A corpus-assisted study of the discourse marker well as an indicator of judges' institutional roles in court cases with litigants in person

In this paper, I concentrate on court cases with litigants in person (lay people who act on their own behalf in legal proceedings without a counsel or solicitor) and discuss the challenges of building a corpus of courtroom discourse where it is crucial to distinguish between speakers due to their distinct institutional roles. The corpus incorporates seven sub-corpora of verbatim transcripts from different court cases with litigants in person and comprises over eleven-million tokens. The focus of this paper is on the interplay between the legal and lay discourse types and how judges project their institutional roles through well-initiated turns directed at litigants in person and counsels. As a versatile discourse marker, well provides a good opportunity to explore how judges have to adapt their roles to ensure lay litigants in person receive the necessary support and that their lack of competence does not impede on the fairness of the proceedings. Given the breadth and importance of the topic of litigation in person, I discuss how the tools and approaches of corpus linguistics can be helpful in this multi-disciplinary area where multiple functions and uses of individual linguistic features need to be explored in depth.

Contradictions and institutional convergences: Genre as method

My purpose here is to put forward a conception of genre as a way to conduct Futures Studies. To demonstrate the method, I present some examples of contemporary political and corporate discourses and contextualise them in broader institutional and historical settings. I elaborate the method further by giving examples of ‘genre chaining’ and ‘genre hybridity’ (Fairclough 1992 2000) to show how past, present, and future change can be viewed through the lens of genre.

Market-Based Instruments for ecosystem services: institutional innovation or renovation?

Recent years have seen widespread experimentation with market-based instruments (MBIs) for the provision of environmental goods and ecosystem services. However, little attention has been paid to their design or to the effects of the underlying pro-market narrative on environmental policy instruments. The purpose of this article is to analyze the emergence and dissemination of the term "market-based instruments" applied to the provision of environmental services and to assess to what extent the instruments associated are genuinely innovative. The recommendation to develop markets can lead in practice to a variety of institutional forms, as we show it based on the example of payments for environmental services (PES) and biodiversity offsets, two very different mechanisms that are both presented in the literature as MBIs. Our purpose is to highlight the gap between discourse and practice in connection with MBIs.

Beyond the silence : institutional racism, social welfare and swiss citizenship

Cette thèse doctorale étudie le rôle de la citoyenneté Suisse et le modèle libérale de l'Etat social dans la production du racisme institutionnel au sein des services sociaux en Suisse. Cette thèse pose la question comment le régime de la citoyenneté Suisse rend possible et contraint les travailleurs sociaux à racialiser et discriminer leur clients avec des différences culturelles alors que les normes de l'aide sociale (normes de CSIAS) ne prévoient pas des traitements différentialistes selon la culture ou l'origine. Le modèle théorique du racisme institutionnel développé se passe sur une approche néo- institutionaliste et des ethnie and racial studies, prenant en compte le niveau individuel, collectif et institutionnel. En incluant ces deux approches, on dépasse le déterminisme des structuralistes dans les études sur le racisme institutionnel. Cette recherche qualitative montre que les travailleurs sociaux utilisent les ressources de la citoyenneté Suisse, de l'Etat social Suisse et leur expériences personnelles quand ils interagissent avec des clients. En plus, cette thèse démontre que le workfare logique en combinaison avec l'idée de l'assimilation culturelle rend possible la production d'un discours sur la nécessité de mériter d'être un membre de la communauté nationale et d'accéder à l'aide sociale. Cette compréhension néo-libérale de la citoyenneté renforce et légitime les travailleurs sociaux de racialiser et pratiquer la discrimination à l'égard de leurs clients et les rend incapable de développer une réflexivité critique. Toutefois, cette thèse montre également que les travailleurs sociaux produisent du travail social interculturel s'ils ont pu développer une telle réflexivité critique dans les institutions de l'aide sociale qui mettent en avant une conception "individuelle" de l'aide sociale.-Cette thèse vise à aller au-delà du silence qui constitue les débats publiques et la recherche sur le racisme au sein des institutions publiques en Suisse. - This thesis questions the role of the Swiss citizenship regime and the Swiss liberal social welfare model in the production of institutional racism in social services in Switzerland. Considering the absence of intercultural formal guidelines in the norms of social welfare (SKOS norms), this research investigates how the Swiss citizenship regime constrains and enables social workers to racialise and discriminate against their clients with cultural differences. This thesis develops a model of institutional racism, taking into account ethnic and racial studies and a neo-institutionalist approach on institutions, addressing the individual, collective and institutional level. In this framework, this thesis allows to overcome the structuralist determinism in the studies on institutional racism. Based on a qualitative inquiry, this research shows that social workers use the resources from the Swiss citizenship regime, social welfare model and their personal experiences when they interact with their clients. This study also shows that the workfare logic in combination with the idea of cultural assimilation enables to produce a discourse on deserving social welfare and earning membership to the national community. This neo-liberal citizenship understanding reinforces and legitimises social workers to racialise and discriminate against their clients and hinders them to develop critical reflexivity. However, this thesis also shows that social workers are able to produce intercultural social work when they could develop such a reflexivity in social services with an "individual" social welfare conceptions. This thesis aims to go beyond a persisting silence regarding public debates and research on racism in public institutions in Switzerland.

