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Introduction
Postmodernism has been called “the most influential intellectual trend of the last third of the 20th century, and one of the central trends in the Western cultural-theoretical thinking since the 1960s” (Viires, 2011, p. 451; Lopez and Potter, 2001, p. 3). As such, postmodernism has significantly impacted many academic fields, including archival, library, and information science/studies (hereinafter LIS) (Brothman, 1999, p. 65; Buschman and Brosio, 2006, p. 408).
Of all the figures associated with postmodernism, the most widely known and widely cited is French intellectual historian and theoretician Michel Foucault (1926-1984) ( Times Higher Education online, 2009; Cronin and Meho, 2009, p. 401). Foucault has been called “the central figure in the most noteworthy flowering of oppositional intellectual life in the twentieth century West” (Olsson, 2007, p. 221, quoting Radford, 1992, p. 416). He is especially remembered for offering radical critique of conventional assumptions, methods, or systems of knowledge and meaning. As LIS scholar Gary Radford notes, “The dissolution of taken-for-granted structures is a hallmark of Foucault’s work” (Radford, 1998, p. 622). The structures Foucault challenged include not only governments, academic and professional disciplines, and other authoritative institutions, but language, knowledge, power, and authority in general.
Because much of Foucault’s critique is rooted at the essential, fundamental level of language and communication itself, the concept of discourse is especially central to Foucault’s thought, and Foucault is particularly identified with discourse (Day, 2005, pp. 589-593; Hannabuss, 1996; Radford, 2003; Frohmann, 1994, p. 119). For Foucault, discourse tends to build in assumptions and “taken-for-granted structures” that ultimately and cumulatively take on a life of their own by controlling, confining, and defining thought, understanding, knowledge, and what may be recognized or understood to be true in any particular community or context. As Radford (1992) explains, “For Foucault, objectivity and truth are sites of struggle among competing systems of discourse. What is scientific at any particular historical juncture is determined by which system is dominant and not which system is true” (p. 418). Searches of academic journal article databases indicate that discourse analysis, whether expressly Foucauldian or not, has profoundly impacted many fields, including LIS.
In light of the significant influence of Foucault and discourse analysis upon LIS among other fields, this study attempts to trace the...