This article presents the results of the analysis of a number of linguistic metaphors found in a corpus of opinion articles published in the Spanish newspaper El País. The authors included in the corpus, who tend towards the left of the political spectrum, use metaphor to express moral judgements on the actions and decisions of the conservative, centre-right People’s party, which governs Spain with an overall majority. With the aim of describing this discourse, we have undertaken a qualitative analysis with (...) a conceptual framework deriving from CDA and cognitive linguistics. First, therefore, we have made use of the methodology developed by Steen and the Pragglejaz group to extract the discourse units that could be considered as the lexical expression of an underlying mapping between domains, that is, the metaphors; second, according to the descriptions of Talmy, Croft, Sweetser, Sullivan, and Dancygier and Sweetser, we have verified that the different types of grammatical structure in which the lexical items appeared also indicated the existence of a metaphorical thought process; and third, in the words of van Dijk, we have studied the ideological semantics underlying conceptual structures and conceptual content. As we have demonstrated, all the samples of linguistic metaphors found led readers to construct the same interpretation of the meaning: The Spanish People’s party government is the past, a past that provokes rejection and which was thought to be definitively ended. (shrink)

This article analyses the multimodal representations of public space in Chilean broadcast news reports on the figure of the hooded rioter and its alleged connections with the student movement. We seek to identify how space is constructed as a legitimation strategy in relation to the actors involved and the actions taking place across four different news broadcast pieces in the light of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics. Results show that the multimodal representations of space are crucial to (...) identify and functionalize hooded rioters as belonging to the student movement. Actions are dependent on the spaces in which actors operate, restricting the occupation of certain spaces to specific actors. Thus, transgressive protest actions are to be contained to educational spaces and represented as naturalized vandalism, ignoring the students’/demonstrators’ motivations to recuperate/vindicate the public space. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical social semiotic analysis of the UK Department of Work and Pensions ‘Employ ability’ initiative. Although this initiative can be read as an attempt to reduce the exclusion of people with disabilities from the workplace, it is argued that the ‘Employ ability’ initiative, should be read as part of a discursive strategy to legitimate neo-liberal welfare reforms, where policies relating to the employment and underemployment of people with disabilities remain fixed almost entirely on the supply side (...) rather than the demand side of labour. A number of semiotic resources are identified that attempt to make a neo-liberal ‘problematic’ appear to be a natural and common sense response to questions of welfare. Most notable is the use of an ‘empowerment’ discourse that seeks to legitimate a disciplinary welfare regime and attempts to fabricate an active citizenry so necessary to the demands of neo-liberalism. (shrink)

Contemporary (Western) social life features countless examples of a common adequation linking industrial productivity and economic growth to enhancements in social wellbeing. These market-oriented...

Digital peddling of fake news is influential to persuasive political participation, with veritable social media platforms. Social media, with their instantaneous and widespread usage, have been exploited by ‘anonymous’ political influencers who fabricate and inundate internet community with unverified and false information. Using van Leeuwen’s Discourse Legitimation approach and insights from Discourse Analysis, this study analyses 120 purposively sampled fake news posts on Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter, shared during the 2019 general elections in Nigeria. WhatsApp allows for the easy and (...) fast sharing of fake news as it pulled the largest occurrence of legitimation strategies, followed by Facebook. Authorisation is the highest occurring legitimation strategy at 46.6% frequency; this is followed by Moralisation which has 27% and Rationalisation at 26.4%; while Mythopoesis did not feature at all in the sampled data, leaving it at 0%. In particular, expert and role model authority are most often deployed to validate fake news such as the demise and cloning of President Buhari, ruling party’s plan to rig and destabilise the 2019 election, massive corruption in the current administration and imminent ethnic violence. The study argues that these strategies are viable persuasive tools owing to their use of discourse markers like make-believe images, emotive language, appeal to emotions, rational conclusions, hateful comments, verbal indictment and coercive verbs. (shrink)

