Search Results

This is the first of two chapters that present a more detailed examination of the ways in which social constructions are produced and negotiated in public politics through the medium of discourse. It looks at public policy and discourse analysis, and starts by defining discourse. The remaining sections of the chapter are: Discourse Analysis; Policy Discourse and Argumentative Struggle; Policy Storylines, which are the basic linguistic mechanism for creating and maintaining discursive order –– a generative sort of narrative that allows actors to draw upon various discursive categories to give meaning to specific or social phenomena (for example, ‘there is nothing we can do’ or ‘we must take immediate action’); and an appendix, Discourse and Social Change: Commodifying Educational Policy.

This is the third of four chapters offering a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and explores the narrative form of discourse and narrative analysis, an emerging and promising orientation in policy analysis. The social meanings uncovered by the interpretive analysis described in Chapter 7 are typically embedded in a policy narrative, designed to portray the fuller picture of a policy problem and the potential solutions. Built around interpretations, the narrative represents the policy situation, and offers a view of what has to be done and what the expected consequences will be. While there is a fair amount of conceptual overlap between the concepts of discourse and narration, narrative analysis is used in this discussion to refer to the analysis of stories. The first two sections of the chapter examines the general features of a narrative story, emphasizing its uses in both the social sciences and everyday social contexts, and discusses the basic epistemological issues involved in the production of a narrative text. The second three sections survey two prominent approaches to narrative discourse analyses that have emerged in the field of policy analysis per se: those of Stone and Roe. The last section examines how the logic of good reasons underlies the rationality of the narrative.

This chapter argues that an appreciation of the symbolic and the performative dimensions of politics and policy making is crucial to understand how authoritative governance is possible in an age of multiplicities, as these factors determine how politics ‘meets the eye’. Reminding the reader how the staging of parliamentary decision-making is itself the product of an active search for a symbolization of political legitimacy in the eighteenth century, the chapter suggests it is questionable whether this particular staging of politics can hold its symbolic power in the age of mediatization. A performance perspective on governance holds that policy makers and politicians are constantly trying to create order and structure in potentially unstable situations. The very variability of the setting and staging of politics calls for more explicit attention to how actors use particular terms in particular settings. Politics is (counter-)scripted and staged for multiple audiences: politics and media are fundamentally intertwined. Understanding governance thus comes from studying the contextualized interaction as a series of ‘performances’, drawing on the combined analytical vocabularies of discourse analysis and dramaturgy to open up the concept of ‘practice’.

This chapter explores different understandings and interpretations of each process of global change. Drawing from discourse analysis and theories about the social construction of scientific knowledge, it shows that understandings of global environmental change and globalization are each embedded in separated and often competing sets of discourses. As a result, critical linkages and interactions between the two processes often remain unrecognized The chapter also emphasizes that discourses carry political weight and reflect underlying power structures, which give currency and legitimacy to some voices over others, and maintain the interests of some over the well-being and security of others. Discourses about global change influence the research questions that are asked, and prioritize the level or scale of analysis, both of which have profound implications for strategies to address the two processes.

The ideal of community has been prominent in practical politics since the 1970s. Explores the tenuous links between the philosophical communitarian critique of liberalism and more recent elaborations of ‘political communitarianism’, although other intellectual and political sources for political communitarianism are also traced. Political communitarianism is analysed using a technique of discourse analysis, and some theoretical problems in the discourse—in particular, with inferences that are commonly drawn from its conceptual structure—are discussed.

The opening chapter identifies and explains the key theoretical, conceptual, and methodological issues explored in the research. In particular, the ‘governance’ and European dimensions of public policy efforts to combat poverty and social exclusion are brought into focus. Specific attention is paid to the contribution of ‘institutionalist’ perspectives on governance and a connection is drawn between ‘discursive institutionalism’ and past analyses that have explored multiple and overlapping social exclusion discourses. It is suggested that EU policy coordination efforts are framed by competing policy frames and articulated through a range of policy discourses, which combine to produce a plurality of policy paradigms that are institutionalized within and across the governance architecture of policy coordination. Although law is decentred from this picture, this new governance architecture remains of concern to scholars of EU law.

