The paper analyzes the discursive strategies of apparent empathy and ideological polarization that were used to legitimize discrimination against covered female students in the Republic of Turkey. We ...approached this complex social problem from the point of view of critical discourse analysis, which represents an interdisciplinary research area centered on the interest in researching the manipulative use of language. The ban on wearing headscarves in universities in Turkey was the fruit of the Kemalist conception of modernism and hegemony established by the Kemalist elites. An important role in preserving that hegemony was also played by the media, whose primary goal was to legitimize social injustice and protect the social order based on an asymmetric distribution of power. They performed this role of the media through the manipulative use of language within clearly recognizable discursive strategies, which was shown by the analysis of the newspaper text that is the subject of this paper.
The widely-used social media have offered Chinese cancer patients online sites for self-disclosure. Collecting self-disclosing discourses from 200 Chinese cancer patients on TikTok and SnackVideo, ...this study systematically analyzes the discursive strategies employed by Chinese cancer patients and their emotions expressed during self-disclosure, with the help of NVivo 12 and LIWC 2015. As a result, it is found that: (1) Chinese cancer patients display self-disclosure oriented toward facts, relationships, desires, and experiences discursively; (2) Chinese cancer patients showed a higher proportion of positive emotions than negative emotions, with female patients being more conservative and stable than their male counterparts when disclosing positive emotions. To some extent, the findings above would shed insights into the provision of psychologically inclusive support for the cancer patients in Chinese culture and beyond.
Ecological identity, acting as the baton to guide the public’s behavior in nature, is closely correlated with environmental crises that threaten human survival. Previous studies of ecological ...identity are mostly conducted in the domain of sociopsychology with an emphasis on human’s attitude and behavior. Less attention, however, has been paid to the discursive construction of one’s ecological identity. The current study aims to build a framework to explore the mechanism of discursive strategies in constructing one’s ecological identity. To this end, this article classifies different ecological identities according to their impact on nature and the ecosophy of holism. It then puts forward a framework based on systemic functional linguistics to explore how lexicogrammatical resources can be employed strategically in the construction of ecological identity. The framework is significant for ecolinguistic investigations of identity and the cultivation of human’s critical language awareness related to the protection of ecosystems.
Community renewable energy promises to play an important role in reducing the generation and consumption of high carbon sources of power, as well as in demonstrating the viability of novel business ...models within a transformed energy system built on principles of locality and democracy. The paper argues, however, that community renewable energy, in England at least, remains marginal, undermined by changing government policies and underplayed institutional factors connected with technology and organisational legitimacy. The paper reports on interviews with 29 actors connected with community renewable energy in England. The analysis identifies themes implicating various types of legitimacy with the partial and uneven institutionalisation of community renewable energy. These are bound up with continuing and new institutional rules and the deployment of strategies for (de)legitimising community renewable energy, including associated technologies and organisational forms, adversely impacting on the potential contribution of community renewable energy to energy system transformation.
•Novel focus on legitimacy-building in institutionalising community renewable energy.•Identifies legitimacy gaps faced by community renewable energy in England.•Uniquely analyses organisational and technology legitimacy and discursive practices.
Concerns about climate change and energy security have been major arguments used to justify the recent return of nuclear power as a serious electricity generation option in various parts of the ...world. This article examines the recent public discussion in Finland, France, and the UK – three countries currently in the process of constructing or planning new nuclear power stations. To place the public discussion on nuclear power within the relationship between policy discourses and contexts, the article addresses three interrelated themes: the justifications and discursive strategies employed by nuclear advocates and critics, the similarities and differences in debates between the three countries, and the interaction between the country-specific state orientations and the argumentation concerning nuclear power. Drawing from documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, the article identifies and analyses key discursive strategies and their use in the context of the respective state orientations: ‘technology-and-industry-know-best’ in Finland, ‘government-knows-best’ in France, and ‘markets-know-best’ in the UK. The nuclear debates illustrate subtle ongoing transformations in these orientations, notably in the ways in which the relations between markets, the state, and civil society are portrayed in the nuclear debates.
