ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises the applied principles of critical discourse studies (CDS) and its overlap with applied linguistics. It reconsiders the missed opportunities in critical discourse studies and allied literatures on workplace, professional, institutional and organisational discourse. The chapter briefly presents some directions – and fraught possibilities – in workplace research. A founding ideal of CDS is, of course, the desire to improve people's lives and to effect social change by feeding the critiques and insights back into the "on the ground" sites of the investigations. Many ostensibly application- or action-oriented discourse studies end with recommendations for the potential uses of their "findings" back for the "real world" contexts of their research. And if scholars are indeed undertaking these kinds of collaborations and making concrete contributions, they tend to exclude this work from their publications such is the demand for theoretical over the practical.