This article reports a critical discourse analysis of the legitimation strategies used in two Chinese government white papers about trade frictions between China and the United States. Drawing on the legitimation framework advanced by van Leeuwen to political discourse, it shows how the white papers use four main legitimation strategies: authorization, moralization, rationalization, and integration. It argues that the Chinese government uses these strategies to legitimate its responses to US trade policy and delegitimate the US government’s motives for initiating/escalating tensions. (...) This article also discusses how the use of these legitimation strategies draws from certain traditional Chinese cultural values, such as Confucianism, the culture of face, and collectivism. This article is a part of a larger research project studying discursive strategies in trade friction discourse and hopes to shed light on the attributes and functions of this type of discourse. (shrink)

Previous studies on legitimation, multimodality and political discourse by researchers, such as Van Leeuwen, Van Dijk and Mackay, have suggested different but supplementary methods of legitimation analysis by providing a number of analytical frameworks. Multimodal legitimation research, however, seems to be in need of a better conflation of the theoretical backgrounds of disciplines, such as narratology. This article focuses on the multimodal discourse of three political advertisements of the political party New Democracy, filmed for the needs of the Greek legislative (...) election of January 2015. What is investigated is the multimodal means by which New Democracy’s president, and Prime Minister at the time, Antonis Samaras attempted to legitimise his candidacy. In this article, I use the six-layer framework proposed by Mackay for multimodal legitimation analyses and I argue that multimodal legitimation research can benefit and get enhanced from the use of narratology and its analytical categories, such as perspective. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe EU referendum was arguably the greatest political event in British politics since 1945 and the campaign was marked by divisive rhetoric. This paper investigates how Britain’s membership...

Institutional identity and social memory are used to construct legitimate images of self and justify past actions. The Uruguayan military as an institution was interested in constructing its own memory of the controversial period of the dictatorship to establish their new identity as political actors and to respond to outside critiques. As a result, the institution produced a wealth of documents to explain and justify its actions before holding power. This paper investigates how the Armed Forces represented their actions during (...) this period, how they positioned themselves and other social actors, and how they evaluated themselves, others and their practices during that traumatic period. The critical discourse analysis focuses on the configuration of lexico-grammatical and discursive choices that construct the institution's shifting identity and its memory of the dictatorship. The analysis demonstrates how the military used discursive practices to legitimate its deviant actions through the construction of a narrative of the past that presented the situation as chaotic and requiring extreme measures. (shrink)

Maria Gołaszewska (1926–2015), a Polish philosopher, was associated throughout her life with Poland’s oldest academic institution, the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. She was a student of the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, himself a student of Edmund Husserl. During the postwar and communist years in Poland, Gołaszewska conducted research focusing on issues related to art and aesthetics. She created her own conception of empirically and anthropologically oriented aesthetics, which I believe is a prime example of a theory that accounts for the perspective (...) of gender, and in this sense should be acknowledged as an important contribution to contemporary gender-sensitive/feminist philosophy. In the article, I present Gołaszewska’s life, academic career, and philosophy as a cognitively valuable response to feminist philosophy’s search for a suitable description of women’s experiences related to art and aesthetic perception. (shrink)

Volume 16, Issue 4, September 2019, Page 381-388.

Contentious relations between Türkiye and Greece can be traced back centuries to conflicts such as Ottoman Turks conquering Istanbul which was the centre of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 and the 182...

This article explores the discursive behaviour of Chinese local officials in press conferences handling the recent 2015 crisis of Tianjin blasts. Drawing upon the previous analyses on relations of trust and discourse, and on the crucial aspects of trustworthiness, it examines how the officials struggled for trustworthiness discursively, and how their ‘doing’ trustworthiness varied in two phases of crisis communication. The analysis reveals markedly different approaches to the officials’ ‘doing’ trustworthiness in two phases. In the ‘unsatisfactory’ phase, the officials mainly (...) constructed the aspect of expertise, with few expressions conveying integrity and none conveying care; while in the ‘well-handled’ phase, the officials constructed all three aspects. In addition, their discursive strategies of constructing expertise changed from extensively using ‘techs’ to combining ‘techs’ and vernacular language, and those of constructing integrity changed from not saying ‘what lacks evidence’ to providing information with adequate evidence. Effects of different aspects and discursive strategies on trust are also discussed. (shrink)

