Interviewing academic elites: a discourse analysis of shifting power relations

2020 ◽  
pp. 146879412092420
Author(s):  
Kaushalya Perera

In interviews with privileged individuals such as academics, power relations become particularly salient and explicit. Investigating how shifts in power relations are manifested in the interview allows us to understand the workings of power in academia as well as in the research process. This article presents a close analysis of selected segments of interviews with academics in elite positions to illustrate this. Comparisons between collaborative and non-cooperative interaction in the interview show interactional features that characterise such dynamics. By providing a reflexive and detailed analysis of interview episodes that characterise both cooperation and a refusal to cooperate, the article illustrates the significance of understanding discursive and contextual factors that are relevant to the management of interviews.

Pragmatics ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Breeze

This article briefly reviews the rise of Critical Discourse Analysis and teases out a detailed analysis of the various critiques that have been levelled at CDA and its practitioners over the last twenty years, both by scholars working within the “critical” paradigm and by other critics. A range of criticisms are discussed which target the underlying premises, the analytical methodology and the disputed areas of reader response and the integration of contextual factors. Controversial issues such as the predominantly negative focus of much CDA scholarship, and the status of CDA as an emergent “intellectual orthodoxy”, are also reviewed. The conclusions offer a summary of the principal criticisms that emerge from this overview, and suggest some ways in which these problems could be attenuated.


2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 440-447
Author(s):  
Setareh Majidi

For the past twenty to thirty years, a good part of the domain of linguistics has been occupied by what has been called discourse analysis. Whereas syntax and semantics are concerned by the sentence and the units from which the sentence is built, discourse analysis claims that interpretation cannot accounted for at the level of the sentence and that a bigger unit, such as discourse should be used to account for language interpretation. We want to show here that discourse is not, in any sense, a well defined object and that, though it is certainly necessary to analyze how a given sequence of sentences is processed and understood, the notion of discourse,  A and related notions such as coherence does not have much to say about it. We rely on epistemological considerations about the necessity of a moderate reductionism and sketch on account of linguistic interpretation which accounts for contextual factors in linguistic interpretation through the notion of utterance (vs. sentence) and a development of Sperber & Wilsons Relevance Theory.


Author(s):  
Amber Sechelski ◽  
Anthony Onwuegbuzie

The analysis of data represents the most important and difficult step in the qualitative research process. Thus, recently, a few authors have written methodological works that contain discussion of an array of qualitative data analysis approaches. Yet, despite the call of Leech and Onwuegbuzie (2007) a decade ago for qualitative researchers to analyze a given set of qualitative data in multiple ways, this practice has been largely ignored. Thus, in this article, we bolster the argument for conducting multiple data analyses. In particular, we use data stemming from an interview to demonstrate how using five qualitative data analysis approaches (e.g., constant comparison analysis, discourse analysis) helped to enhance what we refer to as analysis saturation, thereby increasing verstehen (i.e., understanding).


Author(s):  
Su Jung Um

In this article, I (re)constructed and (re)presented a dialogic inquiry among my chimeric selves engaged in a study which I conducted from 2013 to 2017 to examine teaching experiences of graduates from a social justice-oriented preservice program. I interrogated the roles of my different, disparate, and discontinuous selves in the research process – as a former teacher, a former instructor of my research participants, a researcher with particular academic and political opinions, and as a foreigner working toward a doctoral degree from/in a U.S. higher education institution. In this article, I demonstrated how my chimeric selves with conflicting desires and agendas merged and clashed in the research process. I also portrayed how my chimeric selves added layers to the complex relationship between the participants and me and, accordingly, how power relations in the research were momentary and uncontrollably shifting.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamires Regina Zortéa ◽  
Cláudia Herte de Moraes

