Research Context, Methods and Data Collection

Abstract

In this chapter, I shall first provide an account of more recent changes and developments in Scottish penal policy and its associated discourses. These discourses are expressed in a number of policy documents the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) produced in the wake of the crisis it faced in the mid- and late 1980s, which gave rise to its new corporate philosophy to imprisonment, enterprising Managerialism. By drawing attention to these (discursive) developments and changes, I put my own discussion of the functions of discourse, ideology and power within the deviancy control system into a wider context. Developments in the present can only be understood in terms of the system’s historical developments. All this extra-textual information is necessary for an analysis of discourse as a social practice. As Cicourel (1992: 294) puts it:

Language and other social practices are interdependent. Knowing something about the ethnographic setting, the perception of and characteristics attributed to others, and broader local and social organizational conditions becomes imperative for an understanding of linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of communicative events.