Syftet med uppsatsen är att utifrån teorier om hegemonisk maskulinitet och homosocialitet studera hur normer för maskulinitet reproduceras i tre svenska populära podcasts. Uppsatsen innehåller tre frågeställningar som är följande: Hur förhandlas maskulinitetsnormer hos Alex & Sigge, Filip & Fredrik och Luuk & Lokko?, genom vilka rollprestationer upprätthålls eller omförhandlas normer för hegemoniska maskulinitetsideal? och vad innehåller dessa podcasts för specifika strukturer och hur återfinns maskuliniteter i detta innehåll? Mitt teoretiska och analytiska perspektiv grundar sig i forskning om maskulinitetsprocesser och hegemonisk maskulinitet. Vidare utvecklar jag mitt teoretiska ramverk med genreteoretiska anknytningar där den ideologiska funktionen inom dessa blir central. Analysen består av samtalscitat från mitt material där jag transkriberat relevanta delar för att kunna gå nära texten. Ut efter tematiseringar grundade på huvudpersonernas relationer till varandra och till personer utanför texten analyserar jag sedan mitt material i två delar. Maskuliniteten konstrueras i och med olika rollprestationer som huvudpersonerna sätter i spel gentemot varandra och andra. Dessa rollprestationer blir talande i min analys och bidrar till min slutdiskussion. Sammanfattningsvis avslutar jag med en slutdiskussion där jag anknyter till mitt teoretiska ramverk och diskuterar vilka maskulinitetsnormer som är rådande inom min text. Jag lyfter även det teoretiska perspektivet till en större samhällelig kontext i och med att jag anser att maskulinitetsnormer ingår i ideologiska strukturer i samhället. / The purpose of this paper is: based on theories of hegemonic masculinity and homosociality to, study how masculinity is reproduced in three popular Swedish podcasts. The paper contains three research questions: Which values around masculinity exists and is represented in the three podcasts that I have chosen? How is masculinity represented based on defined performances of Alex & Sigge, Filip & Fredrik and Luuk & Lokko? What content does these podcasts have and which specific structures around masculinity is found in this content? My theoretical and analytical perspectives are based on research in masculinity representations and hegemonic masculinity. Furthermore, I develop my theoretical framework with genre theories, where the ideological functions of these become central. The analysis consists of conversation quotes from my material, which I transcribed the relevant parts in order to get close to the text. I have thematically constructed two levels of analysis based on the characters' relationships to each other and to the persons outside the text. Masculinity is constructed with various performances by the main characters put in play against each other and others. These performances will be critical in my analysis and contribute to my final discussion. In the chapter called conclusion I end with a final discussion, in which I relate to my theoretical framework, and discuss which masculinity values that are present in my text. I also broaden my theoretical perspective to a larger social context, in that I believe masculinity norms are included in the ideological structures of society.

<p>This thesis examines how multilingual spaces in South Africa are imagined and reconstructed through the use of scripted codeswitching in 7de Laan. It explores how the socio-political discourses and other ideologies from the broader South African context shape and influence the ways in which the soap reconstructs multilingual spaces and the identities that exist within these spaces through language and language practices. In the literature presented in this study I explore various theories and case studies that examine Afrikaans and its indexicality in our&nbsp / contemporary society, the conventions of soap opera in representing &lsquo / reality&rsquo / to society, the role of codeswitching in multilingual mass communication, the policies and ideologies that govern post apartheid television and finally the link between ideology, the media, language and imagined identities.. These five overarching themes often overlap throughout this thesis. My investigation of the main questions set in this thesis is based on a triangulated analysis of (a) a five episode transcript of the soap, (b) solicited viewer perceptions gleaned from questionnaires and (c) unsolicited social media commentaries. This analysis is framed by a poststructuralist critical analysis with a specific focus on how social practices and contemporary ideologies manifest in the discourse of the soap. This approach views discourse as the juncture where identity, stereotypes and power are negotiated, enforced, imagined and challenged. In this thesis I argue that the conspicuous absence of indigenous African languages and the use of standard white Afrikaans as the lingua franca in the soap creates an unrealistic utopian portrayal of the new South Africa that naturalises white Afrikaans culture and marginalises other indigenous cultures and languages. I argue that the soap puts middle class white Afrikaners at the epicentre of South African society thus enforcing the idea that non-whites still need to conform to white Afrikaans standards and norms at the expense of their own culture and languages despite the inception of democracy. The soap offers no depictions of resistance to this dominant white Afrikaans culture, thus misleadingly portraying it as the uncontested dominant culture of the new South Africa.</p>

