Showing papers in "Discourse & Society in 2002"

Understanding the new management ideology: a transdisciplinary contribution from critical discourse analysis and new sociology of capitalism

Abstract: Our aim in this article is to explore how one might approach the language of new capitalism working in a transdisciplinary way, bringing together new sociology of capitalism (Chiapello) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough). We focus upon 'new management ideology', and in particular on a recent book by a highly influential management 'guru' (Rosabeth Moss Kanter). The article begins with a discussion of new management ideology based particularly upon the work of Boltanski and Chiapello, followed by an outline of the version of critical discourse analysis we draw upon, and an analysis of a number of extracts from the book. In the conclusion we consider the implications of the analysis for transdisciplinary research

Textual silence and the discourse of homelessness

Abstract: This article delineates five forms of textual elision or `silence': speech—act silences, presuppositional silences, discreet silences, genre-based silences and manipulative silences. Manipulative silence receives extended attention, as it is felt to be the most ideologically powerful form of silence in public discourse. A case study on the discourse of homelessness, drawing on a corpus of 163 newspaper articles and editorials published in the US during early 1999, is used to illustrate how manipulative silences work and, more importantly, how they can be systematically identified by the discourse analyst. The article concludes with a discussion of the notion of authorial `intentionality'.

Language in New Capitalism

Abstract: What is 'New Capitalism'? The capitalist system has a well-documented capacity to sustain itself through major transformations 'New Capitalism' refers to the new form of capitalism emerging from contemporary transformations We can think of these transformations as simultaneously a 're-structuring' and a 'rescaling' (Jessop, 2000) A 're-structuring', in the sense that there are shifts in relations between different domains or fields of social life most obviously, between the economic field and other fields (including the political, educational and artistic fields), including a 'colonization' of other fields by the economic field Witness what is happening to higher education A 're-scaling', in the sense that there are shifts in relations between different scales of social life between social

Identity, categorization and sequential organization: the sequential and categorial flow of identity in a radio phone-in

Abstract: Radio phone-in programmes have been the subject of a number of studies using the methodology of conversation analysis. Although this has been successful in making apparent the sequential organization of this type of interaction, little has been said about its categorial organization. Adopting an ethnomethodological approach, it is demonstrated in this article that interaction on public access radio can be seen to rely upon categorial and sequential identities built up and developed upon over the course of interaction. By paying attention to the categorial features within media interaction, together with the sequential organization, it is possible to examine the way identities are reflexively developed in conjunction with the sequential flow of interaction. This in turn allows an analysis able to address the multilayered organizational methods used by members as part of the on-going flow of interaction.

Self-sufficient Arguments in Political Rhetoric: Constructing Reconciliation and Apologizing to the Stolen Generations

Abstract: This article focuses on the rhetorical and argumentative organization of a major political address by the Prime Minister of Australia on the topics of reconciliation and apologizing to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous peoples. The analysis documents the interpretative repertoires that were mobilized to argue around these sensitive, controversial issues in a public forum, in particular the deployment of discursive formulations of `togetherness', of `culture' and of `nation'. The analysis also demonstrates the ways in which a limited number of rhetorically self-sufficient arguments, identified in recent studies of the language of contemporary racism, was mobilized in this important public speech. We argue that the flexible use of such rhetorically self-sufficient arguments concerning practicality, equality, justice and progress worked to build up a particular version of reconciliation which functions to sustain and legitimate existing inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia.

Competing discourses in the classroom: a Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis of girls' and boys' speech in public contexts

Abstract: ABSTRA C T. This article responds to Billig’s (2000) call for new forms of writing that might challenge the ‘linguistic orthodoxies’ of the critical paradigm. It also responds to Van Dijk’s appeal in this journal for more examination of the differences between Conversational Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis. It argues that Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis (PDA) 1 offers an alternative account of spoken interactions to those of CA and CDA, in that it explores how fluctuating power relations between speakers are continuously reconstructed through competing discourses. This approach is exemplified by a comparative analysis of girls’ and boys’ talk in a secondary English class, which was being assessed for its effectiveness in public contexts. The study reveals a link between the more powerful discursive positioning of boys, and the extent to which they were adjudged more ‘effective’ than girls as public speakers. However, a post-structuralist analysis shows that because girls are multiply located in discourse and not constituted as victims, they can be taught to resist certain dominant classroom practices.

