Institutionality: Studies of Discursive and Material (Re-)ordering (Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse) 3030969681, 9783030969684

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POSTDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN DISCOURSE SERIES EDITOR: JOHANNES ANGERMULLER

Institutionality Studies of Discursive and Material (Re-)ordering Edited by Yannik Porsché Ronny Scholz Jaspal Naveel Singh

Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse

Series Editor Johannes Angermuller, School of Languages and Applied Linguistics, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse engages in the exchange between discourse theory and analysis while putting emphasis on the intellectual challenges in discourse research. Moving beyond disciplinary divisions in today’s social sciences, the contributions deal with critical issues at the intersections between language and society. Edited by Johannes Angermuller together with members of DiscourseNet, the series welcomes high-quality manuscripts in discourse research from all disciplinary and geographical backgrounds. DiscourseNet is an international and interdisciplinary network of researchers which is open to discourse analysts and theorists from all backgrounds. Editorial board: Cristina Arancibia, Aurora Fragonara, Péter Furkó, Jens Maesse, Eduardo Chávez Herrera, Benno Herzog, Michael Kranert, Jan Krasni, Yannik Porsché, Luciana Radut-Gaghi, Jan Zienkowski.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14534

Yannik Porsché · Ronny Scholz · Jaspal Naveel Singh Editors

Institutionality Studies of Discursive and Material (Re-)ordering

Editors Yannik Porsché Faculty of Social Sciences and Public Affairs University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany

Ronny Scholz Faculty of Communication and Mass Media British University in Egypt Cairo, Egypt

Jaspal Naveel Singh Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies The Open University Milton Keynes, UK

Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse ISBN 978-3-030-96968-4 ISBN 978-3-030-96969-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96969-1

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of Saša Bosanˇci´c (1977–2021)

Acknowledgements

The idea for this volume was born during a workshop on multimodal analysis in the political science and international relations organised by the discourse research group of the German Political Science Association at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany in July 2018. We revived this idea at the 3rd International DiscourseNet Congress in Paris in late summer 2019, where we organised the panel ‘Ethnographic Discourse Studies: Comparative, political and polycentric perspectives’. Due to a high number of responses to our call we held two sessions on this theme. With scholars from a broad range of disciplines ranging, among others, from linguistics to sociology and the political sciences and countries such as Canada, China, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, the panel was highly inspiring. Papers presented both academically and politically profound work employing a great variety of qualitative and quantitative methods. This edited volume is driven by the interdisciplinary and international attitude of the stimulating discussions that we led in the panel. Completing such a fascinating project would not have been possible without a network of international supporters. We are grateful

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to Mouton De Gruyter, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, the Maison des sciences de l’homme and the VS Verlag for allowing us to republish—in some cases translated and revised—papers as contributions to this volume. We hope our assembling of a variety of methodological and thematic studies succeeds to illustrate their shared ambition to transgress disciplinary boundaries and schools of thought to inform the empirical study of institutional practices and dynamics of ordering in workplace settings, organisations and beyond. This volume would not have seen the light without the support of many colleagues and friends, many of whom we meet regularly in events organised across national and disciplinary borders by the DiscourseNet Association. DiscourseNet provided a platform where the editors of this volume also enjoyed discussing, exchanging ideas and sharing friendship with Saša Bosanˇci´c—to whom we dedicate this volume. Saša’s sudden passing deeply saddens us. We fondly remember his enthusiasm for discourse studies. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers who provided us with detailed and encouraging feedback. We also want to thank the series editor Johannes Angermuller, and the editorial assistants Cathy Scott as well as the project coordinator Supraja Ganesh from Palgrave Macmillan for supporting this publication project throughout. We received much help from Nicky Runge from the School of English at the University of Hong Kong and from Luca-Sofie Gollub and O˘gulcan Geni¸sel from the Professorship of Sociology of Globalisation at the University of the Bundeswehr, Munich. We are immensely thankful to our partners for tolerating the many extra hours that we put into editing this volume. Last but not least, we would like to thank the authors of the studies for their hard work, which made this book project a highly rewarding experience for us.

Credits for Republications Clayman, Steven E. and John Heritage, “Fragegestaltung und sozialer Kontext: Pressekonferenzen von US-Präsidenten das Verhältnis zwischen Presse und Politik”; in: Ruth Ayaß and Christian Meyer (Ed.)

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Sozialität in Slow Motion: Theoretische und empirische Perspektiven, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2012, pp. 503–524. Guilbert, Thierry and Frédéric Lebaron, “L’économie des mots et les mots de l’économie: analyse sociodiscursive des discours des dirigeants de la Banque centrale européenne”; in: Langage et société 2, Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme (editor Luca Greco), 2017, pp. 217–235. Heller, Monica. “Distributed knowledge, distributed power: A sociolinguistics of structuration”; in Text & Talk 27–5/6, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Mouton, 2007, pp. 633–653. Porsché, Yannik, “Kategorisierungspraktiken in der Extremismusprävention”; in: Birgit Blättel-Mink (Ed.) Gesellschaft unter Spannung. Verhandlungen des 40. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, 2021, pp. 1–10.

Praise for Institutionality

“This important, interdisciplinary volume offers a unique discursivematerial lens for examining institutional practices—including enacting, normalizing, resisting, and transforming institutions. Its grounding in a comprehensive array of topics, such as workplace interactions, media discourses, branding devices, and the production of power and authority, make it a pivotal resource for students and scholars interested in discourse and institutions in modern society.” —Prof. Linda L. Putnam, Distinguished Research Professor, Emerita University of California, Department of Communication, Santa Barbara “In times in which institutions seem to be losing significance due to multi-layered processes of individualisation, this volume beautifully employs the notion of institutionality to demonstrate how dynamics of order production are always subject to change. Both theoretically and empirically insightful, this book advances our understanding of contemporary life through subtle analyses and vivid demonstrations of how

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processes of power operate in workplace interaction, the mass media, and instances of racism.” —Prof. Dr. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Senior Professor, Technical University Dresden, Institute for Sociology, Dresden, Germany “This edited volume is a treasure grove of studies into the discursive and material dimensions of institutional ordering. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the way our lives and societies get shaped in and through institutions that order norms, values, identities, and discourses. The editors’ anti-essentialist concept of institutionality allows them to articulate an interdisciplinary set of research methods and theoretical perspectives, in a coherent and innovative way.” —Prof. Jan Zienkowski, Chair of Strategic Communication, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Department of Information and Communication Science, Brussels, Belgium “Wide-ranging and ambitious in its analytical approaches and thematic scope, from the design of work spaces to discourses of economic crisis and organisational branding, this book sets an agenda for the study of institutionality, the complex of relationships between authority, power and social structure examined as discursive and cultural practices in a context of globally shifting forms of communicative style and material signification.” —Prof. Joanna Thornborrow, Professor, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Department of English, Brest, France “A theoretically robust, analytically and methodologically comprehensive volume that brings together scholars from different backgrounds in a well curated and coherent collection. The volume provides a holistic discussion on the role of institutions as well as the societal conditions and the role of individual stakeholders in constructing, perpetuating or challenging institutional praxis. The contributors address the concept of instituionality from different angles and make the discussion equally valuable to the experienced and the novice reader. Discourse analysts

Praise for Institutionality

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interested in Workplace research will find a wealth of empirical material and theorisation that will contribute to cutting edge discussions in the field.” —Prof. Jo Angouri, University of Warwick, Academic Director for Education and Internationalisation, Department of Applied Linguistics, Coventry, UK

About This Book

Institutional order plays an important role in structuring power relations in society. Yet, contrary to common understandings of structure, institutional orders are far from fixed or stable. They constantly change, and they are resisted and reimagined by social actors. The 20 studies collected in this edited volume develop the notion of institutionality as an overarching perspective to explore how institutional actors and institutional practices order and reorder power in societies across the globe. Thereby the chapters pay special attention to the fluidity, volatility, fragility and ambiguity of order, and consequently to its claims to authority. Employing a broad range of discourse analytic and ethnographic methodologies, the studies show how institutions are discursively and materially constructed, defined, represented and how they are made relevant and become powerful—or how they are resisted, transformed or lose significance—in interaction. Readers will obtain nuanced insights into ways in which differently positioned social actors engage in struggles about how institutions can be imagined and enacted across several domains, such as workplace interactions, architecture, mass-media representations or organisational publicity.

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Contents

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Introducing Institutionality Yannik Porsché, Ronny Scholz, and Jaspal Naveel Singh

Part I 2

3

4

1

Workplace Interaction

Beyond Deontics: Power Relations in Decision-Making Processes in Management Meetings Ilkka Arminen, Aku Kallio, and Tiina Mälkiä ‘We Are in the Hands of the Head Office (.)’: Managing a Multinational Institution in Decision-Making Meeting Talk Kyoungmi Kim Categorisation Work in Extremism Prevention: Institutional Design and Recipient Adaptation Yannik Porsché

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Part II 5

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Beyond Strategy and Tactics: On the Micropolitics of Organisational Aesthetics David Adler

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Silent Coercion: The Materiality of Welfare Waiting Rooms After the Welfare Reform Bettina Grimmer

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Teaching About Racism Within Institutional Whiteness in Germany Yalız Akbaba and Constantin Wagner

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Institutional Occidentalism: On the Connection Between Police Constitutions of Space and Institutional Racism Eva Brauer Time, Affect, Knowledge: The Embodied Institution of Social Protest Movements Sandrine Gukelberger and Christian Meyer

Part III 10

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Bodies, Architecture and Space

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Mass Media Representations

Style as Discursive Practice in the Multimodal Construction of Identity: Towards a Social Media Dispositif Analysis Stefan Meier

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Arguing by Common Sense: Institutionality and Media Discourses in France Thierry Guilbert

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Naturalising Populism as a Collaborative Interactional Practice in Broadcast Media Argyro Kantara

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Question Design and Press–State Relations: The Case of U.S. Presidential News Conferences Steven E. Clayman and John Heritage

Part IV 14

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Organisational Publicity

Institutionality in Anglophone and Japan University Job Advertisements: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Representations of Academic Work Theron Muller and Colin Skeates “Asia’s Global University”: Academic Event Posters as Branding Devices for a Hong Kong University Corey Fanglei Huang Don’t Take Us Seriously: The Case of Satirical Narratives of Institutional Self-Promotion in Swedish Military Recruitment Daniel Beck and Alexander Spencer

Part V

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Legitimising Knowledge and Power

Questioning “Intercultural Opening” and “Cultural Diversity”: Discursive and Organizational Strategies of Forced Migrants’ Labor Market Integration Sepideh Abedi Farizani and Sarah Wieners Narrative Construction of Power and Knowledge in the Police: Suspicion and Defining the Deviant Tamara Dangelmaier

19 The Discourse by the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB) from 2007 to 2015: What Austerity Inflection After the Financial Crisis? Thierry Guilbert and Frédéric Lebaron

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Economists in Social Media: The Discursive Construction of Expertise Between Media, Politics and Academia Jens Maesse and Jan Krasni

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Distributed Knowledge, Distributed Power: A Sociolinguistics of Structuration Monica Heller

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Revisiting Institutionality: Imaginaries and Practices of (Re)Ordering Ronny Scholz, Yannik Porsché, and Jaspal Naveel Singh

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

David Adler is Ph.D. Candidate at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany, trainer for civic education at the IFAK e.V. Bochum, and visiting lecturer for qualitative research methods at the Ruhr-University Bochum. He is co-editor of the DiscourseNet Collaborative Working Paper Series and member of the German Sociological Association’s board “Sociology as a Vocation”. His fields of research include sociology of architecture, economic sociology, political sociology and qualitative research methods. He is currently working on a book project on the programme and performativity of contemporary office architecture. He is the author of Doppelte Hegemonie: Hegemonialisierung im War on Terror-Diskurs nach der Tötung bin Ladens, Baden-Baden, 2015. Yalız Akbaba is PostDoc at the Institute of Educational Science, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany. Her teaching and research fields are teacher professionalisation and migration discourses, diversity, Critical Race Theory, and qualitative methods. Book publications: Teachers and the migration background: Resistance within a dispositif (PhD thesis, university award 2017) and The Implications of “New

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Populism” for Education (together with Bob Jeffrey, 2017). Yalız studied political sciences, pedagogy, law and sociology in Mainz and Reading, UK. Current publications are about the challenges for diversity (education) in schools and institutions for teacher education, and perspectives on decolonizing education. Ilkka Arminen (Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Faculty of Social Sciences) has worked as a director of a network on innovation research. He is also an adjunct professor of technology studies in Aalto University. He has published extensively on methodology of sociology, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis as well as on media and technologies in interaction, i.e., mobile media usage, internet communities and transforming spheres of intimacy. He is active in international networks on studies of experience, knowledge and expertise. He leads a Kone Foundation project (2017–2021) on ethnic relations and Stea project (2021–2022) on remote peer support. Daniel Beck is a Research Fellow at the chair of International Relations, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany. He holds a Master degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from Magdeburg University and a Bachelor in History and Political Science. His research focus is on political humour, post-structuralist approaches and multimodal discourse analysis. His most recent publication, titled “Just a Bit of Fun: The Camouflaging and Defending Functions of Humour in Recruitment Videos of the British and Swedish Armed Forces,” was published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Eva Brauer is a Social Worker and Gender Scientist. She worked for several years in various fields of social work. As a research assistant, she was part of the KORSIT research project at the Münster Police University and conducted an ethnographic survey within the police. She is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Applied Sciences Fulda and is working on her thesis entitled ‘institutional productions of space as a social practice of the police and social work’. Here she reflects on intersectional categories such as class, ethnicity and gender in the context of institutional spatial references.

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Steven E. Clayman is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research addresses human interaction as a topic in its own right, and as a window into social institutions with an emphasis on media and politics. He has published widely in sociology, communication, and linguistics journals, and is the co-author (with John Heritage) of Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions (Wiley-Blackwell) and The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures On the Air (Cambridge University Press). Tamara Dangelmaier works at the German Police University in Münster as a research assistant in the Department of Criminology and Interdisciplinary Crime Prevention. She is doing her Ph.D. as part of the ethnographic research project KORSIT, which deals with the police construction of spaces in the context of security. Her research focusses on police research concerning narratives, the production of knowledge and the justification of action. Tamara studied sociology and criminology, focussing on juvenile delinquency and sociology of work and organisation in Tübingen and Frankfurt am Main in Germany. Sepideh Abedi Farizani is a Doctoral Candidate in the research group “Innovation Organization and Networks” at the Department of Education at the Philipps University of Marburg. Her dissertation project deals with empowerment of women refugees in Germany and is funded by the Hans Böckler Stiftung. Her research interests focus on migration studies, gender studies and discourse analysis, as well as social exclusion and inclusion. Bettina Grimmer is a permanent Researcher at Zurich University of Teacher Education, Switzerland. She holds a master’s degree in sociology, political science and history from the University of Constance and obtained her doctoral degree in sociology at the University of Siegen. In her dissertation, she did an ethnography of talks between unemployed persons and their placement officers at the public employment service. Her research interests include political sociology, sociology of knowledge, educational and social policy and qualitative research methods. Thierry Guilbert is a Lecturer-HDR in language sciences at the University of Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens, France). He continues his

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interdisciplinary research in Discourse Analysis, precisely on neoliberal discourse, at the University Center for Research on Public Action and Politics-Epistemology and Social Sciences (UMR CNRS 7319). Among books and articles in scientific reviews about neoliberal discourse, Greek crisis, Subprime crisis, etc., he published L”évidence’ du discours neoliberal: Analyse dans la presse écrite in 2011 (translated in Brazil in 2020) and co-directed in 2019, with Frédéric Lebaron (sociologist) and Ricardo Peñafiel (political scientist), the dossier for number 166 of the journal Langage and Société entitled “Austerity discourse: history, dissemination and democratic issues.” Sandrine Gukelberger works at the Department of History and Sociology at the University of Konstanz as one of the principal investigators in the DFG-funded research project “Youth Movements and Political Change.” Her main research focuses are urban theory, political sociology, political anthropology, postcolonial studies, and qualitative methodology and methods. Recent publications include a special issue of Sociologus on urban protest in the global South (2019, co-edited), a special issue of Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen on methods and ethics of the global movement research (2019, co-edited) and Urban Politics after Apartheid (Routledge, 2018). Monica Heller is Professor Emerita at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is a Past President of the American Anthropological Association (2013–2015) and past Editorin-Chief of the Journal of Sociolinguistics (2018–2021). Her recent publications include Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History (with Bonnie McElhinny; 2017, University of Toronto Press), and Critical Sociolinguistic Research Methods: Studying Language Issues that Matter (with Sari Pietikäinen and Joan Pujolar; 2017, Routledge). John Heritage is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His primary research field is conversation analysis, together with its applications in the fields of

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mass communication and medicine. He is the author of Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (1984) and, with Steven Clayman, The News Interview (2002) and Talk in Action (2010). He is the editor of Structures of Social Action (1984, with Max Atkinson), Talk at Work (1992, with Paul Drew), Communication in Medical Care (2006, with Douglas Maynard), among other works. He has published over 150 papers on communication and interaction, of which around sixty are focused on primary care. Corey Fanglei Huang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Humanities in the Education University of Hong Kong. He received a Ph.D. degree in Sociolinguistics and Education from the University of Hong Kong in 2020. His research interests include sociolinguistics, critical discourse studies, social semiotics/multimodality, semiotic landscape research and critical higher education studies. He has been publishing book chapters and articles in international peer-reviewed journals, mostly based on his PhD thesis which examines the semiotic and discursive place-making of a Hong Kong university. Aku Kallio is a University Teacher in social psychology at the Tampere University. His research has focused on ordinary and institutional interaction and he has utilized conversation analysis and multimodal interaction analysis in his work. His doctoral dissertation focused on family interaction in media use situations. Currently, he is investigating occupational health counselling. Argyro Kantara works at Cardiff University and University of Wales Trinity Saint David, United Kingdom. She is a Conversation Analyst and her research interests lie broadly in the areas of institutional talk and political communication, with a particular emphasis on how interactants collaboratively produce talk and knowledge. She has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on hybridity, laughter, antagonism and populism in election campaign interviews. Kyoungmi Kim is Lecturer in Korean and Applied Linguistics at York St John University, School of Education, Language and Psychology. Her research interests focus on organisational and institutional discourse and sociolinguistic workplace discourse. Her current research projects include

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language ideologies and culturalism in multinational contexts, translation of norms and ideas in multinational organisations, and discursive construction of trust through instant messaging in a multinational team project. Jan Krasni is a Serbian media studiesscholar of Czech origin currently working in Germany and Russia. Jan’s research interest lies in the interdependency of society and technology during the digital turn. The digitalisation of societies is not only a matter of technological infrastructures. Rather, it is a global process which connects discourse with dispositif in unique ways. Jan explores digital discourses, the influence of digital infrastructure on meaning-making processes, multimodal constructions of texts and their role in the dispositif of digitality determining contemporary societal change. Frédéric Lebaron is Professor of sociology at University Paris-Saclay (école normale Paris-Saclay and IDHES). He specializes in economic and political sociology, and social sciences methodology. He recently co-edited Empirical Investigations of the Social Space with Springer. Jens Maesse, Assistant Professor (PD Dr habil.), Department of Sociology, University of Giessen (Germany). Research focus: discourse analysis, sociology of science and education, economic sociology and political economy. His publications include: “Globalization strategies and the economics dispositive: Insights from Germany and the UK”, Historical Social Research 43(3), 120–146 (2018), and (together with Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta): “Translating Austerity: The formation and transformation of the EU economic constitution as discourse”, Interdisciplinary Political Studies 7, no. 1: 61–94 (2021). Tiina Mälkiä, Ph.D. is an independent scholar, who has previously worked as a post doc researcher and university lecturer at the universities of Tampere and Helsinki. Her research interests include interaction in genetic counselling, board meetings and family members at home. Stefan Meier is an Associate Professor for media studies at the University of Koblenz-Landau. His main research interests are multimodal discourse

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analysis, media semiotics, visual culture studies, popular culture. He completed his Habilitation in 2013 at the University of Tübingen on the subject of visual styles as communicative practices in mediatized worlds. In 2007 he completed his doctorate at the Technical University of Chemnitz on the subject of ‘Discourse on the Net: Concept and Method of a Semiotic Discourse Analysis on the World Wide Web’. He is currently investigating the multimodal practices of successful social media communicators in order to develop a rhetoric of digital storytelling. Christian Meyer is a Professor of Sociology at the Department of History and Sociology of the University of Konstanz, Germany. Before, he held professor positions at the Universities of Würzburg (Qualitative Sociology) and Duisburg-Essen (Communication Studies). His research interests include social and cultural theory, sociology of embodied interaction, media sociology, studies in comparative sociality, and qualitative methods of social research. Recent publications include Ethnomethodologie Reloaded (Bielefeld 2021, co-edited), a special issue of Human Studies on Ethnomethodology (2019, co-edited), and Culture, Practice, and the Body (Stuttgart 2018). Theron Muller is an Associate Professor at the University of Toyama, Japan. He is lead editor on two book projects, Innovating EFL Teaching in Asia (2012) and Exploring EFL Fluency in Asia (2014), both with Palgrave Macmillan. He received his Ph.D. from the Open University in 2018 with a piece of research that explored the publication practicesof Japan-based language teachers. He is active with JALT Publications and a member of English Scholars Beyond Borders. His research interests and publications include English language teaching and learning, writing for academic publication, and most recently discourse analysis explorations of higher education. Yannik Porsché, Ph.D. in Sociology, is a Researcher and Lecturer at the University of the Bundeswehr, Munich. His research focuses on social interactions in institutional contexts of educational work. He

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integrates methods of ethnomethodological interaction analysis, poststructural discourse analysis and analytical ethnography in a theoryoriented, microsociological contextualisation analysis. Porsché’s current research focuses on work dealing with extremism prevention. Previously, he worked at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and the Humboldt University of Berlin on social, cultural and organisational forms of knowledge generation and circulation in criminal prevention work of the police. In his Ph.D. at the University of Mainz and the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon he analysed work in museum exhibitions about immigration in France and Germany. His publications include a monograph entitled Public Representations of Immigrants in Museums: Exhibition and Exposure in France and Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and a collaborative book entitled Polizeilicher Kommunitarismus: Eine Praxisforschung urbaner Kriminalprävention (Campus, 2017). Ronny Scholz is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Research and Media Criticism at the British University in Egypt. He holds a Master’s degree in discourse studies from the University Paris XII and a Ph.D. in sociology and linguistics from Magdeburg and Paris-Est. His work focuses on the discursive legitimisation of policies in political communication and mass media, mostly from a cross-cultural perspective. He has published widely on the analysis of crisis discourses in the German press, higher education reform discourses in France and Germany, and more recently on populist discourses in French and US-American election campaigns. He is the sole editor of ‘Quantifying Approaches to Discourse for Social Scientists’ which was published by Palgrave in 2019. Jaspal Naveel Singh is a sociolinguistic and linguistic ethnographer currently working as Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language at the Open University, UK. He previously held academic positions at the University of Hong Kong and Cardiff University, UK. He studied linguistics, history and philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Jaspal’s ethnographic work has focused on hip-hop cultural production among migrant men in Delhi, India. His first monograph Transcultural Voices: Narrating Hip Hop Culture in

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Complex Delhi, recently published with Multilingual Matters, investigates the construction of many voices (polyphony) in narrative talk and in competitive dance. His analysis arrives at a way of understanding global hip hop in Delhi as a complex form of appropriation that affords marginalised men possibilities to imagine themselves as future participants of a globally unfolding culture of vernacular resistance and aspiration. He has published his work in several edited volumes and in articles in internationally renowned journals, including the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics Review and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. Colin Skeates has published several pieces on language teaching and learning. This is his first publication to utilize critical discourse analysis. While continuing to teach and do research, he Co-Founded Limex360, which utilizes panoramic technology to support artists and museums to further their outreach objectives and to better reach the public during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to this investigation and ongoing co-research with Dr. Muller, Colin is involved in an edited book project investigating Japan-based part-time English language university teachers’ first year of emergency remote teaching as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Alexander Spencer is Professor at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany. His research centres on discourse-analytical methods and violent non-state actors. He has published his research in journals such as European Journal of International Relations, European Journal of Public Policy and Security Dialogue and Foreign Policy Analysis. His most recent monograph, titled Romantic Narratives in International Politics, was published by Manchester University Press in 2016. Constantin Wagner is Assistant Professor for education with a focus on heterogeneity at the University of Mainz. His main research interests are (perceptions of ) Islam in the postcolonial Europe, Islamophobia / (anti-Muslim) racism (in public and educational institutions) and civic education within diversity. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and studied in Frankfurt am Main and Geneva.

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Sarah Wieners is a Research Associate at the research group “Innovation Organization and Networks” at the Department of Education at the Philipps University of Marburg. In her research and teaching she focuses on the intersection of gender and migration in organizations and the in/visibilities that emerge at this intersection from a discourse-analytical perspective.

List of Figures

Chapter 2 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

The executive team of the institute Timothy gestures toward the recipients while making an extension Timothy starts tapping on the table during Bethy’s turn Timothy has gained the recipients’ attention

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Chapter 4 Fig. 1

Still from a video recording of the station battleship

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Chapter 5 Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Layout of the entrance area before the reshaping of the place. (1) small sitting group, (2) cinema chairs, (3) high table, (4) table football Layout of the entrance area after the revamp. (1) Sitting group with DIY furniture, sitting bags, and lounge lamp, (2) picture wall with company-related photographs, (3) fridge with soft drinks and beer, (4) digital whiteboard

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Chapter 9 Fig. 1

Fig. 2

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Fig. 4

Tracing of a still from an ethnographic video of a press conference organized by Aar li nu bokk on 20th June 2019, filmed by Sandrine Gukelberger Tracing of a still from an ethnographic video of an unauthorized protest on 14th June 2019, Dakar, Place de la Nation, filmed by photographer and research assistant Élise Fitte-Duval Tracing of a still from an ethnographic video of the march in Dakar on 2nd August 2019, filmed by Sandrine Gukelberger Tracing of a still from an ethnographic video of the march in Dakar on 2nd August 2019, filmed by Sandrine Gukelberger

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Chapter 10 Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Media dispositif as material, institutional and cultural manifestation of ‘the canvas of the medium’ (Bateman and Sachs-Hombach 2019) Style practices as multimodal construction of identity in form of subjective choosing, forming and composing semiotic resources a Screenshot from Rezo’s YouTube video (18 May 2019): The destruction of the CDU. b Screenshot from Phillip Amthor’s unpublished YouTube video (20 May 2019): The response to Rezo’s video

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Chapter 11 Fig. 1 Fig. 2

The “system” of discursive obviousness Links between ideas of common sense, obviousness and discursive obviousness

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Chapter 13 Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Initiative by presidential term a Directness by presidential term. b Indirectness by presidential term

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List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

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Assertiveness by presidential term Adversarialness by presidential term Accountability by presidential term Adjusted log-odds of adversarialness by administration, relative to 1953–2000 average (Note Initials denote presidential administrations: DD Eisenhower, JF Kennedy, LB Johnson, RM Nixon, GR Ford, JE Carter, RW Reagan, GW Bush, WJ Clinton) Adjusted log-odds of accountability by administration, relative to 1953–2000 average (Note Initials denote presidential administrations: DD Eisenhower, JF Kennedy, LB Johnson, RM Nixon, GR Ford, JE Carter, RW Reagan, GW Bush, WJ Clinton)

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William Mong Distinguished Lecture posters (FoE) The FoSS posters The SoE posters

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Chapter 19 Fig. 1

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Factor analysis calculating the distance between years based on the most dominantly used vocabulary in each year (radial tree representation) Over and underrepresentation of “crédit” (dark gray) and “endettement” (light grey) when contrasting the vocabulary of the years between 2007 and 2015

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Hierarchy of hits in the category “Mindestlohn” (minimum wage) on OES (the blog post was read 12,375 times and received 31 comments)

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Chapter 13 Table Table Table Table Table Table

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The question analysis system Independent variables Sequence of regression models Predictors of aggressive questioning Ordinal logistic regression of adversarialness Ordinal logistic regression of accountability

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Chapter 14 Table 1

Our theme codes and examples from our analysis of the advertisement texts and the corresponding labels in Xiong (2012)

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Number of speeches by speaker and year Number of tokens of the 49 most frequent words, 2007–2015

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Over and underrepresented keywords in 2007 and 2011 Absolute frequencies of derivatives of the root nécessper year

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1 Introducing Institutionality Yannik Porsché, Ronny Scholz, and Jaspal Naveel Singh

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Institutionality: The Institutional Condition of Sociocultural Life

Institutions structure and govern much of our lives. Quite literally, from our first to our last days on this earth, our lives are to a considerable extent tied to institutionaal contexts—many of us were born and will pass away in hospitals, we spend much of our living time in schools, at the workplace, in associations or engaged in family, community and cultural activities. Such formal and informal institutions seem to be the Y. Porsché (B) University of the Bundeswehr, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] R. Scholz Faculty of Communication and Mass Media, British University in Egypt, Cairo, Egypt e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Porsché et al. (eds.), Institutionality, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96969-1_1

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backbones of order and structure in any society. As important pillars of economic, social, political, judicial, educational or healthcare regimes, institutions influence our behaviour, they give meaning to the discourses in which we engage and they regulate the material inequalities to which we are subjected. The omnipresence of institutions deeply shapes the organisation of public, corporate, mediated as well as private life. To capture this institutional saturation of our societies, this volume develops the notion of institutionality. In its most basic meaning, the term points to the omnipresence of institutions in social life. The suffix -ality is meant to indicate the general state, the condition and the variability of institutions; analogously to similar word formations in the English language, such as real/reality, local/locality, material/materiality, colonial/coloniality or final/finality. Whereas the adjective institutional refers to the characteristics of something associated with an institution (e.g. institutional talk, institutional agenda), the suffixed noun institutionalality suggests that institutional characteristics can be regarded as a general condition of modern societies. Institutionality’s generality, however, also means that there can be different understandings of an institution’s characteristics or its ‘nature’. Institution can take on different forms, functions and meanings and can be imagined in different ways by different actors at different times. The term ‘institutionality’ thus does not merely remind us of the omnipresence of institutions in sociocultural life, it also allows us to grasp how institutions are constructed , i.e. how they are brought into existence socially in connection to discourses and materialities alike. Studies of institutionality thus analyse how institutions are enacted, characterised, transformed and resisted by social actors. Institutionality turns our analytical eye on how institutions are made, remade and unmade in discursive processes, symbolic attributions, bodies and material resources that shape (and that are themselves outcomes of )

J. N. Singh Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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institutional practices. Thinking with the term institutionality encourages us to take a methodological step back from an understanding of institutions as taken-for-granted entities of some pre-existing social order, which would assume that as ‘things’ institutions are simply ‘there’. As the 20 chapters collected in this volume illustrate in great empirical detail, an anti-essentialist understanding of institutions reveals the social and contextual contingency of institutions and struggles about their definition. It brings into view the discursive and material conditions of institutional practices, how ideas about what an institution is or should be can differ, the affordances of institutional things that people work with or produce, and the transformation processes that institutions go through over time. It appears to us, therefore, that the concurrence of given institutional structures that constrain and enable people’s lives, as well as the people’s agencies to contribute to, resist or change institutions, makes institutionality an important research topic for discourse studies and cognate disciplines. Our analytical attention to institutionality opens up several questions that we aim to address with this volume: How are practices of institutionalisation, re-institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation legitimised by constructions of knowledge, power and expertise? How are institutional norms and constraints distributed in society and how are they resisted against, reproduced and reimagined by people? What role does mass-mediatisation play in making institutions matter in our lives? The chapters collected in this volume demonstrate the ways that institutions are matters of concern for people, not because they exist in some a priori way, but because they organise actors, practices, symbols, discourses and materialities in ways that make power relations appear as sedimented and stable. Institutionality normalises and naturalises material and discursive power along with knowledge, thereby playing a significant part in reproducing hegemonic structures in society. Yet, moments of institutional crisis, dispute and breakdown reveal that institutions are socially and materially constructed and therefore heterogeneous, dynamic and contingent. Arguing from a similar perspective, the ethnographer and discourse researcher Dorothy E. Smith (2001) criticises that much academic research ontologically presupposes institutions as simply being there, instead of exploring their social constructedness,

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particularity and ephemerality. According to Smith, such research firstly bypasses the problem of how institutions only constitute enduring entities through people’s everyday practices, and the production, uses and circulations of texts. It secondly neglects a critical analysis of institutional power relations. In methodological terms, Smith describes this essentialist problem in the following way: We can, of course, recognise specific social forms, a soccer match, a university class, or a family dinner, for example, but each event is produced in time and locality, and decays into the past over the course of its accomplishment. There is no moment when it is decisively there and no place in which it can be found again as the same as it was before. The essential ephemerality of the social remains a challenge that is particularly daunting when sociology moves to comprehend forms of organisation of larger scope beyond the immediately observable. They exist, we know, as large-scale corporations, governments, and institutions such as universities and school systems but their substance is somehow produced of the same essentially ephemeral stuff as short-lived and locally-achieved events. In ordinary language, we talk of these entities as objects or beings without finding their existence problematic, but as soon as we approach them, they dissolve into the air. (Smith 2001: 163)

It is important to emphasise that such an anti-essentialist perspective neither naïvely rejects an institution’s social existence, nor overlooks the social functions of institutions. Any anti-essentialist approach must recognise that institutions serve as sources of authority for people and with their discursive mobilisation emerge social and symbolic orders that have real-life and material consequences for life on this planet. Taking such a dual perspective, the chapters in this book interrogate how local social practices, bodies, material contexts and their mediatisation and symbolic interpretations bring institutions into existence and constitute consequential power relations. And yet, the studies collected in this volume also show that the social relevance of institutions can evaporate in an instance of an interaction. In practice, we never encounter institutions in their entirety, nor are we able to entirely grasp their complexity. When institutions become relevant in an interaction, in a discourse or in a material ensemble, this usually happens symbolically, for instance

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in the shape of a specific artefact that an institution produces, a representative of an institution, or a particular register of language use in the workplace. The symbols trigger, or index, imaginaries, which are in turn shaped by knowledge about the institution that people acquire through mass communication as well as through personal experience. An ‘imaginary’ in our understanding should not be reduced to an individual’s cognition as it always involves questions of what is thinkable in a society. Without suggesting that all authors of this volume share a coherent theory, we employ the term ‘imaginaries’—rather than, for instance, ‘representations’—to underline their mythlike nature that, collectively framed, involve competing ideal-type visions of what an institution is or should be. Instead of engaging in abstract discussions about cognition or formal political representation or approaching imaginaries as products that could easily be separated from situated practices, we collect empirical case studies of how imaginaries and their materialisations become relevant in social interaction. Since people rarely agree on how to define institutions and have contradicting experiences with institutional practices, our perspectives on institutions appear to always be variable, partial and subjected to ever-changing discursive constructions (see e.g. Guilbert, this volume). The chapters of this volume bring into view this symbolic dynamism, contestation and fragility of institutions to interrogate how institutions come into existence, how they are reproduced, transformed and resisted, how they fall apart and how they lose significance in society. Against this background, this volume provides novel insights into how institutions and organisations can be analysed in postdisciplinary discourse studies. Rather than simply asking what institutions are, what their tasks are, how they relate to each other or how they are internally organised, this volume collects chapters that empirically investigate institutional practices and their consequences in a wide range of contexts from various disciplinary perspectives. The chapters develop methodologies from discourse analysis, ethnography and science and technology studies to critically investigate what it is that makes an institution institutional? And: how is institutionality tied up with the maintaining and

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questioning of social and material order ? To help us approach these questions, we now discuss how institutionality orders and reorders meanings and relations of power in society.

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(Re)ordering Meaning and Social Power Relations

The notion of order is central to our conceptualisation of institutionality. In most general terms, order can be conceptualised as the absence or the suppression of chaos. To establish and maintain social order, human societies have created institutions, such as the church, the monarchy, the caste system, patriarchy, the nation-state, the judiciary, the prison or the police. Institutions can establish and maintain order either by showcasing force, or by laws and conventions. Once discursively sedimented and naturalised, order is usually upheld and legitimised by the people’s consent to and complicity with institutional practices. We can thus conceptualise order as a fundamental prerequisite—as well as an outcome—of institutionality. If we take an anti-essentialist perspective and understand the establishing of order in society as a process in which dynamic and contingent institutions play an important role, then institutionality—the ways institutions are brought into existence, how they are characterised, enacted, transformed and resisted—can help us analyse order all the way through society, from the very beginning until the very end of any empirically observable social practice. Such a perspective would require us to understand order as ordered, or scaled, in hierarchical and ever-changing systems of power, knowledge, materiality and discourse. Taking inspiration from interaction analytic and metapragmatic theorisations about indexical meaning and scalar ordering (Blommaert 2010, 2020), we suggest that the establishment of any order (indexical, interactional, discursive, institutional) requires an understanding of the linguistic, discursive, embodied and material meanings that put things and ideas into their semiotic place and make them readable for social actors. For this reason, before a set of practices or an idea can become institutional and thereby influence the behaviour of individuals and

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groups, knowledge and understandings of their discursive and material meanings and purposes need to be circulated among those who potentially accept being subjugated under this institutional order. As long as discourses about an institution are generated and disseminated, say through public relation events or the mass media, institutional orders can reproduce, as well as challenge, hegemonic power relations. When actors accept that practices have an institutionality—and even when they involuntarily acknowledge such a claim by denying it—these practices stabilise institutions in society and contribute to solidifying hegemonic power relations; at least temporarily, yet sometimes for a very long time; and for some, perhaps, an unbearably long time. Our empirical perspective on struggles over institutionality and its practical enactment or rejection thus exhibits processes of establishing, re-establishing, re-orienting, fading, and ceasing of order. To further conceptualise our approach to ordering, we can draw on methodological and theoretical insights developed in discourse studies, sociolinguistics and metapragmatics. Goffman’s (1974 ; 1981) work on how participants position each other in an order of interactionfor example, has proven to be an effective methodological toolkit for conversation analysts and interactional sociolinguists to pay close analytical attention to the micro-processes of institutional talk and text and show how these can maintain and contest social power relations (see e.g. Arminen, Kallio and Mälkiä; Kim; Porsché, this volume). More theoretically, we can also make use of Blommaert’s (2010: 37–41) notion of orders of indexicality, which brings Silverstein’s (2003) well-known concept of indexical order into dialogue with Foucault’s (1981[1971]) idea of order of discourse. While Silverstein’s indexical order allows us to understand the micro-processes of how signs are made socially meaningful by interactants, both pragmatically and metapragmatically depending on the ideological intensity of their usage, Foucault’s order of discourse allows us to make distinctions between discourses that have power effects by defining what is thinkable and sayable and points of resistance that indicate relations with more limited power (see also Heller, this volume). By combining the two ideas, Blommaert’s orders of indexicality pushes us to understand the meaning-making of signs and discourses as ordered along scales of high and low social value

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and power. This enables a critical analysis of social inequality. The idea that signs are ordered on scales of social value and power becomes particularly important when investigating, as Blommaert does, inequality that is caused by global mobility, intercultural (mis-)communication, translation and other forms of interaction in contact zones. Blommaert provides a straightforward example of how orders of indexicality are at play when people make sense of certain signs in contact zones, in this case social accent registers of World Englishes: ‘The English spoken by a middle-class person in Nairobi may not be (and is unlikely to be) perceived as a middle-class attribute in London or New York’ (Blommaert 2010: 38). In this example, the global economy that orders the meanings of different English accents as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or as ‘middle class’ and ‘immigrant’, according to racialised and classed logics that became institutional during British imperialism, creates unequal orders of indexicality that downgrades the social value of migrants’ communicative practices in the host country. We can use Blommaert’s orders of indexicality, and its focus on unequal social value and power, and adapt it to the study of institutionality: institutions seek to gain hegemony over defining orders of institutionality that construct what counts as socially valuable, acceptable and powerful, and they do so via scales of mediation, from one-on-one interactions to mass-mediated public relation campaigns. As the studies in this volume show, institutions are constructed by diverse social actors and media infrastructures who enter into discursive struggles over defining such scaled orders in which the meaning of an institutional discourse and materiality can be read. Moreover, for the purpose of gaining hegemony over such definitions of meanings, institutions also actively construct non-institutional actors and groups as socially invaluable, unacceptable and unpowerful. Institutionality, then, entails institutional strategies that order social actors, discourses and materialities in unequal ways along higher and lower levels of social power. Since establishing knowledge about institutional orders happens through circulating and contesting discourses, institutional order is subject to struggles and shifts in society and relies on access to mediation. Members of an institution are thus constantly engaged in reorganising

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institutional order. This becomes especially evident in times of institutional competitions, conflicts and crises. These are times when institutions redefine their agendas, policies, political orientation and the scope of their competencies, so as to reimagine the institution in a new sociohistorical situation. Such rescaling of institutional orders often goes hand in hand with a change of the public perception of an institution. For example, during election campaigns political parties formulate agendas that (re-)emphasise their political purpose in a given political landscape at a particular time. As this landscape is constantly changing and challenged by all sorts of societal, economic, media and political developments, the party has to reorient its short-term political programme in ways that attract the majority of its potential voters (Scholz 2010: 54–58). Similarly, institutional re-ordering becomes evident in times of crisis. During such periods, institutions often have to prove that they can fulfil their purpose as guardians of order. Sometimes, they take this as an opportunity to extend their powers. The European Central Bank, for instance, expanded its sphere of influence in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis by arguing that its supra-national constitution is best suited to deal with the challenges of a global financial crisis (see Guilbert and Lebaron, this volume). This argumentation had re-ordering effects in the sphere of banking regulation in the Eurozone. The rescaling of the ECB was a matter of discursive practice that changed its purpose and function based on a particular interpretation of the nature of the crisis. Therefore, the institutional order that is based on this argument can only be legitimately upheld as long as this interpretation of the crisis, including the risks it entails, prevails in discourse. Once the discursive constellation changes, the institution must adapt to the new situation by reorganising its discourse and regain its authority and legitimacy in society. In fact, the rescaling of institutional orders does not only change the imaginaries of singular institutions, such as a political party or the ECB, it can also lead to changing imaginaries of entire institutional systems. For example, in the neoliberal political shifts that we see unfolding in many nation-states across the world since the 1980s and 1990s, processes of so-called debureaucratisation led to a downscaling, outsourcing or withdrawal of state institutions in the public sphere. State-owned public

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services, such as the post, telecommunications, the railways, airlines, the healthcare system or even border forces and detention centres, were privatised and subjected to the market logics of global capitalism. In the current neoliberalisation of the world, which is accompanied by the affordances of new forms of digital communication and mediation, the imaginary of what institutions mean and what their functions in society are seems to undergo dramatic changes, in ways that we can perhaps only fully grasp in the future. Several chapters in this volume document and discuss such ongoing changes in re-imagining institutions in neoliberalism as they are made relevant in empirically observable interactions, discourses and materialities (see Adler; Grimmer; Huang; Muller and Skeates). The changing imaginaries of institutions are often part and parcel of endeavours to inform, educate, influence, manage and sometimes manipulate the public opinion in line with institutional or organisational goals (see Beck and Spencer; Guilbert; Guilbert and Lebaron; Maesse and Krasni). From the point of view of an institution that attempts to legitimise its authority and sustain its influence in a new sociohistorical context, the ideal outcome of such communication processes would be to control and (re-)establish ideas about its purpose and function across various scales in the public sphere. Institutionality thus helps us to account for the (re-)ordering of discursive and material meaning-making processes that take place during institutionalisation, de-institutionalisation and re-institutionalisation caused by sociohistorical changes. This allows us to generate hypotheses about effects that institutional practices can have on structuration and transformation processes in today’s rapidly transforming societies. Applying institutionality in empirical research shifts the perspective from power in terms of an implementation of rules to questions of how institutional orders come into existence, how they are called into question and how they are rescaled, transformed or undermined.