Social media platforms have been vested with hope for their potential to enable ‘ordinary citizens’ to make their judgments public and contribute to pluralized discussions about organizations and their perceived legitimacy :60–97, 2018). This raises questions about how ordinary citizens make judgements and voice them in online spaces. This paper addresses these questions by examining how Western citizens ascribe responsibility and action in relation to corporate misconduct. Empirically, it focuses on modern slavery and analyses online debates in Denmark on child (...) slavery in the cocoa industry. Conceptually, it introduces the notion of cosmopolitanism as a general disposition of care and responsibility towards distant others, conceived as a prerequisite for the critical evaluation of corporate responsibility in the Global South. The analysis of online debates shows that citizens debate child slavery in terms of individual consumer responsibility rather than corporate responsibility. Corporations are not considered potential agents of change. As a consequence, online citizen debates did not reflect a legitimacy crisis for the cocoa industry, as debates over responsibility were overwhelmingly concerned with the agency of the Western individual, the individual agency of the speakers themselves. Participants in debates understood their agency strictly as consumer agency. (shrink)

Depuis le début du siècle, la lutte contre les mariages de complaisance est devenue un élément central des politiques migratoires européennes. En Belgique, le gouvernement a instauré une procédure d’évaluation des mariages « mixtes » entre des citoyen·nes belges et des individu·es provenant d’un pays hors Union Européenne afin de détecter – et empêcher – les mariages de complaisance, c'est-à-dire des unions matrimoniales entreprises uniquement dans le but d’obtenir un titre de séjour. A travers l’analyse de plusieurs documents juridiques et (...) politiques provenant de la Belgique et de l’Union Européenne, cet article vise à examiner les éléments discursifs de la définition juridico-administrative d’un « mariage de complaisance » dans ces enquêtes. Dans un premier temps, nous montrons que cette définition constitue le produit d’un processus de construction discursive et explorons la manière dont cette définition est façonnée et codifiée par l’ensemble de textes et de pratiques sur lesquels reposent les enquêtes. Nous exposons ensuite en quoi ce processus laisse la place à des discriminations – et notamment à des discriminations genrées – ainsi que des cas de « gardiennage » moral. (shrink)

As the interest in corporate social responsibility within advertising industry is growing, this paper explores the discourse on CSR among employees in advertising agencies. Different sensemaking dimensions are taken into account to examine how employees, as one of the key stakeholders involved in the joint meaning construction, make sense of CSR. In addition, this paper studies the legitimation approaches that employees use to address CSR of advertising agencies. The empirical evidence of discursive examples also indicates that there is a linkage (...) between sensemaking and legitimation perspective in CSR discourse analysis and supports the idea that both may be a potential route toward institutionalization of CSR inside organizations or sectors. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn 2013, ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden shocked the world by revealing the American NSA’s extensive surveillance programs. The ensuing media discussion became a focal point for the justification and contestation of surveillance in the digital age. This article contributes to the growing body of literature on the discursive construction of surveillance, concentrating on how the practice is legitimized. Methodologically, the paper draws on Critical Discourse Studies, applying the concept of discourse and utilizing insights from Van Leeuwen’s categories of (...) legitimation and social actor representation. The data come from the media coverage of the Snowden affair in Finland, whose hitherto very limited state surveillance is now being transformed into extensive digital monitoring. The study concludes that surveillance is legitimized through two main discourses, one legitimizing it by constructing it as a tool for protection against terrorism, the other contesting it by depicting it as a threat to the basic building blocks of democracy. The study suggests that the latter understanding tends to be favored in the media, but the critique of surveillance is on a rather abstract level. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article explores, on the basis of interviews with migrants from Ukraine and Lebanon, the role that the linguistic pluralism of Ukraine and the religious pluralism of Lebanon could play in the migrants’ discursive challenges to the norms of cultural homogeneity in Italy, as a country of destination. I define such pluralisms as symbolic and rhetorical resources. The ‘Ukrainophone’ and ‘Russophone’ subnational identities were used by some interviewees to affirm a positive self-image in light of a declassing migratory experience, but (...) the same interviewees were reluctant to advance cultural claims in relation to the Italian context. Similarly, Lebanese interviewees preferred to depict their country as ‘Western’ and to use ‘Italian’ discourses to refer to homogeneity norms. I argue that ‘diasporic’ policies, the context of residence and the migratory experience are among the aspects that influence the use of such discursive resources. (shrink)