The number of women in the Chartered Accounting (CA) profession has continued to rise since the 1970s; women now make up one-third of working CAs in Canada (Tabone, 2007). Yet, the number of women in the upper levels of the profession remains very low. The main purpose of this dissertation is to understand how women CAs experience and talk about the CA profession and to explore the implications of the CA context for the development and maintenance of friendship among women CAs. The ways in which power and agency are exercised in the micro-politics of the everyday lives of women CAs and the nexus of relations through which individuals develop and enact their identities is explored through open-ended interviews and discussion groups with Western Canadian women CAs. <p> The dominant ideology of professionalism constructs both individual and collective identities while structuring workplace relations. The findings of this study demonstrate that female CAs believe strongly in elements of professionalism such as meritocracy, excellence, client service, and commitment but that their understanding is gender-neutral and differs from the dominant masculinist interpretations and practices. The participants narratives reveal a particular pattern of engagement with the profession characterized by stages of early optimism, disillusionment and the glass ceiling, negotiation and the glass box, resignation, and justification. All participants encountered a glass ceiling, or invisible barriers to advancement, as a result of the conflicting meanings of the ideals of professionalism. As the women attempted to negotiate solutions to the constraints imposed by the professions elite, masculinist discourses were mobilized by those in power in new ways resulting in further constraints upon the women, containing them within a glass box that limited their career mobility in all directions and may contribute to gender segmentation in the profession.<p>Masculinist discursive practices have a significant impact not only on the participants career aspirations, but also on their friendship relationships, which are, in part, constituted by their relationship to the profession, their need for support against masculinist strategies, and their choice of gender identity strategy. Friendships do not increase activism as the participants feel powerless to create change and fear reprisals.

Drawing on the assumptions that old ideologies persist over a long period of time, impact on intercultural communication, and can be identified in texts, this study is a critical analysis of the content of an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbook, which was published between 1983 and 1988 in communist Romania. Specifically, the research questions of the present study are: 1) How do the EFL textbook‘s readings represent the relationship between Romanian and non-Romanian people?, and 2) What are the sociopolitical implications of these representations? Based on critical discourse analysis (CDA), as well as content analysis and literary theory, the method of analysis of this study builds on central concepts such as ideology and intertextuality, and delivers a multilayered framework of analysis that comprises the historical and ideological context of the texts, as well as the context of other texts. The findings show that the communist ideology was legitimated and transmitted in language textbooks, and, compared to the Romanians, non-Romanians were unequally represented.

This paper is a discussion and analysis of Red Scare propaganda from two different time periods: 1918-1921 and the 1940-50’s. Six examples of propaganda have been chosen and analyzed both visually and rhetorically. The paper also contains a discussion of the historical context and times surrounding the images, helping to place the texts within a proper framework for discussion. The six images are analyzed through Aristotle’s traditional rhetorical devices – ethos, pathos, and logos. Seven logical fallacies and drawn from this discussion of rhetoric and applied to the images as well. The images are visually analyzed in terms of stereotypes they uphold as well as the American ideology of “Americanism” that they allegedly support.

The purpose of this study is to examine stabilization and change in students' notions of division of labour, wage differentiation and reproduction of labour force. A description is given of the development and application of a qualitative method for the analysis of interviews within the framework of a theory-generating evaluation of long-term effects of higher education. A central concept is notion, the theoretical and methodological development of which up to a strict description of the content is presented in different categories. A model is presented of the structural features of notions. A theoretical revaluation of ideological reproduction is outlined and reconnected with the initial theoretical frame of reference. The empirical data consist of transcribed interviews with students of economics, medicine, psychology and engineering. The interviews were made on two occasions: when the students entered their educational programmes and after a period of about three years. The initial number of students involved were 25-27 from each educational programme. The results of the empirical analyses show initial différencies in students' ideological shaping, both within and between educational programmes. For a majority of students notions remain stable over time. Occurring changes lack general characteristics. For students of medicine and engineering changes in notions of differentiation of wages are unidirectional and fairly common while students of psychology change their notions in another direction but not to the same extent. Changes in notions of division of labour are more common among students of economics and psychology than in other groups but the direction of change is not the same in the two groups. Changes in students' notions can be said to depend on initial notions, educational programme, and societal aspect subject to the analysis. The study ends with some reflections on qualitative methods and theory generating evaluation. / digitalisering@umu

