Resilience through Words?

Abstract

During crises, institutions often seek to legitimize their policy interventions by providing a new definition of the current situation in which their intervention is presented as the appropriate solution to actual problems. This new definition, however, could have adverse symbolic and normative consequences for some groups in the society, e.g. by lowering their social status or challenging group norms and values. The group’s ability to generate an alternative definition of a situation and thus to cope rhetorically with adverse symbolic conditions will be described herein as ‘discursive resilience’. It will be argued that the concept of discursive resilience makes it possible to better understand the more complex critical potential of the broader concept of social resilience. The phenomenon of discursive resilience will be evidenced empirically by means of a meta-analysis of Gerlinde Mautner’s conception of the discourse of marketisation and the author’s own study of the public controversy that emerged after the Czech National Bank launched a foreign exchange intervention in November 2013. It will be shown that discursive resilience occurred mainly in the blogosphere and took the form of translating expert discourse into lay terminology in order to make the intervention understandable to and amenable to criticism by the wider public.

Keywords:

• Discursive resilience
• social resilience
• resistance
• public controversy
• bloggers
• central bank communication