What can conversation analysis contribute to feminist methodology? Putting reflexivity into practice:

Abstract: This article uses conversation analysis to explore an issue central to the design and delivery of feminist research: the relationship between researcher and researched, and specifically, the impact of the former on the latter. A guiding principle of much feminist research is that it should be respondent-centred, allowing participants to set the agenda and define what is important in their own terms. Though not advocated as an explicitly feminist method, one technique deemed to be ideally suited to this end is the use of prompts as stimulus materials. In this article, I revisit data from my own research in which picture prompts were used to derive gender talk. Rather than treat prompts as facilitators of talk in which the respondents set the priorities, I demonstrate how the activity of showing a prompt itself requires work on the part of the moderator. I argue that even where the researcher tries to minimize her impact on the data collection process — as in this case through the use of prompts — that she ...

Building power asymmetries in girls' interaction:

Abstract: This study, based on three years of ethnographic research (and over 60 hours of videotaped interaction) in a Southern California elementary school, investigates how enduring asymmetrical relationships among females in a multicultural peer group are built in moment-to-moment interaction. By exploring how relations of power, based on forms of opposition, bullying, and exclusion, are both built interactively and commented upon in female groups, I call into question the generalizability of accounts of female same-sex talk which focus exclusively on cooperative or polite interactive practices. I employ both ethnographically grounded observations and the methodology of conversation analysis to analyze practices for building power asymmetry in naturally occurring same-sex female talk during play and at lunch.

Discriminatory news discourse: some Hong Kong data

Abstract: This article analyses the discriminatory discursive practices of one leading liberal Hong Kong newspaper, the South China Morning Post, with a view to examining to what extent they mirror those fou...

Accountability in action: the accomplishment of gender, race and class in a meeting of the University of California Board of Regents:

Abstract: In this article, we analyze the proceedings of a meeting that terminated affirmative action policies at the University of California. Employin our recent theoretical reformulation of difference as an accomplishment, we explore participants' means of doing gender, race and class in these deliberations. In discussing our findings, we call attention to their relevance for `formal' and critical discourse analysis.

Towards understanding gender and talk-in-interaction:

Abstract: Feminist language researchers typically assume that gender is relevant to any interaction. Conversation analysis offers an interesting challenge for feminists to show how and that the pervasiveness of gender is achieved in talk-in-interaction. The aim of this article is to make a step towards understanding the interactional mechanisms underling the omnirelevance of gender in daily life. The present study draws upon the practices and principles of conversation analysis, particularly the notions of repair and membership categorization devices, to examine recordings of children's interactions. Evidence that supports the claim that the organization of repair may be implicated in the (re)production of gender is presented.

Globalization discourse: a view from the East:

Abstract: This article presents an analysis of the discourse of globalization from the perspective of Hong Kong. The analysis first discusses the concept of globalization, as portrayed by various scholars. Second, the relationship between Hong Kong and globalization is examined. This is followed by a detailed analysis of the theme of globalization as presented by the Special Hong Kong Administrative Region Chief Executive, Tung Chee Hwa. The article critically analyses a speech delivered by Tung in London in October 2000, which highlights the SAR government's measures to address the challenges posed by globalization and its ability in capitalizing on the assumed benefits of the global phenomenon. The textual analysis shows that globalization is discursively constructed as immutable and that it is the role of the government to manage the consequences of globalization. A range of discursive strategies is identified in the realization of this discursive construction.

Gender, language, conversation analysis and feminism:

Abstract: tives in mind. First, we wanted to collect together, for the first time, conversation analytic studies of gender and language. Our aim was to lend coherence to a previously disparate but distinct strand of language and gender theorizing. Related to this, we wanted to revisit the language and gender arena from an explicitly conversation analytic (CA) perspective, asking what it can contribute to the field. Finally, we wanted to provide a forum for debating the issues that emerge from the integration of feminism, CA and ethnomethodology (EM) so that the academic community can engage with, and see the potential of, feminist conversation analytic work. In this editorial, we set out the thematic and theoretical landscape within which the special issue is located. The field of language and gender continues to stimulate discussion across the social sciences. A shift has occurred in recent years, from early attempts to define gendered speech styles to an approach that draws upon constructionist and performative treatments of gender (cf. Bucholtz et al., 1999; Weatherall, 2002). Somewhat obscured within this literature is a smaller body of work that uses CA/EM to explore how gender ‘creeps’ into talk (Hopper and LeBaron, 1998). LeBaron (cited in Tracy, 1998) neatly summarizes the conversation analytic approach to language and gender and contrasts it with traditional studies:

`I know, 'cos I was there': how residence abroad students use personal experience to legitimate cultural generalizations:

Abstract: This article examines the discursive construction of cultural generalizations, by analysing generalizations about gender and culture made in a large corpus of diary, focus group and interview data produced by modern languages students at university in Britain during or shortly after their period of residence abroad. It is argued that although students demonstrate an awareness of the negative cultural evaluation of stereotyping through the use of mitigation strategies, they are nevertheless willing to produce generalizations under the right discursive conditions, particularly when permission is given by the other participants in the interaction and when they are able to produce evidence to legitimate the generalization in some way. Analysis of the entire corpus shows that the most common form of legitimation is the appeal to personal experience, whereas close analysis of extracts from the data demonstrates the importance of discursive context and process in making such generalizations possible and acceptable.

