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British Journal of Social Psychology (2012), 51, 471477


C 2011 The British Psychological Society

The
British
Psychological
Society
www.wileyonlinelibrary.com

Discursive social psychology now

Ian Parker
Discourse Unit, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
This paper reviews the progress of discourse-analytic approaches in social psychology
from the late 1980s to the present day, with a particular focus on the way conceptual
and methodological contributions from within the Discourse and Rhetoric Group at
Loughborough University have negotiated a positive role for innovative studies of
language in the discipline of psychology. Social psychology has become a key site for
the accumulation of a series of empirical studies that have seen the flourishing of a
distinctive form of discursive social psychology that has succeeded in moving from the
margins of the discipline to a more accepted position. The paper traces this trajectory
of discourse analysis from the limits to the centre of social psychology attending to five
features that now characterise its contribution to psychology; an emphasis on everyday
conversation, a concern with interpersonal interaction, explication of formal sequences;
an insistence on empirical claims; and fidelity to the ethos of its host discipline. The
paper concludes with some comments on the wider context of this new approach inside
psychology today.

Many undergraduate students of psychology in Britain will, at some point in their degree
course, encounter discourse analysis, and many of those who do not will find, if they
take postgraduate degrees at another university, that they should have done. There
are still, of course, higher education institutions that have managed to avoid teaching
discourse-analytic approaches, and all the more so in other countries where it is easier
to dismiss this kind of work on the basis that it is one of the peculiarities of British social
psychology. The local and contained success of what has now become a distinctive
discursive social psychology is a feature of a host discipline psychology that is deeply
divided over what its objects of study are and how one should go about studying them.
Psychology is a diverse discipline that was, in its early years, characterized only by
some measure of agreement over the methods it should adopt (Rose, 1985), but in the
last 25 years even that consensus has been fractured, and a proliferation of qualitative
approaches has come to co-exist with the still dominant positivist mainstream (Harre,
2004). The multiplication of different specialist fields of psychology, of which social
psychology is one of most longstanding, also facilitates this coexistence. Acceptance by
the discipline, and the terms on which newcomers are deemed welcome, is conditional
and partial. New approaches have had to show their worth.

Correspondence should be addressed to Ian Parker, Discourse Unit, Department of Psychology, Manchester Metropolitan
University, Gaskell Campus, Hathersage Road, Manchester M13 0JA, UK (e-mail: I.A.Parker@mmu.ac.uk).

