European Union Discourses on Un/employment An interdisciplinary approach to employment policy-making and organizational change
Produktdetaljer
This struck me as a very insightful study of the policy making process in the EU which constitutes a convincing demonstration of the contribution which discourse analysis can make to researching that process. There are several aspects of this work which are I think particularly rich. First, the operationalisation of the theoretical concept of recontextualisation (developed especially by Bernstein) as a powerful analytical tool in tracing the development of policy making. Second, the analysis of globalisation as a rhetoric, and of how globalisation rhetoric figures within the policy making process particularly within the CAG, and its relationship to neoliberalism within the EU. Thirdly, the thematisation within a discourse analytical per! spective of problems of democracy and the public space. The book is a powerful synthesis of sociological, discoursal and linguistic analysis, and I think it will do much to enhance the claims of discourse analysts to have a substantive contribution to make to social scientific research.
- Norman Fairclough,
This book shows, that discourse analysis, when used in a careful and rigorous way, can contribute with convincing analysis to an area where hypercomplexity bars the way for more traditional political science methods.
- Sven Bislev, Copenhagen Business School, in the Journal of Language and Politics Vol. 3:2 (2004),
This study succeeded in looking behind closed doors within the EU organizational system. Committee meetings were tape-recorded and analysed, drafts of policy papers were examined for recontextualizations and the impact of interest groups and different economic and ideological concepts on policy-making made explicit. A comparison of decision-making processes in the European Parliament and in small networks of the Commission illustrates the different argumentation patterns and discursive practices that are involved in the formation of new employment policies. The ethnographic research is accompanied by a systemic linguistic and sociological analysis of various institutional genres and political spaces.