Abstract
This is one of the rare ‘how to’ books that does not contain step-by-step guidance or recipe-like knowledge. It is not about a conveniently guided tour that would take you from one well-known picture point to the other, but more the kind of lonely planet tour guide you need for being well-equipped in a hands-on exploration of new terrain all by yourself. For newcomers to the field, Hardy sets out three central travel routes that allow for exploring major concepts, contributions as well as methodological aspects. For the more experienced and adventurous scholars, it is easy to navigate the book in different orders or just enjoy and dwell on the wealth of information and insight at hand.
The first tour is about foundations and central concepts in discourse analytical research on organizations. What is a discourse and how did the notion of discourse and particularly the works of Michel Foucault and Norman Fairclough influence the study of organizations? Important stops on this route are the central concepts of meaning, power, knowledge, subject positions and resistance. The following three chapters explore the basic tensions of discourses as executing power through knowledge and the creation of subject positions. Exemplifying discourse analysis’ radical processual take on power, Hardy highlights how dominance comes with constant struggle and is also bound to change. Unpacking her (and of course her different collaborators’) empirical studies on several dominant discourses in management studies – the discourses of risk, lean management, sustainability, and strategy – she carves out the differences of dominant discourses in multiple contexts and shows how the stabilization of a dominant discourse varies as ‘their dominance (or lack thereof) is contingent on the historical and local settings in which they arise’ (p. 16). Exploring particularly the relevance of discursive work, Hardy points out how dominance is manufactured in the local enactments of an organization. Further exploring her and Maguire’s analysis of the case study of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants as well as their later work scrutinizing how the risks posed by chemicals were addressed by the Canadian government, she shows how new institutions emerge through discursive struggle. Authors of texts are identified as agentic actors in this process and Hardy and her collaborator’s analysis show several discursive strategies involved. A final stop on this conceptual tour is the topic of change. Also here, it is Hardy and Maguire’s studies on the pesticide DDT that are further unpacked. Highlighting how new meanings are challenging and finally changing a dominant discourse, Hardy scrutinizes the role of text (and particularly Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring) as well as counter-narratives and highlights that change is neither straightforward nor foreseeable. Rather, it is the ‘discursive manoeuvring’ (p. 58) of several actors ‘in a variable and volatile process’ that allows change to evolve.
This first tour offers valuable insights into the richness and complexity of Hardy’s research. However, it is also a demanding trip and readers should be prepared to be overwhelmed from time to time. First of all, the research is situated in different phenomena such as strategy, sustainability, DDT/toxic substances, the AIDS crisis, refugees or older workers. Hence, every study comes with quite some backpack knowledge that the reader needs to understand first. Second, as most of the conceptual insights are presented as side trips in grey boxes, readers are required to make their own connections in order to stay on track. A demanding, but very rewarding adventure!
The second tour Hardy invites readers for is around ‘levels and issues’ of discourse analysis in organization studies. Starting from the classic division of the individual, the organizational and the field as major bus stops on this tour, the four chapters focus on individual identities, organizational identities, organizational change and, finally, organizational fields. Having introduced and at the same time critiqued this classical triptychon, Hardy is particularly attentive to how the ‘levels’ are of merely analytical nature and need to be seen as fundamentally connected. It is the analytical concept of the subject position that allows analysing the interconnectedness of individual and organizational identities as well as identities and organizing. Spreading out the insights of her and Ainsworth’s research on older workers she shows how the analysis of subject positions reveals a gendered construction of the subject position of the older worker that renders female older workers invisible. Revisiting her analysis, Hardy shows how identities are discursively constructed and how identity is continuously enacted. This exemplifies how on the ‘micro’ level of interactions power and difference are acted out. Organizational identities are explored from the backdrop of several studies on refugee domains, and it is through subject positioning that they shed light on the immense discursive struggles these organizations are in. Investigating identity work in the context of the AIDS crisis Hardy shows how new identities are being created through the discursive work of creating or discarding subject positions. Exploring the fluid construction of organizations and organizational change and how organizations are ‘an emergent property of change – a temporary pattern constituted by and shaped from micro-interactions among actors, situated in their everyday work’ (p. 93), Hardy unpacks several empirical studies in organizations (as different as an employment agency in a Canadian city, an NGO in Israel and the spinoff of a global telecommunication company) and fleshes out how the concept of meaning is crucial for understanding organizational change. Moving on to the third and last ‘level’, the level of organizational fields, Hardy exemplifies how she and her colleagues analysed how institutions are produced by dominant discourses. Coming back to her studies on HIV/AIDS and DDT, she highlights how institutions are built and also changed by texts that produce subject positions – thereby countering the agency of the ‘politically skilled actions of “exceptional” individuals’ (p. 115). Unpacking the role of agency and particularly the agency of the material environment, she suggests the notion of an ‘ecology’ instead of the more static field to highlight the ‘ad hoc, non-deterministic’ (p. 123) aspects of this change resulting from more arbitrary, yet cumulative acts.
