This article proposes a novel discourse-analytical approach that explores Obama's rhetoric of pluralization in his Cairo speech on 4 June 2004. The approach eclectically combines both quantitative corpus and qualitative discourse-analysis methods. Three aspects of analysis are at play. First is the collocational aspect capturing the lexico-grammatical meanings associated with the political and social actors nominated, referenced and predicated in the speech. Second is the intertextual aspect that reflects the political-religious meanings underlying the speech. Third is the institutional aspect related (...) to the spatial setting of the speech and the socio-historical meanings attaching to it; meanings that explain how the institutional framework of the speech go fittingly with its core message. This article has reached four important findings. First, Obama's Cairo speech is rhetorically predicated on the pluralization of politically and religiously heterogeneous social actors, such as Americans, Israelis, Christians and Jews on the one hand and Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims on the other. Second, Obama's speech has drawn upon a political-religious interdiscourse with four major functions, phatic communion, legitimation, exclusion/inclusion and peaceful co-existence – again all are directed toward arguing for political and religious pluralization. Third, Obama's conscious choice of the spatial setting of his Cairo speech is rhetorically oriented toward institutionally pluralistic meanings. Last, there is considerable potential for integrating the micro collocational-intertextual aspect with the macro socio-historical institutional aspect for critically examining the import of political speeches. (shrink)

The increasing significance of ‘managerialism’ in contemporary forms of governance has been widely observed. This article demonstrates how this operates at the level of language. Specifically, the analysis postulates a new sociosemantic category of ‘Managing Actions’, encoding varying degrees of coerciveness. The paper discusses their salient role in texturing the ‘soft power’ of contemporary governance, constructing a form of ‘managed autonomy’ for the governed subject and helping to manage the complex networks of dispersed power through an indirect form of agency. (...) The analysis combines a corpus-based approach to critical discourse analysis with a political economic theory of transformations in the capitalist state. Drawing evidence from a corpus of UK education policy discourse, the analysis illustrates the managerialist form that governance takes under New Labour, while at the same time highlighting the subtle hegemony underlying this new ‘enabling’ technique of governance, which works by assuming, rather than winning, compliance. In terms of sociologically informed theories of language, this analysis goes some way towards formulating a possible ‘grammar of governance’. (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)

In this paper I use critical discourse theory to understand the strategies of the ‘princes’ of the contemporary world. Using Bourdieu's concepts of ‘field’ and ‘homology’ and Agamben's postulate of the ‘permanent state of emergency’, I address data from the political field and from the corporate field to ask whether the discourse of the ‘leader’ as authentic decision-maker can be transferred across fields and whether the associated paradigm of ‘the permanent state of emergency’ may also be circulating between the political (...) field and the corporate field – and if these processes are taking place, whether they are being technologised as a political and business strategy. The paper concludes that this may indeed be happening and that therefore a renewed focus on informed democracy, governance, and law rather than on the figure of the post-bureaucratic leader is needed in these critical times. (shrink)

This text explores how human beings construe experience: experience as a resource, as a potential for understanding, representing and acting on reality.

This groundbreaking collection on global leadership features innovative and critical perspectives by scholars from international relations, political economy, medicine, law and philosophy, from North and South. The book's novel theorization of global leadership is situated historically within the classics of modern political theory and sociology, relating it to the crisis of global capitalism today. Contributors reflect on the multiple political, economic, social, ecological and ethical crises that constitute our current global predicament. The book suggests that there is an overarching condition (...) of global organic crisis, which shapes the political and organizational responses of the dominant global leadership and of various subaltern forces. Contributors argue that to meaningfully address the challenges of the global crisis will require far more effective, inclusive and legitimate forms of global leadership and global governance than have characterized the neoliberal era. (shrink)

The history of ideology and its definition continues to occupy scholars across a range of disciplines. Contrary to the vast volume of earlier work on ideology however, this books provides a challenging new theory of ideology, one that is capable of explaining not only the internal structures of ideologies, but also how ideologies function in society. In formulating theory that is capable of providing the first insights into the internal structures of ideologies while simultaneously explaining how discourse structures may be (...) used in the production and reproduction of ideologies, van Dijk offers a highly important theoretical bridge between the micro and macro structures of society. This book will be essential for all students of discourse studies, communication, social psychology, sociology, and political science. (shrink)