Taken as a model for how groups should make collective judgments and decisions, the ideal of deliberative democracy is inherently ambiguous. Consider the idealised case where it is agreed on all sides that a certain conclusion should be endorsed if and only if certain premises are admitted. Does deliberative democracy recommend that members of the group debate the premises and then individually...

Political theorists have offered many accounts of collective decision-making under pluralism. I discuss a key dimension on which such accounts differ: the importance assigned not only to the choices made but also to the reasons underlying those choices. On that dimension, different accounts lie in between two extremes. The ‘minimal liberal account’ holds that collective decisions should be made...

ion of any dimension of comparison is an imperfect but potentially useful conceptual achievement of simplification, not an inherent property of the world. I offer a model of political discourse that is equally dynamic, and use it to illustrate how structurally anchored discursive opportunities in continental Europe differ from the

This paper seeks to better understand the way middle managers contribute strategically to the development of an organization by examining how they enact the strategic roles allocated to them, with particular reference to strategic change. Through vignettes drawn from the authors’ current research, a framework is developed that shows two situated, but interlinked, discursive activities, ‘perform...

This thesis is a theoretically guided empirical discussion of fashion and its role within the production of national identity in Germany. In recent years, a new patriotism in contemporary German fashion could be observed, starting with the fashion designer Eva Gronbach in 2001. I will approach the term patriotism with the aid of one of Michel Foucault’s key terms, the notion of the episteme. In...

The production and use of energy is an important factor in European politics and science. However, we know little about the discussions that influence how scarce financial resources of governments and organizations are directed to different projects and action related to energy strategy of EU. Therefore, this paper studies the discourses that underlie the ‘energy talk’ of EU decision makers. Th...

Whereas the generation of Shannon-type information is coupled to the second law of thermodynamics, redundancy—that is, the complement of information to the maximum entropy—can be increased by further distinctions: new options can discursively be generated. The dynamics of discursive knowledge production thus infuse the historical dynamics with a cultural evolution based on expectations (as diff...

In this paper, I highlight key differences between a discourse analytic approach to women's accounts of abortion and that taken by the growing body of research that seeks to explore and measure women's experiences of abortion stigma. Drawing on critical analyses of the conceptualisation of stigma in other fields of healthcare, I suggest that research on abortion stigma often risks reifying it b...

In this essay I explore the relationship between research reviews and the fields o f study to which they pertain. Using the curriculum field as an example, ! argue that such reviews are venues where fields of inquiry are constituted, reproduced, and over time changed. This construction occurs, I suggest, as the discursive practices or rules o f reasoning embedded in the language in which these ...