A N T H O N Y J.

L I D D I C O AT

emphasize the shared, collaborative, and unified nature of corporate public

discourse, at the expense of the contested terrain of discourse, rife with compet-
ing interests, conflicts, and, occasionally, resistance. This absence is somewhat
surprising given their emphasis on power and ideology.
Nevertheless, Fox & Fox drive yet another stake in the ground toward greater
legitimacy of discourse studies in organizations. They do so by providing read-
ers with clear and accessible definitions and a range of methodologies that both
supplement and complement one another. Not the least, they have also offered a
passion for the significance and relevance of discourse that supports Mike Reed’s
(2004:419) assertion that we need to “get real about organizational discourse.”
In that respect, the book is further testament that “discourse matters.” It does
things to us, with us, and for us – and our organizations.

REFERENCES
Alvesson, Mats (1985). A critical framework for organizational analysis. Organization Studies
6:117–38.
Frost, Peter (1980). Toward a radical framework for practicing organization science. Academy of
Management Review 5:501–8.
Grant, David; Hardy, Cynthia; Oswick, Cliff; & Putnam, Linda (eds.) (2004). The Sage handbook of
organizational discourse. London: Sage.
_ ; Keenoy, Tom; & Oswick, Cliff (eds.) (1998). Discourse and organization. London: Sage.
May, Steve; Cheney, George; & Roper, Juliet (2007). The debate over corporate social responsibil-
ity. New York: Oxford University Press.
_ , & Mumby, Dennis (eds.) (2004). Engaging organizational communication theory and re-
search: Multiple perspectives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Mumby, Dennis (2004). Discourse, power, and ideology: Unpacking the critical approach. In David
Grant et al. (eds.), The Sage handbook of organizational discourse, 237–58. London: Sage.
Oswick, Cliff; Keenoy, Tom; & Grant, David (1997). Managerial discourses: Words speak louder
than actions? Journal of Applied Management Studies 6:501–23.
Paine, Lynn Sharp (2003). Value shift. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Peters, Tom, & Waterman, Robert H., Jr. (1982). In search of excellence. New York: Harper & Row.
Reed, Mike (2004). Getting real about organizational discourse. In David Grant et al. (eds.), The
Sage handbook of organizational discourse, 413–20. London: Sage.
Weick, Karl (2004). A bias for conversation: Acting discursively in organizations. In David Grant
et al. (eds.), The Sage handbook of organizational discourse, 405–12. London: Sage.
(Received 18 June 2007)

Language in Society 37 (2008). Printed in the United States of America

doi:10.10170S0047404508080792
Catherine Kerbrat-Oriecchioni, Le discours en interaction. Paris: Armand
Colin. 2005. Pp. 368. Pb Y31.
Reviewed by Anthony J. Liddicoat
International Studies, University of South Australia
Magill SA 5067, Australia
Tony.Liddicoat@unisa.edu.au

This book has as its aim not to propose a new paradigm in discourse analysis
but to make the most of, or in the author’s own terms “faire fructifier,” the
596 Language in Society 37:4 (2008)
 REVIEWS

established traditions of discourse analysis. The book, however, constructs this

tradition in a particular way, as an eclectic discursive practice drawing from a
number of distinct approaches to discourse analysis, such as conversation analy-
sis, Birmingham school, Geneva school, contrastive pragmatics, Gricean max-
ims, interactional sociolinguistics, and others. . The author aims to use the
analytic approaches of various schools of discourse analysis as a way of cap-
turing a rich or in-depth interpretation of instances of interaction. The motiva-
tion for the selection of approaches is the utility of their analytic apparatuses
for describing the interaction as it takes place. This utilitarian approach to dis-
course analytic frameworks as methodological tools inevitably (and intention-
ally) removes the investigative techniques from their theoretical positioning
and context of development. At the same time, eclecticism or synchronisme
méthodologique becomes in itself a theoretical position, which argues that the
“machinery” of various approaches to discourse analysis can be disconnected
from and used independently of their original contexts and purposes, as tools
rather than as theoretical constructs. In fact, Kerbrat-Orecchioni (K-O) argues
that a multidimensional approach in which tools are separated from their
theoretical contexts is required by the very nature of discourse-in-interaction
itself: “Le discours-en-interaction est un objet complexe, comportant différents
‘niveaux’, ‘plans’ ou ‘modules’. . . . On doit donc se ‘bricoler’ une boîte à out-
ils diversifiée” (p. 22) [“Discourse in interaction is a complex object made up
of different ‘levels’, ‘plans’ or ‘modules’. . . . One must therefore cobble together
for oneself a diversified toolbox.”]
This diverse toolbox rests on the base of conversation analysis, although the
analytic approach is not directed at the same objectives as conversation analysis
is, focusing more on the creation and interpretation of meanings than on the
organization of conversational action. In this, K-O’s approach of appropriating
tools independently of theory can be seen clearly, as the distinctiveness of con-
versation analysis from other discourse analytic traditions and the difficulty of
reconciling the micro-analytic perspective with other discourse approaches has
been a commonplace of the position of conversation analysts (e.g., Schegloff
1999).
After the discussion of the analytic approach in chap. 1, the book is divided
into two main parts – conversational negotiation (chap. 2) and politeness
(chap. 3) – with a final chapter on issues relating to comparing differences in
interactions across cultures and the relationship between authentic discourse
and created literary discourse.
In the discussion of negotiation, K-O emphasizes the role of collaboration,
not inherent to negotiation but rather achieved by participants. She notes that the
starting points of negotiation, the interests that the parties bring to the inter-
action, have the potential to diverge, and in fact it is the divergence of views that
makes negotiation relevant. She then investigates the procedures used to resolve
the disagreement at the heart of the negotiation, which she sees as fundamen-
Language in Society 37:4 (2008) 597
 A N T H O N Y J. L I D D I C O AT

