Abstract
In recent decades, economic inequality has attracted noticeable scholarly attention from both communication and discourse researchers (among others, Jensen, 2014; Roberts and Lawrence, 2017). However, there has not been a book providing a comprehensive and systematic overview of studies of economic inequality from a corpus-based linguistic perspective. To partially fill the research gap, The Discursive Construction of Economic Inequality, compiled by Gomez-Jimenez and Toolan, which presents a wide range of topics related to economic inequality and various news data, will add to existing literature towards a better understanding of economic inequality depicted in the public discourse.
The volume begins with one illuminating chapter in which the importance of discussing economic inequality is justified and the methodological approach is explained. The following chapters are arranged diachronically, covering some of the significant events in the UK history from the Second World War to the most recent General Elections (2010, 2015 and 2017). The authors conduct keyword analysis on the issue of poverty and social exclusion (shortly for PSWE) in the corpora of all the speeches delivered by Conservative and Labour Party leaders in Britain from 1900 to 2014. In Chapter 1, Lorenzo-Dus and Almaged discuss the similarities and differences in the discursive representation of PSWE in three successive periods.
In Chapter 2, Spencer-Bennett attends to the discursive negotiation of inequality during the Second World War. The focus is on linguistic strategies from the Ministry of Information and the Mass-Observation project. The findings show the social deictic strategy used to communicate with the civilian population was not in the interests of true democratization or egalitarianism.
The welfare state is the crucial concept in Chapter 3. By adopting corpus thematic collocate analysis, Bom and Paterson probe into the representation of the welfare state in the Times between the 1940s and 2000s. They contend that the welfare state is often depicted metaphorically through the use of restructuring and building metaphors.
Chapter 4 then moves on to child poverty by focusing on the changing representations of child poverty in The Times between the 1970s and 2000s. By comparing the keywords and key semantic domains, the study finds a change from collective social responsibility in the 1970s to a contrasting one of families and individuals in the 2000s.
Chapter 5 is a thorough analysis of corporate fraud and modern slavery in the UK national newspapers. Ras draws particular attention to the following keywords -equality, inequality, responsibility, and accountability - in the context of these two particular crimes. Results of frequencies and c-collocates of those keywords clearly indicate that corporate fraud and modern slavery were presented in a neutralizing manner. More importantly, the actors who are responsible for these types of crime were generally ignored.
Chapter 6 offers an interpretation of how the UK government constructs ‘at-risk‘ social groups. Mulderrig uses a qualitative method combing critical discourse analysis and multimodal analysis to examine corpora composed of UK obesity policy documents and 33 adverts selected from a social marketing campaign. She observes that the aforementioned materials indicate the working class should be responsible for the upswing in child obesity issue; however, the author argues the commercial sector and the food and drink manufacturers are the “chief culprits.”
A movement towards austerity is the theme of Chapter 7. Jeffries and Walker focus on the comparison of how austerity was portrayed between the periods of 2009–10 and 2016–17. This close look of naming and transitivity patterns shows that austerity takes a prevailing position in 2009–10, while it becomes more peripheral in 2016–2017. Notably, austerity is depicted as something unavoidable in public discourses and it ‘has also become an a priori virtue akin to democracy, freedom, and equality‘ (p. 147).
By conducting a combination of content and critical discourse analysis, Thomas (Chapter 8) investigates the evolving coverage patterns of poverty, wealth, the squeezed middle and income inequality (or called PWSIE issues) in BBC and ITV news reports between 2007 and 2014. Thomas suggests that the issue was more prominent in 2007 and was in decline in the following seven years. Importantly, he argues that one possible reason is that these media giants deliberately bow down to a prevailing neoliberal consensus (Freedman, 2019: 211)
In Chapter 9, Teubert stresses the significance of the notion of democracy in understanding economic inequality. A systemic collocational analysis of the concept of democracy and its connection to economic inequality in the UK parliament documents within the passing 200 years indicates that the attitude of parliament towards equality had changed from fear to approval. Teubert points out that western democracy is spurious, and it does not mean that citizens participate actively in decisions. In contrast, ‘they only have the right to vote, not the right to decide‘ (p. 169).
Dorling then offers a critical conclusion on the representation of economic equality in the media. All chapters share the common finding that the media are usually manipulated by politics and profit. As a result, it seems the media frame and adjust the discursive information to present economic inequality as a natural or inevitable thing.
The merits of this book lie in two aspects. Firstly, this volume covers wide-ranging exploratory issues related to economic inequality, such as some macro concepts (e.g. austerity, inequality, child poverty) and some public health issues like obesity. In that way, this volume presents a thorough picture of economic inequality. Secondly, this volume provides a tremendous congregational site for research carried out with different analytic tools that are suitable for investigating various topics in different types of public discourse.
However, the book is wanting in several aspects. The first one lies in the selection of the research data, most of which are from print media. Given the popularity of social media, the inclusion of news reports on social practices such as social media giants (e.g. Twitter, YouTube) would have fitted well with and enhanced the agenda of this volume. Second, the result from critical discourse analysis used in this study might sometimes be criticized for its subjective reading.
Overall, this volume, with its context-sensitive, data-driven attempt, provides an excellent read for students and researchers who want to study public discourse and economic inequality.