Abstract
How do vulnerable child witnesses communicate in videoed interviews with the police? How are the categories ‘deficient parents’, ‘children in need’ and ‘children in need of protection’ defined by home-visiting professionals when interviewed about their work? How do social workers conceptualize the concept ‘child at risk’ in written risk assessment reports? How is the identity of people living with dementia constructed in discursive practices involving them, their family and care staff? How are the concepts ‘discourse’ and ‘deficiency’ conceptualized by women interviewees who have undergone mastectomy? How does the absence of intercultural capability limit the educational experience of overseas and local students? These are some of the questions informing Discourses of Deficit, an intriguing and thought-provoking collection of articles edited by Christopher Candlin and Jonathan Crichton.
From the reader’s point of view, the concise and innovative book title has a twofold function. First, it clearly delineates the boundaries of a new research domain at the center of which there are lay adults and children as well as professionals engaged in diverse institutional practices and procedures that are often life-changing. Second, the title establishes a critical stance with regard to this domain as it connects ‘discourses’ with the metaphorical lexical item ‘deficit’ or ‘loss, lack and failure’ (p. 4). Further, the included chapters clearly demonstrate that this newly-created institutional research domain is interdisciplinary, since it cuts across diverse institutional contexts such as social work, healthcare, management, education, marketing and institutional appraisal.
Candlin and Crichton summarize the aim of the book succinctly in the following words:
In this book we explore how people routinely in particular professional domains and at particular sites are discursively constructed as deficient in ways that may affect their life chances. We see ‘deficient’ not as restricted to particular disciplinary formulations or theoretical orientations but as multiply interpretable, depending on the particular locations, research orientations and modes of collaboration between participants and researchers. (p. 1)
The editors’ erudite and detailed introduction (pp. 1–22) furnishes definitions of the central concepts, ‘deficit’ and ‘discourse’, and further emphasizes that the authors were inspired by theory-oriented critical perspectives as well as more data-oriented micro-analytic approaches to discourse analysis in institutional settings.
As the authors stress, this research agenda is guided by a principle of ‘ecological validity’ (Cicourel, 2007) (i.e. ‘the extent to which organizational activities represented by aggregated data . . . can be linked to observable activities in the daily life settings’, p. 7). Reading the book, one discovers how several of its characteristics contribute to the creation of ecological validity. First, the diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks inspiring the chapters (e.g. discourse and conversation analysis, narrative inquiry, hermeneutics, semiotics, critical and mediated discourse analysis, membership categorization analyses, frame theory and ethnomethodology) create an interface between theory- and data- or practice-oriented levels of analysis (Kupferberg, 2010), yielding ‘not only a descriptive and interpretive, but also an explanatory account of focal themes relevant to a particular professional domain’ (pp. 13–24).
In addition, ecological validity is also enhanced by the use of diverse research texts (e.g. written documents, books, web pages, spoken institutional interactions and narrative discourse) – empirical evidence that brings to life various institutional discursive practices and processes in which individuals have to interact with professional and lay others.
The 17 chapters are arranged in seven parts focusing on the clearly-defined institutional settings that were listed earlier. These chapters show how adults and children are often discursively constructed, or positioned by others as ‘deficient’, and how this ‘label’ has bearing on their personal lives.
The chapters are preceded by theoretical and methodological frameworks providing a clear perspective on the approach employed in the chapter (i.e. theory and method; Schwandt, 2007). The chapters are also followed by concluding comments summarizing the essence of the particular deficiency defined, described and interpreted in the chapter. As a result, this meticulously edited and highly organized collection of articles is easy to explore.
The highly organized structure of the book complements its unique content. The book constitutes an authoritative, multi-perspectival, interdisciplinary, ‘discourse-based’ (p. 120) reference work. Its theoretical and methodological frameworks and detailed analyses illuminate institutional discursive processes in which deficits of various kinds often threaten the well-being of lay participants.
Previous publications have already foregrounded research on institutional discourse in general (e.g. Drew and Heritage, 1992; Gunnarsson et al., 1997; Heritage and Clayman, 2010; Kupferberg, 2012; Sarangi and Roberts, 1999), highlighting specific institutional discourse (e.g. Hepburn and Wiggins, 2007; Heritage and Maynard, 2006; Morris and Chenail, 1995; Peräkylä et al., 2008), and self-construction (De Fina et al., 2006) of the troubled (Kupferberg and Green, 2005) and the ill (Hydén and Brockmeier, 2008; Hyuärinen et al., 2010). Discourses of Deficit, however, foregrounds the meaning of deficiency and directs the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the book, the research texts selected, and the description and interpretation of the findings, to this new research domain.
Although the introduction underscores that a research agenda focusing on deficiency requires an explicit construction of practical implications (Sarangi and Candlin, 2003), however, the research-focused chapters do not highlight the practical applications and changes that are called for by the insightful findings uncovered in the various chapters, nor do they focus on future trends that should be followed. As a whole, Discourses and Deficit, a timely book that occupies a qualitative scholarly niche, will nevertheless benefit researchers from various institutional settings seeking to explore communication in order to identify the implicit dimensions of processes and procedures and effect change that will improve lay–professional institutional communication.