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Dimensions of Institutionality

The contributions to our volume provide important indications as to what dimensions become central for conceptualising the (re)productions

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of, and struggles over, an institution’s ontology and power effects. When compiling this volume, we aimed at covering a broad range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies that analyse discursive and material aspects of institutionality to deal with questions of institutional modality and symbolism. In addition, in our reviewing process we noticed that in fact all the chapters engage with the following classic sociological dimensions. The dimensions span continuums between ideal–typical poles with which, in our reading, all contributions in this volume deal to different degrees. They concern interrelated questions of: • stability and transformation, i.e. questions of continuity, constancy or duration • the global and the local, i.e. questions of scope • structure and agency, i.e. questions of power Contributions to this volume, firstly, work on descriptive questions such as to what extent particular institutions under study are stable or changing; secondly, they address analytic questions of whether their effects are only limited to specific interactions or more global in scope; thirdly, with a focus on institutionalities’ consequences we discuss to what extent an institution’s existence is based on, and reproduces, linguistic, economic, juridical, etc., structures and power relations, or whether it is shaped by particular people or non-human actants that are endowed with, or struggle for, a certain degree of agency. In addition, contributions to this volume deal with these ontological questions in methodological terms. Authors choose different methodologies depending on the degree to which the researchers and/or participants under study conceptualise an institution’s existence as, on the one hand, predominantly a symbolic matter, grounded in knowledge, and discursive or, on the other, material and tied to bodies and physical spaces that represent the institution. From this perspective, institutions operate in a field of interdependencies between relatively stable social structures and collective orders, on the one hand, and individual meaning-making or transforming processes, on the other. Contributions to this volume avoid reductions to individualist or situationist accounts or of the kind found in sweeping

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claims and assumptions made in grand models of society by taking into account how institutional practices tend to concern tensions and dynamics between both sides of each of the poles. Institutionality urges us to take a close analytical look at concrete practices that mediate and instantiate institutional order and re-ordering. With regard to the second dimension of the global and the local as well as our methodological aim to take into account both materiality and discursivity, the chapters in this volume make important methodological contributions. The studies propose how methods as diverse as multimodal conversation analysis (Arminen, Kallio and Mälkiä; Porsché), semiotic landscapes (Huang), ethnography (Adler; Gukelberger and Meyer; Heller) quantitative regression models (Clayman and Heritage) or critical discourse analysis (Muller and Skeates) can unpack questions of different scales and analyse both materiality and symbolism in minute empirical detail. Analysing communication practices within their broader discursive and material contexts is essential for investigating the extent to which institutional routines transform into rigid procedures or how they remain flexible and can be adapted according to the situational context by actors. Moreover, approaching institutions via communication—that is, for instance, social interactions in organisations, talk about them and discourse surrounding them—allows analysing not only how institutions constrain or enable behaviour of individuals subjected to them, but helps to understand how institutions themselves are constrained, enabled and constituted by social relations, cultural norms and socioeconomic conditions of those interacting in and around them. We take these dimensions and related questions to be central for grappling with issues of institutionality. In what further ways do contributions to our volume deal with these dimensions? What do they teach us about the constitution, characteristics, and consequences of institutions? And how do the empirical analyses of institutional practices deal with the dimensions in methodological terms? Contributions in this volume shed light on the first dimension, the tension between a (fictional) display of unity or stability and internal dynamics and transformation, and on how this dimension is very much connected to the third dimension on power struggles (see also Rehberg 2014). Several contributions show that public discourse is riddled with (traces of ) contestation and that backstage

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conversations are far from transparent or free of tension (see Akbaba and Wagner; Porsché). Instead, public discourse contains legitimising narratives and conversational devices of mitigation (see Dangelmaier; Guilbert; Kantara). With regard to institutions’ functions in society several contributions to our volume conceptualise institutions as cultural mediators (see Brauer; Clayman and Heritage; Grimmer; Gukelberger and Meyer; Kim; Porsché). This role and impact of institutions makes relevant all three of our dimensions: for instance, journalists who mediate between politicians and the general public can modify the entities they link (i.e. they have an impact on the dimension of stability and transformation of institutional order); they can connect global issues or audiences to particular interview partners in the local scope of situated social interaction (the global–local dimension); and their institutional practices entail both ritualised and technical (infra)structures as well as agency of the interacting people (the structure–agency dimension). Chapters that focus on the third dimension study how institutionality is shaped by, and reproduces, power relations. Power effects are for instance assessed on the symbolic level by analysing processes of institutionalisation, re-institutionalisation or de-institutionalisation (e.g. Clayman and Heritage; Guilbert and Lebaron; Gukelberger and Meyer). If institutionalisation is to be understood as a reproduction of power through practices that affirm systems of rules and constraints, deinstitutionalisation needs to be conceptualised as a loss of power of an institution when, for example, new ideas delegitimise common habitual practices (see also Ebbinghaus 2005; Lieberman 2002; and Adler, this volume). This volume’s focus on concrete meaning-making processes allows exhibiting to what extent order and authority are represented, made relevant, subverted or resisted, or accepted as legitimate by the participants of an interaction. In this sense, analysing institutional practices within their manifold discursive and material contexts contributes to furthering our understanding of how societal structures and order are maintained, as well as how institutional practices drive societal (r)evolution, critique and (unnoticed) transformation.

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Situating Institutionality in the Context of Research on Institutions

The term ‘institutionality’ which we use to conceptualise practices of (re)ordering is not our coinage. Lane (2014) employs this term to refer to common attributes of institutions, yet without developing it further. Furthermore, Rehberg and colleagues (2001, 2012, 2014) suggest ‘institutionality’ as a perspective for the sociohistorical analysis of institutions. In their twelve years of interdisciplinary research funded by the German research council (DFG-Sonderforschungsbereich) in Dresden, Germany, they employed the German term ‘Institutionalität ’ to describe conditions, processes and consequences of institutional self-symbolisation, promises, and stabilisations of social relations and order from a constructivist perspective. Research in this collaboration highlights how order is connected to questions of public representation—especially the upholding of myths of essence and stability. From this perspective, institutions disguise their fragility and internal frictions to appear as legitimate organisers of people’s conduct and social relations. Contributions to our volume employ the term ‘institutionality’ to take analytical perspectives that are compatible with Rehberg’s approach and focus on the empirical details of how institutions are brought into existence, how they are characterised, enacted, transformed and resisted. With regard to research on institutions more broadly, sociology has, since its beginnings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, typically focused on formal institutions of governance and the economy. For some time, research was concerned with, for example, the regional or global cooperation between economic organisations, inter- and transnational political organisations regulating a common economic market, waging war, maintaining peace or promoting human rights and doing development work. The fact that institutions can produce relatively enduring social orders, which individuals internalise and which have a stabilising effect on human conduct, thinking and meaning-making (Douglas 1986: 46–48), has made them an important research object in the political sciences, and in the branch of International Relations in particular. What answers does this research provide for our question about the definition of institutions and the generation of order? So-called

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‘modern institutionalism’ (e.g. North and Streissler 1988) and Parsonian ‘old institutionalism’ explore collective action beyond specific actors and interests, yet these perspectives remain essentialist in the sense that they are not concerned with the social constructedness of institutions and instead render them as pre-exiting ontological facts. They conceptualise institutions as macro-sociological structures that are separate from both individuals and organisations—which institutions precede, influence, and configure from a higher-ranking position. ‘Neo-institutionalist’ research, which is inspired by Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) classic propositions about the relation between organisational structures and institutionalised myths, provides important insights into which functional as well as cultural systems of rules and structures of expectation come with western and modern ideals such as ‘education’, ‘meritocracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘environmentalism’, ‘technological progress’ or ‘capitalism’. In so doing, neo-institutionalism broaches questions concerning the relation between formal structures—some of which are brought into existence for purposes of legitimation and fulfilment of expectations—and less formal activity structures of ‘business as usual’ (e.g. DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Moreover, we can build on neo-institutionalist work inspired by Zucker (1977: 726), which has shown that institutional order is not simply a question of existence or non-existence, but rather a question of degrees of institutionalisation, transformation and appropriation. However, we propose to ground conceptualisations of these complex and intertwined relations and processes in more detailed empirical micro-analysis of practices of work and (de-)legitimation than most neo-institutionalist studies do—see Smith (2001: 267, italics in original) for a critique of how, for instance, the use of nominalisations and metaphors in such ‘organizational and institutional studies presuppose organization rather than problematizing it ’. We can notice a recent rise in studies that pay attention to the discursive practices and material processes that construct and deconstruct institutions. This perspective reveals a higher degree of dynamics and struggles in the making and unmaking of order. In what is sometimes called ‘sociological institutionalism’ (e.g. Overhaus and Schieder 2010; Lane 2014) or ‘discursive institutionalism’ (Schmidt 2008), researchers break with essentialist, realist and rational-choice perspectives and instead

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empirically interrogate how groups and collectives come to share interpretations of rules, how they use symbols to generate meaning, and how institutional practices contribute to creating identities. Several strands of research on institutions—or more narrowly, organisations—recognise the vital importance of discursivity for the empirical study of institutional order negotiation (e.g. Marttila 2019; Oger 2021; Thornborrow 2022).1 Up until now, most discourse research has focused on language practices in or about organisations. Freed (2015) provides an overview of research that focuses on the interactive properties of work-related institutional discourse. Institutional discourse refers to verbal exchanges between two or more people in circumstances (1) where at least one speaker or participant is a representative of (or a spokesperson for) a work-related institution, (2) where the language used, the nature of the interaction, and the speakers’ goals are at least partially determined by the institution in play, and (3) where at least one participant defines the interaction as ‘work’ or as doing work. (Freed 2015: 1)

In discourse research on institutions, the schools of conversation analysis (CA), interactional sociolinguistics (IS) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) all take different stances on whether to restrict analysis to examining talk and text in institutional contexts (CA), whether they provide 1 Different kinds of order have been studied in connection to the terms ‘institution’ and ‘organisation’. In an effort to avoid confusing institutions with organisations, much research decides to focus on only one of these terms, for instance in a phenomenological inquiry of institutions as a philosophical concern (e.g. Rehberg 2014) or an analysis of structures, functions or practices in organisations or workplaces (e.g. Fairhurst and Putnam 2004). Despite a long dispute on the difference between these key terms there seems to be some agreement that organisations are formal cooperations between people for defined purposes with rules about membership, hierarchies and administration (e.g. Hodgson 2006: 9; Rehberg 2014: 156–157). Rehberg (2014) explains that not all institutional constellations employ formal organisation, even if practices carried out in these constellations are organised in other ways or make use of formal organisations (e.g. pen friendships or romantic relationships constitute highly symbolic, normative and collectively shared practices that employ institutionalised genres of communication and organisational infrastructures). Institutionalised practices may lead to the foundation of formal organisations such as in the case of statutory pen friendship associations, but they do not need to do so. However, looking at the matter from the other way round, all organisations rely on some symbolic, institutionalised representation of their aims and statutes (see also Weber 1972 [1972]: 548).

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‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz 1973) that take cultural assumptions and perspectives into account (IS) or whether they follow a political agenda of criticising ideological subtexts (CDA). All of these strands share our interest in the empirical analysis of order, yet we recognise that they will yield different answers as to whether we locate order only on the level of social interaction (CA), or also in the collective sociocultural practices (IS) or in ideologies (CDA). With this edited volume we bring these diverse research strands into dialogue with each other. Several studies in this volume make use of fine-grained analyses of social interactions and its authors are conscious of the risk of essentialising that can come with recurring to macro-analytic concepts. At the same time, we agree that an institutional exchange ‘needs to be analyzed at various levels: as recipient-designed and sequentially organized; as tuned to local context and participant structure; as drawing on members’ lived experiences and background assumptions; as argumentation and reasoning with ideological underpinning’ (Sarangi and Roberts 1999: 26). This methodologically broad approach allows for what Foucault (1978: 175) suggested as a ‘decentering’ from single institutions, their functions and relations to other institutions. Instead, Foucault invites us to explore how institutions are part of larger power structures and regimes that are characteristic of certain historical times. Our studies of institutionality in different times, in different cultural contexts and in different national spaces contribute to generating knowledge about institutional significance or insignificance at various scales of social meaning and action. Fairhurst and Putnam (2004) provide a review of research literature on the relation between discourse and organisations. The authors distinguish between three strands of research: The first conceives of organisations as ‘objects’ that ontologically exist prior to discourse whose features and outcomes are reflected in discourse; the second understands organisations as being ‘in a perpetual state of becoming’ (Fairhurst and Putnam 2004: 5) shaped by discourse; and for the third, organisations are ‘grounded in action, anchored in social practices and discursive forms’ (ibid.). With each strand come different methodological and discourse theoretical views on whether they conceive of several, separate ‘Discourses’

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with a capital ‘D’ as powerful entities or ‘discourse’ as a stream of practices of interaction (see also Potter et al. 1990). In terms of these three research strands, contributions to this volume can be situated in the second ‘becoming’ or third ‘grounded in action’ research strands. These constructivist and anti-essentialist orientations are critical of perspectives that render institutions as given objects or containers of meaning and power. Yet, Fairhurst and Putnam (2004) argue that adopting a constructivist perspective comes at a cost. The authors see the risk that a focus on practices and action does not pay sufficient attention to material and contextual constraints on agency. Further, according to these authors, a fascination with linguistic detail often fails to account for ‘the ways that “organizing” or the finding of “order” in discourse leads to the complex social form “organization”’ (Fairhurst and Putnam 2004: 21). Cooren (2020) and other proponents of the ‘communication as constitutive of organization’ (CCO) perspective and its prominent ‘Montréal School’ (e.g. Mumby and Kuhn 2018; Putnam and Nicotera 2009) plead for integrating insights from both the discursive (or constructivist) and material turn. The CCO-perspective emphasises the importance of discourse by stating that communication not only happens between or within organisations but in fact constitutes organisations (e.g. through communicative speech acts, narrative representations, written regulations). The Montréal School proposes to equally pay attention to conversations, written texts, material things and structures, and technological media of mass publication in organisations. Here, Cooren (2020) suggests conceptualising socio-materiality not as an entanglement of ontologically distinct phenomena (meaning and matter) but as a property of all organisational phenomena—and of any other phenomena, for that matter. In line with a methodological turn to materiality—and without forgetting lessons learnt from a ‘discursive turn’—we can build on Foucault’s work on ‘dispositifs’, insights from Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory or multimodal approaches to social interaction. Foucault’s increasing attention to institutions’ architectures, material foundations and interdependencies between different institutions invites us to broaden our perspective in at least two ways: firstly, regimes of truth, institutional disciplining or a governing of people is not only

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a question of language or discourse in a restricted sense, but also a matter of, for instance, tangible objects in museum showcases, locked doors, financial incentives or the interior design of offices that set the frame for action; secondly, institutions are not self-sustaining monads but connected to, and rely on, numerous other institutions, such as other organisations, academic disciplines or bureaucratic procedures. Proponents from Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory encourage a methodological symmetry that brings into view how nonhuman entities matter: Latour (2005: 71)—who is also associated as one of the founders of the above mentioned ‘Montréal school’ within the CCO-perspective—suggests that we ask whether something ‘make[s] a difference in the course of some other agent’s action or not’. Latour invites us to think of the difference it can make, if a person does or does not wear glasses, is holding a hammer or a gun; or of the impact that, due to their design, speed bumps or doorhandles have on people’s conduct. And multimodal interaction analysis makes apparent various modes—spoken language as well as gestures, positioning in space, or manipulations of our environment, etc.,—that we orchestrate in social interactions. We can draw on this extension of conversation analysis to argue that ‘discursive’ questions of social interaction are always tied to ‘material’ ones—be this through institutional spokespeople embodying an institution or mass media technologies enabling particular modes of interaction. We therefore propose that only by taking into account entanglements between discursivity and materiality—or, if we choose to avoid this separation, both discursive and material properties of all institutional communication—can we shed light on the three dimensions that we proposed as central to any study of institutions’ constitution and consequences. By taking into account materiality and discursivity and by addressing the tensions between the local and the global, agency and structure, and stability and transformation, contributions to this volume share an ambition to contribute beyond narrow disciplinary or theoretical fields and advance postdisciplinary studies.

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The Chapters of This Volume

In the first part of this volume, we focus on institutionality in Workplace Interaction. Arminen, Kallio and Mälkiä present a multimodal conversation analysis of decision-making processes in management meetings of executive teams in public research organisations. The authors argue that decision-making and ensuing power relations of managerial work are tied up in interaction practices such as pre-empting other party’s talk, competing for the floor and value statements. These interaction practices strategically narrow or broaden possibilities for participation, influence other participants, and contribute to building alliances. At stake are questions of authority, acquiescence and resistance to others, and asymmetries and constraints due to institutional roles and different distributions and rights to knowledge and resources. Kim’s chapter offers another conversation analysis of decision-making in meetings to analyse power relations, in this case in a British subsidiary of a Korean multinational firm. Kim focuses on the question of micro– macro relations and construction of institutional context when participants negotiate institutional goals and identities. Her analysis shows how institutions are talked into being and how institutional power is assumed and enacted in meetings when participants comply to a set of (in)formal rules. Porsché’s case study of workplace interaction integrates conversation analysis with an ethnographic study of an NGO’s prevention work to counter radicalisation. The extended and translated re-publication explores how in the particular institutional format of educational training courses institutional categorisation is embedded in the design of the prevention measure and how work practices are adapted to different audiences in an attempt to change people’s perceptions and attitudes. A comparison of how a measure that simulates processes of radicalisation is carried out with school classes of pupils who grew up in Germany and integration classes for refugees reveals how the NGO deals with risks of stigmatisation and re-traumatisation. Porsché suggests that the institutional design and recipient adaptation reveals unrealistic expectations that prevention measures should provide a standardised and soft quick fix to complex and dynamic societal problems.

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The second part explores the institutionality of Bodies, Architecture and Space. Adler presents an ethnographic study of the micropolitics of organisational aesthetics. He analyses the subjectifying effects of space, materiality, and atmospheres of office layouts. The chapter shows how employees’ bottom-up tactics of using the office space partly subvert the top-down strategy of instrumentalist office design that was put in place to optimise work and labour productivity. In fact, analysis reveals that a clear distinction between top-down strategies and bottom-up tactics starts to break down. Adler investigates how the office space is performed in a dynamic interplay of material and discursive pre-figurations, on the one hand, and contingent practices, interpretations and subjectifications to which theses spaces give rise, on the other. Grimmer’s chapter offers an ethnographic analysis of the architecture and its subjectifying effects in welfare waiting rooms in Germany after the welfare reform. She shows how the design of waiting rooms indicates institutionalised mistrust, establishes social orders between the state and citizens and has coercive effects on those seeking support. However, in situated practice citizens can also use the space differently to its design and thereby transform the space. Grimmer presents this case as an example of how institutions that have far-reaching consequences on people’s lives link individual and societal realities. Akbaba and Wagner provide an analysis of institutional education in which bodies are at the centre stage. The authors critically analyse how teaching about racism is carried out in different universities in Germany. Focusing on a specific case in which a black speaker points out racism, the chapter discusses the white audience’s defensive response. Akbaba and Wagner argue that the audience denies unequal power structures and racism to restore the hegemonic order and that possibilities of resisting or questioning the hegemonic order of ‘whiteness’ are institutionally limited by curricular framing. Brauer’s chapter investigates racism in police work in Germany. Drawing on her ethnography among German police officers, Brauer focuses on how postcolonial imaginaries of Orientalism and Occidentalism pervade the ways the police understand and construct urban space. She demonstrates how Occidentalism configures ethnicised and gendered

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power relations to the disadvantage of people living in certain neighbourhoods that are recognised as being ethnically diverse. Moreover, Brauer argues that these stigmatising practices of othering also reproduce a masculine institutionality within the police, colloquially referred to as ‘cop culture’. Gukelberger and Meyer invite us to consider a case of decolonial institutionality outside of the workplace. The authors present ethnographic materials from social protest movements in Senegal. Gukelberger and Meyer draw on phenomenological theory to understand practices of protest on the street and social media as a historical and enduring institution of a civil consciousness against injustices and, at the same time, as an instituting and transforming force. Their analysis of affect and embodied knowledge shows how the institution of protest is located in time regarding issues and visions that are fought for or against, and at the same time draws on historical resources such as former anti-colonial thinkers. The third part of this volume deals with the institutionality of Mass Media Representations. Integrating multimodality and genre elements into the concept of social media dispositif, Meier proposes a comprehensive style analysis of personalisation and aestheticisation as elements of communication strategies in the private–public context of social media. The resulting subjectification effect in visual identity is illustrated by comparing YouTube videos of the German video-blogger ‘Rezo’ with that of a young conservative politician. Guilbert presents an analysis of enunciation and argumentation in columns and editorials of the French press. His analysis makes apparent how the discourse creates a representation—or an imaginary—of the journalistic profession that legitimises the profession’s institutionality. Moreover, the analysis elicits how journalists, during times of social crisis, refer to common sense to persuade readers of positions that are founded in the political establishment and do not represent the broader public opinion. Kantara’s chapter uses conversation analysis to focus on populism as a political style in contemporary political mass media communication. She argues that populism constitutes a collaborative interactional practice through which politicians and journalists co-construct and legitimise

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populist identities in interviews. The contribution analyses televised news interviews to demonstrate how interactants actively naturalise populism as a mainstream strategy for politicians to draw on without framing their positions as too extreme or completely out of established political order. Clayman and Heritage’s revised and translated re-publication proposes a combination of qualitative conversation analysis and quantitative regression models to trace how the institutionality of political journalism has evolved over time. The contribution compares question design by journalists at U.S. presidential news conferences from 1953 to 2000 and shows how questions became more aggressive along various dimensions. Conversation analysis here serves to code a corpus of interactions for characteristics of question design and quantitative analysis relates discursive changes to societal context factors as independent variables that can account for the variation. The authors suggest that historically changing conventions of institutional talk provide insight into ongoing shifts in the institution of journalism and relations between the press and the state. Part four of this volume presents studies on the institutionality of Organisational Publicity. Muller and Skeates employ Critical Discourse Analysis to compare the institutionality of anglophone and Japanese university job advertisements. The analysis reveals a tension between global neoliberalisation driving universities to enhance their selfpresentation in their competition over a global pool of labour, on the one hand, and their anchoring in national education systems, on the other. The authors discuss how applicants have to respond to a mix of a marketing rhetoric that appears to colonise the globe with regional features—with the latter being found more in the Japanese advertisements than in the anglophone ones. Huang studies academic event posters that brand a university in Hong Kong ‘global’. His multimodal and semiotic analysis shows how the neoliberalisation of higher education relates to a prominent brand trope in institutional policy discourse of local and regional impact. Huang investigates how posters in four academic settings semiotically upscale the institutions, representing them as part of a wider Asian culture and economy.

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Beck and Spencer’s chapter deals with institutional self-promotion in the case of Swedish military recruitment videos. The authors argue for the use of narrative analysis to show how satirical humour normalises and legitimises militarism by hiding violence and evading potential criticism. Institutionality here refers to the formal organisation of the military and less formal institutional practices of humour. In part five of this volume, we collect chapters that show how institutionality is part and parcel of Legitimising Knowledge and Power. Abedi Farizani and Wieners outline a discourse theoretical perspective on official German organisational policies that aim to integrate forced migrants into the domestic labour market. The authors review literature to conceptualise institutions in terms of collective belief systems in relation to organisations and processes of organisation that reproduce institutions. Against this background and by drawing on Foucault’s work on power–knowledge relations, Abedi Farizani and Wieners question wide-spread organisational strategies of intercultural opening or cultural diversity. Bhabha’s third space terminology is presented as a more promising avenue that avoids reproducing binaries between the self and other and thereby reducing migrants to economic assets. Dangelmaier’s chapter deals with the complex of power and knowledge in narratives of German police officers. In these narratives, typified characters are mobilised to classify people and situations as suspicious or deviant, which in turn legitimises police action and renders such action as successful. Dangelmaier shows how these narrative legitimisation practices draw on both institutionally and legally sanctioned principles of police work and on an individual police officer’s personal evaluation. This contribution provides us with a critical perspective on how police have the power to stereotypically define people and situations as potentially problematic. Guilbert and Lebaron’s translated re-publication provides a qualitative and quantitative socio-discursive analysis of speeches by the European Central Bank from 2007 to 2015. The authors elucidate how austerity, after the global financial crisis, is represented in ways that legitimises new political competencies of the ECB and impose moral and economic standards on EU-member states.

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Using enunciative pragmatics and dispositif analysis, Maesse and Krasni’s chapter shows how economic expertise is generated in the social media public sphere by drawing from symbolic resources developed in discursive fields of mainstream media, politics and academia. The authors demonstrate how experts are able to influence political debates and how this generates a neoliberal expert hegemony. A re-publication of Heller’s article on the structuration of high school education in francophone Canada provides an ethnographically informed interaction analysis and proposals of how to conceptualise the generation of order on the level of interaction, institutions and society. Heller argues that teaching neutralises institutional contradictions of liberal democratic states and reproduces a dominant national ideology of language. This contribution raises and discusses important questions about unequal knowledge distribution and its consequences for minorities as well as possibilities of resistance. Heller thereby also sheds light on the role of schools in the construction of race and the relationship between schools and workplaces. In our conclusion chapter, Scholz, Porsché and Singh discuss how the chapters collected in this volume further our understanding of how institutional (re-)ordering produces and is produced by the three interlocking dimensions briefly mentioned above, namely structure and agency, the local and the global and stability and transformation. We reflect on what we have learnt from the 20 chapters in this volume and further theorise institutionality. We conceptualise institutional order as an outcome of habitual interaction practices that involves a (re-)imagining and making relevant of rules. In this connection, we advocate paying attention to the contingency and transformation of institutional orders and its claims to authority. We hope that the chapters we have collected in this volume will allow readers to explore the complexity of institutions in today’s societies and inspire further studies into how institutionality shapes and is shaped by people’s lives.

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References Blommaert,. Jan. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, Jan. 2020. “Sociolinguistic Scales in Retrospect.” Applied Linguistics Review 12 (3): 375–380. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2019-0132 Cooren, François. 2020. Beyond Entanglement: (Socio-)Materiality and Organization Studies. Organization Theory 1 (3): 1–24. DiMaggio, Paul J., and Walter W. Powell. 1983. The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. American Sociological Review 48 (2): 147–160. Douglas, Mary. 1986. How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Ebbinghaus, Bernhard. 2005. “Can Path Dependence Explain Institutional Change? Two Approaches Applied to Welfare State Reform.” MPIfG Discussion Paper 05/2. Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Fairhurst, Gail T., and Linda Putnam. 2004. Organizations as Discursive Constructions. Communication Theory 14 (1): 5–26. Foucault, Michel. 1981[1971] “The Order of Discourse.” In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, edited by Robert Young, 48–78. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 2006. “Vorlesung 5. Sitzung vom 8. Februar 1978.” In Sicherheit, Territorium, Bevölkerung: Vorlesung am Collège de France, 1977 – 1978, edited by Michel Sennelart, 173–200. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Freed, Alice F. 2015. “Institutional Discourse.” In The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, edited by Karen Tracy, Cornelia Ilie and Todd Sandel, 1–18. Wiley Online Library. https://doi.org/10.1002/978 1118611463.wbielsi151 Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York, NY: Basic Books. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goffman, Erving. 1981. Footing. In Forms of Talk, edited by Erving Goffman, 124–159. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hodgson, Geoffrey M. 2006. What Are Institutions? Journal of Economic Issues 40 (1): 1–25.

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Lane, Jan-Erik. 2014. “Institutionality: ‘Institution’ and ‘Institutions Matter’” Open Journal of Political Science 4 (1): 23–30. https://www.scirp.org/html/ 42568.html Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lieberman, Robert C. 2002. Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change. The American Political Science Review 96 (4): 697–712. Marttila, Tomas, ed. 2019. Discourse, Culture and Organization: Inquiries into Relational Structures of Power. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan. 1977. Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology 83 (2): 340–363. Mumby, Dennis K., and Timothy R. Kuhn. 2018. Organizational Communication: A Critical Introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. North, Douglass Cecil, and Monika Streissler. 1988. Theorie des institutionellen Wandels: Eine neue Sicht der Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Oger, Claire. 2021. Faire réference : la construction de l’autorité dans le discours des institutions. Éditions EHESS. Overhaus, Marco, and Siegfried Schieder. 2010. Institutionalismus. In Handbuch der Internationalen Politik, edited by Carlo Masala, Frank Sauer, and Andreas Wilhelm, 117–134. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Potter, Jonathan, Margaret Wetherell, Ros Gill, and Derek Edwards. 1990. Discourse: Noun, Verb or Social Practice? Philosophical Psychology 3 (2/3): 205–217. Putnam, Linda L., and Anne M. Nicotera. 2009. Building Theories of Organization: The Constitutive Role of Communication. London: Routledge. Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert. 2001. “Weltrepräsentanz und Verkörperung. Institutionelle Analyse und Symboltheorien. Eine Einführung in systematischer Absicht.” In Institutionalität und Symbolisierung, edited by Gert Melville, 3–49. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau. Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert. 2012. “Institutionelle Analyse als historische Komparatistik. Zusammenfassung der theoretischen und methodologischen Grundlagen und Hauptergebnisse des Sonderforschungsbereiches 537 ‚Institutionalität und Geschichtlichkeit.” In Dimensionen institutioneller Macht. Fallstudien von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Gert Melville and Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, 417–443. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau. Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert. 2014 [1998]. “Die stabilisierende ‚Fiktionalität‘ von Präsenz und Dauer: Institutionelle Analyse und historische Forschung.”

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In Symbolische Ordnungen: Beiträge zu einer soziologischen Theorie der Institutionen, edited by Hans Vorländer, 147–73. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Sarangi, Srikant, and Celia Roberts, eds. 1999. Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Schmidt, Vivien A. 2008. Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse. Annual Review of Political Science 11 (1): 303–326. Scholz, Ronny. 2010. Die diskursive Legitimation der Europäischen Union: Eine lexikometrische Analyse zur Verwendung des sprachlichen Zeichens Europa/Europe in deutschen, französischen und britischen Wahlprogrammen zu den Europawahlen zwischen 1979 und 2004. Unpublished doctoral thesis. Magdeburg und Paris-Est: Institut für Soziologie; École Doctorale Cultures et Sociétés. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life. Language and Communication 23 (3/4): 193–229. Smith, Dorothy E. 2001. Texts and the Ontology of Organizations and Institutions. Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies 7 (2): 159–198. Thornborrow, Joanna. 2022. Power Talk: Language and Interaction in Institutional Discourse. London: Routledge. Weber, Max. 1972[1922]: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Zucker, Lynne G. 1977. The Role of lnstitutionalization in Cultural Persistence. American Sociological Review 42 (5): 726–743.

Part I Workplace Interaction

2 Beyond Deontics: Power Relations in Decision-Making Processes in Management Meetings Ilkka Arminen, Aku Kallio, and Tiina Mälkiä

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Introduction

Power is a rather general and multi-definitional notion, and it is not easily reducible to any given enumerable, definite interactional patterns. Therefore, it is challenging to formulate an empirical program for the study of power on the level of social interaction (Hutchby 1999). For the most part, conversation analysts have remained extremely cautious about making any claims concerning the exercise of power—given the I. Arminen (B) University of Helsinki, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] A. Kallio Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected] T. Mälkiä Independent Scholar, Turku, Finland

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Porsché et al. (eds.), Institutionality, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96969-1_2

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risk of reification of the analysis from observable details in interaction when resorting to a priori interpretations of the work of power structures (Schegloff 1991; cf. Hutchby 1996). Recently, a new form of analysis of social interaction, deontics, carries promise for a new kind of approach for the study of power relations (Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2012). Deontics refers to interactions in which the first speaker makes a suggestion for future events, and the second either acquiesces to or resists the plan (Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2012; Stevanovic and Svennevig 2015). By making such plans, the first speaker claims the deontic right to decide the future actions of the participants. The study of deontics promises CA to open up investigations of “power relations,” which had been neglected. However, we show that deontics alone is too narrow a frame for the study of power relations. We propose that the analysis should be recontextualized by paying close attention to the institutional context in which acquiescing or resisting occurs. The empirical material comes from management meetings of public research organizations (PRO). Management meetings provide an arena for making decisions concerning future courses of action related to the organization and the persons involved; therefore, they are a salient object for study concerning suggestions for future events and their reception. We will focus on such interactions in management meetings where a party—or parties—accountably tries to influence the decision-making process and, in this sense, exercises power. We give a clear and distinct account of these cases, and discuss to what degree these instances can be analyzed within a deontic framework (Dalby et al. 2015; Stevanovic 2018; Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2014). We conclude with a discussion on the benefits and limits of a deontic approach and provide suggestions to take the analysis beyond deontics to accomplish a more thorough view on power relations.

1.1

Deontics/Powerin Interaction

Despite the difficulties in approaching the subject of power, in CA there has been a lot of discussion of related issues. This has focused on, for instance, asymmetries in interaction, in particular in institutional

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interaction in which parties are oriented to institutional tasks and functions (Drew and Heritage 1992). The conventionalized asymmetries in (institutional) interaction reveal the participants’ orientation to complementary (institutional) roles and related constraints (Heath 1986). Such asymmetries relate, for example, to the differential distribution of knowledge, rights to knowledge, entitlements and obligations, and access to conversational and/or institutional resources (Arminen 2017; Drew and Heritage 1992). Yet, not all asymmetries are related to power (Hutchby 1996). Service encounters tend to be sharply asymmetric, but we do not tend to think of a kiosk as an arena of power (Mondada and Sorjonen 2016)—although the kiosk salesperson may have the power, or obligation, to deny underaged clients access to cigarettes, etc. Similarly, the highly asymmetric cockpit interaction between the pilot flying and the pilot not flying is not related to structural power relations, but the captain and the co-pilot switch the roles of the pilot flying/not flying according to standard operating procedures (Auvinen and Arminen 2013). Nevertheless, when asymmetries in interaction converge with permanent institutional role differentiation (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998), asymmetries may be related to power in interaction. In CA, the analysis of power is further complicated by its methodological credo that the researcher has to show how the proposed mechanism of power is procedurally consequential for the observable patterns of interaction, because the shifting distribution of resources that enable the local achievement of interactional effects may be an outcome of sequential courses other than power (Arminen 2017; Schegloff 1991). Given the hardship to fulfill the requirement for procedural relevance, the deontic approach offers promise. It allows us to identify the first speaker’s suggestions for future events and then explore the second speaker’s responses, which acquiesce to or resist the plans, and also indicate the second speaker’s understanding of the first speaker’s entitlement to propose (Stevanovic 2018; Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2012). Though management meetings are utilized for numerous tasks, such as information sharing, innovating and decision-making, they do share an orientation toward future courses of action (Aggerholm and Asmuss 2016; Laapotti and Mikkola 2016), making them ideal for the analysis of deontics. In many other respects, management meetings are also

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variable, for example, in terms of formality, agenda setting and turn allocation (Raclaw and Ford 2015). The relationships and alignments among the participants are also highly variable, ranging from consensus to open disagreements in the decision-making (Kangasharju 2002). Humor and laughter are occasionally used as a strategic resource to reduce or alleviate tensions (Kangasharju and Nikko 2009; Raclaw and Ford 2017). Numerous discursive resources are also used to influence the decisionmaking, including (re)formulations, co-constructions and repairs (Boden 1994; Clifton 2009). Moreover, decision-making styles in meetings vary (Asmuss and Svennevig 2009; Huisman 2001; Raclaw and Ford 2015). In the executive team meetings studied here, the parties normally follow a formal order: the presenter (either the chair or a specialist in regard to the agenda item) introduces the issue, while the chair (the Director General of the Institute) allocates and closes the discussion, and initiates the next agenda item. If the agenda includes a decision task, the chair normally announces the decision after the discussion before moving on to the next item. When the announced decision is not challenged, it counts as a collective team decision through acquiescence. We observe and document the fact that the executive team meetings follow this semi-formal institutional order (i.e., asymmetrical interaction composed of identifiable sequential patterns). The team meetings studied largely follow a routine realized through recurrent sequences of action. However, a more detailed analysis reveals that the order is flexible. It is not uncommon for the parties to depart from the agenda and role-based routines. Both pre-emptions, in which part of the procedure is skipped, and extensions, when a discussion is continued after and beyond the chair-initiated closing, do happen. Our interest in this chapter is on these departures from canonical patterns of meeting routines, in which the participants appear to act against some pre-given standards. However, we are by no means claiming that any of these departures or digressions were salient as such; nor do we assert that infidelities to the routines were somehow more significant than the routines themselves. We acknowledge that, first, routines themselves are achievements, being based on elaborated, fine-grained accomplishments that are foundational for the whole activity (Schegloff

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1986). Second, they may entail ritualized recursivity, which is elementary for the maintenance of interaction order (Goffman 1967 ; 1983). Third, the achievement of routines is embellished in often unmarked pre- and post-expansions that enable the formation of patterns (Maynard 1984; Schegloff 2007); only a fine line divides legitimate pre- and postexpansions from overt digressions. What we argue is that deviations from canonical meeting sequences make the orderliness and purpose of meetings more visible than standard sequences, which resembles the way errors in cockpit interaction facilitate exploration of the pilots’ incessant work to sustain and restore order in the cockpit (Arminen et al. 2010; Auvinen and Arminen 2013). Furthermore, we focus on specific kinds of deviations, in which the deviating party appears to maneuver in a tactical or strategic way to influence the ongoing decision-making process. Notably, CA refers to intentions only when they are accountably observable (Schegloff 1980, cf. Hutchby 1999; Arminen 2017). In the management meetings, participants are oriented to decision-making that bears consequences for the organization and all involved; hence, they are engaged in exercising of power, irrespective of what they themselves would call it. In particular, digressions from the routine course of the decision-making process make participants’ interests perspicuous. Sometimes these interests are overtly stated, whereas at other times they remain unarticulated in the course of the action, which does not eliminate involvement in the decision-making but may make the interpretation of the unstated aims harder. Our study is based on multimodal conversation analysis (Arminen et al. 2014; Goodwin 2017; Heath et al. 2010; Porsché 2017). The data consists of videotaped management meetings at a Finnish public research organization (the Institute). We explore the interplay of multimodal communicative modes—language and other semiotic resources (gesture, gaze, material objects, models, instructions, and technical artifacts). Our empirical cases comprise various kinds of digressions from routine sequential courses of decision-making, in which some kind of influencing on the decision-making happens. The instances include extensions, when discussion on an issue is continued after its signaled end, and interventions, when a sequentially non-ratified party (i.e., someone who is not given a turn or who continues it after its pragmatic

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completion) intervenes in the ongoing decision-making with a digression or an alternative suggestion. In our analysis, we will first describe our cases in question. Then we provide an account of how the case could be analyzed in terms of deontics. Finally, in our discussion we elaborate on the deontic account and point out what more could be said about each case.

2

Data and Methods

Our data was collected in 2009–2010 as part of a research project on the domestication of university and public research organization (PRO) reforms and mergers in Finland. In the project, we received access to videotape meetings of a university executive board and two PRO executive teams, based on participants’ informed consent. For this study we use a videotaped collection of three executive team meetings of one Finnish PRO. For the sake of confidentiality, we do not share further details of the Institute. The meeting length varied from 59 min to two hours and 45 min. Six hours and 40 min of video data was examined for this chapter. We also had access to the meeting agendas and memoranda. Our corpus consists of a selection of meetings that do not involve the most sensitive personnel management issues. The Institute was undergoing wide-ranging administrative reforms during the study period, including profiling and the elimination of overlapping units, with the consequent outsourcing of staff. We did not gain access to the meetings in which outsourcing was discussed. Yet, the less sensitive meetings also involved tensions and delicate decision tasks tied to the participants’ interests. The Institute executive meetings were chaired by the Director General (DG) or his deputy. All the meeting agendas included information sharing, discussion, and decision-making. The issues related to organizational reforms, new procedures implemented, consequential legal reforms, the system and output features of the institute, and resources and their allocation. One stationary camera was used to videotape the meetings. They were all conducted in Finnish, but we provide English translations. The recordings were transcribed using the Jeffersonian system (see Jefferson

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1984a), and the transcriptions include some multimodal aspects, such as gestures and nods. For preserving the participants’ anonymity, only outlined figures of the multimodal aspects of interaction are presented when relevant. The data is technically of high quality in terms of both audio and video, yet it has some limitations. The stationary camera we set up did not capture all the participants all the time: some team members are outside of the frame at times, and others are partially blocked by other participants. Constraints in meeting interaction typically concern both turn-taking and topical progression (Raclaw and Ford 2015; Svennevig 2012). Our data comprises recordings of semi-formal meetings in which the chair is assigned responsibility for turn allocation and agenda control in opening and closing the topics, as well as making summary formulations about the issues discussed. The chair’s role in maintaining the agenda is also evident in bringing the discussion back on track after digressions (see Holmes et al. 2007). The participants’ specific orientation to the meeting as an activity type appears also in their usage of the agenda or earlier turns as their reference points, instead of the previous turn (cf. Arminen 2004). A meeting is also an embodied achievement. The executive meetings in question took place in a designated room in which the participants were gathered around a table. As seating arrangements may also be fixed in some way, in our case the chair was seated either (traditionally) at the end of the table with other parties on either side (as in Fig. 1) or on one side of the table, next to his “right hand,” with the other members seated on the opposite side. Apart from allowing face-to-face interaction between participants, the table also functions as a barrier that separates them. Other physical artifacts, such as laptops, projectors, pens, and papers, also tend to play a role in meeting situations in terms of presenting/recording information and claiming the participants’ attention. In addition, the institutional context may be consequential in many respects. Participants may orient to each other as incumbents of their relevant institutional roles in managing issues and solving problems. In addition to the DG (the chair), the members of the executive board here include the deputy DG, the Communications Director, the Administration Director and all the departmental directors. Almost all of the team members are depicted in Fig. 1, and were joined on occasion by a deputy

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Fig. 1 The executive team of the institute

member, Frank, and other presenters. The transcripts refer to people only by an initial: e.g., Anthony = A. All the names are pseudonyms. We investigate multimodal meeting activities, applying the principles of ethnomethodology (EM), multimodal conversation analysis (CA), and ethnography (Arminen 2017; Heath et al. 2010; Streeck et al. 2011). The analysis of videos examines both verbal interaction and observable physical actions to make sense of the participants’ dynamic and reflexive meaning-making processes. Ethnographic background data is utilized to clarify and enrich the meaning of the participants’ observable actions.

3

Strategic Extensions

Clifton (2009) stresses the distinction between decision-making and decision announcements. Although all participants are able to contribute to decision-making in management meetings, the chair tends to have the privilege of announcing the decisions. Two features characterize decision announcements and the closing of agenda items: (1) the parties typically orient to the prior discussion by means of a summary formulation or a (rhetorical) request to confirm general agreement and display commitment to proposed future actions; and (2) closings offer a final opportunity to influence the decision-making. If no resistance appears at

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the closing moment, the chair may initiate a new item, thereby closing the previous topic. Through the decision announcements, the chair is put in a position to influence the decision-making concerning future actions and definitions of social reality. Therefore, the other meeting participants may try to keep the topic alive until a conclusion has developed in a felicitous enough manner for the initiation of the closing; for instance, Clifton (2009) demonstrates how a suggestion maker may seek the decision announcer’s alignment with a gaze. Alternatively, parties may also try to move out of initiated closings (see Schegloff and Sacks 1973). Opening up the closing may thus allow one more go at the issue. In (1), a team member takes initiative just after the chair’s closing attempt. The move out of a closing opens up the discussion space anew. Here the topic concerns strategic project proposals for which the Institute can apply for state funding. Timothy, the head of administration, had asked earlier if the chair could suggest some possible topics for the proposals, but the chair had not answered directly. At lines 1–8, he formulates a decision announcement for the team members to accept, stating that the sectors/departments should consider potential topics before the next meeting. Already at line 3, Timothy had requested a turn, which was granted at line 10.

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(1) An initiative after the chair’s closure. 1

1 Due to space restrictions, only the translations are shown. The analysis can be followed with them. Originals available from the authors.

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The chair’s conditional decision announcement (l. 1–8) is formulated with the help of a polar question preferring acceptance (Heritage 2010). At the pragmatic completion of the chair’s multi-unit announcement, Timothy is granted the turn he had requested (l. 3, 8–10). First, initiating his turn with “and,” he makes an addition to the chair’s decision announcement, which is acknowledged nonverbally by the team members (l. 11–12) and verbally by the chair (l. 12). Thus far this has been an unmarked extension to a closure acquiesced to by the other team members. However, Timothy then continues his turn incrementally, that is, he moves on after post-completion with a fitted non-main clause addition (Ford and Fox 2002). Anthony, David, and the chair orient to the completion at the word kannata “worth” (l. 11), and it appears that for them Finnish grammar and Timothy’s prosody allow flexibility

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so that the turn can be heard as both completed and open for incremental continuation pohtiakkaan “even considering.” So far, Timothy has produced an unmarked minimal post-expansion (Schegloff 2007), but he continues by rushing through the completion point (l. 13). Rushing enables Timothy to keep the turn, and he begins to give suggestions right away. The multimodal execution of these suggestions is also of interest here, with the use of hand gestures at each suggestion being particularly notable (l. 14, 17, and 22). Not only does Timothy emphasize his suggestions by means of synchronized gestures, at each suggestion he points and looks toward the director of the sector concerned (Fig. 2). The gazes and gestures both emphasize the suggestions and address the directors in question, as well as inviting them to display alignment. Indeed, both Nancy (l. 16) and Bethy (l. 18, 20, and 22) display alignment with Timothy. The extension after the closing is notable in at least three ways. First, with his turn request at the completion of the closing, Timothy manages to initiate the extension legitimately, but instead of making a single point he succeeds in moving incrementally to new proposals as if continuing his granted extension. The action comprises a sequentially, topically skillfully managed, and gradual movement away from the closing and the decision announcement. Second, with his multimodal performance

Fig. 2 Timothy gestures toward the recipients while making an extension

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in presenting proposals, Timothy invites recipient support by acknowledging them with his gaze and gestures, along with his suggestions. Third, although the chair grants Timothy’s initial addition, the continuation moves beyond and against the chair’s decision announcement as Timothy starts to nominate proposals for applications (l. 13, 16, 21). The chair had announced a right for sectors/departments to consider proposals before the next meeting and Timothy, without disputing the resolution, just proceeds to nominate the candidate proposals. Thereby, he manages to resist the announced decision without explicitly stating resistance, but by naming the candidates he defies the DG, who would have left it to the sectors. Overall, this provides a vivid example of strategic participation in decision-making (see Arminen 2017; Sacks 1992). The deontic account shows that recipients did not resist the turn extension, by means of which a party makes future proposals. Moreover, their affirming nodding displays their acquiescence to the action. In this case, the deontic authority of the board member—rather than that of the chair— is acknowledged.