This tour definitely helps the reader to dive into the richness of discourse analytical research. Using her own research allows Hardy to unfold the details of studies that have had a major impact on the field, have been widely cited and also discussed. The route however is cutting short on some of the highlights I would have expected on such a trip. First, as Hardy focuses mainly on her own work, the chapters are short on contextual information. Some historical and field-specific classification and contextualization could have helped here for carving out the routes to the important concepts and how discourse analytical work has gained some momentum. Second, despite the primacy of methodology in the title of the book, the methodological insights are not necessarily up front. Deeper insights into how the various studies have been conducted is merely taking place in another series of boxes that emphasize ‘empirical markers’ in each chapter. While I consider these ‘pointers’ helpful for drafting similar studies, they don’t allow to fully understand how this particular study was done. Presenting the details of so many well-conducted and rich empirical studies, I would have hoped for more insights into the often unprepared, sometimes chaotic, and most often unforeseeable bits of doing empirical work. How the material was produced and collected, how the researchers analysed the text, how insights in reading and re-reading different texts produced learning and insight and how crucial decisions have been taken throughout the projects – I would have liked to learn more about these sides of the story!
With the third and final tour in this ‘lonely planet’ guide to discursive approaches in organizations, Hardy unpacks several insider tips, thereby revealing some of the not yet well-established paths and terrains in the field. Although the identified topics are not necessarily new to the more experienced traveller, Hardy is highlighting some crucial viewpoints and debates and indicates the routes and paths that need to be developed further by future discursive studies. Stopping at the first site Hardy explores the agency of the author. While the role of the author is glorified, the role of the audience for the construction of meaning is often overlooked. Hardy suggests engaging more in-depth with the audience’s ‘consumption’ of texts and how a certain meaning can be resisted or how alternative meanings emerge. Elaborating on the role of translation in different contexts and how resistance can challenge power relations in place, texts develop agency through changing meaning. A second site is that of reflexivity. Discursive research allows one to become reflexive by problematizing reality, and by becoming self-reflexive as a researcher. The third and final site is materiality. As discursive research is focused on text and its effects, the role of materiality (beyond texts) is often neglected. Scholars need to develop concepts that help pay attention to the role of materiality in agency as well as in performativity. However, most often a binary distinction between ‘discourse’ and ‘matter’ is what comes the traveller’s way. Having said that, Hardy emphasizes discourse analysis’s need for new methodological takes in future studies to come. While the three sites are well-chosen, I am at the same time surprised that Hardy did not fully unleash her potential here. Particularly with the topic of the materiality of discourse, there is obviously more that she could have explored and presented. Hardy did not unpack the relevance of her own writing (Hardy & Thomas, 2015), the relevance of material practices (Orlikowski & Scott, 2015), nor Foucault’s notion of the dispositif (Raffnsøe, Mennicken, & Miller, 2019).
With this volume, Cynthia Hardy is opening her treasure chest. Revisiting her own work, she re-organizes her contributions to organizational research from almost three decades of engaged research and writing. The book provides several answers to the question of how discourse analytical research can be of good use in organization studies: as contributing concepts and insights as well as methodologies. It is particularly the richness of Hardy and her collaborators’ empirical studies that provides new insights into concepts and contributions and also allows for new conclusions. Scrutinizing the knowledge we have gained on organizations and organizing over this long period of time, the book provides excellent insights into the developments of the field. Just hop on the tour bus and engage with the routes Cynthia Hardy has sketched out; I promise that there are many jewels to be found!
