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This is the last of four chapters offering a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and explores the dialectics (logical structure) of policy argumentation. Approaches are examined to discursive policy analysis and policy argumentation with an emphasis on the integration of empirical and normative inquiry. The discussion is oriented around a particular line of development in the argumentative turn, namely, a dialectical communications approach based on the informal or good-reasons logic of argumentation. In particular, the productive capacities of the communications model are emphasized, namely, its ability to generate ways of thinking and seeing that open new possibilities for problem-solving and action, or, in the language of Habermas’s critical theory, its ‘communicative power’. The different sections of the chapter look at argumentative discursive policy practices, the communications model of argumentative policy analysis, the search for rational procedures in argumentation, the logic of policy arguments (practical discourse), policy argumentation as practical reason, policy argumentation as communicative interaction (the role of analytical discourses), and critical rationality as undistorted communication.

Naturalistic accounts of language and conceptual capacities more generally have heretofore been guided by the neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis. Niche construction and other aspects of an “extended” evolutionary synthesis suggest a different approach. This chapter develops a naturalistic account of the co-evolution of human organisms with language and other capacities for conceptual understanding, as forms of behavioral niche construction. Discursive practice is part of the normal developmental environment for human beings, which leads to its reproduction in subsequent generations; this environmental inheritance has changed the selection pressures on the human lineage. Grasp of a language is then a practical-perceptual skill in responding and contributing to a public discursive practice, rather than symbolic representation processing. Despite the rudimentary linguistic development of the bonobo Kanzi, which shows that capacities for linguistic acquisition are ancestral, a niche-constructionist approach shows why the evolutionary continuity between human and other animal minds led to discontinuous conceptual capacities in the human lineage. Other animals’ sensitive, flexible practical-perceptual responsiveness to their environments are a barrier to symbolic displacement and discursive understanding. This approach then highlights the challenge, taken up in subsequent chapters, of accounting for the rational normativity of conceptual understanding in its terms.

Recognizing language and other conceptual capacities as forms of behavioral niche construction that involve practical-perceptual skill requires understanding conceptual contentfulness in those terms. This chapter argues that proto-linguistic capacities for symbolic displacement are not sufficient for conceptual understanding, and builds upon other recent accounts of how a more articulated discursive practice evolved. Linguistic and other conceptually articulated performances must be partially autonomous from their environmental circumstances: proximally dependent upon their iterative and “conversational” relations to other expressive performances, but also accountable to the broader practical-perceptual significance of these discursive patterns. The vocative and recognitive aspects of language enable speakers to hold one another to account for their performances and their relations to partially shared circumstances. Such partially autonomous conceptual practices extend well beyond language to include other expressive domains, and interconnected domains of equipment and social roles. This conception of discursive practices then points toward a more adequate account of their social character. The “two-dimensional” normativity of discursive social practices arises not from communal regularities, or supposedly shared rules or norms, but instead from how participants in these practices hold one another’s performances accountable to issues and stakes that are anaphorically indicated by temporally extended interactions.

This chapter analyzes the discursive unfolding of interactions between a professional coach and a middle manager during a management coaching conversation, a specific form of talk-at-work. The theoretical framework aims to forward discursive theorizing by differentiating between discourses and discursive practices as well as between relational and temporal processes. The chapter argues that our framework allows us to study how discourses are constituted through discursive practices between the two speakers and across the course of the session. The chapter’s empirical analysis then illustrates how the coach is able to inscribe the manager into a set of predefined discourses about the management of emotions through a mode of interaction the chapter calls empathetic persuasion. In doing so the chapter also makes an empirical contribution by tracing how employees are inscribed into emotional management discourses through Human Resource Management intervention like management coaching.

