People do not encounter the world without language. Difficulties are described using words already in use within families, professions, organizations, the media, and politics. Words can make experiences comprehensible and provide access to help. They can also direct attention toward certain causes and away from others. A sociological analysis of discourses therefore does not merely examine whether a description is true or false. It asks how the description has become possible, who uses it, what practices it is associated with, and what consequences it has.
Narratives are another aspect of the social realm but cannot be reduced to individual words. They organize events over time, link causes and effects, and assign people positions in relation to others. Michel Foucault makes it possible to examine how knowledge and institutions shape subjects. Norman Fairclough shows how language is both shaped by and contributes to social practices. Margaret Somers explains how narratives and identities are relational, while Ann Swidler demonstrates how people draw on cultural repertoires of narratives, habits, skills, and rituals in their actions.
Language, discourse, and narrative are closely related but not interchangeable terms. Language is the general ability and the signs used to communicate. A discourse is a socially organized way of describing, examining, and acting in relation to a particular field. A narrative organizes events in time so that they have a beginning, a development, and consequences. The same discourse can contain multiple narratives, and the same narrative can be formulated using different words.
This chapter does not treat language as a closed system. Words acquire social meaning through the contexts in which they are used. A concept in a document can be linked to rules, professional judgments, resources, and decisions. A life story can be linked to family relationships, public ideals, and historical conflicts. It is these connections that make the analysis sociological.
Foucault: Discourse, Knowledge, and the Subject
Michel Foucault used the concept of discourse to analyze historically organized ways of talking about, investigating, and intervening in a phenomenon. A discourse is not merely a collection of opinions or words. It is tied to institutions, professions, documents, investigations, classifications, and material practices. The ways in which medicine, psychiatry, and the correctional system produce knowledge were central to Foucault’s own historical studies. They demonstrate how what counts as a true statement is linked to who is permitted to investigate, document, and make decisions.
The fact that discourse is historically structured means that it is not possible to say just anything and have it treated as relevant knowledge in every era and institution. There are established questions, categories, forms of evidence, and methods of documentation. These structures make certain kinds of knowledge possible while making other kinds of knowledge more difficult to articulate or gain recognition for. Discourse analysis therefore examines both the content of a statement and the conditions under which the statement is considered valid.
The connection between knowledge and power does not mean that knowledge is merely power in disguise or that all claims are equally true. It draws attention to the fact that knowledge is produced and used within institutional relationships. Those who are allowed to ask questions, measure, classify, keep records, or make decisions can influence how a phenomenon becomes visible and what actions follow. At the same time, knowledge can grant people rights, care, and opportunities to challenge a decision.
Three Ways of Being Made into Subjects
In *The Subject and Power*, Foucault summarized his work as a history of the ways in which people are made into subjects. The first way is that people become objects of knowledge. The speaking, working, or living person is examined, described, and compared using scientific methods. The person remains an agent, but is simultaneously turned into something about which others can gather knowledge.
The second way is through categorizing practices. Institutions distinguish between categories such as normal and deviant, healthy and sick, or law-abiding and criminal. This categorization is not merely verbal; it can influence placements, rights, treatments, and forms of surveillance. A category therefore becomes operative when it is linked to practices that have consequences.
The third way concerns how people understand and shape themselves through available categories and norms. A person can examine their behavior, talk about themselves, and try to change based on such ways of understanding human beings. Foucault is thus interested both in what institutions do to people and in how people work on themselves within historically available forms.
The term “subject” therefore encompasses a duality. A subject is someone who can speak and act. At the same time, a person can be bound to a specific identity, a responsibility, or an order. Foucault’s point is not that one aspect negates the other. The analysis examines how agency and bondage are shaped simultaneously.
Foucault’s analysis does not imply that every category is false or that material problems disappear if language changes. Categories can provide recognition, rights, treatment, and community. At the same time, they can limit what is brought to attention and which futures appear possible. The sociological task is to examine how a category is used in a specific practice and which power relations make that use effective.
Trace a category through its institutions
Purpose: To examine how a word gains power through documents, professions, and organizational decisions.
Choose a category that influences how a specific challenge is understood. Use a category you already encounter; do not create a new one.
List the institutions in which the category is used, such as healthcare, schools, the workplace, government agencies, or the media.