Although stakeholder salience theory has received a great deal of scholarly attention in the business ethics and management literature, the theory has been criticized for overemphasizing rationality in managerial perceptions. We argue that it is important to better understand what socially constructed emotions signal in business relations, and we posit the role of envy as a discursive resource used to signal and construct the asymmetrical power relations between small business owner–managers and their stakeholders. Our study is based on a qualitative (...) study on discursive accounts elicited from 33 interviews with small business owner–managers in Finland. Our study makes two primary contributions. First, we suggest that socially and culturally constructed emotions have significance in stakeholder salience analyses. Second, we suggest that socially and culturally constructed emotions provide a fruitful context in which to understand the limitations of owner–managers’ personal and moral autonomy. (shrink)

During the last decade, any questionable or illegal behaviour on the part of businesses has received considerable attention in the media. Using a critical discursive perspective, we here investigate how the media constructs one type of questionable business as illegitimate. Our data draw upon articles dealing with cartels and cartel agreements in Finnish business media covering the five year period 2002-2007. Our contributions are following: We add to the current literature on CSR and national businesses, suggesting that regardless of globalization (...) sociocultural history plays an important role in constructing the illegitimacy of business practices. We therefore emphasize the importance of media as an arena where social actors construct the social contract between business and society. We further contribute to studies on questionable business by reconstructing a discursive framework used to construct cartels and cartel agreements. (shrink)

Volume 17, Issue 5, November 2020, Page 510-526.

ABSTRACT In July 2018 the Twitter hashtag #secondcivilwarletters began trending as part of a collective response to conservative media personality Alex Jones’ warning that Democratic supporters were planning to launch a Second Civil War on Independence Day. The response consisted of tweets in the form of parodic letters written as though they were from the American Civil War period, and engaged in a collective form of political commentary and discussion, mostly displaying an anti-Republican and anti-Trump sentiment. This article analyses the (...) different ways the tweeters used Twitter and the #secondcivilwarletters hashtag to engage in the humorous discursive delegitimisation of President Trump and Republicans. It was found that the strategies of authorisation, moral evaluation, rationalisation, and mythopoeisis featured prominently in the tweets and, combined with the humorous edge, nourished the political participation and discourse of this online community. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe continued rise of socio-economic inequality over the past decades with its connected political outcomes such as the Brexit vote in the UK, and the election of Donald Trump are currently a matter of intense debate both in academia and in journalism. One significant sign of the heightened interest was the surprise popularity of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the twenty-first Century. The book reached the top of the bestseller lists and was described as a ‘media sensation’, with Piketty himself as (...) a ‘rock star economist’. This paper, drawing from a major international and cross-disciplinary study, investigates the print media treatment in four European countries of economic policy proposals presented in Capital. Applying social semiotic and critical discourse analysis, we specifically focus on articles which are in disagreement with these proposals and identify five categories of counterarguments used against Piketty: authorisation, moralisation, rationalisation, portrayal of victimhood and inevitab... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe specific aim of this study is to investigate how a group of migrant rights activists in Sweden are positioned in news discourse. The more general aim of this study is to understand the conditions under which activists participate within news discourse. Through a critical discourse analytical framework, with specific focus on the use of epistemic and dynamic modalities in the presentation of activists’ statements, the analysis shows what kinds of knowledge claims can be constructed and from what discursive position. (...) Furthermore, the analysis shows what kind of political claims the activists can make. The activists are positioned as ‘dreamers’ in relation to political possibilities and as ‘experiencing individuals’ in relation to knowledge claims. The main conclusion of the article is that journalistic discourse has inherent ideological resources to include activist voices: at the same time, it is able to exclude the political relevance of activism. (shrink)