Hypercapitalism: language, new media and social perceptions of value

Abstract: Using examples from contemporary policy and business discourses, and exemplary historical texts dealing with the notion of value, I put forward an argument as to why a critical scholarship that draws on media history, language analysis, philosophy and political economy is necessary to understand the dynamics of what is being called 'the global knowledge economy'. I argue that the social changes associated with new modes of value determination are closely associated with new media forms.

Language and bodily conduct in focus group evaluations of legal policy

Abstract: Despite the growing importance of focus group interviews for the evaluation of new legal mandates, we know very little about how these interviews function in the socially situated and concrete deta...

Conflicting discourses, shifting ideologies: pharmaceutical, `alternative' and feminist emancipatory texts on the menopause:

Abstract: This article uses a close pragmatic analysis to examine three discourses of the menopause, each with identifiably different health and lifespan ideologies, each used to further its own set of economic and/or political agendas. We argue that these texts have potentially powerful influential effects on women’s interpretations of their own ‘change of life’. Discourse 1 (the ‘pharmaceutical’ discourse) is represented by pharmaceutical brochures, which construct the menopause as medical ‘pathology’ caused by physiological decrement and generally advocate correcting or suppressing symptoms by ‘treatment’ with hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Discourse 2 (the ‘alternative’ therapy discourse) as represented in popular printed media texts, rejects both subjection to medical/pharmaceutical intervention, and many of the claims made for HRT, and recommends that women take personal and active ‘control’ by using ‘natural’ remedies and making lifestyle adjustments. Although in ideological conflict, both these discourses are arguably ageist in their reproduction of negative perceptions of menopause. Discourse 3 (the emancipatory feminist discourse) reconstructs the menopause as a positively significant rite of passage – a time of re-evaluation and new-found freedom. Like Discourse 2, feminist discourse rejects the medicalization of menopause and the claims Discourse 1 makes for HRT. But, in addition, Discourse 3 rejects the dominant medical view of the cultural meaning of menopause, with the end of menstruation entextualized as gain, rather than loss, and redefines female midlife as a time of new freedom, wisdom and personal insight.

Caring for older people: a gendered practice

Abstract: This article discusses how ethnomethodology and conversation analysis can contribute to the feminist study of caregiving. Interviews with caregivers of older relatives with disabilities were analyzed using a detailed conversation and membership categorization analysis within an ethnomethodological framework. The interviews were treated analytically as interactional encounters, useful to document instances of identity production and moral versions of oneself as a caregiver. The study describes some instances of the moral and relational universe in which caring practices are embedded, exploring the discursive construction of caring. Caring duties were shown to be bound to kin relationships, but significant gendering was evident in the attribution of caring responsibilities.

Keeping the public in their place: audience participation in lifestyle television programming

Abstract: The participation of members of the public in the mass media has been studied discursively at the level of live broadcasting, notably in talk radio and talk shows on television. In this article I examine the construction of public identities in `lifestyle' television programming, specifically property shows, in which members of the public appear either as potential home buyers (`house-hunters') or as home owners looking to maximize the value of their properties (`vendors'). In a selected episode of the Channel 5 show Hot Property, I explore the way in which these identities are managed within the text, through an eclectic analysis both of broad sociocultural discourses and of the verbal and physical interaction between the host and the public participants. It is sometimes argued that media exposure can be empowering for the general public, but in a tightly edited production such as this, subject positions are created for participants that may be less than flattering.

Pedagogy, pathology and ideology: the production, transmission and reproduction of medical discourse:

Abstract: The discourse of any institutional field is composed of a variety of different genres. In medical discourse, three prevalent genres are the research article, the doctor—patient interview and the textbook. This article describes how the textual, interpersonal and ideational metafunctions of each genre operate in relation to their institutional context of situation. As a medical text is delocated and relocated from one institutional context to another, transformations take place with regard to: the ideational options of tense, transitivity and process, the interpersonal options of modality and speaker's comment, and its rhetorical organization. These transformations constitute the codes of the pedagogic device. These operate as a symbol system having two ideological effects. First, certain medical texts are privileged over others as `doxic' texts; and second, subjects are variably positioned in the professional field depending on their command of the codes of the genres relating to different institutional sites.

