Racing White Logics' Institutionalization in School Social Work Practice: A Case Example of and Case for Critical Discourse Analysis of Organizational Archives

Background: Organizational scholarship examines the formation, practices, sunsetting, and consequences of organizational life for people, practice, and knowledge production through diverse methodologies. An underutilized method for analyzing organizations’ roles in social work and social policy is critical discourse analysis (CDA). While CDA is well-established in social work, its uptake by organizational scholars is limited and its promise as an anti-racist historical method unfilled. Deploying an organizational archival case study, this presentation both demonstrates the value of CDA to organizational scholarship and opens up the “black box” of CDA as an anti-racist historical method.

Methods: We conducted a CDA of a 1924 report published by the Public Education Association (PEA) about the visiting teachers movement, an early 20th century term for professionalized school social work. We approached the report as a form of public speech shaped by and shaping discourses of racialized and racializing public education interventions. We documented both analytic memo trails about empirical and conceptual findings and methodological memo trails about our approach to the archives and how we arrived at our findings.

Findings: In this paper, we mobilize empirical and conceptual findings to highlight methodological insights about the application and utility of CDA to organizational archives – the primary aim of this paper. In so doing, we elucidate how our CDA unfolded and helped us arrive at conceptual arguments about PEA’s role in shaping school social work. Our primary empirical and conceptual findings are that PEA drew upon white logics and white methods to generate racialized evidence about students and families; legitimate itself as a credible evidence broker of that evidence; and help institutionalize racist practices in public education via visiting teachers’ everyday work. We developed this argument through two practices of CDA of organizational archives. Practice 1, reading the archives aloud, foregrounded affect and temporality as analytic tools. The archives reflect the organizational processes of positioning PEA as “helping” and “benevolent.” Reading the archives aloud enhanced our analysis of PEA’s linguistic and rhetorical strategies, underscoring the stakes of its racialized practices for families. It also made the past feel present, reflecting how the “archives” functioned, then, more like practice manuals that actively (re)shaped the organizational field of public education in the 1920s. Practice 2, collaborative analysis in real time, involved positioning ourselves and the archives. We grappled with the fact that we are part of the document’s intended audience: white men, public administrators, and scientists shaping an organizational field through the logics and practices of white women. Reading the archives aloud ensured that we, as evidence brokers ourselves, consistently confronted how the archives, as forms of public speech, reestablished power and underscored our accountability to epistemic justice.

Implications: By documenting our analytic and methodological CDA praxis of PEA’s report, we identify practical steps for implementing CDA of organizational archives. In doing so, we offer an example of how CDA can intervene in historical and contemporary organizational practices that (re)produce racist ideologies and actions in social work.