Language and Institutional Reality: Reply and Response
- 1 October 1987
- journal article
- other
- Published by SAGE Publications in Organization Studies
- Vol. 8 (4) , 363-373
- https://doi.org/10.1177/017084068700800405
Abstract
This paper is written in the form of a partial response to an earlier paper in Organization Studies, Clegg's 'The language of power and the power of language'. It argues that Clegg's conflation of realism with materialism, on the one hand, and relativism with idealism, on the other, leads him to neglect some very important sociological sources. In particular, the present paper attemps to rescue ethnomethodology (and to a lesser extent Foucauldian discourse analysis) from Clegg's charges. It does so by arguing for a counter-realist materialism in sociological theory. There is a partial re-analysis of Clegg's main data fragment taken from a transcript of talk on a building site.Keywords
This publication has 13 references indexed in Scilit:
- The Language of Power and the Power of LanguageOrganization Studies, 1987
- Critical and descriptive goals in discourse analysisJournal of Pragmatics, 1985
- Two Axes for the Analysis of ‘Commonsense’ and ‘Formal’ Geographical Knowledge in Classroom TalkBritish Journal of Sociology of Education, 1984
- Ethnomethodology and the Position of Relativist DiscourseJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 1981
- Order in CourtPublished by Springer Nature ,1979
- Structuring School StructureHarvard Educational Review, 1978
- The organization of turns at formal talk in the classroomLanguage in Society, 1978
- Ethnomethodology: The Re-Enchantment Industry or The Californian Way of SubjectivityPhilosophy of the Social Sciences, 1975
- On the structure of speaker–auditor interaction during speaking turnsLanguage in Society, 1974
- Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversations.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1972