Patterns of age‐based linguistic variation in American English1

In prior sociolinguistic research, speaker age has been considered the principal correlate of language change, but it ‘has not yet been explicitly studied as a sociolinguistic variable’ ( Eckert 1997 : 167). Consequently, little is known about how language varies across the life span. The present study employs key word analysis on a large corpus of casual conversation in American English to explore age‐based linguistic variation in spontaneous conversation. Analyses of the key words point to two major patterns of age‐based lexico‐grammatical variation: use of slang, and use of stance and involvement markers. Younger speakers' talk is characterized by an unusually frequent use of slang and swear words, and by a marked use of features indexing speaker's stance and emotional involvement, including intensifiers, stance adverbs, discourse markers, personal pronouns, and attitudinal adjectives; older speakers favor modals. These patterns are suggestive of functional differences in the discourse of youth and adults. It is argued that the expression of personal stance is more explicit and plays a key role in younger speakers' discourse.     

“You are your only limit”: Appropriations and valorizations of affect in university branding

This article considers the role of affect in university branding in a context of neoliberal higher education, by way of examining the semiotic landscape of the Singapore Management University concourse. Contemporary branding often involves stimulating stakeholder/audience investments of meaning and affect into the brand, thereby appropriating consumers’ affective labour for brand‐building and communications. Adopting a discourse‐analytic approach, I examine how linguistic, visual and spatial modalities are utilized to evoke and semiotize particular affective meanings and orientations in the emplaced discourse within the university's brand space. This discourse, which includes organizational branding discourse as well as more organic student‐generated texts, becomes part of the affective regime, helping to encourage and enjoin what is deemed to be normative affective sensibilities and practices in that context. Consequently, the article also considers the kinds of affective subjectivities that are valorized, and how stakeholder/student‐subjects are interpellated in a context of neoliberal‐oriented higher education.     

You are your brand: Self‐branding and the marketization of self

Personal branding was popularized in the late twentieth century through a spate of self‐help literature which enjoined workers to take responsibility for themselves by taking an entrepreneurial approach to the self, seeing themselves as products to be marketed as a means of managing the risks of an unstable labor market. Self‐branding discourse frames the “authentic self” as a source of material value which workers can leverage to build a reputation, which they can later capitalize upon in their attempts to remain competitive as workers. This article examines the literature on self‐branding to trace its origins as a framework for conceptualizing the self. The discourse of self‐branding proposes a singular, profitable self which is at once authentic and consistent. In this review of self‐branding literature, I explore what thinking of the self as a brand does to the way individuals relate to themselves. I examine the social construction of authentic self‐brands, how branding the self on social media impacts the process of self‐presentation, and how workers experience the imperative to self‐brand.     

The Cultural Politics of Childhood: Public Policies in Post‐authoritarian Chile

This article offers an interpretation of the cultural politics of childhood during the second decade of post‐authoritarian democracy in Chile (2001–2010), as sustained by the discourse of public policies in this area. I understand cultural politics as the combination of cultural contexts, social practices and political processes through which childhood is constructed in different societies and different times James and James (2008b). I develop a ‘textual’ analysis focusing on the discourse of the most recent official governmental policy document on childhood, which is still in force, as well as a ‘contextual’ analysis that examines the historical relationship between the state, public policies and childhood in different periods of Chile's history as a republic.     

Constructing Masculinity in the Building Trades: ‘Most Jobs in the Construction Industry Can Be Done by Women’

Construction is one of the most gender‐segregated sectors of the UK economy; men constitute over 99 per cent of the employees in the building trades. This article focuses on the role of discourse in reflecting and reproducing the absence of women in the construction trades. A small excerpt from an industry report is described, interpreted and explained using critical discourse analysis. The analysis takes as its starting point one phrase, ‘most jobs in the construction industry can be done by women’ and places it in its structural, institutional and historic context, showing its dependence on presuppositions about women's abilities, and the ideological basis of those assumptions. Male construction workers' masculine identity is defined in relation to their ‘tough’ job. The culture of taking safety risks, and working long hours in primitive working conditions suits some employers very well. The report's assertion that women can do ‘most jobs’ in construction appears to challenge the dominant ideology but it actually reproduces it, helping to maintain gender segregation. Thus it contributes in a small way to sustaining existing power relations by containing potentially transformative movements.     

