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How do we construct national identities in discourse? Which topics, which discursive strategies and which linguistic devices are employed to construct national sameness and uniqueness on the one hand, and differences to other national collectives on the o

This article conducts a critical discourse analysis of the Hungarian government’s National Consultation campaign on ‘immigration and terrorism’ in early 2015. The analysis draws on a discourse-historical approach to illuminate how the language and contents of the consultation draw on the discursive and political repertoires of the post-2010 Orbán governments and how, at the same time, they are underpinned by particular elements in the history of migration and diversity in Hungary. The consultation framed immigration as both an economic and security threat and conflated asylum seekers, economic migrants and terrorists, as well as regular and irregular migration. Nevertheless, these discourses would later feed into the government’s response to the large number of asylum seekers who entered the country in the summer of 2015 and would be used to legitimize the actions subsequently taken to tackle what would internationally come to be defined as a ‘crisis’.

This article focuses on the discursive underpinnings of the legitimacy crisis that the Eurozone as a transnational institution is facing. By adopting a critical discourse analysis (CDA) perspective, the empirical analysis focuses on the media discussion in Finland. The analysis shows how discourses of financial capitalism, humanism, nationalism and Europeanism played a central role in legitimation, delegitimation and relegitimation. Furthermore, the analysis elaborates on the legitimation strategies that were often used in the media texts: position-based authorizations involving institutionalized authorities and 'voices of the common man', knowledge-based authorizations focusing on economic expertise, rationalizations concentrating on economic arguments, moral evaluations based on unfairness used especially for delegitimation, mythopoiesis involving alternative future scenarios and cosmology used to construct inevitability. By so doing, this study adds to our understanding of the discursive and ideological underpinnings of the social, political and financial crisis in Greece and other European countries and contributes to research on discursive legitimation more generally.

There is a long tradition of linguistic research on political discourse, but little attention has been paid to what the concept of political discourse itself encompasses. With this in mind, this article aims to understand what types of discourse are categorized as ‘political’ in linguistic research and what their characteristics are (form, type of actors, policy domains, geographical coverage). To this end, we conducted a systematic literature review of 164 scientific articles from the Scopus database. Overall, the findings show that political discourse is generally limited to the discourses of (institutionalized) political elites and most specifically to oral monological speeches. The review also highlights discrepancies regarding the geographical scope and the policy domains covered by the empirical analyses, more specifically a bias toward the Western world and issues related to external defense policies, justice and home affairs.

Research into discourse synthesis examines the ways in which writers make use of, and transform, multiple other texts in writing their own. It is intertextual research that has blurred boundaries of various kinds, not only the boundary between the processes of reading and writing but also boundaries across disciplines as well as regions of the world. Guided by a cognitive constructivist perspective, this research into discourse synthesis drew at its origin—and continues to draw now—from multidisciplinary theoretical and empirical work. This article, which establishes the foundations for this research and traces its development, attends to writers’ transformations of multiple source texts resulting from operations of organizing, selecting, and connecting. Studies into synthesis writing for varying academic tasks have shown that, by applying these operations to multiple textual sources, writers produce discourses that function as new texts in new contexts. Following a discussion of historical background, attention in this article goes to three major issues: the variation in synthesis associated with different academic genres; the kinds of insights into product and process that come from different research approaches; and the nature of new instructional approaches that emphasize elements of discourse synthesis. All facets of this research reveal continuity as well as change, the latter occurring, in large part, through contact and convergence of discourse synthesis research with related bodies of work. The conclusion, which centers on the notion of transformation, summarizes research conducted thus far and points to future directions.

Political metaphors and related figurative discourse tools are characterised by their variability and contentiousness.Using them, discourse participants try to gain competitive advantage over others by offering their audiences new meaning nuances, challenging each other and announcing political initiatives.