This chapter describes a study undertaken as part of the UCL Evidence programme to explore how policymakers talk about and reason with evidence. Specifically, researchers were interested in the micro-processes of deliberation and meaning-making practices of a group of people charged with prioritising health care in an NHS Primary Care Trust in the UK. The chapter describes how the research study brought together ideas from rhetorical theory and methods of discourse analysis to develop an innovative approach to exploring how evidence is constituted at the micro-level of social interaction and communication. It presents empirical data to illuminate the representation and meaning of evidence within one particular policymaking forum, and to highlight contrasting constructions of the policymaking process.

This chapter discusses discourse analysis and highlights two specific discursive analytic approaches: discursive psychology and Foucauldian discourse analysis. It examines each approach in relation to its theoretical orientation, central question, major concepts, and orientation to method. An exemplar of each method is included as well as a discussion of the method's general use. The chapter focuses on several concepts—position, voice, silence, and performance—drawn from these approaches and shows how they have been used in the analysis of narratives.

During the past three decades, “new institutionalism” has become the main methodological battleground among political scientists. This is because political scientists differ in their preferred “new institutionalist” approach to political science. There are four basic institutionalist approaches: three older new institutionalisms—rational choice, historical, and sociological institutionalism—plus a fourth newer new institutionalism, called discursive institutionalism. This chapter explores the relationship between ideational and discourse analysis, on one hand, and various forms of new institutionalism, on the other hand. It makes the case for a discursive institutionalism, concerned with ideas and discourse, because it has the greatest potential for reconciling existing institutionalist approaches.

This chapter analyzes the European Union’s “Futurum” discussion forum, which was intended to help close the gap (“democratic deficit”) between institutions and citizens by facilitating a virtual, multilingual, transnational public sphere. Futurum was both an interesting example of how the EU’s language policies shape the structure of deliberative experiments and of a public debate about their relative value. Various quantitative measures of the discussions are combined with a critical discourse analysis of a thread that focused on language policies. Although the debates were predominantly in English, if a thread started in a language other than English, linguistic diversity was more prominent. Discourse and argumentation analysis of multilingual threads showed that multilingual interaction was fostered, and that the debate about language policies was politically and ideologically charged. The analysis also illustrates that deliberation and compromise were achieved, in contrast to other recently investigated discussion forums.

This chapter reviews the progress made from the days in which language conflicts were settled by duels to their replacement by present day defamation law suits, concluding that although much progress has been made, there is still more to be added if lawyers would make use of the linguistic expertise that was illustrated in the preceding chapters.

This study explores social attitudes toward “Greeklish”, an online discursive practice involving the use of the Roman alphabet to write Greek. Approaching Greeklish from the perspective of current theories that attempt to connect global with local practices, the study analyzes a corpus of Greek news media texts and identifies three main trends. The first, a retrospective trend, views Greeklish as a serious threat to the Greek language; the second, prospective trend, approaches Greeklish as a transitory phenomenon; and the third, resistive trend, points to the negative effects of globalization and relates Greeklish to other communication and sociocultural practices. Adopting a critical discourse analytic perspective, this study analyzes the discourses that characterize each of these trends in order to reveal different, often heterogeneous and conflicting representations of Greeklish — and ultimately of Greekness — in Greek society at a specific historical moment.

This chapter presents a framework for analyzing how the participants of social practices can be, and are, represented in English discourse. It outlines and exemplifies the social and critical import of the categories of this framework and details the realization of each category. After discussing the discursive exclusion of social actors and the role social actors can play in discourse, the representation of social actors as groups (assimilation) and as individuals (individualization), the ways in which actors can be categorized (e.g. functionalization, categorization, relational identity) and the metonyms and abstractions that can conceal human agency behind institutions (institutionalization) or behind the means of action (instrumentalization) is addressed. A newspaper article about immigration is analyzed to bring out the potential of the methodology for critical discourse analysis.