4

Strategic Interruptions

Early CA research called overlaps of talk “interruptions,” and considers them as indications of dominance and power (West and Zimmermann 1983; Zimmerman and West 1975), although other studies have identified other functions of overlaps (James and Clarke 1993; Murray 1988). Later, the notion of “interruption” was questioned (Schegloff 2000; 2002). Schegloff (2002) pointed out that it is not who gets to interrupt whom, but what counts is whether participants treat the overlapping talk as problematic. Schegloff (2000) uses the term “overlap resolution device” to describe the mechanism used in responding to problematic overlaps, referring to the interactional resources (e.g., louder voice, higher pitch, prolonged sounds and repeated parts of speech) used to resolve overlaps in conversation. We are also interested in the functions of overlaps. Given that meeting interaction is constrained, overlapping actions (excluding continuers and minimal responses) can be considered violations of the current speaker’s right to complete his/her turn.

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In (2), the team members are talking about the allocation of money within their organization. Bethy’s sector is one of the few with a surplus balance, and she has stated that her sector’s future budget is based on those figures. Timothy, the administrative director, has displayed a disagreement with Bethy by shaking his head and saying, “no.” Below (4), we show what happens next, when Bethy continues. (Figs. 3 and 2.4). In lines 1–5, Bethy presents herself as a spokesperson for her sector and pleads for its case, not to use their surplus for balancing deficit of other sectors, explicitly referring to the researchers’ complaints that they should pay others’ debts. During her turn, Timothy starts to shift his gaze restlessly between her and the chairperson. As the chair does not lift his gaze from his papers, Timothy starts tapping on the table at the point when Bethy uses the term “general deficit” (l. 5–6). The first four beats are produced in rapid succession, and Timothy monitors the response of the chair and others (l. 6). At the first beat, none of the team members are gazing at Timothy, whose eyes are on Bethy. At the second beat, Bethy leans back and turns her gaze to Timothy, who looks at the chair, whose eyes are still on his papers. At the third and fourth beats, Anthony and Matt also turn to gaze at Timothy (Fig. 3). Despite Timothy’s tapping and gazing, the chair remains focused on his papers, shielded from the interaction (Ayaß 2014)

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(2) Tapping the table

At line 8, Timothy addresses the chair directly in a quick tempo. This both requests the chair’s attention and acknowledges that the speaker has not yet been given the right to speak. Moreover, Timothy’s rushing shows his attempt to get the turn after Bethy, who has stopped talking at a possible completion point (l. 5). During Timothy’s words ‘I’m,’ the chair turns his gaze to him, thus displaying his recipiency (Fig. 4).

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Fig. 3 Timothy starts tapping on the table during Bethy’s turn

Fig. 4 Timothy has gained the recipients’ attention

Further at line 10, Bethy returns to compete for the floor, using a louder voice as an overlap resolution device; Timothy responds to the competition with a hand beat (l. 9). The hand beat also emphasizes the strength of his disagreement. The beat is synchronized with the word toista (literally meaning “another” or “different” [opinion]), thus highlighting the disagreeing stance. At lines 11–12, the chair takes the turn, indicating topic completion with his response token joo (Sorjonen 2001) and initiating a conciliatory summary: “in any case, so.”

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Notably, standard turn-allocation techniques in meetings are multimodal: a turn is requested by the raising of a hand and/or looking at the chair. Likewise, the chair may allocate a turn simply with a hand gesture, a nod or a gaze. At line 6, as Timothy has not managed to attract the chair’s gaze, he starts to draw attention to himself by tapping his hand on the table. He also appears to violate the current speaker’s right to complete her turn to articulate a disagreement. At line 10, Bethy then produces a turn in competition. However, Bethy’s turn is composed of an idiom, which shows her orientation to topic closing (Drew and Holt 1998) and indicates her compliance with Timothy’s taking the floor. Coming in (l. 11) after the floor competition, the chair uses a conciliatory phrase, which sets up an initiation to move out of the trouble (Jefferson 1984b). However, Timothy’s rather aggressive interruption does not awake sanctions against it. In (4), Timothy challenges Bethy, thus resisting her deontic authority, and the others acquiesce to Timothy’s action through their silence.

5

Preempting Topics by Defining Discursive Meeting Boundaries

If power is an ability to make the world match words (Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2012), its salient aspect is the ability to define what the world is (Diamond 1996). More mundanely, participants in management meetings interpret the state of affairs and prepare the ground for influencing others to accept their view, in which the terminological choices are of utmost importance as they allude to underlying presuppositions and index interests (Goodwin 1994; Arminen 2017). Negotiation of the meaning of terms gains a specific sense in management meetings, as it may be tied to the boundary between being on and off the record, where only propositions stated on the record become part of the official reality of the organization. Consequently, the scope of officially sanctioned reality varies, depending on how the terms become defined. This also limits the public transparency of the meeting (Haug 2013). From a

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critical perspective, the on-and-off boundary drawing could be considered “ontological gerrymandering,” which contributes to defining what the world is (Woolgar and Pawlutz 1985). In extract (3a), the management meeting is dealing with the strategic project proposals which had been discussed in an earlier meeting (see case 3). Three minutes previously, the chair has mentioned three candidates: “Operation 2000 Follow-up,” a longitudinal study based on the original Operation 2000; “Operation 2000 Rerun,” a repeat of Operation 2000; and “National Project.” Afterward a deputy team member, Frank, poses a question concerning exclusions from the nominations (l. 1–3).

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In his question, Frank displays his stance concerning the project Operation 2000 Follow-up, describing it as “really important and valuable” (l. 1–3). Timothy, the chair and David all answer to Frank almost unanimously, displaying their shared orientation (l. 5–7). After Frank’s hesitant understanding check (l. 8), the chair produces a summarizing formulation that nothing has been decided yet (l. 10). Frank still reformulates his question concerning the prioritizing of projects (l. 12–14). The chair denies that there was “really” any order of priority “yet” (l. 15). In return, Frank displays compliance by saying that he must have heard wrong, thus leaving the chair’s interpretation in force. We can further refine the analysis by taking into account the chair’s earlier words about the projects (see extract 3b below) that Frank’s questions concerned. In (3b) three minutes earlier than 3a, the chair comments on the strategic project proposals. At line 1, he is talking about highly interesting and important research, referring to the project Operation 2000 Follow-up (15 s earlier). He then states that the National Project is something they must absolutely do (lines 5–7). Operation 2000 Rerun is described as an examination survey, which the chair frames with uncertainty, stating that he is not sure about it (lines 7–8). Frank appears to address this moment in his question (extract 3a).

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(3b) The chair comments on the candidate projects three minutes earlier

The chair attributes to the projects varying degrees of certainty. The National Project has to be done “without doubt” (l. 6–7), whereas he is “not completely sure” about Operation 2000 Rerun (l. 7). However, the degrees of certainty are framed in terms of the official duties of the institute, such as monitoring (l. 3), in contrast to a cross-examination survey. Moreover, the chair’s turn was a summary in response to the sector heads’ turns, where they had introduced the candidate projects. It might therefore be a simplification to translate the degrees of certainty to a priority list, as Timothy and David also state in unity with the chair (extract 3a, l. 5–7). Moreover, the chair did not use the term “prioritize” at all. In fact, Edwin, one of the team members and the financial planning officer, referred to “prioritizing” after the chair’s summary, not as something that has already been done but as something that still remains to be done. In

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this context, the chair chooses to state that “prioritizing” has not been part of the discussion. Case 3 demonstrates how terminological choices can become critical objects of contestation. The chair, with the help of two team members, states that their discussion had not concerned “prioritizing.” For the questioner, reference to a “hearing problem” (l. 17) provided a safe way out of the potential controversy. The critical reader might maintain that there had occurred some valuation, implying order between the candidate projects, but that this was deleted from the record of the meeting. Further, this lack of openness could be considered detrimental to the transparency of administrative practices (Haug 2013). On the other hand, the case shows that the received meaning of a terminological choice such as the expression of certainty depends on the recipients. Expressions are dependent on the recipients’ contextual knowledge and values, and on their ability to connect the expression to their discursive contexts (Garfinkel 1967). Executive team members’ entitlement to limit the publicity of their meetings enables them to have discussions that draw on their set of knowledges without a need to open up all presuppositions and implications in a time-consuming manner. Furthermore, their meetings establish this particular expertise for them as a part of their participation in the team (Arminen and Simonen forthcoming). In (3), the recipients resisted a questioner’s right to ask a question concerning prioritizing, yet it seems that the recipients did not disapprove of the person’s right to ask the question as such. Instead, they voiced their criticism against the terminological choice.

6

Discussion

In (1), participants acquiesce to a board member’s action, allowing him to extend his turn and influence the outcome regarding the issue at hand (i.e., in this case the deontic authority is granted). In (2) and (3), a board member’s (Bethy’s and Frank’s, respectively) view—namely, that the unit should not participate in covering a “general deficit” or that prioritizing of candidate projects has been done—was resisted by other members. Hence, their deontic authority was challenged.

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However, although we are able to give a deontic account for many of the actions through which participants in interaction continuously influence each other regarding the proposed future state of affairs, the cases as a whole do not perfectly fit into the deontic frame. In (1), Timothy manages to construct a space to make proposals for candidate projects by skillfully moving out of closing and then incrementing the proposals to the position after the closing. Consequently, what is at stake in (1) is not a legitimate proposal as a part of the official meeting interaction, but an improvised maneuver that takes place off the record. Timothy had not asked for a turn to make a proposal to counter the chair’s resolution proposal. For all these reasons, it might be somewhat misleading to account for these in terms of deontics. Rather than just accepting a proposal, the participants have to consider whether to accept the artful moving out of the closing, which creatively manipulates the institutionally sanctioned meeting procedures. In (2), Timothy clearly and loudly resists Bethy’s view, but it does not appear that he would resist her right to her view. Timothy’s aggressive move is not sanctioned, but not sanctioning only means not displaying disapproval; it does not mean acceptance. In both (2) and (3), there are sharp disagreements about how to handle the deficit (2) and about whether “prioritizing” is the right term to describe what the chair had done (3). This forces us to probe the relationship between “deontics” and “disagreements.” On the face of it, disagreement shows a lack of acquiescence, thereby demonstrating a lack of deontic authority. When we accept this view, then deontic authority is limited to situations where there is a sharp hierarchy between participants and the proposal is accepted unconditionally. Note that these—and most— management meetings are built on an assumption that the executive team contributes to the decision-making, thereby becoming committed to the decisions. Institutionally, executive team members’ unconditional right to express their opinions—to agree and disagree—is guaranteed by separating “decision-making” and “decision announcements” (Clifton 2009). The whole institution of management meetings is based on the idea that parties do not agree totally. In that sense, there is no unquestioned deontic authority in these meetings. It is not that we could not find moments of acquiescence (e.g., in decision announcements),

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but if we based our analysis on these moments only, we could offer only an extremely narrow and reified view of the institutional work of management meetings. Anyone who has ever participated in any decision-making process knows that the discussion grounding the decision is the most critical part of the enormous work that leads to the decision. There are at least two more theoretical grounds on which to question that deontics alone could be a sufficient frame for the analysis of decision-making in management meetings—or of power in general. First, deontics is based on an assumption that it exists as a separate, distinct aspect of interaction, similarly to that of epistemics. The researchers who employ this term erroneously believe that it can be separated from other aspects of interaction (Heritage 2013; Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2014; Stevanovic 2018; Stevanovic and Svennevig 2015). Actually, large parts of the management meetings appear to concern participants’ attempts to use their knowledge “to interpret events and reality and have this interpretation accepted by others” (Diamond 1996, 13). In practice, the work of describing issues, epistemics, and that of making the decisions, deontics, are inseparable. In the instances studied, the participants try to influence how the issues should be seen by considering how things have been done previously, what is considered important, which projects could be seen as fundable, which deficit belongs to whom, what is regarded as “prioritizing,” etc. Although methodologically it is tempting to try to discern distinct moments in which future proposals are made and assessed, in fact, everything that we know about decision-making puts that view in question. The objective of management meetings is to discuss and decide on future actions of the organization. The participants debate and negotiate issues that are of strategic relevance to the organization and the associated institutional realms beyond it. Management meetings are an arena of power, where we can localize sequences of negotiation of future actions; yet, it appears difficult to pinpoint separate, isolated moments or sequences that comprised the nexus of power. Participants negotiate how to deal with a budget deficit or for which projects to apply for additional funding, but even in cases when decisionmaking culminates in proposals, these proposals tend to be embedded in complex information sequences, position statements and explications of

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terms that are indistinguishable from the proposals. As soon as the parties are dealing with issues that they deem to not be innocuous, decisionmaking appears to take a form that makes it hard to identify the moment in which the decision is made (Huisman 2001). A distinction between decision-making and decision announcements may also play a critical role, because as soon as it has emerged, the precise moment of decisionmaking may have vanished (Clifton 2009). Instead, a new paradox arises: there is no decision before its announcement, but the announcement cannot precede the decision reached. Studies on deontics have mainly analyzed small-sized routine distributions of work tasks, such as which hymns to choose for a church service (Dalby et al. 2015; Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2012; Stevanovic and Svennevig 2015). It may be that in those innocuous contexts, where the display of power is less fateful, straightforward deontic analysis works. In more strategic institutional arenas, such as management meetings, the execution of power tends to be embedded in a multi-layered context. The fact that the use of power cannot be pinpointed to individual speech acts may make power veiled in the very contexts in which it is most salient. This makes the analysis of interaction even more important. When participants act strategically, it is even more pertinent to explicate how parties orient to and influence the shifting distribution of the interactional resources affecting the decision-making. Second, Shils’ famous complaint, which gave the inspiration to the birth of ethnomethodology, may apply to deontics as well: “In 1954 Fred Strodtbeck was hired by the University of Chicago Law School to analyze tape recordings of jury deliberations obtained from a bugged jury room. Edward Shils was on the committee that hired him. When Strodtbeck proposed to a law school faculty to administer Bales Interaction Process Analysis categories, Shils complained: By using Bales Interaction Process Analysis, I’m sure we’ll learn what about a jury’s deliberations makes them a small group. But we want to know what about their deliberations makes them a jury” (Garfinkel et al. 1981, 133). It is not that there were no deontics at play in the management meetings. Through the analysis of deontics we may learn that people interact in management meetings, but we want to know which board members’ actions make them a management team. By analyzing management meetings, we should explore what in these occasions involves

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such managerial work that is consequential for leadership, constituting management in practice. Although deontics may well be at play in the management meetings, it is not enough to identify it; we should rather discern what is done with it, and where it arises. Garfinkel’s critique of the social sciences is that their descriptions of social practices tend to be inadequate and fail to make sense of social actions. Garfinkel proposed that to understand jurors’ decisionmaking, the researcher should ascertain the jurors’ reasoning on how they decide the relevance of the facts of the case. This has been called the problem of the “occasioned corpus” (Hak 1995, 110–111). For Garfinkel, what makes a jury a jury (and not just another small group) is the “work of assembling the ‘corpus’ which serves as grounds for inferring the correctness of a verdict” (Hak 1995, 112). Accordingly, the analysis of management meetings should pinpoint how the decisionmaking in management meetings differs from the decision-making in everyday life. As a part of their institutional work, the management teams assemble the corpus, they build cases of the issues they have to decide on, and they determine what the relevant aspects of the cases are, in order to be able to make decisions on them. Our analysis of managerial work may make power relations visible, but it is quintessential to highlight how power emerges out of managerial work. The skillful analyst accounts for managerial team members’ incessant work of selecting, highlighting, and distinguishing the relevancies of all that takes place in their meetings. By deciphering managerial work, we can elaborate on how parties incessantly influence each other in their meeting interactions, in which maneuvers they engage to mitigate undesired influences, how they attempt to broaden their own possibilities for gaining influence and how they color descriptions of issues in the direction they want—in brief, how they engage in power-play. In our analysis, we have shown how parties in executive teams build alliances, or fail to do so, while attempting to build support for their proposals, and how they draw a line between what has officially happened in the meeting and what has taken place off the record, in order to establish managerial work as the institutional task of the executive team.

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Acknowledgements We want to thank participants, stakeholders, and funders of the Merger project, and Birte Assmus, Melisa Stevanovic, and Jan Svennevig for their comments.

Transcription Notation [yeah] [okay] =

(.) (1.4) wo::rd .,? WORD °word° word>word
faster < \

emphasis. micropause. overlapping talk. doubt about accuracy of material in brackets. extension of the preceding vowel sound. speaking faster than surrounding talk. voice going down in pitch markedly.

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Porsché, Y., and D. Negnal. 2017. “Die Erziehung zu gewaltlosen Bürgern: Rituelle Praktiken in polizeilicher Gewaltprävention.” Soziale Probleme 28 (1): 101–125. Rose, N. 1998. Inventing our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H. 1992. Lecture 6: “The MIR Membership Categorization Device.” In Lectures on Conversation, edited by G. Jefferson, 40–48. Oxford: Blackwell. Speziale, T. 2017. “Hacking’s ‘Between Goffman and Foucault’: A Theoretical Frame for Criminology.” International Journal of Law and Political Sciences 11 (7): 1804–1808. Stokoe, E. 2012. “Moving Forward with Membership Categorization Analysis: Methods for Systematic Analysis.” Discourse Studies 14 (3): 277–303. Ulrich, S., M.M. Nabo, I. Nehlsen, and A. Armborst. 2019. Evaluationskriterien für die Islamismusprävention (EvIs). Bonn: Nationales Zentrum für Kriminalprävention.

Part II Bodies, Architecture and Space

5 Beyond Strategy and Tactics: On the Micropolitics of Organisational Aesthetics David Adler

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Introduction

Modern organisations have described themselves as spaces of efficiency and rationality. This self-conception has been supported and maintained largely by the exclusion of the supposedly non-rational: the private, the subjective, the emotional—and not the least: the aesthetic. From a rationalist perspective, aesthetic sensibilities merely constitute a disturbance for the smooth running of the administrative “machine”. Office architecture and the design of office space has, in this perspective, long been seen as a more or less stable technology, which, drawing on scientific knowledge, must be planned to avoid any inefficiency (Galloway 1922). The rise of the creative industries, however, has brought with it an increased explicit attention to and affirmation of aesthetic qualities—be it of the organisation’s products, the appearance of the employees, or the aesthetic D. Adler (B) Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Porsché et al. (eds.), Institutionality, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96969-1_5

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qualities of work environments. Andreas Reckwitz (2017) accordingly talks about a “dispositive of creativity” producing an aestheticisation of society. It is against this background that the role of office design is transformed in particular for administrative, knowledge, and creative labour. Today, the aesthetic qualities of office spaces gain explicit attention. Despite these changes, the discourse on office architecture largely conceives of institutional spaces and their appearance as technical artefacts, that can be strategically employed and that produce distinct and predictable effects on their own terms. Against such a conception, I argue that institutionality does not simply produce spatial effects behind users’ backs. Rather spaces become effective in a performative way: by the complex, contingent, and ongoing interlacing of heterogeneous elements like knowledge, practices, subjectivities, and imaginaries.

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Organising Space: Between Strategy and Tactics

I want to situate the discussion about the organisational space and its aesthetics within more general debates within organisational sociology and the sociology of work. Roughly speaking, here a distinction between strategies and tactics can be made. Stemming from military practice, “strategy” and “tactics” are interdiscursive notions, which have been taken up in many different social fields, such as politics, sports, and not the least, business. In his posthumously published book On War, Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), a Prussian major general and influential military theorist, first of all distinguished strategy and tactics according to scale: While strategy sets the general guidelines of action and defines an overreaching goal, tactics are limited to more specific circumstances. Tactics translate strategy into practical action and adapt it to a particular and dynamic situation (Clausewitz 1873, 116). Clausewitz focussed on the discrete dynamics of the differently scaled military practices, which are at the same time dependent on each other in order to facilitate military success.

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However, the different scales of strategies and tactics have also been translated into contrarian elements: dominance and resistance. Strategic thinking has been mainly attributed to management, based on its asymmetric relationship to labour. In this vein, control is a seminal subject in the sociology of labour relations. With Max Weber this can be understood within a wider development of rationalisation (Thompson and McHugh 2009, 33–39). In this perspective organisational space is an object of the management’s (or owners’) efforts to technically optimise the organisational processes, while being itself subjected to “rational” procedures of cost minimisation. As Harry Braverman (1998) has pointed out in the Labour Process Debate, human labour is essentially an indeterminate potential. This potential cannot simply be realised by a formal act of acquiring labour time. Instead, the corporation has to find ways, to make the workers work efficiently according to its needs. Given the fact that in capitalist work organisations the worker is not the owner of their work product, the capitalist and—with its mandate—the manager is responsible for organising and planning the work process (Braverman 1998, 37–39). So, wage labour has to be subjected to a management strategy (Thompson and McHugh 2009, 107–109). From this Marxist perspective power and dominance become central aspects of the labour process: what may seem like a neutral technological development towards greater efficiency turns out to be an instrument in the surveillance of labour and the repression of efforts of self-management and resistance. Braverman’s approach has been criticised both for overgeneralising the Taylorist mode of organising labour by identifying it with management strategy per se and for overemphasising the coherence of such management strategies (Thompson and McHugh 2009, 107–115). From a Foucauldian perspective, Clegg and Wilson (1990, 234) criticise Braverman’s conception of control and technical development as a “conspiracy of control by the mythically unified subject of ‘capital’”. In it there is little leeway for tactical moves by the employees. Management strategy seems inescapable. Foucauldian approaches to organisations have for their part not been free from such totalising tendencies. They conform with the Labour Process Debate insofar as they see power relations as a key part of the

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organisation’s management of labour, instead of assuming a mere technical rationalisation. Basically, such approaches relate back to two major aspects of Foucault’s thinking: his work on discipline and his later work on neoliberal governmentality. Discipline is usually related to a Taylorist mode of governing labour. It aims at the individual and seeks to adapt behaviour to a predetermined norm. Foucault gives it an explicit spatial form, when he describes the disciplinary logic referring to the “panopticon”, an ideal prison which was developed by Jeremy Bentham in order to technically optimise control over individuals (Bentham 1995; Foucault 1995). In organisation theory the panopticon has become a widely used (some might say: overused) concept to describe an intensified “supervisory control” in the late twentieth century (Dale and Burrell 2008, 61). The concept of governmentality is, in contrast, used more in order to describe contemporary forms of management, which do away with the traditional hierarchies and an individualistic control along the lines of predetermined norms. In his lectures on governmentality, Foucault describes the emergence and development of a new mode of managing the “population”. Rather than trying to discipline the individual, governmental “programmes” (Bröckling 2016, 12–14) seek to indirectly steer the outcome of group processes by manipulating the general conditions of human (social) behaviour (Foucault 2004a, 2004b). Foucauldian approaches can at times have a tendency towards a dystopian projection of an ever more effective and inescapable drilling and use of the subjects, focussing on governmental programmes without systematically taking practices with their emerging and contingent dynamics into account (O’Malley et al. 1997). Seen from the perspective of the self-development of governing knowledge, governmentality risks to reduce resistance to nothing more than one further engine for the perfection of control (Thompson and Ackroyd 1995). Within this logic of omnipotent strategies, office architecture and organisational aesthetics must first and foremost be seen as a mere function or instrument, which acts on the (passive) employees according to the management’s intentions or an objective economic rationality.

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Micropolitical approaches can be seen as an explicit alternative to such a generalisation of overpowering strategies. They open up the perspective for organisational tactics which are not in compliance with the overall goals and interests of the organisation. In fact, the notion “political” was first used in a rather dismissive way, pointing to the efforts to advance egoistic self-interest, that in the end can be to the detriment of the organisation as a whole (Burns 1961). In a similar vein, Henry Mintzberg contrasts political power in organisations with forms of power which draw on formal legitimacy or an underlying ideological consensus. So, political power not only aims at advancing particular interests, it is also “divisive and conflictive” in nature (Mintzberg 1983, 172). While political games can have a variety of functions within the organisation’s everyday life, they are of utmost importance for those who are less likely to justify their behaviour with a legitimate discourse and who don’t have access to the organisation’s “control room”. Accordingly, micropolitics are strongly linked to resistance and to the subversion of managerial strategies. Micropolitical studies render visible everyday practices, which cannot simply be subsumed under overreaching structures. Strategies from above are contrasted with tactics from below. Michel de Certeau, one of the cultural studies’ major influences, explicitly delineated his concept of everyday practices against the assumptions of an inescapable dominance that he found in authors such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. For de Certeau strategy is able to delineate a territory over which it disposes and with which it is able to mould the conditions the participants are confronted with. It is rooted in a privileged standpoint which allows it to overview the events—“une pratique panoptique” as de Certeau (1990, 60) formulates it referring to Foucault—and for which the territory is made readable and devoid of its imponderables. Tactics, in contrast, operate in the space controlled by somebody else. They invade this heteronomous space, while staying fragmented, they “poache” in the territory defined and controlled by a superior authority (de Certeau 1990, XLVI, 61). What does that mean for office architecture and the aesthetics of office space now? Office space and its specific design can be seen as strategic, as they are systematically planned to influence and shape the practices

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and subjectivities of the employees by setting a specific territory for their everyday activities. However, this should not be misunderstood as a kind of socio-technological determinism. Rather, office spaces are subjected not only to processes of interpretation and sense-making, but always also to (re-)negotiations and (re-)arrangements in which they become a matter of political concern within contemporary institutionality.

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Performativity, Discourse, and Ethnography

My empirical analysis is situated in an approach, which I call “performativity analysis”. Performativity has been widely discussed in recent years (for a succinct introduction to some key positions see Gond et al. 2016). I take up motives from different contributions to this debate and translate them into an empirical research perspective which approaches its objects based on both the irreducibility of specific performances of social practices and the recognition of formative elements that permeate such practices. Performativity analysis, against this background, brings together the two major impulses from the broad and diverse discussion on performativity (Austin 1975; Barad 2003; Butler 1993; Callon 2007; Derrida 1988; Law and Singleton 2000): • The transgressive moment: Discourses are not only self-referential systems, but they “perform” reality, as economic sociology points out. • The moment of accomplishment: Structural phenomena and “natural” preconditions are in fact not just givens in interaction but have to be locally and ongoingly brought about in everyday life. Performativity analysis, as I understand it, is not one particular method of analysis, but a broader research programme which uses and extends methods from discourse analysis, ethnography, and dispositive analysis. As such my analysis is situated in the lively debate on the interplay of discourses, materiality, and practices within qualitative methodology in

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recent years (van Dyk et al. 2014; Macgilchrist and Van Hout 2011; Porsché 2018; Scheffer 2007; Wrana 2012). For this chapter my empirical material consists of (1) contemporary office discourses (i. e. textbooks, architecture and business magazines, monographs, contributions from management science), focussing on the German discourse between 1995 and 2015, (2) unstructured indepth interviews with architects and other actors that help understand how these discourses are practically and institutionally embedded, and (3) three months of ethnographic fieldwork in a medium-sized publicrelations company, where I was able to actively participate in everyday activities in the role of an intern. My status as a researcher, which was made known to the staff of the division in advance, allowed me to take extensive notes, observe and tape record a number of meetings and conduct supplementary and in-depth interviews with several employees. My ethnographic research aimed at making accessible the profane everyday usage of contemporary office spaces which is at times overlooked, based on the discursive celebration of spectacular new buildings. Because of the heterogeneous material, I draw on multiple methods for my analysis. Two procedures are of special interest for this chapter. I drew conceptual maps for the individual texts, which helped me to identify typical concepts which structurally bind together different discursive articulations. Thus, these maps—which are both inspired by hegemony analysis and situation analysis (Clarke 2003; Nonhoff 2010)—can help to identify the inner-discursive structuration and the immanent logic of the discourse. But performativity analysis cannot suffice itself with such a quasi-structuralist perspective. It asks how the discourse is dynamically translated into materialities and practices and how discourse is itself practically constituted. In order to bring together aspects from different materials I collected—like textbooks, processes of planning and implementing a building, and everyday usage of space—I coded the texts in a recursive process. In contrast to classical Grounded Theory, which is based on coding (Strauss and Corbin 1998), my aim was not to create a coherent coding system, which would represent a more or less closed meaningful cultural order behind the empirical material. Rather coding was used

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for de-constructive purposes, breaking up the text, making topics accessible and contrasting their discursive representation and, importantly, identifying “dense” text segments for microanalysis.

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Office Space as Strategy? The Discourse on Office Architecture

When reading textbooks, descriptions, articles from journals and popular magazines on the design of office buildings, it seems at first glance quite evident that office architecture is first and foremost an instrument at the organisation management’s command. Be it the direct effect on the employees’ work performance or a contribution to the company’s image by a “corporate architecture” (Messedat 2005), office architecture and the design of office spaces are expected to contribute to the organisation’s formal goals—especially profit and productivity. The organisation scholar Thomas J. Allen and the architect Gunther W. Henn put it quite bluntly: “Architects can play an essential role in arming managers with the tool of physical space to help them plan and direct a successful innovation process” (2007, 127 emphasis in original). The metaphor of a “tool” clearly points to the instrumental view on office space. As such, it serves the “managers” in implementing their intentions, which are identified with the formal organisational goal of a “successful innovation process”. On the flip side, economic and technological developments are presented as objective foundations for the design process, a basis that precedes and determines a specific architecture. Some architects justify whole architectural styles by pointing to a broad mode of capitalist regulation that purportedly ground them: The emergence of postmodern architecture and urbanism in the seventies, sweeping the market in the eighties, represents much more than a new aesthetic sensibility. […] The force behind these developments, rather than emerging from within the architectural discipline itself, must be found in the socio-economic level. Postmodern cultural production

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coincides with the historical crisis in the regime of mechanical massproduction, first developed by Ford in Detroit. (Schumacher and Roger 2001, 48)

This derivation of architectural creation from socio-economic conditions, which echoes the Marxist distinction between economic “basis” and cultural “superstructure” (Hall 1977), is a recurrent theme in the work of Patrik Schumacher from Zaha Hadid Architects, who has an influential voice within the field of architecture. Other authors take changing work practices and new ways of organising work as their starting points and ask in how far those require new spatial programmes. According to these representations of the economy within the architectural discourse, intensified transversal communication, flexible structures, and new possibilities and necessities of mobility are key developments (see Klug et al. 2005). From a discourse analytical perspective, it is striking to see how the economic and technological conditions are made relevant for the architectural solutions promoted in the discourse on office architecture. They are largely mobilised as an anonymous fate that inevitably entails specific spatial solutions. Instead of marking a discursive origin of demand, these are typically masked and naturalised in passive constructions. Typical phrases in this context are: “Multi-functional workspaces are required …” (Messedat 2005, 15), “… flexible and innovative work sites are in demand” (Schittich et al. 2013),1 “Ethnic and cultural adaption is required” (Gerhardt 2014, 8). This evocation of spatial change as anonymous necessity vis-à-vis an a priori economic and technological change, is accompanied by a double textual strategy of threat and promise. Basically, this strategy provides the elements of the discourse on office architecture with an existential dimension. Do as I say, and you will prosper, ignore it and you will perish. To give just one example: “Corporate architecture has become a strategic management instrument and can make a significant contribution to economic success. Businesses that miss this development run the

1 Quotes from the German corpus and from the ethnography have been translated by the author.

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risk of losing their position to competitors on the global market place” (Messedat 2005, 15). Aesthetic considerations certainly play an important role within the design process of contemporary office buildings. However, within the discourse on office architecture they are rarely seen as a value in themselves, but design decisions are explicitly justified based on their purported instrumental contribution to the organisation. To sum this up: what are organisations promised to gain from office architecture? Office architecture is especially touted to contribute to a flow of communication, the facilitation of innovation, the stimulation of creativity as well as the boost of motivation. Most fundamentally this is pursued by three spatial means: • Transparency: The office space is broken up visually. The extensive use of glass on the inside allows to permanently be aware of the others’ activities—and accordingly to be permanently visually exposed to the others. • Openness: Separating walls are torn down. Closed spaces do still exist but are framed as exceptions for “concentrated work”. Openness is sought to create “chance encounters”, which intensify both the flow of information and innovation. • Atmosphere: Office spaces are expected to contribute to the wellbeing and the creativity of the employees. The created atmosphere is intended to make the organisation attractive for desired “human resources”. All of this is not only sought to increase the office work’s efficiency, as was the case in the typical modern office—it is expected to increase productivity of the creation of knowledge goods and cultural products (see Geberzahn and Redemann 1995, 9). In the following, I will switch the perspective from the vantage point of the strategic creation of spaces to the tactics of everyday usage, which can be seen as both: performing office architecture and being performed by architecture.

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Subverting the Strategy: Office Space as a Terrain of Tactics and Resistance

Although the office building in which I have done my fieldwork is not an “avantgarde” building frequently featured in mainstream news media— not an urban landmark of a star architect, neither a gaudy playground for creative workers, nor a fancy exhibition room for designer furniture—the key aspects mentioned above were at play in the construction and interior design of its spaces. Singular office rooms had glass doors and windows to the corridor. Additionally, each floor was equipped with open space areas, which were used as group offices as well as space for meetings and group activities. I participated in the field in a double role: as an ethnographer and as an intern. Thus, participation did not only mean to be co-present in the field, but working alongside with the other participants, experiencing the office space based on a shared practice. At the same time, being known to the participants as a researcher yielded free space for the work of observation. Not only was I able to participate in meetings for projects I was not involved in my capacity as an intern, I was able to openly take extensive notes, to record serval work settings, to ask “naïve” questions, and to invite some of my co-workers to additional in-depth interviews. During my stay I observed several practices that were immediate responses to core strategic elements of contemporary work environments (such as transparency, openness, and a productive atmosphere). One prominent practice was to undo the transparency of walls that is produced both by internal windows and glass doors. This tactic has mostly been employed at workstations, where the exposure to the colleague’s gaze was especially high. The covering of an unused glass door, which connected a larger office to the reception area, with a large indoor plant went largely unnoticed. More attention was attracted by a collection of printed out memes mocking the project management software, which covered one office window, thereby blocking the view from the corridor. While this particular obscuring of transparency was, to my knowledge, not challenged but rather appreciated as a creative expression and ironic comment on the organisation’s everyday life, a similar case on a different floor had created a little controversy, as I learned

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from one of the persons involved. Having to copy some documents, I noticed stripes of privacy film on the window leading from the alcove where the copying machine was placed to an office room; something that I never saw anywhere else. Additionally, a large calendar was stuck up the window. When I asked one of the receptionists about it, it turned out that this window had been the object of a longer tug of war. In a first step, the employee behind the window attached a calendar to it, in order to avoid being on direct display whenever someone used the copy machine. This, however, interfered with the aesthetic sensibilities of other employees, specifically the receptionists who felt responsible for the overall appearance, especially of “their” floor. In the next step, stripes of privacy film were added to the window. This was a compromise, as the receptionist told me: It partly blocked the view on the workstation behind the window but avoided the tinkered feeling of the back of the calendar displayed towards the corridor. However, this apparently did not finitely settle the issue. As mentioned, I found the window covered both by privacy film and a calendar, possibly because the stripes of privacy film had just provided partial protection from being visible. The window I came across, bore the sedimented traces of a complex negotiation of the office space’s (in-)transparency. While in this case the spatial configuration of visibility was renegotiated, another aspect of practically dealing with the aesthetic order of the office concerned the acoustic accessibility. Generally, the employees appreciated the outline of the office, which included a number of open space group offices. However, employees would use small ruses to make their activity less easily accessible to others moving around within the open space. For instance, in the eight-person group office in which I worked, computer screens were slightly turned to the side walls, so that they were less easily visible from the entrance area. While transparency is mainly understood visually, the open space of contemporary offices is also an acoustic space. The employees in smaller rooms of two to three persons could close their door in order to shut out the outside sounds and in order to signal that they did not wish disruption. For the inhabitants of the group offices this was not an option. They had to either move to an enclosable room (for instance, a small attic on the building’s top floor, which I was recommended to use

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when I had to make a series of phone calls). Or they had to wear their walls on their body—performatively substituting the physical enclosure of the traditional office cell. For this both headphones and music as well as earmuffs were used. The use of such devices certainly impeded communication but at the same time it was a communicative act in itself—making it apparent to the others that one wanted to work in a focussed way and liberate oneself from the duty to react to “interpellations”. The cutting off of the office’s public dynamics was quite real though. I observed several situations in the group office where colleagues in close proximity contacted each other via e-mail in order to open up a conversation (which was cut-off again, once the earmuffs were back on). Despite performatively undoing the (economically justified) openness of the office, this form of self-isolation is at least in part not so much subverting the “government” of labour, but implicitly contributing to it: it more often than not aims at improving the work outcome. In a way this materially supported technology of the self already exceeds a simple dichotomy of strategy and tactics. It liberates the working subject from the total communicative integration, which, within the discourse on office architecture, is presented as a strategic tool to increase productivity and innovation. However, it does not simply aim at avoiding or subverting this government of the employees’ bodies and subjectivity. At least in part, it regulates the aesthetic overflow produced by the unlimited open space in the service of work performance, thereby contributing to the company’s success by dint of an entrepreneurial self-government.

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Aesthetisation as Accomplishment: Reworking Workspaces

So far, I have, on the one hand, pointed out major characteristics that are discursively expected from contemporary office spaces in order to render offices more efficient and productive. On the other hand, I have described local practices that subvert key elements of the discursive programme of the office space to make it more habitable for the office workers. I now want to turn to a case from my ethnography, where I

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could accompany an employee-initiated process to reshape one of the office spaces. Shortly before I started my fieldwork in the company, five “competence centres” (CC) were created with the objective of offering opportunities for development for senior employees. The process of spatial transformation was initiated by the members of one of those CC, which aimed at increasing the “attractiveness” of the organisation both for clients and for (potential) employees.2 One major undertaking was the revamping of the entrance areas adjacent to the staircase on the respective floors and the central conference room. The entrance areas were rather spacious, but they were used only very rarely, especially on the floor on which I worked. A group of chairs was almost exclusively used for dropping off clothes when going to the restrooms before lunch break. One employee used the high table, situated closely to the natural light coming in through the kitchen windows, for small informal meetings with one or two other persons (see Fig. 1). The rearrangement was initiated because serval employees suggested that the office spaces did not adequately express the company’s, and notably their own, creativity. More than that, they perceived a deficiency of the office’s aesthetic appeal. During a meeting of the CC, in which I participated and recorded, the employees even expressed actual disgust for some of the facilities infrastructure. Such sensations are not a mere reflection of the “objective” aesthetic status of the office space. Rather they are embedded in the dynamic process of remoulding the corporation’s appearance and in the employee’s aesthetic subjectification. Part of this goes beyond the scope of my ethnographic observations: The sensibilities that are at play in the employees’ aesthetic judgements take shape within the biographic process of habitualisation (Bourdieu 1984). However, within the performativity approach these transgressive moments also depend on practical activation within the given setting. What is more, aesthetic sensibilities play a key part in the situated presentation of self as a “creative” subject.

2 Details like names and specifics of the location have been changed to preserve anonymity. For a more detailed account of this case, see Adler (2017).

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Fig. 1 Layout of the entrance area before the reshaping of the place. (1) small sitting group, (2) cinema chairs, (3) high table, (4) table football

The aesthetic sensibilities depend on the practical orientation and foci, which distinctively changed during the process of transforming the entrance hall. In the first phase of the CC’s activities, during discussions and meetings ever more deficiencies of the office space were collected and piled up. The participants used rather drastic language to describe the given state of the building and its interior design, which framed the intended changes as a dramatic urgency. For instance, Sophia, one of the participants of the CC, while discussing creating a “comfortable atmosphere”, pointed out: That was the first thing, that also I saw here, when I came into the kitchen. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Well, I haven’t seen anything like this in even the ugliest of medical practices, such ugly cityscape pictures. (transcript CC meeting, May 2015: 17:20 min.)

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Given that the CC’s head repeatedly mentioned the problem that he does not even see some of the office’s aesthetic shortcomings because of being so used to them, remembering initial impressions of the office space can be seen as one of the practical methods employed by the participants to break free from the “oblivion of aesthetics” in everyday work practices. “Oblivion of aesthetics” is not to say that the material work environment and its sensuous qualities are strictly speaking unperceivable or irrelevant in everyday life. Rather they can become delegated to a background blur. In addition, in one of the CC’s meetings, where the members prepared for presenting the desired changes to the CEO, the PowerPoint presentation comprised a photograph of the first glance one gets, when entering the floor from the staircase. This picture was accompanied by a narration of an imaginary new “client” entering the building for the first time, climbing the steps, arriving at the reception, climbing another floor to reach the conference room, etc. Based on this imaginary perspective of a client, seeing the company’s workspaces with fresh eyes and without the rusted in vision of the everyday usage, the CC’s members reflected on the signs given off by their work environment: the intuitive assumptions sparked by the appearance of the work environment not only about the innovativeness and productivity of the company, but about the creative capabilities and aesthetic sensibilities of the employees themselves. Given this point, one should expect that a remodelling of parts of the office space quite literally “knocks on an open door” on the “executive floor”. However, the process of implementing the changes was more difficult—a difficulty anticipated by the CC’s members when preparing their demands for the boss. Trying to gain a fresh perception of the office space, and collectively focussing on what ought to be changed, the CC’s members developed a temporary “hyper-sensitivity” for the office’s aesthetic deficiencies and, accordingly, a sense of great urgency: as things were perceived to be dire (“ugly”, “disgusting”) and to give an inadequate representation of the companies and the employees creative potential they had to be changed as soon as possible. This sense of urgency was not necessarily shared by other members of the organisation, who were essential for forming a coalition in order to put through the desired changes. And the economic logic brought forward by the CC’s members, even if widely in compliance with the considerations of the discourse on

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office architecture, was not self-evident either. As one senior employee determines regarding the initial interior design and furniture: I think erm on the one hand that ((the boss)), well, does not have a particular high standard, concerning that. He does not, well, have an aesthetic standard or he has not such a standard that he wants to represent something, but what was important for him was ‘well I want that to work and if its affordable all the better’. (Interview with senior employee, September 2015: 10:27 min.)

Accordingly, in the negotiation between the CC and the CEO, we find two logics: on the one hand, an idea of functionality at minimised costs, on the other hand the idea of a productive increase of return, which, however, requires some expenses. Interestingly, the discourse on office architecture and office design is in itself marked by a similar conflict of economic logics, which subverts, in a way, all to simple concepts of homogeneous and strategic enforcement of “rationality” within the organisation. Institutional strategies are not only limited, countered or subverted by extrinsic tactics, but by the interferences of the multiplicity of the strategy itself.

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Economic Overdetermination: Beyond Strategy and Tactics

If I suggest a perspective on organisational space that rejects seeing it merely as a rationalised and ever more perfect instrument of productivity and/or control, it is not because there is an absence of economic logics. Quite the contrary, what is striking both on the level of architectural concepts and the sense-making of everyday users and inhabitants is that the discourse is economically “overdetermined”. There is more than one economic necessity defining the spatial order of organisations. Not the least because of this, a clear dichotomy of the managerial strategy on the one hand, and elusive and dispersed tactics from below on the other, fails to adequately capture the complexities of organisational aesthetics.

