Ola Svenonius (Södertörn University)

Surveillance is a tension-ridden field of activity. In light of the European political past, surveillance activities have been considered highly controversial and therefore subject of much debate and regulation. Nevertheless surveillance as a technique is used pervasively in most European countries. One area where especially camera surveillance has been widely applied is the public transport sector, where this type of social control is applied almost by proxy, and it is in the technical forefront regarding techniques such as face recognition.
However, due to the controversial nature if surveillance such practices are not necessarily self- evident and the need to justify the use of cameras has been high. This legitimation of surveillance, justifying a practice that runs at the core of the relationship between citizens and the state, has been dealt with in quite different ways in different countries. This paper focuses on the discursive devices used by transport providers and -authorities to legitimate surveillance in Berlin and Stockholm. The paper is part of a larger study on camera surveillance in Poland, Germany, and Sweden, and the paper presents preliminary findings in interview and public document data from two of the cases. The results point toward distinct ways of justifying surveillance - with reference to the specific of the practice itself - and of opposing surveillance - with reference to the general discourse on statehood and citizenship in each context. Thus, the paper highlights not only the problematic of justification but also those of resistance.

J. A. Dawson (East Carolina University)

Harvey argues that society is moving from Fordism principles of mass production to flexible accumulation in a global economy [2008]. Fairclough defines this transition as a neoliberal economic discourse largely built on flexibility—flexibility of production, workforce, and finance [2008]. Whereas the Henry Ford model was based on mass production, the just-in-time model represents the new flexible model. Employees are now used to telecommuting, working part-time, for short-term assignments, and participating in temporary or job-sharing arrangements. A new focus is also placed on employee re-skilling and re-training. Even the circulation of finance has been more flexible as noted by the financial crisis that affected every world economy recently.

Given the economy, layoffs are happening everywhere, and organizations have different strategies for communicating and announcing the layoffs to employees. I analyze several layoff memos that were sent to employees via email by the CEOs of Yahoo, Time, and Microsoft. With a socio-political stance and theoretical framework of flexible accumulation, using Fairclough’s approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, I found instances of the use of ‘we’ and ‘our’ juxtapositioned against ‘you’ and ‘your’ creating hegemonic and legitimized ideologies that affect not only the dislocated workers but the public policy that governs the process of layoffs as well.

Peter Skilling (University of Auckland)

In 2001, a Government-appointed Royal Commission facilitated a national debate on the issue of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in New Zealand. Its conclusions, while predictably ambivalent, were used by the incumbent Labour Party-led Government as the basis and justification for its eventual policy decisions. In this paper I analyse the major discourses that were deployed in these debates, identifying their various models of justification and showing how they referred themselves to broader discourses. I pay particular attention to the ways in which these divergent discourses simultaneously invoked and instantiated certain visions of national identity.

In broad terms, GMO advocates in New Zealand appealed to market rationalities (a hybrid mix of the market and the industrial worlds, to use the terms of Boltanski and Thevenot (2006)) and drew on tropes of efficiency, pragmatism and utilitarianism that run deep in New Zealand's settler society. Opponents appealed to civic, common-good rationalities but also, quite strongly, to an idea of the inspired world as they made arguments based on inherent rather than instrumental value. Indigenous, environmental and religious groups, for example, based their arguments on the inviolability of created life, while also referring to the place of a mythically pristine environment within local identity narratives. The major discourses on either side of the debate, then, carried significant resonance with widely accepted elements of New Zealand identity. In this paper I examine the ways in which these justifications themselves depended on active attempts to naturalise a certain vision of national identity.

The New Zealand Labour Party, in 2002, continued to derive political mileage from its association with the country's iconic anti-nuclear legislation, enacted in 1985. It refused, however, a call to extend a moratorium on the release of GMOs on the basis of what Prime Minister Helen Clark presented as the more urgent priority of economic viability in an increasingly competitive global context. In this paper I analyse how the Government offered several different justifications for its decision to concur with the Royal Commission's advice that it "proceed with caution" with respect to GMOs. In particular I trace the connections that were drawn between the attitudes and behaviours deemed necessary for economic success (on the one hand) and (on the other) Labour's vision of a modern, relevant national identity. Referring to the 'anthropology of policy' approach developed by Shore and Wright (1997) this paper explores how an idea of national identity can be constructed and used as the grounds for policy claims. While it is hardly news that political actors commonly articulate their preferences with a vision of national identity, there is considerable normative interest in exploring how that identity is constructed, who it includes and who it excludes.

Jeremy Hunsinger (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)

This paper analyzes the modes of justification and discourses of legitimation in the Internet Engineering Task Force decision making process.   Traditionally, the IETF has been focussed on developing technologies, some of which have distinctive policy implications.  This paper analyzes their attempts to apply the modes of justification and discourses of legitimation centering on those policy appliances as they are transformed to deal with the IETF's own policy in regards to intellectual property.  The modes of justification based on the functionality of operating code and its ability to meet the standards of best engineering judgement was a particularly poor fit for the problems of intellectual property, as the discourses of legitimation transformed from the techno-rationalist engineering discourse to the juridico-discursive mode of legalistic and biopolitical discourse.

