This brings us to the second part of the feminist critique of DI, which
concerns what Rönnblom and Bacchi (2011) perceive as Schmidt's
overtly agent-centred view of discourses. They maintain that in a
Foucauldian perspective, instead of perceiving discourses as objects
(ideas), they are understood as “social meanings or knowledges that
shape what can be said and how people come to understand themselves”
(ibid). This definition of discourse emphasises the focus on
movement, “the production of the real” through practices (ibid.).
Rönnblom and Bacchi refer to Bacchi's earlier work on problem representations
(2009). This approach focuses on the identification of what
is being represented as problems in policy. Examining critically what
problem representations include or exclude, the focus is on how they
affect what counts as reality. Rönnblom and Bacchi maintain that
Schmidt's definition of discourse is closer to ‘talking about one's ideas’
and it would make more sense to talk about communicative institutionalism
than of discursive institutionalism.