Conservation banking and the economization of nature : an institutional analysis

During the last decade, conservation banking mechanisms have emerged in the environmental discourse as new market instruments to promote biodiversity conservation. Compensation was already provided for in environmental law in many countries, as the last step of the mitigation hierarchy. The institutional arrangements developed in this context have been redefined and reshaped as market-based instruments (MBIs). As such, they are discursively disentangled from the complex legal-economic nexus they are part of. Monetary transactions are given prominence and tend to be presented as stand alone agreements, whereas they take place in the context of prescriptive regulations. The pro-market narrative featuring conservation banking systems as market-like arrangements as well as their denunciation as instances of nature commodification tend to obscure their actual characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to describe the latter, adopting an explicitly analytical stance on these complex institutional arrangements and their performative dimensions. Beyond the discourse supporting them and notwithstanding the diversity of national policies and regulatory frameworks for compensation, the constitutive force of these mechanisms probably lies in their ability to redefine control, power and the distribution of costs and in their impacts in terms of land use rather than in their efficiency.

Perspectives interculturelles et interlinguistiques sur le discours académique – Crosscultural and Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Academic Discourse. Volume 1

The Department of French Studies of the University of Turku (Finland) organized an International Bilingual Conference on Crosscultural and Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Academic Discourse from 2022 May 2005. The event hosted specialists on Academic Discourse from Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, and the USA. This book is the first volume in our series of publications on Academic Discourse (AD hereafter). The following pages are composed of selected papers from the conference and focus on different aspects and analytical frameworks of Academic Discourse. One of the motivations behind organizing the conference was to examine and expand research on AD in different languages. Another one was to question to what extent academic genres are culturebound and language specific or primarily field or domain specific. The research carried out on AD has been mainly concerned with the use of English in different academic settings for a long time now – mainly written contexts – and at the expense of other languages. Alternatively the academic genre conventions of English and English speaking world have served as a basis for comparison with other languages and cultures. We consider this first volume to be a strong contribution to the spreading out of researches based on other languages than English in AD, namely Finnish, French, Italian, Norwegian and Romanian in this book. All the following articles have a strong link with the French language: either French is constitutive of the AD corpora under examination or the article was written in French. The structure of the book suggests and provides evidence that the concept of AD is understood and tackled to varying degrees by different scholars. Our first volume opens up the discussion on what AD is and backs dissemination, overlapping and expansion of current research questions and methodologies. The book is divided into three parts and contains four articles in English and six articles in French. The papers in part one and part two cover what we call the prototypical genre of written AD, i.e. the research article. Part one follows up on issues linked to the 13 Research Article (RA hereafter). Kjersti Fløttum asks wether a typical RA exists and concentrates on authors’ voices in RA (self and other dimensions), whereas Didriksen and Gjesdal’s article focuses on individual variation of the author’s voice in RA. The last article in this section is by Nadine Rentel and deals with evaluation in the writing of RA. Part two concentrates on the teaching and learning of AD within foreign language learning, another more or less canonical genre of AD. Two aspects of writing are covered in the first two articles: foreign students’ representations on rhetorical traditions (Hidden) and a contrastive assessment of written exercices in French and Finnish in Higher Education (Suzanne). The last contribution in this section on AD moves away from traditional written forms and looks at how argumentation is constructed in students’ oral presentations (Dervin and Fauveau). The last part of the book continues the extension by featuring four articles written in French exploring institutional and scientific discourses. Institutional discourses under scrutiny include the European Bologna Process (Galatanu) and Romanian reform texts (Moilanen). As for scientific discourses, the next paper in this section deconstructs an ideological discourse on the didactics of French as a foreign language (Pescheux). Finally, the last paper in part three reflects on varied forms of AD at university (Defays). We hope that this book will add some fuel to continue discussing diverse forms of and approches to AD – in different languages and voices! No need to say that with the current upsurge in academic mobility, reflecting on crosscultural and crosslinguistic AD has just but started.

