Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the representations of male and female social actors within the subversive gendered discourse of “equal opportunities for men and women” in Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks.

From the methodological perspective, this study fused van Leeuwen’s (2003) “Social Actor Network Model” and Sunderland’s (2004) “Gendered Discourses Model”.

Data obtained from this study showed the subversive gendered discourse of “equal opportunities” was supported through such representations within a narrow perspective in line with dominant gender ideologies in Iran. The findings suggest the resistance against such subversive gendered discourse in Iranian EFL textbooks underpins gender norms and religious ideologies existing in Iran.

Such representations of male and female social actors in school textbooks show inclusive education and the discourse of “equal opportunities” have yet to be realised in education system of many countries, including Iran.

This study compares filmic and televisual representations of fictional black presidents to white Americans’ reactions to the advent of the United States’s first African American president. My main goal is to determine if there is convergence between these mediated representations and whites’ real-world representations of Barack Obama. I then weigh the evidence for media pundits’ speculations that Obama owes his election to positive portrayals of these fictional heads of state.

The film and television analyses examine each black president’s social network, personality, character traits, preparation for office, and leadership ability. I then compare the ideological messages conveyed through these portrayals to the messages implicated in white Americans’ discursive and pictorial representations of Barack Obama.

Both filmic and televisual narratives and public discourses and images construct and portray black presidents with stereotypical character traits and abilities. These representations are overwhelmingly negative and provide no support for the argument that there is a cause–effect relationship between filmic and televisual black presidents and Obama’s election victory.

Neither reel nor real-life black presidents can elude the representational quagmire that distorts African Americans’ abilities and diversity. Discourses, iconography, narratives, and other representations that define black presidents through negative tropes imply that blacks are incapable of effective leadership. These hegemonic representations seek to delegitimize black presidents and symbolically return them to subordinate statuses.

As a result of the global financial crisis, the meaning of action has reemerged as a central focus of the current debates. This paper seeks to analyze the meaning given by managers to their contribution to the strategy development process.

The core underlying assumptions in this research are that social phenomena such as strategy are determined by representations shaped by discourse and that education is a major vector for promoting strategic discourses. Through the concepts of social representation and strategy lens, the paper examines the beliefs and paradigms underlying the strategy development process. Based on a sample of 1,033 managers, this research constructs a holistic typology of the social representations of strategy among managers.

Four different groups of social representations of strategy are identified and characterized. Links are established between these groups and a range of socio-demographic, social, occupational and structural variables.

By clarifying various paradigms and providing reference points, this research encourages increased awareness of these paradigms among managers in order to promote emancipation from them.

The study is primarily synthesis-based at a theoretical level, but also in the analysis and interpretation of the role of strategists. It also helps to close the gap between research, teaching and practice.

This paper aims to present insights into representations of discursive trust in asymmetrical business‐to‐business relationships in food chains. The purpose is to understand and define the interorganisational trust in business relationships by viewing these inductive findings in light of the relevant literature.

Discourse analysis of interviews with individuals in the food processing industry is used to determine different representations of trust.

Three representations of trust emerged from the interviews. They indicate that trust is a complex and dynamic phenomenon. The representations found were: a key operational element; recognition of context; and relationship resource stemming from individual bonds and personal characters. Trust is associated with control and context in the food industry as well as with a business's size and its customer reputation.

The implications for food chain participants and other stakeholder groups are discussed to emphasise further the research on trust. However, because the discursive representations are context‐specific, changes in economic, market or relationship power situations can prompt new and different representations.

This paper provides complementary insights into the challenges that business relationships face in their daily processes. The results can be used to recognise and analyse the dynamic and asymmetrical contexts of business relationships and build the competitive advantages of businesses. Trust can actively be used as a tool to distinguish a business from its competitors.

This research increases understanding of the representations of trust in an asymmetrical food business context and offers some new analytical tools for the current trust research.

Within the context of a broader project that analysed CSR practices, this paper seeks to explain a methodological approach to web‐based research that the authors call “hypertext ethnography”. This approach aims to enable the paper to focus on the relations between three publicly listed corporations in Australia and the recipients of a selection of their CSR programs.

