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In the past 15 years or so, a number of varied strands of research have been dubbed “discourse analysis”: speech act oriented studies of conversational coherence (eg, Coulthard & Montgomery, 1981); so-called discourse processes work on story grammars and the like (eg, van Dijk & Kintch, 1983); the “Continental” discourse analysis of Foucault (eg, 1971), which has been concerned with showing the way that different cultural entities are constituted discursively as well as the historical development of that constitution; and, finally, specific developments within the sociology of science that arose in part as a consequence of methodological debates on the role of discourse in research methods (eg, Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984). The approach we have developed (Edwards & Potter, 1992a, 1992b, in press; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell & Potter, 1988) draws on important features of both the Continental and the …