DISCOURSE AND CHANGES OF THE WELFARE STATE

• Authors: Kusa Z.
• Languages of publication: SK

Abstracts

EN

Growing research has been focused at uneven willingness of governments to conform to the tenets of global economic competition promulgated by the international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. There is also increasing interest in the developments of the new members of the European Union, including Slovakia. This study attempts to develop those explanations of the Slovak reform trail-blazing that emphasize the lack of capacity to translate social discontent into credible political opposition. It examines the issue of availability of the symbolic resources for opposing the politics of the retrenching citizens' social rights in Slovakia from historical and critical discourse perspective. First, critical discourse analysis (CDA) is introduced as apposite approach to the study of a transfer of the political ideas. Its analytical power is demonstrated on the CDA studies of the dynamic of welfare discourse in the United Kingdom and other countries. Secondly, the study presents preliminary analysis of the development of Slovak domestic academic and political discourse on social welfare and the social rights. Its main point is that the Slovak welfare reforms were backed up by the borrowed phrasal idioms and the exploited metaphors that had been already doubted as the only alternative by 'Western' academic community. Though the fermentation of social-critical discourse in Slovakia could have been facilitated by this dethronisation, accumulated supplies of arguments were not drawn by the Slovak academicians. Further research is necessary to explain why the Slovak academicians did not attempt to defend the social rights but rather rendered them as the hindrance for the development of democracy.

Keywords

EN

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS; EU ACCESSION; GLOBAL COMPETITION; SLOVAK WELFARE REFORMS

Discipline

• SOCIOLOGY: SOCIOLOGY

• Publisher: Institute of Sociology, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Sociológia (Sociology)
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 40
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 5-34
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Kusa Z.

• Z. Kusa, Sociologicky ustav SAV, Klemensova 19, 813 64 Bratislava, Slovak Republic

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

08SKAAAA03907759