International society is to international system as world society is to...? Systemic and societal processes in English school theory

This article argues that the distinction between international system and international society within the English School of International Relations theory, originally put forward by Bull and Watson, should not be abandoned. The distinction is shown to correspond to complementary etic and emic approaches to the study of social reality. The former approach is most appropriate for studying the unintended emergence of patterns of social organisation, the latter approach for the study of intersubjective negotiations over shared rules and norms within a bounded social context. Elaborating, rather than eliminating, the notion of international system suggests the adoption of the concept of ‘world system’ to complement the English School’s concept of world society. Drawing on the neo-Weberian sociology of Mann and Tilly, the article suggests that the concept of world system is not only theoretically coherent but also congruent with conceptualisations of large-scale change offered by contemporary world historians and historical sociologists

Why metaphor and other tropes? Linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political

The articles in this special issue on linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political share the goal of taking language seriously, achieved through detailed attention to linguistic usage in its respective contexts. They reflect a stance common to both cognitive linguistic and interpretive/ constructivist approaches, namely a view of language as integrally constituting the world it presents, reflecting, at least in part, its users' experiences of that world. One key form of language use discussed is that of metaphor. Rather than being seen as merely a poetic device, metaphor is viewed in several of the articles as playing a pivotal role in the framing of policy or political issues, which it does by casting one idea in terms of the imagery of another. For example, talking about a political entity, such as a country, in terms of it being a kind of container can invite certain inferences about how political states function-in this case, reasoning about inclusion of members within the state 'container' vs. exclusion from it. The research shows that metaphors often have important ties with categorisation, the categories used being determined in part by the words we use to name concepts. In addition to metaphor, metonymy also plays a significant role. The articles show the intimate relationship between political language and political acts. © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd