Culture as deficit: a critical discourse analysis of the concept of culture in contemporary social work discourse

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Sept, 2005 by Yoosun Park

The absence of debate and deliberation cannot easily be attributed to social work's lack of recognition that constructs such as "culture" are consequential. A field so sensitive to the power of labels, which insists on "serving clients" rather than "helping patients," is obviously aware of the perils of language and its uses. The lack arises, perhaps in part, from social work's conceptualization of the issue as one of measurement rather than premise. Our struggles with the definitional niceties of our basic constructs tend to be limited to the problem of methodology: the difficulty in determining the right variables to represent the category/construct at hand. The assumption appears to be that if we had better tools or methods then we could actually get to, and measure, the thing itself. The essential existence of culture is taken for granted, in other words, and it is only the deficits of our existing methodologies in capturing and measuring culture that we find troublesome; the problem is conceived as the need for epistemological refinement rather than ontological scrutiny.

CDA, on the other hand, sees the examination of the taken-for-granted assumption, the investigation of basic constructs, as the crucial task at hand. Discursive demarcations--the acts of naming, classifying, and categorizing--necessary to all language usage are in themselves considered acts of power which demarcate the center from the periphery, the normal from the deviant, the same from the different, self from the Other. Identities and realities constructed through such discursive practices are, consequently, not only constructed in ways that conceal their manufacture, but are always constructed unequally, legitimating one at the cost of the other. From this perspective on language and discourse, de-stablizing basic constructs--interrogating, contesting, and reinscribing entrenched, sedimented, and naturalized assumptions--becomes a political imperative. On this view, a task which we tend to see as an ancillary aggravation to the real work of building interventions, is deemed necessary as a mode of resistance against the marginalizing, exclusionary forces of hegemonic ideologies.

De-naturalizing occluded assumptions, the taken-for-granted context of discourse, is a key task of CDA. That which is uncovered through CDA as both an agent and a product of discursive occlusion is usually defined as ideology (N. Fairclough & Wodak, 1997). Ideology's ordinary indiscernibility in discourse is attributed to the functioning of hegemonic power. Cast in the neo-Marxist terminology of Norman Fairclough (1995),

   the power to control discourse is seen as the power to sustain
   particular discursive practices with particular ideological
   investments in dominance over other alternative (including
   oppositional) practices.... such assumptions are quite
   generally naturalized, and people are generally unaware of
   them and of how they are subjected by/to them. (p. 2)

Although most critical discourse analysts inscribe the mode of hegemonic power as "ideology," it can also be understood to be any version of structurally or "culturally" imposed dominating/subjugating power that functions to construct unequal identities--whether based on gender, race, culture, or other inscriptions of power. Kress' (1996) use of Bourdieu's concept of the "habitus" rather than "ideology" to capture the naturalizing dynamic of power which devises and maintains the unequal binary positionalities of the subject/object is an example.