Lecture 3Institutional Discourse

Institutions are commonlyassociated with physical buildings orsettings such as schools, hospitals,media organisation, prisons orcourts of law.

An institution is seen as anestablished organisation or thebuilding housing such anorganisation.

Institutions are also linked to power. Institution is defined as “a socially legitimated expertise

together with those persons authorised to implement it”(Agar 1985: 164).

This suggests that institutions are not restricted tophysical settings and can refer to powerful groups suchas the goverment or the media.

Agar’s definition includes the concept of institutions asinvolving asymmetrical roles between institutionalrepresentatives (experts and non experts or clients whomust comply with institutional norms and objectives).

Institutional discourse (talk and writing) arose from the broad definition of institution.

Institutional discourse is defined asinvolving “role structured,institutionalised, and omnirelevantasymmetries between participants interms of such matters as differentialdistribution of knowledge, rights toknowledge, access to conversationalresources, and to participation in theinteraction.” (Drew and Heritage 1992:48)

Institutions are held together bytalk and texts both to maintainthemselves and to exclude thosewho do not belong.

The study of institutionaldiscourses sheds light on howorganisations work, how ‘lay’people and experts interact andhow knowledge and power getconstructed and circulate withinthe routines, systems andcommon sense practices of work-related settings.

Drew and Heritage sum up the features of institutionaldiscourse as

1. There is goal orientation of a conventional form. Anorientation by one of the participants to a core goal,task or activity associated with the institution.

2. Institutional interaction involves special constraintson participants as to what is seen as allowablecontributions to the business.

3. There are inferential frameworks and procedures thatare associated to specific institutional contexts.

This means that interactions in institutional settings havea very specific goal (task-oriented) and are oftenasymmetrical in their distribution of speaking rights andobligations.

People cannot contribute on an equal basis becausethey do not have equal status.

Having equal status means having the same discoursalrights and obligations such as the right to ask questions,make requests, the same obligation to comply withthese, the obligation to avoid interruption or silence.

institutional discourse covers both the objective andregulatory elements of any organised group of people,and also the wider set of ideologies and sets of relationswhich form this ruling apparatus.

Institutions can use over-arching truth/knowledgediscourse to maintain themselves and increase theirpower. All the more so since this kind of ‘truth’ masksitself and the act of its production.

We are unaware of ‘the will to truth, that prodigiousmachinery designed to exclude’ (Foucault,1981: 58).

Societies have “regimes of truth,” which are embodied indiscourse, including:o Special status for certain types of discourseo Criteria for establishing truth and falsehoodo Rewards and sanctionso Favored techniques for gaining trutho Establishment of authorities to establish truth

Truth in societies like ours has five traits:o A form of discourse, with its institutionso Constant political and economic incitemento Diffusion and consumptiono Control by a few large political and social apparatio The object of ideological struggle

There is a clearly defined hierarchical structure ininstitutional discourse.

Power is expressed by the more powerful person in theinstitutional setting.

Fairclough (1989) lists 4 devices for doing power.a. Interruptionb. Enforcing explicitnessc. Controlling topicd. Formulation/Summarising

Analysing these devices can give insights into powerasymmetries in institutional discourse.

Students take turns when the teacher directs a question. What students can say is constrained. They are limited

to giving relevant answers. What is considered relevantdepends on the teacher who defines the context andthus decides on what is discoursally relevant.

D: What’s the problem?P: since last Monday it’s a week of sore throatD: hm hmP: which turned into a cold and then a coughD: a cold you mean what? Stuffy nose?P: uh stuffy nose yeah not a chest coldD: hm hmP: uhmD: and a coughP: and a cough … which is the most irritating aspectD: okay. Uh any fever?P: not that I know of. I took it a couple of times in the beginning but haven’t felt likeD: how about your ears?P: before anything happened…I thought that my ears might have felt a little bit funny but I haven’t got

any problemsD: ok, do you have any pressure around your eyes?P: noD: ok, how do you feel?P: tired. I couldn’t sleep last nightD: because of the cough

Doctors routine exert control and authority and patientsacquiesce to their authority.

First, doctors direct encounters through the use ofquestioning, establishing relevant topics and theirdevelopment.

Second, their reactions to patient contributions validate orinvalidate responses and thereby reassert their control.

Third, they dismiss, by ignoring or redirecting, patients talk if itis not consistent with the scientific medical model upheld bythe doctor.

Finally, by controlling and interpreting information dispensedto patients, doctors influence decisions that patients have aright to make for themselves.

‘institutional’ and ‘professional’ discourse

The professional discourse is acquired by professionals asthey become teachers, doctors, human resources personneland so on.

The notion of a profession is drawn from the concept of avocation in which professed knowledge is learnt and used.

Implied in the term is some notion of autonomy or freedom asa result of acquiring a body of knowledge through rigoroustraining.

Professional discourse is a form of ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1991),a set of linguistic practices and conventionalised behaviourand values that the professional has to acquire mastery over.

