This work draws on the discipline of Discursive Psychology for a theory of language, shown to be all but absent in the organizational knowledge management literature, and a methodology for the study of discourse. Organizational knowledge sharing is selected as the topic of primary research for its accessibility to analysis, and because it is considered to be an underpinning action to new knowledge creation. The research approaches discourse as action-orientated and locally situated, as constructed and constructive, with function and consequence for speakers. Indicative research questions are concerned with the discursively accomplished phenomena of trust, risk, identity and context, how these are accomplished in rhetorical interaction and with what effect on organizationally situated knowledge sharing. Recordings of organizations’ everyday knowledge sharing meetings, as well as an online discussion forum, are analysed focusing on these four themes. Findings show them to be accomplished as speakers’ live concerns in knowledge sharing talk. It is claimed that trust, risk and identity, as contexts displayed and oriented to by speakers themselves, are tacitly and collaboratively accomplished actions, shown to be co-relational and influential to knowledge sharing scope and directions. A further claim is that the analysis of discourse for what contexts in general speakers invoke displays speakers’ orienting to trust, risk and identity. Limitations of the present study are discussed, along with speculated implications for knowledge management and future directions for research. This work aims to contribute to the field of knowledge management in three ways. First, in extending the directions that some scholars and practitioners are already indicating through focusing the interest of study on organizational discourse. Secondly, the study seeks to understand how tacit knowing, as a phenomenon invoked by speakers themselves, is accomplished and how it influences the scope and directions of knowledge sharing actions, and with what effect. Finally, it is claimed that the research provides some support for those theorists in the knowledge management field who promote the knowing how-knowing that formulation, and those who are critical of conventional knowledge management’s heavy reliance on technology to deliver its objectives.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Canberra, 2007.

This qualitative study explored the communicative strategies used by employees for discussing diversity and diversity initiatives in the workplace. The study also examined employees' definitions of diversity and the effectiveness of diversity efforts within the organization. Self-directed focus groups of employees within an organization were used to collect data. Four groups were composed of employees based on designated diversity characteristics: White male, Black female, White female, and workers over 50. This study served to bridge the gap between diversity and organizational communication literature. Thematic interpretive analysis was guided by theories of the discursive construction of prejudice and co-cultural communication. Identified strategies were cross-checked with key informants in the organization to verify validity. Finally, the study discussed implications of findings for practice and for future research. / Department of Communication Studies

This thesis presents a discursive analysis of clients’ and counsellors’ metaphorical talk in counselling sessions. Permission was granted for access to, and the research use of, existing data originally collected from the Pluralistic Therapy for Depression Clinic at the University of Strathclyde. This data took the form of audio recordings of counsellors’ and clients’ oneto- one counselling sessions. Of the data obtained, a total of thirteen counselling sessions from the therapy of three client-counsellor pairs’ were transcribed using a modified version of Jeffersonian notation. Transcriptions were then coded to distinguish occasions of metaphorical talk. Subsequently they were analysed using a discursive psychology approach which drew on conversation analytic and ethnomethodological principles. This method considered the consequentiality of metaphorical talk on the surrounding interaction, how metaphorical constructions were assembled, and what actions were performed with metaphorical talk in the situated context of the therapeutic discourse. This was followed by a critical revisiting of some of the findings. The analysis found clients’ and counsellors’ uses of metaphor within the data related to three spheres of activity. The first related to constructions of identity through metaphorical talk – in particular a) the construction of relationships by both clients and counsellors using metaphors related to familial role categories, and b) clients’ metaphorical constructions of past versus present identities. The second involved clients’ use of metaphor to do topic management and resistance. The third involved the use of metaphor as a discursive resource in the construction of shared-meaning. Following this the implications of these findings for counselling psychology practice and other psychological therapists were discussed. In particular, a greater awareness of the possible impact of metaphorical talk and claims, and reflection on their impact in both limiting and freeing what is possible in the discourse was suggested.

