Discourse & Communication recent issues

Communicating (post)feminisms in discourse

Lazar, M. M. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:46:30 PST

Mediated intimacy and postfeminism: a discourse analytic examination of sex and relationships advice in a women's magazine

Gill, R. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:46:30 PST

This article uses a discourse analytic perspective to analyse sex and relationship advice in a best-selling women’s magazine. It identifies three different interpretative repertoires which together structure constructions of sexual relationships: the intimate entrepreneurship repertoire, organized around plans, goals and the scientific management of relationships; men-ology, in which women are instructed in how to learn to please men; and transforming the self, which calls on women to remodel their interior lives in order to construct a desirable subjectivity. The article considers each repertoire in turn, and also looks at how they work together in order to privilege men and heterosexuality. Discussion focuses in particular on the postfeminist nature of the advice, in which pre-feminist, feminist and anti-feminist ideas are entangled in such a way as to make gender ideologies more pernicious and difficult to contest.

Entitled to consume: postfeminist femininity and a culture of post-critique

Lazar, M. M. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:46:30 PST

The article provides a critical analysis of a postfeminist identity that is emergent in a set of beauty advertisements, called ‘entitled femininity’. Three major discursive themes are identified, which are constitutive of this postfeminist feminine identity: 1) ‘It’s about me!’ focuses on pampering and pleasuring the self; 2) ‘Celebrating femininity’ reclaims and rejoices in feminine stereotypes; and 3) ‘Girling women’ encourages a youthful disposition in women of all ages. The article shows that entitled femininity occupies an ambivalent discursive space, which celebrates as well as repudiates feminism, and re-installs normative gendered stereotypes. The ambivalence, it is argued, contributes to fostering a culture of post-critique, which numbs resistance and deflects criticism. For all its appearances to be pro-women, feminine entitlement based squarely on an entitlement to consume offers a rather limited and problematic vision of femininity and gender equality.

The troubling internet space of 'woman's mind'

Barat, E. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:46:30 PST

The article provides a critical analysis of discourses of female embodiment in the contribution to the series ‘What it is like to be a woman’, invited by the Hungarian feminist internet journal i.c.a. All 14 contributions in the data approach women’s life in terms of female embodiment, challenging hegemonic expectations of bodily existence. The analysis will focus on the dynamic web of ‘said’ and ‘unsaid’ statements and explore the relative openness of the contributions to multiple ways of categorization. The analysis of the texts’ orientation to difference has explored four dimensions of categorization, producing a complex differentiation of feminist voices. It contributes to the contemporary debate about the depoliticizing effects of postfeminism, arguing in favour of an ideology critique of gender relations of power.

'You could take this topic and get a fistfight going': communicating about feminism in interviews

Barnard, M. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:46:30 PST

In this article, I analyze discourse from three group interviews to come to a better understanding of how young people communicate about feminism and the factors that can complicate and disrupt this communication. I analyze both the ways that the interview, as a speech event, evokes expectations and assumptions in participants and shapes how they interact, and how participants’ ideologies about feminism affect the way the interviews transpire. An equally important component of my project was to explore how feminism could translate into a research method. Throughout this article, I reflexively examine my research practices and analyses and identify the successes and shortcomings I had while attempting to conduct a research study consistent with feminist values.

Book review: VALLY LYTRA, Play Frames and Social Identities: Contact Encounters in a Greek Primary School. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2007, xii + 300 pp. hardback, EUR105.00/USD158.00

Vine, E. W. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:46:30 PST

Book review: MARIANA ACHUGAR, What We Remember: The Construction of Memory in Military Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008, 246 pp

Azarian Ceccato, N. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:46:30 PST

Book review: MARY TALBOT, Media Discourse: Representation and Interaction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007, ix + 198 pp

Guo, S. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:46:30 PST

Wal-Mart's presentation to the community: discursive practices in mitigating risk, limiting public discussion, and developing a relationship

Buttny, R. — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:34:49 PDT

This study examines Wal-Mart representatives' presentation to the community on their site plan and Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Given the ongoing controversy and criticisms from local residents, it is interesting to see Wal-Mart's strategies in attenuating these risks and negative impacts. The discursive practices found here are: formulating prior citizen complaints by a neutral-sounding, legalistic language which works euphemistically or as a gloss. Citizen concerns are fitted into a problem-solution format where the solutions involve engineering technology. The Wal-Mart representatives display their expertise through describing these technological answers. Scientific documents or tests are presented which point to counter-intuitive results. They draw on a discourse of `facts' and `information', but use these to make arguments in support of their proposals. In addition to displaying scientific-technological expertise, they avow openness to dialogue and willingness to work with the town. The Wal-Mart representatives present themselves as both technical experts and trustworthy partners, but they also may be seen as rhetor in using facts, findings, and documents to make an argument for their project.