The Ukrainian–Russian conflict of 2013–2017 is characterized as ‘hybrid’ warfare, with a crucial role of informational component. Using ideological discourse analytic tools, this article demonstrates how two prominent Russian TV channels shaped the persuasive message, creating strong unity and mobilizing a high level of support among the national audience. Based on legitimation and de-legitimation patterns, Channel One and Russia-1 built ideologically polarized opposition between ‘Our’ and ‘Their’ sides of the conflict. The wide range of editorializing tools, socio-cultural and historical Soviet-time (...) constructs, and references to gay culture served to promote one group and to debase the opposition. Close institutional ties between government and media in Russia sustain multiplicity and intertextuality of ‘general line’, thus eliminating discordant interpretations. The article shows strong evidence that the analyzed TV news programs present a typical illustration of ideological discourse, exploited by the Russian government in order to achieve its political goals. (shrink)

When governments introduce controversial policies that many citizens disapprove of, officeholders increasingly use discursive legitimation strategies in their public communication to ward off blame. In this paper, we contribute to the study of blame avoidance in government social media communication by exploring how corpus-assisted discourse analysis helps to identify three types of common legitimations: self-defensive appeals to personal authority of policymakers, impersonal authority of rules or documents and goals or effects of policies. We use a specialised corpus of tweets by (...) the Brexit department of the British government which we analyse both qualitatively and quantitatively. We demonstrate how the analysis of lexical bundles that characterise each type of legitimation might provide a new avenue for identifying the presence, characteristics and uses of these legitimations in larger datasets. (shrink)

This paper presents selected findings from a historical analysis of change in the discursive construction of social identity in UK education policy discourse from 1972–2005. My chief argument is that through its linguistic forms of self-identification the government construes educational roles, relations and responsibilities not only for itself, but also for other educational actors and wider society. More specifically, I argue that New Labour's distinctive mode of self-representation is an important element in its hegemonic project, textually manufacturing consent over its (...) policy decisions, and helping to articulate its self-styled ‘enabling’ model of governance. As evidence for these claims I discuss two prominent trends in New Labour's education policy rhetoric, which I characterise as ‘personalisation’ and ‘managerialisation’. Respectively, these relate to the discursive representation of social identity and social action. (shrink)

The article investigates the political cartoon construction of two major `players' on the contemporary political stage, and the semio-linguistic and visual rhetorical tools used to achieve this construction, through an analysis of semiotic-discursive aspects of a small corpus of political cartoons in English and Arabic, all about the two `players' — George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden — in the aftermath of 9/11 and within the ongoing `war on terror', followed by a more detailed analysis of two political cartoon (...) texts from the corpus — one in Arabic about Bush and the other in English about bin Laden. A rationale for the combination of semiotics and critical discourse analysis and a discussion of the nature and functions of political cartoon are provided. These are followed by a review of the relevant literature with a focus on political cartoons. The analysis, drawing upon the `dispositive' model and the incongruity theory of humor, addresses the verbal and visual aspects of the cartoons, instances of blending, incongruity and visual metaphors therein. Some major notions in CDA, for example Van Dijk's ideological square and Chilton's legitimation and proximization, are also utilized in examining the sample cartoons. The detailed analysis of the two cartoons elaborates on the salient features and generic aspects of the sample, specifically on incongruity, blending and visual metaphor, toward an understanding of the messages of the cartoons, the tools used to convey these messages and how they contribute to the ongoing war of ideological misrepresentation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the use of language in the construction of identity in the constitution of an anti-state group, which is a part of the sovereign citizen movement in Austria. The group, called ‘Staatenbund Österreich’, had been active for several years before the government charged them with high treason. The group believes that the government is illegitimate – an assumption which allows them to legitimize their behavior. The movement, which is spreading across the globe, has started in the US (...) in the 1970s, and yet, it is still impossible to estimate the actual danger they pose, even though they have been reported to become increasingly violent. The present paper investigates the constitution of the ‘Austrian Commonwealth’ in order to find out how they manage to create an identity for their group, how they legitimize themselves and their claims, and how their language use compares to other extremist groups. (shrink)