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Fig. 2 Layout of the entrance area after the revamp. (1) Sitting group with DIY furniture, sitting bags, and lounge lamp, (2) picture wall with company-related photographs, (3) fridge with soft drinks and beer, (4) digital whiteboard

The CC’s members argued from a productivism perspective: additional costs are rendered profitable because the updated aesthetics are believed to increase the organisation’s success by producing creativity, well-being, and work motivation. On the other hand, the CEO saw costs with uncertain returns. Also, he did not share the aesthetic sensibilities of some of his employees. It is important to note, that there is no levitating centre of calculation, which could neutrally decide this conflict on the basis of pure rationality. As one senior employee points out in an interview: “in the final instance decisions always include a gut feeling”. Getting things passed, accordingly, requires a good sense of timing and the ability to assess the decision makers’ moods. But the productivist position is itself also grounded in beliefs and intuition. I have already pointed to the aestheticisation, which was at play in the process of transforming the office space, pursued by the members of the CC. More

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interestingly, something that can be called “oblivious tactics” was at work here, where the difference between tactical pretext and true conviction is blurred. The employees both believed their economic rationale and employed the rationale tactically, in a micropolitical move to enforce interests that lay beyond the official organisational plane of formal goals and legitimacy. This ambivalence became apparent in the interview with the senior employee, which I have already quoted above. Speaking about the remoulding of the entrance area initiated by the CC’s members, which had by then been completed (Fig. 2), she stated: Yes, so that is the goal […]. That the folks like to come here and happily get up in the morning, because they feel good here. And the environment, and the interior plays its part in this. And, of course, you are more productive and yes, if you feel good, you can perform better. So, that is, that is a fact. For sure. (Interview with senior employee, September 2015: 40:36 min.)

However, when digging deeper and asking if the organisation had any means to really assess the effects of individual changes in the work environment, the employee shifted gears: You are totally right. So, we cannot prove it. We can, we can simply try to sell it the best possible way to the management. (Interviews with senior employee, September 2015: 42:26 min.)

It would be wrong to see this as proof for a secret plot. The employee may well be convinced that the aesthetic changes made will advance the company’s economic goals. What is more relevant here, though, is the smooth transition from convictions about the economic benefit of certain aesthetic aspects of the organisation, to the tactical usage of arguments and the play on the organisation’s formal logic in the name of a higher economic rationale, that might, for instance, escape the shortterm calculations of management control systems. More importantly this implies that organisational aesthetics are not—as the rationalist perspective on organisations would have it—founded on a solid bedrock of economic calculations, but rather in the micropolitical entanglements, the performativity of heterogeneous aspects such as competing economic

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logics, aesthetic sensitivities and self-images, orders of aesthetic valuation, situationally defined urgencies, and conflicting and in part “illegit” interests. At the outset of my argument, I assumed a dichotomy of strategies and tactics. The presence of economic arguments in the office discourse makes it easy to see an inescapable “neoliberalisation” of office space, an ongoing perfection of the control of human labour and stimulation of creativity, as one would assume in the tradition of governmentality studies. In this perspective office architecture and the design of workspaces seem, first of all, to be a tool which helps to put management strategies into practice. But this is, at best, only half the truth. Architects are confronted with a quite similar situation as the CC’s members, when trying to sell their projects to the clients. Across the interviews, architects detail how they try to convince entrepreneurs to consider new spatial programmes. In part, they try to anticipate and play the logics of the client organisations, taking a tactical stance vis-à-vis the economic promises so frequently made in the discourse on office architecture. As one architect put it in an interview: Well, we sometimes argue for something, that we want for entirely different reasons. You can also put forward Trojan horses. If you think something to be more beautiful or more pleasantly designed, you must just sell it as less expensive. (Interview with Architects A and B, April 2015: 23:19 min.)

But, despite such ruses, architects are mostly convinced that their preferred “solutions” really are more economically sound than the ones preferred by their clients. This is for instance due to a conservatism from the clients’ side: clients want the buildings to be cost efficient but intuitively fall back on spatial programmes with which they are already familiar. Against this, architects push new concepts that they consider to be more efficient or productive (Interview with architect C, November 2015). Or it is due to a calculative parochialism of the organisation’s institutionality: for instance, an architect complained, that the management control systems are based on medium-term cost amortisations,

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thereby structurally preferring architectural solutions that likely will be costly in the long run (Interview with architects A and B, April 2015). Neither in discourse nor in the everyday practice of organisations there is an absolute position from which the “rationality” and “efficiency” of the organisation’s aesthetics could be neutrally and objectively measured. Both in discourse and in everyday practices the materiality of the office space is surrounded and supported by heterogeneous and reflexive practices, by concurring economic concepts, habits, self-images, and interests in which strategic and tactical moments are inextricably intertwined. This goes beyond the practical and tactical subversion of discursively elaborated materialisations of managerial strategies, which I have addressed in Sect. 5. What appears to be a strategy, may be tactically motivated, while tactical arguments can “forget” their instrumental status and support a managerial strategy that initially was but a pretext for other goals.

8

Conclusion

Reading the contemporary discourse on office architecture we, at first glance, find some evidence for the prevalence of economic considerations being at the centre of aesthetic decision-making for contemporary workspaces. In fact, architects themselves devalue mere “aesthetic sensibilities” in favour of supposedly sound economic and technical tendencies. An attention to micropolitics can help to make visible the resistances and margins of such processes, which exist in the organisation’s everyday life, and which tend to be missed by more totalising approaches to work organisations. However, the juxtaposition of a discursively fixed spatial “programme” and local practices of resistance does not adequately grasp the deep interrelatedness of strategies and tactics. Organisational aesthetics are situated within an ambivalent negotiation both within its development and within its everyday usage. While workspaces certainly perform the practices that “take place” within them, this does not imply a passivity from the side of the everyday users. Against the tendency of some micropolitical approaches to organisations that understand strategy

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and tactics as opposing forces, equated with legit and formal organisational goals on the one hand and the illegit and informal interests of the employees on the other, my discursive and ethnographic empirical materials point to the fact that both aspects, strategies and tactics, are profoundly intertwined. In the discursive and practical context, it can turn out that strategic arguments are tactically motivated. At the same time, the instrumental usage of economic concepts relating to the design of office spaces may as well solidify and legitimise a specific economic logic. In this regard, the micropolitics of organisational aesthetics do not only constitute an external limit to the realisation of self-sufficient organisational strategies, but it affects the inner core of such strategies. The political conflict then is not one between legitimate strategy and illegitimate deviance from it, but one between multiple strategies—in my case, multiple logics that promise economic success to the organisation. Beyond the specific case of work organisations this points to the fact, that architecture is not only a corset that supports institutionality by setting its spatial conditions in a seemingly stable and sedimented way. As much as architecture provides a shell for institutional practices, it is always also a matter of concern and contestation within these practices. The space of institutions is performed in the transgressive and dynamic interplay of material and discursive pre-figurations and the diverse and contingent practices, interpretations, and subjectifications that emanate from them.

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6 Silent Coercion: The Materiality of Welfare Waiting Rooms After the Welfare Reform Bettina Grimmer

1

Introduction

A large part of everyday life takes place in institutions. We attend schools, take part in court hearings, see doctors, and so on. Clearly, the decisions taken in these institutions have far-reaching consequences in terms of graduate certificates, court decisions and medical treatments etc. In doing so, institutions link an individual to societal realities and the microscopic with the macroscopic level. Among others, local authorities play a crucial role as sites of institutional practices and thus the production of institutionality. They represent the state and address their users as citizens with rights and duties. This enactment of politics and power is particularly true for welfare offices since there is a clear and strong power asymmetry between the authority (allocating benefits) and their clients (being dependent on those benefits). Therefore, political claims B. Grimmer (B) Zurich University of Teacher Education, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Porsché et al. (eds.), Institutionality, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96969-1_6

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materialize here: Is being a welfare recipient a social status connected to an unconditional right based on social citizenship (i.e. the state’s responsibility to protect its citizens from hardship), or is it only a temporary privilege based on conditions linked to individual behaviour? During the late 1990s and early 2000s, many countries have implemented welfare reforms that enforced a shift from the former to the latter; i.e. from the idea of welfare as a collective status to an individual contract (Handler 2003). This shift goes along with an altered experience of being a welfare recipient. Taking an interest in how people experience institutional power, this contribution takes an interactionist perspective on institutions, following the assumption “that all social phenomena, including institutions, are the result of people’s actions, and therefore it is these actions that should form the focus of empirical investigation” (Gibson and vom Lehn 2018: 2). Street-level research has illuminated how the provision or denial of public services in authorities depends strongly on practical circumstances (Brodkin 1997; Hjörne et al. 2010; Lipsky 1980). Traditionally, such interactionist perspectives on welfare policy focus predominantly on human interaction and communication. However, I argue that materiality plays an important role in institutional practices as well. Even before clients enter their caseworkers’ offices, they enter the office building and thus encounter the local authority as an institution. According to spatial sociology (Fuller and Löw 2017), I understand space not simply as a container in which social life takes place, but rather as a relational arrangement in which diverse entities become meaningful through their interrelatedness. Space is constructed through social practice and shapes social practice at the same time. Buildings do things to the people using them and are simultaneously enacted through practice (Delitz 2018; Gieryn 2002). In this sense, the materiality of welfare waiting rooms contributes to the practical experience of being a welfare recipient. Previous studies give us an impression of the ways welfare policies are based on assumptions about human behaviour and the subjects they target (Boulus-Rødje 2019; Grimmer and Hobbins 2014; Le Grand 1997). I argue that this is not only true for policies, but also for welfare offices as material arrangements. Based on an ethnographic case study of

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a German Jobcenter, I explore the arrangements of architecture, interior design, and spatial practices of staff members and clients. According to previous research from different countries (Auyero 2011; Goodsell 1984; Hays 2003; Lundberg and Syltevik 2016; Soss 1999), it seems that welfare waiting rooms have lost their traditionally coercive atmosphere during the last decades. Apparently, against the background of welfare reforms promoting a marketization of welfare in many countries, even the offices were given a more business-like and thus friendlier face. Yet, on the other hand, the studies reveal that for most clients, the experience of waiting in welfare offices is still uncomfortable and degrading. Applying a non-representational approach to architecture, interior design, and spatial practice, which focuses on its physical materiality, I shed light on this apparent contradiction. First, I give an overview of previous research on welfare waiting rooms, the welfare reform, and the non-representational perspective. After a brief description of the German welfare system and of my ethnographic fieldwork, two empirical sections describe and analyze the case of a German welfare waiting room. Although spatial materiality and human practices are deeply interwoven, for heuristic purposes, I separate these two dimensions. First, I introduce the physical setting of the waiting room. Second, I address the practices that take place in this setting, here paying particular attention to the way staff organize their routines around the waiting clients. I will show that the spatial arrangement configures and restricts clients’ actions. It keeps them at distance from staff ’s bodies and things and at the same time enacts assumptions about the clients as subjects, relegating them to a passive and inferior position in the institutional order.

2

Welfare Waiting Rooms from a Non-Representational Perspective

The number of ethnographic accounts of welfare waiting rooms is rather small. Some (older) publications on welfare provision, particularly in the US, briefly mention spatial aspects of welfare encounters and of

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welfare clients’ experiences (Dubois 2010 [1999]; Jacobs 1966; Piven and Cloward 1977; Prottas 1979). By describing the waiting areas of welfare offices, they illustrate the humiliating effect these have on welfare recipients. We learn from these studies how the buildings, their interior design and the way space is organized represent power and apparently degrade their clients as part of their organizational agenda. However, considering the few studies that deal with welfare waiting rooms in a more systematic way, the picture gets more complex. Goodsell (1984: 467) agrees that these spaces, being representations of officialdom, reflect “cues which suggest accepted agency values, desired client comportment, and the organization’s own image of its clientele”. However, based on a study in different welfare offices in the US, he argues that there are very different types of welfare waiting rooms, and not all of them are unpleasant and degrading. He introduces the “dog kennel” and the “pool hall” as traditional forms that mark a strong power imbalance between authority and clients, but also some new, more pleasant, and respectful forms such as the “business office”, the “bank lobby” and the “circus tent”. From today’s perspective, this raises the question whether welfare waiting rooms have now overcome their depressing and humiliating aura from the 1970s. This seems plausible against the background of the welfare reforms that were implemented during the 1990s in many countries. These reforms have their roots in the early 1980s, when, in a period of economic recession, the Western world was confronted with mass unemployment. In order to cut their expenditures on social security and keep their economy competitive, national governments introduced policies to push the unemployed into the labour market. These workfare policies were first introduced in the United States and, with some modifications, adapted by the United Kingdom (Daguerre 2004), which then served as a kind of role model for many European countries, especially Germany (Seeleib-Kaiser and Fleckenstein 2007). The reforms entailed mainly a shift from welfare as an entitlement depending on status towards an eligibility contingent on mutual agreements (Handler 2003). Moreover, the principles of New Public Management were implemented by the authorities (Weishaupt 2010). The transition of welfare as

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a public good to an individual contract has not only effects on how interactions between the bureaucrats and their clients evolve (Dubios 2014); it might also be accompanied by a symbolic turn towards more modern, friendly spaces looking like business offices or bank lobbies. From the US, there are two studies that seem to support this assumption. They observed that during the late 1990s, the offices, including the waiting areas, were given a new and friendlier face (Hays 2003: 3; Soss 1999: 59). An ethnography of a welfare waiting room in Argentina, however, concludes that “these waiting experiences persuade the destitute of the need to be patient, thus conveying the implicit state request to be compliant clients” (Auyero 2011: 6). Drawing on Bourdieu (2000: 228), Auyero understands the practice of letting people wait mainly as an act of power and domination. In this context, he mentions the limited number of plastic seats, the absence of natural light, and the lack of a good ventilation system as well as the dirty toilets. Yet, the vivid atmosphere of people talking, eating, and playing with their children and the lack of officialdom in the description resembles Goodsell’s (1984) type of the “circus tent”. Moreover, an ethnography of Norwegian welfare waiting rooms found a mixture of the spatial genres of the “bank lobby” and the “business office”—“comfortable seats, short waiting times and attempts to create a friendly atmosphere” (Lundberg and Syltevik 2016: 162). They conclude that “the front line of the Norwegian all-in-one bureaucracy is designed to include most people, with its universal design, play corner for children, computers for free use, chairs and sofas” (Lundberg and Syltevik 2016: 158). However, the mere fact of being there (and being a welfare user) is connected to a stigma and thus the friendliness of the atmosphere is tainted by the stigmatized bodies of the persons waiting. The main code of behaviour seems to be “civil inattention” (Goffman 1963: 156)—i.e. visitors avoid contact and thus imposing on strangers while showing that they are aware of one another’s presence. In sum, despite their national and cultural differences, we can observe both an increased friendliness of welfare waiting rooms in terms of their design and symbolism and a persistent experience of stigma and humiliation. Why is this so? A possible explanation for this problem is that previous research has not given much attention to the physical materiality of waiting rooms.

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Within the field of material culture, this follows a tradition that focuses mainly on the symbolic dimension of materiality. According to this, the main question about buildings is their “representational power” (Molnár 2016: 205), for instance how power is symbolized or displayed in buildings as a form of identity politics. Yet, the strong emphasis on representation and the symbolic, while neglecting the physical materiality of space and built environments, has been critiqued by several perspectives. In cultural geography, Thrift (1996) developed a non-representational theory (NRT), which focuses on “mundane everyday practices that shape the conduct of human beings towards others and themselves in particular sites” (Thrift 1996: 142). Rather than analyzing represented meaning in orders, structures, and processes, NRT is interested in physical materiality and embodiment. However, taking a non-representational perspective does not mean to deny the representational quality of architecture. It means not to limit oneself to the search for representation and also take the physical materiality of things into account. For this reason, Lorimer (2008: 6) proposes to speak of “more-than representational theory”. In sum, this strand of research makes us aware that “architecture orders and manages human activities; it distributes bodies in a certain space and organizes the flow of communications” (Kornberger and Clegg 2004: 1100). Regarding its main argument, NRT follows Foucault’s concept of the “productive power” of buildings (Molnár 2016: 89). In his work on the prison, Foucault (1995: 172) highlighted the disciplining effect of buildings: an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them.

From this perspective, architecture and its physical objects are instruments of the productive power that fabricates individuals. For instance, the way chairs are placed in a room affects body movements, postures, lines of visions, and so on. The idea that material objects are intertwined with human interaction and contribute to it was pursued most decidedly by Science and Technology Studies and Actor Network Theory (ANT)

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(e.g. Latour 2005; Law 2008). As Winner (1980) has demonstrated, artefacts do “have politics”. They enable certain people to carry out certain actions, but they can also discriminate against others (for a critique of Winner’s argument, see Joerges 1999). With regard to buildings, this means that as “outcomes of complex practices coordinated by architectural offices to make buildings perform certain tasks” (Guggenheim 2013: 447), they establish a social order: buildings “give structure to social institutions, durability to social networks, persistence to behavior patterns” (Gieryn 2002: 35). To describe these processes, scholars in ANT developed the idea of the programmes of action or “scripts”: Designers thus define actors with specific tastes, competences, motives, aspirations, political prejudices, and the rest, and they assume that morality, technology, science, and economy will evolve in particular ways. (Akrich 1992: 208)

In other words: buildings are designed for certain subjects and always entail assumptions about their behaviour. From this perspective, it is most interesting to reveal the notions about the user-subjects, i.e. the designers’ assumptions about the users, that are inscribed in the welfare waiting room’s architecture and interior design. However, the concept of the script does not imply any form of simple technological determinism—there is a chance that the users act according to the designers’ visions, but they might also act (and thus use and transform the object) in a completely different way (Akrich 1992). The plans of the engineers do not necessarily meet the reality of situated practice (Suchman 2007). This is why it is important to not only encode the scripts of technological objects, but also analyze the users’ practices with and around these objects.

3

The German Welfare Reform and the Jobcenters

In Germany, the social democratic government under chancellor Gerhard Schröder implemented a far-reaching welfare reform between

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2002 and 2005. The main goal of the reform was to promote employment through a more flexible labour market, through modernization of the public employment service (PES), and through activation of the unemployed. Accordingly, the low-wage sector was extended significantly. The PES as an institution underwent a transition from a traditional bureaucratic structure towards a new organization comprising elements of New Public Management. The names of the local organizations changed from Arbeitsamt (‘labour office’) to Arbeitsagentur (‘employment agency’), and other vocabulary from business language was introduced. In the course of the last and most controversial part of the reforms, unemployment benefit regulations were tightened and other forms of unemployment assistance beyond the unemployment insurance were abolished. For those who are not entitled to unemployment insurance benefits but are able to work, i.e. recipients of former social assistance, long-term unemployed, unemployed young people, single parents, etc., a new type of benefit was introduced. According to Schröder’s quote “there is no right to laziness”, these means-tested benefits cover the minimum cost of living of a person and are tied to harsh sanctions. Employable people who are in need of financial support can apply for them in so-called Jobcenters. These institutions work on the local level, but as partners of the federal PES they all employ the same federal policies. The clients do not only obtain their financial benefits from the Jobcenter, but are also assigned to a personal placement officer who provides them with job offers and monitors their attempts to find a job. Placement officers regularly invite their clients, urge them to find employment and sometimes provide them with active labour market policies such as trainings or work opportunities. Placement officers are also authorized to suggest the benefits to be reduced if a client does not keep an appointment or does not take up a job proposed by the Jobcenter. During my fieldwork, I visited eight Jobcenters in two different regions in Western Germany. From 2009 to 2011, I volunteered for a civil society organization in a large city and accompanied unemployed people to the PES as a kind of supportive witness. I introduced myself to the clients as a sociologist and if they agreed, I took notes of the encounter. Usually, I met them in front of the building, they told me about their situation,

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their caseworker, and their fears, then we entered the building, waited for the appointment, and saw the caseworker together. In these encounters, my role as an ethnographer was open to the clients but disguised to the caseworkers. After about 20 documented appointments and numerous interviews with other unemployed clients and NGOs, I changed allegiance and got access to a small-town Jobcenter in another region. In 2011 and 2012, I visited the Jobcenter for 30 days and followed the caseworkers’ work routines as a participant observer. In the mornings, and occasionally during the days, I spent some time in the waiting area. While I was known to all staff from the beginning, I did not introduce myself to the clients that waited on the floor. They took me to be just another client until some of them met me again in the office during their appointment and learned that I was a researcher. The following descriptions are based on my fieldwork in this Jobcenter. When necessary, I will refer to its structural similarities to other Jobcenters and to some differences.

4

The Waiting Area

The office is located on two floors of an office block from the 1970s in the centre of a small town in Germany. There is no reception; after entering the hallways, one finds oneself in a square system of corridors with about 15 offices on each floor. The ground floor is covered with PVC in a light grey, and the walls and doors are covered with plastic material in the same colour. The doors are blank, there are neither pictures nor posters on them, and only a small sticker behind acrylic glass reveals the room number and the name of the person who sits behind this door. There are several black plastic chairs in the hallway, poorly padded with heavy, patterned, dark grey fabric. Some of the chairs are arranged closely together in a corner, others form constellations of two or three in the corridors, vis-à-vis the offices. Several printouts on the walls provide information about administrative competences and recent changes in legislation. On the upper floor, there is a notice board showing job advertisements and the weekly appointments section of the local newspaper. Moreover, each floor

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provides a rack with information leaflets to take away, such as flyers about benefit entitlements, job search opportunities, vocational training, or support programmes. Further, there is one computer on each floor. It is set in a massive and unmovable block of plywood which reveals only a display screen and the surface of a metal keyboard. Instead of a moveable mouse, the keyboard contains a big metal trackball. In front of the computer, there is a metal seat without backrest fixed on the floor. The computer provides access to the web pages of the public employment service and its databank of open positions. In contrast to other public computers such as in libraries, it does not contain other programmes than the web browser, and there is no general access to the internet. The only thing one can do on this computer is gather information about the PES and the Jobcenter, and to search for jobs within the PES database. Apart from these pieces of information—printouts, advertisements, flyers, and computer—there are no other objects which would decorate the interior of the hallways: neither pictures, nor plants or sculptures, as often found in other public buildings; neither books nor magazines to pass the waiting time, as often found in doctor’s offices or hairdresser’s shops; and neither books nor toys for children. In the hallways of the Jobcenter there is nothing to do except to gather information about the authority and the labour market. The architecture and design of the waiting room bear an apparent resemblance to Goodsell’s type of the “dog kennel”: The metaphor of Dog Kennel was suggested by, among other characteristics, the labyrinthine nature of office layout. The buildings in which they are contained are large, multistory, and filled with innumerable rooms and connecting hallways […] creating a Kafkaesque sense of being cut off from the outside world. (Goodsell 1984: 471)

Furthermore, the “dog kennel” is marked by the visibility of other waiting individuals as well as a lack of decoration. However, there are also some differences: According to Goodsell (1984: 471), the “rooms impart a coercive atmosphere”, materialized through “a high counter or through a glass window with a circular speaking hole”. State and national flags emphasize the official character of the building, uniformed guards

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symbolize authority and anticipate deviant behaviour at the same time. The absence of official symbols (only to be seen as logo on the door and document headings, like in a firm), of a formal reception and of security personnel in our Jobcenter, in contrast, rather resemble the type of the “business office”: The furnishings are of standard commercial quality. Fluorescent lights hang from acoustical tile ceilings. Floors and other surfaces are clean and neat. […] Yet despite the blandness, a theme of efficiency is strongly present. The situation seems under control. Business is being conducted smoothly and with dispatch. The scene is quiet and orderly with ample seating, no lines, and no milling about. (Goodsell 1984: 473)

It is no surprise that from this representational perspective, the architecture’s symbolism combines rather traditional accounts of bureaucracy (the “dog kennel”) with business-based imaginaries of efficiency (the “business office”) after decades of administration reforms and New Public Management. Indeed, this hybridity of spatial orders associated with bureaucracy and businesses can be found in most of the German Jobcenter waiting rooms. However, a non-representational look at the scene gives us more critical insights into the user-subjects inscribed in its design. First, the absence of decoration, of magazines and other possible time fillers reminds the visitors that the main purpose of the rooms is waiting for their appointments—as the unemployed are similarly supposed to be available to the labour market all the time, instead of travelling etc. For the sake of efficiency, they should not loaf, but leave the office as soon as possible. And the absence of books, toys, or other facilities for children (see also Auyero 2011; Jacobs 1966: 75; Soss 1999) suggests that children or older family members are not welcome. The chairs provide a minimum of comfort to pass the waiting time, and their robust material anticipates frequent handling without care. The many small arrangements of two or three chairs all along the corridors compartmentalize the waiting area, which, as Dubois (2010: 46–47) has discovered, divides clients and prevents them from solidarizing. Apart from waiting, the

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rooms allow only for gathering information. And every piece of information is directly connected to either the organization itself or the finding of a paid job, which seems to be the first priority. This is also true for the “robust” computer that allows only job searches and cannot be used for other purposes. From the outside, it is so massive that it is impossible to move—or remove parts of it. Even if one tried really hard, it would be almost impossible to damage, destroy or steal the computer. All in all, the whole scene is very functional, easy to clean, very hard to damage, and only marginally educational and informative. To me, it appeared quite depressing and not inviting at all. Instead of creating an atmosphere where job seekers are inspired to figure out what to do with their lives or to feel motivated to apply for a job, the place seems to be dominated by control and suspicion.

5

Waiting and Staff’s Spatial Practices

Only very few clients use the various sources of information. They move along the corridors rather slowly, and sometimes take a brief look at one of the printouts. Almost all of them are here for an appointment, and most of them spend their time waiting. The vast majority of the appointments begin on time, but since most clients arrive early, the average waiting time is 10 to 15 min. Many of the waiting clients take seat on one of the chairs. They silently sit next to the office they await to enter in the empty corridors. Visibly, they do not do anything—and there is nothing to look at—or they pass their time with their mobile phones or take a look at the documents they brought with them. Others will not sit down, they stand in front of the offices or walk around impatiently and seem to be somehow agitated. Those who know each other or have another person with them, talk in a low voice. Very rarely, visitors (mostly men) speak loudly and seek contact with other visitors. But in sum, it is very quiet in the hallway. Only few clients bring their children with them. But why is it so quiet and where are the staff members? Actually, they are in their offices almost all the time, and all office doors are always closed (and locked when unstaffed). For the clients, the offices

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are only accessible by appointment. If their placement officers are ready to meet them, they will open their doors and call their client’s name. They will then go back to their desk, ask the client to close the door and offer them a seat. Handshaking is rather unusual and staff always try to maintain a rather large distance between them and their clients. Physical distancing is the rule between staff and clients, even before the coronavirus pandemic. While clients move along the corridors rather slowly and hesitantly, when staff members leave their office, they move quickly and resolutely. They will not stop on their way, and if colleagues meet in the corridors, they will not talk to each other, except for a brief “good morning” or “hi”. Clients, on the other hand, are usually ignored completely. If staff members are on their way in the corridors, they go either to another office or to one of the staff facilities. There is a copy room, a small kitchen, and toilets for staff, and all the rooms are accessible only with a key. For the clients, there is another set of toilets, one for women and one for men. They do not differ from the staff toilets in terms of size or cleanliness. There is no visible interaction between colleagues in the corridors. When they go to each other’s offices, they close the door before talking. Clients are never allowed to be alone in an office, not even for a second. Staff consistently informed me about the importance of closed (or locked) doors “due to protection against theft of valuables and data”. The silence in the corridors echoes staff members’ increased alertness to noise—be it loud talking or unfamiliar noises. They frequently come out of their offices to see whether a colleague is in danger and needs help. In case a situation with a client is about to escalate, there is a silent alarm system protecting the staff members. They may press a key combination on their keyboard, and all colleagues in the whole building will see the emergency call on their screen, so that they can get there to help or call the police. Similar to the Norwegian welfare office (Lundberg and Syltevik 2016), the main code of behaviour seems to be “civil inattention” (Goffman 1963: 156) in the German Jobcenter as well. Surely, not all clients follow this code, but the few who do not will definitely attract attention. The labyrinth of corridors and waiting zones between the office doors further creates a panoptic situation: the visitors never know who will overhear

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their conversation. The architecture and the silent and neat atmosphere seem to discipline the clients and make them compliant and quiet. In the context of the compartmentalized seating arrangements, the clients really seem to be “patients of the state” (Auyero 2011). It conforms to the “medicalization of welfare” (Schram 2000) within the framework of activation policies. Accordingly, unemployment is a condition that needs to be cured, it is a personal problem and thus treated individually. Another interesting point is the different ways clients and staff take up space. In the 1960s, Jacobs (1966: 75) pointed out that caseworkers could be distinguished from clients through “their neat clothes and the papers they always seem to hold”. While staff members still hold papers and—even more frequently—their big bunches of keys, because they just locked their office door and will immediately unlock another door, their clothes are quite casual and cannot be distinguished from the clients’ clothes at a first glance. Most obvious are the caseworkers’ movements, which are resolute and purposeful—in contrast to the clients’ hesitating and slow movements—and which do not only express efficiency, but also authority. The space is divided in different areas: the corridors, where clients can roam freely, as public areas; the offices, which can only be entered when asked, as private areas; and semi-public areas such as staff toilets, kitchen, and copy room. Although clients are excluded from these semi-public spaces, they are used in a very efficient way—wash hands, make copies, make a cup of tea and take it to the office. Unlike in other offices, these rooms do not serve as “interaction-promoting facilities” (Allen 1977: 248). Interaction among colleagues takes only place in the privacy of the personal office and is thus completely hidden from the clients. Staff members use the corridors merely as transit areas, which makes them “non-places” (Augé 1995). Through these practices, contact between staff and clients is reduced to a minimum. Minimizing contact also seems to be a central part of hygienic and security measures guarding against disturbance, pollution, vandalism, theft, spying, and violence. The staff members seem to be quite aware that they might be in danger any time, and they are very sensitive about loud talking or unfamiliar noises from others. These security measures are enacted very discretely. The policies

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of closed doors and keeping distance is a crucial element of the institutional order in the Jobcenter. Big branches in larger cities employ security personnel and place them visibly in their waiting areas. Smaller branches, in contrast, rely on invisible security mechanisms. Hence, the theme of control and suspicion (see also Dangelmaier, this volume) is not only present in architecture and design, but also in the staff ’s spatial practices, which aim mainly at reducing the clients’ scope of action and minimizing contact with them.

6

Conclusion: Creating an Institutional Infrastructure

Several studies indicate that welfare waiting rooms have become more modern and friendly after the welfare reform in various countries. At the same time, being a welfare recipient and waiting there is still connected to feelings of discomfort and stigma. An ethnographic and non-representational perspective provides a possible explanation for this apparent contradiction. The case of a German Jobcenter shows that from a representational point of view, in the waiting area, the main theme is efficiency. The lacking display of official symbols, the sober and neat architecture, the lack of decoration, and the focus on only relevant information, as well as the busy movements of the staff—all this points to an efficient, professional, and business-like environment. However, a non-representational perspective, taking the materiality and the clients’ scope of action into account, reveals that the spatial order of the Jobcenter is mainly directed to exclusion. On the corridors only organization-related and job-seeking-related information is provided, there is no entertainment which could invite the clients to stay longer than absolutely necessary. Waiting for their appointments, clients depend on their caseworkers’ time regimes, they are not supposed to do anything else than either waiting passively or using their time gathering relevant information. The panoptic setting disciplines and individualizes them (see Foucault 1995). Simultaneously, staff practices minimize contact to their clients. In combination with interior design such as a notice board behind glass

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and an indestructible computer, the risk of mischief, theft or vandalism is reduced to a minimum. A clear distinction between public, semi-public and personal areas—corridors, staff facilities, and offices—minimizes the probability of unplanned encounters between staff and clients. This distance is even increased by hygienic measures (avoiding handshaking, maintaining physical distancing, separate toilets), on the one hand, and physical protection measures (alertness, alarm system) on the other hand. The assemblage of architecture, interior design, and staff practices works mainly to exclude the clients from places and bodies, but, as the closed-door policy shows, they are also excluded systematically from administrative knowledge. Despite the absence of official symbols and other displays of authority, most clients are inhibited and try not to attract attention. This gives us hints about the assumptions made about its usersubjects that seem to be suspicious. In fact, interviews with members of staff display that the Jobcenter works with a certain notion of its clients as potentially dangerous subjects. The hygienic measures suggest that clients might by unhealthy and spread pollutants and bacteria— a concern, which is ubiquitous during the coronavirus pandemic, but was rather uncommon in offices before the pandemic. The office design and the closed-door policy shows that clients might endanger the organization by disturbing, spying, steeling, or destroying property. And staff members’ alertness and the silent alarm system reminds us that clients might endanger their caseworkers by acting violently towards them at any time. The measures I described are used to prevent all these potential dangers. Based on interviews with US welfare users, Soss (1999: 61) came to a similar conclusion: “The length of waits, the uncomfortable setting, and the emphasis on security and authority all seemed to indicate that clients were considered unimportant or dangerous”. However, the Jobcenter prevents the potential dangers of the clients no longer through long waits and the display of official symbols and authority, but rather through an invisible interplay of material objects and human practices. But its suspiciousness towards the clients has not gone. Invisible at a first glance, certain features of the interaction between staff members and clients are delegated to material objects. Instead of always saying “no loitering, please go home”, an environment is created which makes

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it unpleasant to stay. And instead of always saying “keep out of offices and staff facilities”, the doors are simply locked. This reduces the sources of conflict between staff and clients. A non-representational perspective thus unveils a silent and non-negotiable infrastructure, which inhabits assumptions about the clients and relegates them to a passive and inferior position within the spatial and institutional order of the welfare system. It shows that the welfare reform did not lead to inclusive waiting rooms, but rather to a shift from coercive symbolism to a more hidden form of coercive materiality and subtle disciplinary practices. From my personal knowledge of the field, the case presented is quite typical, and most of the architecture, design, and human practice can be found in most, if not all, German Jobcenters. The shift from symbolic to more hidden coercion of the Jobcenter clients seems thus to be one of the consequences of the German welfare reform. This could also be true for welfare offices in other countries and provide an explanation why despite the modern face of most welfare waiting rooms it is still a degrading experience to enter them. As the study of Lundberg and Syltevik (2016) suggests, Norwegian welfare offices are more welcoming, which is consistent with the observation that Scandinavian unemployment policies are more “enabling”, while the Anglo-Saxon way is more coercive (Barbier and Ludwig-Mayerhofer 2004; Dingeldey 2007). This seems to apply to the spatial order of the institution as well. As an element of the apparatus or dispositif (Foucault 1977: 194–196; Rabinow 2003: 50–51), the architectural form and spatial practice is an instrument that contributes to the disciplining of the individual and the regulation of the population in a powerful way.

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Lundberg, Kjetil G., and Liv Johanne Syltevik. 2016. “Everyday Interaction at the Front-Line: The Case of Norwegian All-in-One Bureaucracy.” Journal of Organizational Ethnography 5 (2): 152–166. Molnár, Virág. 2016. The Power of Things: Material Culture as Political Resource. Qualitative Sociology 39 (2): 205–210. Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard Cloward. 1977. Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail . New York, NY: Pantheon. Prottas, Jeffrey. 1979. People Processing: The Street-Level Bureaucrat in Public Service Bureaucracies. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Rabinow, Paul. 2003. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. New Jersey, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schram, Sandford S. 2000. In the Clinic: The Medicalization of Welfare. Social Text 62 (18): 81–107. Seeleib-Kaiser, Martin, and Timo Fleckenstein. 2007. “Discourse, Learning and Welfare State Change: The Case of German Labour Market Reforms.” Social Policy and Administration 41 (5): 427–448. Soss, Joe. 1999. “Welfare Application Encounters: Subordination, Satisfaction and the Puzzle of Client Evaluations.” Administration and Society 31 (1): 50–94. Suchman, Lucy. 2007. Human-Machine Configurations: Plans and Situated Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thrift, Nigel. 1996. Spatial Formations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Weishaupt, Timo. 2010. “A Silent Revolution? New Management Ideas and the Reinvention of European Public Employment Services.” Socio-Economic Review 8 (4): 461–486. Winner, Langdon. 1980. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Dædalus 109 (1): 121– 136.

7 Teaching About Racism Within Institutional Whiteness in Germany Yalız Akbaba and Constantin Wagner

1

Institutional Whiteness in the “Diversified” University

Like in many countries in the Global North, acting within universities in Germany means acting in a “sea of whiteness” (Ahmed 2012, 35). Predominantly white professors, teachers, and staff work, teach, and administer German universities. These—white—universities increasingly commit themselves to the tenet of diversity as do (non-)governmental institutions in general. The subject matter of this debate is, however, very heterogeneous. Business initiatives mainly highlight that diverse teams might work more productively and efficiently. Political initiatives Y. Akbaba (B) · C. Wagner Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] C. Wagner e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Porsché et al. (eds.), Institutionality, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96969-1_7

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emphasise measures to counter racism and other forms of discrimination. Universities increasingly apply diversity strategies with regards to their own organisational structures. They emphasise productivity and the value of diversity and commit themselves to reducing unequal treatment of its members. This “language of diversity” can be understood as a “holy mantra across different sites” (Puwar cited in Ahmed 2013, 9). Ahmed raises the point that institutional diversity practices, policies, and talk of diversity make visible that “institutions take whiteness as their somatic norm” (Ahmed 2013, 3). While universities claim to be(come) diverse, the white perspectives from which they do so remain un-decentred. In our chapter, we examine how whiteness as the institutional norm frames teaching about racism by getting in its way, undermining the elaboration on racist discrimination, and placing those teachers and learners who do not blend in with or subordinate to institutional whiteness in vulnerable positions. Teaching about racism within institutional whiteness turns out to be teaching about racism against institutional whiteness. We, the authors of this chapter, were the course convenors of a seminar on pedagogic professionalisation in the post-migrant society. For one of our sessions, we invited a guest speaker to talk about German colonialism and its current legacy. The guest event was intellectually and emotionally strenuous work for us and the others who had attended, and so we organised several follow-up conversations with the speaker, with colleagues who were present in the session, with students, and among the two of us. During our diverse interactions, we decided to use the event for an analysis of our experience with teaching about racism. A research project was born: we collected (auto-)ethnographic data during events to which we ourselves were invited as speakers. In this chapter, we dig out the dynamics of the initial event that had triggered the research project in the first place. We apply perspectives elaborated mainly in anglophone contexts to empirical data collected in a German-speaking space. As far as we see these theoretical contributions about institutional whiteness have not been applied to the regionally relevant (read prevalent) dynamics when addressing racism. Our analyses of the dynamics show how teaching about racism provokes whiteness to strike back, and how various defence mechanisms unfold in order to put teaching about

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racism in check and within the discursive limits as defined by institutional whiteness. Despite many indications of the white equilibrium being restored, we also track traces of the equilibrium getting challenged.

2

Whiteness and the Silencing of Racism in Germany

Critical Race Studies are marginalised in German-speaking political and academic debates; the concepts of “race” and “racism” widely encounter rejection. There is a limited understanding of racism, locating it at an individual rather than a social level and focusing on physical violence and right-wing extremism. Structural and institutional racism widely remain silenced. Apart from activist groups and a few academic sub-disciplines, there is almost no reception of critical accounts of race and whiteness. Racism, however, is a structure of social inequality as is class-mediated inequality and sexism, each positioning social actors in a hierarchical matrix to one another: “Racial belonging goes hand in hand with social over- and subordination, creating opportunities for the exercise of power and discrimination” (Filsinger 2010, 8). Being white equals a privileged position in a racialised and racialising social order (Jungwirth 2004, 84). Critical whiteness studies thus investigate how white privileged people are entangled in reproducing white supremacy, specifically benefiting from racism in economic, political, symbolical, and structural ways. Dominant discourses in Germany hold that German society consists of an “indigenous German” majority and people discursively positioned as “foreigners”, “migrants”, or “people with migration background”. Being positioned as a “real German” comes along with an unmarked social position in a racially structured society and hence with the privileges of white supremacy. While there are white Germans who view racial discrimination critically, they might not be aware of being socialised in ways that is predicated on not realising the racist structures they are a part of (McIntosh 1989). Critical Race scholarship must, in the German context, break the silence around race and racism: understanding that silencing is an inherent characteristic of racism is a necessary step to uncover white privilege and tackle racial inequality (Lavanchy 2013, 4).

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There is a political and academic debate as to whether the anglophone concept of whiteness applies to continental Europe. Trienekens and Essed (2008), for instance, argue that ‘real Europeanness’—in the sense of an unquestionable belonging to a nation-state and its culture— is more important than the question of whiteness. In our understanding, the claim to distinctly belong to a nation-state and its culture precisely reflects whiteness in continental Europe (Wagner 2014): being white is the subject position of people whom racism does not affect negatively— their legitimate belonging, among other things, is never questioned. Whiteness cannot simply be defined according to a logic of skin colour only, it is also an effect of ethnic and cultural racism. Cultural dress codes such as the Muslim headscarf, for example, can serve as racial markers (Garner and Selod 2014, 9). We put white in italics in order to point at the social construction of whiteness as a marker for privileged status and as a category critically analysing white supremacy. We use the term Black and People of Colour (BPoC) for those subject positions who potentially experience racism in their everyday life. We capitalise Black in order to stress it as a political category and empowering self-description, knowing well that BPoC are not a homogenous group, but rather differently privileged people (Ha 2013). Due to the academic and political knowledge-lag about racism in German-speaking countries, research about racial discrimination that shapes educational settings in Germany has only just begun (Ahmed et al. in press; Akbaba and Harteman 2020; Arghavan et al. 2019; Bücken et al. 2020; Kilomba 2013; Kuria 2015; Mecheril et al. 2013, Steinbach 2016). In comparison, anglophone research on white supremacy, racism, and the university is more elaborated (e.g. Ahmed 2012; Smith 2013), and is path showing for German researchers. The university’s unquestioned whiteness is reflected in scarcely done research on its whiteness, but also in its staff representation ratios and university curriculums. The higher the position at a German university, the fewer BPoC are represented (König and Rokitte 2012, 7). BPoC are underrepresented among students, teachers, and researchers, measured against the total population.

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The event of the following analysis was part of a course in the curriculum for secondary teacher education. Teacher education in Germany is based on a curriculum that predominantly translates issues concerning the post-migrant society into learning how to appropriately deal with groups of pupils and families that are being problematised. Target groups are those “with a migration background” or “with a refugee experience”. A central reference point of teacher education in Germany is the notion of the nation (Steinbach et al. 2020; Shure 2021). It is not specific to Germany that in school the norm derives from the national norm (Butler 2014, 185). However, German academic realisation of this circumstance and how it contributes to reproducing and further establishing white privilege and racial inequality is significantly behind international post- and decolonial studies (Au 2012; Bhambra et al. 2018; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). Teacher education in Germany is nationally written and its curriculum is part of structures that reproduce hegemonic orders of whiteness. By hegemonic order, we mean the unquestioned national and white institutionality that determines content and perspectives on the content of university teaching. The evasion of racism as a topic and structuring characteristic in educational institutions is symbolic violence (Hardie and Tyson 2013; Milner 2012). Consequently, talking about racism in these institutions occurs in spaces historically structured by dominant social relations, rather than in “safe spaces” in the sense that racism is an acknowledged circumstance when discussed (The Roestone Collective 2014). Teaching about racism becomes a very demanding task for teachers (Leonard and Porter 2010) and is dependent on addressing its historical origins and legacies (Lac 2017). Especially white students often struggle to acknowledge the importance of the issue and their involvement in racial dynamics. DiAngelo (2018) analyses defence mechanisms that are presented emotionally as “white fragility”. White people resist the idea of being categorised, it takes remarkably little to set them off and to trigger their defensive side. German-language literature in the field of Critical Whiteness Studies has contributed to this line of thought: white people take their access to power and resources as a given. They often do not recognise racial discrimination and tend to defend internalised racism (Eggers et al. 2009; Bönkost 2016). Martina Tißberger (2016)

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points out the historical dimensions of this phenomenon: “through the epistemic violence of imperialism, archives of racist knowledge sediment in people’s thinking” (Tißberger 2016, 26). These archives also contain the expectation that professional roles are performed by white people and that non-white people were “in need of help, poorly qualified, criminal, uneducated, backward and dangerous” (Tißberger 2016, 26). Our chapter contributes to gaining theoretical and empirical knowledge about the ways in which areas traditionally dominated by privileged white (often straight cis-male) actors, such as educational institutions, deal with critical approaches to structural and institutional racism.