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8309.2011.02046.x

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Ian Parker

Paradigm revolution
It is against this background, a particular set of hurdles faced by discourse analysis,
that we should recognize the achievement of the Discourse and Rhetoric Group at
Loughborough University. It has, indeed, been a difficult 25- year journey (marked by
this special issue of a reputable journal published by the British Psychological Society)
for the work of this group into the discipline. It is important to remember that discourse
analysis was forged during the attempts in the 1970s and 1980s to bring about a paradigm
revolution, to shift the terms of debate in psychology from an old positivist paradigm
characterized by an abstracted and alienating specialist language to describe behaviour
to a new paradigm that would entail what was then called a turn to language (Harre &
Secord, 1972). The turn to discourse in those days was also animated by the critique of
the old paradigm; psychology rarely included itself in the phenomena it described and
preferred to study those outside the discipline assumed not to think like psychologists;
it reduced explanation to its own preferred level down from social-historical processes
and up from physiological functions; it promoted an abstracted model of behavioural and
cognitive mechanisms operating in accordance with the operational procedures used to
study them; it pretended to merely describe while surreptitiously offering interpretations
that presupposed a correct understanding of behaviour; and it subscribed to an ostensibly
neutral objective description that obscured the personal, institutional, and political stakes
in formulating research questions as if they were psychological questions.
A number of those drawn to discourse analysis were already confronting a discipline
that was, as a result of a protracted historical process of composition and institutionalization as part of a wider psy complex that developed alongside and as helpmeet
to capitalism, engineered to delegitimize and marginalize those who threatened it. In
different ways, the early discourse analysts threw into question the dividing practices that
constituted an inside and outside of psychology as such. Those drawing on the sociology
of scientific knowledge were showing that the categories sedimented in the institutional
practice of science were maintained and questioned as commonsensical resources, and
so this required a reflexive engagement of the researcher with those categories rather
than an abstracted distance from them (Mulkay, Potter, & Yearley, 1983). Those with a
background in feminist research tactically mobilized Q-methodological studies alongside
a first tentative study of discourses in participant accounts to show how dominant notions
of sexuality were deployed and questioned, and so how everyday psychological notions
could also be questioned (e.g., Kitzinger, 1987). Those working on representations
of race and racism showed how patterns of talk operated as repertoires that were
embedded in hegemonic representations of society and psychology, and how such
apparently abstract principles were suffused with ideology (e.g., Wetherell & Potter,
1992). Those studying fascism had shown how psychology as a discipline was implicated
in a history of segregation and persecution, and so how scientific truth was mobilized
rhetorically by the discipline with disastrous consequences (Billig, 1978).
In different ways, the political impulse of this early discursive work was to question
psychology, and this connected with a current of research at Loughborough University
that was already unravelling mainstream disciplinary concerns with cognition and
memory (e.g., Edwards & Middleton, 1986). This early discursive work was thus either
implicitly or explicitly non-psychological, or could too-easily be marginalized by the
discipline as being effectively anti-psychological. The 25 years from the founding of the
Discourse and Rhetoric Group in the late 1980s saw a gradual process, perhaps not
even intentionally manufactured by its protagonists, by which discursive research was
reconfigured as part of the field of social psychology and would be seen as acceptable to

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psychology as a host discipline. Five features of this process in the DARG research can
be noted.
Everyday conversation
Discourse analysis in and around the Loughborough group has shifted emphasis from
evidently crafted texts (popular fiction, scientific reports, and media reports, for
example) to everyday conversation, or what is sometimes referred to as naturally
occurring conversation (Antaki, 1994). The point has been well made that even the
staple diet of interview material in qualitative research carried out in psychology
departments is moulded by the particular shape of the interaction (Potter & Hepburn,
2005). An interviewer guides the conversation, organizing the agenda so that certain
issues are topicalized, and other concerns then operate as background resources for the
speakers; the interviewee then orients their responses in such a way as to confirm or
refuse this agenda. Detailed analysis of interviews has shown how this discursive frame
positions interviewer and interviewee in such a way as to render the interaction into
another specific kind of crafted text. Such analysis of enclosed interaction around the
agenda of the social researcher has also been usefully applied to focus groups and
has unsettled the assumption that it is possible to use these groups to discover what
participants are really thinking (Puchta & Potter, 2002).
This work extends, of course, the argument made in some of the earlier arguments
for discourse in social psychology that attitudes are tailored to meet the demands
of different audiences, they are embedded in interpretive repertoires rather than
expressing what lies inside the speakers head (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). The shift
of emphasis to everyday conversation treated as a domain of talk that is less artificial than
written text or than rehearsed speech designed to meet expectations of a researcher has
gathered more support as new researchers have joined the group bringing their own
interest in everyday explanation (Antaki, 1988). As a consequence, discursive social
psychology entering the mainstream has been refocused, away from what the discipline
prescribes and once again towards the meaning-making activity of those outside the
discipline.
Interpersonal interaction
The argument for a shift of emphasis to everyday conversation intersects with an
attention to interpersonal interaction, and so an attention to this particular scale of
interaction and the everyday are mutually reinforcing. There is an important argument
here mobilized from (among other places) ethnomethodology, which has been a sociological source for discourse analysis in psychology running alongside, and sometimes
in tension with, conversation analysis (Garfinkel, 1967; Sacks, 1992). Practitioners of
ethnomethodology and conversation analysis would contest the convenient label microsociology to describe their work in their host discipline, for if everyday meaningmaking is the stuff of social life or even (to borrow from another micro-sociologist)
the interaction order (Goffman, 1983), then it does not make sense to refer to what
goes on here as any more micro or less macro than that which other sociologists
describe; the society that is referred to in traditional research relies on a reification of
social categories employed in everyday talk between people.
This argument facilitates a reversal of an apparent paradox that sociological social
psychology (the micro-sociology now operating as a conceptual and methodological
resource for discourse analysis) was less social than psychological social psychology