'When the mobs are looking for witches to burn, nobody's safe': talking about the reactionary crowd

Abstract: Previous research has successfully problematized the pathologizing discourses used to discredit crowd events. However, examples of reactionary crowds can operate rhetorically as an obstacle to a liberatory account of the crowd in history. The present paper presents an analysis of newspaper accounts of a series of 'anti-paedophile' crowd actions which took place in Britain in the Summer of 2000. Such accounts characteristically pathologized the crowd not only through use of particular terms and concepts, but also through anecdotes which served as evidence of diminished rationality. The paper analyses the rhetorical and ideological functions of these and other constructions identified in the texts, including those offered by participants themselves. A way of talking about the (reactionary) crowd is offered which distinguishes particular crowd ideologies from collective processes per se and which therefore avoids condemning collective action in itself.

Being a new capitalist mother

Abstract: This article analyses the pedagogic discourse of family literacy, a type of education that works on the literacy development of both mothers and young children. It looks at the strand concerned with the adults' literacy and argues that the pedagogy aims to construct the participants as reflexive, but unquestioning, learners ready to accumulate qualifications; and as mothers whose time is constantly available for their children's cognitive development. The analysis traces the relationships between these desired identities and new capitalist ideology and discusses the contradictions inherent in this vision of motherhood.

Human rights discourse and international relations: Le Monde's editorials on Russia

Abstract: Editorials on Russia published by the French newspaper, Le Monde, during the first months of the second Chechen war (August 1999—March 2000) are analysed within the framework of Critical Discourse ...

Romance and friendship in pre-teen stories about conflicts: `we decided that boys are not worth it'

Abstract: Although scholars have given considerable attention to adolescent romance, few have examined the discursive practices of pre-adolescents, as they are just beginning to take up (and to resist) cultu...

Frequency and Specificity of Referents to Violence in News Reports of Anti-gay Attacks

Abstract: Two studies were conducted to test the hypotheses that: (1) news reports of anti-gay attacks would use fewer and vaguer referents to the violence than similar stories about attacks against straight persons; and (2) this milder use of referents would cause readers to perceive less harm done and to blame the perpetrator less. A content analysis of two newspapers found that one used far fewer, less specific nominals to refer to anti-gay than to anti-straight violence, whereas the other, based in a more gay-friendly community, did not differentiate significantly by sexual orientation. An experimental study in which frequency and specificity of referents were systematically varied in mock newspaper stories found that greater referent frequency, but not specificity, caused readers to perceive greater harm to victims. The results are interpreted in terms of cognitive processing and within the context of the use of linguistic variation to encode and enforce power differences.

Disinterring ideology from a corpus of obituaries: a critical post mortem:

Abstract: The Economist is an influential publication read by a worldwide elite audience of politically and economically powerful people and their supporters. This article explores how The Economist constructs and projects an ideology. It is hypothesized that even a peripheral feature of the journal, such as the regular obituary column, will still reveal a great deal about its ideology (i.e. its view/construction of reality). The investigation is undertaken using the paradigm of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). First, a corpus of 100 of The Economist's obituaries is examined to provide a sociological profile of the typical subject. Second, drawing from the both CDA and Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), two of these obituaries, one closely matching the typical profile and one not, are subjected to a detailed analysis to compare and contrast them stylistically and to tease out the underlying ideology. Patterns in the choice of subject and pervasion of an ideology are clearly identified.

Legal institutions, nonspeaking recipiency and participants' orientations

Abstract: In this article, I explore the question of what constitutes a participant's orientation to gender within conversation analysis (CA), suggesting that CA's notion of participant orientation may be to...

The verbal construction of non-verbal behaviour: British press reports of President Clinton's grand jury testimony video

Abstract: On Monday 21 September 1998, the videotapes of president Clinton’s 17 August testimony to the grand jury in the Clinton–Lewinsky affair were released to the public. In this article we analyse reports of the event in eight British national newspapers with a special interest in how Clinton’s nonverbal behaviour (NVB) in the grand jury testimony is presented, evaluated and used to evaluate his overall ‘performance’ and political persona. Overall, we find somewhat predictable differences with the broadsheet and left-leaning newspapers being more positive in their evaluation of Clinton’s NVB than the tabloids and right-leaning newspapers. However, we also observe instances of the genre and ideological cross-over when this pattern is not always clearly upheld. We also discuss the susceptibility of NVB to metapragmatic commentary and manipulation.

(Un)reasonable Doubt? the Invocation of Children's Consent in Sexual Abuse Trial Judgments:

Abstract: The techniques of discursive psychology were used to analyze the discourse of offence descriptions in criminal trial judgments in recent cases of child sexual abuse in Canada. In certain cases, des...