Fairclough's key terms from Language and Power

I am currently reading Language and Power by Norman Fairclough. I asked my AI friend to give me a list of terms, their definition, and an example so I can refer back as I work through the text. Here is what it said.

Text

The actual language produced — spoken, written, or visual. It's the surface level: the words on the page or the utterance in the room.

Example: A performance review document. A CEO's all-hands speech. A job posting.

Discourse (small d)

Language in use — language as a social practice, not just a system of signs. When Fairclough says "discourse," he means the whole event of language happening in a social context.

Example: The performance review isn't just a text; it's a discourse event — it happens between specific people, in a power relation, with real consequences.

Discourse (big D / Discourse types)

A recognizable way of using language associated with a particular social position or institution. Not one event, but a pattern — a style, a set of assumptions baked into how a group habitually talks.

Example: "Management discourse" — the characteristic way managers frame problems, workers, and decisions. "Therapeutic discourse" — the way mental health language has migrated into workplace talk ("resilience," "self-care," "burnout").

Practice

What people do repeatedly and habitually within social structures. Practice isn't random behavior — it's patterned, institutionalized, semi-automatic. It reproduces social relations.

Example: Conducting annual performance reviews is a practice. It happens the same way, across thousands of organizations, and it reproduces a particular relationship between evaluator and evaluated.

Discourse Practice

The production, distribution, and consumption of texts — the social processes around texts, not just the texts themselves. How is a document drafted? Who reviews it? Who reads it, and how?

Example: In a corporation, a policy memo is written by HR, vetted by legal, approved by leadership, distributed to managers, and "acknowledged" by employees. That whole circuit is the discourse practice.

Social Practice

The broader category — any institutionalized pattern of human activity. Discourse practice is one type of social practice, but social practice also includes non-linguistic dimensions: physical arrangements, economic relations, power hierarchies.

Example: "Performance management" as a social practice includes the paperwork (discourse) and the raise decisions, the office arrangements, the surveillance systems.

MR (Members' Resources)

The internalized, largely unconscious knowledge and assumptions people bring to producing and interpreting discourse. Fairclough's term for what you already carry when you enter a language situation — schemas, scripts, ideological assumptions.

Example: When you read "team player" in a job posting, you don't pause to decode it. Your MR tells you instantly what it means — and, crucially, what it demands. That fluency is the MR working. The ideology is invisible because it's already inside you.

Order of Discourse

The structured set of discourse types available within a particular institution or social domain — and the power relations among them. It's the menu of legitimate ways to speak in a given space, and who gets to use which.

Example: In a corporation, the order of discourse includes: executive communication, HR policy language, technical/engineering talk, customer service scripts, union grievance language. These aren't equal — executive communication sets the terms; union grievance language is tolerated but marginalized.

Social Order

The broader, society-wide arrangement of power, institutions, and relations — of which the order of discourse is the linguistic dimension. Social order is reproduced and contested partly through orders of discourse.

Example: The social order of a capitalist organization naturalizes hierarchy, productivity as virtue, and loyalty to the firm. The order of discourse within that organization reflects and reinforces this — certain ways of talking are legitimate, others are "unprofessional."

Naturalization

The process by which historically contingent, power-serving arrangements come to seem natural, inevitable, common sense. This is Fairclough's central ideological mechanism. MR carry naturalized assumptions; orders of discourse reproduce them.

Example: "We're a meritocracy" — the idea that current distributions of reward reflect genuine differences in merit feels like a description of reality rather than an ideological claim. That's naturalization at work.

Interdiscursivity / Intertextuality

Texts don't exist in isolation — they draw on, respond to, and reshape other texts and discourse types. Interdiscursivity is when multiple discourse types mix or colonize each other.

Example: When HR adopts therapy language ("psychological safety," "emotional intelligence"), that's the therapeutic discourse type being drawn into management discourse — with consequences for how workers are expected to present themselves.

The through-line connecting all of these: Fairclough is building a framework for showing how language does ideological work without appearing to. MR are why we don't notice. Naturalization is the effect. Orders of discourse are the structure. And discourse practice is where it all happens, in real time, in real institutions.