scholarly journals Tolerance and intolerance: Cultural meanings and discursive usage

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Maykel Verkuyten ◽  
Rachel Kollar
Keyword(s):  
National Survey ◽  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Lay People ◽  
The Subject

The notion of tolerance is widely embraced across many settings and is generally considered critical for the peaceful functioning of culturally diverse societies. However, the concepts of tolerance and intolerance have various meanings and can be used in different ways and for different purposes. The various understandings raise different empirical questions and might have different implications for the subject positions of those who are tolerant and those who are tolerated. In this study, we focus on cultural understandings of tolerance and intolerance and how these terms are used in discourses. We first describe how in an open-ended question in a national survey lay people use a classical and a more modern understanding of tolerance to describe situations of tolerance and intolerance. Second, we analyze how those who tolerate and those who are tolerated can flexibly use these different understandings of (in)tolerance for discursively making particular “us–them” distinctions. It is concluded that the notions of tolerance and intolerance have different cultural meanings which both can be used for progressive or oppressive ends.

Get That S.O.B. Off the Field: A Critical Discourse Analysis of NFL Team Owners’ Responses to President Trump’s Comments About Athlete Protests

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 291-300
Author(s):  
Kerry R. McGannon ◽  
Ted M. Butryn
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Language Use ◽  
National Football League ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Media Spectacle ◽  
The Subject

In this study, scholarship was extended on the cultural meanings of race and athlete activism by interrogating one key media spectacle surrounding athlete protests: President Trump’s 2017 speech questioning the National Football League (NFL) players’ character, with a focus on NFL owners’ responses. The NFL owners’ statements (n = 32) were subjected to critical discourse analysis. Discourses of post-racial nationalism and functionalism and the subject positions of “good player citizen” and “benevolent facilitator” (re)created meanings of the protests devoid of racial politics, linked to ideologies of color blindness, meritocracy, and diversity. These discourses and subject positions allowed the NFL owners to control protest meanings to maintain White privilege and appeal to their White fan base. These findings expand research on color-blind racism in sport, which perpetuates neoliberal ideals and the myth of a post-racial America, via taken-for-granted language use within discourses.

scholarly journals Hidden in the limelight: A feminist engagement with innovation studies

Organization ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 135050842110153
Author(s):  
Lara Pecis ◽  
Karin Berglund
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Innovation Studies ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Space Race ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Positively Charged ◽  
Blind Spots

Innovation is filled with aspirations for solutions to problems, and for laying the groundwork for new technological and social breakthroughs. When a concept is so positively charged, the hopes expressed may create blindness to potential shortcomings and deadlocks. To disclose innovation blind spots, we approach innovation from a feminist viewpoint. We see innovation as a context that changes historically, and as revolution, offering alternative imaginaries of the relationship between race, gender and innovation. Our theoretical framework combines bell hooks (capitalist patriarchy and intersectionality), Mazzucato (the entrepreneurial state and the changing context of innovation) and Fraser (redistributive justice) and contributes with an understanding of innovation from the margin by unveiling its political dimensions. Hidden Figures, the 2016 biographical drama that follows three Black women working at NASA during the space race, provides the empirical setting of the paper. Our analysis contributes to emerging intersectionality research in management and organisation studies (MOS) by revealing the subject positions and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion in innovation discourses, and by proposing a radical – and more inclusive – rethinking of innovation. With this article, we aim to push the margins to the centre and invite others to discover the terrain of the margin(alised). We suggest that our feminist framework is appropriate to study other organisational phenomena, over time and across contexts, to bring forward the plurality of women’s experiences at work and in organisations.

