Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2007

The stock market floatation of Telecom Eireann (the soon to be renamed Eircom) in July 1999 was, and remains, “the biggest privatization in the history of the Irish state”. Through the application of a critical discourse analysis framework (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Fairclough 2003), this article examines editorial discourse both before and after the company’s initially ‘successful’ floatation in six Irish broadsheet newspapers. The different editorial stances are analyzed in terms of the authority of three key neo-liberal assumptions: that the full privatization of the company is desirable; that the notion of direct state involvement in a modern Telecoms market is archaic; and that public participation in the stock market should be encouraged. The article suggests that while the evidence illustrates a context of neo-liberal hegemony, the ideological authority of neo-liberalism should not be understood in undifferentiated, monolithic terms, as the evidence points to a plurality of neo-liberal discourses and styles, which can be partly understood in terms of the ‘media field’ identity of the different newspapers.

The aim of the article is to analyse changing partisan constructions of unemployment security in Finland during the 1990s. In the article, a corpus of 143 texts comprising partisan statements on un/employment policies is analysed by using Perelman’s (1971/1958) rhetorical design. The focus lies on how the leading parties interpreted state responsibility for labour market failures, the nature of social rights for unemployed persons, and the generosity of unemployment benefits. Were there major reformulations of unemployment security as a reaction to high unemployment, fiscal problems and globalisation? And if so, what kinds of rhetorical argumentation were used in order to legitimate these reformulations? The results show that partisan constructions of unemployment benefits changed in a contractual and reciprocal direction, indicating that elements of so-called workfare rhetoric became rooted in the Finnish political discourse during the Mid-90s. The political elites also moved closer to a narrower interpretation of the concept of social right for unemployed.

When the ideas of capitalist globalisation appear to speak as one across the world, it is timely to re-examine the interconnections between language and ideology. The global market and its dominant neoliberal ideology, increasingly expressed in English, have led some to hold that the language itself constructs the hegemonic order of global capitalism. Others have focussed on language not only as the bearer of ideology but as part of the immaterial production of capitalism. This paper discusses the way in which language and ideology interconnect but argues that the ideology of neoliberalism cannot be adequately described as a discourse. Instead, it is an ideology with specific historical roots and which, as a dominant ideology, makes itself felt in language, although not without contradictions. Two aspects of language and neoliberal ideology are examined here: firstly the way in which the customer metaphor has been adopted in different and unexpected settings and, secondly, how models of listening and speaking in call centres are framed around neoliberal assumptions. Both processes aim to impose a kind of ‘corporate speak’ to reinforce neoliberal ideas as common sense, but both also contain tensions because language is neither a straitjacket nor a settled ideological product. This paper argues that language and ideology are not the same and that it is in the dynamic of their interconnection that world views are both made and contested.

The article discusses linguistic forms and pragmatic features of the verbal interaction that occurred in interviews with Russian politicians in the last decade of the 20th century. The genre of political interview emerged in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union; it was exposed to different trends in verbal communication, gradually shaping its own discourse norms and structure. The study investigates the ways of expression by communicants their intentions and offers a comparative analysis of the ‘talk’ and ‘attack’ interview styles. These two counter types of political discourse dramatically illustrate the inherent features of the Russian culture of communication as a whole.

International relations theory overdetermines proliferation but few states possess nuclear arms. This article maintains the linguistic construction of ‘proliferation’ accounts for the international nonnuclear order. Following an overview of its approach, the article begins with a review of earlier works and notes the inability of ‘nuclear language studies’ to account for the order of rejection rather than acquisition of nuclear arms. The article traces that limitation to a practical assumption about the world that animates scholars to attend to how words distort rather than create reality. The article then introduces a version of constructivism that claims speech acts produce constitutive rules that create what ‘is’ and oblige order (as ‘same use’) to suggest how language accounts for the order that turns on rejection of nuclear weapons. Finally, the article illustrates how states, following this constructivist process, often used discursive practices that emphasized the ‘unnatural’ to create ‘proliferation’ between 1958 and 1968.

The article is based on an understanding that everything in society — including language — is political, at least potentially. For that reason, language must be seen (and analyzed) as a political phenomenon. Language is one of the decisive ‘nation building’ factors among others — sometimes cross-cutting other potentially defining factors. In its identity-building capacity, language is inclusive and exclusive at the very same time. Language has to be seen as one of the most important social (and: therefore political) cleavages. As more and more societies are confronted with ‘multiculturalism’ expressed in a multi-linguistic reality, politics have to come to terms with diversity in different ways.