Discourse in late modernity purports to demonstrate the significance of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), principally a European disciplinary formation, for constructionist social theory across disciplines and social settings, and to argue for the specific importance of CDA within a broader sociology of modernity. The book is principally a work of theory-building and exemplification, meant for a broad scholarly audience. Unfortunately, however, scholars outside the CDA community will be frustrated by the book's dense and sometimes confused use of undefined technical terms, as well as by the very thin analyses of the volume's few empirical examples of complex theoretical points. Terms such as “discourse,” “structure,” and “text” are used in diverse ways, but often without apparent concern for the conflicting traditions in which they are central concepts. The book also politicizes questions of social power in ways that may alienate many readers who do not share the authors' Eurocentric politics. Finally, the writing in this volume suffers from needlessly dense and complex prose syntax. These rhetorical problems are not as minor as they may sound, for they disguise – and, thereby, ironically reveal – more substantial flaws in the core arguments of the volume.

This book attempts to ground CDA in a broader social scientific theoretical context, at the intersection of what the authors dichotomize as “structuralist” and “intepretivist” traditions. It aims to show how CDA approaches to discourse transcend this purported opposition. But this argument is curiously hermetic. The authors virtually ignore the rich array of competing discourse-centered traditions of thought that have grappled with both the discursive character of modernity and the resolution of competing paradigms of social explanation. I refer, in particular, to linguistic anthropology, semiotics, sociolinguistics, and performance-oriented folklore studies. Also relatively neglected here are the many advanced approaches to discourse in modernity that have developed under the rubrics of (popular) cultural studies and media studies. Hence, we are in an intellectual universe consisting only of general theories of modernity and CDA, which causes the book to reinvent problems addressed quite powerfully in adjacent disciplines of discourse analysis, and to ignore other problems raised in those adjacent disciplines (most problematically, issues of orality and literacy, socialization, and subject-formation).

The volume begins by limning the boundaries of the “critical social science” it aims to advance entirely within poststructuralist and constructionist terms. It moves next to theorizing the idea of “discourse” as the interactive production of “texts.” Readers familiar with the principal conversations in American sociolinguistic disciplines since the 1970s will feel the absence of reference to these conversations most acutely in this chapter. A middle chapter attempts to describe broadly the analytic and explanatory concepts deployed in CDA, and contains the fullest empirical example in the book. This example is nonetheless inadequate to the task of differentiating CDA from other approaches as an analytic methodology, at least for a reader not already familiar with the richer examples of CDA as an applied discipline.

The second half of the book is mostly taken up with a series of summary explications of general theories of modernity. Giddens, Habermas, Harvey, Lacalau and Mouffe, Bourdieu, and (Basil) Bernstein receive top billing; Foucault, Lyotard, Althusser, Jameson, Haraway, and Derrida appear in supporting roles. (The last turns in a cameo as a “postmodern discourse theorist,” which is indicative of the level of theoretical reductionism this approach to theoretical positioning sometimes employs, since very few acolytes of Derridean theory would accept such a label.) At a basic level, the book's main value may be the telegraphic summaries it provides of such a large number of complex paradigmatic accounts of the general character of modern social formations. Unfortunately, the summaries are frequently so telegraphic as to be misleading or interchangeable.

The point of this extended exercise in positioning is to demonstrate that there is a place for a rigorous practice of discourse analysis at the intersection of these theoretical accounts of modernity – that social theory and discourse analysis stand properly in a dialectical relationship. The point is quite valid. This is especially so because there is general agreement among the theorists discussed here that “modernity” represents a distinctive epoch in the history of discourse, and as such necessitates a specifically “modern” theorization of discourse (whether CDA fulfills this need is another matter) with an emphasis on mediation, contestation over the public sphere, and the dominance of instrumental reason. Specifically, discourse is described here as a social practice, dialectically related to other forms of social practice in modernity. The term “practice” is meant to situate CDA at the intersection of structuralist and poststructuralist accounts according to which the form and content of discourse are determined by the hegemonic character of modernity, and it is used to organize the theoretical framework offered here into three “levels” of abstraction.

In invoking discourse as a species of “practice,” the authors set themselves the complex and challenging task of theorizing social conduct “beyond” discourse but within particular institutional contexts. Bourdieu and Bernstein are cited primarily to characterize the “middle-level” problematic of the localized organization of social practices (including discursive practices) into texts, fields, and genres, and hybrids thereof. The view offered here of Bernstein's work – as a more flexible and interaction-sensitive perspective than Bourdieu's on the stratification of discursive practice – is perhaps the most useful aspect of this book for sociolinguists accustomed to thinking of Bernstein's work primarily as a contribution to critical studies of education.

