Reviews for Language and globalization

The average rating for Language and globalization based on 4 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-02-27 00:00:00 GREG Roble Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) could be described as an application of Systemic Functional Linguistics. In another book I've recently read and am yet to review, Fairclough pretty well does describe CDA in those terms. What that means is that language is about communication. As such it is about transmitting meaning between agents - I want to use the word 'agents' rather than subjects, because the fact that these have 'agency' (can bring about change) is a key idea here. But meaning always occurs within social contexts which are, by definition, larger than any of these agents. Those contexts are also constantly changing and complicated - we are talking relationships that change so we are talking dialectics. We make sense of these contexts by having ways of talking about specific social situations (genres) and ways of representing particular relationships (discourses). Whenever the word 'critical' is used, you can assume Marx had a hand at the start of this in some way. Okay. This book is about globalisation and how globalisation is represented in language. One of the early things Fairclough does here is to distinguish between globalisation and globalists. Basically, globalisation is a process that is pretty well just a fact. We have an international media. Nation states are fundamentally changing their character from what they had been only a few decades ago. We are seeing a deindustrialisation of the West and an industrialisation of the South and East. We are seeing the growth of knowledge-based economies. These are all facts. But the neoliberal idea that globalisation is proof of the end of history and that free market economics is natural, inevitable and universal isn't a fact - but rather an ideology and what Fairclough calls 'globalism' or 'globalist'. The point is that we have all of these processes happening, and to understand these processes we create genres and discourses - so, an analysis of those discourses and the concrete texts that they generate ought to tell us something interesting about the nature of globalisation and globalism. And that is where this book takes wings. Fairclough's writing is academic - unashamedly so - but when he starts analysing texts, when he does worked examples of his ideas - oh man! There is one of a speech that George W Bush gave starting on pages 100-101. It is a stunning example of the clarity that comes from a close textual analysis. There is one of a discussion of poverty and social exclusion in Romania that is just mind blowing. Briefly, about 30% of the population in Romania meets the EU's definition of living in poverty or extreme poverty. But that's about one in every three people in the population. The EU definition of social exclusion is pretty well the same as the definition of poverty - if you are poor you are socially excluded - but if one-in-three of the population is poor just how socially excluded does that make them? His point is that the discursive frame that makes sense in the EU can't just be slapped on top of Romania and be expected to just 'make sense'. Discourse is contextual and context is, well, everything. And he does this kind of breathtaking analysis time and time again. There is an amazing analysis of a Romanian Cosmo article advising Romanian women on how to women should make 'big decisions'. There is also a remarkable chapter on the role of the media and how that has changed with globalisation and the narrowing of the concentration of power to a contracting number of multinational media outlets. The idea that media provide a sustaining narrative that supports globalism and that they also delimit what can and can't be thought is pervasive here. However, he never quite says that the media fix in concrete what can and can't be thought - clearly that would be going too far. In fact, a key point of all of Fairclough's analyses is that the world is far too complex and people have too much agency for any one 'discourse' to completely capture the world. That said, that in itself doesn't for a minute mean that having the biggest megaphone doesn't give you the loudest voice or that having a loud voice isn't an advantage. It just means that having the loudest voice doesn't mean having the only voice. Like I said, this book is at its best when it is doing critical discourse analysis. And this guy can do amazing things. You can't help but learn from him - even if you get the feeling you are never going to be able to play this game nearly as well as he does. On pages 147-48 there is an alphabetical listing of all of the textual tools he has used in this book to analyse various texts, discourses and genres. Everything from 'argumentation' through 'nominalisation' to 'wordplay'. This book really is useful as a worked example of critical discourse analysis. Some quotes: First, the networks, connectivities and interactions which cut across spatial boundaries and borders crucially include, and we might say depend upon, particular forms (or what I shall call genres) of communication which are specialized for trans-national and interregional interaction. Page 3 In essence, a genre is a way of communicating or interacting, and a discourse is a way of representing some part or aspect of the world. Page 3 I have argued that we need to distinguish