3

Methods

Our ethnographic approach follows a non-standardised qualitative research strategy (Breidenstein et al. 2015; Hirschauer 2002). While method “books convey the impression that the researcher can predetermine and then follow a ‘suitable method’ […], many decisions about how to observe a practice are pragmatic in nature” (Scheffer 2002, 353). Indeed, we took the pragmatic opportunity of a turbulent event to generate an ethnographic story, conveying our experience. We wrote down our experiences as thick descriptions (Geertz 1987, 10) that are methodologically meant to allow the reader to relate to experiences to a social reality. In ethnography “descriptions have the significance which tables, graphics and pictures have in other disciplines” (Hirschauer 2002, 40). Descriptions offer “sociologists the possibility of virtually participating in a described social practice. Conversely, ethnographies can also offer laypeople an opportunity to participate in sociological discourse, by having informational value for their practical problems” (ibid.). Our descriptions represent an attempt to translate an emotionally charged experience into a narration that allows readers to understand the situation. The data reflects our emotional involvement and shows that the experienced situations in the field have left us (and parts of the audience) vulnerable and uncomfortable. Retracing what dynamics

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lie behind this discomfort makes it necessary to start from our individual perceptions. Our ethnographic approach becomes autoethnographic because autoethnography specifically focuses on the emotions of researchers as a resource for research (Canella and Lincoln 2011). Turning the researcher herself into a research tool can be considered as one of the most extreme forms of ethnographic data collection (Ellis et al. 2010). (Auto)ethnography recognises to an even higher degree than ethnography, that the reality to be grasped changes with its subsequent representation. It is therefore not a question of grasping factual truths, but of reality in the sense of its effects both on the researcher and the reader. Our analysis is about the reproduction of whiteness as a structure in university learning settings. In our approach, the audience’s reactions do not reflect individual characters but internalised discursive positions and mechanisms. For this reason, we have not included the students’ perceptions in our analysis: rather than trying to grasp what they mean we are interested in the effects on us of what is being said.1 In our analysis, we try to show how whiteness works as an institutionality structuring the university and the event. Our analysis is about structural ignorance, not individual ignorance.

4

Case Analysis: How Teaching About Racism Means Unleashing Whiteness

We, the authors of this chapter, held a joint university seminar on “pedagogical professionalisation in the post-migrant society”. The seminar addressed students enrolled in teaching degrees for secondary education 1 Research on racism in teaching settings faces the problem that research participants cannot easily be part of the communicative validation, because there are limited ways to talk about racism within racist argumentation structures. Most likely, the analysed defence mechanisms would simply be repeated. We have elsewhere explored the problem of ethically researching on racism (Akbaba and Wagner 2021) and methodologically explored how to do research on defence mechanisms while neither duplicating dogmatic realism we identify in those discourses, nor falling prey to the logic of anti-democratic movements (Akbaba 2021). The tentative proposal for a politically literate methodology is to radically incorporate the researchers’ positionings.

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and focused on structural racism in society and educational institutions. In over thirteen sessions throughout the course of the term, we read and discussed Critical Race Theory texts on everyday racism. For the penultimate session of the seminar, we invited a guest speaker, in order to allow for variation within the seminar. Our idea as course convenors was that a person from a different context would highlight the course’s subject matter. We decided to invite Marco Elbahri,2 who we had previously met at a symposium and deemed pertinent for the purpose of the seminar.3 Elbahri came to speak as an activist for the “Initiative Black People in Germany”, the federal initiative’s local branch he had co-founded. We announced his lecture under the title “Schwarz sein und Deutsch dazu – eine Frage der Selbstverständlichkeit” (“Being Black and German too – a matter of self-evidence”). The lecture consisted of an informed historical outline on Black people in Germany, beginning with racist colonial practices, marginalised and precarious living and working conditions under the Third Reich, the failure to revisit Black history in Germany for the rest of the twentieth century, up until the founding moments of the initiative’s local branch. Elbahri furthermore provided information on political self-designations such as “Black” and other designations which he did not use due to their linkages to the colonial past and their potential to cause pain. As he talks about “the N-word” we noted a “mumbling across the room” in our ethnographic descriptions. Towards the end of his 45-min talk, Elbahri had arrived in the present time. What follows is an extract of our ethnographic descriptions, which we subsequently analyse.

2

This is a pseudonym. During the course of the seminar, students were always able to make suggestions, yet they rarely made use of this opportunity. 3

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“The Logo Has Got to Go”: Challenging Whiteness

Elbahri points out concrete campaigns his initiative is running to combat racial profiling, the use of racist terminology, and other forms of discriminationdiscrimination against Blacks. On the slide of his presentation a woman is holding up a streetStreet sign reading “Anton-W-Amo-Straße” (“Anton-W-Amo-Street”) next to which the current street sign “Mohrenstraße” (“Moorstreet”) is crossed out. The next slide reads “the logo has got to go” and shows the emblem of a locally known roofing company. On the company logo, whose owner’s last name is “Neger” (which is German for the N-word), a stylised portrait of a Black man is shown with overly thick lips, a grass skirt, and earrings evoking colonialcolonial depictions of Black people. The audienceaudience is asked whether they recognise the logo and some answer that they did. Several students are aware that there was a debate about the logo being racist between 2014 and 2016. Yet the businesscorporate refused to take down the emblem, arguing that the firm itself was not racist. The owner had claimed that it was no one’s businesscorporate but his own to decide how to market his name. His name simply happened to be his name. The mood in the room is now similar to when the “N-word” was mentioned, which indicates a need for discussion. Some students raise their hand and repeat the firm’s arguments, namely that the intent behind the logo is non-racist. It is tangible now, that the class is in disaccord and that the perspectives on the case are diverging. Another student weighs in and criticises the logo, citing the previous lecture on the historical context precisely of such symbolssymbol.

By putting the focus on the campaign “the logo has got to go”, a spokesperson from “the fringes” of society is making demands on “the centre”. Ahmed (2013) writes that BPoC are welcome in white spaces under the condition that the Person of Colour makes those people feel comfortable whose belonging no one questions. They are furthermore required to “minimise the signs of difference”, to integrate “into a common organisational culture” and to allow their institutions to “celebrate diversity” (Ahmed 2013, 13). Instead of taking on this assigned role, Elbahri confronts the teachers-to-be with their lack of knowledge

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about racism taking place right in front of their doorstep. He puts colonial racism—so far comfortably imagined as distant in time and space—in front of the audience’s feet. The legacy of colonial racism is now palpable for people in the room as it falls into the concrete lived experience of those students who have taken note of the public debate about a firm that is located in the city of their university. The logo can regularly be seen on company cars and advertising posters across the city. The concrete example exposes racism as a tangible reality, which the audience must now navigate during the discussion. Bringing a seemingly distant topic close to the audience irritates the space. The literature describes white defensiveness as an expectable reaction when talking about racism: “Since Critical Race Pedagogy questions the perceived normality that is racism, it is literally provoking white attempts of normalisation” (Bönkost 2016, 9). The data mirrors how precarious it is for BPoC to address racism, and how dominant society creates unsafe spaces with specific implications for teachers (Leonardo and Porter 2010). Elbahri takes on a different role than the one which is structurally preordained for him. This wilful choosing of a position challenges whiteness in the room, because the hegemonic order generally perceives it to be the task of white people to raise their voice for humanity and non-violence.4 The self-perception of white people is to own a (i.e. the) universal perspective on justice. When a Person of Colour takes on the analysis of a social grievance and addresses the general public and white people in particular, she is seen as overstepping her assigned role. From a white perspective, this is the role of the guest (Derrida 2000), who is granted conditional hospitality. As a Black person, she seems allowed to discuss grievances only when a white person requests her to do so. Elbahri does not conform to the victim’s position, and he does not act according to a role as a representative of the periphery, in need of hegemonial benevolence. Instead, he proactively tackles grievances. And he does so without giving in to the rational impetus of formulating issues in a softened way to “pick people up from where they stand” (in German: ‘die Leute da abholen wo sie stehen’), a German proverb that indicates 4

See: www.whitecharity.de

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concessions to be made to learners and their particular points of view. Later on, he will tell us that this sort of “meeting people half-way” was “part of the system”. In Ahmed’s terms he is showing wilfulness “not to go with the flow” and even further “to cause its obstruction” (Ahmed 2013, 14). The students who insist on arguing against the speaker expose the institutional setting as a white setting. More white attempts of normalisation become apparent in the following extract of the ethnographic description.

4.2

“Do You Also Fight Racism Against White People?”—Whiteness Strikes Back

What follows are a series of remarks, which increasingly irritate me (Yalız). A female student who is not white passing and a white male student are particularly involved in asking questions. One question is whether the initiative was also engaged in fighting racism against white people. The speaker counters by asking what she understood racism to be. The student replies, that it was for him to give that answer since there was such a thing as reverse racism. The male student supports her statement by saying, that “one also has to look at one’s own actions” when expecting tolerance. He uses the example of discrimination against albinos in South Africa to support his statement. I am seriously vexed by the remarks and am looking at Constantin to ensure that we don’t have to intervene just yet. The speaker has the situation under control.

Yalız’s perception mirrors the irritation in the room. Her vexation corresponds to the increasing defence mechanisms of the students. Systematically, we address “racism against white people” first, and then the demand to “look at one’s own actions”. The female student’s question whether the speaker’s initiative is also engaged in fighting racism against white people can hardly be considered a pertinent question. Instead, it contains a twofold claim. The notion of reverse racism enters the discussion as a claim, since it does not follow from the speaker’s previous elaborations. Elbahri had retraced racism as a historically rooted, unequal relation of structural power, where

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white people belong to the dominant part of society. Consequently, they cannot be the target of racist discrimination. Furthermore, the student attempts to re-claim the power to interpret what is legitimate to be assessed as problematic. She has opened a battlefield over the sovereignty of interpretation within the room. Well-meaningly, the student’s statement might be interpreted as nothing but her lacking understanding of structural racism. However, the lack of knowledge about structural inequalities, self-confidently performed, is a product of (and cause for) silenced structural racism. The ignorance and knowing-it-better attitude reflect institutional whiteness. School and university are the most influential institutions in which students have plenty of opportunities to internalise whiteness. The subsequent course of the discussion reinforces the interpretation of a mechanism deflecting the critique of racism and leaving those students behind vulnerable who do not blend in or bough to the white rule. We have more descriptions with scenes that we cannot include here, among them a follow-up joint evaluation of the situation with several emotionally unsettled students, and the subsequent seminar session one week later where the situation escalates once more. The reaction of one part of the audience (namely to consider discrimination against white people too) is structurally comparable to the current debate between “Black Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter”. While “Black Lives Matter” condemns the circumstance that human lives are not given the same degree of worthiness in society, the reply “All Lives Matter” denies a problem which just does not structurally affect white people. “All Lives Matter”, similarly to above, cannot merely be read as an uninformed perspective, because it inevitably is a product of silenced racist structures too. Worse still, the situation in the seminar carries an even more drastic message than that of “All Lives Matter”. Whereas “All Lives Matter” ‘merely’ denies racist circumstances, in the seminar the perpetratorvictim-relationship is turned upside down. The utterance demands Black people to mind “their own” discrimination against others. This tit-for-tat strategy works only on the basis of the basic liberal assumption that all people are assumed to be equal, an assumption that puts the history and legacy of anti-Black racism on the same level with all sorts of variously rooted violent felonies. In addition, the idea that it is necessary to check

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one’s “own” behaviour before deserving tolerance regards Black people as one collective. Black people experiencing racist discrimination in a predominantly white society are taken in kin custody with Black people discriminating against albinos in South Africa, simply on the grounds of being Black. All in all, it is as though, after social “fringes” have dared to challenge white supremacy, whiteness strikes back by denying unequal power structures, levelling racism, and demanding substitute services before even thinking about making amends for racist humiliation. The non-Black “we” defends itself against being homogenised by providing whataboutism examples to lever and derail the problem of racism. This resistance becomes apparent where whiteness or white people are problematised in their dominant function within society. This resistance comes to light when whiteness is problematised as a hegemonic order that subordinates certain others on the basis of historically contingent categories of belonging. The problem of reification, namely to depend on the reproduction of categories when addressing relations of inequality, is turned, so to speak, into a killer argument against those negatively affected by inequality: “you don’t want a generalisation of your group, then you must not refer to collective mechanisms”. Such reasoning, however, makes it impossible to address structural inequality. Our data reflects “white fragility” reaction patterns, theoretically developed in anglophone literature: not understanding what racism is, not seeing oneself involved in history, assuming everyone is having one’s own experience, arrogance, unwillingness to listen, and defensiveness (DiAngelo 2018; Hage 2000), the reversal of victim and perpetrator and the know-it-all attitude (TuSmith and Reddy 2002; Hytten and Warren 2003; Matias 2014). Elbahri speaks within a space that proves to be a white dominated space with an inability to tolerate racial stress that is triggered when the speaker challenges positions, perspectives, and privileges. “White fragility” functions to block the provocation and regain white racial equilibrium (DiAngelo 2018). Elbahri has questioned the institutionally unquestioned normalcy by voicing a demand from the “fringes” of society. The white space, embodied by the students who are socialised in (school and) university as white institutions, strikes back in order to restore the hegemonic order with white interpretation authority. Elbahri challenged white silence about racism (Rodriguez

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2011) by putting his finger to the need for local action against racist structures. The silence could not be upheld, but instead of talking about racism it was replaced by denying and defending racist structures.

4.3

White Double-Bind to Put Blacks in Check?

Elbahri articulates the demand “the logo has got to go” from a specific, Black, perspective. The students reply that his initiative should rather, or at least as well, get involved against discrimination against all people. His demand is rejected for its particularity, and he is in turn demanded to show a universal engagement against inequality. At first, it may sound reasonable to favour equality for all, rather than equality for some. We already touched upon the shortcomings of this perspective above with reference to “All Lives Matter”. The implicit accusation is that the initiative is acting self-servingly, ignoring the grief others have too. Elbahri speaks from a minority position marked by some members of the audience—those who speak back—as illegitimate. However, what remains unsaid is that whiteness is an equally particular position. White perspectives on societal relations appear universal because they can remain unmarked. White perspectives profit from this perception, because they represent the norm and the dominant space (Hage 2000). For Elbahri, the resistance to his position turns into a paradoxical message: on the one hand, as argued above, as a Black person he is not to transgress the assigned role as a guest granted hospitality for his subject position as a particular other with particular topics to represent. On the other hand, when he takes on a particular position this is denounced as inadequate too. The double-bind message he receives is: “stick to the topics that we make you responsible for!” and simultaneously “talking about topics that only concern yourself is self-involved and will not be accepted!” The white space tells him to dare not speak for everybody, and simultaneously to stop speaking for himself only. In other words, he better not speak at all. The literature provides plausible arguments supporting the notion that white students represent white supremacy. “White students who resist talking or learning about race are emotionally choosing to reinvest in

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their whiteness, because the shame of race is too much for them to bear. Their complicity in this process solidifies their oppressor group status inasmuch as it maintains white supremacy” (Matias 2014, 143 as cited in Bönkost 2016, 10). Interestingly, we read the female student who reproduced white defence mechanisms as a Person of Colour. What function does such an investment into the hegemonic order have, coming from a student with potential personal experiences of racism? This investment seems paradoxical at first, since she is taking a stand for a symbolic order that potentially excludes herself. Her reaction may be a result of the psychological effect that her own experiences of being othered may have had on her, reinforcing the internalisation of white perspectives (Thomas-Olalde and Velho 2011). The data at hand does not allow for more insight. What is important is that for the analysis of the dynamics when teaching about racism it is necessary to distinguish between the bodies present and the positions they are representing. The attempts to restore a white equilibrium are followed by double binding Elbahri, trying to add on the defence mechanisms by putting Black resistance in check. According to the ethnographic description, the white defence mechanisms were dominant during the discussion with the guest speaker. Consequently, there was no time left to engage with other questions. The guest speaker himself noted in hindsight, that 15 min of the discussion time were “hijacked”. A student later noted that he would have liked to discuss problematic carnival costumes but did not have the chance to do so. It remains uncertain to what extent the analysed scenes reflect a “successful” white strike back and hegemonic equilibrium, and to what extent the resistant perspectives disequilibrated the hegemonic order. What seems certain, on the one hand, are the attempts to restore the order. On the other hand, during the event people have realised the possibility to expand their perspectives: in the heated setting a student asked whether he himself would be qualified as a PoC and belong to that group, since he was light skinned but had parents from Morocco and had always been perceived as a foreigner throughout school and beyond. Elbahri confirmed, and the description reads that it was palpable in the student’s voice and gaze that a new perspective had been revealed to him.

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On Costs and Pay-Offs When Teaching About Racism

Elbahri’s guest lecture and ensuing group discussions were “successful” in irritating the hegemonic order. There are both costs and pay-offs resulting from the event. As for the costs: the participating PoC had to pay emotional costs (racist wounds), and so did the white people—in the sense that white emotions were triggered and according to Bönkost (2016) shame and suppressed dehumanisation turned the deranged white psyche inside out. There were costs and “inclusion taxes” (Melaku 2019) for the course convenors to pay, such as emotional and time resources spent on debriefings after the session, as well as for the guest speaker, such as hour-long debriefings after the presentation. As for the pay-offs: the experienced irritation also empowered the audience. A student asked if he himself counted as PoC; some students showed solidarity following the lecture; the students gave largely positive feedback about the seminar and the presentation; the conversations between course convenors and the visiting speaker proved solidarity; and finally the lecture was productively transformed into the beginning of a research project. Hence, the event was not unproductive, though it was not satisfying either. In contrasting cases, we reconstructed dynamics in events that for us felt like safer spaces (yet not safe spaces as we do not believe that such spaces exist). In one of these events, similar to Elbahri’s presentation, racist structures were scrutinised using a specific example close to the audience’s reality. The analysis of the example, similar to Elbahri’s presentation, challenged the hegemonic racial order, however, the audience did not reject the offered analysis. During the discussion following the presentation participants did not enact defence mechanisms, but reflected on them, sharing experiences of their own (white, BPoC, ambiguous, and intersecting) positions within society. The audience had shared knowledge about fundamentally unequal positions and used terms such as “white fragility” without the speakers introducing them. While in Elbahri’s case white emotions steered the discussion, covering and reproducing racism, in the contrasting case white emotions were part of the discussion as a common point of reference. One student referred to “pain” as a white emotion. The speakers and the audience discussed this

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white pain, without putting it on the same level with racist humiliation. White pain or the experience of it were not enacted as a defence strategy, because the discussed white pain precisely emerges when white subjects acknowledge racism causing unequal positionings for society members. White pain expresses the exhausting process after a belief in a maxim of justice turns out an illusion. The participants were not concerned with whites who, by pointing to pain as a white emotion, ward off engagement with racism or collapse under it. The audience further engaged with the question of what would unite white and BPoC-perspectives, thus entering the third space despite having different positions. It allowed itself to go further in discussing the content and still involved less competent participants. In this contrasting case, it was possible to “strike a balance between constructive racial engagement with white students and tending to the needs of students of color” (Spanierman and Cabrera 2015, 23 cited in Bönkost 2016, 13). It is for these reasons we labelled the case as an example of how a competent discussion about racism could look like.

6

Conclusion: Teaching About Racism Against Institutional Whiteness

Teaching about racism is a risky and costly task as it comes with making whiteness visible—a historically deeply rooted fundamental structure whose powerful defence mechanisms spare no expense to regain equilibrium. The case analysis shows that teaching about racism within institutional whiteness works within and consequently against institutional whiteness. Teaching about racism comes along with unleashing the “White Giant” (Akbaba and Harteman 2020), having to take up with it as a consequence. We did not tie the interpretation down: it could be that, by reproducing racism in a setting with racialised students in the room, the discussion caused greater damage than its intention to contribute to knowledge about racism was. Equally, chances are that whiteness was unbalanced, evoking sustainable reflection processes in the wake.

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School and university are the most influential institutions in which the present students had plenty of opportunities to internalise whiteness. This very institutional framework designates diversity as a desired goal. The “institutional will” (Ahmed 2013, 9), however, does not (yet) go as far as to structurally embed this topic in the curriculum. In our analysed case, the lecture is part of an elective module, a one-off event, and its focus is subject to the course convenors’ decision. The data might illustrate that selective offers are not conducive for teaching about racism. As we have carved out of the material and as Ahmed (2013) states in reference to her research, the event as many of our other data shows, too, has to calculate with constitutive failure. Ahmed interviewed practitioners in diversity offices who maintained that the institution does not acknowledge what they do: “although there seems to be an institutional will to diversity, the experience of practitioners is of the institution as a wall” (Ahmed 2013, 10). Our case reflects a similar paradox: although the tenet of diversity creates an image of an institutional will, our data proves the students’ discursive performance to work as the institution’s wall against the acknowledgement of structural obstacles for conditions of equality— a sine qua non prerequisite for diversity. Our outlook on contrasting data showed that, at the same time, university settings do exist, in which talking about racism generates dynamics in which the audience jointly reflect on defence mechanism instead of enacting them. The contrasting case shows that parts of the audience have already critically addressed whiteness. These stocks of knowledge, our material implies, seem carried into the university rather than reflecting stocks of knowledge from inside. In order to create more such learning spaces for teaching about racism, rather than tuning into the holy mantra of diversity, the university must collaboratively decenter whiteness as a powerful institution. Acknowledgements We would like to thank Marco Elbahri for his inspiring coping with the challenging situation, which made us start with this project in the first place.

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and the Matrix Center for the Advancement of Social Equity and Inclusion 4 (2): 134–153. McIntosh, Peggy. 1989. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Peace and Freedom Magazine July/August: 10–12. Mecheril, Paul, Susanne Arens, Susann Fegter, Britta Hoffarth, Birte Klingler, Claudia Machold, Margarete Menz, Melanie Plößer, and Nadine Rose. 2013. Differenz unter Bedingungen von Differenz: Zu Spannungsverhältnissen universitärer Lehre. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Melaku, Tsedale M. 2019. You Don’t Look like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman and Littlefield. Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, and Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Milner, H. Richard. 2012. “Losing the Color-Blind Mind in the Urban Classroom.” In Urban Education 47 (5): 868–875. Rodriguez, Dalia. 2011. “Silence as Speech: Meanings of Silence for Students of Color in Predominantly White Classrooms.” International Review of Qualitative Research 4 (1): 111–144. Scheffer, Thomas. 2002. “Das Beobachten als sozialwissenschaftliche Methode: Von den Grenzen der Beobachtbarkeit und ihrer methodischen Bearbeitung.” In Qualitative Gesundheits- und Pflegeforschung, edited by Gabriele Müller-Mundt and Doris Schaeffer, 351–374. Bern: Huber. Shure, Saphira. 2021. De_Thematisierung migrationsgesellschaftlicher Ordnungen: Lehramtsstudium als Ort der Bedeutungsproduktion. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Smith, Annie. 2013. It’s Not Because You’re Black: Addressing Issues of Racism and Underrepresentation of African Americans in Academia. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Steinbach, Anja, Saphira Shure, and Paul Mecheril. 2020. “The Racial School: Die nationale Schule und ihre Rassekonstruktionen.” In Unterscheiden und Trennen: Die Herstellung von natio-ethno-kultureller Differenz und Segregation in der Schule, edited by Juliane Karakayalı, 24–45. Weinheim/Basel: Beltz. Steinbach, Anja. 2016. “Thematisierung migrationsgesellschaftlicher Differenzund Machtverhältnisse in der universitären Lehramtsausbildung.” In Pädagogisches Können in der Migrationsgesellschaft, edited by Aysun Do˘gmu¸s, Yasemin Karaka¸so˘glu, and Paul Mecheril, 297–300. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. The Roestone Collective. 2014. “Safe Space: Towards a Reconceptualization.” Antipode 46 (5): 1346–1365.

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Thomas-Olalde, Oscar, and Astride Velho. 2011. “Othering and its Effects - Exploring the Concept.” In Writing Postcolonial Histories of Intercultural Education, edited by Heike Niedrig and Christian Ydesen, 27–51. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Tißberger, Martina. 2016. “Hegemonial Self-Reflection: Critical Whiteness as the Intersection of ‘Race’ and Gender.” In Gender, Human Rights and Activism: Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress in Cultural Studies. Coimbra: Grácio. TuSmith, Bonnie, and Maureen T. Reddy. 2002. Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wagner, Constantin. 2014. “Wer ist , wir‘? Weißsein und Strukturen, Institutionen und Praktiken der Herrschaft.” In Migration, Asyl und (Post-) Migrantische Lebenswelten in Deutschland: Bestandsaufnahme und Perspektiven migrationspolitischer Praktiken, edited by Miriam Aced, Tamer Düzyol, Arif Rüzgar, and Christian Schaft, 177–200. Berlin: LIT.

8 Institutional Occidentalism: On the Connection Between Police Constitutions of Space and Institutional Racism Eva Brauer

1

Introduction

In recent years, members of the police force have come under public scrutiny for their political stances. Quite appropriately, there is a considerable public protest about right-wing extremist statements in a private WhatsApp group within a German police service and an intensified discussion, which includes the media, about personal suitability for the police profession (e.g., Oltermann 2020). The protests of the Black Lives Matter movement, which are also being taken up in Germany, must also be framed in terms of a public discussion about patterns of institutional racism. Specific to Germany, there is an intensive debate about the subject of Islam in conjunction with cultural ascriptions (on this: El-Menouar 2019). Since summer 2018, the topic of clan-crime has been discussed E. Brauer (B) University of Applied Science Fulda, Fulda, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Porsché et al. (eds.), Institutionality, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96969-1_8

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in the media and in public. To define the phenomenon, ethnic-cultural categories have been brought into focus as an essential component of the phenomenon and as a basis for attribution (LKA.NRW 2019, 7). This is linked to police measures that, as a result of such a definition, explicitly target ethicised spaces, for example by raiding shisha-bars. A critical discussion of the culturalising and stigmatising ascriptions towards an Arab-Muslim population along the institutional approach, as it happens in the scope of a Black Lives Matter movement, has not been recorded so far. As a possible reason for the lack of engagement with stigmatising police practices in relation to proceedings around clan-crime could be the predominant focus on ethnicised spaces rather than individuals. Thus, these measures are directed towards specific streets, districts, or bars and cafes, rather than stop-and-search practices. The definition of racism is primarily understood as the exclusion, disadvantaging, or degradation of individuals, rather than the ethnicisation and ‘othering’ of spaces. The spatial reference, as a seemingly neutral foil, appears to mitigate the critical moment of racism in such practices. In the process of a field survey that was part of the ethnographic research project on the constructions of urban space within the German police force, KORSIT,1 I repeatedly encountered ethnic attributions to one of the districts—‘Rosenberg-North’—, which was considered to be inferior to the other districts of the city by the police officers. Although the police officers in the better-off district ‘Rosenberg-South’ stated the same range of tasks and workload for their area, the district Rosenberg-North was described across all districts as the ‘toughest’ area. These spatial descriptions legitimised, in turn, a tougher approach by the officers in the area of Rosenberg-North. Spatial ascriptions are thus constitutive for the institutional practices of the police. There is already a scholarly debate about the connection between policing and space. Feth (2016, 21, my translation) notes that ‘police 1

The KORSIT project (The construction of space in the context of security – spatial knowledge in the police; German: Die Konstruktion von Räumen im Kontext von Sicherheit – Raumwissen bei der Polizei ), led by Daniela Hunold at the German Police University, Münster, Germany. It was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) between November 2017 and April 2020. For other outputs from this project, see also Dangelmaier in this volume.

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activities have a deeply spatial and space-constituting character, especially in the urban context’. Herbert (1997, 5), moreover, describes the power of police officers to shape social action as depending fundamentally on their capacity to control space. ‘Territoriality’, hereby, ‘is clearly a central component of police behavior (…)’ (p. 161). Wacquant speaks of an ethno-racial control that is historically grounded and concentrated in urban geography (2008, xxix). However, a systematic examination of the institutional constitution of urban space, which focuses on the institutional processes of producing of such ‘problem areas’ itself, which also includes the dimension of gender, is lacking so far. The paper aims to examine institutional productions of space regarding the reproduction of stigmatising and discriminatory effects. The focus is on the examination of institutional racisms, which becomes effective through a specific institutional constitution of space. In order to trace these mechanisms, postcolonial studies provide analytical tools which makes it possible to consider the ‘othering’ of spaces as a precondition for the production of relations of subordination. The concepts of Orientalism and Occidentalism shed light on various processes of culturalisation and ethnicisation. As a consequence of linking the analysis of institutional productions of space and forms of institutional discrimination based on postcolonial concepts, a complex of effects becomes apparent, which is here defined as institutional Occidentalism. In this context, the category of gender engages in a mutually stabilising relationship with the categories of space and ethnicity. With the analytical category of institutionality, it is possible to connect the social practices related to stigmatising spatial productions with the meso-level of the institutional agency. The constitution of ‘other spaces’, as will be shown, is thus also to be seen as a form of institutionality; as social practices that give validity to the institution of the police in its specific embodiment in terms of a deeply rooted hegemonic masculinity. The first section contains a methodological classification of the police as an institution regarding the possibility of the constitution of space. This is followed by a theoretical overview of the concepts of Orientalism and Occidentalism. Those considerations are subsequently transferred

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to the social practices of the police based on empirical data. The interview excerpts presented here are part of a data pool I elicited as part of an ethnographic study in the research project entitled KORSIT funded by the German Research Foundation. The interviews were held with police officers in two different socio-demographic districts2 of a large German city with the better-off district ‘Rosenberg-South’ and the stigmatised district ‘Rosenberg-North’,3 in which the ethnographic research was conducted. In addition to the interviews, I did more than 300 hours of participant observation, during which I accompanied police officers in their everyday police work, regardless of whether they were on the early, late, or night shift. The data were transcribed, pseudonymised and analysed taking inspiration from Grounded Theory (Strauss and Cobin 1990). The evaluations are part of my, to this date unpublished doctoral thesis titled Space and Gender as Social Practices of Police and Social Work: A Comparative Empirical Research of Institutional Spatial Constitutions.4

2

Institutional Constitutions of Urban Space by the Police

Institutions are characterised by the fact that they provide a normative framework for practices (e.g., everyday operations) to unfold. Institutions guarantee the observance of socially negotiated norms. Berger and Luckmann (1966, 72) state that ‘Institutions also, by the very fact of their existence, control human conduct by setting up predefined patterns of conduct, which channel it in one direction as against the many other directions that would theoretically be possible’. The police represent an institution with both an organisational and a symbolic-normative dimension which inform patterns of conduct that guide police officers’ actions. Moreover, we can distinguish between an externally directed

2

Rosenberg-South: 294,331 inhabitants, 8.97% unemployed, 9.7% of foreign nationals, 137.76 km2 area. Rosenberg-North: 250,928 inhabitants, 21.75% unemployed, 18.66% of foreign nationals (2018). 3 The name of the city, as well as the names of its districts were pseudonymised. 4 The thesis is supervised by Monika Alisch at the PhD Centre of HAW Hessen, Germany.

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mandate and an internally directed style of behaviour. As a legal institution, the police are legitimised to preserve public order and authorised and specialised to carry out measures of social control by using force. The institution refers in its actions to formal rules and a formal institutional self-image—the Police-Culture. In turn, the police have a deeply rooted ‘cop culture’ (Behr 2008): a specific organisational practice which is characterised by an informal system of values. The police officers are socialised into this ‘cop culture’ and develop institution-specific roles, perceptions, and value patterns, which can have a decisive impact on the execution of their mandate. Rafael Behr states that cop culture is still androcentric (Behr 2017, 541). Police masculinity (ibid.), as an essential component of cop culture, is expressed in gestures of superiority, dominance over an adversary, rigidity, production of winners and losers, and the formation of bipolar positions (ibid.). Cop culture is based on the constitution of a hazardous community that elevates the willingness to take risks (of one’s own health, life, morality) as a virtue (p. 543). In this context, Behr establishes the category of warrior-masculinity, a policespecific figuration characterised by making the body available for combat (ibid.). Behr attributes the model of warrior-masculinity as a ‘masculinity capable of violence, sometimes also with an affinity for violence’ (p. 545). In the following analysis, institutionality represents the effects of institutional norms on the actions of individuals who are committed to the institution. Bi-directionally, institutionality also represents the social practices that, in favour of stabilising and strengthening the institution, refer to the normative framework and reproduce it in this process. Consequently, the invocation of such institutionally defined norms by individual police officers should be understood more as a practice of asserting the institution, than as an individual attitude. If we look at these police activities through the lens of institutionality we will understand better how police officers enact on behalf of the institution in a particular social and societal context. Thereby, the institutional power of the organisation is articulated in a social context that does not only have a powerful effect on this context but also on the organisation itself. As we look at the institutional spatial constitutions, it is important to understand that the police are divided into formal and informal structures. Police officers might exercise their role in a way that foregrounds

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stereotypes based on social categories when at the same time the police as an institution does not allow to make use of such stereotypes in their work. Institutionality, as an analytical category, helps to understand how institutions appear in discursive practices and with which effect(s) for the power relations of those interacting within and moreover with a particular institution. Therefore, the institutional Occidentalism presented through the empirical materials serve to stabilise the informal structure within the police, which is not compatible in its specific expression but in its implementation with the formal structure. During participant observation, it quickly became clear that police officers intersubjectively shared knowledge about spatial segments, but that this knowledge was only invoked informally, on the level of collegial conversations and informal operational planning. Spaces such as districts, public squares, or streets were associated with certain groups of people, which in turn were linked to different characteristics. Knowledge of and about spaces therefore refers to a specific institutionalised constitution of space and (re)produces this knowledge by invoking it. Space becomes a category of knowledge that guides the practices of institutional actors (Koch 2011). As a result of the repeated institutionalised invocations of space, these spatial knowledges might appear as objective knowledge to individuals. Koch sees the problematisation of space as a category of knowledge as a not-to-be-avoidable consequence of this social constructivist conceptualisation of space and knowledge (p. 269). The problematisation of space as a category of knowledge provides a broader view of the constructedness of space (e.g., Löw 2016; Massey 1994). Knowledge and space, in their historical and social bonds, are thus always an expression and instrument of power relations (Koch 2011, 270; Maresch and Weber 2002). I am here less concerned with the police officers’ application of knowledge in concrete situations of policing practice and more with the immanent logics and principles of their discursive construction of knowledge about spaces. At the centre of my engagement are schemes that indicate boundaries and differences and thus show ‘places of border negotiations’ (Koch 2011, 282, my translation). This type of ‘border management’ is accompanied by the police’s authority to define and constitute space in the city. The invocation of institutional spatial patterns through the

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actions of the police officers not only structures urban society, but also asserts the institution itself. In this process, structural categories such as ethnicity, class and gender are invoked and (re)produced, through which in turn social power relations, access and privileges are distributed and negotiated. During participant observations and interviews it became clear that in one of the districts (‘Rosenberg-North’), which according to socioeconomic data is an economically disadvantaged district, a specific institutional style of action was cultivated, which can be described as ‘rigid’. This was expressed by choosing rather terse formulations in the interaction with the residents of the district. As a matter of principle, the informal form (‘Du’ = ‘you’, as opposed to the polite form ‘Sie’ which normally would be used) was chosen for addressing the residents. Also, operations that took place in the district led to a higher use of resources and personnel. This style was underlined by an emphasis on masculine attributes, which was also reflected in the distribution of personnel by an informal quota system of 1/3 women to 2/3 men. As a result of the surveys, it became apparent that the justifications for this more rigid style of action were made on the basis of attributions made along the categories of space-ethnicity-gender. However, the respective attributions turned out to be flexible. At the centre of the justification, however, was always a continually flexible but mutually stabilising triad composed by the invocations of the categories. This ‘stabilising legitimation complex’ will henceforth be defined as institutional Occidentalism. Before outlining the mechanisms that underly institutional Occidentalism along the analysis of the interview excerpts, in the following, a theoretical overview on the modes of Occidentalism will be given in order to transfer the considerations thus prioritised to the social practice of the police.

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Mechanisms of Occidentalism: Space-Related Productions of Suband Superordination

The term Orientalism is used to describe the creation of a Eurocentric, Western view of the ‘world of others’, described as a ‘style of domination, restructuring and the possession of authority over an Orient’ (Said 1978, 11). The ‘Orient’, as derived from sol oriens—the rising of the sun in the east—is an imaginary spatial construction that stands in contrast to the Occident (sol occidens)—the setting of the sun in the west— whose respective geographical and content-related allocations have been subject to a process of negotiation over the centuries. The ‘Orient’ used to be associated in the Anglophone world with the entire ‘Asian world’, i.e. the Arabic-speaking countries, as well as India and China. Today’s use of the term (from the point of view of discourses of migration in Germany) tends to be limited to the Middle East and the Arab-Islamic areas—including Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Northern Africa. Said has shown in that regard how the ‘Orient’ was constructed in the colonial literature and art to help constitute an identity for the West. According to Said, the Orient is a product of European Oriental and Islamic Studies, which have systematically created a space of ‘difference’ in an effort to distinguish Europe from the spaces of her (would-be) colonial appropriations. Everything that ‘Europe’ should not be was transferred to the ‘oriental space’ and its associated people, who were imagined to have certain social qualities, such as being irrational and uncontrolled, lustful, exotic, mysterious, and fanatically religious. In this process, whole continents and their inhabitants were constructed and subsequently viewed as inferior and degraded in contrast to ‘Western civilisation’. Orientalism therefore has to be understood as a powerful and multi-layered colonial discourse that creates the space of the ‘Orient’ and ‘the others’ (Said 1978, 11–12). ‘Othering’ is the production of boundaries and differential categories and ultimately it is a discursive distinction between the ‘we’ and the ‘other’. Through the construction of the ‘other’, a separate position for

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the ‘we’ is indirectly created, which can now be naturalised as selfevident, positive, and superior. The naming of the ‘other’ has the effect that people are categorised and devalued as non-affiliated with and deviant from the in-group. The setting of a ‘we’ above ‘others’ represents a decisive tool for the distribution and regulation of resources and that connected to the power of defining. The shift in perspective, away from the construction of an inferior ‘Orient’ and towards the question of the processes of production of a superior ‘Occident’ is called Occidentalism (Coronil 1996). Henceforth the focus is on occidentalist practices used to determine a hegemonic location. ‘It is therefore always a matter of creating orientalised otherness, while at the same time reasserting occidentalised ‘peculiarities” (Brunner cited in Dietze et al. 2009, 13, my translation). The concept of Occidentalism describes not only a result or an effect, but also the condition of the possibility of Orientalist projections. While Coronil used the term Occidentalism to show the concrete consequences of colonialism along an axis of the Global North and Global South, Dietze et al. (2009, 27, my translation) propose to use the term as an ‘additional tool for the analysis of contemporary neo-orientalism’. At the centre of this occidental position is the setting of a cultural ascription of a foreign culture that is incompatible with western value system (p. 31). Occidentalism can therefore be understood as ‘meta-racism’, which, without the use of biologisms, carries out a hierarchisation of people on the basis of spatio-cultural attributions. In this chapter, the concept of Occidentalism serves as an extension of the concept of institutional racism. The Macpherson Report (1999, 34) defined institutional racism as ‘the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin’. Through the conceptual expansion we can investigate how the institutional constitution of spaces is made functional in order to shape relations of sub- and superordination. Institutional Occidentalism represents a form of institutional racism, which, in contrast, unfolds its mode of operation explicitly through the institutional production of space. In the theoretical framing of Occidentalism, the production of an ‘other space’ by police officers is a form of institutionality, which claims the sovereignty of the police over the urban

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space. Thus, within the framework of institutional spatial constitutions, police officers do not merely produce subordinate subject positions, but rearticulate the social position of the institution of the police.

4

Institutional Occidentalism: The Constitution of a Near-Spatial Orient

In the following, the essential mechanisms are described that structure institutional Occidentalism; these mechanisms are spatial demarcation and spatial allocation. Based on this, patterns of legitimisation of the police for discriminatory actions are revealed. The interplay of spatial, ethnic, and gender attribution is essential for this pattern of legitimation. Finally, the constitution of space will be discussed in terms of institutionality—as a practice that stabilises the institution of the police itself.

4.1

Spatial Demarcations and Allocations

One of the basic mechanisms of Occidentalism is the demarcation of a ‘here’, which is marked as ‘normal’, from an ‘other space’, which is marked as ‘abnormal’. In the terminology of Occidentalism, ‘RosenbergNorth’ takes on the function of a near-spatial-Orient, which is located within the city as a territory of police jurisdiction. Spatial boundaries are drawn based on two main attributions. On the one hand, with regard to the categorisation of the inhabitants of a district area and, on the other hand, on the basis of an anticipated condition of the space concerning its atmosphere. Excerpt 1 I:

5

Does it make a difference to you, to your police work, whether you work in [Rosenberg-South] or [Rosenberg-North]?

(m): male police officer; (f ): female police officer.

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(m)5 PO: Definitely. Well, I’d say that if I work in [Rosenberg-North], where perhaps I have a larger proportion of people who come from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds, who are more likely to be criminals or who generally have a problem with the police, then there is of course perhaps more tension from the outset. There is always the situation that is perhaps more evident in [Rosenberg-North] than in [Rosenberg-South], when the police are required for interventions. Perhaps a group of people will get there more quickly and act against the police.

This interview section suggests that Rosenberg-North is considered a problem-area compared to Rosenberg-South. The persons who are assigned to the area are described as people with “educationally disadvantaged backgrounds, who are more likely to be criminals or who generally have a problem with the police.” The biggest problem, as the interview illustrates, is the residents’ negative stance towards the police (“act against the police”). They tend to have a “general problem” with the police. This classification leads to the assumption that an intervention in Rosenberg-North is connected with “more tension from the outset.” The spatial allocation of groups of people and problems creates a tense atmosphere within the police unit. Working in Rosenberg-North means working in an exceptional space. Rosenberg-North is constituted as a hostile, threatening environment, in which the police officers ‘dare to enter’ every day. An essential characteristic of the Rosenberg-North district is the higher percentage of ‘foreigners’: Excerpt 2 I:

Where do you think this image of the north being the ‘fierce’ district comes from? (f )PO: I think it’s really, yes, the higher percentage of foreigners somehow. But I / I have never seen it in cold print if it is not similar in [name of another city].

The area ‘Rosenberg-North’ is primarily associated with an increased percentage of foreigners or people with a migration background, even the

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police officer makes it clear that the constitution of urban areas cannot be derived either from statistics or from their own experience.

4.2

Space-Differentiating Practices of Action

The discursive production of an ‘other space’ requires a separation from the space that is known or perceived as normal. What can be regarded as ‘normal’ is taught during the training programme for new police officers, in which specific policing strategies are introduced. However, during participant observation and interviews, the Rosenberg-North district was repeatedly described as a ‘different space’ in which the contents of the training could not be implemented. As a consequence, it was deemed necessary to break away from the official set of rules and regulations and come up with one’s own style of action (see also Adler, this volume). This discursively creates a space in which policing strategies can be more or less freely patched together in an ad hoc fashion. Similar to the ‘blank spaces’ (Said 1978, 216) on the colonial map, Rosenberg-North is thus constituted as an ‘blank space’ with regard to police practices. The detachment from institutionally anchored knowledge of space sets the stage for differentiated as well as discriminatory practices of police action, as the following interview excerpt illustrates. Excerpt 3 I:

What skills do you need to do a good job in both [RosenbergSouth] and [Rosenberg-North] districts? (m)PO: Yes, in [Rosenberg-South] I would say that (…) you are a good policeman, one who is very familiar with the law and (…) takes correct and clean measures and (…) communicatively you don’t have to be, I would say, asocial actually, but you also have to know how to express yourself. Because here [Rosenberg-North] that’s the way it is, a lot of things are not carried out correctly, because we don’t have the time for it, but it’s different there, isn’t it? Yes.

It becomes apparent that ‘other’ strategies for action are legitimised on the basis of ‘other’ spatial attributions. Here, it is not the people who

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experience the attribution of an ‘otherness’, but the space is classified as ‘different’. This ‘otherness’ in turn legitimises a ‘different’ style of action in comparison to the surrounding areas. Whereas in the district of Rosenberg-South the measures are carried out ‘correctly’ and ‘cleanly’— e.g., according to regulations—and communication with the residents is characterised by polite (not ‘asocial’) communication, the situation in the district of Rosenberg-North is the exact opposite. Whereas communicative skills were emphasised in Rosenberg-South, and the style of action was described as service-oriented, the district of Rosenberg-North was imagined as a space in which the police had to wield repressive control over the residents and maintain or establish a hierarchical relationship between themselves and the residents of the district. The framing of a different approach in a different space, as described in the interview above, receives its justification in the following section with reference to the category of ethnicity. Excerpt 4 I: (m)PO: I: (m)PO:

I: (m)PO: I: (m)PO:

And now that you’ve said, in [city X], there are more women somehow, percentage-wise… about 65, 70 percent Yes, exactly. Do you think that has an influence on the style of action in the district [Rosenberg-North]? It’s still okay in [city X], there are other people there, right? But if we had the percentage of women here [Rosenberg-Nord], it would be difficult right? It would be very difficult. Yes? That’s just how it is […] Yes, but why, what exactly is the problem in [RosenbergNorth]? Why do you have to be more/ Foreigners. That’s the thing? Yes. The (…) the male foreigners […] You have to talk to people in a completely different way, otherwise they won’t understand. Right? They just don’t have any respect and generally don’t let women say anything to them anyway.