Describe which documents, tests, procedures, or decisions make the category operational.
List the people or professions that have the authority to define and apply it.
Highlight what the category makes possible and what it risks leaving out.
Afterward: Formulate a question about how the category is used specifically in the practice you are examining. Do not draw a general conclusion about the category in all contexts.
Limitations and when the exercise should not be done: The exercise should not be used to rule out a diagnosis or necessary assistance. If the category relates to an ongoing government or healthcare process, actual regulations and professional assessments must be verified.
Historical Context and Defamiliarization
A discourse may seem self-evident because its history is no longer apparent in everyday use. Historicization involves making this history part of the analysis. One asks when a way of describing a phenomenon arose, what earlier descriptions and practices preceded it, and what changes in institutions, professions, or technology made it possible.
Defamiliarization means making the familiar less self-evident for a moment. The intention is not to make the phenomenon alien or incomprehensible. The intention is to be able to see rules, categories, and relationships that have become so commonplace that they would otherwise go unnoticed. When the self-evident becomes describable, its social organization can be analyzed.
Historization and defamiliarization are related but serve different purposes. Historization adds a temporal dimension and examines change. Defamiliarization creates analytical distance from what is taken for granted in the present. Both approaches are found in Foucault’s historical analyses and in sociological discourse analysis.
The aim is not to show that older language was better or that every modern concept is arbitrary. Instead, history shows that categories have changed, that multiple descriptions have competed, and that practices have been restructured. This creates distance from the idea that the prevailing description is the only one possible. This distance must be combined with source criticism: it is not enough to find an old word on the internet and treat it as a complete historical explanation.
Historicize a way of describing a difficulty
Objective: To examine how an established description has emerged and changed.
Choose a word or phrase used today to describe a difficulty.
Search two to three credible sources to find out when the phrase first came into use and in which institutions.
Note which older terms or practices preceded it.
Describe which changes in knowledge, policy, organization, or technology contributed to this shift.
Conclude by discussing what the history makes less obvious and what it does not determine regarding its use today.
Afterward: Save your sources so you can distinguish historical evidence from your own interpretation.
Limitations and when to avoid this exercise: Avoid uncertain etymologies and isolated quotes. Historicization should not be used to claim that current suffering or healthcare needs are unreal.
Subject Positions
Discourses offer positions from which a person can speak and be addressed. In sociological and discourse-analytic research, the concept of subject position is used to examine such positions. A position can entail rights, obligations, and expectations: student, patient, expert, parent, job seeker, consumer, or citizen. The same person occupies multiple positions, and these positions may conflict with one another.
A subject position is not a description of a person’s innermost or true identity. It specifies how someone can be understood and addressed in a specific context. The position influences which questions the person is expected to answer, what knowledge she is deemed to possess, and which actions are considered legitimate. Therefore, the same person must be analyzed differently depending on whether she is encountered as a student, patient, employee, or citizen.
Subjectification means that positions can be both taken and assigned. A person does not freely choose among all identities. Which positions are available depends on al institutions, discourses, social standing, and how others respond. At the same time, people can relate to a position, reinterpret it, and seek out other social contexts. The analysis must therefore balance limitations with agency.
When a position is taken, it means that the person uses it to speak, make demands, or make sense of an experience. When it is assigned, it means that others place the person in that position and treat her according to its expectations. Often, both processes occur simultaneously. A person may accept certain aspects of a position, oppose others, and yet still depend on the institution’s definition to gain access to resources or rights.
Map a subject position
Purpose: To identify the rights, obligations, and opportunities for action that come with a position in a specific context.
Choose a position that you are frequently assigned or that you yourself assume within a particular institution.
Write down the characteristics and behaviors expected of someone in that position.
List the rights, resources, and opportunities that the position provides.
Describe what becomes difficult to say or do from that position.
Compare it to another role you have in a different context and note what changes.
Afterward: Formulate a brief question about how the position could be made less restrictive without negating its actual responsibilities.
Limitations and when the exercise should not be done: Do not use the map to speculate about other people’s innermost identities. In cases of a significant power imbalance, an attempt to openly challenge the position may have consequences that need to be assessed first.
Fairclough: Language as Social Practice
Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis examines the relationship between language, power, and social change. For Fairclough, language is part of social practices. A statement is shaped by the institutions, genres, and relationships in which it is produced, but the statement can also contribute to maintaining or changing these practices. The relationship is dialectical: discourse and the broader social order influence each other without being one and the same.
