Developing the contribution of discursive psychology to sustainable business and circular economy research.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In my PhD research I explored how product designers navigate being held to account for how sustainable products are. Amid a crisis of overproduction and overconsumption, many design educators, design academics, and sustainability campaigning organisations are providing guidance on how to design more sustainable products. For example, biodegradable or reusable materials can be chosen, or products can be designed to be easier to dismantle and repair. However, professional designers working in and for companies may not be in a position to make these decisions. Even if designers themselves want to focus on sustainability, the final decisions about products are often made by managers or clients. To see how professional designers manage accountability for the outcomes of their work, I carried out interviews and collected recordings of conference panel discussions in which designers were talking about their decisions and responsibilities. I used a method called discursive psychology to closely analyse the ways the designers talked, including paying attention to hesitations and types of language used. I identified recurring patterns in the ways the designers assumed or deflected accountability in the ways they talked. To build on this PhD research, during the postdoctoral fellowship I will focus on three areas. Firstly, I will seek to publish three more of my four analysis chapters in academic journals. This would enable researchers in different disciplines to be exposed to the usefulness of the discursive psychology method. One of the analysis chapters, on talking about decision-making in sustainable design, has been published in the journal Design Studies. The other three chapters are on talking about the role of personal values in design; different ways of talking about responsibility; and on talking about influencing decisions rather than making them. I will seek to frame these chapters in ways that make them clearly relevant to sustainable business and sustainable production journals.Secondly, I will further explore the usefulness of discursive psychology as an approach to conducting research on sustainability in business. Analysing how people talk to each other in business settings is common in business research, often using critical discourse analysis or conversation analysis (Fairclough 2013; Wodak et al. 2011). Yet discursive psychology is not commonly used in business studies. I aim to develop an agenda for using discursive psychology to study aspects of sustainable business and circular economy, identifying specific examples of studies that would be useful to undertake.Thirdly, I will expand my focus on the potential real-world impact of discursive psychology research. A lot of discursive psychology research focuses on better understanding social practices related to important issues such as racism or other forms of prejudice (Edwards 2004; Huma et al. 2020; Tekin and Drury 2021). However, translating the findings from such research into different sorts of resources and tools that can lead to positive impacts for society has not been a key focus. Scholars who use conversation analysis, a method closely aligned to discursive psychology, have developed methods for achieving practical impact from their research findings (Hepburn et at. 2014; Stokoe 2020). I aim to study the ways in which analysing conversations has been translated into practical impact and elucidate the opportunities for discursive psychology scholars to focus more on research impact.