We content analyze the text of Wal-Mart annual reports, both for what is said and in antenarrative fashion what is left out. We find that the specter of Samuel Walton, dead since 1992, dwells in stories told. We intend a critical discourse analysis of the narrative ways in which Wal-Mart translates and crystallizes its version of hyperglobalization by rearticulating its dead leader. Our analysis uses the three-step specter arrival described by Derrida. We also investigate the Weberian routinization of Mr. Sam's (...) charisma, and examine the specter's Bakhtinian double narration. Our thesis: Specters are re-narrated and theatrically enacted by restorying dead leaders. The specter of Sam Walton is employed to answer concerns about Wal-Mart raised by activists. At the same time, the activists also re-present Mr. Sam, claiming: ‘Mr. Sam is rolling over in his grave at what his successors have done, in his name.’ In sum, we explore what Derrida calls a hauntology of the world's largest corporation. Corporate narratives of the dead leader are invoked and masquerade as polyphonic story by both those for and those against Wal-Mart's hyperglobalization effects. (shrink)

Australian trade unions face the organizational and ethical challenge of advanced liberalism and its privileging of an enterprise culture, an ideological hegemony which unions, with their traditions of solidarity and collectivism, struggle to resist. While it has been argued that critical discourse studies offer a research methodology to develop politically engaged resistance strategies, CDS has not subjected the values and language of union mobilisation and class resistance to sufficient scrutiny. Employing discourse analysis to promote equality and workplace justice requires a (...) willingness to engage in a critical examination of what terms like class solidarity now mean in the context of enterprise culture. Foucault's stress on the power relationships embedded in discourse clarifies the history of solidarity and intensifies our critical analysis of the new discursive formations of enterprise culture which have stripped traditional union solidarity of its institutional basis and authority. Foucault's ethics, based in the notion of the care of the self, suggests that union claims to govern and represent the interests of their members can only be reinvigorated by applying the Socratic ideal of self-examination and self-transformation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCritical Discourse Studies positions itself as a critical, transformative practice that seeks to expose the ways in which discourse is able to constitute social, political, economic, gendered, racial, and sexual inequalities as normal and unremarkable. In this respect, CDS is an expressly political and therefore ethical project. Nevertheless, this article posits that, quite remarkably, the ethical frameworks that guide CDS have remained largely under-theorized and taken for granted. Accordingly, this paper seeks to contribute to this much-needed area of theoretical inquiry (...) by offering a brief discussion of how CDS has tended to define its own criticality and identifies three problems that emerge from how CDS practitioners have tended to formulate the praxis of critique: namely, the tendency to conceive of CDS as a demystificatory practice, the implicit logocentrism of modeling ethics upon the Habermasian Ideal Speech Situation, and finally, the deontological nature of discourse ethics. Each of the three problems is discussed in relation to a brief multimodal critical discourse analysis of three online employer profile videos. As such, the study is offered to demonstrate not only the analytical strength of multimodal analysis but also the political-ethical relations beyond Discourse Ethics that are immanent in such analyses. (shrink)

Large companies must increasingly satisfy not only the conditions of their formal licences, but also the concerns and expectations of host communities and broader society. This has led to the emergence, particularly in the minerals industry, of the notion of “social licence”, an interdiscursive term whose meaning is rarely interrogated. We use textual analysis to critically investigate the construction of social licence discourse in minerals companies’ sustainable development reports and at a recent industry conference. We find that the texts mystify (...) the nature of agency, and privilege processes that maintain existing power relations. Through their partial accommodation of heterogeneous discourses, the texts downplay tensions and conflicts. We conclude that there is a need to reconceptualise the nature of company–stakeholder relationships through a more collaborative, dialogic and reflexive process, avoiding the binary state implied by the term licence. (shrink)

Critical discourse analysis stands on the shoulder of giants – different giants – in order to answer how its critique, its ethico-moral stance, is theoretically grounded and justified. Concerning this question, this article explores the role of the Frankfurt School in the discourse–historical approach. Although references to the Frankfurt School can regularly be found in the DHA's canon, I argue that an even more comprehensive discussion would help in combating accusations of the DHA being unprincipled and politically biased, and further (...) enrich the DHA's toolkit for empirical analysis. After reviewing existing references to the Frankfurt School, I discuss this intellectual tradition – from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's The dialectic of enlightenment to Jürgen Habermas's language-philosophy – showing to what extent it can ground the DHA's emancipatory and socially transformative aims. Thereby, I illustrate how the DHA's critical standard is not simply based on a coincidental, though progressive, consensus but theoretically justified. (shrink)