Demonizing the Sensible and the ‘Revolution of Our Generation’ in Rosia Montana

Abstract

‘Save Rosia Montana’ is an emblematic socio-ecological movement in post-communist Romania. It started in 2000 as a local reaction against what was projected to be the largest open-cast gold mine in Europe; it has gradually grown into a national movement with global networking. Activists have been consistently accused of acting under the impulse of an emotional luggage which could function as an impediment to understanding the ‘real’ issue, that of Romania's development. While the corporation claims to present the ‘real’ story articulated in the supposedly objective discourse of rational science, the choice to take a stance out of other beliefs has been demonized as emotional. This article will make a critical discourse analysis of corporate texts and Rosieni's testimonies to highlight what appears as ‘legitimate’ versus ‘illegitimate’ discourse, how some phrases are presented as self-evident rationales while others are dismissed as inappropriate or ‘emotional’. Rosieni have created visibilities for new things, objects, languages, and projections that have been downplayed by the post-communist political context. The conflict is not just over cognitive aspects or valuation languages but also over how one is allowed to feel, what one is allowed to enjoy (doing), how is one supposed to live (spend time), what Ranciere calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’.     

Transnational political action and ‘global civil society’ in practice: the case of Oxfam

The term ‘global civil society’ has taken on increasing significance within scholarly debate over the past decade. In this article we seek to understand transnational political agency via the study of a particular transnational actor, Oxfam. We argue that various schools of thought surrounding the global civil society concept, in particular the prevailing liberal‐cosmopolitan approach, are unable to conceptualize transnational political action in practice – due largely, in the case of liberal‐cosmopolitanism, to a shared normative agenda. We also assess what contribution literature on development and civil society has made to the analysis of groups such as Oxfam. In investigating Oxfam's own perceptions of its context and the meanings of its agency, we discover an anti‐political perspective derived from an encounter between Oxfam's longstanding commitment to liberal internationalism and globalization discourse. Existing scholarship has insufficiently identified the local or parochial nature of the identities of global civil society actors.     

‘This is Our City’: branding football and local embeddedness

In 2005, with a view to cultivating the loyalties of local supporters rather than attracting new support, Manchester City Football Club launched its Our City branding campaign. The campaign suggests that ‘real’ Mancunians support City and not local rivals like Manchester United, which it implicitly conceives of as a global, non‐local, corporate entity. By building on established fan culture and the myths surrounding the local and the global, City is portrayed as ‘authentic’, ‘cool’ and rooted in a traditional ‘working‐class community’. Contending that football is a revealing field in which to explore contemporary formations of identity, in this article we critically explore the relationship between branding, place and identity. We describe the campaign, explore the myths with which the Our City campaign is aligned and discuss the embedded contexts that constrain the global branding of football.     

Imagination laboratory: making sense of bio‐objects in contemporary genetic art

Public engagement in biotechnology has declined as cloning, genetic engineering and regenerative medicine have become socially and culturally normalized. Zooming in on existing bio‐technological debates, this article turns to contemporary genetic art as sites for ethical reflections. Art can be viewed as an ‘imagination laboratory’, a space through which un‐framing and rupturing of contemporary rationalities are facilitated, and, in addition, enabling sense‐making and offering fantastic connections otherwise not articulated. In this article, the framework of ‘bio‐objectification’ is enriched with Bennett's (2001) notion of enchantment and the importance of wonder and openness to the unusual, in order to highlight alternative matters of concern than articulated through conventional politico‐moral discourse. Drawing on a cultural sociological analysis of Eduardo Kac's Edunia, Lucy Glendinning's Feather Child, Patricia Piccinini's Still Life with Stem Cells and Heather Dewey‐Hagborg's Stranger Visions, we discuss how the intermingling of art, science, critics, art historians, science fiction, internet, and physical space, produce a variety of attachments that this article will unpack. The article demonstrates that while some modern boundaries and rationalities are highlighted and challenged through the ‘imagination laboratory’ of the art process, others are left untouched.     

Masculinity and Non‐Traditional Occupations: Men's Talk in Women's Work

Occupation segregation is a persistent aspect of the labour market, and scholars have often researched what happens when women and men enter into what are seen to be ‘non‐traditional’ work roles for their sex. Research on men within women's roles has concentrated mainly on the challenges to a masculine identity, while research on workplace language has focused on women's linguistic behaviour in masculine occupations. To date, there has been relatively little research into the linguistic behaviour of men working in occupations seen as women's work (e.g., nursing, primary school teaching). To address this gap, this article focuses on men's discursive behaviour and identity construction within the feminized occupation of nursing. Empirical data collected by three male nurses in a hospital in Northern Ireland is explored using discourse analysis and the Community of Practice paradigm. This paper discusses how the participants linguistically present themselves as nurses by performing relational work and creating an in‐group with their nurse colleagues by actively using an inherently ‘feminine’ discourse style.     

Relocating Civil Society in a Politics of Civic‐Driven Change

Politics is central to development discourse, yet remains peripheral. Over some twenty years, a civil‐society narrative has not fulfilled its potential to ‘bring politics back in’. Reasons can be found in conceptual confusion, in selectivity in donor thinking, in policies towards civil society and in the growth‐driven political economy of NGO‐ism. Remedies for the political lacunae are being sought through a focus on rights, citizenship and leadership that show valuable focused progress. This article examines a comprehensive complement to such efforts referred to as civic‐driven change (CDC). Originating in a grounded empirical approach, the constituent principles and elements of CDC offer a lens that can both sharpen and deepen insights and advance analysis of socio‐political processes.     

