Ian Parker (psychologist) - Discursive Analysis

Discursive Analysis

Discursive analysis appears in his earliest writing, which is focused on the ‘crisis’ in laboratory-experimental social psychology during the 1960s through to the 1980s. In his first book, The Crisis in Modern Social Psychology, and How to End It (1989), Parker uses structuralist and post-structuralist theories to disrupt the claims that psychologists make to speak a professional expert ‘truth’ about human psychology. Toward the end of the book he moves beyond the ‘turn to language’ in social psychology to a ‘turn to discourse’, and this, he argues, will enable critical researchers to treat psychology itself as a set of discourses or stories about people rather than as things that are universally true. Analyses of ‘psychologisation’ are then necessary to critical discursive work.

This argument is taken forward in Discourse Dynamics: Critical Analysis for Social and Individual Psychology (1992), but now there is a discussion of the relationship between discourse and reality, and at this point Parker seems to think that ‘critical realism’ might be helpful to avoid problems with ‘relativism’ in the social sciences. He returns to these issues ten years later in Critical Discursive Psychology (2002), but by this time he is pessimistic about the critical potential of a purely discursive approach. He prefers the term ‘discursive practice’. His book on methodology, Qualitative Psychology: Introducing Radical Research (2005) includes a new version of discourse analysis that attempts to break down the divisions between the researcher and those they study.

Critical responses and commentaries on the impact of Ian Parker’s work on discourse analysis have often focused on what is seen as a reification of ‘discourse’. His conceptual work on discourse has been criticised on this basis from a traditional social psychological position (e.g., Abrams and Hogg, 1990) and from a ‘discursive’ position (e.g., Potter et al., 1990; Potter et al., 1999).