Online communities, created and sustained by people sharing and discussing texts on the internet, play an increasingly important role in social health movements. In this essay, we explore a collective mobilization in miniature through an in-depth analysis of two satiric texts from an online community for people with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). By blending a sociological analysis with a rhetorical exploration of these texts, our aim is to grasp the discursive generation of a social movement online community set up by sufferers (...) themselves to negotiate and contest the dominating biomedical perception of their condition. (shrink)

Performativity and performance of language are the subject of this re-writing of Derrida's position on the gift. Here the source of performativity is Althusser's while the source of the gift is not only Marcel Mauss, but also both the opening of Derrida's Given Time: I, Counterfeit Money and the signing through letters of Madame de Maintenon, wife of Louis XIV and founder of a school for girls. A third writing plays a role, that of a 1910 biography of Madame. The (...) paper is a ‘relay,’ a ‘re-play’ of the positions of the central ‘characters,’ -- Derrida and Maintenon -- and a semiology of their writings. Out of this a new ‘gift of pedagogy’ is evoked in a conception of ‘pedagogical retreat.’. (shrink)

Discourses of public education reform, like that exemplified within the Queensland Government's future vision document, Queensland State Education‐2010 (QSE‐2010), position schooling as a panacea to pervasive social instability and a means to achieve a new consensus. However, in unravelling the many conflicting statements that conjoin to form education policy and inform related literature ( ), it becomes clear that education reform discourse is polyvalent ( ). Alongside visionary statements that speak of public education as a vehicle for social justice are (...) the (re)visionary or those reflecting neoliberal individualism and a conservative politics. In this paper, it is argued that the latter coagulate to form strategic discursive practices which work to (re)secure dominant relations of power. Further, discussion of the characteristics needed by the ‘ideal’ future citizen of Queensland reflect efforts to ‘tame change through the making of the child’ (, p. 201). The casualties of this (re)vision and the refusal to investigate the pathologies of ‘traditional’ schooling are the children who, for whatever reason, do not conform to the norm of the desired school child as an ‘ideal’ citizen‐in‐the‐making and who become relegated to alternative educational settings. (shrink)

Discourses of public education reform, like that exemplified within the Queensland Government's future vision document, Queensland State Education‐2010 , position schooling as a panacea to pervasive social instability and a means to achieve a new consensus. However, in unravelling the many conflicting statements that conjoin to form education policy and inform related literature , it becomes clear that education reform discourse is polyvalent . Alongside visionary statements that speak of public education as a vehicle for social justice are the visionary (...) or those reflecting neoliberal individualism and a conservative politics. In this paper, it is argued that the latter coagulate to form strategic discursive practices which work to secure dominant relations of power. Further, discussion of the characteristics needed by the ‘ideal’ future citizen of Queensland reflect efforts to ‘tame change through the making of the child’ . The casualties of this vision and the refusal to investigate the pathologies of ‘traditional’ schooling are the children who, for whatever reason, do not conform to the norm of the desired school child as an ‘ideal’ citizen‐in‐the‐making and who become relegated to alternative educational settings. (shrink)

E-patients are increasingly using the Internet to gain knowledge about medical conditions, thereby problematizing the biomedical assumption that patients are ‘lay’. The present paper addresses this development by investigating the epistemic identities of patients participating on an online health forum. Using poststructuralist discourse analysis to analyze a corpus of cardiology-related threads on an ‘Ask a Doctor’ forum, we compare how patients are discursively constructed by online professionals as ‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’ with the online knowledge identities patients choose for themselves. (...) Analysis reveals a complex picture, with patients positioning themselves and being constructed as biomedical novices, as well as claiming the subject positions of experts challenging medical expertise. This paper provides a snapshot of an important social identity in transition, illustrates a procedure for comparing language use around imposed and self-appropriated identities, and considers discursive choice in relation to the metapragmatic matter of “sayability”. (shrink)

We reflect on the nature of corporate codes of conduct is this article. Based on John Austin’s speech act theory, four characteristics of a performative concept of corporate codes will be introduced: 1) the existential self-performative of the firm identity, 2) which is demanded by and responsive to their stakeholders; 3) Because corporate codes are structurally threatened by the possibility of failure, 4) embracing the code not only consists in actual corporate responsible behaviour in light of the code, but in (...) the incessant recapturing of the code in the struggle of firms against the possible incongruence between their ethical principles and their actual responsible behaviour. A performative concept of corporate codes helps to bridge classical dichotomies like individualist versus collectivist approaches of moral agency and restrictive versus empowering ethics, and opens a new perspective on the interaction between individual ethical behaviour and the corporate institutionalisation of codes. (shrink)

Ethical oaths for bankers, economists and managers are increasingly seen as successful instruments to ensure more responsible behaviour. In this article, we reflect on the nature of ethical oaths. Based on John Austin's speech act theory and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, we introduce a performative concept of ethical oaths that is characterised by (1) the existential self-performative of the one I want to be, which is (2) demanded by the public context. Because ethical oaths are (3) structurally threatened by (...) the possibility of infelicity or failure, we stress (4) the behavioural aspect of ethical oaths in economics and business. We conclude that a performative concept of ethical oaths can contribute to more ethical behaviour in economics and business, because the performative involves action and behaviour. At the same time, it becomes clear that a radical new perspective on the nature, function and limitation of oaths is needed. (shrink)

Appeals to practices are common the humanities and social sciences. They hold the potential to explain interesting or compelling similarities, insofar as similarities are distributed within a community or group. Why is it that people who fall under the same category, whether men, women, Americans, baseball players, Buddhists, feminists, white people, or others, have interesting similarities, such as similar beliefs, actions, thoughts, foibles, and failings? One attractive answer is that they engage in the same practices. They do the same things, (...) perhaps as a result of doing things at the same site or setting, or perhaps as a result of being raised in a similar way among members of the same group. In the humanities, appeals to practices often serve as a move to point out diversity among different communities or diversity within the same community. Communities are distinct from one another in part because their members do different things or do things in different ways. The distinct and varied ways in which different communities enact social norms or formulate law, state institutions, and public policy might be explicable in part by the different practices their members are socialized into. Appeals to practices hold the promise of explaining these differences in terms of the different background practices of the groups, cultivated through a kind of cultural isolation or sense of collective identity. In the social sciences, appeals to practices have played a central role in fundamental theorizing and theory building. Appeals to practices in the social sciences are often much more systematic and theoretical, forming the core of the systematic theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens in Anthropology and Sociology. Practice theory has thus become a growth industry in social scientific investigation, offering the promise of a central object of investigation that explains both unity and difference within and across communities and groups. But it is unclear just what practices are and what role, both ontological and explanatory, that practices are supposed to play. The term `practices' is used to pick out a wide range of things, and its relation to other terms, from `tradition' or `paradigm' to `framework' or `presupposition', is unclear. Practices are posited as ubiquitous, yet they are difficult to isolate and pin down. We are all said to participate in them, but they remain hidden. Their role, whether causal, logical, or hermeneutical, remains mysterious. After locating the historical origins of appeals to practices in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, my dissertation uses Stephen Turner's broad and systematic critique of appeals to practices to develop a new type of account. My account is a phenomenological account that treats practices as human doings that show up to people in material and social environments and make themselves available for specific responses in those environments. I argue that a phenomenological account is an effective alternative to accounts that treat practices as either shared objects with properties or shared and implicit presuppositions. I use a phenomenological account of practices to treat important debates in feminist philosophy and the philosophy of the social sciences, particularly debates over pornography's subordination of women and the classification of mental disorders in psychiatry. (shrink)