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The interview section focuses on the percentage of women police officers compared to men in the different districts. Rosenberg-North is characterised by its male-dominated police units compared to the surrounding districts, and especially compared to the district Rosenberg-South, where the percentage of female police officers is higher than the percentage of male police officers. The interviewee emphasises that policing in Rosenberg-North would be ‘difficult’ with a higher percentage of female officers. The location of this genus group ‘male foreigners’ lays the foundation for a spatial image of extraordinarily challenging working conditions, which male officers are imagined to be better equipped to deal with. Female police officers would not be as readily suitable for deployment in Rosenberg-North as their male colleagues. This naturalised, as well as spatially assigned competence to act as a universally set possibility for male officers to work is legitimised by two factors. On the one hand, male officers are imagined to be physically strong and therefore capable of dealing with tumultuous situations involving male foreigners in Rosenberg-North. On the other hand, and much more frequently, the deployment of women in the district was problematised with regard to certain cultural attributions of the residents. The police officer describes on what argumentative basis a ‘tougher’ approach becomes necessary in Rosenberg-North (“You have to talk to people in a completely different way, otherwise they won’t understand . Right? ”). By ‘different’ he means a direct and aggressive style of communication. The main problem is the residents’ lack of respect. He makes the generalising statement that male foreigners “generally don’t let women say anything to them anyway.” The emphasis that foreigners do not listen to women is understood against the background of a problematic deployment of female police officers in the district, but it clearly echoes a racist and sexist public and media debate about ‘oriental patriarchs’ in Germany, who on the one hand rule over ‘their’ women, and on the other hand also do not show respect for the women of Western culture. This narrative puts female police officers working in the district Rosenberg-North at risk of being exposed to the disrespectful insubordination of the local residents, more specifically to the male foreigners. Here a boundary is drawn between ‘one’s own’ and the ‘other’ cultural group. Gender classifications take a prominent position in the discourses

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of the police officers in this demarcation. The own culture, which is set as the ‘guiding culture’ (Leitkultur ), is distinguished from the ‘other culture’ along a moral axis of women’s equality.

4.3

The Mutually Stabilising Triad of Space-Gender-Ethnicity

The cultural difference is directly linked to the problematisation of the police deployment of female officers in the district Rosenberg-North. Dietze et al. (2009, 33–34) claim that constructions of occidentality and gender are systematically intertwined. The discursive creation of the orientalised ‘others’ based on culturalising demarcations generates, via a ‘rhetoric of emancipation’ (p. 24) of the Western women, a progressive and morally superior occident as a result of this classification. The discourse about the oppressed oriental woman thus creates a setting in which the occidental self can develop as a morally justifiable subject. The neo-racism that emerges in police discourses, which unfolds along with cultural attributions and on the spatial projection surface without reference to biologisms, serves for a self-referential identity work. In this context, male police officers in particular set themselves apart from Rosenberg-North residents by granting their female colleagues’ equal status. In this context Dietze et al. (p. 33) speak of an “Occidental Gender Pact ”: In the rejection and stigmatisation of the oppressed ‘orientalist’, the justification and necessity of ‘emancipation’ is suddenly recognised, which was previously considered unnecessary […]. The occidental woman is thus staged, so to speak, performatively as already emancipated. The ‘emancipation performer’ privileged in this way, in return, renounces annoying struggles for justice and equality. (Dietze et al. 2009, 36, my translation)

The performative positioning of a Western-emancipated woman represents the hallmark of ‘Western culture’, the claim to superiority over the orientalised ‘others’ is inferred from its recognition. This assertion of superiority represents a joyful moment in the interaction with the male

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inhabitants of Rosenberg-North, especially for the male police officers, as the following excerpts are intended to show: Excerpt 5 (m)PO: […] Here [Rosenberg-North] there is really always a show of force all the time. If you put it a bit lame now, it is a dick swinging contest [Schwanzvergleich]. Yes. It is a linguistic usage, a fixed idiom. I also know situations where women were not taken seriously. Even if the woman has said something, and a reaction was made, the colleague. I: Yes. (m)PO: A woman, a colleague, said something, and the person reacted to it, but then spoke to me and I said, “What do you want from me? Speak to my colleague.” I: But that is quite (inc.) (m)PO: I actually enjoy it very much. Excerpt 6 (m)PO: And it really gives me a lot of fun. Whenever I have these bodybuilders, pushers, steroid-types in front of me, I tell my female colleague, “You speak”. And then when he addresses me, I just ignore him, which makes him even more upset. And before it escalates, I say, “You don’t need to talk to me. Colleague takes action, action colleague, if you need to talk: colleague.” I’m an accessory, I just stand there sticking my chest out. Bloody fun.

The officer in Excerpt 5 suggests that the district Rosenberg-North is characterised by a masculine competitive mood. This means that demonstrations of power or, as the interviewee has it here, a “dick swinging contest ”, are important aspects of cop culture (Behr 2008). This competition takes place between the police officers and the male residents of the district. In this way, the precinct is constituted as an area of battle in which the serious games of competition (Bourdieu 1997, 203) take place and the hegemonic forms of masculinities can be rearticulated (Brauer 2021). As a significant precondition for the demonstration of power, the police officers refer to the principle of gender equality attributed

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to the German ‘guiding culture’. It is suggested that gender equality prevails in the German police force. The officers consider the instruction of these values towards the male inhabitants of Rosenberg-North as part of their duty, which certainly invokes and revives the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’: The alleged duty of the white colonial authorities to take care of the non-white native subjects (“sullen peoples, Halfdevil and halfchild”) in their colonial possessions in order to civilise them (Kipling 1899). The male officials even enjoy accentuating the equality of their female colleagues in front of the male residents. The allegedly equal position of occidental women serves as a marker for a culturally embedded difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. As a result of this discourse, a dualism between a ‘progressive’ self and a ‘backward other’ emerges. The police officers working in Rosenberg-Nord operate on the basis of a hegemonic self-image that is being reified in the process. Thereby they distinguish themselves in two ways: they refuse to allow the male residents to address the male police officers, while at the same time they refer them to their female colleagues, a sovereign standpoint of western values is demonstrated. This point of view gains additional weight because of the representative practice of a gender-equalising guiding culture is secured by the state monopoly to use of force legally. The demonstration of this position is a powerful showing-off of the male residents of Rosenberg-North. On the other hand, male officers can present themselves as noble-minded towards their female colleagues, as they defend the honour of their female colleagues against the male foreigners of Rosenberg-North, by presenting them as equals. Excerpt 6 shows how a female colleague is instrumentalised as part of this “dick swinging contest.” Bringing the female colleague in front of “bodybuilders, pushers, steroid types”, and instructing her to speak (“you speak”) creates a situation of provocation. Well aware of a sovereign authority to define and act, the provocation consists of the fact that the male dominance presented here by the police counterpart in terms of physical superiority is opposed by the appearance of a woman and is thereby defamed. This strategic use of women, as described here, is moreover used in connection with new implemented measures against the phenomena of clan crime in order to ‘injure and weaken the

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masculinity of the members of clan crime structures’ (see Essen Police— BAO Action Plan 2020, 12). The superior position of the male police officer refers to the promotion of equality of women as part of his ‘own culture’, while presenting this achievement as a well-functioning source of enjoyment. The civilised principle with reference to the equality of women, which the interviewee embodies in his narrative, supersedes the physical principle. The officer defines the dominant social position on the foil of a complementary separation principle (rational vs. physical). The statement of the police officer makes it clear that he could very well compete with the physical masculinity presented here by the male resident (“sticking my chest out ”). This is an implicit response to the specific representation of masculinity. Only by perceiving this representation of masculinity in principle the police officer is able to strike a blow against it. By not refusing to the level of physical masculinity he gives emphasis to the rational principle in the situation. In this context, the police’s power to define the situation enables the display of hegemonic masculinity.

4.4

The Constitution of a Near-Spatial Orient as a Praxis of Institutionality

The application of gender equality is kept flexible within the police. Within interviews with female police officers, it was possible to trace a perspective on the spatial constitution that relativises the above narrative by the male police officers [(f )PO: “I have always felt respected as a police officer by residents.” ]. They show that while gender equality is demonstratively demanded by the residents of Rosenberg-North, the pillar of this highly valued occidental cultural achievement becomes porous within the institutional handling. While the image of equality is propagated to the outside, it is hardly a matter of course within the police. This is indicated by informal quotas of two-thirds men and one-third women, or by statements from superiors who consider female employees to be generally too soft for the police profession and especially for the precinct of Rosenberg-North. The district Rosenberg-North represents in its specific

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police constitution therefore an ideological battlefield on which occidental masculinity is being expressed. Rosenberg-North is thus a ‘space reserved for men, in which the games ordinarily considered the most serious ones of human existence, such as the games of honour, are played out’ (Bourdieu 2001, 49). The male police officers operate on a double demarcation within this institutional constitution of space— the establishment of Rosenberg-North as a misogynistic place—leads to relationships of dominance both towards female colleagues and towards other forms of masculinity embodied by the male residents of RosenbergNorth (see also Bourdieu 1997, 215). From the interview excerpt above it becomes clear that the subject position of women is handled flexibly within the police. Whereas the establishment of gender equality serves to legitimise a more rigid style of action in Rosenberg-North and refers to processes of ethnicisation of the inhabitants, the differentiation between the sexes leads to the spatial exclusion of female police officers. By constructing a near-spatial Orient, where male attributes are required according to the constitution of space, the institution of the police is stabilised, according to an institutionalised masculinity that is deeply rooted in cop culture. In doing so, the police not only reproduce their state-hegemonic claim towards the citizens but also defend the institutional structures of masculinity against an increasing pressure to legitimise those. The social practices of spatial constitution can thus be understood as practices of institutionality that seek to maintain the institution’s deep rooted masculinity. The subject position of women as well as the specific constitution of a near-spatial Orient—here described in the form of Rosenberg-North— represent flexible components that support each other and underpin the position of a dominant institutional position. In each case, ethnicity serves as a stabiliser for the respective attribution. In other words (and extended by the concept of male dominion): In a quite constant way, Orientalism [and masculine dominion] depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the [male] Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient [the subject: ‘Women’] without ever losing him the relative upper hand. (Said 1978, 15/A.N.)

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Conclusion

In this chapter, I showcased the connection between institutional racism and the institutional production of space by the police. Based on the concept of Occidentalism, the police seem to be actively involved in an ‘Othering’ of space. The district Rosenberg-Nord was identified as a near-spatial Orient; as an ethnicised, culturalised space in the immediate environment of the city. The social practices of socio-spatial frontier management are constitutive for the complex of mechanisms that was here defined as institutional Occidentalism. Based on negative attributions, for example by describing the atmosphere as hostile to the police, a ‘rigid’ style of action was legitimised in the district area. Considering that the police officers attribute the district mainly to male foreigners who, on the one hand, are hostile to the police and, on the other hand, do not respect female personnel, the triadic constellation of gender space and ethnicity becomes evident. The institutional discourse about the lack of respect for women on the part of the male inhabitants of RosenbergNorth puts male police officers in a morally superior position. Whereas the establishment of gender equality serves to legitimise a more rigid style of action in Rosenberg-North, the differentiation between the sexes leads to the spatial exclusion of female police officers. In sum, a kind of exclusively male space is thereby created. Interestingly, the flexible subject position of the woman is instrumentalised in terms of the self-referential reassurance of the police officers’ hegemonic masculinity. The concept of institutionality expands the possibilities to situate the social practices underlying institutional Occidentalism in a larger context. The police officers do not refer to any individual position in the context of their actions but rather refer to a superordinate and institutionally anchored system of values. The expression of institutional Occidentalism echoes the deeply rooted constructions of masculinity that are constitutive of cop culture. The claim of sovereignty over the inhabitants, as part of the police culture, is managed via the production of subordinate positions in the context of the constitution of an ‘other space’. The designation of such ‘other spaces’ thus offers the possibility of a rearticulation of informal as well as formal values and patterns of an institution. Institutional Occidentalism is aimed to generate and

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strengthen a distinctive identity of the institution and its members. A moral mission is ascribed to the police as an institution based on the mechanisms of institutional Occidentalism. In turn, as defenders of a culture set of the ‘Germans’/ ‘god men’, members of this organisation are put in a superior position. Institutional Occidentalism thus has a special pull, especially regarding the members of an institution since it promises them a positive image of themselves. The analytical category of institutionality is suitable for understanding the power of the institution regarding the actions of the individuals who feel affiliated with it. The limits of this efficacy, and thus of institutionality itself, become visible where institutions do not provide a subject position for individuals or as can be seen here in the case of female police officers, where individuals cannot fill this position (e.g., based on social attributions). By analysing the limits of institutionality, processes can be revealed that may expose possibilities for changing institutions. The effects of an institutional Occidentalism are not limited to a spatial section. Although these immediate discriminatory effects are limited to the residents of a district constituted as a near-spatial-Orient, such as the district Rosenberg-North in this case study. Nevertheless, in recent years, an increased reference to discourse formations within the police that underlie institutional Occidentalism has become apparent. For example, in an internal position paper of the North Rhine Westphalia police published in 2018 (source no longer accessible), it was suggested that the police should become ‘more capable of violence.’ Currently, increasing resources are made available to the police to fight clan crime. Targeting an ethnically marked group of people, measures are directed towards spaces that are characterised as criminal spaces by the police. Without a critical reflection of their own institutional discourses, it is possible that the triad of arguments, consisting in the claim of police sovereignty, the reference to object positions to be protected against a group of people marked as ‘different’ on a seemingly neutral foil of space, will become the essential basis for action of the police organisation. As a result, the police could develop into a two-class police force by setting different standards for ‘other spaces’ and thus legitimising differentiations in terms of how they deal with the respective residents: Divided into a police for citizens and residents of better-off neighbourhoods and a force

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to control ethnically marked spaces. Since the spatial attributions can be defined flexibly, and the discriminatory potential of such attributions can be concealed based on a foil of assumed neutrality, there is a real risk that these ‘other spaces’ will be expanded by the police. However, a police force which, as a state institution is committed to all citizens, should critically examine its own institutionally defined spatial references and its intersections with ethnicity and gender. Urban space is not a neutral foil on which social processes are depicted, but the spatial constitution itself is a powerful process of structuring society.

References Behr, Rafael. 2008. Cop Culture – Der Alltag des Gewaltmonopols: Männlichkeit, Handlungsmuster und Kultur in der Polizei. Wiesbaden: Springer. Behr, Rafael. 2017. “Maskulinität in der Polizei: Was Cop Culture mit Männlichkeit zu tun hat.” Juridikum 4: 541–51. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1997. “Die männliche Herrschaft.” In Ein alltägliches Spiel. Geschlechterkonstruktion in der sozialen Praxis, edited by Irene Dölling, and Beate Krais, 153–217. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Masculine Domination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brauer, Eva. 2021. “Männliche Räume: Polizeiliche Raumproduktionen und Geschlecht.” Bürgerrechte und Polizei/CILIP, no. 126: 35–45. Coronil, Fernando. 1996. “Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories.” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 1: 51–87. Dietze, Gabriele, Claudia Brunner, and Edith Wenzel. 2009. Kritik des Okzidentalismus: Transdisziplinäre Beiträge zu (Neo-)Orientalismus und Geschlecht. Bielefeld: Transcript. El-Menouar, Yasemin. 2019. “Religiöse Toleranz weit verbreitet – aber der Islam wird nicht einbezogen.” Religionsmonitor Bertelsmann Stiftung. Last modified July 11, 2019. https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/de/themen/ aktuelle-meldungen/2019/juli/religioese-toleranz-weit-verbreitet-aber-derislam-wird-nicht-einbezogen. Accessed August 12, 2020.

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Essen Police—BAO Action Plan. 2020. “Arabische Familienclans—Historie. Analyse. Ansätze zur Bekämpfung.” www.polizei.nrw.de/essen. Accessed May 4, 2021. Feth, Anja. 2016. Staat, Polizei und Alltag in Buenos Aires: Raumproduktion im Kontext städtischer Unsicherheit. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Herbert, Steve. 1997. Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kipling, Rudyard. 1899. “The White Man’s Burden: The United and the Philippines Island.” McClure’s Magazine, 21 February. Koch, Gertraud. 2011. “Raum als Wissenskategorie: Raumkonzepte und praktiken in Prozessen der Wissenserzeugung.” In Räume der Wissensarbeit. Zur Funktion von Nähe und Distanz in der Wissensökonomie, edited by Oliver Ibert, and Hans Joachim Kujath, 269–85. Wiesbaden: VS. LKA.NRW. 2019. “Clankriminalität – Lagebild 2019.” https://polizei.nrw/ sites/default/files/2020-08/200814_Final%20Lagebild%20Clankriminalit% C3%A4t%202019.pdf. Accessed August 10, 2020. Löw, Martina. 2016. The Sociology of Space: Materiality, Social Structures, and Action. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Macpherson-Report. 1999. “The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William MacPherson of Cluny.” https://www.gov.uk/govern ment/publications/the-stephen-lawrence-inquiry. Accessed August 18, 2020. Maresch, Rudolf, and Niels Weber. 2002. Raum — Wissen — Macht. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Oltermann, Philip. 2020. “German Police Officers Suspended for Sharing Neo-Nazi Content.” The Guardian. Last modified September, 2017. https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/17/german-police-officers-suspen ded-for-sharing-neo-nazi-content. Accessed March 15, 2021. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge. Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. 1990. Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Wacquant, Loïc. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press.

9 Time, Affect, Knowledge: The Embodied Institution of Social Protest Movements Sandrine Gukelberger and Christian Meyer

1

Introduction

In this chapter, we aim to broaden our understanding of social protest movements and their continual presence in history up until the present day, that is of revolutions, decolonialization uprisings, and protest actions taking place on a global scale. Our objective is to engage with the sociological debate concerning social protest movements, and to develop a phenomenological perspective which allows us to bridge approaches that exclusively focus on the situation and its endogenous dynamics (Collins 2008) and approaches that solely emphasize historical and structural conditions (opportunities, resources, semantics) for the emergence S. Gukelberger (B) · C. Meyer University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] C. Meyer e-mail: [email protected]

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of movements (f. ex. Gamson 1975; Mamdani and Wamba-dia-Wamba 1995; Piven and Cloward 1977; Tarrow 1994; Raschke 1988 [1985]). The phenomenological approach permits us to understand protest as an institution in and of itself, placing its durability, varying patterns, and aspects of political change at the center of attention. With our approach we refer to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (2010) conception of institution that draws heavily on his ideas about embodiment and time. Against the backdrop of different forms of modernization and applications of technical innovation (e.g., global data exchanges, telephony, Internet, satellite radio, and TV, etc.), protest today happens within a mediatized global society. Transnationally connected and cross-border protest movements critical of globalization have spread across the world since the early 2000s. The famous “summit protests” in Seattle (1999), Prague (2000), and Genova (2001) can be regarded as being representative of new ways of global connectivity and have entered into the shared stocks of memory of many movements and activists as the “ground zero” of the new global movement. In Seattle, around 50,000 opponents of globalization from around the world, came together to call for sustainable economic policies and fair trade. These protesters were, for the first time, mobilized worldwide through the then very young medium of the Internet. Post Seattle, the first World Social Forum took place in Porto Alegre in 2001, where civil society groups, as well as scientists from all over the world, met under the slogan “Another world is possible.” In terms of the “form” of their criticism, these movements emerged to a certain extent from the so-called “internationalism” of previous protest movements. However, as political scientist Leggewie (2001) says, one of the main differences is that they are no longer simply small radical minorities, like for example the anti-capitalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Movements critical of globalization and its interdependencies differ from these earlier movements in two main aspects: (1) their global reach, specifically through their ability to utilize transnational networks, and (2) the way in which they frame their demands, which entails a critical reflection of the post-Fordist financial industry and forced (labor) migration, and takes into account such additional subjects as human rights, social justice, transnational solidarity, cultural diversity, and climate change (f. ex. Keck and Sikking 1998; della Porta and Tarrow

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2005; Tarrow 2006). Alongside the movements critical of globalization, protests against neoliberal policies also swept into countries in the global South around 2010, protests which too are shaped by a certain type of transnational character. One example of such protests, which will be analyzed in more detail in this chapter, are those which have taken place in Senegal, where social movements campaign against the extraction of natural resources by international enterprises, who cooperate with the state.1 These protests, often dominated by the young, include renewed calls for decolonization, demands that are additionally spread via transnational solidarity networks, for instance through the mobilization of diaspora activism. The origins of these calls go back to battles against colonial ruling practices, and modern embodiments of protest contest the enduring legacies and modern forms of coloniality––creating an emancipatory mindset and leading to protest. The critical understanding of global geopolitical and temporal orders that grew out of these early forms of resistance has manifested itself in today’s postcolonial theory (Gukelberger and Meyer 2021), a point which we return at a later stage. In our chapter we study protest and its temporal, affective, and epistemic dimensions from a phenomenological perspective, asking what exactly makes joint protest and its common goals recognizable as such, for actors as well as for researchers. We therefore conceptualize protest as a specific form of sociality that—in the course of its emergence—is nourished by embodied and other forms of large-scale historical institutionality. This allows us to bring aspects of protest movements into focus that have been overseen by extant approaches that (over-) emphasize mentalistic or structural dimensions. To do so, in the next section we delve into the phenomenological understandings of institution developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2010). Merleau-Ponty’s theory helps us developing a dual characterization of protest: as an institution and, at the same time, as an instituting force. Through the use of this dialectic, the temporal dimensions of past, present, and future orientations make it possible to model protest and its 1

This chapter is based on data collected by Sandrine Gukelberger during her nine weeks of ethnographic fieldwork in Dakar in Senegal in 2019 in the context of a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (see acknowledgements at the end of this chapter).

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(inter-) situational historicity as a reiterative process—even in its most embodied and affective dimensions of joint practice. We then focus on ethnographic research about protest situations in urban Senegal to show how the protest movement as an inclusive social collectivity is instituted anew with each protest instance. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s four dimensions of institutionality we reveal how corresponding instances of reiterative protest offers the possibility of both transforming and perpetuating, and of universalizing and particularizing the very institution of protest, for example via “the street” and/or social media. Our treatment of the ethnographic data will thereby look at: (a) how protest transforms practices and semantics, revealing global power relationships and unequal cultural representations; (b) how protest perpetuates the ongoing practice of decolonizing along with demands for decolonization; (c) how the epistemology of resistance of former anti-colonial thinkers are actualized and universalized ; and (d) how this epistemology is at the same time particularized in the collective memory of decolonial protest. To conclude, a summary of the main points helps us to explain how temporal protest orders, which have grown out of former forms of resistance, have now stabilized and manifest themselves in today’s protests for decolonized futures.

2

The Role of Time in Institutions

In order to understand the temporal dimension of social protest, we take up Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of institution which he developed in 1954 and 1955 (Merleau-Ponty 2010).2 In his notes, Merleau-Ponty uses the word “institution” in a dual sense by extensively playing on its ambiguous meaning that denotes the process of creatively transforming reality by establishing a social object on the one hand, and the perpetuation of the social object, once established, on the other. 2 “The course summaries were published in the Annuaire du College de France and reproduced by [the publisher] Gallimard in 1966. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Resumes de cours: College de France 1952–1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); English translation by John O’Neill, as ‘Themes from the Lectures at the College de France 1952–1960,’ in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970)” (Lefort 2010, xxx).

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According to Merleau-Ponty, both processes of transformation and of perpetuation constantly oscillate between movements of universalizing— rendering more and more inclusive—and of particularizing—making exclusive—the established social object. In the following section, we will present this perspective in more detail, since, as we view it, it advances a political ontology that allows for analyzing social protest particularly well. We intend to subsequently show that the dual interest of protest movements in promoting change, as well as preserving the particular cultural realities of an individual country, is characteristic for postcolonial societies. This becomes even more evident when we think of the modern paradox of simultaneously striving for change and preservation––for the ability to transform and to perpetuate.

2.1

Transforming and Perpetuating

Being rooted in phenomenological philosophy, for Merleau-Ponty, the notion of institution becomes apparent when contrasted to the crucial phenomenological concept of constitution. The constitution of objects in consciousness is realized by the intentional subject in a constant, though ephemerous and ever-fading, process of world relating. However, each constitution of external objects of experience by the intentional subject necessarily draws on anonymous and pre-reflexive experiential resources that result from past experiences and precede each next constitution. Merleau-Ponty (1968, 221) says, “it is not I, who makes myself think any more than it is I who makes my heart beat.” Rather, prereflexive processes of perception, experience, and understanding occur in me (my body, my consciousness). These processes are guided by those embodied and yet socially distributed resources that Merleau-Ponty calls “institution.” Being external to the subject, institutions are thus able to perpetuate the social reality for several individuals as intersubjective. However, since for the subject, institutions have no experiential reality (as they are the media for experiences), they only become experientially relevant in the moment of constitution:

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[…] the instituted makes sense without me, the constituted makes sense only for me and for the ‘me’ of this instant. […] The instituted straddles its future, has its future, its temporality, the constituted depends entirely on the ’me’ who constitutes (the body, the clock). (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 8)

An institution can therefore be viewed as an element of the unquestioned and taken-for-granted lifeworld, that allows us to understand new events as, principally, “always already there” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 216) and known, experienced merely another next first time in ever changing and dynamic, yet familiar, phenomenal fields. Merleau-Ponty (2010, 77) says, by institution, we were intending here those events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequel or a history—or again the events which deposit a sense in me, not just as something surviving or as a residue, but as the call to follow, the demand of a future.

For Merleau-Ponty, the body and time play the most crucial role in the formation of an institution. Both are pre-reflexive forces, shaping the conscious experience (and constitution) of reality. However, the subject is not impassively exposed to them. As Merleau-Ponty (2005 [1945]: 451) says, even though it is clear that I am not the author of time (…), nor am I the one who takes the initiative of temporalization; I did not choose to be born, but no matter what I do, once I am born, time flows through me. And yet, this springing forth of time is not a mere fact that I undergo; I can find in time a recourse against time itself, as happens in a decision that I commit to, or in an act of conceptual focusing.

Particularly through time, an “intertwining” of the passive institutions and the active constitution occurs that allows for new and yet intelligible experiences of reality and in turn for new processes of instituting. Therefore, through the body, the self is confronted with the depth of time and

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of its own past. The past is pre-reflexively “sedimented” in one’s body, and therefore, the past is constantly reopened, readopted, and reinstituted in new actions and events (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 42, 51). The body thus acts as a reservoir of time and sedimented experiences. The body, as Merleau-Ponty assumes, is our means of grasping the world and it is with and through our body that “instituted and instituting subject[s], […] put an activity en route, an event, which is productive after it […]––which opens a future” (2010, 6, original emphasis). In this sense, body and time, for Merleau-Ponty, are the main characteristics of all actions and events, as they are bodily performed and experienced; they endow our experiences with durable dimensions that reach beyond our individuality and enable intersubjectivity. That is, while it might be true that the “French Revolution can never occur again. ‘The same,’ when it occurs for the second time, is no longer a first but a second occurrence of ‘the same’” (Schütz and Luckmann 1974 [1973]: 49), the event must inescapably be re-constituted in the consciousness of the intentional subject ever again. Thus, even reoccurring events possess a double nature of being both “the same again” and “a next first time.” This is why Merleau-Ponty (2010, 8) claims that, for the subject of reiterative processes, “constitution [means] continuous institution, i.e., never done.” Merleau-Ponty (2010, 13–14/44–45) concludes that, in the end, an institution is neither an activity nor a thing, but rather a series of events that are related to one another, be it by resemblance or by another form of correspondence. Thus, Merleau-Ponty claims that all regularities and repetitions not only in the intersubjective, but also in the historical and cultural world more generally, even though they are based on institutions, necessarily have to be re-constituted by intentional subjects as same, or familiar, ever again, in order to remain existent, relevant, and “real.” Referring to events that initiated the development of capitalism and continued to re-institute either its transformation or its petrification (Lefort 2010, xvii), Merleau-Ponty takes a closer look at how events reoccur, given that the event itself always differs slightly and never occurs in the same way. In his view, all events, for example the introduction of the potato plant to Europe (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 13), give rise to further events,

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opening up a particular sociohistorical field (2010, 48). The sociohistorical field results from the temporal existence of the institution and manifests itself as a particular “event-matrix” that makes a spectrum of subsequent events and actions possible. Merleau-Ponty also speaks of the principal “event-ness” of being (2010, 13). An institution thus is the perpetual reactivation of the potentials created by that which precedes it. Therefore, the institution “confronts us with a relation between an instituting activity and an instituted state, such that the institution— the formation, the innovation—always supposes a pre-given and the instituted state includes an opening, a call to the future” (2010, 16). With his concept of institution, Merleau-Ponty thus attempts to indicate a temporal meaning-structure of an “always-already” that, before we were born, has formed our language, meaning repertoires, and common history, our lifeworld and our horizon. All institutions depend on the presence of this permanent and “unlimited fecundity” of the past as a past present (Merleau-Ponty 1964 [1960]: 59). Therefore, in the institution, present, past, and future are mutually intertwined. Related to the topic of post-revolutionary and postcolonial society, Merleau-Ponty claims that, in the context of, for example, the French revolution or of the decolonial revolution in Haiti, a new eventmatrix was instituted out of the novelty of thinking about and through protesting, which opened the sociohistorical field for a new dynamism and specific patterns of political action and protest culture.

2.2

Universalizing and Particularizing

Merleau-Ponty continues to develop a critical global perspective on institutions, especially through his examination of how and by whom they are fabricated as event-matrices. Most importantly, he considers the specific event-matrix that produced “Western history” as phenomenon recognized by others in the world (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 14). An example of a Western-historicized, embodied institution, for Merleau-Ponty (2010, 9, 15), is the Oedipus complex, first instituted in the work of Sigmund Freud. The institution of the Oedipus complex provided an event-matrix

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that shaped cultural relations and practices in societies, manifested in kinship, childcare, and so forth. Thus, institutions are always particularizing, because they perpetuate specific, original ideas and knowledge domains. But at the same time, they are universalizing, because they have the ability to permeate other domains, a society as a whole, and even across societies. They also have the ability to incorporate new and comparable topics. Their ability to universalize allows the subject to understand differences: It is not by accident that there is no trace of most of the civilizations and that on the contrary we attempt to restore the history of [non-occidental cultures].––Someone will say: but that is merely because we have created means of transportation in order to explore, writing, ink, paper, learned societies, science. [But in reality,] it is the cooperation of circumstances which provides us with more of an event-character. (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 14)

In saying that “we attempt to restore the history of them [non-occidental cultures],” Merleau-Ponty (2010, 14) anticipates the future work of historians and anthropologists who, for instance, are involved in the making and instituting of the history of so-called “primitive” Brazilians (p. 14) or of pre-Colombian civilizations (p. 13). Thus, Merleau-Ponty presents, in the context of his time, a progressive epistemological criticism in respect to universalist ideas of history and thereby advances a new political ontology that draws on the “unlimited fecundity” of institutions. This allows him to deconstruct the generativity of dominant temporal fields as event-matrices perpetuated in the West and global North. Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to the topic of institution is manifold and cannot be reduced to a theory of embodied intersubjectivity, for which he has become famous (Lefort 2010, xxiii; see also Revel 2015). The position of historians as speakers—one in which they are socialized and educated in occidental epistemology—informs their making of history that, according to Merleau-Ponty (2010, 15), then, as an institution, defines the relation “between people mediated by material and immaterial things.” In this sense, Merleau-Ponty’s theory of institution

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includes a postcolonial perspective, as it forces to reflect upon critical counterpoints to dominant concepts of modernity such as a linear Eurocentric understanding of history. In the next section, we aim to show how protest as an embodied institution is based on the “unlimited fecundity” of the historical processes as temporal references that have formed the bodies and minds of the protesters.

3

Decolonial Protest in Urban Senegal

In Dakar, the capital of Senegal, the Atelier de la pensée [atelier of thinking] was created by Felwine Sarr, an economist from Senegal, and Achille Mbembe, a historian and philosopher from Cameroon, to serve as a transdisciplinary space. Here, academics, activists, journalists, and others discuss and produce knowledge focusing on the need to decolonize Africa and achieve full independence, i.e., economic, political, social, and cultural. Sarr describes the awakening of Africa to a journalist from a leading German national subscription newspaper in November 2019 in the following way: “We want to be actors in and of our history, face our destiny, with dignity, and without sentimentality” (Häntzschel 2019, 17, our translation). Sarr thereby depicts the Atelier de la pensée as a new institution based on a novel epistemology, and with MerleauPonty it can be seen as a means of spreading a new event-matrix and generativity of decolonial fields in Africa. In what follows we pay attention to another institution that is also directed against neo-colonial transnational elites in order to bring about political change within their own nation-state: the current decolonial protests in urban Senegal. The descriptions of our example will consider the four above-mentioned dimensions of institutionality: (a) how protest transforms practices and ideas, revealing global power relationships and unequal cultural representations; (b) how protest perpetuates the enduring practice of decolonizing along with the claim for decolonization; (c) how the epistemology of resistance of former anti-colonial thinkers are actualized and universalized ; and (d) how this epistemology is at the same time particularized in the collective memory of decolonial

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protest. In addition, the role of time in decolonial protest is examined across three overlapping dimensions of temporal orientation: those which are synchronic, relating to the current series of protest actions; those which are diachronic, relating to the reformulation and reconfiguring of the historical basis of the postcolonial situation; and those which are future-oriented, relating to transformative modes of action and institutions.

3.1

The Event-Matrix of Protest, the Protesting “We,” and the Body

A series of protest actions, including rallies, marches, distribution of leaflets, and so forth, started in Dakar in June 2019, initially targeted against natural resource extraction (of oil, gas, and iron ore) in the north and south of Senegal by foreign investors. The lack of economic recovery and the continuing misery in the country since formal independence from France in the 1960s was attributed to the machinations of transnational elites, i.e., mainly Senegalese and French government members, and multinational corporations. The opportunity to both initiate and widen these protests, according to many protesters and local journalists, was linked to a BBC documentary that reported on a lack of transparency in the profit distribution agreements between the Senegalese Government and multinational stakeholders. This documentary was widely circulated in social media and added fuel to long-smoldering fires of dissatisfaction and opposition to government policy in Senegal, as various protagonists of past collective actions began communicating via phone calls and WhatsApp messages in order to say anew: “Enough is enough” (ethnographic interview with one of the leaders of the movement Aar li nu bokk, Dakar, 7 August 2019). In June 2019 this collective unrest led to the formation of the platform Aar li nu bokk, #sunu petrol [riches that belong to us, #our petrol]. Various movements, NGOs, and political opposition groups form part of Aar li nu bokk. It frames its long-term goals as the establishment of more transparency in government politics and la bonne gouvernance [good governance]. As part of the methods to achieve these goals, the

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leadership group depicts their work as politicising and mobilizing the citizens of Senegal, i.e., institutionalizing a civil consciousness against the injustices caused by transnational political elites and multinational enterprises; and expressing this rising awareness in the form of regular protest actions in the cities of Senegal and the diasporas in Paris, Ottawa, Brussels, Milan, and New York. Public protests continue these days in the cities of Senegal and those of the diasporas. Some protests in Senegal have been banned by the city administration, there have been frequent violent clashes between police and protesters, and many activists have been arrested. The grievances of the protesters are now no longer directed only toward external exploitation of natural resources, but also toward the detention of activists, overcrowded prison cells, and the inhumane conditions in the prisons, as well as toward increases in electricity prices, among others. In the meantime, the anger of the people in Senegal has led to criticisms of Senegalese (trans-) national state politics as a whole. Before every collective action, Aar li nu bokk organizes a press conference, a practice that has been shaped in particular by the youth movement Y’en a marre [we are fed up] since its foundation in 2011. It has formed the event-matrix of subsequent protest, respectively. The press conferences always begin with the representatives standing up on a platform, and together with journalists and other spectators singing the Senegalese national anthem Le Lion Rouge [The Red Lion]: “Pincez tous vos koras, frappez les balaphones” [Everyone strum your koras, strike the balafons]. Figure 1 shows how the activists are standing close together in an upright position, some of the participants folding their hands, while singing the national anthem in front of running cameras and microphones to demonstrate their attachment, respect, and solidarity toward their nation. Through the synchronous body movements of standing up and singing that establish a joint rhythm of the participants, through joint bodily expansion and contraction (including the actions of their voices), the activists affirm their alliance with each other. Thus, while the joint singing as embodied activity creates an affective inward communitization, the ostentatious commitment to the Senegalese nation by singing the national anthem launches an outward signal of trust and responsibility.

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Fig. 1 Tracing of a still from an ethnographic video of a press conference organized by Aar li nu bokk on 20th June 2019, filmed by Sandrine Gukelberger

Subsequently, speeches are held in Wolof, the language spoken by the majority of people living in Senegal, as well as French, the latter in order to address the international media channels. The speeches mainly address why, when, and where protest is to take place. The need to conduct collective action non-violently is always pointed out, in order to avoid and thereby alter prevalent interpretations of protest which vilify youth protesters as ready for violence (see Diouf 2005). Thus, while some of the affective and symbolic resources perpetuate extant orientations, others transform them, creating a new symbolic field and event-matrix, a point that will become clearer in the following description. All these medial practices not only underscore an awareness that protests matter, help set the protest agenda, and strengthen an embodied “we” among protesters, they most importantly institute the communicative preconditions for establishing the type of sociality that protest represents. In this way, the imaginations of the protest organizers are carried out into the world, mobilize participants for future non-violent collective actions, legitimize the occurrence of bodily forms of peaceful protests, and at the same time, generate national and international witnesses.

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The first protest action planned by Aar li nu bokk, on 14 June 2019 at the Place de l’Obélisk (renamed in 2016 as Place de la Nation), was banned at short notice by the city administration. In order to prevent any kind of collective action, the police occupied the planned protest area. The protesters started to gather instead in side streets, where journalists interviewed some of them. Some protesters were arrested during these interviews and police then used tear gas to disperse small “resisting assemblies” (Lilja 2017, 343). The protesters either ran away, or, as depicted in Fig. 2, resisted the attempted dispersion by the police by raising their arms and forming their fists into a cross. This x-gesture symbolizes the letter x in the French word paix [peace], and is one of the emblematic protest signs used by the youth movement Y’en a marre since its inception in 2011. Since then it has been part of the specific symbolic repertoire and event-matrix of youth protest in urban Senegal, allowing for its use in ever changing situations and contexts. Protesters explain its relevance as an indication of unity, togetherness, and an unbreakable spirit in the cause of peaceful protest to prevent police aggression. It can also be understood as a sign of positive attitude, and self-denial, in the sense of voluntary sacrifice,

Fig. 2 Tracing of a still from an ethnographic video of an unauthorized protest on 14th June 2019, Dakar, Place de la Nation, filmed by photographer and research assistant Élise Fitte-Duval

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consented to a higher interest yet on the part of oneself or a value which represents a legitimate ambition to act collectively for social change (conversation with activists from Y’en a marre, 8 June 2020). It can thus be viewed as the locally specific embodied symbol for peaceful insurrection, comparable with, and yet distinguishable from, other similar gestural expressions of resistance such as the raised fist and the kneetaking of the Black Power movement or the sit-in and analogous forms of passive resistance as they were applied for example in Gandhi’s decolonial movement in India. In Senegal, social collectives in the 1980s and 1990s, such as the set setal [cleansing] movement, had already foreshadowed this youthful dynamic of reappropriating urban sites as a place to rewrite and re-institute memory, history, and national conscience (see Ba 2016; Diouf 2005; Havard 2009). The examples of bodily activity and gesture demonstrate how protest is instituted in the body as a specific form of sociality. They are characterized by the alignment of the self with a larger collectivity on the basis of intersubjectively shared affects and body practices, and aim at mobilizing the people to transform the conditions in which they live. The ability to create joint will and resolve is based on the reactivation of experiences and memories instituted in the body. The examples furthermore show how protesters are actively involved in the production of a mass media audience, and allow information about current issues important to them to be received and interpreted by viewers through their use of media channels. This endows the event-matrix of protest with its characteristic time-perspective: This time-perspective is one in which the here and now invokes an ambiguous past, of respectable nation-building and criticizable state politics, that coalesces with an expectant future. It thereby becomes a decisive confluence of past, present, and future orientations toward radical change, both a perpetuation and a transformation which eventually acquires the power to reconfigure history.

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Smartphones, Intellectuals, and the Re-institution of History

In one of the subsequent, authorized protest marches on August 2, 2019 organized by Aar li nu bokk, two demands took center stage: Firstly, a demand to immediately release the activist Guy Marius Sagna, and secondly, to put an end to the exploitation of the country’s natural resources, #FreeGuy, #sunuPetrole. On 16 July 2019, Sagna, a leading figure for the movement Front pour une Révolution Anti-Impérialiste Populaire et Panafricaine [Front for an Anti-Imperialist, Popular, and Pan-African Revolution] (FRAPP)––known for their campaign France dégage [France, get off ]––had been arrested for his online postings on Facebook about the state’s failure to seriously invest in health facilities and neglect of the country’s health system. The protesters gathered at the Place de la Nation and equipped a truck with posters and sound systems. Such trucks are part of many protests in Dakar and they often become the platform for embodied activities of the protesters that reconfigure and refunction their material environment (see Butler 2015; Lilja 2017). Also, other materials, for example, dresses, flags, and paper walls are used as signs of protest. On this day, many protesters wore professionally printed T-Shirts with slogans proclaiming Libérez Guy Marius Sagna [Free Guy Marius Sagan], #sunu petrol [#our petrol], or France Degage [France, get off ]; others put slogans on their red vests, e.g., “Macky is a coward,” referring to the Senegalese President Macky Sall. The protest march took place at the Boulevard de Charles de Gaulle surrounded by and accompanied by the police. Some of the marching assembly were holding posters in the air with messages saying “Mousse Pakkireur. Bayil diengul ” [Prosecutor, stop being stubborn], others were waving the Senegalese flag (as shown in Figs. 3 and 4). Just before the march began, a small assembly of protesters walked closely together and shouted the following slogan while they were filmed by journalists and other protesters:

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Fig. 3 Tracing of a still from an ethnographic video of the march in Dakar on 2nd August 2019, filmed by Sandrine Gukelberger

Fig. 4 Tracing of a still from an ethnographic video of the march in Dakar on 2nd August 2019, filmed by Sandrine Gukelberger

NO TO DICTATORSHIP, NO TO DICTATORSHIP, NO TO DICTATORSHIP, ALIOUNE SALL THIEF [Alioune Sall, the president’s brother, is one of the main figures in a scandal centred around contractual agreements between the state and multinational stakeholders], MACKY SALL DICTATOR, WE SAY NO, WE SAY NO; WE SHALL NOT BE REPRESSED, WE SHALL NOT BE REPRESSED, NO TO

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THE FRENCH DICTATORSHIP, MACKY SALL SLAVE, MACKY SLAVE OF FRANCE. (our translation)

Through their walking movements and their shouting of angry slogans about the neo-colonial relations between Senegal and France, the protesters call into question the official national historiography about Senegal’s independence and the post-1960 Senegalese Nation. The joint bodily activity thereby calls for a re-institution of imagination associated with affects and stocks of knowledge that are bodily experienced. It calls for the production of a new mode of historicity (“in principle event-ness,” Merleau-Ponty 2010, 13) with respect to the postcolonial situation as an alternative to the official national historiography. Another example is of call-and-response activities in the march, between a protester using a microphone on the truck stage and the protesting crowd, commenting on the current state of affairs: Protester: Crowd: Protester: Crowd: Protester: Crowd: Protester: Crowd:

“WHO IS THE THIEF?” “ALIOUNE SALL” “WHO IS THE DICTATOR?” “MACKY SALL” “WHO IS THE CORRUPT ONE?” “PROSECUTOR” “WHO SHOULD BE RELEASED?” “GUY MARIUS SAGNA” (our translation)

Through the synchronous body movements of marching in the same direction and the vocal involvement in the question–answer sequence, the protesters re-institute and amplify their alliance in embodied, affective, and epistemic ways. Figures 3 and 4 illustrate how these coordinated cooperative actions form a dynamic and moving cohesion among the protesters, and how some of them film the protest with their smartphones and tablets. In particular, the protesters themselves, as social media users, also served as eyewitness documenters and writers of opinion pieces about the protests, for example, by uploading photos and videos of speeches taken during the protest on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or to their

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status on WhatsApp (the status function allows you to share with your WhatsApp contacts text, photos, videos, or GIFs that disappear after 24 hours). In the moment of uploading, items detach themselves from the producer’s body and take on a new lifespan and temporal orientation independent of its producer. Thus, social media do not only provide the means for establishing a communicative infrastructure of protest, they also help the protesters adopt a self-reflexive stance and thereby transcend the embeddedness of the protest in the here and now and make it relevant for the future. This allows the newly instituted topics and means of protest to spread beyond the activists and become a more general scheme of interpretation in the society. Furthermore, in this protest situation, and concomitantly in the online documentations, an emergent decolonial memory surfaces by reimagining anti-colonial thinkers with their demands for social, economic, and political autonomy. This establishes the protest as an institution with its own historicity and time depth. In our case, these thinkers and activists are Thomas Sankara (1949–1987) from Burkina Faso, also known as Africa’s Che Guevara, independence fighter Amicar Chabral (1924–1973) from Cape Verde, scientist Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986) from Senegal, known for his work on precolonial African culture and Pan-African unity, or psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), born on the Caribbean island of Martinique and known for his books Black Skin, White Masks (1984 [1952]) and The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 2008 [1961]). As the march came to an end, the truck stopped, and after having sung the national anthem, the representatives of Aar li nu bokk were invited on stage to comment briefly on why their protests matters: HELLO, I AM REPRESENTING THE STUDENTS OF THE AAR LI NU BOKK PLATFORM. I take this opportunity to magnify the presence of all the students of the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar who have marched from the university to the Place de l’Obélisque, TO SHOW THAT THE STUDENTS HAVE TAKEN BACK THIS BATTLE IN THEIR HANDS, AND WE WAIT FOR NO ONE TO CONTINUE WITH THIS FIGHT. BECAUSE THIS FIGHT IS A POPULAR FIGHT. AS FRANTZ FANON SAID: “EACH GENERATION MUST, OUT OF RELATIVE OBSCURITY; DISCOVER ITS MISSION, FULFILL IT, OR BETRAY IT.” WE WILL SWEAR

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TO FULFILL THIS MISSION AND TO GET SENEGAL OUT OF THIS CHASM IN WHICH IT IS. AS THOMAS SANKARA SAID, “HOMELAND OR DEATH,” WE WILL WIN. THANK YOU. (our translation)

The speech, and other snapshots of the march circulated in social media, some protesters uploaded them with their status function on WhatsApp, adding images of anti-colonial thinkers, a practice which is commonplace during protests. Thus, on the one hand, smartphones maintain and reinstitute the counter-memory propagated by anti-colonial thinkers as a pan-African fundus, one which encompasses both discourses and practices. On the other hand, the ubiquity of media storage and distribution services creates a new dimension of self and an external observability of both staged and everyday communicative memories. In this respect, body-worn smartphones can function as an extension of decolonial body-memory (Gukelberger and Meyer 2021). The event-matrix of protest is characterized by a nationalistic embodiment, language, and iconography of its bearers: the waving of national flags, the shouting of slogans, the singing of the national anthem, the parading of images, and a strong commitment to the nation and to national unity. At the same time, protest in the here and now and the associated medial practices alter and transform the extensive existing focus on national memory practices and historiographies, and repurpose them into calls to continue the decolonial struggle on behalf of their ancestors. To use Merleau-Ponty’s terms, protest as an institution has the ability to transform and to perpetuate as well as to universalize and to particularize: (a) It transforms neo-colonial power relationships and unequal cultural representations as well as established policies of the state, (b) it perpetuates the ongoing demand for decolonization, but at the same time, the legitimacy and affective connotation of the Senegalese nation-state, (c) it universalizes the epistemology of resistance of former anti-colonial thinkers (d) and it particularizes the collective memory of decolonial protest cultures in urban Senegal.

