Introduction

Abstract

This book has three main aims. Firstly, it argues that media and communication studies has largely neglected Bourdieu’s approach to language and power presented in the essays contained in the book Language and Symbolic Power (Bourdieu and Thompson 1991). Essentially, that book has been seen as an intervention into theoretical debates in linguistics and neglected by media studies which has preferred to relate Bourdieu’s later ideas (Bourdieu 1998) to the field. The present study argues that Bourdieu’s concern with giving a sociological account of language actually has great relevance for understanding language in the media. In fact, most discussions of Bourdieu’s work in media studies have been conducted at a highly abstract theoretical and conceptual level. For example, Chapter 2 argues that the key recent book on this topic by Benson and Neveu (2005) hardly touches on language, preferring to follow Bourdieu’s idea of the ‘field’ of journalism as a ‘topography’ of positions. There have also been no book-length studies of how Bourdieu’s ideas on language relate to key topics in language and media research. This book aims to fill this gap in the literature, and to offer a timely overview and application of Bourdieu’s understanding of language and symbolic power in relation to key contemporary trends in the mass media and communication technologies, as well as seeing how it stands up to major competing perspectives on this topic such as ethnomethodology (Hutchby 2006) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999a).