A Literature Review of Organizational Discourse and Prospects

Organizational discourse studies essentially regard the organizations as discourse-based social construction process, and analyze organizational behavior, phenomena, relationships, elements and even the organizations themselves by directly exploring verbal and written discourse texts in organizational context. The special theoretical framework and research method take the “linguistic turn” in social sciences as the development opportunity, challenge the tradition of empiricism, rethink the relationship between language and reality, have reform significance to organization research, and have been extensively used in such organization research fields as institution, strategy, identity and change. Based on a systematic review of major findings in the four critical areas, this paper sums up main contributions of discourse analysis to organization research, and then proposes theoretical model of discourse construction process of organizations and their elements. It points out main problems in current research and future research directions from perspectives of language attention degree, theoretical basis, research method and research topics, and especially makes basic suggestions about the construction of Chinese organizational discourse system and related studies, to introduce organizational discourse studies into Chinese organizational management field, and pave ways for future related studies, especially organizational discourse in Chinese context.