Better politics: Narratives of indignation and the possibility of a prosocial politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Moral Outrage ◽  
Social Crisis ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Politics Of Resistance ◽  
The Subject

This chapter calls for a truthful understanding of politics that admits the complex and sometimes very contradictory subject positions that people adhere to. There is always a temptation to disengage from contemporary political struggles and instead expend time postulating what a ‘postneoliberal’ future might entail. In examining neoliberalism, the politics of resistance, and prosocial forms of engagement, the chapter argues that a useful starting point is to interrogate the subject positions people adopt to understand the contemporary political era. Often these rely on a depiction of an economic and social crisis accentuated by neoliberalism, a sense of moral outrage, and the attribution of culpability on to those who are considered responsible.

scholarly journals Tarnished Stars: The Discourses of Celebrity in the British Tabloid Press

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Breeze
Keyword(s):  
The Sun ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Tabloid Press

En este estudio se analiza el discurso referido a las celebridades en la prensa popular inglesa. El análisis se centra en los recursos lingüísticos utilizados en este contexto, y el discurso informal que se emplea para atraer y representar a los lectores. Se procede a un estudio crítico de las posiciones de sujeto ofrecidas al lector, y las relaciones retóricas que se establecen. En las conclusiones se subraya la función de la prensa popular como mediador social, irreverente sin ser amenazador, que genera discursos populistas para enganchar una audiencia de masa en una época de fragmentación.Abstract:This study analyses the discourse of celebrity in texts from the British tabloid newspaper The Sun. The analysis focuses on the linguistic resources deployed in association with celebrities, and the typically vernacular voice with which the writer engages readers and claims to speak for them. The article then discusses factors underlying the subject positions offered to the readers and the nature of the rhetorical relations that are established. Conclusions are drawn about the operation of tabloid newspapers as social mediators that are irreverent without being threatening, generating populist discourses that contrive to engage mass audiences in an age of fragmentation.

Cultures in Cyberspace: Communications System Design as Social Sculpture

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Couey
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
American Indian ◽  
System Design ◽  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
Concept Design ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Communications Network ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Communications System

Cultures in Cyberspace was a temporary communications network organized by the author in 1992 to connect five culturally diverse online communities in conversation: American Indian Telecommunications/Dakota BBS (US), Arts Wire (US), ArtsNet (Australia), the WELL (US), and Usenet (international). Produced at a time of impending transformational technological change, the project provided a platform for people to participate in co-creating cyberspace, bringing their cultural backgrounds, stories and histories to the table. Cultures in Cyberspace was based on the premise that social, political and cultural meanings are made possible or not depending on who is connected to whom and the forms of communication that are supported and prioritized. The chapter discusses the art practices and socio-political context that informed the project, as well as its concept, design, implementation, and content. It includes participants' contemporary reflections on questions raised by the project.

Some remarks on subject positions and the architecture of the left periphery in Spanish

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard Pöll
Keyword(s):  
Simple Rule ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Subject Field ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Landing Sites ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThis article reexamines the puzzling issue of where subjects, lexical and null, are located in Spanish and offers a novel explanation for the incompatibility of preverbal lexical subjects with fronted focussed constituents. Both SpecIP and the left periphery appear to be potential landing sites for subjects, according to discourse-pragmatic factors. Assuming that pro is a clitic, it is argued that the aforementioned incompatibility can be captured by a simple rule: SpecIP must be empty for focus fronting to occur. This is the case with pro, which adjoins to Infl, or with postverbal subjects since they remain in SpecVP. From this analysis it follows that: 1) the subject field in Spanish is less articulated than is generally assumed, 2) the differences between Spanish and other null subject languages with respect to the availability of preverbal subjets can be reduced to this rule and a different ordering of focus and topic phrases, and 3) it is unnecessary to posit two different topic positions.