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a chronic and complex psychosomatic condition, characterised by a primary drive to be thin and a refusal to maintain normal body weight. Only a minority of people diagnosed with AN ever become asymptomatic and more research has been called for to address high drop-out rates and lack of engagement in AN treatment services, in particular psychotherapeutic treatment. Prior studies have generally examined this problem in terms of patient mediated variables, such as attitudes and behaviours, with little focus on contextual factors. Research that has studied therapeutic engagement in the area of AN has yet to examine psychotherapeutic treatments-in-practice. Guided by this gap in the literature this thesis examines ways in which therapists engage with adolescents diagnosed with AN in naturally occurring psychotherapeutic interactions. A secondary and concurrent focus is to look at how the therapists’ underlying theoretical models are reflected in in situ practice. The data corpus comprises twenty-four therapy sessions recorded in an eating disorders programme based in a children’s hospital. In contrast to eating disorders treatment statistics reported in the literature, the programme has a low drop-out rate, zero mortality rate and good long-term patient outcomes, making it an especially suitable setting to examine engagement. Drawing on methods from discursive psychology (DP) and conversation analysis (CA), a number of interactional practices are found which show how the key principles of engagement and neutrality are brought off, or achieved as such in turn-by-turn interaction. Central to the analysis, is the recurrent production of patients’ bodily states and conduct as delicate items. As these topics are also the primary focus of the institutional setting, the analysis shows how practices such as perspective display series and dispositional management allow delicately marked institutional tasks to be carried out. The analysis also examines how patients’ bodies and conduct are embedded in, and constituted as problematic in the interactions. Regularities, such as agentic repositioning in accounts, demonstrate the co-production of patients as psychologically compliant with treatment while physically non-compliant. This thesis contributes to work in applied CA concerning links between theoretical models and interactional practices by demonstrating naturally occurring regularities that describe key guiding principles of the eating disorders programme. It also builds on work in DP concerning examinations of the body and embodiment, by showing how patients’ physical bodies are an integrated feature of the interactions. Finally, this thesis has implications for a clinical audience in terms of extending therapists’ awareness of how engagement with patients is constituted interactionally, which also contributes to wider AN literature on ‘resistance’ to therapy.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Murdoch University, 2007. / Thesis submitted to the Division of Health Sciences. Includes bibliographical references (p. 381-431).

Yes / In recent years, constructionist methodologies such as discursive psychology (Edwards & Potter, 1992) have begun to be used in sport research. This paper provides a practical guide to applying a discursive psychological approach to sport data. It discusses the assumptions and principles of discursive psychology and outlines the stages of a discursive study from choice of data through to transcription and analysis. Finally, the paper demonstrates a discursive psychological analysis on sport data where athletes are accounting for success and failure in competition. The analysis demonstrates that for both success and failure, there is an apparent dilution of personal agency, to either maintain their modesty in the case of success or to manage blame when talking about failure. It is concluded that discursive psychology has much to offer sport research as it provides a methodology for in-depth studies of supporting interactions.

This study sets out to explore how people who took part in mass protests in Russia produce and negotiate accounts of their protest involvement in talk. Although there has been a proliferation of research on protest in Russia, especially after the first mass demonstration in December 2011, the existing literature tends to prioritise the role of structural and demographic factors in mobilising dissent. However, there has been little investigation into how protesters themselves account for protest involvement and how they make such factors relevant. In addition, no in-depth social psychological exploration of protesters’ views has been conducted in Russia to date. This thesis addresses these gaps by offering a detailed empirical investigation of autobiographical accounts produced by Russian protesters regarding the reasons and motives for taking part in active protest and the subjective interpretations of what being a protester means. Semi-structured interviews with 48 Russian participants were collected, transcribed and translated. The data were analysed within the framework of discursive social psychology (DP). The analysis focused on how particular descriptions were used by protesters in talk to justify and contest certain versions of reality, and on the social actions thereby accomplished. The analysis led to novel insights into how protesters in Russia construct the causes and motives of their dissent, negotiate problematic identity categories and manage issues revolving around accountability and blame. For example, the analysis illustrated the potentially problematic nature of defining protesters’ interests and objectives as ‘political’. That is, when asked about their political attitudes, the interviewees actively justified these as not intentional. They mobilised various discursive resources to imply that they did not intend to become interested in politics and protest, but rather experienced situations that ‘naturally’ led to the acquisition of political interest. Similarly, when talking about motives for active protest participation, protesters tended to downplay explicitly political motivations. Instead, they portrayed their actions as a logical consequence of the deteriorating situation: some participants justified their involvement in terms of duty to defend their loved ones and the country in general, while others defended the appropriateness of active resistance through invoking powerful negative emotions. Such accounts functioned to protect protesters from being seen as motivated by personal or economic concerns, and warranted active protest as the only available means to address the unjust state of affairs in the country. Furthermore, I have shown that identifying with the label of ‘opposition’ is problematic for protesters, with oppositional membership being either denied or delimited in a number of ways. For example, the analysis demonstrated how respondents accomplished denials by making claims about the activities and attributes associated with the category of ‘member of the opposition’ and by invoking the negative connotations of the very term ‘opposition’. The instances of self-ascription of opposition membership further illustrated the sensitive nature of the topic: affirmation accounts were often modified to delimit the extent and nature of membership, with it being portrayed as a logical consequence of a speaker’s views, rather than in terms of emotional or psychological basis, such as shared identity or desire to belong. Finally, my study focused on the arguments relating to the people who do not protest. Interestingly, I found that, despite routinely warranting rationality and necessity of active protest, respondents portrayed the passive members of the public as not blameworthy. The behaviour of non-protesters was justified through attributing it to various practical hindrances and to specific cultural/generational mindsets, thereby placing it outside of peoples’ control. Overall, my thesis contributes to the social psychological literature on protest, by providing a complementary model of contention through the prism of protesters’ own orientations. The study demonstrated that, for protesters in Russia, protest experiences appear to be closely linked with interpersonal and normative considerations, with dissent being manufactured as a necessary and inherently moral act aimed at protecting Russia and its people. The study thus illustrated the utility of putting people’s accounts at the forefront of the analysis and treating them as valuable in their own right. In adopting a novel methodological approach to exploring protest realities as products of interaction, this thesis created an opportunity for a better understanding of the complexities and challenges of popular protest in Russia.