The COVID pandemic has sparked fear among many people worldwide and has thus led to the emergence of a variety of conspiracy theories. Individuals believing in these theories come from various social and demographic backgrounds, some of them being mere skeptics, while others are more radical and extreme. The present paper investigates the use of language in a conspiratorial anti-COVID Facebook group with the aim of describing the linguistic features and strategies employed to share and spread conspiracy theories and to (...) form a common identity. The results show that the group uses features typical of extremist groups, such the ideological in- and out-group presentation, the use of agentless passives to create fear, and intertextual references. Further strategies detected in the data are the misrepresentation of scientific knowledge, the use of colloquial language, humor, and irony, among others, which are used to create a bond among the groups’ members and to set themselves apart from the government and the rest of the population, whom they perceive as enemies and oppressors. (shrink)

Although a large number of studies have explored the main causes of gender inequality in academia, less attention has been given to the processes underlying the failure of gender equality initiatives to enhance gender representation, especially at the professorial level. We offer a critical discourse analysis of recently promulgated gender policy documents of the five Flemish universities, and demonstrate that defensive institutional work is a fundamental process underlying resistance to gender equality in the academic profession. That is, powerful organizational actors (...) resist gender change by intentionally deploying a combination of discursive strategies that legitimate what we describe as non–time-bound gender equality initiatives: The expected outcomes are undetermined in time, and they delegitimate concrete, time-bound measures that define specific outcomes against well-defined deadlines. By explicitly bringing a temporal dimension into our analysis, we argue that defensive institutional work deflects questions regarding what ought to be achieved when, and contributes to the slow pace of gender change in academia. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Doxxing is a form of online abuse where doxxers deliberately seek and publish their targets’ personal information without consent, often with malicious intent such as ruining their reputation. Despite its prevalence, doxxing has received little scholarly attention compared to other forms of online aggression, and almost no study has approached doxxing from a language and discourse perspective. This exploratory study analyzes 464 online forum posts and comments related to doxxing during the on-going pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, addressing the (...) overarching question: In what ways is doxxing a discursive action? More specifically, how is doxxing realized intertextually? What are the discourse strategies that forum participants employ to legitimize doxxing? Informed by Critical Discourse Analysis, the analysis begins by illustrating doxxing as an intertextual and recontextualized social practice, focusing on a forum thread that discloses a police officer’s personal information. The core part of the paper discusses four key legitimation strategies of doxxing identified in the data, rationalization, definition, construction of negative-Other, and victimizing ‘Us’. The paper concludes by considering the role of doxxing in the Hong Kong social movement, and outlining some directions for future research. (shrink)

This article explores the discourse-conceptual linkages between ‘Brexit’ and ‘crisis’ in European news media reporting about the UK referendum on leaving the European Union of 23 June 2016. The study examines media discourse about the Brexit vote in Austria, Germany, Poland and Sweden at the transformative moment in between the pre/after vote period. The conceptually-oriented critical discourse analysis shows how Brexit was not only constructed as an imaginary or a future crisis but also how its mediated visions were made real (...) by recontextualising elements of various past social/political/economic crises. As is shown, such a strategy of discursively amalgamating the real and the imaginary, as well as the experienced/past and the expected/future, often allowed constructing Brexit as one of the most significant, critical occurrences of post-War Europe. Through the analysis, the article aims to show how wide and diverse the importance of ‘Brexit as crisis’ has been for European news media discourse. It also emphasises that while in the UK itself – including huge part of the UK traditional media – the critical nature of Brexit was often strategically downplayed, the wider European discourse would see it as a multifaceted ‘crisis’ of huge significance to both the present and the future of the EU, wider Europe and the world. (shrink)

This study examines self-legitimation and other-delegitimation in the online radio broadcasts of Nnamdi Kanu, the Supreme Leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). Using Theo van Leeuwen’s (2008) legitimation approach, the paper analyses four speeches he delivered in Israel following his ‘reappearance’ in 2018. The analysis reveals that Kanu uses three legitimation strategies, namely authorisation, moralisation and rationalisation to justify his sudden escape from Nigeria, call for Biafra’s self-rule and boycott of elections and to discredit alleged cloning of the (...) president, electoral malpractices, marginalisation of the Igbo and corruption and brutality among security agents. These strategies are linguistically realised by self-glorification, exclusive and inclusive pronominalisations (us-them dichotomy), polarisation, derogatory nomination (labelling), and hyperbolic expressions. They are aimed at presenting Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB positively as fighting a legitimate cause. (shrink)

