ABSTRACT
Along with what came to be known as the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences, workplace research has drawn on several research approaches from the field of linguistics, a prominent one among which is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA is a research orientation that aims at tackling pressing problems by analyzing the discourses that create and recreate those pressing problems. Workplace researchers are naturally drawn to CDA because a significant portion of the most pressing problems in today's societies is directly or indirectly related to the role of workplaces. Beyond the offered basic definition, however, workplace researchers have understood and appropriated CDA in various ways, and lack of critical reflection upon this variance has led to a great deal of confusion and inconsistency in the literature. As a result, some scholars have called for increased methodological rigor and disciplined use of vocabulary in the studies that employ CDA. Other scholars have criticized these calls by arguing that strict methodological protocols hinder the capacity of CDA to be formulated in contingent ways for addressing different sorts of problems. The following chapter introduces a middle-ground perspective that clearly articulates what CDA is and when and how a workplace researcher can employ it. Moreover, it also highlights the methodological elasticity of CDA in practice. Accordingly, the chapter offers a generic process model for CDA and highlights how this model accommodates the methodological elasticity of CDA.
