Why do firms fail in the face of radical technological change? Answering this question requires addressing how customers develop their interpretations and evaluation criteria of the new technology. This interpretive process occurs through discussions with other market participants. Firms can influence customers’ interpretations through the use of language and visual images what we call “discurs...

This article describes the background and premises of the AHRCfunded project, ‘The Linguistic DNA of Modern Western Thought’. We offer an empirical, encyclopaedic approach to historical semantics regarding ‘conceptual history’, i.e. the history of concepts that shape thought, culture and society in a particular period. We relate the project to traditional work in conceptual and semantic history...

Discourse analysis has come to represent something of a ‘growth industry’ in both research and critical psychology. Despite the apparent indebtedness of many such methods of discourse analysis to Foucault, there exists no strictly Foucauldian method of analysing discourse. Through a close reading of Foucault's ‘The order of discourse’ (1981), this paper re-characterizes the concept of discourse...

Abstract This study aimed to investigate how English language teaching textbooks portrayed male and female social actors according to their social roles and gender identities. To examine the linguistic representation of male and female social actors and construction of gender identities in ELT textbooks, Top Notch series was selected. To do so, attempts were made to analyze the series in terms ...

In this essay, the authors consider the challenge made by two keynote speakers at recent social work research conferences, one in the United States and the other in Europe. Both spoke of a knowledge crisis in social work. Both John Brekke (Society for Social Work and Research) and Peter Sommerfeld (First Annual European Conference for Social Work Research) proposed some version of realism as a ...

We aim to characterise the comparability of corpora, we address this issue in the trilingual context through the distinction of expert and non expert documents. We work separately with corpora composed of documents from the medical domain in three languages (French, Japanese and Russian) which present an important linguistic distance between them. In our approach, documents are characterised in...

We aim to characterize the comparability of corpora, we address this issue in the trilingual context through the distinction of expert and non expert documents. We work separately with corpora composed of documents from the medical domain in three languages (French, Japanese and Russian) which present an important linguistic distance between them. In our approach, documents are characterized in...

Critical genre analysis, especially targeting specific professional practices, crucially depends on the availability of discursive data from the professional practice under investigation, which is not always easily accessible. In this paper, I take up a typical example of this kind of difficulty focusing on an international initiative, in which I have been involved for the last several years, w...

Confronted with the centrality of body for trans-masculine individuals interviewed in United Kingdom and Portugal, we explore how bodily-reflexive practices are central doing masculinity. Following Connell’s early insight that bodies needed to come back political sociological agendas, propose practice is a concept suited account production trans-masculinities. Although multiple, journeys demons...