Post-Structuralist Discourse Theory analyzes political ideas and action from a Marxist direction. However, while classic Marxian sociology is rooted in economic processes that “structure” society and ideas, Post-Structuralist Discourse Theory emphasizes the absence of any determinative principle. Thus, it radicalizes an ongoing shift in Marxism away from economic essentialism towards indeterminacy, contingency, and openness. The ideological superstructure becomes ever more important at the expense of the economic base; class struggle and relations of production lose analytical and strategic purchase in favor (...) of a complex and integral form of politics; there are no deeper, natural foundations determining how society is organized and structured. Post-Structuralist Discourse Theorists argue that this orientation leads to a more satisfactory analysis of political practice than is possible through positivist research. Assessing this claim requires a survey of the hermetic terminology in which Post-Structuralist Discourse Theorists express their ideas—the discourse, as it were, of Discourse Theorists—exploring their use of sociology, structuralist linguistics, psychoanalysis, and the political theory of populism. (shrink)

Although both academics and policy-makers still debate its exact causes and the extent of its consequences, the ongoing financial crisis is doubtlessly the most distinctive economic event of the late 2000s. But despite the importance of such large-scale economic phenomena, there has been little research on their discursive construction. This paper presents some empirical data to show how the crisis is identified and its boundaries construed in corporate communication, seeking to understand how economic actors selectively shape public perceptions of critical (...) events by routinely emphasising the role of certain agents and stakeholders while ignoring others. Terms for the crisis, their collocates and their discourse preferences are drawn from a 1,500,000-word ad hoc corpus of annual reports. (shrink)