Informed by ethnographic principles, hypertext ethnography provided the research protocols and analytical frame that were used to deconstruct the meanings in web texts that represented the connections between the corporations and their CSR stakeholders.

The corporations and the stakeholders articulated their perspectives on CSR in affirmative ways, apparently to maintain their positive benefactor‐recipient relations. While these discourses held the potential to mask more complex tensions in their relationships, the web was found to provide a rich hypertextual story that had a vastly broader scope than the self‐contained corporate and stakeholder agendas.

The research approach presented here provides a useful first approximation to the study of CSR, through self representations, and offers a rigorous critical understanding of the practice of CSR. The approach can achieve much with only limited resources, but it could be developed through on‐site ethnographic research.

Because image‐conscious corporations are often reluctant to participate in CSR research, the unobtrusive approach of hypertext ethnography can provide access to important data for the researcher. This is especially significant in the case of critical research, and when the characteristics of the CSR contributions or stakeholder relations are to be investigated.

This paper offers a new way for approaching the study of CSR, by taking advantage of rich sources of data that are publicly available. Treating the web texts as primary data and critically analysing them following rigorous research protocols, enable new opportunities for understanding the public representations of CSR.

The purpose of this paper is to create knowledge on how Google and Google search are discursively constructed as a political subject suitable or not suitable for governing in the debate regarding the Right to be Forgotten ruling (RTBF).

A total of 28 texts are analysed using a Foucauldian discourse analysis focussing on political problematisations in the media and in blogs.

Google is conceptualised as a commercial company, a neutral facilitator of the world and as a judge of character. The discourse makes visible Google’s power over knowledge production. The individual being searched is constructed as a political object that is either guilty or innocent, invoking morality as a part of the policy. The ruling is framed as giving individuals power over companies, but the power still lies within Google’s technical framework.

The ruling opens up an empirical possibility to critically examine Google. The value of the study is the combination of focus on Google as a political subject and the individual being searched to understand how Google is constructed in the discourse.

This paper offers a critical discussion to contribute to sociological work by emphasizing deconstruction(s) of the markers of gendered and racialized borders and epistemological injustice(s) in theory and practice of contemporary global frames of representation and women's intersectional identities and rights. Through a postcolonial, situated feminist approach, the theoretical framework aims to scope and review literature from the South and North.

The research employs a mixed-methodology of a survey paper and media critical discourse analysis of media monitoring frames of Egyptian women's rights post–Arab spring. The content, layout and imageries produced by representations are assessed to explore whether there are lingering subtle and blatant hints of continued orientalism in knowledge canons.

The underlying causes for misconceptions and reductionist sociopolitical attitudes may be styled by patriarchal and orientalist imposition and are highly found to be somewhat maintained by persistent Western-centric epistemologies claiming to define or speak for the so-called other. The above-mentioned structures are evidently channelled through languages which essentialize and control women of the South, urging for further research in knowledge canons which calls oppressive frames into question.

More feminist contributions from non-Western gazes are needed to fill gaps in canons of knowledge and deconstruct patriarchal and colonial codes which impose inequalities on women as seen through the survey paper of theoretical representation and media politics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resurfaced challenges to gender equality and gender relations both worldwide and in Norway. There have been massive public discussions on social media platforms, highlighting the potential of analysing public discourses in a non-reactive manner (Rauchfleisch et al., 2021). Further, discourses from social media may affect cultural representations and broad discourses in society (Rambukkana, 2015), such as that related to gender. In this article, by studying the Norwegian Twitter users' discussion on gender as related to COVID-19 pandemic, the authors will examine the everyday gendered discourses.

Data for this project were collected from the social media platform Twitter. The authors conducted the search on 16th November 2020, and that resulted in a total of 485 results, inclusive of both original tweets and replies. The data were analysed qualitatively using thematic analysis.

