The origins of what is now termed "discursive psychology" can arguably be traced to the late 1980s, and the collaborative research and analysis sessions that took place as part of Loughborough University's then newly formed Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG).
Charles Antaki, writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, described the impact of this book: Potter and Wetherell have genuinely presented us with a different way of working in social psychology.
The book's clarity means that it has the power to influence a lot of people ill-at-ease with traditional social psychology but unimpressed with (or simply bewildered by) other alternatives on offer.
It could rescue social psychology from the sterility of the laboratory and its traditional mentalism.The field itself was originally labeled as DP during the early 1990s by Derek Edwards and Potter at Loughborough University.
Discursive psychology draws on the philosophy of mind of Gilbert Ryle and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, the rhetorical approach of Michael Billig, the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel, the conversation analysis of Harvey Sacks and the sociology of scientific knowledge of those like Mike Mulkay, Steve Woolgar and Bruno Latour.
The term "discursive psychology" was designed partly to indicate that there was not just a methodological shift at work in this form of analysis, but also, and at the same time, that it involved some fairly radical theoretical rethinking.
Discursive psychology focuses on the locally organized practices for constructing the world to serve relevant activities (in this case managing the live question of who is to blame and who needs to change in the counselling).
Although most recent DP oriented studies take talk-in-interaction as their primary data, it is not difficult to locate another strand of DP-related research in which texts are approached as sites for the active literary/narratorial management of matters such as agency, intent, doubt, culpability, belief, prejudice, and so on.
[10] This approach has proved particularly productive in an age marked by the growth in usage of social media,[11] SMS texts, photo messaging apps, blogs/vlogs, YouTube, interactive websites (etc.