Giddens, Habermas, and Harvey provide the main “macro-level” accounts of the broad limits on and possibilities for social organization and discursive mediation invoked by the term “modernity.” At the other extreme, Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics is introduced to resolve “micro-level” questions relevant to the analysis of actual texts (though it is only one of many such micro-analytic approaches, and one wishes the authors had surveyed the terrain of formal and semiotic approaches to grammar as broadly as they survey social theory). Practice theory mediates between “modernity” and “discourse” as objects of analysis. This is a useful and interesting way of conceptualizing the place of discourse analysis in the sociology of modernity, but it is by no means as transparent as this volume makes it seem. One can imagine connecting Halliday's and Harvey's work through Bernstein's, for example, in very interesting ways. But such a connection is neither exemplified nor juxtaposed with other possible mediations. And it is not clear why CDA, as these authors see it, interconnects these “levels” of theoretical conception (macro theories of the modern, micro theories of discursive form, and “middle-level” theories of the organization of practice) in ways that make it a uniquely powerful paradigmatic approach to modern discourse.

A sustained example would help. But despite the argument the authors frequently advance for a rigorous textual analysis to operationalize the proposed dialectic of sociological and linguistic models, the principal lacuna here is the nearly complete absence of any concrete, extended examples of the analytic practice being advocated, even in the form of citations. Of the minimal examples, almost all are sketchy “reanalyses” of low-quality data drawn from other scholars' work, and almost all are intended to illustrate very particular points (and to indict American culture) rather than to demonstrate the general importance or utility of CDA. But none of these analyses is contextualized richly enough or pursued in sufficient detail to warrant the grand claims for CDA as the “critical” synthesis of social theory and discourse analysis to which all theoretical roads lead. The authors frequently assert that “discourse” is broader than verbal language, textuality, and the emergent rules and codes governing register, style, and interactional dynamics; however, there is almost no consideration of differences in communicative modality, let alone of such aspects of discourse as gesture, paralinguistic form, or poetics. The authors frequently invoke vaguely sinister (“totalitarian”) forces operating through discourse, for the most part represented by somewhat facile references to sexism, corporate culture, and the instrumental colonization of domestic and public life, as if these were uniform across modern social formations. At no point, however, do we encounter a systematic consideration of power or resistance (which is much fetishized here) as such, let alone an example of a characteristically “late modern” social struggle conducted on the terrain of discourse. And despite several promising references to the “semologic” (i.e., “semiotic logic”) and “lexicogrammar” of discourse, the book pays little attention to the kinds of formal dimensions of expression that most sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists would recognize as central to any approach to “discourse analysis.”

The book's title, with its invocation of “late modernity,” suggests some consideration of the fate of orality, the status of discursive agency, new structures of difference, new vectors of oppression and resistance, and new technologies of mediation, but such ideas receive little attention here. The usual postmodern tropes – the fragmented subject, the aestheticization of politics, the play of simulations, the dissolution of the public sphere, disembodied networks of semiosis, the triumph of difference over universalism – appear here, but without coherent applications. The figures such tropes seem to have replaced within European Marxist and Social Democratic thought – culture, the intending subject, ideology as the terrain of social conflict, actual interpersonal interaction, locality, and practical reason – are also absent, and sorely missed. (Raymond Williams, for example, addressed many of the issues on display here with much more subtlety 30 years ago.) “Modernity” appears here to be an undifferentiated phenomenon. It is familiar to the point of banality (hence there is no need to place the book's few examples in sociologically precise contexts); yet it is impervious to critical interrogation by ordinary speaking subjects (hence there is no need to ask how discourse might be related to cognition, consciousness, or experience). These are flaws that beset several major traditions of sociolinguistic theory, but they become more problematic when discourse analysis is seen as a key to sociological explanation in general, not merely as a description of socially conditioned linguistic practice.

Thus, it is hard for me to recommend this volume to anyone who is not already engaged in the project of institutionalizing CDA. This book is, at best, a murky window through which the project of CDA appears only in outline, and as such it is hard to tell how it differs from other, related projects. For those who already identify their work as belonging to the CDA enterprise and seeking paths through a broader social scientific landscape, this book offers an equally clouded view of the theoretical terrain beyond. Moreover, the volume's style, rhetoric, and organization only add to and amplify the overall lack of clarity and direction. There are insights of value in this volume. They are simply overmatched by the book's several flaws.