actual processes of globalization from discourses of globalization, but then argued that discourses contribute to creating and shaping actual processes of globalization. Page 4 Actually my position is rather that (a) there are real processes of (e.g. economic) globalization, independently of whether people recognize them or not, and of how they represent them; (b) but as soon as we begin to reflect upon and discuss these real processes, we have to represent them, and the ways in which we represent them inevitably draw upon certain discourses rather than others. Page 4 The key feature of 'globalism' is that it interprets globalization in a neo-liberal way as primarily the liberalization and global integration of markets. Page 7 But this is what 'globalist' discourse does: it represents the highly complex phenomenon of globalization reductively as purely economic, as a particular form of capitalism and a particular view of what capitalism should'must'be like. Page 8 We can see features of 'globalist' discourse in this text, but this discourse (indeed any discourse, or genre) can only be identified on the basis of features which are recurrent across a substantial number of texts, and which show a measure of stability over time. Page 9 Critical discourse analysis (CDA) constitutes a valuable resource for researching these relations between discourse and other social elements, seeing them as dialectical relations. One advantage is that it allows us to incorporate textual analysis within social analysis of globalization. Page 11 Globalization is not exclusively to do with the global scale, but with new sets of relations between the global scale and other scales and the 're-scaling' of particular spatial entities (nation-states, regions within them, cities, etc.) with respect to particular sub-systems (economy, law, etc.) or a combination of sub-systems. Page 19 Political economy differs from classical economics in asserting that economic systems and economic changes are politically conditioned and embedded'that they depend upon and are closely interconnected with political forms and systems. Page 23 Globalism, neo-liberal globalization, is in part an order of discourse in this sense. It is important to add however that the dominance or hegemony of such a successfully operationalized strategy can never be complete or final'because actual processes always exceed even successfully constructed construals of them, because there are always alternative and even counter strategies and discourses, and because any successfully reconstituted reality is a contradictory and crisis-prone reality. Page 24 I shall distinguish three levels of abstraction within social analysis: social structures, social practices and social events. Page 25 One particular contribution that CDA can make to cultural political economy, and indeed to social scientific analysis in general, is detailed analysis of texts. Page 27 But I want to adopt an approach which is firmly relational. That is, I see what is crucial as change in the relations between institutions, organizations, practices, orders of discourses, discourses, genres and styles. Page 28 In many cases, the recontextualization of social practices is in its initial phase the recontextualization of a discourse or discourses which project(s) imaginaries for wider social change. Page 29 Discourses are 'translated' into social relations, forms of power, rituals and institutions, beliefs and values and desires, and material practices. Page 29 Social changes are not mono-causal; they involve complex interactions between diverse causal factors and forces. Page 29 It is associated with another claim that is commonly asserted or presupposed in globalist texts: that the most effective form of capitalist economy is one based upon 'liberalized' markets, where trade and the movement and investment of capital, prices, employment and so forth are subject only to market forces, without the 'interference' of state regulation. This justifies a strategy to extend free market capitalism based on neo-liberal tenets to virtually all the countries of the world. Page 34 One aspect of contemporary globalization is that 'the national scale has lost its taken-for-granted primacy' Page 56 A final point is that changes in 'vertical' relations between scales impact upon and interact with changes in 'horizontal' relations between social fields or institutions within particular spatial entities. Page 56 But 'transition' is a very dubious way of representing economic and social change, because it implies not only a given starting point (socialist economies and states) but also a known destination. There is a certain irony here. Socialist economists were criticized by liberals for assuming that economic change could be centrally planned, whereas in fact no central planner can have knowledge of all the contingencies which determine how economies will actually evolve. This supposedly shows the superiority of market economies over centrally planned economies. Yet theorists of 'transition' often themselves seem to assume that the process can be planned, controlled and managed with precision. Page 58 All this indicates the difficulty of construing Romanian problems in terms of EU categories, given that it is not the case that there is a majority who live a 'normal' life at a 'decent' standard, in relation to which certain groups can be identified as 'socially excluded'. As we have seen, on the figures and