p.513 Modern social reality, with its all-too-familiar features, has to be continually constructed and sustained through such aggregative discursive acts of reality-construction. The idea that reality, as we know it, is socially constructed, has become an accepted truth. What is less commonly understood is how this reality gets constructed in the first place and what sustains it.

p.517 in everyday discourse... there is a preference for circumnavigating an issue, tossing out subtle hints that permit only a careful listener or observer to surmise where the hidden or unspoken core of the question lies. Communication of thought is often indirect, suggestive, and symbolic rather than descriptive and precise... despite the basic inadequacies of discourse to communicate deeper truths, there is little doubt that it serves a purposeful role in our lives by transforming a difficult and infrangible reality into a resource at our disposal... discursive action works to translate the difficult and the intransigent, the remote or resistant, the intractable or obdurate into a form that is more amenable

p.517 Discourse is what constitutes our social world. The etymological meaning of the term 'discourse' is 'to run, to enter, to and fro'. In other words, to discourse is to run to and fro and in that process create a path, a course... out of which human existence can be made more fixed, secure and workable. So discourse is first and fundamentally the organizing of social reality... Discourse itself is a form of organization and, therefore, organizational analysis is intrinsically discourse analysis... From the point of view emphasized by this paper, we ourselves are organized as we engage in acts of organizing. My identity is established in the very act of differentiating and detaching myself... from my surroundings through material inscriptions and verbal utterances.