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Chapter 8 Power, authority and discourse change In this book I have focused on academic genres to determine how communicative practices contribute to the social relations that organise disciplinary realities. We have seen that what writers essentially do in pursuing their professional goals and constructing knowledge is to engage with others, and because of this, discourses carry assumptions about knowledge, relationships and how these should be structured and negotiated. As a result, disciplines are also sites of power and authority which influence differential access to resources for creating knowledge and which define discipline approved realities . My analyses demonstrate that social context always impinges on the discourses of the academy; by extension, this also implies that there is a political dimension underlying academic practices. It should be clear from my discussion that particular genres and conventions playa privileged role in ratifying meanings and legitimising certain forms of interaction. Less obvious perhaps is the fact that these discourses also act to determine the influence of the discipline with outsiders and define its position in the wider social world. We need to understand academic knowledge then as a cultural product mediated by a wider social context, and to examine how discursive practices shape beliefs, define identities and structure relationships in ways that serve particular interests. In this chapter I first sketch some background and central concepts in approaching these issues, and then situate the authority of academic discourses, both in the wider secular community and in the webs of relations that tie individuals to their disciplines. In the final section I briefly examine the consequences that these issues have for the possibility of discursive and genre change. ANALYSING DISCOURSE AND POWER The notion of power as an organising concept in the relationship between discourse and social groups has been explored by those working within a linguistic perspective often labelled 'critical discourse analysis' (CDA), and by social theorists, particularly those emerging out of a broadly post-structuralist 155 156 Disciplinary Discourses framework. While incorporating several diverse positions, much of this work is underpinned by a view which emphasises the importance of culture and ideology, rather than economics, in reproducing capitalist social relations. CDA includes a diverse body of work which essentially highlights the role of power relations in social institutions as ideologically shaping how language is used in them. Discourse is a form of social practice, implying a dialectical relationship between a particular event and the institutions and social structures within which it occurs (e.g. Fairclough, 1992, 1995; Wodak, 1996). A number of writers in this area therefore follow Giddens' (1987) concept of structuration and regard discourse as shaped by situations and also constituting them, so the languages of the academy work as social practices to reproduce and transform the identities and relationships of the disciplines. This has important ideological consequences as discourses can reproduce unequal power relations through the ways in which things and people are represented and positioned (Kress, 1989; van Dijk, 1997). A number of eminent social theorists also contribute towards establishing this link between language and power. In particular, post-structuralism rejects a representational view of language and sees language use as inherently involving domination, referring to different ways of structuring knowledge and social practice. Not only are all our perceptions and understandings filtered through the medium of language, but the way in which this works serves the purposes of regulation and control. The idea that language can be used to represent things outside itself is essentially ideological, and academic discourses are the leading exponents of this ideology. Bakhtin (1981: 289), for example, argues that genres are inherently ideological and imbued with the value judgements of particular professions and social elites, and Bourdieu (1991) links social power to the ability to employ institutional discourses expertly. In addition, postmodern discourse theorists such as Laclau, Mouffe and Zizek (Torfing, 1999) also give a primary role to discourse, insisting on its role of shaping social relations. Like post-structuralism, this work also moves beyond constructionist perspectives in seeking to marry post-structuralism with post-Marxism, interweaving the semantic aspect of language with the pragmatic aspects of action. Once more, social interaction can only be understood in terms of its discursive context, which is seen as constituting a coherent framework for what can be said and done, bridging the distinction between thought and reality. Discourse here, then, is taken to influence the cognitive scripts, categories and rationalities that are central to any kind of action; in its ideological role it conceals the contingent...

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