Discourse Theoretical Perspective Research Articles

Mobilfunk ja – aber Masten und Antennen bitte nicht hier! Diskursive Aushandlungsprozesse um die Standortwahl von Sendeanlagen in Deutschland

A stable and nationwide mobile network coverage is increasingly regarded as essential. This requires an expansion of mobile networks throughout the country. However, the installation of masts and antennas has often been the subject of conflict in Germany, especially due to fears about potential health effects of electromagnetic fields. Transmitters become both a trigger and a target of social protests. From a discourse-theoretical perspective, we identify central lines of argumentation in the German cellular network conflicts. A triangulation of quantitatively oriented and qualitative analysis components forms the methodological basis. Regional case studies provide an opportunity to identify local differences. A comparison of past and recent conflicts reveals discursive shifts over time. Debates about the possible health effects of mobile radio were particularly contentious in the context of UMTS mobile phone expansion at the turn of the millennium. The (planned) installation of transmitters at the local level often sparked this discussion. During the expansion of the 5G network, in addition to the debate about the health risks of the technology, questions are now being raised about whether and to whom the expansion is necessary. Compared to the previous period of investigation, local conflicts about transmitters now appear to be less virulent and can be found primarily in southern and southwestern Germany.

European Integration Processes in the EU GI System—A Long-Term Review of EU Regulation for GIs

Prosciutto di Parma, Bavarian beer and Roquefort—Geographical Indications (GIs) have been systematically protected at the EU level for 30 years and are now an important part of the farm2fork strategy. The article analyses how the integration of the EU GI system can be explained from an institution and discourse theoretical perspective and ties in with the soft spaces debate. In doing so, scalar shifts in competence from a German perspective and the role of discursive spatial relations are examined in more detail. The empirical results are based on a mix of methods that includes the evaluation of secondary statistical data, document analyses, participant observation and expert interviews. The study shows that the European Commission (EC) is increasingly acting as a spokesperson for GIs, but that regional actors are also playing a more important role in implementation and enforcement. This development is fed by the influence of the agricultural policy instrument in terms of competition, but also consumer protection and trade policy. Overall, there are three development layers: protect and systematise, legitimise and expand and open and defend. A more independent development of the EU GI system as an instrument of quality policy and for the development of rural areas could give greater weight to the sustainability-relevant, environmental policy aspects currently demanded by society.

Where is ‘the political’ in the journal Political Communication? On the hegemonic articulation of a disciplinary identity

ABSTRACT Critical scholars have long critiqued the circumscribed theoretical boundaries of political communication research in its dominant disciplinary identity. This identity is usually attributed to the hegemonic authority of a functionalist paradigm of political communication anchored in the use of positivist epistemologies and quantitative methods. This article revisits these old debates from a post-foundational discourse theoretical perspective, drawing on arguments about the ontological implications of ‘the political’ to examine political communication’s hegemonic disciplinary form. The primarily theoretical argument is supported by an elementary empirical method that examines how the signifiers ‘ontology’ and ‘the political,’ and theorists associated with that vocabulary, are cited in a 24-year archive of articles from the journal Political Communication which we frame as a proxy for the dominant disciplinary identity. We argue that the relative invisibility of an otherwise influential political ontology literature in the journal supports our argument about the lack of theoretical pluralism in political communication research and suggests the enduring authority of a dominant disciplinary habitus that, even when it recognizes paradigmatic differences, sees methodological virtue as the guarantee of scholarly rigour. We end by reflecting on the politics of how different (inter)disciplinary identities are articulated in communication studies.

Migrants, Swedes and the unchanging practice of music: discursive representations in Swedish newspapers

Traditional news media is one of the most important sources of information on contemporary society. Media has the power to affect public opinion and alter identities, which in the long run may affect social norms, practices and participative conditions. In traditional news media research, migration is an established topic while music is not. Their combination is lacking in both media and music research. In this study 106 newspaper articles from six major Swedish newspapers, published over a period of five years, are analysed through a discourse theoretical perspective. The discursive representation of ‘migrants’ in the investigated media confirms the picture provided in previous research, according to which the ‘migrant’ is often associated with the alien, the worrying and the problematic – not least in its relation to the ‘Swede’. More surprising is that while ‘music’ is repeatedly described as capable of affecting social relations and processes, it does not lead to a political practice of change. Instead ‘music’ becomes a mythic ritual, according to which subjects turn into conforming and well-integrated citizens.