O artigo estuda as relações de poder entre professores e alunos no episódio Presidente por Acidente do seriado Os Simpsons. O objetivo foi analisar os discursos dos personagens do desenho e foi empregada a perspectiva teórico-metodológica Análise de Discurso. Como resultado é possível perceber que não foram encontradas tantas marcas discursivas de mando e obrigação quanto de controle e persuasão. Palavras-Chave: Desenho animado; Os Simpsons; Poder; Análise de Discurso; Formações Discursivas. Relaciones de poder entre profesores y alumnos: un análisis del discurso del episodio Presidente por Accidente de Los SimpsonsResumen: El artículo presenta el estudio de las relaciones de poder entre profesores y alumnos en el episodio Presidente por Accidente de la serie Los Simpsons. Se analizaron los discursos de los personajes y empleada la perspectiva teórico-metodológica Análisis de Discurso. Como resultado, es posible percibir que las marcas discursivas de control y persuasión fueron más recurrentes que de mando y obligación.Palabras clave: Dibujos animados; Los Simpsons; De potencia; Análisis del Discurso; Formaciones discursivas. Power relations between teachers and students: an analysis of the speech of the President for Accident of The SimpsonsAbstract: The article presents the study of the power relations between teachers and students in the episode President Accident of the series The Simpsons. We analyzed the discourses of the characters and employed the theoretical-methodological perspective Discourse Analysis. As a result, it is possible to perceive that the discursive marks of control and persuasion were more recurrent than of command and obligation.Keywords: Cartoons; The Simpsons; Power; Discourse Analysis; Discursive formations.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 470-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Sohl

Intimacy, shared experiences and evening out the power relations between researcher and the participants play an important role in feminist methodology. However, as highlighted in previous research on studying ‘up’, such methods might not be appropriate when studying privileged groups. Therefore, studying privileged women challenges fundamental assumptions in feminist methodology. When researching privileged women, the assumption that the researcher is almost always in a superior position within the research process becomes more complicated. The article seeks to contribute to the feminist methodological literature on how to study privileged groups by exploring how class, gender and whiteness are produced in three fieldwork situations with women who hold privileges in a postcolonial and capitalist landscape. Drawing on interviews and participant observations with white Swedish migrant women, the article argues that researchers need to turn the problems, fears and feelings of being uncomfortable into important data, in order to study privileged groups of women.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jenna Kammer

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Technology in universities is constantly changing. Universities often use models of shared governance to make decisions about what these changes should be. However, existing relations of power may play a role in the discourse created during events of technological change. This study looks at power embedded in discussions about technology. It investigates power relations as evident in the discourse created by several public, land-grant universities who participated in selecting a new learning management system (LMS) for the university. Using critical discourse analysis, language from websites, correspondence, open forums and vendor meetings are analyzed from four different land-grant universities for evidence of existing power relations. Keywords: Technological change, shared governance, power relations, critical discourse analysis, learning management system


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 160940692096381
Author(s):  
Judith Eckert

Failure is a typical experience in research, but it is largely taboo in published studies. In recent years, however, we can observe a small yet growing body of literature on failure in qualitative research to address this gap. In this article, I contribute my experiences of failed interviews in a mixed-methods study in Germany to this body of literature and highlight some aspects of failure that have not yet received enough attention. First, in my example, it was not only one interview or a few interviews that failed; rather, it seemed that the whole study failed in design due to particular methodical decisions. Second, failed research presents an intellectual challenge, but it also produces emotional and social trouble because failed research might be attributed to a failed researcher. This may be one reason failure is so damaging for one’s well-being and so difficult to share. Nevertheless, practicing some form of “uncomfortable reflexivity” (Pillow, 2003) via qualitative, close analysis helped me navigate the research process, gain methodical insights and substantive results. Third, I share lessons that might be useful for other researchers: reading literature on failure, the search for a safe and supportive space, and analyzing failure as closely and early as possible.