The third transformation of Japan: An institutional narrative on agglomeration economies in abenomics

Objective of the study The aim of this study is to understand the institutional implications in Abenomics in a spatial context, the contemporary economic reform taking place in Japan, which is to finally end over two decades of economic malaise. For theoretical perspective of choice, this study explores a synthesis of institutionalism as the main approach, complemented by economies of agglomeration in spatial economics, or New Economic Geography (NEG). The outcomes include a narrative with implications for future research, as well as possible future implications for the economy of Japan, itself. The narrative seeks to depict the dialogue between public discourse and governmental communication in order to create a picture of how this phenomenon is being socially constructed. This is done by studying the official communications by the Cabinet along with public media commentary on respective topics. The reform is studied with reference to historical socio-cultural, economic evolution of Japan, which in turn, is explored through a literature review. This is to assess the unique institutional characteristics of Japan pertinent to reform. Research method This is a social and exploratory qualitative study – an institutional narrative case study. The methodological approach was kept practical: in addition to literature review, a narrative, thematic content analysis with structural emphasis was used to construct the contemporary narrative based on the Cabinet communication. This was combined with practical analytic tools borrowed from critical discourse analysis, which were utilized to assess the implicit intertextual agenda within sources. Findings What appears to characterize the discourse is status quo bias that comes in multiple forms. The bias is also coded in the institutions surrounding the reform, wherein stakeholders have vested interests in protecting the current state of affairs. This correlates with uncertainty avoidance characteristic to Japan. Japan heeds the international criticism to deregulate on a rhetorical level, but consistent with history, the Cabinet solutions appear increasingly bureaucratic. Hence, the imposed western information-age paradigm of liberal cluster agglomeration seems ill-suited to Japan which lacks risk takers and a felicitous entrepreneur culture. The Japanese, however, possess vast innovative potential ascribed to some institutional practices and traits, but restrained by others. The derived conclusion is to study the successful intrapreneur cases in Japanese institutional setting as a potential benchmark for Japan specific cluster agglomeration, and a solution to its structural problems impeding growth.

Analysing institutional partnerships in development: a contract between equals or a loaded process?

Partnerships are complex, diverse and subtle relationships, the nature of which changes with time, but they are vital for the functioning of the development chain. This paper reviews the meaning of partnership between development institutions as well as some of the main approaches taken to analyse the relationships. The latter typically revolve around analyses based on power, discourse, interdependence and functionality. The paper makes the case for taking a multianalytical approach to understanding partnership but points out three problem areas: identifying acceptable/unacceptable trade-offs between characteristics of partnership, the analysis of multicomponent partnerships (where one partner has a number of other partners) and the analysis of long-term partnership. The latter is especially problematic for long-term partnerships between donors and field agencies that share an underlying commitment based on religious beliefs. These problems with current methods of analysing partnership are highlighted by focusing upon the Catholic Church-based development chain, linking donors in the North (Europe) and their field partners in the South (Abuja Ecclesiastical Province, Nigeria). It explores a narrated history of a relationship with a single donor spanning 35 years from the perspective of one partner (the field agency).

