ABSTRACTThe paper discusses the housing crisis in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, a phenomenon that particularly affects the socioeconomically vulnerable. The paradigm adopted is the interpretative, with Critical Discourse Analysis as a theoretical framework and qualitative methodology. The Converging Linguistic Approaches Method is adopted. By studying a corpus of relevant legal texts, this paper explores the way in which the poor are constructed as subjects in City Law No. 3706, the only text where they feature as a dominant focus (...) category. To that end we need to deepen our understanding of the way in which the linguistic and discursive category of the poor as actors/subjects is constructed in the text. This paper also aims to show the ways in which linguistic discourse enquiry may use a qualitative analysis tool to shed light on social issues. (shrink)

The received wisdom among welfare state scholars is that policy feedbacks render social insurance programs durable. Yet, in the case of Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy, a voting majority of retired city workers accepted a settlement that asked them to waive key legal protections, formally accept gutted medical benefits, trimmed pension benefits, and a new public-private pension financing mechanism. This article synthesizes interactionist theories of loss to introduce the concept of “collective cooling.” I argue that collective cooling helps to establish the limits (...) of policy feedbacks by explaining how a group of retirees’ collective self-understandings were adjusted from that of contractual rights holders to charitable dependents. Key components of this process included: First, seeking to adjust understandings of how pensioners were perceived by powerful outsiders; And, second, seeking to adjust the loss from one that reflected poorly on pensioners to one that did not. Implications are discussed for how people accept unexpected economic losses, especially those imposed by a trusted institution such as an employer or government organization. (shrink)