Elgar Introduction to Organizational Discourse Analysis

Elgar Introductions to Management and Organization Theory series

Marco Berti, Nova SBE, Lisbon, Portugal

Our knowledge and understanding of organizations is both enabled and constrained by invisible relationship of power that are embedded in the ways in which we act and speak. The notion of discourse has been used by many authors to describe and study these phenomena, and this volume offers a succinct but comprehensive introduction to the vast field of critical organizational discourse analysis. Targeted at graduate and doctoral students, and at non-specialist academic who need to familiarize with the academic debate on the subject, the book harnesses the power of metaphors to describe the many faces of discourse.

‘Research on organizational discourse has indeed become one of the most fruitful and interesting areas in the field of organization and management studies, and has not only improved our understanding of how communication works, but also helps to “see” how discourses shape reality. The book introduces three “images” of discourse with the purpose of both illustrating and enabling the emergence of new knowledge and meaning: organizational discourse as a map, as organizing and as a mask. Moreover it provides a concrete exemplification of an application of organizational discourse analysis: the global institution of business education. The heuristic potential of the approach is employed to critically describe a complex inter-organizational field of practices relevant to how we “do” society through discourses.’
– Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento, Italy

“终于有一本书,探讨了深度and contours of organizational discourse in a way that is simultaneously sophisticated and accessible. Marco Berti’s achievement is to have canvassed a multitude of theoretical and methodological ways that discourse is deployed in the study of organizations, and to have distilled that into a comprehensive framework of metaphors. The result is a novel and valuable approach to organizational discourse analysis that synthesizes the field without sacrificing any of its complexity.’
– Carl Rhodes, University of Technology Sydney, Australia