Private climate change reporting: an emerging discourse of risk and opportunity?

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the nature of the emerging discourse of private climate change reporting, which takes place in one-on-one meetings between institutional investors and their investee companies. Design/methodology/approach – Semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives from 20 UK investment institutions to derive data which was then coded and analysed, in order to derive a picture of the emerging discourse of private climate change reporting, using an interpretive methodological approach, in addition to explorative analysis using NVivo software. Findings – The authors find that private climate change reporting is dominated by a discourse of risk and risk management. This emerging risk discourse derives from institutional investors' belief that climate change represents a material risk, that it is the most salient sustainability issue, and that their clients require them to manage climate change-related risk within their portfolio investment. It is found that institutional investors are using the private reporting process to compensate for the acknowledged inadequacies of public climate change reporting. Contrary to evidence indicating corporate capture of public sustainability reporting, these findings suggest that the emerging private climate change reporting discourse is being captured by the institutional investment community. There is also evidence of an emerging discourse of opportunity in private climate change reporting as the institutional investors are increasingly aware of a range of ways in which climate change presents material opportunities for their investee companies to exploit. Lastly, the authors find an absence of any ethical discourse, such that private climate change reporting reinforces rather than challenges the “business case” status quo. Originality/value – Although there is a wealth of sustainability reporting research, there is no academic research on private climate change reporting. This paper attempts to fill this gap by providing rich interview evidence regarding the nature of the emerging private climate change reporting discourse.

Private climate change reporting: a discourse of risk and opportunity

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the nature of the emerging discourse of private climate change reporting, which takes place in one-on-one meetings between institutional investors and their investee companies. Design/methodology/approach – Semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives from 20 UK investment institutions to derive data which was then coded and analysed, in order to derive a picture of the emerging discourse of private climate change reporting, using an interpretive methodological approach, in addition to explorative analysis using NVivo software. Findings – The authors find that private climate change reporting is dominated by a discourse of risk and risk management. This emerging risk discourse derives from institutional investors' belief that climate change represents a material risk, that it is the most salient sustainability issue, and that their clients require them to manage climate change-related risk within their portfolio investment. It is found that institutional investors are using the private reporting process to compensate for the acknowledged inadequacies of public climate change reporting. Contrary to evidence indicating corporate capture of public sustainability reporting, these findings suggest that the emerging private climate change reporting discourse is being captured by the institutional investment community. There is also evidence of an emerging discourse of opportunity in private climate change reporting as the institutional investors are increasingly aware of a range of ways in which climate change presents material opportunities for their investee companies to exploit. Lastly, the authors find an absence of any ethical discourse, such that private climate change reporting reinforces rather than challenges the “business case” status quo. Originality/value – Although there is a wealth of sustainability reporting research, there is no academic research on private climate change reporting. This paper attempts to fill this gap by providing rich interview evidence regarding the nature of the emerging private climate change reporting discourse.

Institutional legacies and capabilities: work practices and employment relations in Portugal and Mozambique

This is a study of institutional change and continuity, comparing the trajectories followed by Mozambique and its formal colonial power Portugal in HRM, based on two surveys of firm level practices. The colonial power sought to extend the institutions of the metropole in the closing years of its rule, and despite all the adjustments and shocks that have accompanied Mozambique’s post-independence years, the country continues to retain institutional features and associated practices from the past. This suggests that there is a post-colonial impact on human resource management. The implications for HRM theory are that ambitious attempts at institutional substitution may have less dramatic effects than is commonly assumed. Indeed, we encountered remarkable similarities between the two countries in HRM practices, implying that features of supposedly fluid or less mature institutional frameworks (whether in Africa or the Mediterranean world) may be sustained for protracted periods of time, pressures to reform notwithstanding. This highlights the complexities of continuities which transcend formal rules; as post-colonial theories alert us, informal conventions and embedded discourse may result in the persistence of informal power and subordination, despite political and legal changes.

