Discursive Legitimation of a Contested Actor Over Time: The Multinational Corporation as a Historical Case (1964–2012)

MNCs-related controversies within their historical context

We began with a thematic analysis, which is argued to be a first dimension of a discourse-analytic approach (Wodak, 2001) and a commended way to start critically oriented media analysis (Vaara et al., 2006). This analysis led to an understanding of the specific contents of the controversies. In line with our historical approach, we then turned to secondary sources to further understand the different controversies within their particular historical context (Rowlinson et al., 2014). In particular, we relied on various types of literature: business history (Fieldhouse, 1986; Kobrin, 2005), contemporary history (Eckes, 2011; Mazower, 1998), historical accounts produced and disseminated by the UN (Hamdani & Ruffing, 2015; Sagafi-nejad, 2008), left- and right-wing advocacy journalism (Klein, 1999, 2007; Norberg, 2003), sociology of globalization (Fiss & Hirsch, 2005); transnational law (Murphy, 2005; Stanley, 1980), business ethics and corporate social responsibility (Kell, 2013; Levy & Kaplan, 2008), and international relations (Van de Meerssche, 2006; Vernon, 1998). For the most recent historical developments after 2006, however, it was difficult to find relevant publications. We therefore relied on newspaper reporting on anti-capitalist protest activities from The New York Times and The Guardian.

Inductively identifying distinct periods or phases

Having interpreted the different controversies within their broader socio-political and historical context, we inductively arranged them into distinct periods or phases (Rowlinson et al., 2014). Understanding phases as ‘relatively distinct and coherent clusters of activity, temporally bracketed, and organized around common themes’ (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2009, p. 184), we identified three distinct phases in the discursive legitimation of MNCs. They emerged as we noted that different types of controversies situated in a particular socio-political and historical context came to the fore, along with different actors questioning the legitimation of MNCs. We further noted how in each phase the intensity of legitimation differed.

Identifying suitable start and end points of historical periods is however challenging as different researchers may judge the same events differently on their significance (Rowlinson et al., 2014; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2009). In our study, we decided on the turning points for the following reasons. The first phase ranges from 1964 until 1988. We decided on 1964 as starting point as it was then that the first article on opposition against MNCs appeared. The phase ends in 1988, when the final article about the controversy of that time was published. We then noted that references to MNCs’ controversies subsided almost completely for about seven years (transitional phase between 1989–1994). The second phase ranges from 1995 until 2005. As the Brent Spar case in 1995 clearly triggered this phase, we took 1995 as starting date. The year 2006 was a transition year, with no articles on controversies. From 2007 on, we noticed the start of a new phase, coinciding with the Great Recession.

Table 1 gives an overview of our periodization regarding MNC-related controversies over time: ‘The MNC within the North-South dialogue’, ‘The MNC in the anti-globalist era’, and ‘The MNC and the Great Recession’. Categorizing our data set of 145 magazine articles along these three phases, we found 61 articles between 1964 and 1988, 45 articles between 1995 and 2005, and 34 articles between 2007 and 2012. Five articles appeared during the transitional phase (1989–1994), mentioning some form of opposition against MNCs, however, without substantial discursive legitimation.

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Table 1.

Periodization regarding MNC-related controversies during the current wave of globalization.

Characteristics of the phase	1964–1988The MNC within the North-South dialogue	1995–2005The MNC in the anti-globalist era	2007–2012The MNC and the Great Recession
Focus of the controversy	Need for universal codes of conducts	Societal calls for moral responsibility of MNCs	Corporate involvement in tax evasion
Actors involved	Governments of developing countries Governments of developed countries Supranational organizations Critical academics Western labor unions	Non-governmental organizations Anti-globalization activists Governments of developing countries	Non-governmental organizations Governments of developed countries Anti-corporate activists Supranational organizations
Intensity	Slightly visible with temporary peak during the 1970s	Highly visible – polemic tone, cover pages, long articles, and cartoons	Slightly visible – news on MNCs overshadowed by global economic crisis

Discursive legitimation strategies

Having distinguished three phases of MNCs’ controversies, we performed for each phase a textual analysis to study how MNCs were discursively legitimized. We initially relied on Van Leeuwen’s ‘grammar of legitimation’ (Van Leeuwen, 2007; Van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999) as his model of discursive strategies was specifically developed for legitimation as well as later used by studies on discursive legitimation of MNCs and journalistic practices (Vaara & Tienari, 2008; Vaara et al., 2006). When making sense of our material from this model, we found three legitimation strategies that The Economist extensively used: ‘authorization’, ‘rationalization’ and ‘moral evaluation’. While the first two strategies well matched onto our empirical material, the latter strategy of moral evaluation required further refinement. Going back and forth between our data and other theoretical notions on discursive strategies, we distinguished two sub-types of moral evaluation: ‘amoralization’ (Crane, 2000) and ‘improvement’ (Sillince & Brown, 2009).