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Ian Parker

(Farr, 1978). That latter sub-discipline included studies of group processes and, in the
hands of some of those who were to become leading figures in the Loughborough group,
studies of ideology and the politics of psychological research (Billig, 1976). The current of
research that continues in this vein now accompanies, as a counterbalance (as an enabling
dilemmatic force, as it were), the majority of the studies produced from within the
DARG. Those studies micro-sociologically inspired and now at home in psychology
are then able to proceed with close examination of interpersonal interaction that brackets
out a concern with broader social processes. They have succeeded in bracketing out
what were always seen as distractions from good psychological research in psychological
social psychology that had strayed beyond the remit of the discipline.

Formal sequences
The academic credentials of DARG-based research have been increasingly warranted
through the explication of talk in terms of formal sequences of interaction. This enables
a distance to be taken from what might be seen as the overly phenomenological
stance of ethnomethodology, for an attention to and respect for the meaning-making
methodology of everyday folk in that tradition of work disturbs the taken-for-granted
assumption in sociology and psychology that another distinctive explanation should be
provided for what is going on by the researcher. It also means that over the years a much
more explicit alliance has been struck with conversation analysis, and this resource
has been mobilized to great effect to insist upon the analysis element of the original
term discourse analysis (Antaki, Billig, Edwards, & Potter 2003). A detailed reading of
transcript that narrows down the focus of inquiry on to the minutiae of interaction is
then also embedded in a distinctive scientific vocabulary, or something approaching
the form of scientific vocabulary (which will suffice for administrative and assessment
purposes for most psychologists).
Apart from providing justification for the claim to be really conducting an analysis,
the consequences of this elaboration of an analytic vocabulary pre-sequencing,
adjacency pairs, repair organization, and so forth are threefold. First, it delimits a
specific domain of study; like other specialist vocabularies in academic research, it helps
the analyst stay focused on their own objects of study (here the domain of interpersonal
interaction in everyday conversation). Second, it permits a reframing of other adjacent
phenomena in terms already defined within this vocabulary; an expansion of the field
of work is then possible, encompassing, for example, displays of affect traditionally
assumed to be merely para-linguistic (Hepburn & Wiggins, 2007) or conceptual reframing
of existing theoretical systems in psychology (Billig, 1999). Third, it allows for the
development of alternative models of a Discursive Action Model, for example
(Edwards & Potter, 1993) and this serves as further evidence that researchers in
this sub-field are participating in what colleagues in psychology take to be the proper
investigative activity of researchers in the discipline.

Empirical claims
Discursive social psychology elaborated in and around the DARG has managed to meet
the requirement of its host discipline that it justify its analysis empirically. This is actually
also a fourth consequence of the elaboration of a distinctive analytic vocabulary that then
becomes another feature of the process by which discourse analysis could be habilitated
in psychology as an acceptable approach. The conceptual apparatus of conversation

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analysis is, again, of use in this process, and so there has been a significant shift from
the early anticipations of a discursive approach reading literary texts (Potter, Stringer, &
Wetherell, 1984), to the loose transcription conventions employed in the introductory
texts that helped define the field (e.g., Potter & Wetherell, 1987), and then to the more
complex notation retrieved from source texts in sociology. In this sense, the geographical
location of this form of discourse analysis has some significance, for this approach that
has taken root in British social psychology has been able to meet the particular demands
of a host discipline, a form of psychology informed by the English empiricist tradition
(mistakenly so-termed, for key theorists were actually Scottish) that values what can
actually be seen by the researcher.
To meet such demands made by the local type of psychology in which it has found
a home has necessitated some careful negotiation of evidence. The impulse (in part
derived from ethnomethodology) to honour the meaning-making activity of participants
in everyday conversation has meant that, even though discursive social psychology has,
to an extent, been institutionalized as part of psychology, there is a disinclination to
engaged in the kind of hermeneutic reading that would then pretend to provide a
correct account superior to participants. However, there is a correct and incorrect
reading of text when one is using the apparatus of transcription that is at stake in
the induction of a researcher into the method. There is then, and for good political
reasons (most evident in the feminist versions of conversation analysis) perhaps, also a
deployment of this reading to show something that the participants do not themselves
immediately know (Kitzinger, 2000). This kind of reading is therefore, to an extent,
compatible with the aims of mainstream psychology.

