Abstract
Social and economic inequality is an important topic in the social and cultural sciences. Studies on inequality analyse how socially and linguistically constructed categories such as social class, gender, age, race, region, health, nation and so forth influence how people can participate within societies and individuals can develop their human potentials. On the other hand, inequality studies show how power structures and practices exclude and marginalise people while others enter privileged social positions. Discourse-focused studies usually analyse the logics and modalities of representing, reproducing, politicising and depoliticising inequalities via language use in different contexts.
The aim of this volume by Gómez-Jiménez and Toolan is to study the discursive construction of wealth inequality in its complex appearances applying methods from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Corpus Linguistics (CL). The context is the British history of public discourses on inequality. The authors argue that the notion of wealth inequality covers most dimensions of social inequality, ranging from classical views to more indirect representations.
The volume provides encompassing and deep analyses of media representations about wealth inequality in British public discourse. Nine chapters plus one Introduction cover the time period between 1900 until 2020. The authors have background in different international contexts and they restrict their analyses to media representations of wealth inequality, conceptualised with respect to different dimensions of inequality, including social class, gender, age, region and sexual orientation. This represents a valuable contribution to three research fields: social studies of societal inequality, by taking the linguistic dimension into account; social studies of economics, through analysing how economic categories as performative devices shape (the perception of) social relations; and discourse studies, by applying CDA and CL to economics and the economic dimensions of inequality.
A central goal of the book is reflected in detail on different dimensions of economic inequality elaborated in terms of income, assets and access to ‘qualitative’ goods and services such as education, personal development, living, health and so forth. The second goal is to study long-term developments of representations of different dimensions of inequality in public discourses – mainly mass media. The third goal of the analyses is to develop a mostly quantitative and encompassing picture on how economic inequality is presented in British public discourse. Finally, the book seeks to make methodological contributions for further developing Discourse Studies, especially with respect to CDA and CL. A special attention is made with respect to the combination of quantitative tools (mainly comparative analysis of lexical forms) and qualitative tools (especially analyses of deictic markers).
The empirical data include party programmes and related statements, texts published by governments and ministries, mass media texts and TV broadcasts. Most chapters analyse huge time periods and apply comparisons across actors, media and points in time. The chapters investigate different aspects of wealth inequality, for example welfare state, poverty, children, employment/unemployment, slavery, obesity and inequality in general. In addition to that, the chapters do not only apply a broad variety of discourse analytical tools – such as metaphor, narrative, ideology, collocation, context, co-text, stereotype, deixis or multi-modality – but also discuss analytical categories that are typically analysed in sociology and other social and political sciences – such as family, securitisation, neoliberalism, exclusion, the state, individualism/collectivism, crime and many more. This makes this volume an interesting contribution for scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds. All chapters provide clear findings with respect to the discursive modalities of the construction of wealth inequality. Finally, they deal critically with different discursive rules hiding and excluding the complexity of social inequalities. Here, the political dimensions of language use and economic inequalities are made visible.
Most of the literature in the field focuses either on inequality from the viewpoint of sociological, economic and social policy, or on language- and media-related issues. A particular strength of this book lies in bringing together both strands of research. Here, the authors present different linguistic modalities of articulating, performing and representing economic inequalities in public discourse. In addition to that, the authors highlight the political dimension of wealth inequality and the crucial role of media and other public discourses for reproducing, naturalising, politicising and depoliticising inequality. Furthermore, the field of Social Studies of Economics developed in the last years as a highly heterogeneous and interdisciplinary field of research, covering scholars from sociology, history, economics, political sciences and linguistics. Yet, linguistics and cultural studies (especially CDS) are still under-represented in the analysis of the role of economics as a ‘performative tool’ that seeks to shape social and political relations. This book makes a valuable contribution in this respect since it focuses primarily on economically mediated discrimination.
The main contribution of the volume is its complex understanding of different dimensions of inequality. In addition to that, the volume combines approaches on wealth inequality from social and cultural sciences. This opens up new perspectives on the understanding of inequality and their different forms of symbolic representation. Yet, even if the book makes valuable contributions in the fields of inequality studies, two critical aspects should be addressed. First, the authors have all a background in discourse studies. A more interdisciplinary composition of the contributors could offer a more dialogical understanding of inequality and it would make the book more attractive for interdisciplinary visibility. Second, the restriction to CDA perspectives on inequality may also restrict the opportunities for understanding discourses on wealth inequality in its diversity. Yet, the book makes nevertheless a valuable contribution for experienced as well as early career scholars.
The book addresses a wide audience, ranging from linguistics and discourse studies to political sciences, sociology and cultural studies. It provides methodological scholarship and analytical examples for early career researchers in the fields of discourse studies, a well-elaborated tableau of inequality analyses for scholars working in the field of inequality studies and many data on British history usable for researchers of British national history and politics.