The Blame Game: Economic Crisis Responsibility, Discourse and Affective Framings

Abstract

Key elements of discourse on the recent economic crisis are attributions of crisis responsibility. Such attributions are assumed to have consequences for audiences' thoughts and actions in domains relevant to the crisis. Although studies have suggested ways to conceptualize attributions of responsibility, their effects on social action remain poorly understood. This essay develops an empirically grounded theoretical model and methodological tool to reconstruct ideal-typical attributions of responsibility from discourse along the dimensions of attribution targets and attributed logics of action. It further proposes that combinations of these ideal types constitute affective framings that influence how the crisis is perceived and how an audience may act in crisis relevant domains.

Emotional roots of right-wing political populism

“…The divide between the unemployed and those in the labor force has become particularly salient in post-industrial societies where people’s blame for the deterioration in work shifts to often faceless and intractable macroeconomic and structural developments, as is evident, for example in recent media discourse on the financial crisis (von Scheve et al, 2014). Consequently, the unemployed become a salient target group to be resented, in addition to the political elite that is blamed for merely standing by.…”

Mass-mediated discourse on emotion, and the feeling rules it conveys: The case of the Sarrazin debate

“…By drawing our attention to how mass-mediated discourse on emotion disseminates feeling rules, this study also complements research that has focused on feeling rules in a variety of fields (Bröer and Duyvendak, 2009; Hochschild, 1983; Hochschild and Machung, 1989; Wingfield, 2010), but has neither studied feeling rules in mass-mediated discourse nor systematically considered mass-mediated discourse as an emotion-managing and emotion-sanctioning authority in the society at large (but see Ahmed, 2004; von Schewe, 2016). This seems quite surprising, given that Hochschild herself sees feeling rules as coming into play not only in professional workspaces and within specific groups, but also at the level of societal culture; she has written that it is ‘our culture’ that ‘invites women, more than men, to focus on feeling’ (1983: 57; see also Hochschild, 1990).…”

Disguised compliance or undisguised nonsense? A critical discourse analysis of compliance and resistance in social work practice

“…The use of intensification strategies adds to the constructed events which mark out everyday language practices and intensify the groups of meanings and identities assigned to both social workers and parents (see Gabriel, 2015;von Scheve et al 2014;Wetherell, 2012).…”

“…Questions of accountability and prevention, therefore, play an integral part in the social construction process of understanding what happened in order that lessons can be learned and future tragedies can be avoided. This process of deconstructing what happened always takes place after a crisis unfolds and is an aspect of how societies at large react after a tragedy has occurred (von Scheve et al 2014).…”