In addition to these four strategies of legitimizing MNCs’ activities, we saw that The Economist tended to rely on additional discursive strategies to de-legitimize the opponents’ critiques. To interpret these strategies, we again used an abductive way of interpreting which led to the distinguishing of three additional types of legitimation strategy: ‘a predicational strategy’, ‘a referential strategy’, and ‘refutation by wit’. The two first strategies are types of discursive strategies which belong to the classification by Wodak (2001, p. 73) involving ‘the positive self- and negative other presentation’ and turned out to be very useful for interpreting how The Economist portrayed the opponents of MNCs. ‘Refutation by wit’, a classical rhetorical strategy, was used to further undermine the credibility of the opponents through the wittily reduction of their particular arguments to absurdity (Corbett & Connors, 1999). Table 2 presents a definition and illustrations of the seven discursive legitimation strategies.

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Table 2.

Discursive strategies to construct a sense of legitimacy for MNCs.

Discursive strategies	Definition	Example
Authorization	referring to the authority of actors and individuals in whom institutional authority of some kind is vested (Van Leeuwen, 2007)	‘And the UN study confirms that multinationals help the balance of payments of developing countries’ (11-22-1975)
Rationalization	referring to the utility of specific actions based on knowledge claims that are accepted in a given context as relevant (Vaara & Tienari, 2008, Van Leeuwen, 2007)	‘Multinationals have created 2m jobs in the third world, trivial in relation to its workforce but appreciable set against its 54m known unemployed in 1973’ (11-22-1975)
Amoralization	pointing to the moral neutrality of business activities; not making an event the subject of moral reflection (Crane, 2000)	‘Whom to blame for all this darting through loopholes? Mr Levin chided companies for practising ‘tax alchemy’. But they are bound to exploit weaknesses in the rules, if only to avoid putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage’ (09-29-2012)
Improvement	comparing between a worse and a better position, thereby implying a laudable movement from the one to the other (Sillince & Brown, 2009, based on Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969)	‘Many big companies take moral issues more seriously than ever’ (07-20-1996)
Predicational strategy	labelling the opponents negatively through evaluative attributions of negative traits (Wodak, 2001)	‘They [MNCs] have been the easy targets of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which understand perfectly well the value to themselves, in prestige and membership, of running a campaign which succeeds in humbling a mighty corporation’ (01-29-2000)
Referential strategy	constructing previous opponents as belonging to the ‘in-group’ of proponents (Wodak, 2001)	‘The battle lines separating hard-nosed champions of profit from rock-throwing demonstrators are fading. Partnerships between firms and NGOs are springing up. Oxfam, an anti-poverty group, works closely with multinationals such as Unilever, a consumer-goods giant.’ (07-20-2007)
Refutation by wit	reducing the opponent’s argument(s) to absurdity through sophisticated humor (Corbett & Connors, 1999)	‘The costs for ExxonMobil to reduce its production of fuels that may contribute to climate change, as Greenpeace demands, would be huge: arguably, shutting itself down. Even though environmentalists invaded its offices dressed in tiger suits (and though rivals such as BP do talk to NGOs), Exxon has refused to negotiate on this. … But increasingly, firms may conclude that if they are going to have to live with NGOs, they need to know which ones will play fair. Wise firms should talk to those – and leave the others to their tiger costumes’ (08-09-2003)

Whereas discursive studies often rely on frequencies to indicate the importance of particular strategies (Joutsenvirta, 2013; Joutsenvirta & Vaara, 2009, 2015), we decided not to do so as, in our case, the importance of a discursive strategy is also influenced by its visibility. The visibility of the articles varied enormously, ranging from cover pages, first articles of an issue, multiple page articles with cartoons to small articles in the middle or end of an issue. Also, articles appearing right after specific incidents which triggered new or fed existing controversies deserve special attention, as they were written at a time when the need for legitimation was particularly high. So, the importance of discursive strategies is hard to capture by frequencies. Rather, the strategies we present here are the ones that emerged from our interpretive analysis as the most visible throughout the magazine in the last 50 years.

