The linguistic turn of the later twentieth century has led to a widespread and growing interest in discourse, both in organization studies and in the social sciences more generally. Since the late 1970s, organization scholars have began to move beyond a conception of language as a functional, instrumental conduit of information, and drew attention to its symbolic and metaphorical aspects as constructive of social and organizational reality (Dandridge, Mitroff and Joyce, 1980: Manning, 1979), constitutive of theory (Morgan, 1980, 1983), and enabling of shared meanings, co-ordinated action, and even organization itself (Daft and Wiginton, 1979; Louis, 1983; Pondy and Mitroff, 1979; Smircich, 1983). Subsequent scholars have adopted a wide range of approaches to the analysis of organizational discourses and have conceptualized discourse itself, and its relevance to organizational interpretations, actions and subjectivity, in a variety of ways (Grant, Keenoy and Oswick, 1998; Heracleous and Hendry, 2000; Mumby and Stohl, 1991; Phillips and Hardy, 2002).

Discourse analysis, in the broad sense of utilizing textual data in order to gain insights to particular phenomena, has had a rich and varied heritage in the social sciences, spanning the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science and history (OConnor, 1995), and this same richness and diversity is evident in the organizational sciences.