New slavery,old binaries: human trafficking and the borders of ‘freedom’

This article explores dominant discourse on ‘trafficking as modern slavery’ in relation to the many legal and social fetters that have historically been and are today imposed upon individuals who are socially imagined as ‘free’. It argues that discourse on ‘trafficking as modern slavery’ revitalizes the liberal understandings of freedom and restriction that have historically allowed vigorous moral condemnation of slavery to coexist with the continued imposition of extensive, forcible restrictions on individuals deemed to be ‘free’. In place of efforts to build political alliances between different groups of migrants, as well as between migrants and non‐migrants, who share a common interest in transforming existing social and political relations, ‘trafficking as modern slavery’ discourse inspires and legitimates efforts to divide a small number of ‘deserving victims’ from the masses that remain ‘undeserving’ of rights and freedoms.     

Stancetaking and the joint construction of zine producer identities in a research interview

This article examines the construction of zine producer identities (self and other) during a research interview. Zines are self‐published texts that circulate in mainly underground communities. In this study, I draw on dialogic understandings of the notion of ‘stance’ to show how a zine producer accomplishes a situated identity performance in the interview that also functions as an interdiscursive move in a larger conversation about the role Do‐It‐Yourself (DIY) ethics should play in zine communities. Specifically, I show how this speaker displays stances in relation to recognizable social types within zine communities but also the canonical stances associated with these social types. I unpack the features that work in support of this stancetaking, including discourse markers, constructed dialogue, referring terms, and prosodic cues. The analysis also foregrounds how the interviewer's turns contributed to these emergent stance displays, which furthers our understanding of the dynamic social context of the research interview.     

Tamil diaspora and the political spaces of second‐generation activism in Switzerland

In this article, we study the emergence of the political spaces of activism of second‐generation Swiss Tamils resulting from a critical event – the suffering of Tamils during and after the final battle in early 2009 of a civil war in northern Sri Lanka that had lasted for decades. We contend that we can explain the geographies of newly emerging second‐generation activism committed to achieving Tamil Eelam through two factors. These are first, this generation's multiple senses of belonging both to Switzerland and to the Tamil ‘nation’ and, second, the way a specific politics of affect remoulded second‐generation identities because the pain of witnessing the brutality of war and suffering of Tamils occurred concurrently with a perceived lack of interest from their ‘new home’ (Switzerland). The combination of these factors made them want to acknowledge their Tamil ‘roots’ and encouraged them to become politically active. Consequently, these second‐generation activists primarily sought to engage with their host society – to awaken it from its indifference to the suffering of Tamils and from its passivity in taking action on an international level. We thereby witness the emerging of a new type of Tamil activism in Switzerland, which is firmly located in and bound to the host country.     

Reconfiguring Worker Subjectivity: Career Advice Literature and the “Branding” of the Worker's Self

Career advice literature, commonly used by many job seekers, has increasingly exhibited an emphasis on “personal branding,” an economic discourse that invites workers to conceive of themselves as profit‐generating enterprises. In this article, we examine the meanings that personal branding provokes in the minds of precariously employed white‐collar workers in Boston. We use interviews conducted with 62 white‐collar workers and job seekers to explore the utility of Foucauldian theories of governmentality, which have received little attention within American sociology. Results suggest that precariously employed workers do feel pressured to incorporate personal branding into their orientations toward both self and work, much as Foucauldian theory expects. Yet our findings also identify important exceptions to this pattern, with smaller proportions of workers engaging in outward accommodation of self‐branding discourse, or else explicit contestation of its terms. We conclude that Foucauldian theories of the “enterprising self” warrant more widespread consideration among American sociologists, hopefully opening up a stronger understanding of counterconduct, one of the theory's notable blind spots to date.     

The Search for an Authentic Entrepreneurial Identity: Difference and Professionalism among Women Business Owners

This article contributes to the recent stream of research on enterprise and identity by exploring the authenticity‐driven identity work of a group of women business owners. While previous research has highlighted the effort some female business owners put into fitting in with the masculine identity of the entrepreneur, this article focuses on those women who self‐consciously adopt a feminized entrepreneurial identity as a means of being ‘who I really am’ in a business context. Nevertheless, despite their expressed commitment to a feminized identity, the article highlights their incorporation of a contrasting position or antagonism in this authenticity‐driven endeavour. Drawing on Charme's notion of existential authenticity, which places an emphasis on the cultural, historical, political, economic and physical limits to being ‘true to oneself’, the article shows how the situated nature of women's search for an authentically driven entrepreneurial identity means that they draw on a feminized discourse of difference and a contrasting masculine discourse of professionalism in their identity construction labours.     