Controversy on codes of conduct

In the first phase, between 1964 and 1988, the legitimation of MNCs was mainly questioned by governments of developing countries, critical academics, and Western labor unions who raised concerns about MNCs’ uncontrolled power and initiated discussion on the need for universal codes of conduct for MNCs. During this period, The Economist articles often mentioned this internationally shared concern that MNCs could act against the interests of nation-states by abusing their size and international structure. Other authors (Fieldhouse, 1986; Kobrin, 2005; Vernon, 1998) also mention this controversy, indicating it increased during the 1970s. The following excerpt from The Economist satirically summarized the various issues surrounding MNCs in those years:

It fiddles its accounts. It avoids or evades its taxes. It rigs its intra-company transfer prices. It is run by foreigners, from decision centres thousands of miles away. It imports foreign labour practices. It doesn’t import foreign labour practices. It overpays. It underpays. It competes unfairly with local firms. It is in cahoots with local firms. It exports jobs from rich countries. It is an instrument of rich countries’ imperialism. The technologies it brings to the third world are old-fashioned. No, they are too modern. It meddles. It bribes. Nobody can control it. It wrecks balances of payments. It overturns economic policies. It plays off governments against each other to get the biggest investment incentives.

This detailed characterization of MNC criticism contained already an explicit reference to the ‘race to the bottom’ theory as well as to the relation between the developing and developed world. This relation is an important aspect of the historical context in which this controversy is embedded. At that time, the economic dominance of the industrialized world was questioned by a loose coalition of 77 developing countries within the UN General Assembly (the Group of 77), who argued for a ‘New International Economic Order’ with a more fair distribution of welfare across the globe (Eckes, 2011; Sagafi-nejad, 2008; Stanley, 1980; Van de Meerssche, 2006). In this so-called North-South dialogue, much attention went to MNCs as many developing countries felt threatened to be exploited by powerful and predominantly American and Western European MNCs, which were often considered as the main instruments of neocolonialism (Eckes, 2011; Van de Meerssche, 2006).

Within this political-historical context, various supranational entities (e.g. ILO, UN, OECD, EC) showed the intention to compose codes of conduct for MNCs (Murphy, 2005; Sagafi-nejad, 2008). During the 1970s and the 1980s, there was much argument over the content of these guidelines, with some actors (Western labor unions, third world countries’ political leaders) arguing them to be mandatory whereas others (mostly certain governments of developed countries) favored a voluntary approach. The underlying tenet of this debate referred to the question of the most suitable global economic model. For actors advocating global free market capitalism, MNCs were the major force in driving up the global economy, whereas for actors supporting a regulated economic model, universal codes of conduct were necessary to avoid abuse.

Also The Economist reported on the first voluntary code of conduct for MNCs (06-26-1976), which was published in 1976 by the OECD. While the magazine was in favor of business, its attitude regarding a universal code of conduct for MNCs was rather ambiguous. It occasionally supported the idea – the OECD guidelines were considered to be too weak – but also expressed skepticism. At the end of the 1980s, a time characterized by increasing hostility of the US administration towards a UN code of conduct for MNCs (Sagafi-nejad, 2008), the magazine published a polemic article refuting the idea of a UN code (November 1988). With this point of view, The Economist joined the side of other influentially business media like the Wall Street Journal, who had claimed that the UN was too hostile to the business world in its attempts to draft a code of conduct for MNCs (Sagafi-nejad, 2008).

Legitimation through discursive antagonism

Analyzing the discursive strategies within this phase, we note that explicit debate and refutation of criticism – which we call ‘discursive antagonism’ – were dominant. In particular, to counter the opposition, The Economist constructed a positive actor image of MNCs that was opposite to the race to the bottom arguments, as well as a negative actor image of the critics that undermined their credibility.