tally located in real time, synchronous action “dans l’interstice entre la proposi-
tion et la contre-proposition” [in the interstice between the argument and counter-
argument] (183).
K-O identifies negotiation as applying to two quite different levels, organiza-
tion and content. The organization of the interaction, which comprises language,
genre, participation frames, turns-at-talk, openings, and closings, operates at
macro, meso and micro levels. The macro level is the script or schema of nego-
tiation. It appears from K-O’s discussion that the operation of such a schema is
in some way determined by internalized procedures rather than being achieved
by the participants themselves. Here then is a key departure in K-O’s approach
from the original theoretical framework of conversation analysis (Schegloff 1986).
The content of the interaction is conceived as topic, choice of words, interpreta-
tion, opinions, and actions. Each of these is discussed with reference to exam-
ples drawn from a variety of sources, including service encounters, interviews,
conversations, and literary works.
The chapter then moves to an analysis of misunderstanding as a special case
of negotiation – that is, a case in which interpreted meanings are the basis of the
different starting points for interaction. The examples discussed in this section
can all be grouped as cases of repair (Liddicoat 2007). However, it is less clear
how they work as negotiation. For example, K-O’s first example of the inter-
actional treatment of misunderstanding goes as follows:

A: Bron ça a pas mal vieilli je trouve. [Bron has aged quite a bit, I think.]
B: Oui ça s’est bien dégradé! [Yes, it’s quite run down.]
A: Mais non je voulais dire que malgré tout l’architecture elle tenait encore la route!
[But no, what I meant was that in spite of everything the architecture is still holding up.]

In this example, there is evidence of disagreement between understandings of the

first turn-at-talk; however, this third-positioned repair shows little evidence of
negotiation in the sense of collaborative working together to reach a common
point, which has been constructed as the essential core of negotiation. What this
example shows is not an instance of negotiation, but rather an instance of the uncer-
tainties that come into being when theoretical underpinnings are subordinated to
a pragmatic approach to terminology. A similar problem exists in the next section
on negotiation of identities and relationships, where again the issue is more one
of clarifying, expressing, and creating subject positions rather than any necessary
disagreement about positioning that underlies the interaction. For example, in ser-
vice encounters, the scope for negotiating identities and relationships is quite min-
imal, and it is often uncertain exactly what is being “negotiated” in the strict sense
of the term. For example on p. 167 K-O cites a case of an interaction between a
customer and a baker in which the customer uses first tu and then vous, while the
interaction is concluded with the baker using tu instead of vous. There is clearly
something happening here in relation to the relative positioning of the two, but
that this involves working toward agreement is not obvious.
598 Language in Society 37:4 (2008)
 REVIEWS