Non‐understanding as a heuristic to hypothesizing cultural models: A meta‐oriented sociolinguistic strategy1

This article is concerned with the development of an analytic strategy to construct U.S. cultural models of war and terrorism, which are ‘mediatized’ or significantly shaped by the media. Central to that strategy are repair cues to non‐understanding as heuristics in intercultural encounters. These are applied to an inherently mediatized discursive ‘reality’ of war and terrorism. Theoretically, I synthesize sociolinguistic and anthropological perspectives into a ‘meta‐oriented sociolinguistics’, which analytically focuses on the meta‐dimension of discourse. The strategy is applied to a text on war and terrorism from the New York Times, to demonstrate its utility. Furthermore, I provide implications for enhancing validity in the ethnography of mediatized discourse. Specific to the findings of this article, I suggest that corpus studies of media discourse should be conducted on the metadiscursive keywords kamikaze, surprise attacks, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 in particular temporal frames.     

From Rome to Accra via Kigali: ‘Aid Effectiveness’ in Rwanda

Since the mid‐2000s, significant strides have been made in Rwanda to implement the ‘aid effectiveness’ agenda as captured in the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. This article explores the historical evolution of this process since 1994, exposing the complex manoeuvring to establish workable practices, and the less visible political implications of this agenda. The Rwandan government is considered to have strong ‘ownership’ of aid strategies. However, the article demonstrates that the concept of progressive ownership implicit within ‘aid effectiveness’ discourse is misleading. The evidence points rather to joint ownership between donor and recipient, reflecting limitations to the amount of control over aid that donors will cede.     

The persistence of cliques in the post‐communist state. The case of deniability in drug reimbursement policy in Poland

This article explores a key question in political sociology: Can post‐communist policy‐making be described with classical theories of the Western state or do we need a theory of the specificity of the post‐communist state? In so doing, we consider Janine Wedel's clique theory, concerned with informal social actors and processes in post‐communist transition. We conducted a case study of drug reimbursement policy in Poland, using 109 stakeholder interviews, official documents and media coverage. Drawing on ‘sensitizing concepts’ from Wedel's theory, especially the notion of ‘deniability’, we developed an explanation of why Poland's reimbursement policy combined suboptimal outcomes, procedural irregularities with limited accountability of key stakeholders. We argue that deniability was created through four main mechanisms: (1) blurred boundaries between different types of state authority allowing for the dispersion of blame for controversial policy decisions; (2) bridging different sectors by ‘institutional nomads’, who often escaped existing conflicts of interest regulations; (3) institutional nomads’ ‘flexible’ methods of influence premised on managing roles and representations; and (4) coordination of resources and influence by elite cliques monopolizing exclusive policy expertise. Overall, the greatest power over drug reimbursement was often associated with lowest accountability. We suggest, therefore, that the clique theory can be generalized from its home domain of explanation in foreign aid and privatizations to more technologically advanced policies in Poland and other post‐communist countries. This conclusion is not identical, however, with arguing the uniqueness of the post‐communist state. Rather, we show potential for using Wedel's account to analyse policy‐making in Western democracies and indicate scope for its possible integration with the classical theories of the state.     

Starting somewhere different: methodological cosmopolitanism and the study of world politics

In this article, I contribute to the debate on Ulrich Beck's idea of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ from a political science perspective. How fruitful is Beck's idea for the study of world politics? How can a political science perspective turn ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ into a more transdisciplinary subject of debate? Guided by these questions, I speak to two audiences. First, I offer political scientists a distinct strategy for empirical ‘cosmopolitan political science’ research. At the heart of this strategy is a novel object of research, the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, understood as a discourse that breaks with the ‘national outlook’ to open possibilities for a world beyond ‘reflexive modernization’. With that, I shift the perspective from structure to discourse and broaden the normative grounds on which to assess cosmopolitan reality. Rather than just considering the emergence of normative cosmopolitan ideals, I build into cosmopolitan research the normative, empirical question of whether we see an emergence of a world beyond reflexive modernization. Second, I address scholars outside the field of political science who are interested in methodological cosmopolitanism by offering the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ as a novel object of study that could also be explored from other disciplinary perspectives and by proposing they put the question of the purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism centre stage. This question can, I argue, constitute grounds for substantial debates on methodological cosmopolitanism not already precluded through disciplinary premises and concerns. Contributing to such a transdisciplinary debate, I distinguish between the long‐term and immediate purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism, the former being about the development of a cosmopolitan language and grammar and the latter about empirical explorations of the reality of the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, eventually and in a collective and transdisciplinary endeavour building up to contribute to the former.