Personal power and positional power in a power-full `I': a discourse analysis of doctoral dissertation supervision

Chiang, S.-Y. — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:34:49 PDT

This article explicates the specific manners in which professorial power is indexed and implemented in the first personal pronoun `I' in academic discourse. The matter of analytic interest is to find out how the semiotic sign `I' acquires its semantic property of power in the pragmatic context of doctoral supervision. The data under consideration consist of two dyadic interactions conducted respectively by a PhD candidate with her two supervisors in an American university. The data analyses reveal that professorial power may be performed in two different ways (personal and positional) in three types of communicative acts — directive, evaluative, and explanative. The findings here may have some important implications for academic supervision in terms of the relationship between language and power.

Organizational decision-making, discourse, and power: integrating across contexts and scales

Kwon, W., Clarke, I., Wodak, R. — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:34:49 PDT

Research has downplayed the complex discursive processes and practices through which decisions are constructed and blurs the relationship between macro- and micro-levels. The article argues for a critical and ecologically valid approach that articulates how discursive practices are influenced by, and in turn shape, the organizational settings in which they occur. It makes a methodological contribution using decision-making episodes of a senior management team meeting of a multinational company to demonstrate the insights that can be obtained from embedding the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) within a longitudinal ethnography. The approach illuminates the latent and intricate power dynamics and range of potentials of agents, triangulating micro-level discursive strategies with macro-level historical sources and background knowledge on the social and political fields. The article also makes a theoretical contribution by demonstrating the dependency of decision outcomes on often unpredictable and subtle changes in the power—context relationship.

Strategy as text and discursive practice: a genre-based approach to strategizing in city administration

Palli, P., Vaara, E., Sorsa, V. — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:34:49 PDT

Despite the acknowledged importance of strategic planning in business and other organizations, there are few studies focusing on strategy texts and the related processes of their production and consumption. In this article, we attempt to partially fill this research gap by examining the institutionalized aspects of strategy discourse: what strategy is as genre. Combining textual analysis and analysis of conversation, the article focuses on the official strategy of the City of Lahti in Finland. Our analysis shows how specific communicative purposes and lexico-grammatical features characterize the genre of strategy and how the actual negotiations over strategy text involve particular kinds of intersubjectivity and intertextuality.

Book review: MARY P. SHERIDAN-RABIDEAU, Girls, Feminism, and Grassroots Literacies: Activism in the GirlZone. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008, xii + 204 pp

Marianne, M. — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:34:49 PDT

Book review: MARY P. WOOD, Contemporary European Cinema. London: Hodder Arnold, 2007, xxiv + 200 pp., paperback, {pound}16.99

Babaii, E. — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:34:49 PDT

Book review: DAYA KISHAN THUSSU, News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment. London: Sage, 2007, 224 pp

Elbadri, M. — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:34:49 PDT

Book review: NIMA NAGHIBI, Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, xxx + 187 pp., $67.50, ISBN: 978--0-8166--4759--0. HOKULANI K. AIKAU, KARLA A. ERICKSON and JENNIFER L. PEIRCE (eds) Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories from the Academy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, viii + 357 pp., $75.00, ISBN: 978--0-8166--4934--1

Pinto, J. P. — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:34:49 PDT

Book review: PATRICIA L. SUNDERLAND and RITA M. DENNY, Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007, 368 pp., paperback, USD29.95

Pajtek, A. C. — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:34:49 PDT

Management through spiritual self-help discourse in post-socialist Slovenia

Erjavec, K., Volcic, Z. — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:07:02 PDT

From the 1990s, during and after the post-communist transitions in Eastern Europe, different self-help texts advancing spiritual or personal well-being continue to be a highly popular discourse in Slovenia. In this article we examine the appropriation of self-help discourse in one of Slovenia's most influential management magazines, Manager. On the basis of a critical discourse analysis of Manager's articles, we argue that the magazine predominantly uses spiritual self-help vocabulary and accordingly transforms definitions of basic business vocabulary. It offers a spiritual self-growth discourse as a solution to any current management or social problems and in doing so supports the (neo)liberal capitalism. This discourse attempts to advise managers as to how to adapt to the new competitive business environment. It furthermore promotes the belief that solely spiritual self-growth will help managers and their business partners to resist political and economic barriers and assure the business success in times of global corporate `survival'.