A social practice is a recurring way of organizing action within a particular domain. It may involve roles, rules, material resources, knowledge, and language. A genre is an established way of using language for a specific purpose, such as a government decision, a job posting, a medical record entry, or a political speech. The genre influences who is allowed to speak, how a claim is structured, and what kind of response is expected.
The term “dialectical” describes a reciprocal relationship in which two parts influence each other but cannot be reduced to one another. Language is shaped by institutions, power relations, and material conditions. At the same time, recurring ways of speaking can reinforce roles, allocate responsibility, and make certain actions more legitimate. The fact that the relationship is dialectical therefore means neither that language controls everything nor that language merely reflects a pre-existing reality.
This is important for the sociological use of discourse analysis. If an organization describes a problem in a new way, it can change what employees pay attention to and which solutions are considered reasonable. But the change in language does not automatically alter working hours, resource allocation, decision-making power, or the physical environment. Fairclough’s perspective makes it possible to analyze both the text and the practices that give rise to the text’s consequences.
A simple critical discourse analysis can therefore address three questions. What is actually stated in the text or said in the conversation? How is the phrasing produced, disseminated, and interpreted? What social practice and power relationship does it form part of? The analysis becomes misleading if it jumps directly from a single word to a broad claim about society. It needs to demonstrate the intermediate links that connect language to action and institutions.
Text, Use, and Social Context
The first question concerns the text. Here, we examine word choice, grammar, categories, assumptions, and what is left unsaid. The analysis should begin with what can actually be substantiated in the text. The second question concerns the text’s use: who produces it, how is it disseminated, who is expected to interpret it, and to which other texts does it refer? The same phrasing can take on different meanings when used in different processes.
The third question concerns broader social practice. Here, the organization’s mission, rules, resources, and power relations are examined. These three components must be connected. A word does not automatically acquire social significance simply because the researcher can link it to a grand idea. The analysis must demonstrate how the text’s form and use are actually connected to institutional actions and consequences.
Analyze a text within its social practice
Purpose: To apply Fairclough’s connection between formulation, dissemination, and institutional context.
Choose a short text that actually influences a situation: a decision, a procedure, an advertisement, a form, or a public information text.
Identify which people, actions, and causes the text mentions and which it omits.
Write down who produced the text, who is expected to read it, and how it is used.
Describe which rules, resources, and power relations cause the text to have—or lack—practical consequences.
Formulate a precise question about how language and social practice are connected in this case.
Afterward: Distinguish between what the text shows, what the context reveals, and what remains your interpretation.
Limitations and when not to do this exercise: Do not use private messages or sensitive documents without permission. A single statement is not enough to determine a person’s intent or an organization’s entire culture.
Compare how the same question is phrased in two contexts
Purpose: To examine how institutional context changes responsibility, normality, and possible actions.
Choose two public texts or your own texts in which the same issue is addressed in different contexts.
Highlight the words used to describe causes, responsible parties, and desired outcomes in the first text.
Do the same in the second text.
Describe which organizational tasks and power relations might explain the differences.
Write down what each phrasing makes possible and what it risks obscuring.
Afterward: Do not choose a winner based solely on tone. Assess which description has the strongest support and what social practice it leads to.
Limitations and when not to do this exercise: The comparison should not be used to cast suspicion on an entire group based on a single document. Check the context and dates.
Somers: Stories Are Relational
Margaret Somers has developed a sociological theory of narrative and identity. She criticizes the notion that the narrative of who I am exists solely within the individual. Narratives are made possible through relationships, institutions, public narratives, and historical conflicts. From this perspective, identity is relational: a person understands their position through connections to other people, groups, and societal narratives.
“Relational” here means that identity gains meaning through connections. Understanding oneself as a student presupposes an educational institution, other roles such as teachers and classmates, and narratives about what education is supposed to lead to. Identity does not exist solely in a person’s self-image, nor does it exist solely in the judgments of others. It is shaped in the relationship between one’s own narratives, social positions, and the contexts in which those narratives become comprehensible.
