Power and access in the public hearings of city council meetings

Abstract

This article investigates the public hearings of a northeast Ohio city’s council meetings. Using grounded theory, conversation analysis (CA), and critical discourse analysis (CDA), the article examines the discourse exchanges between government officials and the general public during public hearings, access to the legislative process leading up to the public hearings, and access to the agenda that controls the topics and method in which the meetings are run. Results demonstrate that although the public has access to the public hearings, their access is controlled and restricted not only during the hearings but in the entire legislative, agenda-setting, and decision-making processes preceding the hearings.

Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches? Deontics and epistemics in discussions of health and well-being in participatory workplace settings

“…Although a number of studies have focused on power in participatory decision-making, both within the workplace (Hardy and Leiba-O’Sullivan, 1998; Heery, 2015) and elsewhere (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Farkas, 2013), little research has explored how participants negotiate what can be considered a problem and what they can do about it. Based on the CA approach, the present study contributes to discussions of power in participation by demonstrating that even at the ‘micro’ level of problem and solution work, the possibilities that employees are ostensibly given for influencing their working conditions in participatory settings might be challenged due to asymmetries in the epistemic and deontic interactional domains.…”

One Disaster, Three Institutional Responses

“…The position of the mediator is situated in the middle ground to reconcile the competing views between the dominator and its challenger. Given their specific location in the larger social structure, each follows its own logic of what might be imperative, but all are bound by the overall legal and institutional arrangements through which their ideas as social transcript could be realized (Farkas 2013). The government, of course, is part of the powerful state and omnipresent in every aspect of Chinese society.…”

“…The coercive state's control, combined with the mimetic organizational responses when facing political and economic uncertainties in crisis, directs social actors to behave similarly and forms institutional isomorphism. The dominance of political power over social power is thus manifest in the process of discursive competition and interaction (Van Dijk 1989;Farkas 2013).…”

Differentiating Participation: Identifying and Defining Civic Capacities Used by Latino Immigrants in Participatory Budgeting

“…Some revealing exceptions include interdisciplinary research between planning and other fields (Radinsky et al 2017; Taylor 2020), where discourse analysis has been used to examine talk over longer time scales that describes and explains change in a range of variables, that can include knowledge, behaviors, or the focus of this study: participants’ civic skills/capacities. Given how few, if any, planning activities take place in one speech event, different time scales are needed to study how participants learn the norms and practices of participatory processes, or more specifically the “interactions that occur between citizens and government officials participating in the official work of the city” (Farkas 2013:24).…”