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Conclusion

In our chapter, we have approached protest in its temporal, affective, and epistemic dimensions. To do so, we have drawn on a phenomenological perspective, which, bridges approaches that restrict their perspective on the situation and its endogenous dynamics and approaches that emphasize historical and structural conditions (opportunities, resources, semantics), doing justice to the embodied existence of sense-making social actors. As we view it, conceptions of social movements and protest need to include a perspective of embodiment and affectivity if they do not want to lose their connection to the vitality of their motivation. At the same time, social protest movements feel the need to reconstruct the historicity of the embodied memories and stocks of knowledge that are giving form to these motivations. Asking what exactly makes joint protest recognizable as such, this perspective allowed us to analyze protest as powerful mode of sociality—as embodied institution that, though drawing on familiar and collectively shared repertoires of expression and concern, aimed at the transformation of society through the ongoing modification and re-institution of these repertoires, and thus ultimately striving for social change. Through the “chiasmic intertwining” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 130ff )— i.e., the dialectic—of instituting and being instituted, or of constituting and instituting, re-constituting and re-instituting, protest could be shown to be modeled in its temporal dimensions as a confluence of past, present, and future orientations. Together with the dual interest of protest movements in promoting change, as well as in preserving the particular cultural realities of an individual country, this temporal orientation is characteristic not only, but is particularly evident form, for postcolonial societies. Acknowledgements The ideas for this chapter derive from our research project Youth Movements and Political Change, in which we are, among others, interested in mediatized practices and their role in the changing political cultures in urban Senegal and Bangladesh from a transregional perspective. This research project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Project Number

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395804440) whom we would like to thank for their financial support. We thank Ines Junginger who created the tracings for the figures in this chapter.

References Ba, Mamadou. 2016. “Dakar, du mouvement Set Setal à Y’en a marre (1989– 2012).” Itinéraires 1. http://journals.openedition.org/itineraires/3335. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Collins, Randall. 2008. Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Della Porta, Donatella, and Sidney Tarrow. 2005. Transnational Protest and Global Activism: People, Passions, and Power. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Diouf, Mamadou. 2005. “Wall Paintings and the Writing of History: Set/Setal in Dakar.” GEFAME Journal of African Studies 2, no. 1. http://hdl.handle. net/2027/spo.4761563.0002.102 Gamson, William A. 1975. The Strategy of Protest. Homewood, IL: Dorsey. Gukelberger, Sandrine, and Christian Meyer. 2021. “Postkoloniale Theorie und soziale Gedächtnisforschung.” In Handbuch Sozialwissenschaftliche Gedächtnisforschung, edited by Matthias Berek, Kristina Chmelar, Oliver Dimbath, Hanna Haag, Michael Heinlein, Nina Leonhard, Valentin Rauer, and Gerd Sebald, 1–14. Wiesbaden: Springer. Häntzschel, Jörg. 2019, November 9/10. “Utopia des Südens.” Süddeutsche Zeitung 259: 17. Havard, Jean-François. 2009. “Tuer les ‘Pères des indépendances’? Comparaison de deux générations politiques post-indépendances au Sénégal et en Côte d’Ivoire.” Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée 16: 315–31. Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikking. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lefort, Claude. 2010. “Foreword.” In Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège, edited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, translated by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey, xi–xxxi. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Leggewie, Claus. 2001. “Nach dem Fall: Globalisierung und ihre Kritik.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 52/53. www.demokratiezentrum.org. Accessed 28 May 2020. Lilja, Mona. 2017. “Dangerous Bodies, Matter and Emotions: Public Assemblies and Embodied Resistance.” Journal of Political Power 10, no. 3: 342–52. Mamdani, Mahmood, and Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba. 1995. African Studies in Social Movements and Democracy. Dakar: Codesria Book Series. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964 [1960]. Signs. Translated by Richard C McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1970. Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 1952–1960. Translated by John O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1988. In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by John Wild, James M. Eclte, and John O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2005 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2010. Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954–1955. Translated by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey, foreword by Claude Lefort. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Piven, Frances, and Richard Cloward. 1977. Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail . New York, NY: Vintage. Raschke, Joachim. 1988 [1985]. Soziale Bewegungen: Ein historischsystematischer Grundriß . Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Revel, Judith. 2015. Foucault avec Merleau-Ponty: Ontologie politique, présentisme et histoire. Paris: Vrin. Schütz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. 1974. The Structures of the Life World . Translated by Richard M. Zaner and H. Tristam Engelhardt. London: Heinemann. Tarrow, Sidney. 1994. Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tarrow, Sidney. 2006. The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part III Mass Media Representations

10 Style as Discursive Practice in the Multimodal Construction of Identity: Towards a Social Media Dispositif Analysis Stefan Meier

1

Style as an Identity Marker in Multimodal Online Environments

Not only the former US President Trump, but almost all politicians are becoming media figures via Twitter and Facebook where they talk about their positions and experiences beyond party programs and party hierarchies. Thereby, the logic of authentic style inherent to the social media dispositif seems to reverberate into other spheres of communication and social life wherever style practices become dominant in performing identity. Styles practised in influencer communication are adapted to a maximum to the social media dispositif. Their semiotic work can be understood as a prototypical activity for performing identity in social media and therefore deserves thorough investigation. S. Meier (B) University of Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

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On 18 May 2019, one week before the 2019 European Parliament election, a video was published on YouTube by Rezo. The name of the video was: ‘Die Zerstörung der CDU’ (The destruction of the CDU, the conservative party in government at the time). Rezo’s video went viral; it received more than 13 million views within the first eleven days and triggered a broad political debate. In the video, he accuses the German government parties of continuing to be actively involved in the ever-faster destruction of the earth, despite many promises. They are destroying ‘our lives and our future’ (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Rezo, accessed 12 March 2021). The Rezo video quoted many scientific and political expert opinions, which were subsequently publicly examined and confirmed by many journalists and vloggers. In view of the high response to the Rezo video, the youngest CDU member of the Bundestag, Phillip Amthor, produced a response video. However, this was not published at the request of the CDU Secretary General. Nevertheless, the video triggered vivid reactions and collective laughter about the CDU in the online and offline media world. This episode illustrates how influential and even hegemonic social media have become for political communication in the public sphere. Thereby, the communication style in social media is different from common practices of political communication in traditional mass media. Social media makes the staging of authenticity necessary. Emotionality, visual appearance, age and message must be credibly performed by the communicators. Rezo seems to have got all of this right with his youth culture outfit, behaviour and fact-based outrage. His opponent from the CDU, however, shows himself to be a conformist youth in a tailored suit. His conservative performance does not fit into the social media world, which is presented as unconventional, even if this is already conventional again. In order to be able to adequately study these new practices of (political and organizational) face work in the formation of public discourses, new public-theoretical and methodological approaches must therefore also be designed. The discourse-relevant re-institutionalization of social mediamediated communication must be examined as well as the new identitycreating multimodal style practices (van Leeuwen 2008; O’Halloran and Lim-Fei 2014).

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Even if a multimodal turn has already been declared occasionally (Bateman et al. 2017, 9) it often remains unclear how the various sign modalities actually correspond in a meaningful way. Based on Foucault’s (1980) concept of the dispositif , Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) understanding of multimodality, and Bateman et al.’s (2017) idea of media materiality as a canvas, this article develops categories for the analysis of communicative style practices in the (social) media context. Thereby, I emphasize the aspect of social media style practices as a form of as semiotic transcription practices that are engendered in response to a particular material, institutional and cultural contexts in which social media activities are performed. Against this backdrop, institutionality is understood as the implicitly interpellated authority that emerges with the crowds engaging with a message. The imaginary of this community has legitimized authority over what has to be said and how. This sort of institutionality evaporates together with the communication episode—in the example at the end of the controversy that the Rezo video triggered in the public sphere. The contribution is divided into four parts. First, I will explain the conceptual aspects of digital communication in correspondence to the social media dispositif. Second, some explanation of the concept of multimodality will follow. Third, I illustrate the visual style of Rezo’s and Amthor’s videos as part of a style analysis in the social media (dispositif ) context. Thereby, I highlight some aspects of (visual) style practice as a discursive practice. I argue that the subjective receptions of discourse practices determine the specific style of the discourse actors. They choose, form and compose semiotic resources for the construction of their identities (Meier 2014).

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The Media Dispositif as Institutional Context of Communication

The notion of dispositif always implies the disciplining of body and mind based on a complex mixture of discourses, materialities or technologies, institutions, rules and norms, administrative and scientific measures, philosophical, moral or philanthropic doctrines (cf. Foucault 1980, 120).

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A dispositif is a heterogeneous ensemble that produces meaning and subjectivity through the particular composition of its elements. It is a concept that translates Foucault’s understanding of multidirectional and multifaceted power relations and its effects into an analytical category. With regards to the media dispositif there are two dominant principles that I would like emphasize in this contribution. They, both organize communication behaviour in social media contexts, as well as the interpretation of social media content. On the one hand, there is the technical infrastructure with certain material affordances. It is the canvas which structures the semiotic toolbox and the accessibility of the addressees as well as the possibility of reciprocal interaction. On the other hand, there are certain rules of communication and role models which are based on genre specifications. Both principles depend on the knowledge of the participants of the media interaction about the cultural and situational contexts. The cultural contexts provide the semantic rules and the hegemonic knowledge in form of discourses. The genre rules and style patterns are also adopted mimetically by (media) socialization and were enacted by habitual social styles. Situational contexts are the media infrastructures that are used for concrete communication, including their specific affordances. Figure 1 illustrates these interdependencies. The concept of the media dispositif is thus not limited to the relationship between media affordances and the subject, but also includes its institutional character, which has conventionalized certain systems of knowledge and modes of behaviour. In this way, what can be said and what cannot be said or what can be shown and what cannot be shown, as well as the stylistic way of communication is structured. In the media dispositif, semiotic and structural communication constrains of the media affordances are linked with pre-defined socio-cultural requirements. The technical media affordances structures how the semiotic practices are materialized (textual, pictorial, audiovisual) and how the communication is constituted (one-directional or—bi-directional communication, synchronic or asynchronic communication). The socio-cultural expectations are enacted by the orientation towards certain genre conventions within a particular discourse. Whereas a discourse offers meanings to be realized within a particular universe of ideas that has a socio-conceptual location, genre offers the means for

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Fig. 1 Media dispositif as material, institutional and cultural manifestation of ‘the canvas of the medium’ (Bateman and Sachs-Hombach 2019)

contextualizing/locating/situating meanings in social spaces (Kress 2011, 114). Moreover, genre mediates between the social and the semiotic by helping to determine the social as well as the communicative function of a communicative act. In this sense, genres are communicative patterns that help to create messages and respond to them in a socially acceptable way, as well as to understand these messages within the semantic universe of a particular discourse. Thereby, they are characterized by typical content and plots organized by ‘certain rules, prescriptions, traditions, ingrained habits, role models etc.’ (Van Leeuwen 2008, 123). Bateman et al. (2017) conceptualized the interplay of media material, semiotic modes, discourse semantics and communicative genres in an innovative model of canvas of the media. It makes clear how media materiality is related to the social rules of communication. Figure 1 illustrates how media consumers read multimodal media products with reference to situational and cultural contexts which are made relevant in

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a particular communication situation. These contexts in form of explicit discursive and implicit habitual knowledge give orientation on how to read the products and how to react. The media consumer perceives phenomena on a surface to which they give symbolic functions. The surface is the media which Bateman et al. call canvas because it is the material ground on which (through) signs are materialized or appear. By giving the phenomena sign functions, the media consumer turns it into a meaningful regularity because this meaning making process articulates certain discourse semantics with certain social rules and conventions. The interplay between canvas and signs define Bateman et al. as follows: Similarly, we also generalise across all possible bearers of meaningful regularities with the term ‘canvas’. This is to be understood as anything where we can inscribe material regularities that may then be perceived and taken up in interpretation, regardless of whether actual, virtual (digital), simply produced, performed physically in time, or the result of a complex technological process. This places minimal demands on the materialities of their adopted sign vehicles—almost anything that can carry some material regularities that suggest intentionality and order might serve. There are, however, many more interesting kinds of materiality that can be employed as we shall see as we proceed.

This means that the different kinds of media materialities or ‘the nature of canvas’ (Bateman et al. 2017, 89) may support different kinds of communicative practices. The keyword for this relationship is affordance (Kress 2011; Bateman et al. 2017; Meier 2019) which was developed first in Gibson (1986). ‘When seen in terms of affordances, an object is directly perceived in terms of the possibilities for action that it opens up for an agent in an environment. More recent studies of the parts of the brain that “light up” when perceiving highly functional objects like door handles generally offer good support for Gibson’s proposal. Seeing particular functionally-loaded shapes appears indeed to cause relevant motor routines (for turning, for holding, etc.) to be activated’ (Bateman et al. 2017, 90). For example, an armchair invites you to sit down. It doesn’t just do this because it is shaped so that you can sit on it. Rather, it promises comfort and relaxation through its appearance and its connotative meaning. The

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smartphone and its functions are even more attractive, so many people can’t even leave it in their pockets while face-to-face conversations. Affordances can therefore not only be understood as possibilities for action but also have the character of encouraging their use. This means that media affordances can be fruitfully integrated into the concept of media dispositifs. In the following section, I will demonstrate this in more detail when explaining affordances as an important determinant for style in social media.

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Influencer: Stylish Self-Publishing via Social Media (Dispositif)

The affordances of the social media dispositif animate user to provide acquaintances, friends or stakeholders with messages and photos in order to increase and manage their personal reputations. Conceptually, this can be described with Goffman’s (1956) notion of Presentation of Self in the Everyday Life and with Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of Social Capital . The users construct identity through impression management which is accomplished through semiotic work. In this way, communicators create a personal public sphere and users participate in numerous digital public spheres at the same time. They are not private individuals in the network, but persons of personal public life. Symptomatic for this development is the communicative practices of social media influencers. Their aim, implicitly or explicitly, is to appear as attractive and entertaining, smart and tough. In social media, institutions or companies are increasingly communicating via these new opinion leaders. They give the organization, a product or a public opinion a concrete face. Thus, organizations interact as collective identities in the style of individual persons. In this way, they can also appear as acting protagonists in narrated stories. Organizations are no longer abstract institutions, but actors who more or less successfully enter into personal relationships and achieve goals. This was also evident in the debate between Rezo and Phillip Amthor. While Rezo presented

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himself as a spokesman for the younger generation critical of the government, Amthor spoke as the youngest member of the Bundestag and as a member of his party, the CDU. For a deeper understanding of social media dispositif effects, we take a closer look at the multimodal style practices of these social media activists in the next section. This is combined with methodological suggestions for an adequate analysis of these communicative practices in the social media context.

3.1

The Multimodality of Influencer: Videos as Transcription Style Practice

Influencers and organizations communicate their messages multimodally, using various semiotic resources like moving images, spoken or written language, music and sounds, graphics and layouts. Multimodality research reconstructs the different modalities of their representation functions. The modalities in which communication can be realized and mediated depend on the media used. For example, only audio communications can be broadcast over the radio, but the television and online media can play videos by materializing the audiovisual signs. The affordances of the various media make the different modalities perceptible and mediate them between producers and recipients. So, the production and reception of different modalities or modes (Kress 2011) such as visuality or auditivity, or code systems such as spoken language, text, image, music etc. depend on the media dispositif as the cultural context in which they occur. As a result, mediality inscribes itself in the multimodality of signs. That means that the concept of multimedia has become increasingly problematic and is being replaced by that of multimodality. In order to clarify the concrete interaction of the different modes of signs in the production and reception process, the concept of transcriptivity might be helpful. Transcriptivity focuses on meaning making by the correspondence of different modalities of semiotic resources such as language and image. The reference to a certain discursive knowledge as

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meaning making practice is generated through the intersemiotic transcription of different symbol systems (Jäger 2002, 28). Based on the semiotic model of de Saussures, Jäger assumes that only the coupling of different tokens or types of signs makes them mutually readable. The media linguist Holly (2015) explains this principle of meaning making not as arising from amodal representations of an amodal real world but rather as a result of various ‘transcription’ processes such as paraphrasing, explication, explanation, commentary or translation, which are either ‘intramedial’ (mediating within the same mode and sign system) or ‘intermedial’ (mediating between different modes or sign systems). Jäger (2002, 30) describes these transcriptions as dynamic processes. They consist of an interplay between pretexts, scripts and transcripts in the subjective meaning making process, whereby the scripts are to be understood as overrides or translations that are derived from the pretexts (e.g., language or pictorial symbols) as transcripts. The meaning of an audiovisual text or video is generated through the interpretative merging of the created pretext meanings of the various semiotic resources such as moving images and spoken language into an integrating transcript. This constitutes the multimodal text meaning of a certain YouTube video, which undergoes further modifications through previous and subsequent videos, comments and subtitles on the same website. The principle of transcriptivity is also effective in film editing. This is made up of different cuts and sequences. These are put together dramatically by the producer and the viewer transcribes the individual sequences into a coherent plot. Furthermore, this cinematic principle is shaped in its own stylistic way in influencer videos. With the influencer videos, a separate film genre with specific style conventions and subgenres has emerged. Based on these conventions, however, the influencers pay attention to a personal style that makes them distinguishable from other influencers. They break with social styles (habitus) in a socially acceptable framework to seem as personally authentic as possible. For performing a personal style, they pay attention to use specific lifestyle elements in form of fashion, behaviour, humour, preferences, attitudes, gestures and so on. That makes them professional public relations workers in their own right. This self-presentation makes it easier for influencers than organizations to establish a personal network. It is a personal branding which should

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serve the recognition and above all a coherent impression in the public. Traditionally, organizations enact this via artifacts of corporate designs such as logos, representative photographs, company fonts and company colours. As individually acting personalities, influencers give the organization and its products an individual and authentic face. The corporate identity of the organization is reflected in individual use and in the stories of ‘authentic’ people. This is a new form of advertising and a new form of individual self-marketing. These new individual communicators (and their teams) are producing discursive fragments on the web which are grounded in a plethora of intentional and more or less unintentional decisions regarding the ways, messages are made communicable. Thus, communication always happens through the performance of style. The notion of style is not new but very functional. Van Leeuwen (2006, 140) describes the idea of style as ‘(…) an inventory between individual freedom and social determination’. He distinguishes three types of styles: the individual style, the social style and the lifestyle. The individual style is the spontaneous way individuals enact feelings, their style of walking, gesturing, looking, intonating. The social style is an externally motivated and socialization-related behaviour. It is closely related to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1986). However, lifestyle is a combination of social and individual style, it is the conscious performance of style in order to present oneself as belonging to a certain social group or expressing a certain cultural orientation. Through their performing lifestyle, ‘people can announce their interpretations of the world, their affiliation with certain values and attitudes’ (van Leeuwen 2006, 145). The concept of lifestyle, however, is based on the fact that, on the one hand, individual physical and social dispositions are reflected in the personal style. On the other hand, the individual can also, with a subjective intention enact a social style in order to perform a certain identity. In communicative practice, style means how communicators express messages by using multimodal signs, how communicators express social and individual identity, how communicators choose, form and compose semiotic resources. From this point of view, style is communicative practice in certain cultural and situational contexts that determine the

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adequacy and success of that practice. Style practices construct individual and social identity and organize interpersonal relationships by the subjective design of semiotic resources, based on the orientation to social practices or patterns. The notion of style makes also produced some key ideas of the theory of social practices and is part of the practice turn.

3.2

A Model of Style

The model of style (Fig. 2) involves the dimension of signs as the different modes of semiotic resources which are chosen, formed and composed in a multimodal manner to make messages communicable in cultural and situational contexts. In this sense, signs are styled artefacts which are materialized through and with different sorts of media, depending on their respective affordances. The affordances of semiotic

Fig. 2 Style practices as multimodal construction of identity in form of subjective choosing, forming and composing semiotic resources

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modalities or modes also mean their potentials and limitations in their representational functions. Kress describes for example this different logic of the modes image and language this way: The resources of the mode of image differ from those of either speech or writing. Image does not ‘have’ words, nor sounds organized as phonology, nor the syntax and grammar of speech or writing, nor any of their entities/units. (…) While speech is based on the logic of time, (still) image is based on the logic of space. It uses the affordances of a surface: whether page or canvas, a piece of wall or the back or front of a T-shirt. In image, meaning is made by the positioning of elements in that space, but also by size, colour, line and shape. The image does not ‘have’ words; it uses ‘depictions’. Words can be ‘spoken’ or ‘written’, images are ‘displayed’. (Kress 2011, 82)

Thus, the different affordances of modes can be used to do specific semiotic work. Images enable the communicator to show objects simultaneously and in detail. Written or spoken words make something rational plausible. These modes locate objects in the time and space continuum. Looked at in this way, affordances of modes and media are materialized in any media product. The production and reception of this product is shaped by the influences of the cultural contexts habitus and discourse which, on the one hand, have led to the specific material affordances of signs and media and, on the other hand, have constituted the social rules for their use. This is manifest in the media dispositif, in which the media material infrastructure with a certain specific pattern of communication (genre conventions) comes together. Thus, the habitus suggests the social rules of communicative behaviour as social conventions of style practices. The relevant (hegemonial) discourse formation provides the framework of knowledge or the semantic rules for making meaning. The concrete communication process is also influenced by situational contextual factors. First, the place or location of communication (Scollon and Scollon 2003), because it makes a difference whether I hang a prohibition sign on a pillar in the street or put it in my living room. The fact whether I am quietly writing a WhatsApp message on my home computer or during crossing a traffic light can make the message quite different. Second, it depends on the situation who I communicate with.

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What are the social roles and hierarchies within the interaction and what changes the communication process? Thirdly, it goes without saying that the situational mental state and personal abilities influence communication. And last but not least, it is a question of time or timing that determines the communication process. Within these implicit potentials and limitations of the cultural and situational contexts, the communicator does the semiotic work in his own stylistic way. Thus, style is a practice of subjectivation in which individual style characteristics and social style patterns come together in a subjective manner. This ‘own stylistic way’ is how the semiotic resources (like lines, shapes, space or sound etc.) are chosen, formed and composed depending on the goals of the communicator and how he prioritizes the context factors. This style practices (Fig. 2) are the semiotic work of constructing identity. The way the semiotic resources are intentional chosen, formed and composed signals (peer) group membership, taste, attitude and communicative goals. From the subjective point of view of the recipient, the style performance indicates unintentionally how this face working is successful or not. It is successful if the recipient attributes authenticity to it. Examples of successful and unsuccessful face work on the role of the CDU and the other German parties before the 2019 European elections have already been mentioned. The videos will be discussed again in the following example analysis. In sum, Fig. 2 is the conceptual framework for empirically analysing style practices. Based on the idea of social semiotic metafunctions (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006), the practices of selecting, shaping and composing semiotic resources for doing identity are to be understood as discursive design practices. It is a creative form of bringing together social and individual style with the help of lifestyle elements for a performance of personality. In the following, these practices will be operationalized for style analysis. To illustrate this, I will use the video from Rezo and the response from the young CDU MP Philipp Amthor that was banned from being published by the CDU leadership. I will demonstrate how the situational and cultural context effect the way an individual style is practiced. Moreover, I will show that the personal social media presentation does not necessarily have to correspond to the self-image of the organization to which this person belongs. The following analysis shows

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to what extent this institutionalized form of communication also brings the young politician Phillip Amthor into a style conflict.

3.3

Stylistic Practices for Constructing Identity in Rezo and Amthor Videos

As already stated, style practices take place in the form of the choice, formation/design and composition of the semiotic resources made available by the production and communication medium. Focused on the choosing, questions of analysis arise regarding the symbolic function of the chosen subjects and issues or propositions of communication: The subjects of both camera shots (Fig. 3) are the approximately 30-year-old YouTube musician Rezo and the nearly similar old CDU member of the German parliament Phillipp Amthor. Before the video ‘Destruction of the CDU’, Rezo was known less as a communicator of serious or political issues and more as an entertainer with an affinity for youth culture topics. His language and way of presentation were more in the style of pop and party culture. So up to now, Rezo has symbolized rather an apolitical hedonism, which, however, pursues a certain innovative way of music production. Philip Amthor was the second youngest member of the German Bundestag when he was elected in 2017 and the youngest CDU politician to do so through a direct mandate. Despite his experience in politics and lobbying, he still forms a contrast to the rather older CDU celebrities. The fact that he belongs to the conservative wing of the Christian Democratic Party despite his age makes Amthor inconsistent. Even before the debate about the Rezo video, he appears as an ambivalent figure in public. Focused on the forming, on one hand questions of analysis arise regarding the communicative design of the visual and verbal messages, sound, typography and graphics. This includes all meaningful elements of the media products and how these create identity or organize the relationship between communicator and recipient. In a personality representation like the influencers do, such elements are for example outfit, gesture, facial expressions, status, attitude, poses and special rhetorical

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Fig. 3 a Screenshot from Rezo’s YouTube video (18 May 2019): The destruction of the CDU.1 b Screenshot from Phillip Amthor’s unpublished YouTube video (20 May 2019): The response to Rezo’s video2

skills. On the other hand, the analysis of the forming examines the camera actions, which includes the perspectives, shots, etc. and how this organizes the relationship between subject/content and viewer: Rezo shows himself in urban youth-cultural clothing and with a corresponding, blue-dyed hairstyle. He shows emotional indignation but also, he argues logical and makes extensive references to expert opinions and scientific studies. He is sitting at the table in his YouTuber workplace, which shows a few guitars in the background, a microphone and speakers in the foreground. Rezo looks into the camera, addressing the viewer directly. The camera is positioned at the YouTuber’s eye level. The viewer is thus related to the communicator from normal perspective. He is practically opposite to the recipient as an equal interlocutor. Rezo seems to invite the viewer into his room for a personal conversation. Phillip Amthor is also sitting behind a desk. The viewer sits across from him through the camera perspective. However, he shows himself with a strict hairstyle and in an official suit with a white shirt. The collar is a little frizzy, so that he has temporarily put away the tie, which is

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Online-document: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1lZQsyuSQ, 3 March 2021. Online-document: stern.de: https://www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/philipp-amthor--cdupolitiker-zeigt-ausschnitt-seines-antwort-videos-an-rezo---dann-wird-es-peinlich-8914518.html, 3 March 2021. 2

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actually mandatory for the supposed informal conversation. Nevertheless, Amthor continues to wear the suit, so that he continues to mark himself as belonging to his official role. The blackboard in the background with indicated molecular diagrams also gives him something instructively distant. He acts like a teacher behind his desk. Thus, he does not speak to the audience symmetrically, but as a teacher who explains to his ‘students (and Rezo)’ the world that they do not yet understand. With an arrogant attitude, he jokes about the conspicuous student Rezo. Moreover, Amthor stages the contradiction between alleged youth culture naivety and serious politics by using youth culture phrases in his official appearance. In doing so, he ridicules the person Rezo and thus also his political statement, as well as his sympathizers. And last but not least, focusing on the multimodal composing of the meaningful elements, there are questions of analysis regarding salience effects or conciseness caused by color and shape contrasts, positioning in the image space, proportions and formations of the elements on the surface. The answers are results of a close reading, which is also closely related to the contexts (Porsché 2017). Because these provide the social patterns of the style-full communication, which are subjectively appropriated in the specific style practices. The subjective style is expressed in the selection of communicative elements, in the addressee and goal-oriented shaping of these elements and in their specific multimodal structuring and emphasis. The latter brings together the different elements or the different affordances of the semiotic modes in a communicative way. The multimodal transcriptions described above here come into play. Certain gestures can be used as visual emphasis on what is being said. You can also visualize verbal content through gestural forms, etc. The decisive factor here is that the producer and recipient can intuitively recognize semantic connections or accentuations between the modes. If this is not the case, the coherence of communication is not given, and misunderstandings can happen: The first thing you notice in the Rezo video is the intensive colour contrast. The YouTuber wears a bright orange hoody, which makes him stand out from the rather simple and colourless room. His bright facial expressions and gestures also emerge through the pale foreground and background as well as the dark hair and cap. This spatial and coloured

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highlighting focuses the viewer entirely on the messages and (emotional) movements of the communicator. The speaker is in the centre, and with emotional intonation and scandalous information, he keeps the user attention in a multimodal manner. He doesn’t need any help but stands alone for his position and outrage. Rezo steps out of his comfort zone of entertainment and takes a position despite the expected consequences because he can no longer bear the situation. This is his message and this is the story that has been told to his friends, followers and users. He asks them to do the same, at least in the voting. The statement should appear so necessary that Rezo is even ready to leave his usual subjects. The high effectiveness of the video can also be explained by this contrast between the assumptions of the present media format and the current divergent media behaviour of Rezo. On one hand, by so radically breaking the style conventions of the entertainment genre that Rezo actually is part of, he can gain this special public attention. On the other hand, such a contrast can also trigger vivid reactions in form of a ‘shit storm’. The CDU officials probably feared a shit storm when they cancelled the publication of the Amthor video. Why? Like other YouTubers, Amthor performs his opinion. He makes a fool of his opponent and comes to strong judgements. But that is a serious breach of style. Amthor is usually not part of the YouTube community. It thus adopts the YouTube style in an inauthentic way. His staged response to Rezo is therefore inconsistent and could actually meet with strong resistance from the recipients. It violates the social media norm of authenticity. It is clear that this is only a dominant narrative pattern that is effective with the social media dispositif. As with all (media) staging it is about the credible performance of authenticity which of course is not related to his authentic appearance in other contexts. The social media dispositif requires a performance in which the communicator has to act out ‘honest feelings, unplanned and spontaneous reactions, etc.’ to signal truthfulness. This performance must remain within the range of what can be expected, i.e. it must not relativize the coherence of the communicator’s established personality too much. However, that is exactly what Amthor’s response video would have done. In the video, the politician shows a joking irony that would make him appear too contradictory as a serious politician, as he would otherwise appear in the media. His satirical answer in front of the blackboard

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makes him an arrogant senior teacher so that the users who think Rezo’s video is right can hardly feel that they are being taken seriously.

4

Conclusion

This contribution focuses on the way multimodal semiotic work is carried out in certain (social media) cultural and situational contexts. To this end, the institutionalized modes of action of the social media dispositif were first described. The basic idea was that media infrastructures and semiotic modalities bring specific materialities with them. These materialities cause certain affordances. Thus, how the semiotic modality can be used for communication (e.g. written or spoken language, static or moving image, etc.) depends on the media affordances, the way of communication depends on the affordances of the semiotic modes used in each case: A picture can show things in great detail, but a text can classify things in the time–space continuum. Media materially in form of a digital video platform can make a video perceptible. The affordances of a newspaper do not allow this. These material possibilities and restrictions are combined in the institutionalized media dispositif with social rules and conventions that dictate the practices of what can be said and shown in certain situational and cultural contexts. In the social media dispositif, the norm of authenticity seems to be very dominant. While organizations use corporate communication (e.g. logos, house fonts, clothing, behaviour, etc.) for direct communication, for social media communication they are increasingly commissioning influencers in order to give their positions and products a specific face and authenticity. This is simply a requirement of the social media dispositif in which they operate. The influencers themselves must be concerned about their authenticity by regularly making their own or independent statements when starting actions. This can also be observed in Rezo’s video that we studied in this text. Moreover, the contribution provides scholars with a methodological toolkit for a multimodal style analysis to examine this claim. Thereby, style was defined as a way of showing a particular communicative

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behaviour comprising of socio-cultural orientation patterns and individual or subjective adoptions of these patterns. The concept of lifestyle as an appropriated form of social style was also used to describe practices of self-presentation. Here, certain semiotic resources are selected, shaped and composed in order to signal cultural affiliation, taste and certain knowledge. These semiotic resources are the tools that are used for the stylish self-presentation of organizations and individuals. They do this in a subjective way, creating an individual style. This makes them distinctive and recognizable. They do this in a social way by following communicative patterns in order to be understood in the intended sense. Thus, the style practices for constructing identity are both: individual and social. In their meaning making, they refer to existing knowledge and style patterns in order to evoke socially connectable associations. At the same time, they set themselves apart with their own shape and colour designs in order to be recognized as an independent identity. It is a semiotic game with various myths aiming to convey one’s own story or political message fostering the construction of identity.

References Bateman, John, and Klaus Sachs-Hombach. 2019. “Multimodalität im Schnittbereich von Medientheorie und Semiotik.” Zeitschrift für Semiotik 41, nos. 1/2. Bateman, John, Janina Wildfeuer, and Tuoma Hiippala. 2017. Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis: A Problem-Oriented Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson, 241– 58. New York, NY: Greenwood. Feezell, Jessica T. 2017. “Agenda Setting Through Social Media: The Importance of Incidental News Exposure and Social Filtering in the Digital Era.” In Political Research Quarterly, vol. 71, issue 2, 482–94. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

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Foucault, Michel. 1980. “The Confessions of the Flesh.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 , edited by C. Gordon, 194–228. New York, NY: Pantheon. Gibson, J. James. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Science Research Centre. Holly, Werner. 2015. “Bildinszenierungen in Talkshows. Medienlinguistische Anmerkungen zu einer Form von ‘Bild-Sprach-Transkription.’” In PolitTalkshow: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf ein multimodales Format, edited by Heiko Girnth und Sascha Michel, 123–44. Stuttgart: ibidem. Jäger, Ludwig. 2002. “Transkriptivität: Zur medialen Logik der kulturellen Semantik.” In Transkribieren: Medien/Lektüre, edited by Ludwig Jäger and Georg Stanitzek, 19–41. München: Fink. Kress, Gunther. 2011. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Meier, Stefan. 2014. Visuelle Stile: Zur Sozialsemiotik visueller Medienkultur und konvergenter Design-Praxis. Bielefeld: Transcript. Meier, Stefan. 2019. “Multimodalität in medialen Dispositiven: Konzeptuelle Anregungen zum institutionellen Zeichenhandeln in medienkulturellen und medientechnologischen Infrastrukturen.” Zeitschrift fuer Semiotik 41, nos. 1/2. O’Halloran, Kay. L., and Victor Lim-Fei. 2014. “Systematic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis.” In Interactions, Images, and Texts: A Reader in Multimodality, edited by Sigrid Norris, and Camen Daniela Maier, 137–55. Berlin: De Gruyter. Porsché, Yannik. 2017. “The ‘Bologna Process’ as a Territory of Knowledge: A Contextualization Analysis.” In New Studies in Multimodality: Conceptual and Methodological Elaborations, edited by Ognyan Seizov and Janina Wildfeuer, 247–76. London: Bloomsbury. Scollon, Ron, and Suzie Wong Scollon. 2003. Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World . London: Routledge. Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2006. Introducing Social Semiotics. New York, NY: Routledge. Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

11 Arguing by Common Sense: Institutionality and Media Discourses in France Thierry Guilbert

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Arguing by Common Sense and Obviousness in Media and Political Discourses in France

This paper aims to present my current research on common sense and obviousness as evidenced in French mainstream media discourses. Discourse is an activity in which individuals engage when they try to make sense of the context they are situated in. This activity involves not only the interpretation of a particular meaning but also its communication in discursive practices. Context, thereby, should not be imagined as passive background but rather as an imaginary about the circumstances that is activated to make sense of the situation. The imaginary of the institutional context in which an individual is active is of primordial T. Guilbert (B) University of Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Porsché et al. (eds.), Institutionality, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96969-1_11

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importance for the interpretation. It is entangled in two ways with the meaning making process. On the one hand, an imaginary of an institution comprises a set of ideas and norms which are more or less imposed on individuals influencing their social behavior (Pêcheux 1990, 112). On the other hand, and this is the thesis I argue for in this text, these ideas and norms are constituted and disseminated in discourses. In sum, an institution is constituted by social norms and rules that are evidenced in a particular discursive practice resulting in an imaginary of this institution. The discursive practice is, at the same time, the source for change of this imaginary and as a consequence a source for what constitutes an institution. Institutionality, then, is the representation of an institution in an imaginary as part of the discursive practice at a particular point in time. The (re)actualization of institutionality as it emerges by and through situated discursive, embodied and material language practices results in an ongoing process of institutionalization. On this background media discourses will be analyzed in both directions: First in the way they reproduce a particular imaginary of the French press as an institution; and second, in the way they change this imaginary in their discursive practice when articulating it in a particular context. As is the case for the majority of democratic countries, in addition to theoretically constituting an oppositional force to political power, the French mainstream media represents a dual-specificity inherited from its past: it is structured according to distinct political positions (Charon 1997). Furthermore, it maintains close and complex ties with political powers, even if certain media do not hesitate to mention certain contacts between the two worlds (Halimi 1997; Bénilde 2005; Rimbert 2011; Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot 2011; Cagé 2015). I therefore, understand media discourses in France operating within the frameworks of political discourses as media political discourses. Insofar the two discourses are intertwined, it is often difficult to distinguish between political positions and journalistic commentary (Ringoot 2014). As all mass media organizations French mainstream media are institutions that aim to normalize or institutionalize the positions that they argue for in the public sphere. I will analyze how French press organizations manage the process of institutionalization in their communications as a form of socialization of their own positions. My assumption is that

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persuading the reader of the common sense or the obviousness of their positions is part of their discursive practice as a result of which they emerge with a particular image of institutionality in the public sphere. Thereby, discursive practice and positioning is understood as an interdependent act of subjectivation in which the institution is materialized and embodied within social and historical contexts. The notion of “positions” [positionnement in French] was proposed by the linguist Dominique Maingueneau: “Positions are the product of an act of ‘positioning’, in the commercial meaning of the word” (1999, 186). It means “taking a stance” as well as position, process and result. Thus, it refers to the discourse held and what this discourse produces when it is held and confers an identity to the locutor (individual or institution): “the identity of each position emerges and is kept up through the interaction, often conflicting, with the others” (1999, 186). Then, the “position” of a newspaper is simultaneously the position held and the maneuvers put into play to maintain or to change its “position in a symbolic field” (1999, 178). More precisely, positioning in this sense includes cases where: first, the claimed positions do not necessarily correspond with the positions that is really held. For example, newspapers that claim a left-wing position may in fact be positioned on the right of the political spectrum by a sociologist or a discourse analyst (Duval 2000; Guilbert 2007). Secondly, in journalistic field, the “operation” of positioning takes place via discourse, even if other elements are at play (the composition of the editorial board, financial autonomy, etc.). Thus, columnists and editorialists aim to persuade their readers primarily of the accuracy of their positions instead of convincing them with rational arguments. The newspaper, via its journalists, takes a position in a journalistic field made up of its internal power struggles (Bourdieu 1996; Champagne 2007). Therefore, it seems that there is a self-legitimizing feedback loop between the maneuvers of a newspaper to take a stance and the institutionalizing operation of that newspaper. In the same movement, the newspaper takes a position that reproduces an imaginary of the newspaper as an institution. And, this imaginary of the institution allows it to utter a position in the journalistic field as someone who is actually legitimized to speak in this field.

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On this background we, as discourse analysts, could expect to notice strong indicators for positions in French newspapers that allow us to specify the position but also and more importantly to analyze the way in which this positioning work is part of a particular discursive practice. My work, among others (Lee 1999; Herman and Jufer 2001; Koren 2004), has shown that editorials and chronicles in the press—two journalistic genres that involve commentary work—use a position in order to assign meaning to an event (Lee 1999; Ringoot and Rochard 2005; Riutort 2009) in a strongly polarized media field. Thereby, they almost never take a position themselves or on behalf of themselves. To understand of this apparent paradox, it is essential to consider the argumentative aims of these discourses. Their forms have strong repercussions on their argumentative range (Chateauraynaud 2011) and it is thus important to study them. My research shows that, in order to persuade the reader, press discourses often use implicit discursive devices, as presuppositions or use of background knowledge. Relying on common sense is one of the main discursive ways used in such discourses I have thus, in the past 20 years of my research, found that resorting to common sense logic aims at giving readers the impression of obviousness and truth (Guilbert 2007, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2017). Thereby, I understand common sense as the ensemble of background and shared knowledge, that is named doxa. Using common sense is not a form of shared rationality. Rather saying something that anyone knows is an implicit argument that journalists try to attribute to their texts in order to create an impression of obviousness that discharges them from the responsibility to prove. This impression of obviousness is useful for journalists because it is a device that is both very efficient and very easy to implement: they do not need to convince their readers with clearly stated arguments but only need to make readers believe (Ducrot 2004; Breton 1999) and persuade them of their own position the most efficiently as possible. In this contribution, I will show how obviousness seems to be the intended goal of turning to common sense in journalistic discourse. In general, obviousness can be simultaneously considered as an unconscious and involuntary state of suspended judgment by an audience that does not feel the urge to question anymore. This state is similar to what Chomsky calls “voluntary ignorance” (Chomsky and Bouveresse 2010, 148). I understand this state

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as a feeling of obviousness (Gil 1993) that influences the functioning of a discourse in a particular way. Thereby, the feeling of obviousness is only one in a number of “discursive devices” that are involved in the meaning making processes aiming to persuade an audience. I will analyze some of the most important discursive devices and their articulation with functioning of discourse in Sect. 2.3 and in the second part of this contribution. I argue that using common sense as part of their positioning work in discourse gives journalists and their institution the opportunity to appear as legitimate speakers in the journalistic field of discourse. Referring to common sense helps them to (re-)establish their institutionality in the discursive practice and to present their opinions as shared opinions. In this way, by simulating their position as common sense they are able to impose opinions on readers as already shared understanding. In the first section of this chapter, I will explain the theoretical underpinnings of “common sense” as an analytical concept and its relation to “obviousness.” In the second more empirical section I will illustrate how both concepts can be used in discourse analysis. Thereby the focus of discourse analysis is not on what is being said in discourse but rather how it is said. My analysis shows how these two concepts (common sense and obviousness) have a real relationship in journalistic discourses, that is to say, how one draws on another. In order to do this, the second section does not analyze a particular corpus but uses examples of journalism coming from French mainstream press of the past 25 years. Finally, in the third section, I will present some complementary reflections about obviousness and common sense.

