TP 8 (Sub-)Project Description

TP 8 NACHOS | Area: Culture & Ethics

Key research question of the sub-project: 

How can qualitative linguistic discourse analysis contribute to predicting the likelihood of technical innovations being accepted?

 

TP 8: Predicting the acceptance of innovations through qualitative discourse analysis

(Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr Kersten Sven Roth | Co-Principal Investigators: Jun.-Prof. Dr Stefanie Börner, Prof. Dr Kai Heinrich)

 

Over the last ten years, discourse analysis has established itself as the most important qualitative (corpus-based) and, in some respects, quantitative (corpus-driven) methodological paradigm in linguistic social research. Its aim is to reconstruct the ‘knowledge’ (i.e. both cognitive as well as affective and conative epistemes) of discourse communities on the basis of multidimensional analyses (intratextual, transtextual, actor-level). In doing so, linguistic discourse analysis generally adopts a theme-centred approach, seeking to reconstruct social knowledge within its discursive structures on a specific topic.

The challenges, opportunities and functioning of the social aspects of technical innovation extend beyond such a thematic framework in the sense of previous research practice; however, they are characterised by a sufficient degree of semantic commonality to make the application of discourse-analytical methodology possible. However, the question of the extent to which such primarily qualitative analyses can be directly application-oriented—ideally to generate an output that can be incorporated as a ‘soft factor’ into the modelling of acceptance prospects—proves to be more challenging. Such an application-oriented focus has so far been very underdeveloped in linguistic discourse analysis; preliminary work has primarily been outlined by the Principal Investigator in the context of linguistic policy advice (qualitative discourse-pragmatic analysis of prior knowledge). However, there is no question that the way in which a society communicates about a particular innovation through the media and in interpersonal (‘participation-oriented’) discourse—that is, that discourse semantics constitutes a key factor in the acceptance of innovation (and can itself be used to gauge that acceptance)—is beyond dispute.

The project therefore has the task, in addition to conducting a concrete, exemplary analysis, of developing an analytical approach which, whilst meeting the methodological requirements of linguistic discourse analysis itself, also provides a framework for generating operationalisable findings that go beyond the narrower linguistic scope of inquiry. Such an approach has so far been lacking in the field.