It may be, but you need to have DISCOURSE to analyse.  What communication or interaction could you analyze?

This is exactly the problem. My question is that if such matters could be studied in CDA?  At first, staff's avoiding doing their jobs and some conventional words and sentences in society are the only sources that come to mind 

I will be grateful if you guide me in this respect or help me find a suitable subject like the one above.

Best regards

Dr Keith Richards, who was at Warwick University until recently, and may still be associated has done a fair amount of work on staffroom discourse. His work, if I recall correctly, was more from a Conversation Analysis perspective than a CDA one. However, it may still be relevant to you.

Tnx a million Chris.

On mehtodology for analysing conversation you could read this:

Santamaría-García, Carmen (2011). "Bricolage assembling: CL, CA and DA to explore the negotiation of agreement in English and Spanish conversation". Farr, Fiona and Anne O'Keeffe (eds.) Applying Corpus Linguistics. Special issue of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 16: 3. 345-370. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

ISSN (Online) 1569-9811 ISSN (Print)1384-6655

DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.19.3

Hi

It is impossible to do critical discourse analysis on staff's avoiding doing their responsibility. The outcome will be very simplistic and superficial.

You can use CDA if you can get access to some kind of verbal exchange as basis for discourse analysis.However note that most staff avoid doing their responsibility quietly and so you may not get data. Get another topic.

If you do not have access to any linguistic data, you could try with Multimodal Discourse Analysis along the lines of e.g. van Leeuwen, Jewitt, Kress, etc. It would entail treating situations and behaviours as 'texts', and there might be som epistemological problems here, depending on your other theoretcial approaches; it is a more structuralistic framework than e.g. the more dynamic framework of (M)CA, which regards texts as unfolding processes.

Thanks a lot. Your comments were helpful. 

If you have any materiality within the institutional communications, like a chain of e-mail exchanges, or negligent responses to procedures or company specs, then you might have a corpus to analyze using CDA. The discousive practices of the institution will be fundamental to grasp the ruptures of the work flow. And I also agree with Mr. Thomas Andersen above, for the Multimodal approach here would be very powerful, if these incongruent working behavior is manifested through body, visual or verbal discourse.

Anyhow, I believe that to be a good research issue.

All the best!

I think you can provided that you should identify criteria for deciding that your data are in fact representing language of avoiding responsibility.Then, you can develop or adopt an analytical model that can help you to address your topic and answer all the questions about that topic, especially those related to reproducing the text, the influence of factors such as dominance and power, ideologies of subjects in question, in addition to a stance that you should take according to your findings.

 I imagine your work to start with clarifying the concept of the targeted responsibility itself. It could be classified into at least two main types: formal and informal; that is legal and sociolinguistic, respectively. That will be helpful in identifying at least tentative data to be dealt with.  

Paulo's idea is excellent, but you will need to seek ethical permission to both examine such exchanges and include any examples from them in anything that you publish.

Good point!

I think such kind of work relates to a field study as identifying people avoiding doing their responsibility is somehow fuzzy. On what criteria can you pass a judgement on whether X is avoiding her/his responsibility or not? I could not get the point of doing an "historical" research, why historical?  

Tnx a lot. very useful.