Using ‘discourse sketches’
My writing began to take a productive turn when I understood I needed to shift from a descriptive level of writing to a more critically analytical level. Descriptive writing tends to be explanatory, seeking the reasons for why things are the way they are. Discourse analysis examines the way people are positioned by discourse and looks for contradictions and discontinuities without obligating the writer to resolve an issue. An important moment occurred at the end of a detailed journal entry in which I sought to understand why a nursing group had chosen a particular position. I wrote:
Journal entry 15 December 2004
Perhaps an answer is not needed. Perhaps I just need to start thinking about where these things position nurses.
It was not long after this realisation that I started to use the questions Foucault (1977c, p. 138) proposed at the end of the essay What is an author? That is, “What is the mode of existence of this discourse? Where does it come from; how it is circulated; who controls it? What placements are determined for possible subjects?” I used these questions as a template to create what I called ‘discourse sketches’. Under each question, I would bullet point the ‘evidence’ drawn from participant interviews and my reading of the health-service-related literature that could justify the existence of a particular discourse.
I initially developed discourse sketches for ownership, industrial/unionist, academic, competence, autonomy, and neoliberal discourses. The evidence for a sketch was not exhaustive but was enough to shape my initial thinking about which discourses were at play, and collectively the sketches formed the basis of the structure of the analysis chapters.
Using ‘the tools’
Until I discovered the tools for approaching the text described earlier in this chapter, the journey towards writing less descriptively and more analytically was slow. It involved writing and re-writing the same material and did not come easily:
Journal entry 3 October 2005
The issue is that I continue to revert to description in an effort to put chosen texts in context. I continue to want to draw on ‘evidence’ that I know is plentiful to illustrate my point. I suspect it is just re-thinking how to write this way – theoretically. My ideas seem to be good, but just need to be written theoretically not descriptively. That’s what’s hard.
The key to progressing the level of analysis was to formalise my ideas about the approach I would use to analyse the data in combination with the discourse sketches. I wrote in my project journal some thoughts about how the techniques I had planned actually worked:
Journal entry 14 February 2006 The process seems to involve 3 steps:
1st, I choose the text. Sometimes this is hard and other times, easy.
Mostly, I get a feeling that arises from having read widely around the topic that a particular piece of text ably illustrates a power dynamic.
2nd, using mostly Riggins tools, I describe in present tense what I see happening in the text. In one sense I re-state what is said in the text, but the tools help to bring another dimension to what could otherwise be a paraphrase.
3rd, the second stage leads on to Foucault’s 5 questions about power relations. This is where the analysis moves beyond description of the text to examine how the words are used discursively to construct
representations that permit a relation of power.
These steps open up the text to consideration of particular aspects of Foucault’s work, such as surveillance, dividing practices, governmentality etc. Finally, establishing and naming a discourse within which this text fits is aided by his questions: how does a discourse exist, is it circulated, controlled, creates subject placements?
I had written a great deal about neoliberalism and the New Zealand health reforms of the 1990s and understood a neoliberal discourse as being central to the emergence of an advanced nursing discourse. The changing role of the NZNO was of great interest, and discussions during that decade of a changing notion of nursing ‘competence’. Three threads seemed to officially position nursing: the professional voice, regulation, and academia. Consequently, much of part two of the thesis is based on these threads and the events of that decade.
An overall structure
Establishing an overall structure to the thesis was pivotal for me to make headway with writing. Prior to reaching this point, I had ‘practised’ my discourse analysis technique on a variety of texts (both interview texts and published texts) that
seemed to fit with the discourse sketches I had created. There was no particular coherence or order to what I wrote about, and I recall comparing the process to making a patchwork quilt. Having made a quilt myself (one or twice), I knew that little pieces of fabric are stitched together in a particular pattern to make a ‘piece’. When enough pieces are made, they are all laid out to see where each piece will best fit in the overall design of the quilt. The next step is to stitch those pieces together and then to sew a border that goes right around the outside.
Many of my ‘pieces’ of analysis were aligned with particular discourses, but settling on how these pieces would fit together occurred while reading Elaine Papps’ PhD thesis (1997). Her work was presented in three sections, and although other theses I have read are structured similarly, there was immediate resonance with how I needed to present my own work. I had settled on the idea that an interstice had been created by the construction of the competent nurse and paved the way for the most expert nurse. ‘Practising in the interstice’ seemed to capture the subject position for the most expert nurse, as well as being a partner phrase to ‘creating an interstice’. Dividing the analysis chapters into two distinct categories provided a way to end discussion about competence and focus the last section of the thesis on a new nursing identity, the nurse practitioner.
Like Julianne Cheek (2004), I experienced the tension of deciding how much contextual information should be included for a reader (especially an international reader) to make sense of any piece of text chosen for analysis. I had planned to include a historical chapter to put the New Zealand health and disability sector in context; however, this eventually proved to be unnecessary because contextual information is included within each of the analysis chapters. The final configuration of chapter appears in the table below.