Controversy of morally irresponsible scandals

A second phase in which MNCs’ sense of legitimacy was questioned ranged from 1995 until 2005. During this time, Western NGOs and anti-globalist street protesters managed to bring the moral responsibility of MNCs into the public debate by revealing corporate involvement in a series of highly mediatized scandals. The Economist started to discuss this new-anti-corporate activism in 1995, when the Royal Dutch Shell Group became the subject of a large-scale media controversy resulting from its plan to dispose the oil storage ‘Brent Spar’ in the Atlantic Ocean and its failure to take a clear public stance against the Nigerian military junta after executing nine environmental and anti-Shell activists from the local Ogoni minority. The significance of these incidents can hardly be overestimated. From 1995 onwards, corporate misbehavior became the subject of large-scale and highly visible anti-globalization protests in the Western world – at least 40 000 anti-globalization protesters took the streets in Seattle, during the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization in 1999 (Fiss & Hirsch, 2005; Kobrin, 2005).

Different from the previous phase is that The Economist published highly visible articles on MNCs. Whereas the controversy over MNCs in terms of codes of conduct had not reached a large audience in Western industrial world, Western NGOs and anti-globalization activists – probably because they have a stronger discursive power position (Banerjee, 2010) than the governments of developing countries – managed to make moral responsibility of MNCs the subject of an intense public debate. This was reflected in The Economist articles – lengthy, cartoons and pictures, some on the cover page, explicitly aiming to support the MNC against its most ‘merciless’ critics who accused MNCs of despoiling the environment, human rights abuses, sweatshop and child labor, unfair competition, and offshoring production.

Legitimation through discursive antagonism

In this heated anti-globalist era, we note the continuation of discursive antagonism as the dominant form of legitimation. Yet, compared to the previous phase, the explicit refutation strategies became extensive and polemic. This was exemplified in the construction of multiple, rather than only one, positive actor images of MNCs and the almost aggressive undermining of opponents’ credibility.

Legitimation through discursive co-optation

While discursive antagonism was the dominant form of legitimation in this phase, we noticed that a supplementary form of legitimation – which we call ‘discursive co-optation’ – appeared. In particular, additional legitimatizing occurred through staging previous opponents as ‘becoming partners’ of MNCs.

Controversy of tax evasion

A third and last phase, between 2007 and 2012, mainly centered around the controversy of large-scale tax evasion by MNCs. We understand this controversy as situated within the recent ‘Great Recession’, when a new wave of large-scale anti-capitalist criticism such as the ‘Indignants’ movement in Spain and the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests in New York emerged. Compared to the anti-globalization era, however, this mass protest is less focused on economic globalization and MNCs but more on a broad number of shared concerns regarding wealth inequality, large-scale unemployment, the deterioration of democracy, political corruption, and all kinds of austerity measures taken by governments. Meanwhile, bankers, financial institutions, credit rating agencies and international entities like the IMF seem to have joined the MNCs as the ‘evil faces’ of corporate capitalism. Nevertheless, The Economist regularly mentioned societal opposition against MNCs related to the negative environmental impact of palm oil production, executive payment, genetic modification, mining, sustainable supply chain management, resource nationalism in Africa, MNC-restructuring, oil production in Africa and Latin America, and corporate tax evasion. This latter was the most recurring MNC-related controversy during the third phase.

That the ‘old’ issue of tax evasion by MNCs, already discussed by The Economist in 1964, came to the foreground is understandable given the civil and political resistance against the austerity measures taken by the governments of various European countries facing growing public debt. The wide-spread tax optimization strategies of MNCs are increasingly considered to contribute to the budget deficits of the European governments. This controversy raises – as in the previous phase – questions about corporate moral responsibility with media reports on Apple, Amazon, Google and Starbucks (The Economist, 12-15-2012). Next to street protests, these celebrity firms were also formally interrogated by the British Parliament and the American Congress (The Guardian, 11-13-2012; The New York Times, 05-20-2013). Meanwhile, the OECD declared to reflect on new international rules for corporate taxation to close the loopholes in the tax system which MNCs are abusing today (The Guardian, 02-12-2013 and 07-19-2013).

Legitimation as an interplay between discursive antagonism and discursive co-optation

As controversies over MNCs became less prominent, so did flagrant legitimation attempts in The Economist. Discursive antagonism – although still present in the form of the actor image of MNCs as a morally neutral actor – lost its initial prominence and gradually, discursive co-optation, as evidenced in the last decade, became more important.

