David Machin

Visually branding the environment: Climate change as a marketing opportunity

While there has been extensive work on the textual realizations of climate change in the media, there has been little on the way such discourses are realized and promoted visually. This article addresses this using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to examine a new collection of images from the globally operating Getty Images intended for use in promotions, advertisements and editorials. Getty is promoting this collection in terms of Green Issues being a `marketing opportunity. In this article we consider the results of these issues being recontextualized through this process, where they are shaped to fit the culture of branding. Analysis is of the images and the search terms where Getty lay out what can be said with the images.

Language style and lifestyle: the case of a global magazine

This article seeks to co-articulate a sociological and a linguistic-discourse analytical concept of style. In both fields there has been some renewed interest in the notion of lifestyle as commentators have noted that, with the decline of traditional types of social groupings such as class and age, lifestyle has become the dominant source of social identity. Both therefore centre on style as the expression of identity and values. The authors use this approach to understand the language of a global women’s magazine, Cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan style is a hybrid of different styles, chosen for the connotations they bring, for the way they help express the magazine’s identity and values. Although local versions adopt it in their own specific ways, overall it is a global style. The local languages may differ, but the identities and values conveyed by the style do not.

The Umbilical Cord That Was Never Cut The Post-Dictatorial Intimacy between the Political Elite and the Mass Media in Greece and Spain

Market dynamics has led to a dramatic transformation of the Spanish and Greek media systems since the late 1980s, bringing them in line with West European patterns. The current media landscape is, thus, a far cry from the introvert, parochial press and broadcasting systems present in the two countries in the first 15 years of democratic government, when the partisan political control of radio and television and the overpoliticization of the press were dominant features of their media systems. The aim of this article is to analyse the key developments in the media industries of these two Southern European countries and identify the elements of continuity and change through an examination of the interplay between the state, the market and the media. Despite the multiplication of media outlets, it is argued, state policy in the media is determined as ever by the persistent culture of political expediency, typical of the European south, as political elites still seek desperately to influence the content of political coverage.

Lifestyle and the Depoliticisation of Agency: Sex as Power in Women's Magazines

Sex, due to its connotations of dangerousness and the non-traditional, has been used heavily in womens magazines and other mass media to signify core values of power and freedom as part of their brands. Through this process, other forms of agency for women have tended to be excluded. In these magazines women are shown to be assertive, powerful and independent, not through the political views that they hold, not through the way that they act upon society, but through the way that they seduce men and behave sexually. We show, using a number of examples, that for this to happen a fantasy space has to be created: a space where real-world obstacles and meanings are erased, allowing a repertoire of theatrical sexual play to operate. This is typical of the lifestyle society in which we now live. In this society, we define ourselves not on the basis of who we are, in an older sense of gender or social class, but in terms of what we do and the values we hold. The way we communicate these values is often through our use of consumer products, which allows us to align ourselves with the core values and meanings with which the products have been loaded. But while lifestyle itself may be a matter of choice, the choices available to us are often created to serve the interests and needs of large corporations, of consumerism. Sex is one such choice of which we must be very careful.

Corporate crime and the discursive deletion of responsibility: A case study of the Paddington rail crash

There has been little in-depth research on media representations of corporate crime in either media studies or critical discourse analysis (CDA). Taking one small step to address this situation, this paper assesses the unfolding press representations of one instance where corporate negligence and greed led to the death of 31 people – the Paddington rail crash in London in 1999. At first the event is covered as a ‘disaster’ through its associated language of ‘accidents’ and ‘heroes’. Later, issues of corporate responsibility are raised even in the popular press, but there are a number of obstacles to the language of crime and criminality being used.

The changing spaces of war commemoration: a multimodal analysis of the discourses of British monuments

This paper examines the way that war monuments infuse our public physical spaces, and therefore our internal mental spaces, with discourses that legitimise war, soldiery and militarism in different ways at different times creating different kinds of physical environments. In critical theory and cultural studies there has been a growing interest in the way that physical spaces have psychological roles and house human thoughts and feelings – that our social and cultural memories exist in a way that intertwined with our natural and constructed environments. Commentators have noted, however, that there is still need for more systematic methods to be developed for analysing the materiality of objects such as monuments and other buildings to show precisely how they communicate as physical entities that constitute spaces. Using multimodal discourse analysis this paper carries out such an analysis looking at case studies of British war monuments, from early in the twentieth century and later in the twenty-first century. In the tradition of social semiotics, the paper seeks to describe the available semiotic resources that allow us to communicate through objects in space.

Toys as discourse: children's war toys and the war on terror

War toys of different eras realize the dominant discourses of war of the time, and they do so in a way which allows children to enact these discourses and values in play. This paper examines war toys over the past 100 years before providing a detailed multimodal analysis of contemporary war toys distributed around the planet, mainly by global American corporations, which teach children about the importance of the quick decisive strike, the role of the team and the morality of technology. Through this they convey how conflicts are resolved in todays world, and why. Early on children are recruited not just into the war on terror but also the values of corporate capitalism. The paper ends by looking at some ethnographic data where children play with guns.

Branding the self

In this chapter we focus on the origins of two powerful ‘models of identity’, two powerful ways of constructing ‘identity’. One is constructed and propagated by nation-states, the other by global corporations and their agents. Both models involve classifications which not only have material effects in people’s lives, but also provide them with resources for talking about their own identity, and about identity generally. We will begin with an example of such identity talk, an extract from a research interview with two 37-year-old women. They were asked to describe their identity to a male interlocutor, and they did so confidently. As one of them said: ‘I know who I am and what I want.’

Renewing an academic interest in structural inequalities

Class and class divisions remain central forces in shaping the ways we live. Indeed, arguably, in neo-liberal capitalist societies, class remains the primary division of structured social inequality. Official reports still speak of the vast inequalities in access to wealth, power and resources that characterise Western developed countries (Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2007; Institute for Public Policy Research, 2004; UNICEF, 2000). Massive sections of our populations experience inadequate access to employment, housing, education, nutrition and healthcare. These inequalities cut across ethnic, ‘racial’ and gender groups and seem, on one level, to create a shared set of life experiences and responses. In many of our cities we find whole areas where those formerly engaged in industrial production, including those who once arrived from overseas to offer cheaper labour, now find themselves marginalised from the current needs of neo-capitalism, creating new kinds of social classes. A Joseph Rowntree Foundation report (2005) on (in)equality in Britain recently described the continuing correlations between wealth and educational success, between wealth and access to good healthcare. It also commented on the fact that the areas where many second homes remain vacant most of the year are also areas where local people struggle to find accommodation. About 3 million homes in the UK have more than three cars and the same number have none. It also showed that in families where there were no adults in employment children were more likely to be found as full-time carers. The report concludes that perversely it is the poorest people who have the most need but also least access to resources. However, to many, the study of social class, or ‘social stratification’ as it became known in sociology, has been long out of date. Once it formed the heart of sociology, but as the traditional working classes seemed to disappear with the demise of manufacturing, academics that had wanted to champion class in the Marxist tradition drifted to other causes. Yet, meanwhile, it is clear that we live in societies where who you are, who you can become, are to a significant extent shaped by your socio-economic – or class – position in society.