definitions given in these documents some 30 per cent of Romanians are excluded from a 'normal' life. Page 80 From a discourse analytical perspective, there is hybridity or mixing of different discourses: the discourse which was developed by researchers within Romania in the 1990s for representing poverty, and the EU discourse. And it is this hybridity, motivated it seems by pressure to 'fit' Romania into the EU model, which is the source of the confusion and contradictions I have noted. Page 80 The mass media play an important part in the constitution of new scales, the transformation of relations between scales, the re-scaling of spatial entities, and the construction and consolidation of a new 'fix' between a regime of accumulation and a mode of social regulation (which I discussed in Chapter 3). All of these processes depend upon the social dissemination of discourses, narratives, ideas, practices, values and so forth, upon their legitimization, upon the positioning and mobilization of publics in relation to them, and upon the generation of consent to or at least acquiescence with change. Page 84 Modern forms of telecommunication (the telegraph and telephone, then radio, television, and then the internet) have resulted in the 'uncoupling of space and time' (Thompson 1995:32), in the sense that communication with 'distant others' is no longer subject to the delays resulting from the need to physically transport symbolic forms (e.g. letters or printed material). Page 85 They (the media) are the main source of views and ideas, of a sense of what is right and what is possible, and the main providers of credibility and legitimacy for the powers that be. Page 86 But the independent role of the media as a 'fourth estate' fulfilling a public service role, providing accurate and dispassionate information, and, where necessary, exposure and criticism of social ills, is being progressively undermined as the transnational corporations become dominant in the media field internationally. Page 86 But the 'cultural imperialism thesis' has to be treated with some caution. First, because the content and forms of media, despite the convergences I have indicated, are considerably more varied than this thesis suggests'even American television is very far from projecting a unitary set of values and lifestyles. And, as I have argued, recontextualization is a complex phenomenon, involving not a simple colonization, but also an active process of appropriation whose character and outcomes depend upon diverse circumstances in diverse contexts. Page 87 The boundary between the social fields of media and politics has been redrawn, producing a substantial if partial intersection between the two: political debate and persuasion, the making and implementation of policy, and the whole business of government have so to speak migrated to a significant degree from specialized institutions in the political field to the media. Pages 87-8 The remarkable extension of branding from commercial goods to virtually any institution, to persons such as politicians and to spatial entities like cities, can be seen as part of the operationalization of neo-liberal discourse, specifically of its representation of virtually all areas of social life as markets or potential markets. Page 91 There seems to be very little public questioning of the neo-liberal assumptions that branding is based upon'that anyone or anything can be treated like a commodity'though there is plenty of private cynicism. Page 91 Neo-liberalism redefines the role of the national state as facilitating markets without regulating them (or 'interfering with' them), and drastically reducing commitments to social welfare. Page 92 In this scenario, the choice between political parties in elections is becoming largely a matter of image, the personalities of leaders, and brands. This obviously presupposes the mediatization of politics in that communicating image, political personality or 'brand values' requires high visibility in mass media. Page 92 But let me note here that representing terrorism and terrorist acts in religious terms as 'evil' excludes questions of political difference, political grievances and conflicts, questions about American politics in especially the Middle East and possible political solutions. If these people and their acts are 'evil', then normal political relations and processes cannot apply. Page 102 The mass media are a crucial element in the global dissemination of information, news, reactions to and interpretations of information and news, new strategies, discourses, ideas and practices, new norms and values in economic activities, political systems and processes, social institutions, organizations, and the conduct of ordinary life, changes in attitudes, sentiments and identities and so forth. Virtually all aspects of social life are now affected by the media and mediation, including even the conduct of private and domestic life and of personal and intimate life, and media 'messages' about all aspects of life are circulated globally. Page 103 The globalization of the mass media has contributed to a limited extent to the construction of a global public, global public opinion, and even a global 'cosmopolitan public sphere' in which debate, action and mobilization on a global basis are generated. Page 104

Review # 2 was written on 2014-11-15 00:00:00 John Hurt A solid textbook on basic statistics. It was useful in class. The examples are very helpful.