Discursive antagonism

Our study suggests that in the beginning, a sense of legitimacy is maintained through explicit dispute, confrontation, and refutation of criticism, which we label ‘discursive antagonism’. To counter the first controversy, the legitimation process primarily denies the critique and discredits the criticism and its advocates, hereby reproducing, even reinforcing existing hostilities with opponents. In particular, considering the actor images in our study, we suggest that discursive antagonism consists of counter-narratives that aim to produce a positive image of the actor under scrutiny which is opposite to the criticism as well as a negative image of the opponents to undermine their credibility. Inspired by sociological work on civil discourse (Alexander & Smith, 1993; Jacobs, 1996), we understand these two counter-narratives of discursive antagonism as the construction of a binary structure to ‘purify’ the actor under scrutiny and to ‘pollute’ the most prominent critics.

Purifying one’s own image, the first aspect of discursive antagonism, is done by constructing an actor image that portrays the self as ‘heroic … rational and controlled in their motivations, open and trusting in their relationships, and regulated by impersonal rules in their organizational activities’ (Jacobs, 1996, pp. 1244–1245). In our study, such purification of the self is illustrated by the actor image of ‘MNCs a source of welfare’, casted to counter the criticism of that time that portray MNCs as responsible for ‘the race to the bottom’.

To construct such antipodal actor image, the traditional discursive strategies such as authorization, rationalization and moral evaluation were found to be all suitable. This is unlike previous discursive legitimation studies (Joutsenvirta, 2013; Vaara & Tienari, 2008), which tend to treat the various discursive strategies of Van Leeuwen and colleagues as fundamentally different ways to shape legitimacy. Yet, our study indicates otherwise. Considering the use of discursive strategies over time, we suggest that they, irrespectively of their different foci, can serve the same aim, i.e. producing a particular actor image within a cultural meaning system.

Next to purifying one’s own image, we propose that discursive antagonism is characterized by polluting one’s opponents, a kind of legitimation process that previous research on legitimation within management and organization studies have not yet attended to. The pollution or discrediting of actors’ opposition is done by constructing an actor image that portrays those opponents as ‘irrational and uncontrolled in their motivations, secretive and deceitful in their relationships, and arbitrary and factionalized in their organizational activities’ (Jacobs, 1996, p. 1245). In our study, the construction of a polluting actor image occurred through the discursive strategy of predication (Wodak, 2001) and the rhetorical strategy of refutation by wit (Corbett & Connors, 1999).

The predication strategy is suitable to pollute as opponents can be constructed as ‘irrational’ through assigning various negative traits to them. In our study, this was done by portraying governments of developing countries, NGOs and anti-globalists as self-interested, unreliable, narrow-minded, unreasonable and naïve. These negative traits do not only stage opponents as antagonists but also in ways that undermine their identity and authority position (Vaara, 2013). They are positioned as actors with low moral character, hereby destabilizing their criticism and rendering them less power to speak (cf. Lefsrud & Meyer, 2012). The polluting of opponents further occurred by refutation by wit, a rhetorical tool that in legitimation studies has remained absent. Yet, it is a very powerful device to challenge a particular thesis because as quoted by Corbett and Connors (1999, p. 280) ‘ridicule is the test of truth’. Parody, sarcasm and irony can serve as effective tools to further pollute opponents’ actor images as these rhetorical techniques can wittily reduce a well-presented argument to absurdity (Corbett & Connors, 1999).

Discursive co-optation

Different from discursive antagonism, ‘discursive co-optation’ is a form of legitimation that engages with criticism by strategically appropriating previous opponents. Since Selznick (1949) identified co-optation as a process of absorbing challenging elements into established decision-making structures, processes of co-optation have been discussed in various contexts but central to co-optation is the idea of influencing and neutralizing the opposition (Oliver, 1991). Our discursive perspective similarly points to the appropriation of opponents, but highlights the textual strategy to do so. In particular, we note that the referential strategy serves as an effective tool, categorizing challenging actors no longer as opponents or belonging to the out-group but as partners whose goals aligns with its own goals. While our study indicates only referential strategy as a way to construct discursive co-optation, the work by Livesey (2002) indicates another textual strategy. In her study of ExxonMobile’s advertorials on climate change, Livesey (2002, p. 128). sees ‘co-opting’ as strategically appropriating ‘the very language and rhetorical position of the environmental movement’. Multiple textual strategies of discursive co-optation are thus possible and future research may want to further explore how discursive co-opting can be produced, hereby appropriating criticism for incorporation into capitalist systems (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005).