2

Articulating Common Sense and Obviousness

In this section, I will explain how common sense and obviousness work together. Firstly, it is important to define the two notions which I developed in an interdisciplinary approach drawing from Fernando Gil’s (1993) framework of obviousness in philosophy and Paul Watzlawick’s (1967) idea of the paradox in pragmatics of communication. Secondly, I revisit linguistic positioning and explain the different levels of meaning

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of these two notions in language in use. And finally, I illustrate the functioning of obviousness and common sense in press articles: how columns and editorials persuade their readers in using common sense to institutionalize their positioning in the doxa.

2.1

Common Sense, Obviousness and Doxa

The idea of common sense has been studied for a long time in philosophy where the question of the dichotomy between reason (logos) and myth (mythos) has been discussed since the Greeks Presocratic philosophers, as Parmenides or Heraclites (Couloubaritsis 1992). Myths are illusion, appearance and opinion while reason permits to approach the truth. Now, two definitions of common sense are given by philosophers (Cislaru and Nyckees 2019): common sense is associated, in the philosophic field, with rationality and is contrasted with opinion; in another sense, it is the whole of shared knowledge and beliefs of a community, the doxa. Depending on who uses the concept common sense has two meanings, both of which produce obviousness, but in a radical different sense. Obviousness when used by intellectuals is the result of questioning or investigation while obviousness used in everyday language means to take something for granted, without questioning or investigation (Guilbert 2009). It is important to note that for both the philosopher and the nonphilosopher, common sense is itself an obviousness. However, I consider that there is no need to choose between these two epistemic approaches for the following reason: argumentative and discursive strategies often play with this ambiguity in aiming for obviousness. As opposed to some scholars that excluded the everyday language meaning of obviousness based on a normative judgment (e.g., J. Jacques quoted in Armengaud 2004 or Husserl quoted in Gil 1993, 8) I deliberately choose to integrate it into my analysis because in these contexts obviousness is related to a feeling of certainty (see below Sect. 2.2). The feeling of obviousness is a perfect match between the expectation of meaning and satisfaction of meaning, it may be simultaneous.

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The feeling of the obvious leaves no play, no place for doubt, and is described as a cognitive emotion of recognition (Gil 1993, 114). Adding to this, the principal means of expressing common sense is discourse (Cislaru and Nyckees 2019): if obviousness is the truth for an audience, then dressing one’s discourse with aspects of common sense leads politicians and journalists alike to look for the effect of obviousness as proof of truth and to naturalize the subjective aspects of discourse. When journalistic discourse draws on common sense it becomes the vector of shared knowledge and understandings, of “background knowledges (BGK for short)” (Fairclough 1995, 28) or of the “common Base” (van Dijk 2005), in other words of the doxa, the common sense put into discourse. Drawing from ideas developed by Norman Fairclough, I argue it is important to analyze “how BGK subsumes ‘naturalized’ ideological representations, i.e. ideological representations which come to be seen as a non-ideological ‘common sense’” (ibid., 28). This naturalization of ideological positions is part of the institutionalization of this position in the discursive practice of politicians and journalists. It (re-)produces the imaginary of a truthful and trustworthy institution. Obviousness is an abstract notion, which from an empirical point of view falls apart once I notice it. And yet, obviousness is also “that which is presented in order to be immediately noticed” (Rey 1998). Obviousness must, therefore, be seen without being noticed. This apparent ontological contradiction corresponds to the paradox definition given by Paul Watzlawick (1967) since the conspicuous nature of obviousness is simultaneously denied and also necessary for establishing evidence: “see me but don’t notice me” seems to be the paradoxical injunction of obviousness. So as not to be noticed, while being perceived, obviousness must take on a shared aspect, that is, agreed upon, conventional, usual (Guilbert 2007).

2.2

Common Sense and Obviousness in Discourse

The processes of discursive obviousness do not necessarily refer to common sense directly: some are explicit while others are entirely

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implicit. Nevertheless, these implicit and explicit processes are not simply content embellishment. It is important now to come back to the aim of this process, which is to widen common sense. I have called this process the “use/constitution of doxa” (2007). This takes on many forms but assumes a sole dialectical principle: to use the belief in the doxa (unquestioned obviousness) in order to validate and create new opinions, beliefs, etc., in the doxa or common sense. The aim, then, is to widen the minimal social consensus and to adorn ordinary characteristics of obviousness to discourse in order to present one’s own opinions and beliefs as elements preexisting in common sense, the doxa or BGKs. Discursive obviousness therefore has a performative aim in the sense that it seeks to bring into being what it enunciates. In political and media discourses, the columnist who is a leader of opinions, enunciates his own opinion that he presents either as good sense or as a commonly shared opinion in order to convince the reader. It is a way, thus, to constitute public opinion on a given subject while using public opinion. To get there we will see that not only the columnist hides behind what he says, but also: • that he presents his commentary as what the public opinion thinks, therefore making himself the “innate spokesperson for public opinion” (Landowski 1989), • that he draws on shared beliefs with the “truth” of opinion polls (Richard-Zappella 1990), • and that he uses stereotypes and other preconceived ideas from the doxa to legitimize his claims. So, the dialectic process of widening common sense leads to a form of naturalization of discourse which presents itself, according to Fairclough, on many levels: I shall assume a scale of naturalization, whose ‘most naturalized’ (theoretical) terminal point would be represented by a proposition which was taken commonsensically given by all members of some community, and seen as vouched for by some generally accepted rationalization (which referred it, for instance, to ‘human nature’). (Fairclough 1995, 31)

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Indeed, one cannot deny that such a scale exists, or at least that there is a theoretical continuum, and thus many degrees between a total absence of naturalization of discourse and a totally naturalized discourse. Some processes, like false generalizations and similarly those enunciations that aim to impose a framework of natural or “undriven” perceptions (Goffman 1974) on human acts, are certainly close to maximal naturalization (see below). The construction and/or resort to a “universal addressee” (Perelman and Lucie Obrechts-Tyteca. 1988) is also an important element here because it is a way of addressing oneself to everyone without specifying a particular target, this in turn allows one to quickly escalate into generalizations.

2.3

Discursive Functioning, Processes and Devices

At this point, it is important to highlight the articulation of the linguistic notions I use. It concerns the relationships between the different devices identified in the next section. I will analyze many forms and discursive devices that lean on common sense in political and media discourses and they are often superimposed on each other. My proposition is that a general functioning combines with processes, which, themselves, are realized in devices. Firstly, the general discursive functioning of discursive obviousness implements discursive processes—like the showing/covering up of obviousness, expectation/satisfaction, use/constitution of the doxa—which can be qualified as dialectic in the sense that the two antagonistic forces of each process contribute to the success of this process. Secondly, these dialectical processes materialize themselves in discursive devices during the discursive positioning. This is how we can speak of actualization of processes by discursive devices. This is illustrated in Fig. 1. discursive workings

dialectical processes

Fig. 1 The “system” of discursive obviousness

discursive devices

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The arrows going left indicate that there is a cascading retroactive effect of the discursive devices on the dialectical processes and of the dialectical processes on the general working This schema therefore describes a complex system wherein all levels interact: if an upper level is actualized in or is produced by a lower level, in turn, the lower level produces the existence of the closest upper level. For example, a discursive form x that aims to widen the doxa is simultaneously the product of the process of use/constitution of the doxa and its actualization. By so doing, the discursive devices validate the existence of the dialectic processes.

3

Some Discursive Devices that Resort to Common Sense in the Press

In this section, my goal is therefore to present the variety of ways used by journalists to appeal implicitly or explicitly to common sense, these ways to use language are named “discursive devices.” My thesis is that to use discursive devices, producing effects of meaning and the feeling of obviousness, allow them to institutionalize their discourses. I classify the discursive devices according to whether they are explicit or implicit, even if implicitness and explicitness are far from being dichotomous, rather they are on a continuum (Haroche 2013). I shall therefore talk about an explicit pole and an implicit pole.

3.1

Implicit Pole Devices

As mentioned in the introduction, in the French mainstream press authors of editorials and columns do not assume completely the responsibility for the content and try to share it with the reader, as I will show. The common principle of these devices is to create a “universal addressee” which refers to a shared knowledge, to common sense. Speaking for the public opinion is a device used in commentaries to implicitly refer to a shared common sense, to create the universal addressee and to use/constitute the doxa. Expressions like “opinion states

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that,” “France thinks, loves, wants, etc.” or even “one knows/everyone knows” are relatively common in newspapers. This phenomenon is called “desubjectivization” (Lee 1999; Guilbert 2007). A characteristic of the genre “commentaries” substitutes “je” (‘I’ ) for “nous” (‘we’ ) or “on” (‘one’ ) (French indefinite pronoun), which can have an inclusive first-person plural meaning. The choice of pronouns establishes a “community of understanding and interpretation” (Ringoot and Rochard 2005) with the reader. It not only erases the personal will but presents himself as the representative of the community or of common sense (Gil 1993, 27) and presumes a shared consensus by turning the reader into a co-enunciator that is associated to one’s own claims—and, this to the extent that, for the taken position, some sort of co-responsibility is expressed in the statement (Guilbert 2007, 38). The generalizing enunciation (Guilbert 2007, 200–02) is an enunciation that includes three characteristics brought together in the example below: a total desubjectivization (here in the impersonal “there” (‘il’ ), the generic present and an enunciative modalitythat is at once impersonal and moralizing whose goal is to appeal to good sense. Introduced by a metalinguistic commentary, the enunciation aims to “explain” (see Sect. 2.2) that there is not an alternative to the proposed retirement reform, shared reality refers to common sense and to good sense: (1) Le Nouvel Observateur, 02/11/1995, Jacques Julliard, column: […] Alors risquons une explication : il n’y a pas de pensée unique, il n’y a qu’une réalité commune. […] So let’s risk an explanation: there is no unique thought, there is only a shared reality.

Paremic enunciations, such as proverbs, maxims, sayings directly refer to common sense by taking up universal enunciations of another type. Editorials and columns grasp the proverbial authority of the proverb (Grésillon and Maingueneau 1984, 114) or the authority that is bestowed upon a form of proverbial meaning: “resemblance is a discursive stunt” (1984, 125). The first type (use of a proverb) takes advantage of a descending legitimacy due to its membership to the doxa, which assures the legitimacy of claims. However, the authority of the second

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(diversion of a proverb) is ascending because it comes from the recognition of its “formal proverbial approach” (Guilbert 2007, 205–06). This form is also a call to wisdom and to common sense.

3.2

Explicit Pole Devices

Obviousness is not only erasure or masking, but also a necessary ostentation or demonstration the desired goal of which should not be noticed if the device is supposed to work (see the Sect. 3). In order to be seen without being noticed, it has to show itself in the usual, ordinary, common language attire. This category includes deixis, a means of giving to a simple opinion an existence in reality; framing and schematization which refer directly to shared visions of reality; over-assertion which poses an opinion as an obviousness; communicational metadiscourse which shifts the emphasis of the debate; and formula which plays on repetition that produces the feeling of obviousness.

3.2.1 Deixis as Authentication In previous studies I have shown that temporal deixis (for example, the adverb “today”/ “aujourd’hui ”) anchors a statement in a particular time frame (present) that renders what is being said into a reality underpinning its obviousness (Guilbert 2013) as “the displaying of the present and of present action” (Gil 1993, 29). Obviousness produces a temporal identity between the present time (the time in which one is speaking) and the opinion of which one is speaking. For example, today/aujourd’hui anchor that of which one is speaking, which one could invent, to the present. The use of a temporal deixis is an example of both implicit/explicit way of referring to common sense and also to bring about that which one enunciates. The goal of the columnist seems to persuade the reader not to convince them that what he says already exists in reality. The only justification of the purpose resides in the use of “today,” for example, which validate this argumentation. The opinion of the journalist is presented as a simple observation of reality.

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Framing and schematization are the reminder of familiar patterns— like comparisons with neighbors (regional, European, international), battle of the leaders, the good family’s father, etc. (Guilbert 2011, 93– 96)—fulfills the expectation of meaning, the goal of these comparisons is to refer to norms of behavior and to the main or conform meanings given to events. According to Goffman (1974), when arriving in a situation, we always ask ourselves: “What is it that is going on here?” He distinguishes between natural and social frames as primary frameworks to answer this question that guide the interpretation of a situation. For example, natural framing was very present in press commentaries during the’subprime crisis’ in 2008, but it could also be found during 1990s explaining to readers the “phenomenon of globalization” (Guilbert 2007, 202–04). The two following examples related to the “subprime crisis” shows that a lexicon of natural disasters and rescue operations gives meaning to the event and refers to familiar ideas: (2) lemonde.fr, 17/09/2008, “The crisis in questions” anonymous, lead paragraph: Un an après s’être levée aux États-Unis, la tempête des subprimes ravage le système bancaire mondial et menace l’économie réelle. One year after being prompted in the United States, the storm of subprimes ravaged world banking systems and threatened the economy.

Using these natural frames (“storm, ravaged, threatened”) to give a meaning to this event makes it possible to refer directly to common sense, to an already-here sense. The longer they are reproduced in the press discourse, the better it goes unnoticed. This is also the case of the old schematization concerning the constitutive emotionality of populations often reactivated by journalists to comment on working class demonstrations. That schematization “recalls” that people are emotional by nature, which implies that their judgment is distorted, while reason is on the side of power and institutions. With over-enunciations, we are getting closer to the explicit pole: the demonstration of obviousness is becoming more visible. Indeed, overenunciations reinforces an assertive form by using an adverb or a locution that, whether placed between two commas or not, is a comment by the

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journalist validating his own assertion. The over-enunciations—which use the word “obvious” and its derivatives or the locution “there is” (Tamba 2000)—posit the necessary certainty of the statement’s object. The following example comments on a retirement reform: (3) Le Point: 09/09/2010, “The French incongruity,” Franz-Olivier Giesbert, column: Obviously, we live in a bubble, as if we were alone in the universe, without partners or competitors. A l’évidence, nous vivons dans une bulle, comme si nous étions seuls dans l’Univers, sans partenaires ni concurrents.

The over-enunciation “obviously” allows the author to refer explicitly to good sense while also validating the proposal to which they belong. The assertion is coupled with schematization comparison with neighboring countries and the formula (see below) “the French incongruity”. The two last devices, communication metadiscourse and formulas, are more specific of mass media’s communication because they come from mass media. Therefore, as the other devices, they guide and alter the perception of an event by referring precisely to the obviousness that they are establishing at the same time. They have to do with the dialectical process of the use/constitution of doxa and the aim of ensuring the institutionalization of the commentary position of the newspaper/journalist.

3.2.2 Communication Metadiscourse Since 1995 (though it surely started before), I notice the following lexicon in French press commentaries: “pedagogy,” “communication” and “(good) communicant,” “to explain” and “explanation,” “to inform” and “information” and so forth, to relate the politics communication in mediadiscourse. Those words are metadiscourse because they communicate on communication—here government communication –, they do not say anything about the ongoing reform, or of the accuracy of the ideas exchanged. It is therefore a form of demonstrating obviousness with two meanings, both implicit and explicit: it means implicitly that the

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reform is good, fair, and relevant, and explicitly that only the political explanations are problematic. If the French were better “informed,” if politicians had “communicated” well, both would see the obviousness of the reform and the debate never would have taken place. It is a way of sidestepping the debate. (4) Libération, 29/05/2003, “Untraceable compromise”, Jean-Michel Helvig, editorial: […] But if Jean-Pierre Raffarin who was entitled to an oral catch-up on TF1, had put fullness and pedagogy into it, the idea remains […] to play one’s electorate and public opinion against the proliferating havoc. […] Mais si Jean-Pierre Raffarin, qui avait droit à un oral de rattrapage sur TF1, y a mis dela rondeur et de la pédagogie, l’idée demeure […] jouer son électorat ainsi que l’opinion contre la chienlit qui se profile.

In example 4, the editorialist does discuss the event only in terms of communication strategies used by the Prime Minister, as if it was superfluous to consider his retirement reform, which do not need to be demonstrated.

3.2.3 Formulas and Other Solidifications The last device, as communicational metadicourse, is a device omnipresent in mass media. Formulas (Krieg-Planque 2003, 2009) are the solidified sequences of words that circulate in political and media discourses. Being semi-solidified, they create variants at the lexical (synonymous substitution), syntagmatic (adding a complement), or semantic (allusion) levels. Here we have also seen how the formula “the French exception” also comes in the lexical variant “the French incongruity” but also the allusive variant “as if we were alone in the universe” (example 3). The persuasive interest of the formulas is to give a name to a factual problem (e.g., “ethnic cleansing,” “financial crisis”) or a subject that one wishes to put forward as a problem (‘the French exception’). It is a means of communication that aims to shape a discursive element with the goal that it will be taken up and spread in the political and media spheres. I believe that this means of communication via formula aims to

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increase the doxa, or even to create a new situation. This is the case in the formula “the Euro crisis” beginning in 2012, which has no referent (the Euro is not in crisis), and which also has a syntactic variant “crisis in the Euro zone.” Further, when conjugated into the formula “debt crisis” (see example 4) this communication seeks to create an emergency situation therefore allowing the demand of necessary reforms as an obviousness (Guilbert 2015). The discourse of the journalist who seems to have no position is then that of the institution which brings obviousness.

4

Complementary Reflections About Obviousness and Common Sense

This chapter does not aim to be exhaustive but to illustrate the way in which the commentary articles of the French mainstream press take a position in the socio-political field. These positioning essentially use common sense and discursive obviousness rather than rational arguments to convince their readers of their position. It seems to me that we can see in the use of common sense and obviousness the search for an institutionality, a form of institutionalization in discourse, a social legitimation. The first point I would like to discuss is the different levels of obviousness. I distinguished in Sect. 1 two senses of obviousness: the questioned obviousness from the unquestioned obviousness. The second concerns the obviousness used in what the philosophers name “ordinary language,” that is to say everyday language. I came to the conclusion that the ordinary meaning of common sense is made up itself of two types of obviousness: “perceptive obviousness”, that which establishes itself as selfevident, and “social obviousness”, which relies on shared knowledge and beliefs—the minimal social consensus (Guilbert 2009). “Social obviousness” is both expressed by the doxa, by common sense and by social norms—is then obvious what does not derogate from the instituted norms. Then this aspect of social normality is linked to social obviousness and common sense. Both are important for the normalization of conducts which consists in folding back the deviations toward normality, that is to say, what the majority does or thinks (Foucault

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2004). I mean that institutional discourses, like press discourses, participate in the normalization of conducts and in return respect for discursive norms (including journalistic norms) confers the actors—here the journalists—a form of institutionality. When social obviousness which includes, for the majority of the audience, the minimally shared rationality is expressed verbally—it can also express without/within language in routines, rituals, traditions, fashion, for example—it seems that we have what I called discursive obviousness (Guilbert 2007). I thus arrive at the following schema (Fig. 2). I am, of course, interested here in social obviousness (“Minimal social consensus”), and more specifically discursive obviousness, but I also wish to point out that the two types of unexamined obviousness are inextricably linked in everyday life. The second point to which I would like to come back is the paradoxical nature of obviousness and the different stages of the evidentiary process. There is a distinction to do between the idea of obviousness

Common sense

Evidence

Obviousness

Self-evidence

Minimal social consensus

Social norms

Discursive obviousness

Fig. 2 Links between ideas of common sense, obviousness and discursive obviousness

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itself and its use, the sought-after result named the feeling of obviousness (Guilbert 2007, 2014). Here, as any paradox is an injunction according to Watzlawick (1967), obviousness should be recognized but the search for the result must not be noticed. Obviousness is ostentatious under the condition that the search for the result of obviousness is masked. It is therefore necessary to distinguish the notion itself from its aim. This distinction allows to surpass the paradoxical nature of obviousness and at the same time to specify its function as a process (see above) and that which the discourse analysis of obviousness must take into account: the discursive strategies (processes and devices) that seek to naturalize and institutionalize them. Indeed, by appearing as natural proof , discursive obviousness becomes an effective strategy for persuasion: “the strength of obviousness stems from an internal necessity, which under all circumstances demands obedience, obviousness cannot deceive” (Gil 1993, 17). The philosopher Fernando Gil shows, relying on Husserl, rather deals with perceptual obviousness. As we have seen above, his proposition is that obviousness is given to fulfill an expectation of meaning (Gil 1993, 5 and 8). This filling triggers contentment or appeasement which, beyond feelings, is “an intellectual affect” (1993, 11). The appeasement provoked by the obviousness, the feeling of obviousness, is thus sufficient in the search for meaning, it “definitely fills the wait” (1993, 114). These details seem to corroborate the hypothesis that the sought-after result of obviousness is the recognition of a déjà vu, an already known. Obviousness produced by recourse to common sense gives a well-known meaning to the world that without saying (the-taken-for-granted) has the effect of appeasement. Furthermore, obviousness is not only self-sufficient, but it erases doubt and alternative. Obviousness is described as a definitive truth” (1993, 114). So, I can provisionally conclude this chapter by specifying that, after having studied hundreds of editorials and columns, persuasion in of the French mainstream press is to a large extent based on discursive workings and the usage of discursive devices of common sense and obviousness: journalists do not seek to convince but to produce indisputable certainty, the feeling of obviousness, all while masking this goal (Guilbert 2007, 2011). The persuasion using the strength of obviousness is

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therefore a means of manipulation since the journalist is hiding his argumentative aim while making the reader believes that he is not taking a position but only reminding him of common sense. Thus, the process of institutionalization by common sense and obviousness processes aims to simultaneously suspend judgment, questioning or tension (unquestioned obviousness) to guarantee appeasement while relying on doxastic forms or on opinions in order to establish that are nevertheless agonistic as shared certainties. This finding has direct democratic implications, since newspaper columns and editorials play the role of opinion leaders. However, they relay the political discourses by presenting these positions in the form of obviousness. They thus mask the properly political character of government decisions and greatly contribute to their acceptance without any real democratic debate. By using discursive obviousness, mainstream journalism respects the socio-political norms of power and favors its institutionality at the expense of its role in challenging power.

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12 Naturalising Populism as a Collaborative Interactional Practice in Broadcast Media Argyro Kantara

1

Introduction

Populism is a widely debated term both in its ontological sense, what it is–ideology, political logic, discourse, or political style (see De Cleen 2019; Stavrakakis 2017; Wodak and Krzy˙zanowski 2017)—and in its various manifestations, from the right to the left and in the mainstream (Ivaldi et al. 2017; Lorenzetti 2018; Massetti 2018; Montesano Montessori and Morales-Lopez 2019). This chapter aims to contribute to debates in both areas: it will contribute to discussions that examine populism as a political style (Ekström et al. 2018) and discussions that examine the manifestations of mainstream populism in broadcast media (see Bossetta 2017), placing these discussions within the area of institutionality. A. Kantara (B) Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Y. Porsché et al. (eds.), Institutionality, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96969-1_12

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The chapter proposes to understand populism not as a property of politicians’ talk in isolation but as a collaborative achievement of all parties in the interaction: politicians and journalists. In so doing, it brings together media populism studies (see Mazzoleni 2003, 2008) and political communication studies on mainstream populism as political style (see Moffitt and Tormey 2014; Snow and Moffitt 2012) through the lenses of institutional interaction analysis. Following Roth (2002) and Ekström (2002) in their discussion of the functions of question–answer sequences in the knowledge generated by the institution of TV journalism (the epistemology of TV journalism), this chapter argues that the ever-changing question-and-answer practices of TV journalism need to be considered in any discussion of populism and the knowledge the institution of TV journalism produces in interaction with (populist) politicians. With these considerations in mind, this chapter provides empirical evidence for the relationship between the mediatisation of politics and populism (see Manucci 2017) or what the editors of this volume refer to as ‘institutionality and their political concerns”. Although arguments made here are drawn from the Greek context, the methodology used, and the conclusions drawn may be applicable to other national broadcast media as well. The chapter is organised as follows. The first section will offer an overview of mainstream populism as political style and relevant research in the field of broadcast media. This will be followed by a discussion of the relationship between the epistemology of TV journalism and media populism and how media and politics are related to each other in the Greek context, to put the ensuing analysis into perspective. Then, by using data extracts from one-on-one interviews between Greek mainstream political party leaders and journalists, I will demonstrate and discuss how journalists, through their interactional practices, namely their neutralising moves, that is when journalists neutralise politicians’ attacks by agreeing with what was said or by ignoring the attack (Hutchby 1996) in effect softening the attacks, assist mainstream politicians in building a populist identity. I will conclude by suggesting that these neutralising journalistic moves have a twofold effect; firstly, they naturalise mainstream politicians’ populist interactional moves, thus

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enabling those moves to take a legitimate place in institutional interactions. Secondly, by doing so, they do not only assist politicians in building an (interactionally) antagonistic populist persona, but also educate the overhearing audience that, since such performances have entered the ‘standard’ institutional practices of news interviews, they are acceptable. In that sense, the chapter discusses the ways situated interactional institutional practices co-produce mainstream populism as political style, and subsequently generate knowledge. In this chapter I also propose that populist identities should be examined as an activity or feature of political interaction and not as an a priori conceptual definition (see also Gidron and Bonikowski 2013, 25 for a similar suggestion).

2

Mainstream Populism as Political Style

While examining the discourse strategies used by two centre-right political party leaders: ex-Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and ex-Australian Prime Minister John Howard in pre-election speeches in 2003, Snow and Moffitt (2012) notice that creating a division between ‘the people’ and ‘the other’, typical of populist discourse (see Rovira Kaltwasser et al. 2017), manifest in these two mainstream politicians’ talk. Snow and Moffitt introduce the term ‘mainstream populism’ (2012, 272) to describe the populist discourse strategies used by these two politicians. Based on Panizza’s (2009) ideas of ‘populist interventions’ of mainstream politics, and Curran’s (2004) suggestion that mainstreaming of a populist discourse will make it more agreeable to wider audiences, Snow and Moffitt (2012, 274) suggest that the two mainstream political party leaders they examine used populist discourse for electoral success and party building. Later, attempting to fully encompass populism’s fluidity as manifested in mediatised contexts by politicians belonging to different political parties, Moffitt and Tormey (2014) introduced the concept of ‘populism as a political style’. As they claim, viewing populism as a political style has two advantages. Firstly, it frees researchers from the puzzle of populism’s

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ability to appear across the political spectrum and points towards the redefinition of populism (as political style) as potentially a feature of any politicians’ talk. Secondly, it allows us to consider the consequences of the mainstreaming of populism and how it is possible and ‘appropriate’ that politicians move in and out of the populist style to achieve rhetoric ends and electability (Mofitt and Tormey 2014, 392–93). Mofitt and Tormey (2014, 387) define political style as ‘the repertoires of performance that are used to create political relations’ and claim that incorporating the concept of performance with political style enables researchers to examine, among other things, how ways of acting within politics can become the backbone of the public’s political ‘common sense’. This idea tallies with the epistemology of TV journalism (Ekström 2002; Roth 2002) and the knowledge produced through journalists’ and politicians’ institutional interactional practices, an issue that will be discussed in the next section of this chapter. Finally, in their discussion of how populism as political style may be enacted and performed, Moffitt and Tormey (2014, 391–94) and Moffitt (2016, 41–45) identify three stylistic features. First, appeal to ‘the people’ that is, speaking in the name of the common people versus an elite establishment. Secondly, exhibiting bad (interactional) manners, contrary to ‘established’ political culture. And thirdly, performing a sense of crisis, breakdown and threat from ‘others’. The core stylistic feature is an ‘appeal to the people’, around which the two other features are built and from which they gain their legitimacy. In relation to this core stylistic feature and the manifestation of politics as conflict (see also Schoor 2017, 8), in contrast to the usual division between ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’ identified in previous literature on populism (Mudde 2007), Moffitt and Tormey claim that ‘the other’ may emerge as an alterity for the ‘people’. ‘The other’ could be any group or institution (2014, 391), such as the media elite/journalists as this chapter will argue, which is rendered to work against the will of the people.

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281

Previous Research on (Mainstream) Populism as Political Style in Broadcast Media

One of the studies that examined the micro-level features of populist rhetoric thus advancing current understandings of populist political style is Ekström et al.’s (2018) study. Ekström et al. investigate the communicative strategies employed in mediated contexts by right-wing populist politicians in three countries: Greece, France and the UK. In this brief overview, I will focus only on the manifestation of interactional ‘bad manners’ by Florian Philippot (Front Nationale, France), during a televised debate with two mainstream politicians, as it is directly relevant to this chapter. Although not directly stated by the researchers, I would argue that Philippot’s populist style verges on the idea of mainstream populist style—or at least it is not so much associated with the traditionally conceived populist style of right-wing politicians—and because of that, it is indicative of the mainstreaming of populist discourse. Among the techniques used by Philippot to undermine the other two politicians and deviate from conventional rules of televised debates were interruptions that offered evaluative commentaries on what his co-participants were saying, frequently enriched by smiling. As Ekström et al. (2018, 7–8) claim, by going against the normative rules of televised debates, that is by being disruptive and non-verbally expressing amused scepticism in response to others’ talk, Phillippot undermines and makes fun of his coparticipants, manipulating interactional resources, to set himself against his ‘elite’ political opponents.1 Another study that advanced our understanding of the concept of (mainstream) populism as political style in mediated environments, is Bossetta’s (2017) examination of the debate performances of the British politicians Nick Clegg (ex-leader of Liberal Democrats) and Nigel

1 Hall et al. (2016) have made a similar claim in relation to the populist style of Donald Trump, focusing on his use of gesture and humour to caricature his opponents and provide comedic entertainment.

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Farage (ex-leader of UKIP) during two debates leading to the 2014 EU elections. Although Bossetta himself does not classify his study as one that discusses mainstream populism as political style, I would suggest that the research results and conclusions drawn indicate that it is. More specifically, Bossetta found that Nick Clegg, while maintaining a non-populist ideology, after losing the first debate, adopted a populist style in the second, in order to outperform a populist politician. As he claims: ‘this study provides further evidence that […] the populist style has penetrated the mainstream in British politics’ (Bossetta 2017, 732). Based on this conclusion, the studies done by Bossetta and Moffitt and Tormey both strongly suggest that populism as political style is employed by mainstream politicians for electoral gains (similar claims have also been made by Bale 2013 for mainstream right-wing politicians in Britain and by Mayaffre and Scholz 2017 about Sarkozy in France). Elsewhere (Kantara 2020) I provide data-driven support for the notion of mainstream populism as political style, by examining Greek mainstream political party leaders’ responses to journalistic adversarial questioning. To account for mainstream politicians’ ‘aggressive’ responses, I employ the notion of conversational violence (Luginbühl 2007, 1374), that is the employment of interactional strategies that portray the other interlocutor negatively and restrict their ability to control the direction the conversation is taking (Luginbühl 2007, 1377–85). My analysis reveals that, when challenged, Greek mainstream politicians breached the ‘standard’ way of doing interviews and politics through their interactional bad manners by employing one, or a combination, of the following techniques (which I call counterchallenges to differentiate them from resisting answering techniques identified in previous conversation analytic research)2 :

2 Counterchallenges issued by mainstream politicians in my study, differ from resistance techniques identified in conversation analytic research (see for instance Clayman and Heritage 2002, 257–69; Rendle-Short 2007, 398–402) or equivocation techniques (Bull 2003, 114–22). This is the case, as the resistance or equivocation techniques identified in previous research, involved sidestepping a question or refusing to answer it, but not attacking the person asking it and/or not restricting the other interlocutor’s rights and role in the conversation. In previous research, politicians, when challenging journalists, did not construct them in personal terms but either

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1. Asking a question instead of answering one. 2. Issuing personal attacks regarding the standard of knowledge or competence of the journalist. 3. Challenging the validity of the journalist’s adversarial question. Combining research on conversational violence, on (mainstream) populism as political style and on the ways politicians attack journalists (e.g. Clayman and Heritage 2002, 140–48), I argue that Greek mainstream political party leaders employed conversational violence and exhibited bad interactional manners in order to outperform journalists, treating them as ‘the other’; i.e. members of a ‘corrupt media elite’. Doing so enabled Greek mainstream politicians to portray themselves in a positive light and their ‘opponents’ in a negative light, an interactional technique typical of right-wing populists (see Bonnafous 1998 in relation to the populist style of Jean-Marie Le Pen). In effect, I have argued that a populist identity should not be necessarily considered as an inherent quality of specific politicians or parties but instead it could be conceptualised as an activity or feature of political interaction, an idea that will be further elaborated in this chapter. My results support similar research (see Bossetta 2017; Meinert 2019) arguing that mainstream politicians can dip in and out of populism as a political style for electoral gains and that mainstream populism as political style is a seemingly well-rooted practice in political communication. That seems to tally with Gidron and Bonikowski’s notion of ‘populist contagion’, the idea that ‘populist discourse has migrated from the fridges to the core of the political spectrum” (2013, 26). In Kantara (2020) I also touch upon the role of journalists’ interactional moves in this process, an issue that I am going to further explore in the present chapter.

raised them in passing and/or produced a justification for not cooperating with the journalists in the Question–Answer format of the news interview (Dickerson 2001, 203).

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Media Populism and the Epistemology of TV Journalism

Through the selection and broadcast of news items to millions of viewers, TV journalism produces knowledge that influences other social institutions, as these selected news items are in turn often cited and inform public discourse. This may be described as the knowledge-generating aspect of TV journalism, or epistemology of knowledge in Ekström’s (2002) terms. In a sociological study of knowledge-producing practices […] epistemology […] refers to the rules, routines and institutionalized procedures that operate within a social setting and decide the form of the knowledge produced and the knowledge claims expressed (or implied). […] the legitimacy of journalism is intimately bound up with claims of knowledge and truth. It is thanks to this claim of being able to offer the citizenry important and reliable knowledge that journalism justifies its position as a constitutive institution in a democratic society. (Ekström 2002, 260, emphases in original)

Both Ekström (2002) and Roth (2002) argue that epistemologies are rooted within institutional practices. In the case of TV journalism, and in news interviews in particular, the way the news interview is conducted, produces knowledge and classifies reality. In this process all the actors involved play a more or less active role in the knowledge production; interviewers through their questions and institutional role produce knowledge for the overhearing audience and the interviewees through their responses do likewise.3 Furthermore, as Ekström (2002, 277) argues, the knowledge claims of journalism are legitimised through concrete practices; it is by making use of set rules, techniques and genre conventions that the public is 3

The way I understand and use the term “overhearing audience”, as the recipient of public talk, follows Warner’s (2002, 422) conceptualisation of the public as addressees and participants in any public discourse. In that sense politicians’ public talk does not only address the audience that recognises themselves as realising the world in the way articulated, i.e., their supporters, but more importantly addresses an “indefinite overhearing” audience and “hope(s) that people will find themselves in it” (Warner 2002, 418).

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persuaded of the trustworthiness of the knowledge produced. In the case of news interviews this is achieved by both parties adhering to news interview conventions, especially the turn taking system of news interviews. As Roth (2002, 359) puts it: ‘[…] aspects of turn design do not merely REFLECT a social distribution of knowledge; they partly CONSTITUTE it’ (emphases in the original). Through the social practice of institutional talk-in-interaction, interactants create a social world in which knowledge is produced and recognised as legitimate knowledge by means of the orderly practices typical of the TV journalism genre. What is the role of populism in any discussion of the epistemology of TV journalism? As the media are important message and image dissemination channels for politicians and a source of information for citizens, they significantly contribute to the streamlining of politicians’ messages and performances. As Mazzoleni (2003, 2) notes, the mass media themselves may intentionally or unintentionally be players in this political game by endorsing or opposing political, including populist, performances (see also Mazzoleni 2008). Mazzoleni’s observations tally with the role of set institutional practices of TV journalism in relation to its knowledge-producing practices; if journalists assist (populist) politicians in their populist performances, the media is likely to play an important role in legitimatising populism. This legitimatisation process is enabled through TV journalism practices and question–answer sequences, the focus of this chapter. So, if through institutional norms of televised interviews, politicians portray an interactionally antagonistic populist persona, journalists through their reactions may validate or invalidate this portrayal, subsequently co-producing knowledge in relation to acceptable norms of political behaviour and doing politics; or as the editors of this volume put it, the (dynamic) institutionality that raises political concerns.

5

Data and Methodology

The extracts presented in the next section, come from one-on-one televised interviews from the double 2012 Greek general elections campaigns. They involve interviews between the three key political

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players of the period (Antonis Samaras, the then leader of New Democracy, a conservative party, Evangelos Venizelos the then leader of PASOK, a socialist party, and Alexis Tsipras, leader of SYRIZA, Coalition of the Radical Left) and leading journalists of a private TV channel (MEGA) and the public broadcast corporation (NET). The interviews have been transcribed and analysed qualitatively using a conversation analytic perspective and are presented in the original language, alongside my translations into English. The unit of analysis are extended sequences of journalistic adversarial questions, politicians’ counterchallenges (i.e., interactional moves that exhibit interactional ‘bad manners’) and journalists’ neutralising moves (i.e. when journalists neutralise politicians’ attacks by agreeing with what was said or by ignoring the attack) (see also Hutchby 1996).

6

Data Analysis

The first extract comes from an interview between Evangelos Venizelos, the then president of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and Elli Stai working in the public TV channel (NET). It was broadcast on 1 May 2012. Points of interest in all extracts are indicated in italics. Notation particulars can be found at the end of the chapter. Extract 1: Journalist answers politician’s questions 1

ημ:

2

oλ:

o αρχηγ´oς τoυ πρωτoυ ´ κ´oμματoς. Aν μαλιστα ´ τo κ´oμμα αυτ´o šχει ´ μια:, σημαντικη´ διαϕoρα. (0.1) δεν ε´ιναι αυτoδι↓κα´ιως o πρωθυπoυ↑ργ´oς? ´ εαν, ´ [μπoρε´ι να γ´ινει, εαν, εαν ´ μπoρε´ι, εαν ´ μπoρε´ι ´ μπoρε´ι να γ´ινει μoν-, εαν να γ´ινει μoν-, εαν ´ μπoρε´ι να γ´ινει]↓μ´oνo τoυ.(.)

Jour:

the leader of the first party. Especially if this party wins with a:, significant majority. (0.1) is not the ↓rightful prime ↑minister?

Pol:

if, [it can happen, if, if it can, if, it can happen o-, if it can happen o-, if it can happen] on its ↓own.(.) (continued)

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(continued) 3

ημ:

4

oλ:

5

ημ:

6

oλ:

7 8 9 10

ημ: oλ: ημ: oλ:

11

ημ:

[↑δεν θα ε´ιναι o κ. ´ αμα↑ρας ´ δηλα↑δη´ εαν τo κ´oμμα τoυ ε´ιναι πρωτo ´ και με σημαντι↑κη´ διαϕoρα?] ´ o κ. αμαρας ´ ↓παντως ´ αρνηθηκε ´ στoν αρχηγ´o τoυ ασoκ, να ↑ε´ιναι o πρωθυπoυ↓ργ´oς την πρoη↑γoμενη ´ ϕo↓ρα´ αυτ´o ε´ιναι μια-δ-(.) ´ περ´ιoδoς,= πρoηγoμενη =zτ ι ενν oε´ιτ ε π ρ oηγ o´ μενη π ερ´ιoδ oς?z= ´ =με διαϕ oρετ ικ α´ ντατα.= =τ ι ντ ατ ´ α;= =τ ωρα ´ θα υπ α[ρχει ´ μ´ια,] [χα,χα,χα] τ ι ντ ατ ´ α?= =τωρα ´ θα υπαρχει ´ £μ´ιαμα£ για αυ↓τ´o σας τα ρωταω ´ ↑εσας, ´ [για να ´ παρω ´ απαντησεις.]

Jour:

[↑won’t it be Mr Sama↑ras if his party gains significant majority and is the ↑first in people’s votes?]

Pol:

Mr Samaras ↓though did not agree that the president of Pasok,↑should be the Prime ↓Minister ↑last ↓time

Jour:

this is a-p- (.) previous period,= =zwhat do you mean by a different period?z=

Pol:

Jour: Pol: Jour: Pol: Jour:

=with different data.= =what kind of data?= =now there would [be a,] [ha, ha, ha] what kind of data?= =now there would be £a-but£ ↓that’s why I am asking ↑you, [to get answers.]

In this extract, the politician in turn 6, after having resisted answering the journalist’s adversarial questions in turns 1 and 3, responds to her question in line 5, a question that challenges the politicians’ response (Greatbatch 1986a, 1986b), by asking her a question in return ‘τ ι ενν oε´ιτ ε πρ oηγ o´ μενη περ´ιoδ oς? –what do you mean by a previous period?” Such strategies have been documented in previous research (Bull 2003, 115; Kantara 2012, 184, Gialambouki and Pavlidou 2019, 21–22), which has indicated that politicians may resist interviewer adversarialness by asking a question instead of answering one. Asking a question, involves an apparent power and role reversal (in theory journalists ask questions and politicians answer them, not the opposite) and a question–answer ‘standard’ interview practice breach. It also shifts the focus of the interview from the politician and their non-answer, to the journalist, as it questions the latter’s knowledge and

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thus their legitimacy to occupy the role of questioner.4 As discussed in Kantara (2020), moves like these that attack the journalist and breach ‘standard’ ways of ‘doing’ interviews, are instances of conversational violence exhibiting bad interactional manners and are indications of mainstream populism as political style. In this extract, the politician’s question/attack in turn 6, initiates a series of questions and answers until turn 10, where the repetition of the politician’s question, further enriched by the use laughter that provides an implicit commentary (Romaniuk 2013b) on the journalist’s answer in previous turn ‘[χ α, χ α, χ α] τ ι ντ ατ ´ α? –[ha, ha, ha] what kind of data?’, that eventually results in the journalist accounting for/justifying her counter in turn 11. The politician’s questions that escalate in their level of challenge—from a question uttered in decreased volume in turn 6, indicated by the use of decreased signs (zz), arguably testing the waters, to laughter, demonstrating his power to ridicule, are reminiscent of the populist style adopted by Florian Philippot, as discussed by Ekström et al. (2018). I would further argue that the politician’s moves could not fully work as indications of mainstream populism as political style if they were not, indirectly, supported by the journalist. This is the case as, by providing answers to the content of the politician’s attacks, in turns 7 and 9, Elli Stai accepts the role reversal and allows Evangelos Venizelos, even if only momentarily, to take the upper hand in the conversation, thus assisting him in his interactionally antagonistic populist performance. So, although strictly speaking the journalist does not ignore the politician’s attacks nor agrees with the attacks—journalistic practices that soften the other interlocutor’s attacks, what Hutchby (1996) calls neutralising moves—by playing along in this power and role-reversal game, and answering the politician’s questions (instead of pointing out to the overhearing audience that her role is not to answer but ask questions as she did in turn 11) the politicians’ counterchallenges against are neutralised. The second extract comes from an interview between Antonis Samaras the then leader of New Democracy (a conservative party), and Yiannis 4 For an overview on basic ground rules of news interviews see Clayman and Heritage (2002, 95–149).

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Pretenteris a journalist working for a commercial TV channel (MEGA TV). It was broadcast on 9 April 2012. Before the excerpt, after the politician had already evaded answering, the journalist exhibited persistence by going back to his original question: whether one of the problems in collaborating with PASOK in case the politician’s party did not achieve an absolute majority, was that they would agree on him becoming the prime minister (instead of the PASOK leader). The politician evaded answering the repeated question again and talked about why he wanted the absolute majority. At this point the journalist overlaps, that is, he talks at the same time as the politician (Clayman and Heritage 2002). Extract 2: Journalist ignores politician’s attack 1

ημ:

[μoυ ξεϕ-, ´ μoυ μoυ μoυ] μoυ ξεϕγατε ´ o´ μως λ´ιγo στην ε↓ρωτηση, ´ γιατ´ι η ε↑ρωτηση ´ αϕoρoσε ´ τη πρωθυπoυργ´ια ↓αμαρα= ´

Jour:

2 3

oλ: ημ:

Pol: Jour:

4

oλ:

5 6

ημ: oλ:

=zναιz= =δηλαδη, ´ η o´ πoια συνεν↑ν´oηση, πρo¨Uπoθšτει την πρωθυπoυρ↑γ´ια αμα↓ρα, ´ >εϕ´oσoν βšβαια ε´ιναι, πρωτo ´ ↓κ´oμμα η Nšα ημoκρα↑τ´ιαif of course, ↑New Democracy is the first ↓party