Valuation practices and the cooptation charge: Quantification and monetization as political logics

Market-like devices that enact quantification and monetization processes (QM) underpin a growing number of valuation practices, but the widespread take-up of QM has given rise to the ‘cooptation charge’: for all the good intentions and results produced by those who deploy QM, they are complicit in reinforcing problematic neoliberal tendencies. A political discourse-theoretical perspective, combined with a pragmatist scholarship that has made significant advances in our understanding of QM, suggests that the cooptation charge relies on an overly simplified picture of both QM and neoliberalism. However, while we acknowledge this as an important advance, we argue that the normative, political, and ideological significance of QM remains surprisingly underspecified. We still lack a convincing theoretical framework that provides a more rounded multi-dimensional critical perspective within which to navigate the evaluative dilemmas produced by these increasingly widespread techniques, including cooptation worries. Drawing on the logics approach of the Essex school of political discourse theory, we develop a framework that brings together the strategic, normative, and ideological dimensions that otherwise tend to be treated separately in the literature, allowing a fuller assessment of such technologies.

Political Performances of Control During COVID-19: Controlling and Contesting Democracy in Germany

Drawing from interpretive, namely discursive-performative approaches to both institutional and grassroots (populist) politics, this article explores political performances and counter-performances of control in Germany during the so-called first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methodologically, the article constructs a comparative analytical framework including three cases from both within and outside of the federal institutional structure of Germany: at the institutional level, the cases comprise Angela Merkel, long-term federal Chancellor of Germany, and Michael Kretschmer, the regional Governor of the state of Saxony; at the grassroots level, the selected case is the populist protest movement “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident” (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, PEGIDA). Based on original empirical data generated using the toolkit of qualitative-interpretive methodology, notably online ethnography, the comparative analysis focuses on a few key counter-performances of control, among them a TV address (Merkel), a visit to an “anti-lockdown” demonstration (Kretschmer), and virtual protest events (PEGIDA). Emphasizing the performed, dynamic, and contested character of political control in Germany in spring 2020, the empirical analysis yields the following results: first, it sheds light on the different political styles of performing and contesting institutional control, including the habitus, modes, and (emotional) tones of the communication of the performers, and the scripts, stages, intended audiences as (imagined) constituencies, and modalities of transmission of their performances. Second, the discourse-theoretical perspective of the analysis reveals that political performances of control were closely linked to articulations of democracy as an empty signifier, and to claims for safeguarding democratic principles as such. Third, the article demonstrates the value of interpretive approaches to politics to generate more nuanced understandings of the relationships between the pandemic, democracy, and populism in a situation of an ultimate lack of control.

Discursive Media Institutionalism: Assessing Vivien A. Schmidt’s Framework and Its Value for Media and Communication Studies

Vivien A. Schmidt’s discursive institutionalism (DI) framework has gained considerable popularity in media and communication studies, particularly among scholars studying media institutions. However, while scholars refer to DI to emphasize the importance of ideas and discourses in institutional processes, to date, a critical assessment of the framework is lacking. In this article, we discuss DI from the perspective of media and communication studies and suggest a modified DI framework in which we (1) rethink discourse from a discourse theoretical perspective and emphasize power as a constituting element of media institutions, (2) differentiate between public (mass media) communication and other nonpublic and semipublic forms of communication, and (3) integrate macro perspectives (market, political system, culture, technology, globalization) into Schmidt’s micro–meso-focused framework. With these differentiations, our proposition is to be understood as a heuristic for a systematic analysis of media institutions as a field of power.