Delphine Deschaux-Beaume (PACTE- Sciences Po Grenoble)

Is the EU a discursive substitute in international affairs ?An analysis of the legitimating strategies of ESDP in France and Germany

My proposal originates from my doctoral dissertation and deals with the discursive dimension of ESDP. This European Defence Policy goes today through a striking tension between the intentions claimed at the European level (reactivity to crisis, coordination in security and defence matters, integrated approach according to the ESS...) and the national representations of ESDP. This tension is particularly visible when the political representatives of the member states take over the Presidency of the EU.
My paper will aim at analyzing this tension from the comparison between French and German legitimating discourses around this specific security policy both in national and European arenas. My aim is to demonstrate that ESDP fulfils latent functions, which are at least as important as its proclaimed manifest functions (reactivity to crisis). The European Defence Policy can be analyzed as a discursive and political substitute for the EU in its aim to become a real global player: wanting the EU to be an international actor in defence and security matters starts with claiming that it is such an actor. Thus my paper will analyze the tension between the European discourse produced by the national and European political actors (as Solana's team or the European think tanks) and the current practices of these legitimization discourses which are still much nationally oriented, as the comparison between French and German political actors shows.
 This tension will be analyzed on three levels in my paper. First I'll analyze the gap between these European legitimating discourses and the diverging national representations of ESDP in France and Germany. These diverging representations are also part of a global divergence in the vision of the European political project in both countries. Second I'll focus on the gap between the officially claimed effectivity of ESDP and its rather limited effectiveness. Last but not least, I'll focus on the legitimating strategies of the French, German and European actors for advertising ESDP before the national Parliaments and public opinions as crucial arenas for this policy.  These elements enable me to justify my analysis of ESDP as a policy at least as discursive as related to security.

Reges Schwaab (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul)

Abstract: The text discusses journalism's actuation when facing contemporary environmental policy problems. It develops the hypothesis that journalism, among other social fields, seeks to legitimate to itself a position of place of knowledge about the subject as an actor in the policy field. From the discourse reading of some cases in Brazilian journalism, the article points out that journalism's actuation happens especially in an intermediate space in policy conflicts on ecology: between the disputes engaged by scientific and environmental knowledge. Journalistic discourse is, thus, a privileged surface for the legitimization of an environmental rationality to face contemporary reality.

Jana Vargovcikova (Charles University Prague)

What do the discourses that policymakers use to legitimize introducing lobbying regulations tell us about what discourses structure the field of possible private actors' entrance into the public policy-making process? And also, what do they tell us about what reasons motivate policymakers to change the rules of the policy-making process?
The nature of the practice of lobbying is nowadays paradoxical: while context-specific informal practices of influence on the decision-making processes by private actors have been in place for ages, the current shape and place of the practice of lobbying seems to reflect the globalized character of the practice.  In the Czech Republic and in France, the debates on lobbying regulation have taken place simultaneously and despite context-related differences, policymakers draw on similar discourses to justify the introduction of regulation. Significantly enough, legitimizing lobbying regulations intersects with legitimizing lobbying as such. According to my analysis, major discourses performing this are the following: the "everyday practice" discourse (lobbying is normal, it is part of everyday reality) that shows how powerful unofficial and ambiguous practices are in shaping the normative discourses, secondly, the "civic participation discourse" and the "efficient information" discourse.
When it comes to legitimizing the regulation of public-private interactions concerning the decision-making itself, and not legitimizing lobbying as such, the following discourses come together and mutually influence each other's delimitations:  it is the "preventing risky drifts" discourse, the "fighting corruption" discourse and, most importantly, the "transparency" discourse together with the "regaining civic confidence in public institutions" discourse.
It is my conclusion that in the interplay of these discourses two significant equivalences are drawn that partially answer the questions asked at the beginning and show how the mutual supply of information is viewed as the condition of a working relationship between the public agents and the citizens: information supply from the public agents to the citizens is supposed to produce greater confidence and loyalty of the former in the latter (that is, information supply and not a change of behaviour or a reform of the decision-making process), and secondly, supply of useful and efficient information from the citizens to the public agents provides the basis for the legitimate participation in the decision-making process (and thus reshapes the possibilities of civic participation). Normative implications of both of these need to be critically evaluated.

Liz Brewster (University of Sheffield)

This paper utilises an Actor Network Theory (ANT) approach to examine how the use of books to help people with mental health problems was translated from an informal practice in secondary care psychiatry, into a national primary care scheme in Wales, under the banner of Book Prescription Wales (BPW).  It focuses on a legitimising discourse typically utilised to guide healthcare policy; evidence-based medicine. The paper demonstrates that this legitimising discourse has been disregarded and reinterpreted by actors in the network, yet can still be utilised to reinforce the network.