A narrative organizes events into a sequence and gives them a connection. When certain events are chosen as the beginning, turning point, and aftermath, other events become less visible. The narrative can therefore influence what a person expects from the future and which actions appear reasonable. At the same time, Somer’s research on the formation of the English working class shows that collective identities cannot be explained solely by economic position. Political rights, public narratives, and relational networks shaped how people understood themselves and were able to act collectively.
When events are linked together, they acquire not only a chronological order but also an interpreted meaning. An event can be treated as a cause, evidence, obstacle, or turning point depending on the narrative in which it is placed. This does not mean that the narrator freely invents the connection. The narrative is constrained by what has actually happened, by other people’s versions of events, and by the public narratives that are available.
A public narrative refers to a story linked to larger institutions, groups, or societies that many people can relate to. Narratives about education as the path to success, about work as a measure of independence, or about the proper order of family life can give meaning to individual experiences. They can also make other life trajectories more difficult to describe. The analysis therefore examines which public narratives a personal narrative is based on and which experiences they make visible or invisible.
The sociological contribution is not to replace a negative narrative with a positive one. A positive narrative can be just as simplistic. Instead, the analysis asks which relationships and institutions the narrative presupposes, which events do not fit into it, and how other narratives in society have shaped it. This makes identity less isolated and less fixed without rendering it arbitrary.
Examine the social foundations of a recurring narrative
Purpose: To see how a narrative about one’s own life is supported by relationships, institutions, and public perceptions.
Write a short recurring narrative about a specific area of your life in no more than four sentences.
Identify which people and relationships have confirmed or contradicted the narrative.
Identify which institutions and public narratives make the narrative comprehensible.
Write down which events have been chosen as the beginning, turning point, and aftermath.
Write about an event or relationship that doesn’t fit in and could therefore change how the story is understood.
Afterward: Rewrite the story so that what was previously omitted is included. The new version should be more precise, not just more positive.
Limitations and when the exercise should not be done: Limit the exercise if it evokes strong feelings of shame, grief, or trauma. A story about abuse or threats should not be reworded in a way that removes responsibility.
Distinguish Between Personal and Public Narratives
Purpose: To explore how a story about one’s own life derives order and meaning from broader cultural narratives.
Choose a phrase from your short story that contains a clear “should,” failure, progress, or ideal.
Write down which public narrative the phrase resembles—for example, one about education, work, family, health, or success.
Write down which institutions and media outlets disseminate that public narrative.
Write down which groups are favored, recognized, or rendered invisible by the narrative’s structure.
Articulate what remains important to you once the demands of the public narrative have been made visible.
Afterward: Note whether you can retain a value without retaining the entire public narrative about how that value must be realized.
Limitations and when the exercise should not be done: The exercise does not determine that a public narrative is false. It examines its social origins and scope.
Swidler: Culture as a Repertoire
Ann Swidler describes culture as a repertoire of symbols, narratives, rituals, habits, skills, and ways of acting. She uses the theory-based image of a cultural toolbox to critique the idea that culture primarily governs people through fixed values. People use cultural elements in various combinations to construct more enduring strategies for action.
Here, “repertoire” refers to a socially learned store of ways of understanding and doing things. It may consist of stories that explain what a situation requires, rituals that mark a transition, habits that make an action easier, and skills that enable a person to carry it out. The repertoire is not unlimited and is not chosen entirely freely. It depends on the families, groups, educational settings, jobs, and cultural environments in which the person has participated.
According to Swidler, an action strategy is a more enduring way of organizing action over time. A single habit or narrative is not automatically a strategy. A strategy emerges when multiple cultural elements can be used together in recurring situations. This perspective therefore explains why people who claim to share the same values may still act differently: they may have different skills, rituals, and social contexts that make certain actions possible.
Swidler also distinguishes between more stable and more turbulent periods. During stable periods, much of culture is embedded in everyday skills and unquestioned ways of acting. During times of upheaval, explicit ideologies and new cultural models can take on greater significance when established habits are no longer sufficient. This distinction helps explain why a person might embrace a value without acting on it: what is missing may be a socially learned skill, a ritual, a context, or a viable strategy for action.
In this context, “stable” and “turbulent” describe the relationship between culture and action, not whether a person’s entire life feels calm or difficult. During a stable period, established habits and institutions function well enough that much action can take place without explicit ideological considerations. During a period of upheaval, old ways of acting have lost their self-evident nature. At such times, new ideas can take on greater significance because people need to develop different strategies for action.
