Discourse Analysis: varieties and methods

This paper presents and analyses six key approaches to discourse analysis, including political discourse theory, rhetorical political analysis, the discourse historical approach in critical discourse analysis, interpretive policy analysis, discursive psychology and Q methodology. It highlights differences and similarities between the approaches along three distinctive dimensions, namely, ontology, focus and purpose. Our analysis reveals the difficulty of arriving at a fundamental matrix of dimensions which would satisfactorily allow one to organize all approaches in a coherent theoretical framework. However, it does not preclude various theoretical articulations between the different approaches, provided one takes a problem-driven approach to social science as one?s starting-point

Rethinking communication in innovation processes: creating space for change in complex systems

Abstract: In innovation studies, communication received explicit attention in the context of studies on the adoption and diffusion of innovation that dominated the field in the 1940-1970 period. Since then, our theoretical understanding of both innovation and communication has changed markedly. However, a systematic rethinking of the role of communication in innovation processes is largely lacking. This article reconceptualises the role of everyday communication and communicative intervention in innovation processes, and discusses practical implications. It is argued that we need to broaden our perspective on the types of (communicatively supported) intermediation that an innovation process includes and requires. Keywords: innovation, communication, discursive space, intermediaries, everyday tal

The Performance of Knowledge: Pointing and Knowledge in Powerpoint Presentations

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.Powerpoint and similar technologies have contributed to a profound transformation of lecturing and presenting information. In focusing on pointing in powerpoint presentations, the article addresses aspects of this transformation of speech into 'presentations'. As opposed to popular attacks against powerpoint, the analysis of a large number of audio-visually recorded presentations (mainly in German) demonstrates the creativity of these 'performances', based on the interplay of slides (and other aspects of this technology), speech, pointing and body formations. Pointing seems to be a particular feature of this kind of presentation, allowing knowledge to be located in space. Considering powerpoint as one of the typical technologies of so-called 'knowledge societies', this aspect provides some indication as to the social understanding of knowledge. Instead of 'representing' reality, knowledge is defined by the circularity of speaking and showing, thus becoming presented knowledge rather than representing knowledge

From a single line of code to an entire city: reframing thinking on code and the city. Programmable City Working Paper 4

Cities are rapidly becoming composed of digitally-mediated components and infrastructures, their systems augmented and mediated by software, with widespread consequences for how they are managed, governed and experienced. This transformation has been accompanied by critical scholarship that has sought to understand the relationship between code and the city. Whilst this work has produced many useful insights, in this paper I argue that it also has a number of shortcomings. Principal amongst these is that the literatures concerning code and the city have remained quite divided. Studies that focus on code are often narrow in remit, fading out the city, and tend to fetishize and potentially decontextualises code at the expense of the wider socio-technical assemblage within which it is embedded. Studies that focus on the city tend to examine the effects of code, but rarely unpack the constitution and mechanics of the code producing those effects. To provide a more holistic account of the relationship between code and the city I forward two interlinked conceptual frameworks. The first places code within a wider socio-technical assemblage. The second conceives the city as being composed of millions of such assemblages. In so doing, the latter seeks to provide a means of productively building a conceptual and empirical understanding of programmable urbanism that scales from individual lines of code to the complexity of an entire urban system

Gendering the European Digital Agenda: The Challenge of Gender Mainstreaming TwentyYears after the Beijing World Conference on Women

open1The goals set out in the 1995 Platform for Action of the Beijing World Conference on Women—to achieve gender equality in and through the media—interrogate today’s digital policies: To what extent have internationally agreed-upon norms of gender equality and gender mainstreaming been recognized and implemented? To what extent has the knowledge produced by feminist scholarship informed media policy developments? What kind of new knowledge, and analytical frameworks, may contribute to unmask gender-unequal power relations in contemporary media environments? The article addresses these questions with a focus on European discourses and institutional practices for the Digital Agenda.Special issue edited by Padovani and Shade on 'Gendering Global Media Policy: Critical Perspectives On Digital Agendas’openClaudia PadovaniPadovani, Claudi

The strategic use of metaphors by political and media elites: the 2007-11 Belgian constitutional crisis

On 9 December 2011 a new Belgian government was sworn in after a record-breaking 541 days of negotiations between all democratic political forces with the aim to alter the constitution and provide more autonomy to the different regions that make up Belgium. In this article, the frequent use of political metaphors by North-Belgian politicians and journalists is analysed through a critical metaphor analysis (CMA) that approaches the different metaphors at a descriptive, an interpretative and a motivational level. Four meta-categories of metaphors were identified - sports and games metaphors, war metaphors, culinary metaphors and transport metaphors. The different metaphors fed into six core frames: expressing immobility, attributing blame, the need for unity, bargaining and teasing, the end is nigh and finally lack of direction and leadership. Metaphors were instrumental in strategies to present the Flemish demands as unquestionable and common sense, while the counter-demands of the French-speaking parties were positioned as unreasonable, impossible to accept. In other words, the strategic use of metaphors, some of which resonated throughout the long period of analysis, not only served to represent complex political issues in an easily digestible language, but also shaped and influenced the negotiations through their various mediations and the ideological intentions embedded within the metaphor

"Meaning" as a sociological concept: A review of the modeling, mapping, and simulation of the communication of knowledge and meaning

The development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning as analytically different from the communication of information. Knowledge can then be considered as a meaning which makes a difference. Whereas the communication of information is studied in the information sciences and scientometrics, the communication of meaning has been central to Luhmann's attempts to make the theory of autopoiesis relevant for sociology. Analytical techniques such as semantic maps and the simulation of anticipatory systems enable us to operationalize the distinctions which Luhmann proposed as relevant to the elaboration of Husserl's "horizons of meaning" in empirical research: interactions among communications, the organization of meaning in instantiations, and the self-organization of interhuman communication in terms of symbolically generalized media such as truth, love, and power. Horizons of meaning, however, remain uncertain orders of expectations, and one should caution against reification from the meta-biological perspective of systems theory