Our study highlights discursive co-opting as strategically emphasizing dialogue and collaboration with challenging actors and this is likely to maintain as sense of legitimacy for two reasons. First, strategically staging previous opponents as becoming partners may alter the public perceptions about the intensity of the opposition. Successfully appropriating the mainstream, moderate groups within the opposition allows corporations to stage more progressive elements employing confrontational tactics as quibblers and radicals with unreasonable demands, which may result in these latter’s marginalization (Winston, 2002). Second, and maybe even more important, discursive co-optation through partnership may indirectly contribute to the purification of one’s own image. By representing former opponents differently, emphasizing dialogue and partnership, this discursive process tends to contribute in a suggestive and implicit way to an idealized image of the self. In our study, the co-opting of NGOs implicitly suggests an image of MNCs as morally responsible actors. It hints at a positive evolution of the MNC’s morality over time, the injustice of past criticism on MNCs, and/or the existence of shared interests between global business, the developing world, and civil society in sustainable economic development issues. This suggestive aspect of discursive co-optation supports Vaara and colleagues’ (2006) position that the ‘unsaid’ elements in texts may be also relevant for discursive analyses of legitimation.

As co-optation of opposition is considered to enhance legitimacy (Baur & Schmitz, 2012; Dowling & Pfeffer, 1975; Oliver, 1991), it is rather surprising that its discursive aspects have not yet been discussed in discursive legitimation research within management and organization studies. Yet, the neglect of historical context by previous research might precisely the reason for that. Considering the periodization in our study, we propose that discursive co-optation only arises when the discursive position of challenging actors has changed because of historical evolutions that make discursive co-optation possible. For instance, co-opting governments of developing countries was possible only because international relations had changed, influencing the attitude of industrializing developing countries towards MNCs. Similar, NGOs could be co-opted because of various CSR-related initiatives in which both actors collaborate.

We believe that discursive antagonism and discursive co-optation are valuable constructs to further develop the related concept of defensive institutional work as discussed by Maguire and Hardy (2009). While they understand the latter as ‘the purposive action of individuals and organizations aimed at countering disruptive institutional work’, mainly under the form of ‘countering assertions regarding negative impacts, the inappropriateness of practices, and the need for regulation’ (p. 169), our study puts forward that countering or antagonistic response can also take the form of creating actor images, both in terms of purifying one’s own image and polluting the image of the critics. Our findings further suggest that countering disruptive assertions is not only about contesting or disputing criticism but also about discursively co-opting critics.

Dynamic interplay of discursive antagonism and discursive co-optation

Finally, when discursive co-optation arose as a prominent legitimation process in the public debate, we note that the characteristics of discursive antagonism changed significantly. In particular, the latter transformed into a legitimation process that is fully complementary with discursive co-optation. We see this transformation in two ways. First, our findings suggest that the polluting aspect of discursive antagonism completely disappears. The emphasis on partnerships and dialogue leaves little room for polluting the images of traditional opponents as staging the latter as becoming partners is contradictory with staging these same actors as unreliable and undermining their arguments through humor. In addition, we see that in combination with discursive co-optation, discursive antagonism can only produce a particular type of purification of the self. In the final phase, when discursive co-optation was very prominent, there were no longer distinctly positive portrayals of MNCs as during the previous decades. Rather, confronted with the legitimacy issue of tax evasion, discursive antagonism occurred primarily by constructing a self-image as ‘morally neutral’. So, the purification of the self occurred in a more cautious way, very likely to avoid polemic that would undermine public perceptions about dialogue and partnerships between business and civil society. This latter is probably also the reason why the discursive strategy of ‘amoralization’ has hitherto not been discussed in previous studies on the legitimation of controversies. Examining discursive legitimation in the immediate aftermath of a scandal, studies are very likely to find polemic strategies and not the more cautious ways of purifying the self. Overall, these transformations thus support the view that discursive co-optation can be considered as the establishment’s ability to ‘bend without breaking’ (Campbell, 2001, p. 354) when faced with societal opposition and protest.