with details of the nature of the infringement. We will investigate the claim and if justified, we will take the appropriate steps.
This article formulates precise questions and 'rules of engagement' designed to advance our understanding of the role populism can and should play in the present political conjuncture, with potentially significant implications for critical management and organization studies and beyond. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and others working within the post-Marxist discourse theory tradition, we defend a concept of populism understood as a form of reason that centres around a claim to represent 'the people', discursively constructed as an underdog in opposition to an illegitimate 'elite'. A formal discursive approach to populism brings with it important advantages. For example, it establishes that a populist logic can be invoked to further very different political goals, from radical left to right, or from progressive to regressive. It sharpens too our grasp of important issues that are otherwise conflated and obfuscated. For instance, it helps us separate out the nativist and populist dimensions in the discourses of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Trump or the Front National (FN).Our approach to populism, however, also points to the need to engage with the rhetoric about populism, a largely ignored area of critical research. In approaching populism as signifier, not only as a concept, we stress the added need to focus on the uses of the term 'populism' itself: how it is invoked, by whom, and to what purpose and effect. This, we argue, requires that we pay more systematic attention to anti-populism and 'populist hype', and reflect upon academia's own relation to populism and anti-populism.
This chapter disentangles the concepts of populism and nationalism to shed light on how populism and nationalism have been combined in populist politics. Drawing on Essex-style discourse theory, it defines nationalism as a discourse structured around “the nation,” envisaged as a limited and sovereign community that exists through time and is tied to a certain space, and that is constructed through an in/out (member/non-member) opposition. Populism, by contrast, is structured around a down/up antagonism between “the people” as a large powerless group and “the elite” as a small and illegitimately powerful group, with populists claiming to represent “the people.” The chapter uses this theoretical distinction to analyse the intricate empirical connections between populism and nationalism. It pays particular attention to the articulation of exclusionary nationalism and populism in populist radical right politics, populist ways of formulating demands for national sovereignty, and the possibilities and limitations of a transnational populism.
When Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe published an elaborate version of their discourse theory inHegemony and Socialist Strategy(1985), they were met with fierce resistance by a unified front of traditional Marxists and anti-poststructuralists. The debates on post-Marxism dominated much of the book’s reception. This focus, combined with discourse theory’s rather abstract nature, its lack of clear methodological guidelines, and its more natural habitat of Political Studies, caused discourse theory to remain confined to this realm of Political Studies, despite the broad ideological definition of the political preferred by the authors. This article aims to revisit discourse theory and bring it into the realm of Media Studies. A necessary condition to enhance discourse theory’s applicability in Media Studies is the re-articulation of discourse theory into discourse theoretical analysis (DTA). DTA’s claim for legitimacy is supported in this article by two lines of argument. Firstly, a comparison with Critical Discourse Analyses (CDA) at the textual and contextual level allow us to flesh out the similarities — and more importantly — the differences between CDA and DTA. Secondly, DTA’s applicability is demonstrated by putting it to work in a case study, which focuses on the articulation of audience participation through televisional practices. Both lines of argument aim to illustrate the potential, the adaptability and the legitimacy of DTA’s move into media studies.
In a recent article in this journal, Rogers Brubaker formulates a critique of the distinction we make in our work between populism and nationalism, and further develops his own, thicker conceptualization of populism, which integrates the nationalist dimension without however totally conflating populism and nationalism. In this article, we briefly respond to the critique of our work, further clarifying and refining our plea for clearly distinct conceptualizations of populism and nationalism in dialogue with the considerations formulated by Rogers Brubaker. More broadly, we see this response as a chance to contribute to the further development of a framework that allows for the rigorous study of populism's pivotal as well as complex and often troubling relation with nationalism.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.