Overview

Our knowledge and understanding of organizations is both enabled and constrained by an invisible relationship of power that is embedded in the ways in which we act and speak. This book offers a succinct but comprehensive introduction to the vast field of organizational discourse analysis, the approach that studies organization as a linguistic phenomenon, and offers an original approach to investigate the relationship between materiality and discourse. Three original images of discourse are employed: discourse as a map, discourse as organizing and discourse as a mask. These metaphors are used as cognitive tools to highlight different implications and perspectives on discourse. The book critically compares and contrasts various linguistic-focused approaches to the study of organizations, and proposes the use of linguistic phenomena in connection with other methodologies. One section even offers an exemplification of the proposed approach to discourse analysis, presenting a map of discursive terrain, which plays a central role in the reproduction of local organizational and management discourses. This rich and approachable introduction is targeted at graduate and doctoral students, as well as non-specialist academics who want to familiarize themselves with the organizational discourse debate.

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9781786436368

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Reviews

`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 `Finally there is a book that explores the depths 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

'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 'Finally there is a book that explores the depths 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

Author Information

Marco Berti, Nova SBE, Lisbon, Portugal

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