Disciplinary fidelity
The DARG contributions have now arrived at the point when it is possible to stake a claim
to have provided something new for psychology, something new that now blossoms
under the rubric discursive psychology (e.g., Potter, 2010). The stakes of this claim
are immense, and clearly go beyond the more modest suggestion in the late 1980s that
discourse analysis could provide a different way of thinking about how social psychology
went about research. There is in the accumulated corpus of empirical studies also a
series of redefinitions of psychological topics that challenge the discipline to refashion
itself to accommodate the findings presented in journals and textbooks. As with other
attempts to redefine psychology as a discipline and to make it more congruent with
the actual behaviour and experience of people at different points in history, discursive
social psychology operates as a bridge between a sensitivity to language among nonpsychologists (if it is possible to use that term for people who are outside the discipline)
and an argument inside psychology that discourse is central to human action (at least,
that it is becoming all the more central today). In this respect, it would be possible to
argue that this discursive psychology is, at this point in time in this culture, genuinely
psychological.
At the same time, discursive social psychology can thereby participate in a discipline
that has, from the beginning, been driven by the ambition to provide an account of
human behaviour and experience that was universal (even if that meant providing a
universal account of developed psychology that not all cultures in the world had yet
arrived at). Here, it is necessary to strip out the particularities of local cultures to arrive
at a method that is transferable, and that will easily allow the translation of material
backwards and forwards across language boundaries. There has, as a result, been a shift

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Ian Parker

away from the attention to ideology in some of the early studies that would hamper
such a transferable account (e.g., Wetherell & Potter, 1992), or a redefinition of ideology
itself as the negotiation of dilemmas in talk (Billig, 1991). A strict transcription system
promises the bare bones of this method, and empirical studies in this new psychology
have made a virtue of its ability to transport transcripts and analysis around the academic
world unhindered by local contexts of language use (Nikander, 2008).

Conclusions
The achievement of discursive social psychology, the success of discourse analysis in
the DARG inside psychology, should not be underestimated. This brief review has
concentrated on the transition from discourse analysis in the 1980s, when it was
associated with politically motivated critique and was viewed by some colleagues as
being incompatible with, if not outright hostile to mainstream psychology, to a new
discursive psychology today that is able to work in partnership with the discipline.
There are institutional obstacles to a full integration of this work, and some of the
scholarship produced at Loughborough is still avowedly interdisciplinary, difficult to
be made coherent with one single line of research in the group (e.g., Billig, 2008). In
research assessment exercises, for example, it is still thought prudent to be counted in
sociology rather than psychology. However, this quiet revolution in the social sciences
(as the prospectus for this special issue put it) may have an impact outside the discipline
as well.
Psychology is not only an academic and professional practice, but it operates as a
constellation of practices, a dense network of descriptions and prescriptions for how
people behave, how they think and speak about themselves. And even beyond this psy
complex, as this constellation of practices has become known by some of its critics (e.g.,
Rose, 1985), psychology has expanded at an exponential rate and has been a globalizing
force so that speculation about self-understanding and self-improvement in one culture
are now immediately recognizable in another (Gordo & De Vos, 2010). This expansion
and mass circulation of psychology in contemporary neo-liberal capitalism calls for new
more flexible, reflexive forms of psychology. There are opportunities here for new forms
of psychology suited to the role of transmitting knowledge from inside the discipline to
the outside world and back again. Discursive approaches are well suited to this task, and
the journey of discourse analysis from the margins to the centre of the discipline is an
indication that it will be of great benefit to Western psychology.

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Received 19 April 2011