Discourse is a popular term used in a variety of ways, easily leading to confusion. This article attempts to clarify the various meanings of discourse in social studies, the term's relevance for organizational analysis and some key theoretical positions in discourse analysis. It also focuses on the methodological problem of the relationship between: a) the level of discourse produced in interviews and in everyday life observed as `social texts' (in particular talk); b) other kinds of phenomena, such as meanings, experiences, orientations, events, material objects and social practices; and, c) discourses in the sense of a large-scale, ordered, integrated way of reasoning/ constituting the social world. In particular, the relationship between `micro and meso-level' discourse analysis (i.e. specific social texts being the primary empirical material) and `grand and mega-level' discourse (i.e. large-scale orders) is investigated.

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This article takes the linguistic turn, or turns, in the social sciences as its point of departure and discusses the implications for methodology, empirical research, and field practices in social and organizational studies. Various responses can be identified: grounded fictionalism, giving up the hope of making substantive, empirical claims in terms of research texts capturing social phenomena; data-constructionism, where the ambiguous and constructed nature of empirical material gives space for a more relaxed, freer, and bolder way of interacting with empirical material; and discursivism, in which the researcher concentrates on the details of empirical material that lends itself to representations in the form of language, for example, conversations and texts. The article develops some ideas for a more reflective way of dealing with language issues in empirical social research. It argues for a more discourse-near but not discourse-exclusive approach to organizational research and refers to this as discursive pragmatism.

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