The thematic analysis of the tweets revealed three main categories which were mirrored in recognisable and widespread discourses about gender: (1) stereotypical gendered behaviours, (2) construction of masculinities and (3) othering. The authors argued that the stereotypes on gendered behaviour, traits and ideology together attribute to the maintenance of unequal gender structures.

This article explored discourses on gender on Twitter, the networked public sphere of Norway during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that discourses both reflect and shape social configurations, they have the power to shape gender realities. With the transcendence of social media across geographic boundaries, the authors’ findings are relevant both for Norway and globally.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2022-0482

The retail sector is not largely studied in Italy. The study offers a comparison between youth retail shift work in Milan and London. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the one hand on youth work and on the other hand to the debate on agency and structural factors in life planning, representation of the future and the transition to adulthood, observed in the United Kingdom's and Italian labour market. Even if the second one is a Southern European Country, these contexts are both characterised by a service-oriented economy and the widespread of precarious and flexible jobs.

Qualitative methods were used: one year of ethnographic observation, 50 interviews and two focus groups were carried out between 2015 and 2018 with retail workers and trade unionists. The contexts are Corso Buenos Aires in Milan, Italy, and Oxford Street in London, United Kingdom. Analysing young workers' discourses, the author identifies narratives that allow to grasp their present agency and imagined future.

Observing the crisis of the narrative (Sennett, 2020) allows to highlight the social consequences of working times on young workers' everyday life and future. The author argues that young workers struggle with the narrative of their present everyday life and the representation of the future. This relates to the condition of time alienation due to the flexible schedules and the fast pace of work in retail, both affecting the work-life balance.

The social consequences of flexible schedules in retail and fast fashion sector, which are new issues not yet sufficiently explored, are here investigated from the perspective of young workers. The study is focussed on the representations of young people working with customers in social and economic contexts characterised by flexible schedules and the deregulation of shop openings, the so-called 24/7 service society, not largely investigated in the sociological scientific literature, above all in the Italian context.

Isu diskriminasi antara kaum telah tular di media sosial berikutan isu pemberian vaksin secara jumpa terus yang mula dibukakan di Pusat Vaksinasi Stadium Tertutup pada hari Jumaat, 24 September 2021. Jumlah orang ramai yang ingin mengambil vaksin telah melebihi jangkaan sehingga menyebabkan keadaan menjadi tidak terkawal dan berlakunya pelanggaran Prosedur Pengendalian Standard (SOP). Kajian ini dijalankan untuk membincangkan isu diskriminasi kaum yang berlaku semasa gelombang kedua pandemik COVID-19. Penelitian menggunakan metode kualitatif secara deskriptif. Data yang diperolehi daripada komen-komen dalam halaman Brunei Dot Com, dan Facebook ini seterusnya dianalisis menggunakan model tiga dimensi Fairclough (1992). Hasil kajian mendapati kesemua komen telah menunjukkan sikap diskriminasi dalam kalangan masyarakat Brunei secara sedar ataupun tidak. Isu diskriminasi ini bukan sahaja dapat dilihat dari sudut representasi linguistik, tetapi juga penghasilan dan pewahanaan wacana berkaitan pada halaman Brunei Dot Com, dan Facebook. Kajian ini juga menunjukkan bahawa wacana bukan saja mampu dibentuk masyarakat tetapi juga membentuknya.

The issue of racial discrimination concerning the commencement of walk-in vaccination at the Indoor Stadium Vaccination Centre on Friday, 24 September 2021 was widely addressed in the social media. Chaos ensued as an influx of people attended the centre and violated the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). This paper examines the issue of racial discrimination during the second wave of COVID-19 pandemic in Brunei. As a qualitative-descriptive study, data obtained from Brunei Dot Com, and Facebook page, were analysed using Fairclough's (1992) three-dimensional approach. Findings have shown presence of discriminatory attitudes among the local community displayed as deliberately or unintentionally. This is manifested in its linguistic representations, discourse production and consumption in the selected Brunei Dot Com and Facebook pages. This study indicates that a discourse is not only capable of shaping but is also shaped by the community.