No Joking Matter: Discursive Struggle in the Canadian Refugee System

Introduction

In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding the inter-relationship between discursive activity at the level of an institutional field and the societal discourses that surround that field. While work focusing on discourse and language is becoming increasingly common in the organizational analysis literature (e.g. Huff 1990; Mumby and Stohl 1991; Hatch and Ehrlich 1993; Boje 1995; Mauws and Phillips 1995; O'Connor 1995; Phillips 1995; Watson 1995; Ford and Ford 1996; Garsten and Grey 1997; Hamilton 1997; Keenoy et al. 1997; Litvin 1997; Phillips and Hardy 1997), the importance of the broader societal context as a source of discursive resources for organizational and interorganizational discursive activity has received far less attention (Keenoy et al. 1997). Consequently, while we are learning more about discursive activity within and between organizations, the role played by broader discourses in enabling and constraining this activity is less well understood.

In order to explore these relationships, we draw on a study of the Canadian refugee system. Specifically, we examine the link between the broader discourse of immigration - as represented in the form of cartoons - and the discursive activities of members of this particular institutional field. As we noted in an earlier paper (Phillips and Hardy 1997), refugees are constituted through the discursive activities of different organizations in this complex institutional field. Refugees are not, however, produced solely by the discourse that takes place within the refugee system; they are also produced by much broader discourses that occur at a societal level, and that act as a resource and a constraint for actors within the field. In this regard, this paper further develops the themes of our earlier paper to provide a greater understanding of the discursive context within which individual strategies occur.

The remainder of this paper is structured in five sections. We first provide an overview of discourse analysis and discuss the link between discourse in a particular institutional field and discourses at the societal level. We then introduce the example of the Canadian refugee system and show how broader societal discourses of human rights, sovereignty, paternalism and empowerment form the foundation of the discursive struggles within it. Third, we analyze a sample of cartoons to show how the societal immigration discourse helps to constitute refugees. Fourth, we discuss how the societal immigration discourse constrains and facilitates the activities of particular members of the institutional field. Finally, we examine the implications of this study for research and practice.

Discursive Production and Institutional Fields

We define a discourse as a system of texts that brings an object into being (Parker 1992). Discourse is therefore the foundation of the process of social construction upon which social reality depends (Berger and Luckmann 1967). Discourse does not simply mirror 'reality', but brings into being 'situations, objects of knowledge, and the social identities of and relations between people and groups of people' (Fairclough and Wodak 1997: 258). By extension, discourse analysis is the structured investigation of these systems of texts and the concepts, objects, and subjects that they constitute (Fairclough 1992; van Dijk 1997c). Methods of social scientific investigation that can be referred to as discourse analysis therefore include a wide variety of methods (Keenoy et al. 1997: 148-149; van Dijk 1997a,b) from semiotics to deconstructionism that share two fundamental characteristics: they are interested in the constructive effects of texts and they are necessarily interpretive.

The specific approach we adopt in this paper is generally referred to as critical discourse analysis. It focuses on the role of discursive activity in constituting and sustaining power relations:

'Discursive practices may have major ideological effects: that is, they can help produce and reproduce unequal power relations between (for instance) social classes, women and men, and ethnic/cultural majorities and minorities through the ways in which they represent things and position people. ... Both the ideological loading of particular ways of using language and the relations of power which underlie them are often unclear to people. CDA aims to make more visible these opaque aspects of discourse.' (Fairclough and Wodak 1997: 258)

The ability of actors to manage discursive processes to their advantage is therefore our concern in this paper. We attempt to analyze 'dialogical struggle (or struggles) as reflected in the privileging of a particular discourse and the marginalization of others' (Keenoy et al. 1997: 150; Mumby and Stohl 1991). But what form, exactly, do such struggles take and how are they influenced by the constructive effects of discursive activity? Drawing on the work of Fairclough (1992; also see Taylor 1985: 36), we focus on how discursive activity structures the social space within which actors act through the constitution of concepts, objects, and subject positions.