When a prelate objected to his Latin, Sigismund I is said to have declared “Ego sum Rex Romanorum, et supra grammaticam”. The Holy Roman Emperor was no linguist, but this simple idea —that linguistic rules are socially made, and that the exercise of social power is often carried out in the linguistic arena— is an essential part of modern sociolinguistics and informs many other fields. This blog chronicles, with no ambitions of comprehensiveness, my wanderings in them.

My research focuses on the nature of management discourse and the role it plays in legitimating, justifying and internalising contemporary capitalist ideology. I am not so much concerned with assessing the nature of this ideology —there are excellent works on the subject from scholars in sociology and critical management studies— as I am with understanding how it is strategically legitimated in discourse.

In my dissertation, I explored what genres, styles and themes are drawn upon and recontextualised in popular management writing to create the “expert system” of managerial knowledge. My current research uses corpus methods to analyse the conceptual models and principles of classification that the business community brings to public debates about development, sustainability and the environment, through a focus on Corporate Social Responsibility reports. This work attempts to combine Corpus Linguistics tools with more qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis, to reliably show how corporate reports introduce conceptual shifts and managerialist presuppositions in this disputed field. The first part of the project, currently underway, involves the compilation and tagging of a 1.2 million word corpus of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports from Swedish companies. A second stage will involve ethnographic analyses of producers and users of these materials.

I have a somewhat odd mix of interests, having arrived to discourse analysis from a background in philosophy and sociology. My main concern, globally speaking, has to do with the processes involved in legitimation. I acutely feel the need for serious interdisciplinary work on the matter, combining the insights of sociological and philosophical thought with more concrete psychological approaches to how people internalise the beliefs that lead them to assent and acquiesce to power. Few things say as much about the current condition of social science that the fact that these topics were hotly investigated a few decades ago, with fascinating experimental work such as that conducted by Zimbardo or Milgram, while today such research is almost non-existant.