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Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor and Simeon J. Yates (Eds) Discourse as data: A guide for analysis London: Sage, 2001. ISBN 0-76197-157-2, £55 (hbk); ISBN 0-76197-158-0, £l6.99(pbk);344pp.
The surge of interest in discourse in the social sciences has led to a burgeoning literature on the subject. However, this book earns its place among the most useful of these texts as it succeeds in providing a comprehensive introduction to what has become an ever widening collection of approaches to discourse analysis. The book's contributors provide varied explanations of how to do discourse research. Combined with a companion book, a reader, this volume forms part of a masters' level programme for the Open University. Although it does work as a stand-alone text, the book requires the theoretical background provided by the accompanying volume in order to situate the practices described by the authors into a broad framework of current transformations in social theory.
Chapter one and the final chapter, both written by Stephanie Taylor, work to hold together the framework of the text. The opening chapter, in which a broad introduction to the topic area is given, includes: epistemological issues, ethics, transcription, the role of the researcher and writing up research. The final chapter outlines the evaluation and application of discourse analytic work. Taylor manages to effectively summarize these important topics while making reference to chapters in the accompanying volume, and also to wider references, for a longer discussion. Writers who adopt differing approaches to the study of discourse author the seven individual chapters, which form the remainder of the book. These approaches are positioned as integral parts of an account of discourse analysis, which celebrates both their unique qualities and, in some cases, their similarities to one another. That is not to say this book merely attempts to describe a methodology; one of its strengths lies in outlining and emphasizing the theoretical perspectives taken by the writers, and the implications this has on the kind of questions that may be asked, and answered, using discourse analysis.
As the book covers a wide range of approaches, in this review I briefly outline how each author contributes a particular understanding of discourse analysis and how it fits with the overall message of the book.
In chapter two, Robin Wooffitt...