Doing discourse research: An introduction for social scientists gives an introduction to the basic principles and approaches of discourse research and provides practical research strategies and frameworks for doing discourse analysis in the social sciences. This book also covers the general research process in social sciences, that is, developing a research question, selecting data, analyzing it, and presenting the results.

The book consists of seven chapters. The first six chapters explain the methodological procedure of investigating discourse from a sociology of knowledge perspective. Chapter 1 describes the current relevance of discourse research. Chapter 2 introduces various approaches in discourse research, and chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 describe the research process and are devoted to interpreting and presenting the results of detailed analyses. The last chapter emphasizes that methodologies for doing discourse analysis in the social sciences should be understood as proposals and not as prescriptions or obstacles to a researcher's own creativity. It concludes that a social scientist should develop appropriate descriptions of the roles of social actors in discourses, acknowledge the social-historical contexts of discourses, and consider results in relation to other theoretical and research perspectives.

Several themes thread through this book. First, Keller explores a tendency towards the ‘sociologizing of discourse research’ (p. 1), that is, the expansion of discourse research within linguistics towards a better integration with the social sciences, including an increasing interest in the analysis of audio-visual or multimodal data. Second, the author analyzes discourse in terms of knowledge shared between subjects. Keller cites Michel Foucault to emphasize the background of interpretive social research, in order to go beyond what is perceived as a microsociological limitation to the ephemeral, the local, and the multiple (Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse: Grundlegung eines Forschungsprogramms, 2005). The focus is on stocks of collective knowledge on a societal level, putting the actor in the background. While turning away from the linguistic and practical dimensions of discourse, interpretive coding practices are mobilized against the background of Foucault's posthumanist epistemology. Third, the book proposes that qualitative methods adapted to the complexity of discourse should consist of more than textual analysis. Previous work on discourse often developed from linguistics where the focus of study was on the direct influence of linguistic forms, in particular texts, on social processes. There is now an inclusion of the interaction of multiple sign modalities, such as visual, verbal, and media—the idea being that intersubjectively shared knowledge is inseparable and is socially situated, cognitively connected, and communicatively explored.

All in all, this is a book that certainly contributes to an understanding how to do discourse research in social science. It is a thought-provoking book, as well as a contribution to the extension of discourse analytic methods in social science. It is sure to be of interest to both students and scholars of linguistics, politics, education, sociology, media, and culture studies, and other research fields in the social sciences.