Critical Discourse Analysis

A critical analysis should not remain descriptive and neutral: the interests guiding such an analysis are aimed at uncovering injustice, inequality, taking sides with the powerless and suppressed. (Wodak, 1989, p.14)

Here I will introduce the central ideas underpinning CDA and elaborate a bit on the more concrete method for my dissertation, the common grounds for all of the three analyses as well as the specific character of each substudy.

According to CDA, discourse is seen as a form of social practice.

“Describing discourse as social practice implies a dialectical relationship between a particular discursive event and the situation(s), institution(s) and social structure(s) which frame it” (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997, p.258). Put differently, discourse is socially constitutive and at the same time socially shaped in the way that it constitutes objects of knowledge, situations, relations and social identities. Discourse is constitutive in sustaining, reproducing and transforming the social status quo. In short this inevitably links discourse with ideology. CDA aims to deconstruct the ideological constructions and make the underlying relations of power visible. This points to the fact that CDA is not a dispassionate and objective part of social science, instead it is to be seen as an intervention in social practice encouraging sholars to “take responsibility” and highlight different kinds of social inequalities. Critical science does not focus on purely academic or theoretical matters, instead it takes its departure in a real social problem and chooses the perspective of those with less power, critically examining those

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in power (van Dijk, 1986, p.4). The main claim of CDA is that societal changes, in terms of changes in politics and social life, include substantive elements of cultural and ideological change and have a linguistic-discursive character, which offers an opening for the discourse analysist to trace these elements (van Dijk, 1986, p.271).

In CDA, the data collection and analysis are not necessarily two separate steps, but may be carried out simultaneously. Theory and empirical data are approached in parallel in order to refine the analytical approach. It is often said that empirical research can be thought of as a circular process of selection, conceptualization and operationalization (see Meyer 2001, p.19).

There is however always a first step for every analysis. In my case the very first step was the determination of a location where the understanding of the relationship between state, labor and capital possibly could be expressed, followed by a mapping of the news discourses in an attempt to distinguish the key topics of the texts and identify what discourses there are about rights and responsibilities and how the social relations of power are manifested.

The initial mapping of the main categories in the crisis news coverage to find out what the journalistic story is about and who participates in it was done simultaneously with a mapping of relevant theories regarding journalism and society. After reading, rereading and categorizing the news coverage for a total of three months about the closure of the car factory in Sweden’s largest morning and evening newspapers, three overarching areas were extracted. These categories are the workers, the responsible politicians and the economic elite—highlighted herein in separate studies.

In the first study the method is partly indebted to van Leeuwen’s (2008) conceptualization of how social actors are represented in discourse and focuses on whether workers and ordinary citizens are included or excluded in the news, how they are quoted and referred to, and what roles are allocated to them. The focus of the second analysis concerns questions of political responsibility, the discursive strategies that are used to legitimate

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control or naturalize the social order (cf. Fairclough, 1985); how causes, solutions, consequences, expectations etc. are put forward and argued for by leading politicians—and in what way this is recontextualized and framed by journalism. The method used in the second study focuses on two dimensions of the text, the description of the political problem and the way this is recontextualized by journalism. The method of examining the first dimension: the argument strategies and how political representatives make use of modalities, evidential devices and rhetorical figures or questions, is inspired by Wodak (2001) and Chilton (2004). In the analysis of the second dimension, how journalism relates to the political frames, the text is approached in accordance with what has been outlined by Richardson (2007), focusing on the journalistic use of direct or indirect quotations, on what meanings, explicit and implicit, are expressed by the choice of words when journalism is referring to people, concepts, events and processes, as well as on what choices are made in the structure of the text, as in the order in which sources are referred to. The third analysis aims at capturing the main story, the overall message in the journalistic construction of crisis.

Following the modus of analysis suggested by Jäger (2001) and Fairclough (2013, 2014), the understanding and explanation of the causes, characters and solutions of crisis, how this is brought forward (and by whom), is investigated. The focus of this analysis is also how the main topic corresponds with the interpretation shaped by the voices of experts.

CDA approaches questions of validity and reliability in a very different way than quantitative research within the positivist tradition (Wodak and Meyer, 2009). Abalo (2015) raises the question of validity in a way I also find applicable for my dissertation in terms of how to ensure the accuracy of research within the qualitative tradition. In a dissertation containing different qualitative studies we should ask questions of how well the different studies collectively capture the aim of the dissertation (p.65) and in an overall perspective how the analysis succeeds in capturing the object of knowledge. Managing to do so rests on the ability to place the object of the study within the appropriate sociopolitical as well as theoretical frame. In other words, generalizability within the qualitative tradition revolves more

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around theory than the empirical findings. Taken all together and translated into my dissertation, the question is how I manage to capture how neoliberal discourse operates in the reporting, how journalism represents the actors and events involved in an industrial crisis, as well as what and how contextual settings and agency are working together in the shaping of the journalistic output. Different methods within the CDA tradition have been used in my three analyses to fulfill this claim.

As for reliability, the transparency in providing ample empirical examples from the material makes it possible for others than the writer to form an opinion about the news coverage. Common to the substudies in my dissertation is that they operate at the same level of analysis as they seek to illuminate discursive patterns of the text and establish the journalistic themes which are then discussed on a macro level; in what way the journalistic discourse corresponds with ideology and the overall social power structure. The analyses focus on the linguistic level without emphasizing the outmost and closest micro level which is a conscious choice springing from the overarching aim to understand in a broader sense what perspectives, actors and aspects are represented and in what way. The structure of the analysis, rich with empirical examples, also enables a comparison and makes it possible to highlight the disparities and similarities between crisis representations situated in different contexts.