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    The missing million: the discursive construction of age-related unemployment in the UK

    Pritchard, K. and Whiting, Rebecca (2014) The missing million: the discursive construction of age-related unemployment in the UK. In: 11th International Conference on Organisational Discourse, 9th - 11th July 2014, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff, UK. (Unpublished)

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    Abstract

    Event synopsis: Terra Firma draws attention to well-trodden terrain: the dominant, the safe, the familiar and the reassuring. organisational discourse analysis has firmly established itself in the past two decades as a topic of interest, an analytical perspective informing a variety of theoretical approaches, and a methodology for organisational research. Through Terra Firma, while we welcome papers that engage with these core debates and theories, in this 11th conference we also wish to attract papers that reflect more critically on the contribution that organisational discourse analysis can offer. We call for greater scrutiny of the dominant and the institutionalised in our theoretical approaches and in the worlds which we research and inhabit. We welcome papers that question what might be viewed now as the solid ground of orthodox and established discursive approaches in organisation studies. Equally, we encourage papers that call into question the firm ground of hegemonic or deep-seated discourses, to explore the processes whereby certain meanings and forms of representation become institutionalised. Terra Nova casts our attention to issues of novelty and emergence. We call for papers, firstly, that consider new empirical sites, new issues, new theoretical approaches, and new methodologies for the discursive analysis of organisations. Additionally, through the theme of Terra Nova, we encourage papers that scrutinize and question the discourse of 'newness' and its relationship with aspects of social, organisational or discursive change. Such papers could focus on either contemporary or historical examples of apparent discursive novelty. In doing so, we emphasise the power effects of discourses to question how particular worlds are made possible through the invoking of certain discourses. Terra Incognita traditionally marks the part of a map left empty, denoting the undocumented or the unchartered, and in popular myth depicted by the expression "here be dragons". We use the term to draw attention to the hidden, marginalised, excluded bodies, silent voices and submerged meanings, or the ways in which organisations operate to maintain the obscurity of certain meanings and identities. We also point to more unorthodox, risky, possibly iconoclastic approaches and understandings of social phenomena. Through Terra Incognita we invite consideration of issues and ways of understanding that move beyond the conventional in discourse analysis, drawing perhaps on critical praxis, new forms of intervention, and more effective ways of linking academia to different communities. Finally, we draw attention here to the recursive and interconnected nature of meaning and to how one person’s incognita may be another person’s terra firma. These three sub-themes should be viewed as indicative rather than exhaustive. All papers are invited that have an interest in language and discourse in different aspects of organizing or on processes of discursive production and re-production in constituting different types of social worlds and social actors.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Business and Law > Birkbeck Business School
    Depositing User: Sarah Hall
    Date Deposited: 23 Feb 2016 10:16
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:22
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/14449

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