K-O argues that because of its real-time enactment, conversational negotia-

tion is distinguished from other forms of negotiation of ideas in which an inter-
actant is an absent imagined participant. That is, negotiation is dialogic only in
the sense of dialogue between individuals, and not in the sense of dialogue between
ideas. While enacted conversational negotiations of agreement are likely to be dif-
ferent in some ways from other delayed or distanced forms of reaching compro-
mise, this does not seem to be a necessary distinction to draw on the level of the
procedures discussed in this work. Modifications of starting positions may be
undertaken in real time, in reference to actual disagreement, or in reaction to imag-
ined objections from some non-present audience. In neither case does the propo-
nent of an idea have complete freedom in the formulation of the argument, because
the presence of an expressed, projected, or imagined counter-argument affects the
ways in which an argument will be formulated. Although K-O asserts that con-
versational negotiation is different, it is not clear what is distinctly conversa-
tional about the procedures she identifies, as it is not only with a co-present
interlocutor that arguments and counter-arguments affect each other. The prob-
lem in the definition of conversational interaction is further underlined by the use
of examples from Sartre’s Huis clos [No exit], which cannot be really considered
to be a face-to-face interaction between the characters but would be better con-
sidered as an imagined negotiation constructed by Sartre himself.
Chap. 3 investigates politeness, which K-O argues is fundamental to discourse-
in-interaction. She starts from the perspective of Brown & Levinson’s theory of
politeness, which she adopts not only because it is the best-known and most-
used framework, but also because it is best suited to explaining the empirical
data she uses. That is, the adoption of Brown & Levinson’s work is motivated
not by theoretical concerns by rather by pragmatism. Brown & Levinson’s work
is associated in various places with other constructs, notably preference organi-
zation, although the discussions are more adpositions of concepts rather than the
development on an integrated whole. The chapter is largely an exposition of
Brown & Levinson’s model, with examples drawn from casual conversation,
service encounters, and literary texts.
The final chapter on “comparative approaches” deals with two quite different
topics: politeness across cultures, and the reflection of everyday conversation in
literary dialogue. The section on intercultural comparison is quite brief and seeks
to determine the universal and the variable in politeness across cultures. The
theme of literary dialogue is actually an unexpressed theme that is implicit in the
whole work, as literary texts are often used to exemplify conversational negoti-
ation. There is therefore an a priori assumption that conversation and literature
are equally capable of exemplifying discourse-in-interaction, which is not ad-
dressed until the end of the book in an explicit way. In spite of the use K-O
makes of literary texts, she nonetheless notes that literary dialogue is “lacunaire
et hypertrophié, contracté, et dilaté, dans des proportions parfois considérables”
[“incomplete and overdeveloped, contracted and dilated, in sometimes consider-
Language in Society 37:4 (2008) 599
 GABRIELE BUDACH

able amounts”]. Rather than seeing this as a difficulty, K-O argues that literary
dialogue, because of these distortions, provides an analytic resource.
This book is an interesting contribution to the study of discourse, more be-
cause of its eclectic program rather than because of the themes it treats. It ex-
plores the possibility of an eclectic, theory-neutral approach to the study of
discourse, which is a logical response to the claims of some discourse analytic
approaches, such as conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, to be data-
driven rather than theory-driven. In a sense K-O’s work is a radical statement of
data-driven approaches to discourse. However, the work also raises a question as
to how far the analytic techniques of the various schools of discourse analysis do
in fact furnish a theory-neutral toolbox, and to what extent they can be disem-
bedded from their theoretical context. In K-O’s work it is difficult to see just
how far technique and theory are in fact divorced, as the argument is very much
grounded in the work of the original authors. Thus, the discussion of politeness
is framed entirely according to Brown & Levinson. It is hard to see elements
such as “face,” “face threatening act,” or “positive and negative politeness” sim-
ply as analytic tools rather than theoretical constructs, and it is not clear that
K-O uses them in any way that differs from a theory-driven account of polite-
ness. Often the eclectic method appears to be a juxtaposition of discourse analy-
tic approaches that varies according to the phenomenon analyzed. This means
that rather than being a cohesive whole, the result is a collection of theoretically
embedded accounts framed under an overarching topic. The approach is there-
fore characterized better as multi-theoretic than theory-neutral. Nonetheless, read
critically, this work is a thought-provoking treatment of the relationship between
theory and practice in discourse analysis and is well worth reading for this reason.

REFERENCES

Liddicoat, A. J. (2007). Introduction to conversation analysis. London: Continuum.

Schegloff, E. A. (1986). The routine as achievement. Human Studies 9:111–51.
_ (1999). ‘Schegloff ’s texts’ as ‘Billig’s data’: A critical reply. Discourse Processes 10:558–72.

(Received 23 July 2007)

Language in Society 37 (2008). Printed in the United States of America

doi:10.10170S0047404508080809
Ben Rampton, Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 443. Hb $95.00.
Reviewed by Gabriele Budach
Romance Languages, Frankfurt University
Frankfurt am Main
budach@em.uni-frankfurt.de

This book investigates language use and its social meaning in urban schools in
contemporary Britain. The author argues that, in the context of late modernity,
600 Language in Society 37:4 (2008)