‘institutional’ and ‘professional’ discourse

Institutional discourse is formed both by the widerideologies and relations of the ruling apparatus and,following Weber (1947) and the critical theoristHabermas (1979), is also characterised by rational,legitimate accounting practices which are authoritativelybacked up by a set of rules and regulations, abureaucracy (Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996) governingan institution.

‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ discourse

In institutional settings, the backstageis where professional knowledge isproduced and circulated but alsowhere staff and professional groupsdo the institutional work.

Much of the frontstage work isbetween the expert and the lay clientor applicant (as in service encountersin healthcare)

Power and asymmetry Goal-oriented encounters Gatekeeping and labelling

Power and asymmetryo Institutional discourse cannot be uncoupled from powerful

discourse, as Foucault’s studies have shown, andinstitutional relations, ideologies and categories assume ahierarchy of knowledge, status and degree of belongingwhich produce asymmetrical interactions.

o Typically major themes include:1. the degree of control over the content of talk;2. the allocation of turns;3. the special inferencing that experts have access to;4. the differential distribution of participation rights;5. the very different impact that decisions have for the

client or applicant

Goal-oriented encounters

o In comparing institutional talk to ordinary conversation, Drewand Heritage (1992: 21–4) suggest that its definingcharacteristic is that it is goal-oriented and that this, in turn,involves particular constraints on what is allowable, andspecial aspects of reasoning or inference.

o These goals may be more or less explicitly defined but theyall have some element of what Agar calls ‘diagnosis’ (Agar1985).

o For example, in emergency calls (Zimmerman 1992), theparticipants are clearly oriented to an urgent task and theinstitutional representatives’ talk is highly scripted.

Gatekeeping and labelling

o Most institutional and workplace encounters involvesome sort of labelling and sorting process where peopleare checked through an invisible gate.

o In service encounters, ‘the institutional representativeuses his/her control to fit the client into theorganisational ways of thinking about the problem’ (Agar1985: 153) and this may happen both frontstage andbackstage.

Ethnographic studies Conversation Analysis Critical Discourse Analysis

Ethnographic studies

o Some of the early ethnographies of the workplace stemfrom the tradition of the Chicago school where the focuson the observation of socially and culturally boundedworlds drew on methods of participant observation andinterviews.

o Long periods spent within institutions provided insightsnot only into how they functioned as workplaces butalso into the perspective of those who were regulatedby them,

Conversation Analysis

o the orthodox CA position is that the how oftalk-in-interaction discovered throughtechnical analysis must come before thewhy, and that the participants’ orientation towhat is happening should take priority overthe analysts’.

o The interpretation of data depends on howparticipants display their understanding ofthe interaction rather than on any outsidecontextual information.

Critical Discourse Analysiso While Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) maintains the

focus on the detailed analysis of talk and text, it takes aradically different stance from the earlier studies andfrom CA.

o Detailed linguistic analysis is integrated with criticaltheory, drawing on Habermas, Foucault and Bourdieuto understand how institutional discourse serves to bothreflect and construct unequal power relations.

New work order Superdiversity Linguistic penalty and linguistic capital Script-like performances

New work order

o the impact of new technologies and global mobility onworkplaces and institutional life is changing thelandscape of institutional discourse studies.

o The globalisation of the market and the new digitaltechnologies have created a ‘new work order’ (Gee etal. 1996) supported by the discourses of new or fastcapitalism.

Superdiversity

o Changes in the nature of work itself have occurred atmuch the same time as global flows of people havebegun to transform institutions and organisations.

o Early work on the impact of language diversity oninstitutions tended to focus on particular ethnolinguisticgroups and on clear demarcations of language use.

o Recent changes in migration and mobility have led toincreasing situations of ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec 2007)where no single ethnic group stands out but whereemployees are from many different backgrounds.

Linguistic penalty and linguistic capital

o Many studies argue that there is a ‘linguistic penalty’experienced by a minority ethnic group.

o This penalty is faced by anyone who has notdeveloped the ‘linguistic capital’ of the particularinstitutional sub-field of the job interview (Bourdieu1991)

o When there is no shared ‘socially constructedknowledge of what the interview is about’ (Gumperz1992: 303), candidates cannot cue into the specialinferences required to understand a competencyquestion such as the following: ‘right, what would youtell me is the advantage of a repetitive job?’.

Script-like performanceso As an interview is controlled almost entirely by the

interviewers who govern the interactional norms,allocation of turns and speaking roles, gatekeepers arenow drawn from minority backgrounds as well as fromthe white majority.

o The institution’s response to more diverse institutionalrepresentatives is to require a script-like interaction inwhich set questions are asked and in which only certainanswers are allowable and institutionally processable.

Script-like performanceso Ironically, such script-like performances from

gatekeepers produce an even more damaging linguisticpenalty for those who lack the linguistic capital of the jobinterview (Roberts and Campbell 2005).

o So, the interview is not only a site for individualselection and the reproduction of inequality, it is also asite for the production and maintenance of institutionaland social order.

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