The 'background' and 'battlefield' in the struggle for justice : text analysis of trade union, feminist, and human rights media communications
Abstract
The study is a computer-assisted text analysis of corpora obtained from the web pages of nine volunteer, non-governmental organisations and interest groups. The analysis encompasses three areas of justice claims: trade unions (the relationship between employers and employees), feminism (the relationship between men and women), and human rights (the relationship between citizens, foreign nationals, and the state).
The aim of the study, based on Foucaultian concepts, is to determine whether media communications are structured by the formative impact of the discourse of claim-making or justice. The main findings relate both to the content and the structure of textual production.
First, the organisations examined do not make frequent use of normatively loaded words in their statements. The matter of justice is implicit in their texts.
Second, the structure of the statements, represented by the thirty most frequently used words, exhibits a common pattern in all three areas studied. At the one end of the 'statement spectrum', there are words referring to the social situation of the contesting actors ('background'), while at the opposite end, words used in reference to their 'battlefield' (claim-making, bargaining and decision making) appear.
This polar structure supports the hypothesis that the media communications of selected activist groups are influenced by the discourse of claim-making or justice.