This article highlights that by focusing on concepts, many contemporary discourses increasingly turn towards (re/definitions of) various abstract ideas while moving their focus away from representations of doers as well benefactors of social and politico-economic processes. Focusing on the process of such an increasingly conceptual nature of discourse as one of the key displays of contemporary neoliberal logic in public and regulatory discourse, the article argues that the concept-driven logic – evident in policies, but also in media and political genres – necessitates new theoretical (and analytical) tools in critical discourse studies (CDS). It is suggested that, on the one hand, incorporation of ideas from within conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) into CDS is necessary. On the other hand, it is also argued that an in-depth rethinking of the ways in which CDS approaches recontextualisation as a concept is equally crucial. As is argued, both insights might help tackling the conceptual dynamics in/of discourses by tracing the conceptual logic of discourse and identifying ideological ontologies of contemporary public and regulatory discourses. They also help scrutinise discourses in which social practice is often regulated and where the image of non-agentic ‘invisible’ social change allows for legitimisation of the often-negative social and politico-economic dynamics.

This paper challenges the predominant view that legitimation is merely a specific phase in merger or acquisition processes. We argue that a better understanding of postmerger organizational dynamics calls for conceptualization of discursive legitimation as an inherent part of unfolding merger processes. In particular, we focus on the recursive relationship between legitimation and organizational action. We have two objectives: to outline a theoretical model that helps one to understand the dynamics of discursive legitimation and organizational action in postmerger organizations, and to examine a revealing case to distinguish the inherent risks and problems in discursive legitimation. Our case analysis focuses on the merger between the French pharmaceutical companies BioMérieux and Pierre Fabre. We adopt a critical multimethod approach and distinguish specific discursive dynamics and pathological tendencies in this case. The analysis highlights the unintended consequences of discursive legitimation, the central role of sensegiving and sensehiding in discursive legitimation, the inherently political nature of legitimation and the risks associated with politicization, the special problems associated with fashionable discourses and the role of the media, the use of specific discursive strategies for legitimation and delegitimation, and the crucial role of actual integration results. This analysis adds to the existing research on mergers and acquisitions by treating discursive legitimation as part of the merger dynamics. In particular, our case analysis provides a new explanation for merger failure. We also believe that the recursive model connecting discursive legitimation and delegitimation strategies to concrete organizational action makes a more general contribution to our understanding of organizational legitimation.

Studies of political dynamics between multinational enterprise (MNE) parents and subsidiaries during subsidiary role evolution have focused largely on control and resistance. This paper adopts a critical discursive approach to enable an exploration of subtle dynamics in the way that both headquarters and subsidiaries subjectively reconstruct their independent-interdependent relationships with each other during change. We draw from a real-time qualitative study of a revealing case of charter change in an important European subsidiary of an MNE attempting to build closer integration across European country operations. Our results illustrate the role of three discourses - selling, resistance and reconciliation - in the reconstruction of the subsidiary-parent relationship. From this analysis we develop a process framework that elucidates the important role of these three discourses in the reconstruction of subsidiary roles, showing how resistance is not simply subversive but an important part of integration. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the micro-level political dynamics in subsidiary role evolution, and of how voice is exercised in MNEs. This study also provides a rare example of discourse-based analysis in an MNE context, advancing our knowledge of how discursive methods can help to advance international business research more generally.

The Russian climate policy debate pays special interest to the economic and political benefits and threats related to international climate policy. Applying critical discourse analysis, in this study, I dismantle issue discourses into sub-discourses, identifying six central themes, and then discuss the truth-value of the claims made. Policy decisions relevant to climate diplomacy are often in line with sub-discourses of low truth-value. Thus, socially constructed reality can go against statistical data and scientific research, setting the context for policy decisions and international climate cooperation. That makes it difficult to influence Russia’s climate position or domestic policies by sharing knowledge. However, the sub-discourses also indicate a domestic debate on Russia’s climate-diplomacy options—a debate of higher truth-value that may influence constructions of social reality. Thus far, the Russian government has managed to avoid costly domestic emissions-reduction measures. However, the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) will impose carbon costs on Russian export products, forcing reconsideration of this social reality.