What’s cooking in organizational discourse studies? A response to Alvesson and Kärreman

Abstract

While Alvesson and Kärreman’s (2000) ‘Varieties of Discourse’ essay was an important and oft-cited marker in the field of organizational discourse studies, I argue in this response that their rather gloomy, even curmudgeonly, updated reading of the field is not only misplaced but also rooted in their own reductionist conception of discourse — a charge that they themselves level against contemporary organizational discourse research. As a communication scholar who makes his interdisciplinary home in the area of organizational communication/organization studies, I argue that much of Alvesson and Kärreman’s critique has its origin in a rather anemic, even wrongheaded, reading of the ‘linguistic turn’ — a reading that limits the generative and analytic possibilities of post-linguistic turn organizational discourse studies.