Swidler’s perspective makes it possible to take stock of cultural ideals and practices without reducing them to a choice between distinct lifestyles. The question is which repertoires already exist, in which social contexts they have been learned, and which actions they actually support. A cultural resource may be useful in one context and inappropriate in another.
Identify a cultural repertoire
Purpose: To highlight the narratives, habits, and skills already used to handle a specific situation.
Choose a situation where you repeatedly need to take action but often get stuck.
Write down the habits, skills, rituals, stories, and expressions you already use in that situation.
Write down the families, groups, educational settings, workplaces, or cultural contexts where you learned them.
Identify what actually helps, what is merely repeated, and what creates conflict with other important practices.
Choose an existing skill that can be tested in a similar situation without being given a new name or turned into an identity.
Afterward: Reflect on what the skill made possible and what social context was necessary for it to work.
Limitations and when not to do the exercise: Do not use other cultures or religious practices as isolated techniques without context. The exercise applies primarily to repertoires that you actually have access to and can understand.
Identify conflicting cultural ideals
Purpose: To investigate whether an internal conflict is also driven by socially widespread and mutually incompatible demands.
Choose a recurring conflict in which two different demands seem to pull in opposite directions.
Describe the two ideals in plain language and identify the social contexts that teach them.
Describe the practices, relationships, and rewards associated with each ideal.
Describe the costs that arise if both ideals attempt to govern the same situation at the same time.
Determine whether the situation requires prioritization, a distinction between contexts, or more knowledge before you make a choice.
Afterward: Identify which part of the conflict is personal and which part stems from conflicting social demands.
Limitations and when not to do the exercise: The exercise should not force a quick value judgment on issues with major consequences. Seek input from those involved when the conflict concerns shared responsibilities.
Discourse is part of the social
Foucault, Fairclough, Somers, and Swidler highlight different aspects of how language and culture function. Foucault focuses on historical orders of knowledge, institutions, and the formation of subjects. Fairclough examines how texts are embedded in social practices and power relations. Somers demonstrates how narratives and identities are relational and historical. Swidler shows how culture provides repertoires for action. These perspectives should not be merged into a new model, but they can be used side by side as long as their distinct concerns are kept clear.
A discourse analysis becomes inadequate if it assumes that a new language alone changes material conditions. At the same time, a material analysis becomes inadequate if it disregards how words and narratives distribute responsibility, normality, and agency. Therefore, the concluding exercise must distinguish between language, practices, relationships, and material conditions without making them independent of one another.
Material conditions include factors such as physical circumstances, money, housing, working hours, technology, and physical access to places and services. They are not automatically affected by a change in wording. At the same time, language can influence how material resources are distributed through decisions, rules, and assessments. Distinguishing between these elements therefore means specifying what is linguistic, relational, institutional , and material in the analysis. Not treating them as independent means also examining how these elements influence one another.
Examine language, practices, relationships, and material conditions
Purpose: To conduct a focused discourse analysis without letting language explain the entire situation.
Choose a challenge and write down the most common phrasing used to describe it.
Describe the practices associated with the phrasing: what people are expected to do, document, or change.
Describe which relationships and institutions lend authority to or oppose the phrasing.
Describe which material conditions remain even if the phrasing changes.
Formulate a tentative sociological description that specifies both the effect of language and the non-linguistic conditions.
Afterward: Check that the description raises a more precise question. It does not need to provide an immediate solution.
Limitations and when not to do this exercise: Do not use an alternative phrasing to downplay suffering, responsibility, threats, or the need for professional help. Stick to a working hypothesis.
Discourses and narratives influence what people see, how they understand themselves, and which actions appear reasonable. They operate through relationships, institutions, and practices, while simultaneously encountering bodily and material conditions that cannot be dismissed. A sociological analysis therefore neither attributes all power to language nor treats words as mere surface phenomena. It examines their specific effects in the social life in which they are used.
References
Elder, G. H. Jr. (1994). Time, Human Agency, and Social Change: Perspectives on the Life Course. Social Psychology Quarterly, 57(1), 4–15.
Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1982). The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795.
Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press.
Somers, M. R. (1994). The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach. Theory and Society, 23(5), 605–649.
Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological Review, 51(2), 273–286.