To study this translation of informal practice into a national healthcare policy inscribed in the Welsh mental health strategy Raising the Standard, requires an engagement with discourses of social care, cultural and healthcare policy, as well as with the discourses formulating the construction of mental health problems in society.  The translation process forming BPW was a two-stage one; firstly the need for a solution to access to psychological therapies had to be translated into a local book prescription scheme; then the local book prescription scheme had to be re-conceptualised as a national scheme.

The paper examines the role of the focal actor, in what Callon (1986) refers to as the problematisation, interessement and enrolment processes. It interprets the network to demonstrate that there are still many actors who could destabilise the network forming BPW, including the new developments in the Increasing Access To Psychological Therapies (IAPT) program.  The paper concludes that while the focal actor presents a discourse of evidence-based medicine to the network, this is supplemented by a number of needs-based agendas, which actually legitimise and enforce the decision to support the construction of the network.

Emma Blomkamp ( University of Auckland)

This paper examines the dominant discourses employed to justify offering public finance to New Zealand filmmakers.  Through a historical narrative, it focuses on the discourses surrounding, and emanating from, the New Zealand Film Commission.  By tracing the emergence and subsequent institutionalisation of cultural nationalism as a policy frame, this analysis attempts to understand how the New Zealand government came to fund, and justify its support of, the production of fictional films.  While this frame has continued to legitimise New Zealand film funding policy, it has had to make room for the discourse of economic rationalism, which became influential following the rise of neoliberal policy and the associated state sector reforms of the 1980s. 

Arts and cultural policies have since been reframed according to the principles of economic rationalism.  This change in discursive emphasis, accompanied by a reduced budget, appears to have caused the New Zealand Film Commission to refocus its activity in the 1990s.  Aligning itself with the dominant discourse, and in response to requirements to integrate principles of New Public Management, the Film Commission concentrated on supporting film productions that would attract international finance.  The state-funded agency was consequently criticised by members of the film community and academia for abandoning its core values.  The Commission's use of an economic rationalist discourse to legitimise film funding was seen to threaten its ability to pursue and demonstrate intangible reasons for supporting cinema, such as its contribution to the cultural public sphere.  

These situated discourses in film policy are thus explored in this paper.  While focusing on political debates and developments in New Zealand, international concepts and perspectives from cultural policy studies are also explored and applied to this case study.  The dichotomies employed in film funding debates are found to oversimplify complex arguments, yet nevertheless help us to identify the competing and complementary frames that serve to legitimise state-funded cinema.

Ondřej Slačálek (Institute of International Relations & Charles University Prague)

Anticommunism as a Discourse of Legitimization and Delegitimization:
Czech Cases about the Institute for Study of Totalitarian Regimes and The Electoral Campaign 2010

How can a discourse about the past influence our contemporary political disputes? Have discourses of exclusion their own dynamics? Could these discourses contribute to delegitimization of some actors, or can they contribute to legitimization of others and by which means?

In my paper, I analyze contemporary Czech anticommunism in two parts. I call the first one, which had its hegemonic position in 1990s, "anticommunism of distance". I identify the second one, which launched to profile after the election of Václav Klaus as president of the Czech Republic in 2003 (with the communist support of his election) and which attempted to restore unsettled hegemony, as "anticommunism of exclusion". I aim to show that both forms of anticommunism aim (1) to exclude some actors from the political participation and (2) they do that by demarcating the field of delegitimization.

 The field of delegitimzation appears to be determined by the demand to ban the Czech communist party. But the analysis will expose that this kind of delegitimization can expand. I argue that delegitimization is the exclusion and clear condemnation of the communist past with certain political ideas (the list of them could be broadened). Thus, the anticommunist discourse broadened the field of delegitimization. At the beginning, it was oriented also on the delegitimization of president Klaus (elected with the support of communists); afterwards, the delegitimization fixated in the depiction of social democrats as strong leftwing party unhesitating to receive support from the communists. Sometimes the discourse of exclusion is broadened even on the whole old generation, which is made responsible for the communism in the past and in the same time for the support of contemporary left in the elections.

The paper analyzes diffusing of positions of anticommunism of exclusion in the disputes about contemporary policies and their potential for (de)legitimization. The analysis (texts of the prominent anticommunist representatives and of some politicians and media) reconstructs the use of anticommunism of exclusion. The analysis will focus on how this discourse (a) legitimizes the Czech equivalent of the Institute of National Memory, which was founded in 2007 under the name Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, and (b) delegitimizes opponents of the right-wing policy reforms in the election campaign 2009-2010. In both cases, the paper will analyze the inclusion of the figures of exclusion into the structures of legitimization and delegitimization. In the same time, various positions of the anticommunist discourse will be differentiated: first, the position "not to forget" that accents on reminding of history and on "coming into terms with the past"; second, the position of "purity", which accents exclusion and suppressing "bearers of the evil" from the contemporary political disputes, and third, the position "not to permit" that accents the protecting against situation when historical evil could come back in any form.