Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Comparative Literature, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 234-247).

Globalization has, within academic, political and business circles alike, become a prominent buzzword of the past decade, conjuring a diversity of associations, connotations and attendant mythologies. The literature devoted to the issue of globalization is both vast in scope and diverse in nature, becoming increasingly prominent not only in academics and politics, but in the popular press, as well. The goal of this dissertation is to provide the reader with a map of themes, narratives, and characterizations related to globalization circulating in the United States in order to demonstrate the potential ways that individual thought on the issue is shaped by public discourse. A secondary goal is to critically examine specific texts to identify areas where their arguments overlap, conflict, or may be misconstrued due to weak or inaccurate evidence. By better understanding the map of rhetorical formations in widely-read texts regarding globalization, it may be possible for people to be better able to understand the concerns and intentions of those voicing various and often competing viewpoints.

This study aims at highlighting the ideological implications of school development as a discursive practice. More comprehensively the aim is also contributing to rearrangements and shifts in perspective when school development is the matter. One of today´s most widespread and dominant discourses are said to be the one which concerns development, and according to many interpreters, development is one of the most prominent commandments in the modern as well as the post-modern narratives. School development as a concept has for the last 15 years established itself firmly in both Swedish school policy and in Swedish school research. It may sound obvious and commendable but also such axioms may be questioned.The design of the study lies in the field of discourse research and more specifically within critical discursive psychology, which draws on both a post-structural and a postmodern conception of discourse. The study is based on the idea that the ideological potential of arguments occurs, develops and changes in discursive practices and not anywhere else or at any abstract level. The starting point is a perception that certain issues and topics within e.g. conversation, depending on time and context will be seen as controversial, while others will be taken for granted.One part of the basis of the study consists of texts with a direct bearing on a specific school research and development project which took place between 2003 and 2008. Participating partners in the collaboration were the Swedish National Agency for School Improvement, Karlstad University, Dalarna University and 13 municipalities in Sweden. Another part of the basis of the study consists of texts in which ‘school development’ is considered and negotiated in more general terms, usually without reference to the project. All texts derive from the period 2003 – 2006.The analysis shows that school development as discursive practice often rely on a set of stereotypical expressions and ways of arguing. Stereotypes, which among other things, tend to divide people into suitable and non-suitable, capable and non-capable, which may be regarded as a somewhat unexpected implication of school development. The material has been dramatized by an intrigue inspired by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman´s texts. He has written extensively on the modern in relation to the postmodern and about the ambivalence which resides in between and school development as discursive practice can be understood in much the similar way.

Very little is known about older womens anger and, to date, nothing is known about how older women talk about anger. By limiting response options on questionnaires and using pre-determined categories to organize interview data, researchers have traditionally determined what constitutes anger and its expression. The unique focus on anger-talk in the current investigation sheds light on how the interviewer and interviewees co-construct anger within the context of a research interview. I conducted a discourse analysis of seven interview transcripts in order to explore two central questions: (1) how is anger co-constructed in participants discourse? and (2) what is accomplished by those constructions? The older women in the present study used minimizing and distancing strategies to construct anger as within their control, in the past, and forgotten. Through these constructions, the interviewees established that they were not angry women.

Crystal meth has been an illicit drug for many years but did not surface as a problem until the 1990s. Between 200 and 2006, a number of provincial documents were produced in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan to examine this problem. A shift appeared to have occurred in terms of how to handle this situation. Traditionally, illicit drugs such as crystal meth were dealt with by the criminal justice system; however, in this case, provincial health departments prepared these documents. The intent of this thesis is to examine these documents by providing a discourse analysis and applying concepts from Foucault, vanDijk and Phillips and Hardy. Three questions are asked: (i) who are the voices of these documents? (ii) who is identified as being at risk? and (iii) how is crystal meth socially constructed and what solutions are presented? All three provinces identify the same at risk population, our youth. British Columbia and Saskatchewan construct crystal meth as an educational and health problem, while Alberta focuses mainly on crystal meth as being a criminal problem. This research concludes that the solutions offered by the various experts from these provinces are unrealistic. The social determinants of health such as adequate income, housing and employment opportunities are discussed in these provincial documents however, nothing concrete is provided. Saskatchewan is the only province to commit money to finance new programs to assist with the crystal meth problem.

