This volume offers an approachable entry to the field of institutional discourse, defined by the authors as the institutional use of language in the assertion and maintenance of institutional power. Operating in a variety of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) frameworks, the four contributors to this book (Mayr, David Machin, Gill Abousnnouga, and Tony Bastow) seek to confront “the hegemonic rise of specific institutional discourses” (p. 3) in a way that illustrates practical, CDA-based methodology in use. They focus on universities, prisons, the media, and the military.
The authors draw upon a Foucauldian sense of discourse that sees language as a vector through which knowledge and power are able to regulate social relations. In this sense, strategic use of language can both represent the world in a particular way and set parameters on the ways in which a particular topic can be talked about. By looking at instances in which such discourses serve to legitimize certain institutional practices, the authors’ CDA projects attempt to reveal underlying ideologies which organize and direct institutional agendas.
Language and power is organized by the particular institution being studied, and employs a variety of multimodal, CDA-based methods of analysis for visual and textual artifacts. The authors rely heavily on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) for analytical grounding but combine this approach with a variety of other analytical tools and approaches. Fortunately, the authors have included an introduction that gives both a useful summary of CDA and its methodological assumptions, and an approachable overview of SFL and the way it is employed throughout the book. Specific methodologies are explained in great detail in each chapter, providing a valuable resource to those with minimal CDA experience.
For example, a chapter examining the ways in which discourses of personal responsibility permeate rehabilitation programs in prison (thus eliding wider systemic causes of crime) analyzes both the materials of the rehabilitation program and transcriptions of prisoners and instructors as they participate in the program. In this case, the author looks at nominalization, transitivity, modality, and lexical cohesion as they relate to the systematic construction of a particular social relationship between prison inmates and larger social/institutional structures. In another chapter, corpus linguistics is blended with a more traditional CDA approach in the examination of military speeches, looking at the repeated use of we as a means of asserting mutual obligation between speakers and audiences. In all cases, the authors “show their work,” which makes this volume as much a study in CDA methods as it is an introduction to institutional discourse.
Further underscoring its pedagogical potential, the book concludes with a “how to” section for setting up projects and conducting research within the field of institutional discourse. This final chapter, aimed primarily at students doing advanced undergraduate work, covers literature review, data collection, and data analysis, and, when combined with the methods outlined in this book, would certainly prove useful in classrooms inclined to take on the topic of institutional discourse from a CDA perspective.