The Dislocation of the Empty Signifier Freedom as a Tool in Global Political Struggles: A Case Study on RT’s Mini-Series How to Watch the News

Freedom is approached in this article as an empty signifier and as an object of discursive struggle, from a discourse-theoretical perspective. The hegemonic centrality of freedom in Western discourse and identity construction is acknowledged, but at the same time the article argues that hegemony is never total and all-encompassing. In other words, hegemonic constructions are seen as always particular, with their universal claims displaying cracks and gaps. Especially when different discursive communities (e.g. the West and Russia) engage in global discursive struggles, these cracks become visible through dislocatory strategies. The second part of the article then addresses a case study about how this discursive struggle is organised in practice, focussing on the RT mini-series How to Watch the News, which prominently features Slavoj Žižek. The discourse-theoretical analysis demonstrates how the mini-series deconstructs the Western articulation of freedom, in three ways, namely by showing the failures of Western liberal democracies, and the divided nature of Western societies, and by critiquing the individualistic articulation of freedom. The article concludes by pointing to the ambiguities related to the centrality of freedom, the role of RT and the role of Žižek as public intellectual.

Post-Marxist reflections on the value of our time. Value theory and the (in)compatibility of discourse theory and the critique of political economy

ABSTRACT This article aims to bring together post-Marxist discourse theory and the critique of political economy in the context of the debate on the Marxian theory of value. Although Laclau and Mouffe criticized Marxism for its economic reductionism, they did not connect this to a comprehensive critique of Marx's writings on value and labor. The merit of considering the theory of value in more detail is underscored by discourse theory's relative silence on the capitalist economy. By drawing on the work of Postone and Elson, it will become clear that there are largely two ways to interpret Marx's theory of value: either as an essentialist theory of price and exploitation, or as a historically specific theory of the constitution of social labor relations in capitalist society. By teasing out Laclau's implicit understanding of Marx's value theory, the article argues that it is in fact his essentialist interpretation of the labor theory of value that constitutes an obstacle toward grasping the social relations of labor and commodity production from a discourse-theoretical perspective. This clears the ground toward approaching Marx's value theory from a post-Marxist perspective, which would grasp the social relations of abstract labor as a hegemonic formation.

Populismin muoto, diskursiivisuus ja retoriikka

Tässä artikkelissa annan näkökulman politiikan ja populismin tutkimiseen merkityskamppailuna. Populismiin liittyvät hegemoniakamppailut, vallalla olevien jakolinjojen haastaminen ja uudelleen määrittely. Kehittämäni retorisperformatiivisen diskurssiteorian ja soinilaisen perussuomalaisuuden analyysin avulla näytän, kuinka populismi on erityinen merkityksenannon logiikka tai muoto, joka tuottaa tunteikasta vastakkainasettelua ja ”meitä”. Tästä laclaulaisesta näkökulmasta populismilla ei ole kiinteää sisältöä mutta sillä on muoto. Artikkeli tulkitsee ristiriitaisiakin ilmiöitä soinilais-perussuomalaisessa retoriikassa ja esittelee populismintutkimukselle hyödylliset peruskäsitteet.

Winning Hegemony. A Discourse-Theoretical Perspective on Political Strategy and the Trade Politics of the European Parliament

Winning Hegemony. A Discourse-Theoretical Perspective on Political Strategy and the Trade Politics of the European Parliament

The political production of ethical war: rethinking the ethics/politics nexus with Laclau

ABSTRACTTaking Maja Zehfuss’s War & the Politics of Ethics as a starting point, this paper thinks through the ethics/politics nexus from the perspective of ‘Essex School’ poststructuralist discourse theory. Specifically, it asks how ethics – or, rather, morality, the temporary, contingent and context-dependent normative framework that regulates what is commonly seen as good or bad within a given society – is produced. From a discourse theoretical perspective, notions of the moral good are the result of political struggles over meaning. Here Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of hegemony can provide significant insight into how this process works, that is, how some claims about what is morally right become widely accepted as the (only) right thing to do while others fail to do so. The paper illustrates the theoretical argument with a brief case study of the changing articulation of the threat and use of military force in the German security discourse after unification. This case is of particular interest because Germany’s allegedly deeply engrained antimilitarist culture should, from aconventional constructivist perspective at least, stand in the way of any arguments about ethical war ever becoming accepted. Nevertheless, this is precisely what happened.