A large number of Swedish public authorities produce ‘platform of values’ texts that present core values. This article presents a study of how such texts and practices, including the core values they revolve around, are legitimized. Using Van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework, three different data sets are analysed: 47 ‘platform of values’ texts, a focus group discussion with seven senior HR officers, and a quantitative questionnaire study answered by civil servants at three public authorities. The analysis shows how the existence of (...) ‘platform of values’ texts and practices is legitimized through rationalizations, above all by describing the texts as concrete means for reaching specific ends and, with regard to the choice of core values, through a custom-conformity type of authority. Thus, this article addresses discursive transformations of contemporary organizations with a particular focus on available discursive space for critical thinking in the wake of New Public Management and related developments. (shrink)

When governments introduce controversial policies or face a risk of policy failure, officeholders try to avoid blame and justify their decisions by using various legitimation strategies. This paper focuses on the ways in which legitimations are expressed in government social media communication, using the Twitter posts of the British government’s Brexit department as an example. We show how governments may seek legitimacy by appealing to (1) the personal authority of individual policymakers, (2) the collective authority of (political) organisations, (3) the (...) impersonal authority of rules or documents, (4) the goals or effects of government policy, (5) ‘the will of the people’, and (6) time pressure. The results suggest that official legitimations in social media posts tend to rely more on references to authority and shared values rather than presentation of evidence and sound arguments. (shrink)

Corporate sustainability reports are supposed to provide a complete and balanced picture of corporate sustainability performance. They are, however, usually voluntary and thus prone to interpretation and even greenwashing tendencies. To overcome this problem, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) provides standardized reporting guidelines challenging companies to report positive and negative aspects of an organization’s sustainability performance. However, the reporting of “negative aspects” in particular can endanger corporate legitimacy if perceived by the stakeholders as not being in line with societal norms (...) and values. Starting from the theoretical lenses of economics-based disclosure theories and socio-political theories of disclosure, the focus of this study therefore was to analyze the communicative legitimation strategies companies use to report “negative aspects,” i.e., negative ecological and social impact caused by corporate activity. Using qualitative content analysis of GRI-oriented sustainability reports from companies listed on the US Dow Jones Industrial Average Index and on the German DAX Index, we identified six legitimation strategies. We discuss these strategies regarding to symbolic and substantial management of legitimacy. We show that symbolic legitimation strategies aiming at modifying the perception of legitimizing stakeholders dominate in the reports at hand. Such persuasion, however, does not meet the requirement of impartiality as postulated by the GRI guidelines. Building upon this conclusion we propose a concise characterization of “negative aspects” and develop a GRI-compliant schema of reporting about them. In doing so, we offer a way to improve the overall “balance” of sustainability reporting contributing to a true and fair view in sustainability disclosure. (shrink)

From princesses who free princes to journalists who tell stories about natural catastrophes and, most generally, individual and collective actors who make sense of the world, narratives are everywh...

RESUMO A partir da perspetiva de uma análise crítica do discurso, este artigo analisa a questão da autenticidade nos atos discursivos de expiação política. O objetivo é estudar de que forma a autenticidade dos atos discursivos de expiação política pode ser avaliada através de estratégias de reelaboração do passado empregadas em discursos de penitência. O artigo enfrenta a seguinte pergunta de pesquisa: de que forma estratégias de reelaboração do passado influenciam na autenticidade de um ato discursivo de expiação política? O (...) artigo analisa uma declaração de 2015 proferida por Shinzo Abe, antigo primeiro-ministro do Japão, e argumenta que, no seu ato discursivo de expiação política de 2015, ele desenvolveu uma estratégia de cancelamento da memória histórica nipónica. Tal estratégia impediu que a declaração de 2015 de Shinzo Abe fosse considerada um genuíno ato discursivo de expiação política. (shrink)