Some parts of the discursive literature in IR overlap with the scholarship that focuses on foreign policy practices. This is not surprising given the specific intentions by the scholars behind the practice turn to create an interparadigmatic research programme and promote methodological pluralism (Adler and Pouliot 2011:3). Nevertheless, there seems to be a division developing in the practice turn between those who focus on the language practitioners use by building on scholarship inspired by Michel Foucault, and those who focus on practitioners’ political actions, that is ‘what practitioners do’, in line with Pierre Bourdieu’s work. This book argues that it is instrumental to combine both. However, focusing on the linguistic resources used by practitioners and on the way they construct their social actions allows us to understand and explain specific foreign policy decisions or their practice. In order to do so, a new framework called Discursive International Relations (DIR) is put forward. DIR shares the same philosophical roots as some constructivist and most poststructuralist discursive approaches applied in IR, but it also combines features of discursive psychology (Edwards and Potter 1992), conversation analysis (Davies and Harré 1990; Sacks 1992) and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967, Lynch et al 1983) in order to combine discourse and practice.

The introduction discusses music as a discursive practice that encodes musical sounds with meanings. It highlights some of the implications resulting from the introduction of the folk yodel into professional music making in Europe. The chapter elaborates the semiotic/semantic analytical approach employed in the book to investigate musical meaning and sets out some of the key themes that are explored in the following chapters, including class division, identity, musical hierarchies and artistic status, and the symbolic function of music. Yodeling’s origins in folk cultures unconnected with Europe’s intellectual classes are discussed, focusing specifically on the Alps and Africa, as well as yodeling’s relationship to conventional European singing practice. It discusses the spread of musical ideas, the changes in their connotations resulting from new contexts, as well as taste and its relationship to discourses about art.

This chapter approaches early socialization through the prism of narrative practices. Because socialization is an inherently interdisciplinary problem, the discussion is grounded in interdisciplinary fields of inquiry, interweaving their histories with a program of comparative research, spanning three decades. The research involved two working-class communities in the United States and middle-class communities in Chicago and Taipei. In each case, it found that the universal predisposition to narrative takes root and burgeons very early as youngsters step into local discursive practices that are culturally differentiated from the beginning. Placing personal storytelling front and center opens a window on how socialization happens on the ground and exposes a dynamic early moment in the co-creation of persons and cultures. The chapter argues that these vital processes depend as much on young children's agency as they do on the systematic socializing efforts, witting and unwitting, of parents and other family members.

School culture is based on values and norms which, in the Rishi Valley School, are derived from two kinds of practice that are constitutive of school life: organizational practice and discursive practice. Both organizational and discursive practices are common to most schools but in Rishi Valley, there is a third element/value which is enshrined in Jiddu Krishnamurti's philosophy. Value is realized through organizational features and practice as well as through rituals of challenge and effervescence. Hence, all three elements operate together resulting in different activities including the performance of certain kinds of rituals and ceremonies. This chapter examines the routinised rituals and ceremonies in Rishi Valley as part of the school's culture. One of these is the evening ritual of asthachal in which all students are required to be outside and watch the sun set over the hills. The other is the preparations of J Krishnamurthy's annual visit which bring ‘a mystical quality’ to the school. The chapter ends by discussing rituals as dramatizations of the routine.

This chapter is about collective identity and how practitioners define this highly complex topic. Two main patterns emerge from the corpus. Practitioners’ main concerns while discussing the concept of ‘European’ identity are as follows: to differentiate between European neighbours and the neighbours of Europe, and to account for the European credentials of the South Caucasus or Kazakhstan. In addressing differentiation between the neighbours, practitioners draw on geography, culture, history and economic ties to distinguish between countries which are in Europe and those which are not. At the same time practitioners make explicit distinctions between the key EU policies: the European Neighbourhood Policy and the enlargement policy. They also build up the category of the ‘European’. When they offer accounts of the South Caucasus and Kazakhstan, one practitioner relies on a heredity account of the European civilization, while others seek to justify, in different ways, the European-ness of the Caucasus and potentially Kazakhstan.