► Focus on argumentation on new nuclear power in Finland, France, and the UK. ► Nuclear power is justified by climate change, energy security, and independence. ► The credibility of discursive strategies varies across countries. ► Country-specific state orientations shape the success of discursive strategies. ► Discursive strategies contain normative claims about state-society relations.
Market-level studies based on institutional theory have gained prominence in recent marketing research seeking to investigate legitimation dynamics. Although these studies have paid particular ...attention to how organizations build legitimacy in new markets, they have rarely explored legitimations strategies in mature markets, which mostly remain the prerogative of organizational theory. Such emphasis on new markets is thus limiting our understanding of legitimation dynamics in general and legitimacy maintenance in particular, especially since new and mature markets have different characteristics. When markets are well established, they tend to become the target of a growing number of contestations by actors seeking to introduce new societal issues. Once these issues have been institutionalized, organizations must address them to maintain their legitimacy. In this study, we investigate the discursive strategies used by the French carmakers when environmental considerations gained prominence between 2006 and 2008. In contrast to prior works in organizational theory which assume that organizations respond to institutional pressures in an undifferentiated way, our results show that organizations adopt differentiated legitimation strategies by adapting their discourse to their different stakeholders. Paradoxically, we find evidence of industry-wide isomorphism, where rather than developing idiosyncratic discourses, organizations adopt conventional discursive strategies.
•We explore how firms can maintain their legitimacy in mature markets when confronted with societal shifts•We investigate how French carmakers discursively maintain their legitimacy when corporate environmentalism became a key issue•We show that firms use different discursive strategies depending on the stakeholders they target.•We demonstrate that these legitimation strategies are very similar across the three firms we examine.
The advances and proliferation of social media technologies have not only empowered Chinese users with more opportunities for opinion expression and public participation, but also provided the ...censors with increasingly sophisticated means to monitor and control the public discourse. In this game of cat and mouse, Chinese censors and users are intertwined with each other as new forms of censorship and counter-censorship stimulate both sides to further develop tactics to compete with each other. Drawing on (social) media discourse analysis, this study examines the strategies users adopted in an online relay campaign to keep a censored article alive on WeChat Public Accounts. The analysis highlights three major forms of creative strategies including textual reproductions, multi-semiotic and multimodal reproductions, and technically encoded forms. It also underscores platform censorship as a particular level of censorship where the platform takes responsibility for removing sensitive or perceived sensitive posts and content. This study adds to the growing literature that examines creative strategies of censorship engagement and a more nuanced understanding of the multi-layered online censorship mechanism in China.
This article, which focuses on selected plays by contemporary Congolese playwrights, has two objectives: the first of which is to illustrate how theatre production in the DRC in contemporary times ...has been devoted to highlighting various social and political conflicts within the society. The paper's second objective is to examine the aesthetic and technical aspects of the plays under study, such as the use of allegory, metaphors, verbal invention, proverbs, enunciative heterogeneity, voice orchestration, and theatricality encoded in stage directions (didascalia). Through its critical analysis of dramaturgy and style, the paper reveals the manner in which the authors display a heightened sense of awareness about conflicts within their society by employing an agonistic mode in their plot construction. The paper also highlights how the plays have contributed greatly to the development of writing for performance in Africa in general, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo in particular.
This paper identifies and accounts for mitigation strategies in a corpus of language that attempts to reflect the communicative style of Chinese speakers in semi-structured oral interviews. Thus, the ...analysis was carried out on the informal conversations of the C-ORAL-CHINA corpus. Mitigating resources were classified and grouped into seven general procedures that constitute different strategic mechanisms with which mitigation is carried out. Regarding the strategic mechanisms through which mitigation was carried out in these semi-structured oral Chinese interviews, the most common strategies were the following: the use of resources that downgrade what has been said or done, the use of resources that involve the addressee in what has been said or done, and the use of resources that limit or restrict what has been said or done. Conversely, the strategies of correcting or repairing what has been said, justifying, and defocalizing had the lowest frequency of use.
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