Punctuating the home page: image as language in an online newspaper

Knox, J. S. — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:07:02 PDT

Between February 2002 and April 2006, the Sydney Morning Herald online [www.smh.com.au], an influential Australian newspaper which went online in 1995, showed a remarkable degree of change in the design of its home page. However, over the same time period, the use of images in hard-news stories on its home page was remarkably consistent, both diachronically and synchronically. These hard-news images are small `thumbnails', and are most typically close crops of faces. Their small size, their consistent and limited subject matter, and their positioning in news stories represent a new practice in hard-news reporting, and raise questions about the role they play in the multimodal story-telling practices of the newspaper, and about the discursive practices of online newspapers more generally. This article presents an analysis of these thumbnails using tools from systemic functional semiotics, and an investigation from three socio-historical perspectives (news photography, typography, and punctuation). On this basis, I argue that in the specific discursive context of the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald online during the time period studied, thumbnails function less as images and more as an expression of the expanding system of language in computer-mediated communication.

`A mess' and `rows': evaluation in prime-time TV news discourse and the shaping of public opinion

Patrona, M. — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:07:02 PDT

This article examines a recent shift in the organization of prime-time news on Greek private television, from the `one-way' dissemination of information to an interactive format, where the news genre meets the talk show. By drawing on Hunston's model of evaluation in written academic discourse, it is argued that this conversational news format serves as a vehicle for evaluation, allowing the anchorpersons and journalist panels more freedom to voice concrete views. More specifically, prime-time news is generally cast in terms of two major sub-genres, namely the debate and the structured panel discussion. These sub-genres particularly lend themselves to the performance of acts of evaluation by TV journalists. Far from merely reporting events, journalists unequivocally show that their main task is to jointly interpret reality (news events and the actions of news makers) on behalf of the viewer audience. They set about this task by explicitly encoding their personal attitudes, while directly challenging government spokespersons and policies. It is argued that, in so doing, media personalities in effect shape audience opinions. The data attest to the increasing empowerment of the Greek media, and illustrate the ways in which conversational processes bring into being the continuously evolving public sphere in contemporary Greece.

Coherence in political computer-mediated communication: analyzing topic relevance and drift in chat

Stromer-Galley, J., Martinson, A. M. — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:07:02 PDT

There is a general perception that synchronous, online chat about politics is fragmented, incoherent, and rife with ad hominem attacks because of its channel characteristics. This study aims to better understand the relative impact of channel of communication versus topic of communication by comparing chat about four different topics. Discourse analysis and coding for topic drift were applied to two hours of chat devoted to the topics of politics, auto racing, entertainment, and cancer support. Findings demonstrate that topic may have an effect on the coherence of chat, with discussion in the politics chat room surprisingly being more coherent than in the other rooms. This research suggests that users can sustain relatively coherent interaction on political talk, suggesting chat technology may not be an inherently problematic medium for political discourse.

Book review: WOLFRAM BUBLITZ and AXEL HUBLER (eds), Metapragmatics in Use. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007. iix + 308 pp. ISBN 9789027254092 (hardback), US$ 142.00

Zhiying Xin, — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:07:02 PDT

Book review: JOHN LECHTE, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Post-humanism, 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2008

O'Mochain, R. — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:07:02 PDT

Book review: TEUN A. VAN DIJK, Discourse and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. vii + 303 pp

Wu-Peng, — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:07:02 PDT

Book review: VINOD PAVARALA and KANCHAN K. MALIK, Other Voices: The Struggle for Community Radio in India. New Delhi, London, Los Angeles and Singapore: Sage Publications, 2007. 319 pp. (hardback)

Downing, J. D.H. — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:07:02 PDT

In memorium -- Ron Scollon (1939--2009)

van Leeuwen, T. — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:07:02 PDT

`Keeping things moving': space and the construction of middle management identity in a post-NPM organization

Ainsworth, S., Grant, D., Iedema, R. — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:45:20 PST