The terrorist group Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) and its place in post-war German history have been an important topic and therefore featured in public discourses of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1970 and 2008. The question whether this complex discourse and the underlying political and social views have changed significantly over the past four decades is addressed in this thesis. Considering the dialectic relationship of discourse and society, a qualitative and quantitative discourse-linguistic study of a corpus of newspaper articles of this time period is conducted. The online archive of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit was selected as a source to establish the text corpus for this study. The analysis follows the methodology of the Düsseldorfer discourse-linguistic research and is informed by the general approach of Critical Discourse Analysis. After a brief discussion of the role of language in the construction of social reality, the relevant scholarly literature is reviewed and an overview of the major historical events in the context of the RAF is provided. The two theoretical discourse-linguistic approaches are discussed in some detail to derive the units of analysis and the necessary categories for the textual analysis in this project. These categories are then operationalized for this study. The focus lies on categories such as lexical choice, metaphors, semantic fields, argumentation patterns, and meta-linguistic comments. A pilot study was conducted to determine the scope of the representative corpus and to establish a set of concrete categories. Two complex topics for a detailed analysis were chosen: Mythos (myth) and Gnade (mercy, pardon, leniency). The analysis of a ‘Mythos RAF’ showed that the meaning of this phrase is highly polysemous in the whole period that was analyzed. It is interpreted as a Schlagwort as a means to evoke several semantic meanings. The field of Gnade is analyzed mainly for Argumentationstopoi (argumentation structures) that have been used in discussing whether or not former RAF terrorists should be released from prison. The analysis showed that there has been a certain change in the way the topic was publicly discussed, but it was not significant enough to infer a change in society’s view towards the topic. On the contrary, one could argue on the basis of this analysis that many of the biased views in German society remained stable.

The terrorist group Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) and its place in post-war German history have been an important topic and therefore featured in public discourses of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1970 and 2008. The question whether this complex discourse and the underlying political and social views have changed significantly over the past four decades is addressed in this thesis. Considering the dialectic relationship of discourse and society, a qualitative and quantitative discourse-linguistic study of a corpus of newspaper articles of this time period is conducted. The online archive of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit was selected as a source to establish the text corpus for this study. The analysis follows the methodology of the Düsseldorfer discourse-linguistic research and is informed by the general approach of Critical Discourse Analysis. After a brief discussion of the role of language in the construction of social reality, the relevant scholarly literature is reviewed and an overview of the major historical events in the context of the RAF is provided. The two theoretical discourse-linguistic approaches are discussed in some detail to derive the units of analysis and the necessary categories for the textual analysis in this project. These categories are then operationalized for this study. The focus lies on categories such as lexical choice, metaphors, semantic fields, argumentation patterns, and meta-linguistic comments. A pilot study was conducted to determine the scope of the representative corpus and to establish a set of concrete categories. Two complex topics for a detailed analysis were chosen: Mythos (myth) and Gnade (mercy, pardon, leniency). The analysis of a ‘Mythos RAF’ showed that the meaning of this phrase is highly polysemous in the whole period that was analyzed. It is interpreted as a Schlagwort as a means to evoke several semantic meanings. The field of Gnade is analyzed mainly for Argumentationstopoi (argumentation structures) that have been used in discussing whether or not former RAF terrorists should be released from prison. The analysis showed that there has been a certain change in the way the topic was publicly discussed, but it was not significant enough to infer a change in society’s view towards the topic. On the contrary, one could argue on the basis of this analysis that many of the biased views in German society remained stable.

Very little is known about older womens anger and, to date, nothing is known about how older women talk about anger. By limiting response options on questionnaires and using pre-determined categories to organize interview data, researchers have traditionally determined what constitutes anger and its expression. The unique focus on anger-talk in the current investigation sheds light on how the interviewer and interviewees co-construct anger within the context of a research interview. I conducted a discourse analysis of seven interview transcripts in order to explore two central questions: (1) how is anger co-constructed in participants discourse? and (2) what is accomplished by those constructions? The older women in the present study used minimizing and distancing strategies to construct anger as within their control, in the past, and forgotten. Through these constructions, the interviewees established that they were not angry women.

Crystal meth has been an illicit drug for many years but did not surface as a problem until the 1990s. Between 200 and 2006, a number of provincial documents were produced in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan to examine this problem. A shift appeared to have occurred in terms of how to handle this situation. Traditionally, illicit drugs such as crystal meth were dealt with by the criminal justice system; however, in this case, provincial health departments prepared these documents. The intent of this thesis is to examine these documents by providing a discourse analysis and applying concepts from Foucault, vanDijk and Phillips and Hardy. Three questions are asked: (i) who are the voices of these documents? (ii) who is identified as being at risk? and (iii) how is crystal meth socially constructed and what solutions are presented? All three provinces identify the same at risk population, our youth. British Columbia and Saskatchewan construct crystal meth as an educational and health problem, while Alberta focuses mainly on crystal meth as being a criminal problem. This research concludes that the solutions offered by the various experts from these provinces are unrealistic. The social determinants of health such as adequate income, housing and employment opportunities are discussed in these provincial documents however, nothing concrete is provided. Saskatchewan is the only province to commit money to finance new programs to assist with the crystal meth problem.