RESUMO A partir da perspetiva de uma análise crítica do discurso, este artigo analisa a questão da autenticidade nos atos discursivos de expiação política. O objetivo é estudar de que forma a autenticidade dos atos discursivos de expiação política pode ser avaliada através de estratégias de reelaboração do passado empregadas em discursos de penitência. O artigo enfrenta a seguinte pergunta de pesquisa: de que forma estratégias de reelaboração do passado influenciam na autenticidade de um ato discursivo de expiação política? O (...) artigo analisa uma declaração de 2015 proferida por Shinzo Abe, antigo primeiro-ministro do Japão, e argumenta que, no seu ato discursivo de expiação política de 2015, ele desenvolveu uma estratégia de cancelamento da memória histórica nipónica. Tal estratégia impediu que a declaração de 2015 de Shinzo Abe fosse considerada um genuíno ato discursivo de expiação política. (shrink)

This study explores how paradoxical tensions between economic growth and environmental protection are avoided through organizational mythmaking. By examining the European oil and gas supermajors’ “CEO-speak” about climate change, we show how mythmaking facilitates the disregarding, diverting, and/or displacing of sustainability tensions. In doing so, our findings further illustrate how certain defensive responses are employed: regression, or retreating to the comforts of past familiarities, fantasy, or escaping the harsh reality that fossil fuels and climate change are indeed irreconcilable, and projecting, (...) or shifting blame to external actors for failing to address climate change. By highlighting the discursive effects of enacting these responses, we illustrate how the European oil and gas supermajors self-determine their inability to substantively address the complexities of climate change. We thus argue that defensive responses are not merely a form of mismanagement as the paradox and corporate sustainability literature commonly suggests, but a strategic resource that poses serious ethical concerns given the imminent danger of issues such as climate change. (shrink)

The Occupy Central Movement was the biggest protest in Hong Kong in decades and caused an unprecedented division of opinion in society. Reports about the event in local Chinese media were remarkably different in stance and attitude. To understand the ideological dissonances and their linguistic construction, this article analyzes a corpus of 120 reports on the Occupy Central Movement from four major Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong, namely, Apple Daily, Ming Pao, Oriental Daily News and Ta Kung Pao, which cover (...) the political spectrum from anti-Beijing to pro-Beijing. In total, 856 concordance lines of the two selected words ‘佔中’ and ‘佔領’ were annotated using the Attitude framework. Analysis shows that their attitudes toward the event form a continuum from supportive, through neutral, to antipathic. The attitudes do not simply reflect the stances of the newspapers, but are strategically selected and designed to legitimize or delegitimize the event. The pattern of attitudes reflects the ideological divergence in Hong Kong society, and at the same time, the news reports also exacerbate the divergence by reinforcing the attitudes of their readers. (shrink)

The Scottish independence referendum in 2014 saw the breakthrough of online political campaigning in the UK. Despite the outcome, research and media alike concluded that the main pro-independence campaign, Yes Scotland, outdid the main pro-union campaign, Better Together, in the online battle. This article addresses this discrepancy by exploring how YS and BT used social media affordances in order to legitimize their own and de-legitimize their opponents’ positions. The material consists of multimodal tweets published by YS and BT in the (...) run-up to the referendum. The article employs a model for multimodal legitimation that takes into consideration the construction of authority, moral evaluation and the construction and justifications of means and goals. The findings show that both campaigns made extensive use of de-legitimating strategies, although YS was more balanced. The article also shows that the campaigns’ communicative choices had implications for the construction and justification of goals and means, with YS running a more visionary campaign than BT. (shrink)

StyleLikeU is a hugely successful online social media platform that presents itself as a social justice movement related to body acceptance. Presenting moving personal stories, it offers a site for what it calls ‘diverse individuals’ to share their experiences as part of promoting individual self-acceptance in the face of a world that prioritizes one kind of body over another, which take the form of ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, sizeism and prejudice against disfigurement. Drawing out the discursive script carried (...) across the platform, we show how, beneath the rhetoric of progressiveness, social justice becomes a kind of personal therapy, related to empowerment and transformation, which erases actual differences in personal circumstances and the very forces of injustice. We place StyleLikeU into broader scholarly concerns about the neoliberal colonization of identity politics, diversity and intersectionality in institutions and in branding, drawing attention to how this can form one part of what are now presented as social justice movements. (shrink)