Reforms associated with New Public Management (NPM) have led to changes in the management of work and organization that challenge the stability, durability and linearity of the managerial hierarchy in contemporary public sector workplaces. Against this background, this article considers the ways in which two clinician-managers who work in a large metropolitan teaching hospital speak about their organizational roles. Reflecting the complexity of their part of the organization, the emergency department, the interviewees position themselves as operating at the interstice between the competing and contradictory spatial logics of locality and mobility. With their identities strongly anchored in emergency as locality, the clinician-managers intervene in the flows of meanings and resources that affect its processes in ways that require intra- and inter-organizational mobility and which are incommensurate with traditional perceptions of middle managers. In regarding the interviews as `practical authoring' (Shotter and Cunliffe, 2003), we note our own spatial ambiguity as academic researchers interested in organizations other than our own and suggest that our insider-outsider positionings are reflected in the interviews' complex spatialities. We conclude that the interviewees' boundary-spanning and cross-spatial self-positionings are indicative of the hybrid roles that workers under NPM increasingly embody and are in contrast to traditional perceptions of how the provision and management of public service work is carried out.

The ideology of patient information leaflets: a diachronic study

Mcmanus, J. — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:45:20 PST

This study explores society's attitudes towards medicine, as reflected in the language of Patient Information Leaflets (PILs), and attempts to explicate how they have changed over the last century. For this purpose, Halliday's (1985) transitivity model is employed as a method of discourse analysis in order to carry out a systematic, comparative investigation of the language of early 20th-century PILs and that of their modern equivalents. The study demonstrates how the transitivity choices in the respective samples cumulatively realize a particular `world-view', and considers the implications this has for the construal of the wider social/cultural context and the projection of particular ideologies. The analyses show significant differences in transitivity patterns between the two samples, which reflect changes in the way medicine is viewed in Western culture.

Television news, narrative conventions and national imagination

Mihelj, S., Bajt, V., Pankov, M. — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:45:20 PST

By and large, contemporary news stories are stories about a particular nation, told to an audience that is seen and addressed in national terms. However, the understanding of the exact ways in which national imagination becomes engrained in the narrative conventions of news reporting is still rather limited, in particular when it comes to audiovisual genres. This article aims to fill a part of this blank by examining the links between national imagination and the narrative conventions of television news. Building on existing debates about different modes of news reporting, the article distinguishes two distinct sets of narrative conventions at work in television news: one typically found in routine reporting, the other characteristic of crisis and celebratory reporting. It is argued that each of these two sets of conventions is tied to a different form of nationalism, and normally arises in a different political climate. Links between national imagination and narrative conventions vary accordingly. To demonstrate this, the article provides a comparative analysis of narrative structures in selected samples of television news bulletins broadcast in the early 1990s in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The concluding section reflects on the external validity of the chosen case study and surveys supportive evidence from four other relevant cases, drawn from the UK and Israel.

Reported speech as an element of argumentative newspaper discourse

Smirnova, A. V. — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:45:20 PST

The present article deals with reported speech as an element of argumentation in the newspaper discourse of Great Britain viewed in the unity of its syntactic and semantic characteristics and argumentative functions. Theoretically, the research is based on the dialogic understanding of quotations, the dialogue theory by Bakhtin and contemporary argumentation theory. The proposed integral approach to reported speech combining linguistics with logic and argumentation theory revealed the relations between purely linguistic (syntactic and semantic) characteristics of reported speech with its functioning in argumentative discourse of contemporary British press.

Book review: IKUKO NAKANE, Silence in Intercultural Communication: Perceptions and Performance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. 239 pp., hardback, EUR100.00/ USD158.00

Tatar, S. — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:45:20 PST

Book review: DAVID DEACON, MICHAEL PICKERING, PETER GOLDING and GRAHAM MURDOCK, Researching Communications: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural Analysis, 2nd edn. London: Hodder Arnold, 2007. ix + 430 pp. ISBN (paperback) 978--0-340--92699--4

Ogutu, J. N. — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:45:20 PST

Book review: PHILIP RILEY, Language, Culture and Identity. London: Continuum Academic, 2007. ix + 265 pp., paperback, AUD69.95, ISBN 978 0 8264 8629 5

Taylor-Leech, K. — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:45:20 PST

Book review: HAO SUN and DANIEL Z. KADAR (eds), It's the Dragon's Turn -- Chinese Institutional Discourses. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. 262 pp

Citing Li, — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:45:20 PST