Egypt is not for sale! Harnessing nationalism for alliance building in Egypt’s Tiran and Sanafir island protests

ABSTRACT Adopting a discourse-theoretical perspective on contentious politics in Egypt, this article investigates how in early 2016 the transfer of the archipelago of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia became a catalyst for oppositional subject formation and the emergence of an unlikely protest coalition. Drawing on a combination of protest event analysis and discourse analysis, it explores how the land swap provided the opposition with an opportunity to challenge the state’s nationalist prestige, and produced relations that favoured cross-movement mobilisation. The so-called ‘Popular Campaign to Protect the Land’ brought together leftists, liberals and nationalists, and thus enabled the articulation of broader socio-political demands in an otherwise closed context. The case study illustrates how dissonance between the discourse and practices of nationalist regimes can trigger cross-ideological collaboration. It furthermore shows how the emergence, as well as the trajectory and goals of such alliances, are shaped by interaction with the state.

One terrorism to rule them all: Turkey, the PKK and global terrorism discourse

The international political language on terrorism should be taken seriously within IR, both due to its prevalence, its distributing of identities, and its role in the legitimisation of policies. Taking a discourse-theoretical perspective where ‘global terrorism’ is a political concept rather than a distinct empirical object, this article studies Turkish representations of terrorism within the United Nations and the NATO Centre of Excellence: Defence Against Terrorism. By analysing speeches and newsletter articles between 2001 and 2013, I show how global terrorism discourse serves as a political resource by allowing for three main dynamics: (1) articulating specific, regional conflicts to the idea of a global terrorist threat—in this case that with the PKK, (2) the tainting of an enemy through association with a fundamentally illegitimate terrorist identity, and (3) the representation of a rightful and shared international Self, with the terrorist as constitutive Other. The article emphasises how the language used by the Turkish actors is not idiosyncratic or arbitrary; rather, it draws from shared and well-established rhetorical resources.

Between Text and Discourse: Re-Theorizing Islamic Orthodoxy

This article will examine the concept of orthodoxy as it appears in the work of Talal Asad and two of his interlocutors, namely Ovamir Anjum and Shahab Ahmed. In response to Ahmed’s critique of Asad which attempts to dislocate orthodoxy as constitutive of Islam, this article employs the distinction Anjum draws between local and universal orthodoxy and theorizes it from a discourse-theoretical perspective. Hence, it will be argued that universal orthodoxy is central to Islamic discursive tradition because it is the limit which preserves Islam’s singularity and allows it to exist as a unified universe of meaning. Furthermore, against Ahmed’s contention that orthodoxy cannot account for Islamic philosophy1 and Sufism as Islamic discourses because it is an inherently exclusionary concept, I will demonstrate that exclusionary limits are necessary for the formation of all discourses including Sufism and Islamic philosophy. Displacing orthodoxy effectively amounts to subverting the singularity of Islam and reproduces the pitfalls of anti-essentialist approaches.

How dislocation and professional anxiety influence readiness for change during the implementation of hospital-based home care for children newly diagnosed with diabetes \u2013 an ethnographic analysis of the logic of workplace change

BackgroundIn 2013–14, the evidence based care model Hospital-based Home Care for children newly diagnosed with diabetes was implemented at a large paediatric diabetes care facility in the south of Sweden. The first step of the implementation was to promote readiness for change among the professionals within the diabetes team through regular meetings. The aim was to analyse the implicit facilitators and barriers evident on a cultural micro level in discussions during the course of these meetings. What conceptions, ideals and identities might complicate, or facilitate, implementation?MethodsA case study was conducted during the implementation process. This article draw on ethnographic observations carried out at team meetings (n = 6) during the introductory element of implementation. From a discourse theoretical perspective, the verbal negotiations during these meetings were analysed.ResultsThree aspects were significant in order to understand the dislocation during this element of implementation: an epistemological disagreement that challenged the function of information within care practice; a paradoxical understanding of the time-knowledge intersection; and expressions of professional anxiety. More concretely, the professionals exhibited an unwillingness to give up the opportunity to provide structured, age-independent information; a resistance against allowing early discharge; and a professional identity formed both by altruistic concern and occupational guardiancy. The findings suggest the necessity of increased awareness of the conceptions and ideals that constitute the basis of a certain professional practice; a deeper understanding of the cultural meaning that influences care practice within a specific logic in order to predict in what way these ideals might be challenged by the implemented evidence.ConclusionsOur main contribution is the argument that the implemented evidence in itself needs to be examined and problematized from a cultural analytical perspective before initiation in order to be able to actively counter negative connotations and resistance.