This is a study of changes in Chinese kindergarten education in the era of the post-Mao four modernisations. Based on fieldwork carried out in China in 1997, this thesis examined the changes of Chinese kindergarten education at two levels — changes in system (structural change) and changes in educational activities (curriculum and ideological change), especially for the period of the 1990s. Changes are described and discussed in a historical context, in which both changes in policy and in practice are examined. Changes in education are closely linked to the social, political, economic and cultural context. The content, process and outcomes of reform in early childhood education in China have been affected by the national goals of reform, the social context of early educational institutions, their organizational characteristics, family structure, family policy, and the specific professional culture of teaching and learning. Recent structural reforms in early childhood education have been shaped by the foremost task of the nation - economic development. The previous welfare model of kindergarten, which was regarded as one of the outcomes of a socialist system, is being transformed into a new market competitive model to meet a political demand for the marketisation of society. The curricula of early educational program, teachers' attitudes to children, and their professional activities, therefore, have been re-shaped according to new ideas about the needs and abilities of children, new conceptions of child development and, not least, the new modernisation "knowledge" that gained ascendancy in China during the 1990s. / digitalisering@umu

The purpose of this dissertation is to study the vocational and career education in upper secondary school and to answer the question if and how this education contributes to the socialization of the younger generation to the various sectors and positions of working life. The ambition was also to acquire more general knowledge of the mechanisms generating different classroom discourses. The main problem thus deals with how and why an objective reality, in this case the working world, is transformed into various teaching situations and how and why it grows into different classroom discourses. In accordance with the theoretical frame of reference, career education is regarded as a transmission of ideologies and as part of the social reproduction process. By analogy with this approach the training effects have been studied in terms of transmitted opinions and notions in various aspects of education and working life. For a period of one year we observed the instruction in social studies and vocational teaching in four different course programmes of upper secondary school. The empirical studies also include interviews with teachers and students in nursing and metalwork course programmes, in economics, in social sciences and in natural sciences as well as employees in the metalwork and health-care sector. The main aim was to study the notions of education and working life of various interested parties in relation to the notions transmitted in the course programmes. The results show that there are great differences in vocational teaching in the different course programmes, in spite of the fact that the content of this teaching is supposed to be almost identical according to the curriculum. In an attempt to explain the formation of education we have formulated a "content-related steering group theory". In simplified terms this means that the content of education is characterized by certain predominant structures of thought characteristic of both the social field (sector) and the social stratum (level) towards which the education is primarily directed. The predominant structures of thought are brought into the classrooms through the students' individual and historical relations with the world of work. These structures then function as a generating and controlling mechanism for the classroom discourse. The teacher will, more or less unconsciously, adjust the content of his or her teaching to the predominant structures of thought of the selection of students forming his or her class. Our analysis ends in the assumption that the differences in structures of thought between students in various course programmes are reinforced during the time spent in upper secondary school - not so much as a result of the education itself, but more as a result of the different social environments of different student categories to which the education is adapted. / digitalisering@umu

Drawing on the assumptions that old ideologies persist over a long period of time, impact on intercultural communication, and can be identified in texts, this study is a critical analysis of the content of an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbook, which was published between 1983 and 1988 in communist Romania. Specifically, the research questions of the present study are: 1) How do the EFL textbook‘s readings represent the relationship between Romanian and non-Romanian people?, and 2) What are the sociopolitical implications of these representations? Based on critical discourse analysis (CDA), as well as content analysis and literary theory, the method of analysis of this study builds on central concepts such as ideology and intertextuality, and delivers a multilayered framework of analysis that comprises the historical and ideological context of the texts, as well as the context of other texts. The findings show that the communist ideology was legitimated and transmitted in language textbooks, and, compared to the Romanians, non-Romanians were unequally represented.

This study explores the differences (and similarities) between sentencing reform and the legal practices of criminal defence lawyers. This research specifically focuses on Section 718.2 (e) of the Criminal Code, which is aimed at reducing the use of imprisonment for Aboriginal offenders and the application of the section in the Supreme Court’s 1999 decision R .v. Gladue. It investigates whether or not the section and/or Gladue has affected the legal practices of criminal defence lawyers and if so, how. The practice of lawyers, in this study, is conceptualized as structured action. The agency of lawyers is thus constrained and enabled by both macro and micro processes. These include traditional legal ideology, managerial/organizational ideology, presuppositions surrounding Aboriginality as well as the broader socio-political context of neo-liberalism and neo-conservativism. How the practices of defence lawyers either reflect or contradict the section and Gladue is examined through the oral narratives of lawyers—obtained through in-depth semi-structured interviews with twelve defence lawyers. The findings of this analysis show that the vast majority of lawyers were not integrating the section or Gladue in their defence strategies. This suggests that efforts to remedy the issue of Aboriginal over-incarceration need to be aware of the complexity of criminal justice processes, the agency of lawyers and the broader social and political context. / October 2008