Review # 3 was written on 2014-02-27 00:00:00 Rob Pienta Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) could be described as an application of Systemic Functional Linguistics. In another book I've recently read and am yet to review, Fairclough pretty well does describe CDA in those terms. What that means is that language is about communication. As such it is about transmitting meaning between agents - I want to use the word 'agents' rather than subjects, because the fact that these have 'agency' (can bring about change) is a key idea here. But meaning always occurs within social contexts which are, by definition, larger than any of these agents. Those contexts are also constantly changing and complicated - we are talking relationships that change so we are talking dialectics. We make sense of these contexts by having ways of talking about specific social situations (genres) and ways of representing particular relationships (discourses). Whenever the word 'critical' is used, you can assume Marx had a hand at the start of this in some way. Okay. This book is about globalisation and how globalisation is represented in language. One of the early things Fairclough does here is to distinguish between globalisation and globalists. Basically, globalisation is a process that is pretty well just a fact. We have an international media. Nation states are fundamentally changing their character from what they had been only a few decades ago. We are seeing a deindustrialisation of the West and an industrialisation of the South and East. We are seeing the growth of knowledge-based economies. These are all facts. But the neoliberal idea that globalisation is proof of the end of history and that free market economics is natural, inevitable and universal isn't a fact - but rather an ideology and what Fairclough calls 'globalism' or 'globalist'. The point is that we have all of these processes happening, and to understand these processes we create genres and discourses - so, an analysis of those discourses and the concrete texts that they generate ought to tell us something interesting about the nature of globalisation and globalism. And that is where this book takes wings. Fairclough's writing is academic - unashamedly so - but when he starts analysing texts, when he does worked examples of his ideas - oh man! There is one of a speech that George W Bush gave starting on pages 100-101. It is a stunning example of the clarity that comes from a close textual analysis. There is one of a discussion of poverty and social exclusion in Romania that is just mind blowing. Briefly, about 30% of the population in Romania meets the EU's definition of living in poverty or extreme poverty. But that's about one in every three people in the population. The EU definition of social exclusion is pretty well the same as the definition of poverty - if you are poor you are socially excluded - but if one-in-three of the population is poor just how socially excluded does that make them? His point is that the discursive frame that makes sense in the EU can't just be slapped on top of Romania and be expected to just 'make sense'. Discourse is contextual and context is, well, everything. And he does this kind of breathtaking analysis time and time again. There is an amazing analysis of a Romanian Cosmo article advising Romanian women on how to women should make 'big decisions'. There is also a remarkable chapter on the role of the media and how that has changed with globalisation and the narrowing of the concentration of power to a contracting number of multinational media outlets. The idea that media provide a sustaining narrative that supports globalism and that they also delimit what can and can't be thought is pervasive here. However, he never quite says that the media fix in concrete what can and can't be thought - clearly that would be going too far. In fact, a key point of all of Fairclough's analyses is that the world is far too complex and people have too much agency for any one 'discourse' to completely capture the world. That said, that in itself doesn't for a minute mean that having the biggest megaphone doesn't give you the loudest voice or that having a loud voice isn't an advantage. It just means that having the loudest voice doesn't mean having the only voice. Like I said, this book is at its best when it is doing critical discourse analysis. And this guy can do amazing things. You can't help but learn from him - even if you get the feeling you are never going to be able to play this game nearly as well as he does. On pages 147-48 there is an alphabetical listing of all of the textual tools he has used in this book to analyse various texts, discourses and genres. Everything from 'argumentation' through 'nominalisation' to 'wordplay'. This book really is useful as a worked example of critical discourse analysis. Some quotes: First, the networks, connectivities and interactions which cut across spatial boundaries and borders crucially include, and we might say depend upon, particular forms (or what I shall call genres) of communication which are specialized for trans-national and interregional interaction. Page 3 In essence, a genre is a way of communicating or interacting, and a discourse is a way of representing some part or aspect of the world. Page 3 I have argued that we need to distinguish actual processes of globalization from discourses of globalization, but then