Draining off Trade Unions' Role: Gordon Brown's Speech to the TUC Conference 2007

Claudia Ortu (University of Cagliari)

Volume 3, Issue 2

Abstract

According to Bourdieu and Wacquant (2001) Trade Unions are one of the obstacles to the success of the neo-liberal project carried out by powerful social actors, international institutions and Governments.  Analysis of how Trade Unions are construed (Fairclough et al. 2002) by Governments is thus a necessary step in understanding language in new capitalism.

Because of the change of power in Great Britain from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown both Trade Unions and political commentators expected a change in the relationship between New Labour and the workers' organisations.  However, analysis of Gordon Brown's speech to the 2007 TUC annual conference shows that those expectations have not been fully met.

The conceptual framework for this analysis is Fairclough's most recent one for Critical Discourse Analysis (2003, 2006), coupled with the Discourse Historical Approach (Wodak and Meyer 2001).  Text analysis is carried out using a pragma-dialectic approach to argumentation theory (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1992) alongside the tools of systemic-functional grammar (Halliday 2004).  The interconnectedness of the linguistic data with other moments of the social practice is also discussed as the study claims a post-disciplinary (Jessop and Sum 2001) perspective.

Download

Download full text of the article as PDF

References

Bourdieu, P.  and Wacquant, L.  (2001) New Liberal Speak: Notes on the new planetary vulgate.  Radical Philosophy 105: 2-5.

Fairclough, N.  (2000) New Labour, New Language? London: Routledge.

Fairclough, N.  (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research.  London: Routledge.

Fairclough, N.  (2006) Language and Globalization.  London: Routledge.

Fairclough, N.,  Jessop, B.  and Sayer, A.  (2002) Critical Realism and Semiosis.  Journal of Critical Realism 5 (1): 2-10.

Gordon Brown's Speech to TUC Conference 10 September 2007, retrieved from http://www.tuc.org.uk/congress/tuc-13692-f0.cfm

Halliday, M.A.K.  (2004) An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd edn.  London: Arnold.

Jessop, B.  (2002) The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity.

Jessop, B.  Sum, N-L.  (2001) Pre-disciplinary and Post-disciplinary Perspectives.  New Political Economy 6 (1): 89-101.

Ortu, C.  (2008). Construing Trade Unions: The Anti-Trade Union Discourse of British Governments (1978-2007).  Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Naples, Federico II, Italy.

Reisigl, M.  and Wodak, R.  (2001) Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism.  London: Routledge.

Sayer, A.  (2001) For postdisciplinary studies: Sociology and the curse of disciplinary parochialism/imperialism.  In J. Eldridge et al. (eds.), For Sociology: Legacies and Prospects.  Durham: Sociology Press.  pp.83-91.

Swales, J.M.  (1990) Genre Analysis.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

van Eemeren, F.  H.  Grootendorst, R.  (1992) Argumentation Communication and Fallacies: A Pragma dialectic perspective.  New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

van Eemeren, F.H., Grootendorst, R.  and Kruiger, T.  (1987) Handbook of Argumentation Theory.  Dordrecht: Foris Publications.

van Leeuwen, T. (1996) The representation of social actors.  In C.R. Caldas-Coulthard and M. Coulthard (eds.), Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis.  London: Routledge.  pp. 32-70.

Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (eds.) (2001) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage.