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In:Studies of Discourse and Governmentality: New perspectives and methods
Edited by Paul McIlvenny, Julia Zhukova Klausen and Laura Bang Lindegaard
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 66] 2016
► pp. 209–234

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Dialogue and governmentality-in-action

A discourse analysis of a leadership forum

Published online: 29 June 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.66.07bag
We explore how dialogue as governmentality-in-action was both overtly challenged and unintentionally employed in an interdisciplinary leadership development forum held at a university. We study the forum as a site to explore Foucault’s understanding of the conduct of conduct combined with Agamben’s and Deleuze’s proposals to advance and nuance the concept of dispositif. We compare dispositif with Bakhtin’s and Linell’s notions of dialogicality and dialogism as sites of centripetal and centrifugal forces with heteroglossia and orientation to third parties. This methodological move makes it possible to study dialogue and dispositif as related concepts that are lived out in situated practices. We employ membership categorisation analysis (MCA) to complement a multimodal conversation analysis of the opening lecture of the forum to show the taken-for-granted nature of the setting as a dispositif.
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