argued that discourses contribute to creating and shaping actual processes of globalization. Page 4 Actually my position is rather that (a) there are real processes of (e.g. economic) globalization, independently of whether people recognize them or not, and of how they represent them; (b) but as soon as we begin to reflect upon and discuss these real processes, we have to represent them, and the ways in which we represent them inevitably draw upon certain discourses rather than others. Page 4 The key feature of 'globalism' is that it interprets globalization in a neo-liberal way as primarily the liberalization and global integration of markets. Page 7 But this is what 'globalist' discourse does: it represents the highly complex phenomenon of globalization reductively as purely economic, as a particular form of capitalism and a particular view of what capitalism should'must'be like. Page 8 We can see features of 'globalist' discourse in this text, but this discourse (indeed any discourse, or genre) can only be identified on the basis of features which are recurrent across a substantial number of texts, and which show a measure of stability over time. Page 9 Critical discourse analysis (CDA) constitutes a valuable resource for researching these relations between discourse and other social elements, seeing them as dialectical relations. One advantage is that it allows us to incorporate textual analysis within social analysis of globalization. Page 11 Globalization is not exclusively to do with the global scale, but with new sets of relations between the global scale and other scales and the 're-scaling' of particular spatial entities (nation-states, regions within them, cities, etc.) with respect to particular sub-systems (economy, law, etc.) or a combination of sub-systems. Page 19 Political economy differs from classical economics in asserting that economic systems and economic changes are politically conditioned and embedded'that they depend upon and are closely interconnected with political forms and systems. Page 23 Globalism, neo-liberal globalization, is in part an order of discourse in this sense. It is important to add however that the dominance or hegemony of such a successfully operationalized strategy can never be complete or final'because actual processes always exceed even successfully constructed construals of them, because there are always alternative and even counter strategies and discourses, and because any successfully reconstituted reality is a contradictory and crisis-prone reality. Page 24 I shall distinguish three levels of abstraction within social analysis: social structures, social practices and social events. Page 25 One particular contribution that CDA can make to cultural political economy, and indeed to social scientific analysis in general, is detailed analysis of texts. Page 27 But I want to adopt an approach which is firmly relational. That is, I see what is crucial as change in the relations between institutions, organizations, practices, orders of discourses, discourses, genres and styles. Page 28 In many cases, the recontextualization of social practices is in its initial phase the recontextualization of a discourse or discourses which project(s) imaginaries for wider social change. Page 29 Discourses are 'translated' into social relations, forms of power, rituals and institutions, beliefs and values and desires, and material practices. Page 29 Social changes are not mono-causal; they involve complex interactions between diverse causal factors and forces. Page 29 It is associated with another claim that is commonly asserted or presupposed in globalist texts: that the most effective form of capitalist economy is one based upon 'liberalized' markets, where trade and the movement and investment of capital, prices, employment and so forth are subject only to market forces, without the 'interference' of state regulation. This justifies a strategy to extend free market capitalism based on neo-liberal tenets to virtually all the countries of the world. Page 34 One aspect of contemporary globalization is that 'the national scale has lost its taken-for-granted primacy' Page 56 A final point is that changes in 'vertical' relations between scales impact upon and interact with changes in 'horizontal' relations between social fields or institutions within particular spatial entities. Page 56 But 'transition' is a very dubious way of representing economic and social change, because it implies not only a given starting point (socialist economies and states) but also a known destination. There is a certain irony here. Socialist economists were criticized by liberals for assuming that economic change could be centrally planned, whereas in fact no central planner can have knowledge of all the contingencies which determine how economies will actually evolve. This supposedly shows the superiority of market economies over centrally planned economies. Yet theorists of 'transition' often themselves seem to assume that the process can be planned, controlled and managed with precision. Page 58 All this indicates the difficulty of construing Romanian problems in terms of EU categories, given that it is not the case that there is a majority who live a 'normal' life at a 'decent' standard, in relation to which certain groups can be identified as 'socially excluded'. As we have seen, on the figures and definitions given in these documents some 30 