Citius, Altius, Fortius: Managers’ quest for heroic leader identities

In this paper, we draw on Foucault’s concept “governmentality” to show how a cohort of middle-aged senior managers who engaged in competitive endurance sports fabricated (avowed) “heroic” leader identities drawing on this repertoire of discursive resources. Neoliberalism constitutes a form of governmentality which encourages people to regard themselves as autonomous and to aspire to personal fulfillment by investing entrepreneurially in themselves as “human capital.” Healthism, which requires individuals be responsible for their own health and wellbeing, is one program by which this is accomplished. We analyze managers’ talk about themselves as people who self-examined, and sought continually to transform (improve) themselves, to avow identities as superior (heroic) leaders. Our study contributes to the literature on governmentality by showing how in neoliberalism “healthism” constructs managers as enterprising selves.

‘Bad choices’: Unintended pregnancy and abortion in nurses’ and counsellors’ accounts of providing pre-abortion counselling

Little research tackles healthcare providers’ experiences in conducting pre-abortion counselling sessions in circumstances where pregnant persons may request an abortion. We report on a study conducted in South Africa, in which two nurses and two counsellors were asked about how they conduct these counselling sessions. Using a synthetic narrative approach, we present these health workers’ micro-narratives about their motivations for providing abortion services, the purpose of the counselling, their information-giving practices, and whether and how third parties are included in the counselling. We highlight how these micro-narratives are premised on discursive resources that problematise unintended pregnancy and abortion. These resources enable and justify directive counselling that undermines pregnant peoples’ reproductive autonomy. We locate such directiveness within dominant anti-abortion discourse and call for training to reframe normative understandings of abortion.

Animation and myth of the hero as discursive device in Mexican political campaigns

A political campaign is a dialogical game that will always make a deployment of discursive resources that manage to generate empathy and in that way, obtain the vote of the people. Animation and myth are resources that politicians use in their favor to construct their messages. The reason? These elements are exceptional dialogical units thanks to their power of meaning and cohesion on a personal and social level. This research focus in two Mexican politicians Alfredo del Mazo and Andres Manuel López Obrador, who during their elections – 2017 and 2018, respectively – used digital animation to create a striking propaganda. The critical frame is based on Joseph Campbell, Rollo May, Carlos A. Scolari, Clifford Geertz and Edna Becerril.

Discursive work in resisting stereotypic representations of the Chinese among Chinese students

The negative effects of stereotyping arising from a victim’s acceptance and internalisation of stereotype identities are well-known. As stereotypes are created and maintained in discourse, understanding how targets of stereotyping employ discursive resources to resist the constraining structures of stereotypic identities imposed upon them can provide insight into the process of stereotyping and contribute to efforts to reduce the threat of stereotyping. We examined the strategies used by targets of stereotyping in contesting stereotypic representations of their social group through the mobilisation of a range of discourse strategies when presented with stereotyping attacks on the group. The findings revealed that stereotypes are subtle in nature and may not be easily recognised and hence, difficult to resist. Participants employed a number of discourse strategies to repair their fragmented self and group identities. However, in their attempt to maintain identity coherence, they ended up using stereotyping discourses themselves to devalue the perceived outgroup as well as subgroups they created within their own social group. The study highlights the complexity of stereotyping and its self-perpetuating character, and sheds light on the difficulty faced by targets of stereotyping discourse in reconciling their identities through intense discursive and identity work.

’Bursting With Activities‘: Impression Management as Edu-Business in School-Age Educare

Starting from an understanding of contemporary society as occupied with a dominant trend in image-boosting, the study explores how school-age educare centers engage in edu-business when promoting themselves through self-presentations on their websites. Using a qualitative method with an analytical attention directed towards unexpected angles, these self-presentations are problematized in terms of discursive impression management and with a focus on how messages are communicated by using different discursive resources to make the presentations trustworthy and selling. The edubusiness logic found on the websites is not primarily about competition between different school-age educare centers, but is instead about competition between compulsory school and school-age educare, as well as the choice to participate or not in the education offered in the school-age educare centers.

Entextualizing and contextualizing the status quo in domestic violence narratives

Victim/survivors of domestic violence are asked to tell their stories many times, in different contexts, and for different audiences. These stories are contextualized for the new context and audience at the same time that they become texts – entextualization – in that context. This article argues that narrative is produced via the co-processes of entextualization and contextualization (Silverstein & Urban, 1996). The co-processes of entextualization/contextualization in domestic violence narratives about staying and leaving violent relationships produce stories that comport with the status quo, as it is envisioned in the stories of the victim/survivors. Using staying/leaving stories of domestic violence victim/survivors, I show that entextualizations/contextualizations are (1) socioculturally saturated processes and (2) rhetorical arguments. I argue that narratives entextualize/contextualize events of domestic violence in ways that involve and comply with the status quo. Ultimately, these processes create discursive resources that reinforce domestic violence.

Alternative logics: A Discursive approach to normative and alternative organizing

The marketization of nonprofit organizations is often taken for granted as an inevitable fact. Drawing on the institutional logics and discursive resources perspective, I examine the organizing practices of two shelters that serve homeless women in the same area. In my analysis, I argue that a Discursive approach to institutional logics has much to offer in examining differences between nonprofit organizations as these organizations enact their organizational mission. Using comparative ethnographic methods, I examine how each organization sought to enact a social welfare institutional logic, and how that enactment resulted in more normative or alternative organizing practices. At one organization the social welfare institutional logic was translated into getting clients ‘back on track’ while at the other shelter it was translated as practicing ‘hospitality’. I argue that these translations served as primary discursive resources that both enabled preferred organizational practices and productively maintained tensions between conflicting Discourses.

‘If You Have to Say You Are, You Aren’t’

How are identities constituted in a post-truth context? To answer this question, the authors of this chapter take a paradox approach to identity, which can address the contradictions of a post-truth era. They show how the paradoxical tensions that actors experience serve as discursive resources for individual and collective identities. The authors assert that the greater the interrelatedness of paradoxical tensions evidenced in discourse, the more likely are they to knot in a dynamic interplay that may result in self-referential action of a contradictory or paradoxical nature. Drawing from the logic of extreme context research, the chapter examines the discourse of the post-truth presidency of Donald J. Trump to illustrate how identity knotting subverts managerial agency in identity construction.