The Nine Circles of Surveillance Hell: An Institutional View of Information Flows and Information Threats in Libraries

In the past few years, libraries have started to design public programs that educate patrons about different tools and techniques to protect personal privacy. But do end user solutions provide adequate safeguards against surveillance by corporate and government actors? What does a comprehensive plan for privacy entail in order that libraries live up to their privacy values? In this paper, the authors discuss the complexity of surveillance architecture that the library institution might confront when seeking to defend the privacy rights of patrons. This architecture consists of three main parts: physical or material aspects, logical characteristics, and social factors of information and communication flows in the library setting. For each category, the authors will present short case studies that are culled from practitioner experience, research, and public discourse. The case studies probe the challenges faced by the library—not only when making hardware and software choices, but also choices related to staffing and program design. The paper shows that privacy choices intersect not only with free speech and chilling effects, but also with questions that concern intellectual property, organizational development, civic engagement, technological innovation, public infrastructure, and more. The paper ends with discussion of what libraries will require in order to sustain and improve efforts to serve as stewards of privacy in the 21st century.

The illuminist discourse of the digital divide: a critic to the Post-Fordist Informatic Mundaneum from Knoxville, Tennessee

This article discusses the project of the Information Society and the discourses that undergo it, as part of a political and ideological conception universalized by those countries that created and dominate computer technology, which is in turn is aligned with the Post-Fordist industrial capitalist order and its emphasis on economic accumulation and consumerism. We explain how information technology creates routines and legitimate social orders, taking for analyzes the case of the Clinton-Gore policy in the United States, when the discourse of the computer society was associated with the development and social welfare. This association is revealed in the speech made by Clinton in the city of Knoxville in year 1996. There we see the beginnings of the concern about the Digital Divide as a new form of "social disease" that prevents the passage to a better world, focused on productivity, accumulation and consumption in information-dense societies. This generates a clash between the industrial-graph-centric world and the oral-pre-industrial communities, as a result of attempting to transplant the institutional forms of the developed West. We explain the pillars of the new computerized order, and how they replaced previous epic narratives creating techno-deterministic or techno-phobic discourses in prejudice of more critical approaches. We identify the effects such deterministic discourses that connote the association between the Information Society, welfare and development, questioning the urgency of deploying this system at global level without profound critical discussion, clear goals focused on the benefit of the human beings, and the open participation of the users of the system.

Institutional Processes and Discursive Strategies: Rhetoric and Vocabulary Analysis of CSR and Sustainability

The candidate tackled an important issue in contemporary management: the role of CSR and Sustainability. The research proposal focused on a longitudinal and inductive research, directed to specify the evolution of CSR and contribute to the new institutional theory, in particular institutional work framework, and to the relation between institutions and discourse analysis. The documental analysis covers all the evolution of CSR, focusing also on a number of important networks and associations. Some of the methodologies employed in the thesis have been employed as a consequence of data analysis, in a truly inductive research process. The thesis is composed by two section. The first section mainly describes the research process and the analyses results. The candidates employed several research methods: a longitudinal content analysis of documents, a vocabulary research with statistical metrics as cluster analysis and factor analysis, a rhetorical analysis of justifications. The second section puts in relation the analysis results with theoretical frameworks and contributions. The candidate confronted with several frameworks: Actor-Network-Theory, Institutional work and Boundary Work, Institutional Logic. Chapters are focused on different issues: a historical reconstruction of CSR; a reflection about symbolic adoption of recurrent labels; two case studies of Italian networks, in order to confront institutional and boundary works; a theoretical model of institutional change based on contradiction and institutional complexity; the application of the model to CSR and Sustainability, proposing Sustainability as a possible institutional logic.