per cent of Romanians are excluded from a 'normal' life. Page 80 From a discourse analytical perspective, there is hybridity or mixing of different discourses: the discourse which was developed by researchers within Romania in the 1990s for representing poverty, and the EU discourse. And it is this hybridity, motivated it seems by pressure to 'fit' Romania into the EU model, which is the source of the confusion and contradictions I have noted. Page 80 The mass media play an important part in the constitution of new scales, the transformation of relations between scales, the re-scaling of spatial entities, and the construction and consolidation of a new 'fix' between a regime of accumulation and a mode of social regulation (which I discussed in Chapter 3). All of these processes depend upon the social dissemination of discourses, narratives, ideas, practices, values and so forth, upon their legitimization, upon the positioning and mobilization of publics in relation to them, and upon the generation of consent to or at least acquiescence with change. Page 84 Modern forms of telecommunication (the telegraph and telephone, then radio, television, and then the internet) have resulted in the 'uncoupling of space and time' (Thompson 1995:32), in the sense that communication with 'distant others' is no longer subject to the delays resulting from the need to physically transport symbolic forms (e.g. letters or printed material). Page 85 They (the media) are the main source of views and ideas, of a sense of what is right and what is possible, and the main providers of credibility and legitimacy for the powers that be. Page 86 But the independent role of the media as a 'fourth estate' fulfilling a public service role, providing accurate and dispassionate information, and, where necessary, exposure and criticism of social ills, is being progressively undermined as the transnational corporations become dominant in the media field internationally. Page 86 But the 'cultural imperialism thesis' has to be treated with some caution. First, because the content and forms of media, despite the convergences I have indicated, are considerably more varied than this thesis suggests'even American television is very far from projecting a unitary set of values and lifestyles. And, as I have argued, recontextualization is a complex phenomenon, involving not a simple colonization, but also an active process of appropriation whose character and outcomes depend upon diverse circumstances in diverse contexts. Page 87 The boundary between the social fields of media and politics has been redrawn, producing a substantial if partial intersection between the two: political debate and persuasion, the making and implementation of policy, and the whole business of government have so to speak migrated to a significant degree from specialized institutions in the political field to the media. Pages 87-8 The remarkable extension of branding from commercial goods to virtually any institution, to persons such as politicians and to spatial entities like cities, can be seen as part of the operationalization of neo-liberal discourse, specifically of its representation of virtually all areas of social life as markets or potential markets. Page 91 There seems to be very little public questioning of the neo-liberal assumptions that branding is based upon'that anyone or anything can be treated like a commodity'though there is plenty of private cynicism. Page 91 Neo-liberalism redefines the role of the national state as facilitating markets without regulating them (or 'interfering with' them), and drastically reducing commitments to social welfare. Page 92 In this scenario, the choice between political parties in elections is becoming largely a matter of image, the personalities of leaders, and brands. This obviously presupposes the mediatization of politics in that communicating image, political personality or 'brand values' requires high visibility in mass media. Page 92 But let me note here that representing terrorism and terrorist acts in religious terms as 'evil' excludes questions of political difference, political grievances and conflicts, questions about American politics in especially the Middle East and possible political solutions. If these people and their acts are 'evil', then normal political relations and processes cannot apply. Page 102 The mass media are a crucial element in the global dissemination of information, news, reactions to and interpretations of information and news, new strategies, discourses, ideas and practices, new norms and values in economic activities, political systems and processes, social institutions, organizations, and the conduct of ordinary life, changes in attitudes, sentiments and identities and so forth. Virtually all aspects of social life are now affected by the media and mediation, including even the conduct of private and domestic life and of personal and intimate life, and media 'messages' about all aspects of life are circulated globally. Page 103 The globalization of the mass media has contributed to a limited extent to the construction of a global public, global public opinion, and even a global 'cosmopolitan public sphere' in which debate, action and mobilization on a global basis are generated. Page 104

Review # 4 was written on 2014-11-15 00:00:00 Max Dax A solid textbook on basic statistics. It was useful in class. The examples are very helpful.