Identity constructions in multilingual advertising

2001 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
INGRID PILLER
Keyword(s):  
Social Identities ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Consumer Market ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Business Elite ◽  
Identity Constructions ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Commercial Advertising ◽  
English Dominant

Contemporary social identities are hybrid and complex, and the media play a crucial role in their construction. A shift from political identities based on citizenship to economic ones based on participation in a global consumer market can be observed, together with a concomitant shift from monolingual practices to multilingual and English-dominant ones. This transformation is here explored in a corpus of German advertisements. Multilingual advertisements accounted for 60–70% of all advertisements released on various television networks and in two national newspapers in 1999. The subject positions that are created by multilingual narrators and multilingual narratees are characterized by drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, and on point-of-view more generally. In order to test the acceptance of or resistance to these identity constructions outside the discourse of commercial advertising, the uses of multilingualism in nonprofit and personal advertising are also explored. All these discourses valorize German–English bilingualism and set it up as the strongest linguistic currency for the German business elite.

Introduction to Special Issue: Matters of classification and representation: Quantifying ethnicity, religion and migration introduction

Ethnicities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Supik ◽  
Riem Spielhaus
Keyword(s):  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Diverse Populations ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Political Field ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Migration

In addition to serving as an introduction to the subject, this paper suggests a conceptual framework for the investigation of issues of classification and quantification related to migration and the ethnically and religiously diverse societies in Europe. Nationality, ethnicity and religion are situational, contextual and dynamic social phenomena which tend to defy rigid classification, making it especially difficult to capture and quantify these entities in order to organize and represent them in an intelligible manner in official statistics (e.g. censuses), institutional governing practices or in academic survey research. By drawing on previous work by demographers and social researchers, we suggest a typological classification of ways in which diverse populations become statistically visible or invisible. We show that the rationale for creating classifications and particular sets of categories changes, depending on the political field in which data are used in the governance of populations and migration. A science studies perspective can make these diverse taxonomies the object of studies to understand how they are embedded within, and how they sustain, power relations. By focusing on practices of classification as instruments of research and governance, this special issue contributes to a reflection on the conditions and effects of quantifying practices in culturally diverse and constantly changing societies, in which the line between government and academia, between power and knowledge, is frequently indistinct.

Functioning of Mentality in Society: Socio-Cultural Hypothesis

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Губанов ◽  
N. Gubanov ◽  
Губанов ◽  
Nikolay Gubanov
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Reproductive Activity ◽  
Integral Characteristic ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Multiple Challenges ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Mental Characteristics

Category of mentality has additional heuristic capabilities as compared to traditional categories of the mental life. Firstly, it serves as an integral characteristic of the uniqueness of the man’s mental world, and secondly, gives an understanding of the specific type of perception of the world by the subject, thirdly, it explains the distinct way of subject’s activity – his behavior, communication, performance. Because the mentality determines the mode of activity of a social group or an individual; the human activity orientation and it’s specificity, so the mentality can be interpreted as a core for the group and personal culture, also as a strategic cultural program of the subject. One of the basic clashes of society has the form of a contradiction between the mentality, containing new cultural forms, and the social relations. In the course of the individual cultural creativity development as a response to the multiple challenges of history, new mental characteristics are generated in the mentality of the intellectual elite representatives. They represent innovative programs of human being activity – performance, behavior, communication. The new mental characteristics spread in society and become components of group mentalities. This accrued contradiction between the mass mentality and the old social relations generates a constructive tension; negotiation the tension through the reproductive activity of subjects can establish the more progressive social relations. Old elements of mentality, in turn, inherent social inertia and conservatism. They can obstruct the new social relations establishment. Therefore, mentality has the contradictory nature, embodying the dual opposition of tradition and innovation. In the same time mentality is a social progress stimulating factor, and a factor that holds back excessively large and excessively rapid social changes. There is a difference between the mentality of the creators of innovative cultural meanings and the mentality of the masses. In the mentality of the creators that make up the intelligent elite of the society, the innovational component is more intense than the traditional. In the mentality of the masses is vice versa - the traditional component dominates over the innovational. There are many driving motives of the society development: changes in a way of material production, in the culture in general and in education in particular, in engineering, in science. But the most significant force, apparently, displays the changes in mentality that generate new forms of reproductive activity of the subject in the economic, political, social and mental spheres.

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