The conservative political logic: a discourse-theoretical perspective

In contrast to other core constituents of modern politics, conservatism has not been the object of much discursive-constructivist rethinking. Inspired by Laclau’s work and by Glynos and Howarth’s discourse-theoretical development of the notion of logics, this article sets out to identify the conservative political logic. Conservative politics, it argues, articulate demands as conservation, envisaged as a process of ensuring the desirable continuity of the social order between past, present and future, in opposition to a (demand for) change that is argued to constitute a dislocatory threat to the continuity of the social order. The conservative political logic interpellates citizens as members of that threatened social order, and presents conservative politics as the way to protect this threatened social order. Building on a critical discussion of dominant approaches to conservatism, the article proposes to identify the more formal logic that structures conservative rhetoric as an alternative for a substance-based ideological definition of conservatism. The distinctiveness of the discourse-theoretical perspective on conservative politics becomes more pronounced as the article moves on to argue that conservatism discursively constructs changes as threats to the social order, and, finally, shows how conservative politics discursively construct and reproduce the social order they (cl)aim to conserve.

Who and What Does Involvement Involve? A Multi-Sited Field Study of Involvement of Relatives in Danish Psychiatry

This article gives an account of aspects of a multi-sited field study of involvement of relatives in Danish psychiatry. By following metaphors of involvement across three sites of the psychiatric system—a family site, a clinical site and a policy site—the first author (J.O.) investigated how, and on what grounds, involvement of relatives is perceived in Danish psychiatry. Paradoxically, the current understanding of involvement of relatives fails to take into consideration the perspectives of the relatives per se and families that were being studied. By analyzing involvement from a discourse theoretical perspective laid out by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the aim of this study is to show how the dominant discourse about involvement at the political and clinical sites is constituted by understandings of mentally ill individuals and by political objectives of involvement. The analysis elucidates how a psycho-ideological discourse positions the mentally ill person as weak, incapable, and ineffective. By contrast, the supporting relative is positioned as a strong, capable, and effective co-therapist. Furthermore, the analysis considers how this dominant discourse of involvement is constituted by a broader discourse of neoliberalism and market orientation, which justifies involvement as a subtle institutionalization of social control. The article highlights that the role of the relative as a co-therapist may be contested by the families’ discourse, which emphasizes issues concerning the responsibility toward the mental health of the ill individual as well as toward the psychological milieu of the family.

The Politics of Mental Illness and Involvement—<i>A Discourse Analysis of Danish Anti-Stigma and Social Inclusion Campaigns</i>

The present study is a part of a broader multisited field study on involvement of relatives in Danish psychiatry. The article aims to elucidate which political classifications of normality and mental illness that are displayed in two health political campaigns regarding anti-stigmatization and social inclusion and how such classifications co-constitute the subjectivity of individuals suffering from mental illness and their relatives. Drawing on a discourse theoretical perspective laid out by political theorists Laclau and Mouffe, we analyze how the campaigns bring into effect a weak and ineffective subject of deviance and how it is constituted by a subject of normality characterized by opposing traits. The article takes up the discussion of how the campaigns’ articulations of the subjects of normality and deviance are imbedded in a hegemonic discourse of neoliberalism and individualism that asserts involvement as an expanded division of responsibility for the identification, classification and regulation of mentally ill subjects between public and private spheres of the Danish welfare state.

Organizational creativity diluted: a critical appraisal of discursive practices in academic research

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore the discursive practices employed in academic research on organizational creativity through a critical lens.Design/methodology/approach– The literature on organizational creativity is reviewed from a discourse-theoretical perspective and three groupings of dominant discursive practices are identified. The theoretical and practical implications of the practices are discussed, and other potential aspects of creativity that appear to have been neglected or suppressed in the discourse are further examined.Findings– The dominant discursive practices in the organizational creativity research contribute to the building of a simplified and one-sided picture of organizational creativity; a stripped-down and diluted version that is more easily achievable and manageable, and leads to positive outcomes. Failure to recognize its inherent complexities reduces the value of creativity as an organizational asset.Originality/value– The findings contribute to the organizational creativity research in recognizing a range of dominant practices that appear to promote the dilution of the concept. Although the diluted and stripped-down version of organizational creativity suits the managerial agenda and complies with organizational discourse, it fails as an organizational asset, which should be about embracing the unconventional and risky, and taking advantage of change.