Year: 2013
Type: dissertation
Abstract: political, partisan discourse or administrative productions. Website\nstudies have been growing in importance in the literature, including critical ones. However, the study of institutional discourse has rather rarely been done with web-based data, and has been rather countryspecific.\nNo such study exists for Belgian institutional-administrative web-based communication. We propose to critically explore the websites\nof public social providers under municipalities’s authority in Brussels\n(CPAS-OCMW).We propose a small corpus-based quantitative analysis to prevent over interpretation. We then go into details and provide a close-reading of the 19 websites’ texts (one for each municipality in Brussels). The aim is to provide a critical insight into what the discourse on those websites does in term of social categories, power and inequalities and how organizations act as state-apparatuses.\nThe analysis showed the constructions and re-assertions about the social field as individualized, which were produced by the texts of the organizations studied. It showed the organizations as re-producing the system of institutions and conceptions rather than challenging or changing\nthem in a context of institutional interconnectedness. An omnipresent\nrhetoric of voluntarism, professional competence and legal entitlement\nhas been shown to obscure the social role of these organizations, and conversely, emphasize their top-down role.
Author: Lucas Perais
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W560043739