice in order to maintain the critical and political features of CDA. This was achieved by

trying to be reflexive at every step of the research process, but also through insightful interactions and discussions with my supervisors and fellow academics and practitioners at various conferences. I discuss this in more detail in section 4.12.

As the various constructions emerged, I began to analyse them and make sense of them: this step often included discussing the emerging ‘findings’ with my supervisors, discussions which lead to reformulating questions and constructions, or simply to more politically-aware conceptualisations - where by political I refer to power relations between the knowledge producer (myself) and the data used to produce such knowledge. This back-and-forth process (that of description and interpretation followed by discussion with the supervisors, and vice versa) took place at various moments during data analysis. I think these regular interactions contributed to a more self-reflective and open approach to my data and my research as a whole.

There are further points to consider to ensure that the research is addressing issues of validity and reliability.

Following Morse et al (2002), these have to do with the verifiability of the research. The authors specifically mention that the researcher should ensure her study is verifiable through practices such as “ensuring methodological coherence, sampling sufficiency, developing a dynamic relationship between sampling, data collection and analysis, thinking theoretically, and theory development" (Morse et al, 2002: 18).

Ensuring methodological coherence entails the alignment of the research questions with the chosen methods. This has been ensured by keeping my research questions open to change as my analytical framework evolved. Sample saturation "ensures replication in categories; replication verifies, and ensures comprehension and completeness" (Morse et al, 2002: 18). My

data sample saturated as I progressed with data analysis, and noticed replication of emerging topics and discourses. Thinking theoretically refers to when "[i]deas emerging from data are reconfirmed in new data; this gives rise to new ideas that, in turn, must be verified in data already collected" (Morse et al, 2002: 18). I link this to data saturation, in that the emergence and repetition of discursive constructions was confirmed at later stages of the iterative process of data analysis. Finally, theory development ensures the movement from the micro level of data to the macro level of theory. This takes place throughout analysis, but more explicitly comes together at the stage of discussion when the research contributions are clarified.