Author(s):  
Majia Nadesan

In 2009, one of the most powerful executives in the world, Goldman Sach’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein, asserted that his firm was “doing God’s work.” This comment was made in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, a crisis that Goldman Sachs and other U.S. and European investment banks played important roles in creating. The comment’s audacity did not escape notice, raising eyebrows even in the mainstream news media given its historical situatedness at the tail end of the crisis. Although Blankfein’s comment was coded negatively in the cultural consciousness, it was also represented as iconic of the culture of Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe,” as referred to in the popular vernacular. Blankfein’s comment is deployed to illustrate the conceptual models and methodologies of those fields of study known as critical and cultural organizational communication research. These closely coupled but distinct fields of study will be delimited with special attention to their objects of investigation and methodological deployments using this example. Cultural and critical organizational communication represent closely coupled fields of study defined primarily by their phenomena or objects of study—organizational communications. Scholarship maps and analyzes communications to understand how organizations are constituted through communications that decide organizational policies, programs, practices, and values. Typically, organizational communications include all formal and informal signifying systems produced by members of the particular organization under investigation. Cultural approaches to organizational communication emphasize how these communications produce meaning and experience, while critical approaches address the systemic and historically sedimented power relations that are inscribed and reproduced through organizational communication signifying systems. Organizational communication scholarship from a cultural approach would ordinarily seek to represent the organizational culture primarily using ethnographic methods aimed at disclosing an organization’s employee articulations, rituals, performances, and other circulations of symbol systems in the course of workaday life. However, the challenges to accessing Goldman Sach’s hallow grounds might defeat even the most intrepid ethnographer. Lacking direct access to the day-to-day practices and experiences of investment bankers, challenges of access to work-a-day spaces have encouraged researchers to adopt rhetorical and/or discourse analytical methods to understand the culture as represented in available cultural texts, such as internal communications, press announcements, available corporate policies, shareholder reports, and so on. Ethnographies of communication and rhetorical/discourse analysis together represent the primary nonfunctionalist methodologies commonly used to study how organizational meanings are produced, disseminated, and transformed. Across disciplines, organizational cultural analysis, particularly when pursued ethnographically, is typically rooted in an interpretive tradition known as verstehen, which understands meaning as agentively produced through a temporally emergent fusion of subjective horizons. Culture is therefore regarded as emergent and is believed to be actively constructed by its interlocutors, who are afforded great agency within the tradition of verstehen. The emergent aspects of culture are fertile and seed subcultures that produce novel cultural performances as members delineate symbolic boundaries. Power is regarded by this tradition as largely visible to the everyday interpretive gaze, although admittedly fixed in institutions by rules, roles, and norms. The relatively visible character of institutional power hierarchies is believed to beget open conflict when disagreement exists over the legitimacy of power relations. Power is believed to circulate visibly and is thus subject to re-negotiation. This emergent and negotiated social ontology encourages researchers to adopt a pluralist view of power and a more relativistic approach to evaluating the social implications of specific organizational cultures. However, the Blankfein example raises complex moral questions about organizational cultures. Does everyone at Goldman Sachs really think they are doing God’s work? If they do, what does that actually mean, and is it a good thing for society given the firm’s demonstrable appetite for risk? More deeply, what are the conditions of possibility for the CEO of one of the world’s most powerful organizations saying that his firm is pursuing God’s work? Critical organizational communication adopts the methods of verstehen, in addition to methods from other critical traditions, but interjects ethical interrogation of systemic inequities in access to power and resources that are found across many social institutions and are deeply embedded historically. For example, a critical scholar might interrogate whether Goldman Sach’s cultural exceptionalism is found across the financial sector’s elite organizations and then seek to explore the roots of this exceptionalism in historical event and power trajectories. The critical scholar might address the systemic effects of a risk-seeking culture that is rooted in the collective belief it is doing God’s work. Critical organizational communication research seeks to understand how organizational communications naturalize or reify particular organizational interests, elevating them above the interests of other stakeholders who are consequently denied equitable opportunities for agency. Cultural and critical organizational communication studies have prioritized various discourse-based methodologies over the last 20 or so years. The challenges with ethnographic access may have helped drive this shift, which has been decried by those who see discourse analysis as too disconnected from the daily performances and meaning-makings of organizational members. However, the primary challenge facing these fields of study is the one long recognized as the “container metaphor” (Smith & Turner, 1995). The study of organizational communication too often represents its field of study as a self-contained syntagm—a closed signifying system—that too narrowly delimits boundaries of investigation to communications produced in and by particular organizational members with less examination of the material and symbolic embeddedness of those organizational communications within a wider social milieu of networked systems and historically embedded social structures. In essence, organizational communication has struggled to embed its observations of discrete communications/practices within more encompassing and/or networked social systems and structures.


Perception ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirley Fisher

The experiment was designed to investigate the effects of 2 s, 80 dB noise bursts on a five-choice serial response task, using ‘close’ analysis of data. A localised effect of noise burst onset was reported. This effect was confined to the distribution of ‘first responses’, following noise burst onset but not ‘offset’, and occurred on only a proportion of trials. Detailed analysis of the occurrence of the brief delays suggested that there was no systematic occurrence, that the information processing stage of the on-going serial response might be important, and, finally, that ‘distraction’ and not ‘paralysis’ provided a better description of the mechanism of the effect.


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