Interview with Thomas Jacobs: Discourse Theory and Strategic Communication

We talk to Thomas Jacobs about his Journal of Language and Politics article, Discourse Theory and Strategic Communication: A long-expected party, as he tells us why the two fields can benefit each other.

Photo by sk on Pexels

scholars of discourse and scholars of strategic communication can learn a lot from each-other

Why did you decide to write this piece?

For a few years now, my teaching assignments have included a class on Corporate Communication and a class on Organisational Communication, and I have naturally been reading the literature on these topics quite a bit. Since my own research interests are focused on questions about discourse, hegemony, rhetoric, and strategy, I was particularly interested in the field of Strategic Communication. As I became more familiar with this literature, I was (pleasantly) surprised in several respects. First of all, while a rationalist and positivist research agenda was omnipresent, I found a remarkable openness to and interest in the notion of discourse and in discursive approaches. Secondly, it was very interesting and enriching to see how Strategic Communication scholars who are not native to the domain of Discourse Studies but who have been grappling with discursive questions approach and use the notion of discourse. Some insights which we have started to take for granted in Discourse Studies remain completely absent from the literature on Strategic Communication despite their obvious promise and potential. Vice versa, even without the large theoretical and methodological baggage of Discourse Studies, the Strategic Communication literature has developed several tendencies and breakthroughs whose adoption would greatly enrich and strengthen Discourse Studies. As such, I started to explore the potential for dialogue and cross-pollination between these two literatures.

What are the key takeaways?

The core claim of the article is essentially that scholars of discourse and scholars of strategic communication can learn a lot from each-other. From the point of view of a discourse scholar, the strategic communication literature struggles with an overly narrow, top-down, and intentionalist definition of strategy. Additionally, some of the existing discursive approaches in the Strategic Communication literature feel the unwarranted need to constantly ground their discursive analyses within a non-discursive ontology, thereby trivialising the research in question and bracketing the relevance of its findings. A discourse-theoretical approach can help out on both fronts, while simultaneously respecting the methodological and empirical diversity that constitutes one of the main strengths of the Strategic Communication literature. Discourse Studies and the PDT literature, meanwhile, stand to gain a lot of credibility by tackling some of the ‘harder’ economic and administrative topics that are common in the Strategic Communication literature. Furthermore, engaging with the Strategic Communication literature will also force Discourse Studies to reflect more deeply about the emerging division of labour between on the one hand critical discursive approaches that evaluate their research objects normatively and ethically and on the other hand discursive approach interested in how hegemonies are successfully or unsuccessfully challenged, reproduced, and transformed through politicisation and depoliticisation.

Where do you plan to go next in your research?

My main interest remains in political strategies, hegemonies, and how their interplay can be understood from a discursive perspective. I hope to continue to explore this subject from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. I am for instance currently preparing an article on how the old anthropological concept of cargo cultism can help us understand certain strategic reflexes in socialist movements and political parties, and I am soliciting funding from various sources to run a big research project on the role that narratives, discourses, and interpretations play in the articulation of data-driven political communication strategies. Whichever way my future work goes, though, I feel that all my future research will become a lot richer now that I have become more intimately familiar with the literatures on corporate communication, management, strategic communication, digital communication, marketing,… I would encourage all discourse scholars to engage with these topics, because I feel that even a superficial acquaintance with these domains will add new perspectives and new insights to their understanding of processes of social construction.