Although significant growth has occurred in some areas of the grief and bereavement literature, little attention has been paid to the phenomenon of adult child loss from the perspective of parents. Simultaneously, there have been mounting challenges to the traditional grief work hypothesis, which translates 'detachment' as healthy grieving, by proponents of the 'continuing bond' model. While the notion of an ongoing connection with the deceased seems to more accurately describe the experience of bereaved parents, there has been minimal research to explore evidence for this. The intent of this qualitative study was to examine the written and spoken discourse of parents bereaved of adult children in an effort to understand the ways that language is used to give account to that experience and to discern something of the nature of the parent-adult child relationship in death. A discourse analytic approach (Potter & Wetherell, 1987) was taken in order to understand more specifically the function, structure, and variability of written and spoken accounts of bereaved parents. Discourse was collected from diverse sources, including solicited written submissions, face-to-face interviews, published writings and Internet chat between bereaved parents. The findings revealed a range of discursive devices and practices available to participants, through which they achieved reconstructions of their deceased adult children, their relationships with their children, and their experiences of parental bereavement. The most prominent result was the discovery of the use of extreme case formulations (Pomerantz, 1986) by bereaved parents. This particular discursive device had only previously been identified in contexts of conflict. Additionally, participants used categorization, detailed description, characterization, comparison, contrast, paradox, evidence-building, and metaphor as discursive strategies and devices. The social actions performed in the process included: constructing/reconstructing, convincing, remembering, evaluating, describing, and demonstrating parental investment. The discursive content ranged from talk of how special the child was, to the constancy of thoughts about the deceased child. There was also discursive evidence in support of the of 'continuing bonds' model. This study promises to inform the literature on parental bereavement as well as to widen the field of discursive psychology to now include research in grief and loss.

This thesis is an exercise in discursive psychology. The body of discourse analysed concerns the defence of rural space against New Travellers. In contrast to previous sociological and human geographical work in this area, instead of newspaper articles and Parliamentary discourse, participants' talk and texts are the starting point for the - investigation. The data corpora have been generated from a variety of sources: Focus groupd iscussionsw ith policeo fficers;i nterviewsw ith landowners(or their representatives);le tters to the editors of local newspapers;and private letters of complaint to a local council. The thesisf ocuseso n the participants's electiono f locational formulations,t he work this hast aken,a ndh ow this work partly constitutesin teractional business. The thesis makes a distinctive contribution to several different areas. This includes offering a disciplinaryc ritiqueo f how humanistg eographerasn de nvironmental psychologistsh avec onstructeda ttachmentto placea st he norm,w hilst problematising high residentiaml obility. Without takingu p a positioni n this debatet,h e thesis demonstratehso w a discursivea pproachc an offer a differentp erspectiveo n place discourse- includingt he way thatp lacei dentity / attachmenmt ight be reconceiveda nd studied. The first two analytic chapters provide a distinctive contribution to discursive psychology by bringing together, and building on, previous work around the analysis of Abstract place discourse. Chapter five demonstratesp articipants' use of location as a domain of warrant for making complaints about New Travellers. Chapter six demonstratesh ow participants used spatial descriptionst o construct New Travellers as transgressiveo r literally 'out-of-place'. The third andf inal analyticc hapter,c hapters evenp rovidesa contribution to social psychology by demonstrating citizenship in practice. The project concludes by considering these contributions and their implications, and outlining several reasons for further work on the discursive psychology of place. The thorny issues raised by a focus on place, such as realism vs relativism are also discussed.