Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 7, Issue 3, 2008

In this paper I analyse differences in the legitimation strategies used by and on behalf of the two presidential candidates in the elections of December 2004 in Romania, using a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis and pragmadialectics. These differences are seen to lie primarily in the varieties of populist discourse that were drawn upon in the construction of legitimizing arguments for both candidates: a paternalist type vs. a radical, anti-political type of populism. I relate the success of the latter type to more effective strategic maneuvering in argumentation, part of more effective branding strategies in general, but also to existing types of political culture amongst the electorate and to social, economic circumstances. In CDA terms, I discuss the “Băsescu brand” as involving choices at the level of discourse, genre and style; in pragma-dialectical terms, I view its success as partly the effect of successful strategic maneuvering. I also place the success of this brand within the Romanian context at the end of 2004, where often questionable populist electoral messages were perceived as reasonable and acceptable, as fitting adjustments to the situation and even as means of optimizing the deliberative situation of the electorate.

The article investigates the actual usage of the term feminist in current Swedish public debates and analyses it as a strategy of political branding. The following questions are considered in particular: How and when are resisting political attitudes integrated into the political mainstream? To what degree can this be traced in verbal actions? Furthermore, the article introduces the concept ofcritical occidentalism as a starting point for analysis. In this way, the investigation focuses on the self-construction of hegemonic European identities. The analytical focal point is therefore transferred from the construction of others – as is very often the case in CDA studies of the mechanisms of racism and sexism – to the construction of selves. The hegemonic and interdependent ‘nature’ of linguistic collective identity constructions is then discussed in this context.

In many contemporary polities, democracy is portrayed as a universal good, a democratic ideal appears to be spreading globally, its practice burgeoning; it seems to be appearing for the first time in some places and deepening in established democracies. Yet, when one looks for the concrete touch of democracy in one’s own activities, groups, communities and nation it becomes elusive. I discuss this apparent contradiction in relation to discourse and a new “Area Forum” in the English city of Preston. The categories of ‘global’ and ‘local’, ‘identity’ and ‘branding’ prove useful in discussing the contradiction as situated in the English context. I suggest that this problem of democracy may be understood in terms of the ideological concept of ‘democratism’: the assumption that the status quo in England is unproblematically democratic whilst discursively closing off the possibility of genuine democratic progress.

This paper compares the vision documents for a British borough and a German city to see how the city-as-brand is encoded in different semiotic modes, to draw inferences about the cognitive structure of the brand, to ascertain in how far any global brand values are adapted to local contexts, and discuss what this tells us about the relationship between councils and citizens. As such, the study represents a cognitive critical approach to discourse in which texts are seen as vehicles for their producers’ mental representations, disseminated to align recipients’ representations with those of producers. This approach leads to the investigation of linguistic and visual parameters such as attribution, actors and processes, modality and tense, and layout and logo elements. Despite local adaptations, both municipal entities are conceptualized as brands with largely generic and interchangeable attributes. Global competition among cities leads to the appropriation of corporate discourses, such as branding, which redefine and ultimately depoliticize the relationships between council and citizens.

Using a discursive/social semiotic perspective, tourism advertising is here investigated as a global discourse worth of critical investigation. Different identities are construed in texts for tourists and they are not purely reflections of personal identities. They are recontextualisations whose realisations and forms are conditioned by the social practices of the advertisers and by their stereotypical views of the countries being advertised. Gender representation is a key factor and the use of the human body, as a branding strategy, is an essential part in the construction of such identities. Exemplifying from tourism brochures and web pages, my aims are to discuss the different types of identities construed in the discourse, the way the representation of the human body is used as a semiotic resource and as a branding strategy, and the values which underlie the appeal to possible travellers and the implications of the branding strategies for gender representation.

The development of corporate communication in recent years has brought about a fading of the division of labor between commercial and non-commercial organizations. While the practices of commercial organizations are becoming increasingly ethicalized, so the practices of non-profit organizations are becoming increasingly commercialized. This paper explores the use of media discourse for the communication of ethical messages by humanitarian organizations, caught, as they are, in a tension between, on the one hand, the commercial strategies of visibility and still greater dependence on the media, and, on the other hand, the public’s skepticism toward mediated morality and what is commonly referred to as compassion fatigue. The issue is investigated through an analysis of a TV spot produced by the Danish section of Amnesty International in 2004. This spot is taken as an example of how the organization’s branding strategies testify to a high degree of reflexivity about the conditions of what Luc Boltanski calls a Crisis of Pity. The analysis illustrates how, in the face of compassion fatigue, the organization manages to carve out a new space for itself in the marketized ethical discourse, and leads to a discussion of the consequences of such rebranding for the construction of morality by the organization.