This chapter discusses contemporary Byzantine definitions and conceptions of poetry and literature. To that end, it investigates the role of the poet in society, reviews meta-literary and meta-poetic statements, and analyses Byzantine perceptions of their own literary history. This chapter concludes that Byzantine ‘poets’ defined themselves foremost as logioi (intellectuals) and their textual products as logoi (discursive practices). Instead of artistic motivations, their discursive practices need to be seen as social acts, unconnected to any consciousness of a literary tradition.

This chapter investigates the forms and rhetoric of poetic criticism adopted or invented by women poets and critics from the period of the Ming-Qing transition to the late Qing. These include discursive practices located in prefatory materials to anthologies and poetry collections, letters, poems discussing poetry, shihua literature (critical works focusing on poetry), and critical anthologies. In particular, this chapter discusses and compares the critical principles and rhetorical strategies underlying the commentaries in three acclaimed works produced at different historical junctures: Guixiu ji (Anthology of Talents of the Women's Quarters) by Ji Xian (1614–1683), Mingyuan shiwei (Classics of Poetry by Women of Note) by Wang Duanshu (1621–ca. 1680), and Mingyuan shihua (Remarks on Poetry by Notable Women) by Shen Shanbao (1808–1862).

Chris Heffer sets out an argument, illustrated through judicial attitudes to jury instruction on the criminal standard of proof, about how authorized language can lead over time to a breakdown in legal-lay communication. He argues that a few individuals, invested with the highest institutional authority, can use their powerful agency, or authorized voice, in legal metadiscourse to establish a privileged reading of a text that resounds through time. This is internalized as authoritative discourse to the point where it becomes part of a judge’s accumulated, normalized and unquestioned experience of discursive practice in legal settings. Where this legal-linguistic habitus is, or becomes, incommensurable with lay discursive practice, it can result in the legal professional failing to hear the lay voice and tending to question the competence of the lay person rather than the authoritative discourse. This communication breakdown can be highly consequential and may result in miscarriages of justice.

This chapter focuses on norms and the functions of norms in EU foreign policy. The analysis presented here offers an evaluation of the EU’s role as a normative power in the region, examining what EU practitioners understand as norms. It also offers insight in the context in which EU foreign policy is practiced through norms which in turn guide the practices of EU practitioners. The following patterns emerge from the data. First, how norms are constructed, what norms the EU can spread to its neighbours and how practitioners can urge neighbouring states to embrace these norms through the EU’s prescribed reform process. Second, practitioners’ attention shifts to the EU model of norms itself. They strive not only to make the specific EU model relevant but also attractive to the neighbours. In addition, they claim to have the necessary expertise to assist these countries to emulate this model. Third, practitioners address two sources of non-compliance: one is non-alignment with the EU model, and the second is the existence of a competing model, the Russian model, that does not quite meet EU standards of norms. Finally, practitioners put forward an all-encompassing EU-centric view that reveals a particular ethnocentric view.

This chapter focus on the moral concerns of practitioners regarding the eastern neighbourhood. The normative power literature deliberately decouples norms from values. But this chapter demonstrates that in practice it is impossible to do so. The EU practitioners demonstrate how they operationalise their specific moral concerns for the eastern neighbourhood. Their norm deployments are consistent with Legro, Buzan and Zizek’s claims of norm use. In addition, the analysis reveals instances when practitioners risk sounding moralising rather than moral. This is highly problematic for two reasons. First, moralising endangers alienating neighbouring states who align themselves with the EU but do not want to receive a lecture by EU practitioners. Second, if the EU cannot deliver on specific commitments, this will have implications for its status with regards to support for democracy or human rights in the region.

This chapter compares three radically heterogeneous models for managing the relation between past and future: two procedures of exception (in Athens, after the civil war, the decree of 403 BC—it is as far as we know the first procedure of amnesty) and, in South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) after the collapse of apartheid; and a third, “normal” procedure, that of the French management of sensitive archives (like those of World War II). These three models help shed light on certain relations between politics, discursive practice, and deliberation, and provide insights into the ways in which truth and deliberative politics are linked.