Methodological Innovation in Study of Discursive Financialization: How to Analyze Ideologies in Economic Discourse(s)?
Abstract
Research question: The article presents an innovative methodology for assessment of discursive financialization. Discursive financialization accounts for processes in which institutional agents employ discursive strategies and practices to transform subjectivities (e. g. citizens to investors) and normalize certain set of values connected to economic behaviour of households.
The question raised is how to deal analytically with accounts of financialization in seemingly non-ideological contexts such as financial literacy manuals, or seemingly personal blogs of providing quasi-consulting advices for the homebuyers. More generally, the question is how to identify ideological accounts in discourses enacted by institutional agents with purpose to influence practices of informal actors (i. e. individuals and families).
Theoretical framework: Financialization as a concept has been employed to describe a set of discursive and material practices which at micro level (trans)form the subjectivity of individuals (Saegert, Fields and Libman 2009; Deville 2012; García-Lamarca and Kaika 2016) and on the structural level reshape public services such as housing, education or health system through marketization and commodification of goods (Aalbers 2009; Allon 2015; Druta and Ronald 2016). The presented method of analysis is inspired by the developments in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Structural Narrative Analysis (SNA) and combines the contextual and reflexive character of CDA (Fairclough and Wodak 1997) approach with a formal rigor of SNA (Labov 1972) which is reconsidered in the later (interactional) critique of its rigidity (De Fina 2009).
Methodology: Innovation in methodology was developed by considering CDA analytical procedures in context of their application on specific data. Dataset serving to develop the method comprised of a) guidebooks for households from the socialist era (1948-1989) of the former Czechoslovakia; b) contemporary manuals, issued by the Czech National Bank suggesting financially responsible behaviour of individuals, and c) blogs authored by the real estate agents that contain tips concerning searching for and buying a house.
Specifically, the method focuses on reliable identification of evaluative and descriptive accounts in texts under scrutiny. Features of utterances such as expressive/technical lexicon; practical/abstract orders or reference (Van Leeuwen 2008; Krzyzanowski 2016); naturalization/exceptionality of objects or practice is taken into consideration when constructing analytical units of texts (e. g. paragraphs).
These units of analysis are further considered in terms of a) their overall function in text i. e. to what extent form (moral) interpretation of text and b) their positionality in the text structure i. e. whether they occur as openings/endings and to what extent evaluative and descriptive elements alternate. Preliminary findings or conclusion: The article concludes that joining insights and principles of CDA and SNA may overcome the methodological difficulties in the study of ideologies in discourse of financialization.
These are namely the lack of contextual information (who are the readers, how they interact with texts, what linguistic and cognitive resources they use) and risk of essentialization and generalization of ideological accounts (e. g. subsuming ideological accounts under label of "neoliberalism"). Regarding substantial findings, the parts of texts which combine descriptive and evaluative features are potentially the most influential regarding the ideological transformations of readers.
In other words, the ideological transformative power is the most effective in the sections of texts which combine descriptive and evaluative elements, i. e. ideology is not self-evident, but instructions are morally framed and they enable a reader to become "a better person" if s/he embraces the directions. The novel contribution or significance of research: The contribution of the article is threefold.
Firstly, it brings seemingly contradictory approaches (CDA and SNA) together to overcome difficulties resulting from the lack of contextual knowledge during analysis and deals with shortcomings of CDA and SNA. By these shortcomings I mean SNA's lack of flexibility regarding interactional and intertextual dimension of analysis and CDA's lack of distinctiveness regarding different "amount" of ideological load in analyzed texts.
Secondly, the article provides substantial findings regarding the relation between public and private discourses of financialization in context in which institutional agents (are trying to) influence practices of households. Thirdly, it opens new ways for further research of discursive practices of institutionalized and informal agents intervening over the power to define the situations, set up the (moral) hierarchies of values or designate what accounts as "truth" or "fact".
Such research may prove valuable in area of performativity studies of economy as debated in cultural economy approaches or in area of (post)politics studies and social media spread of ideologies. The lastly mentioned issue is highly relevant in the contemporary so-called post-truth social media enacted space, where ideological and political is melted into seemingly non-ideological and apolitical accounts.
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