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Executive governmental authorities contribute a discourse, making-up, outlining and configuring the consumer. The objective of this paper is to elaborate on the discursive construction of the consumer provided by governmental institutions. Exemplified by Finnish and German policy documents, this paper tries to provide an insight on the consumer as the subject that is governed by politics. Thus, a discourse analytic approach reveals according to what rationale the consumer is discursively constructed on a dichotomous sovereignty-vulnerability-continuum. Hence, this paper provides actors and institutions that are involved in consumer policy deliberate basic principles for the understanding of consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germany's new immigration law, which took effect in 2005, was hotly debated over a period of four years. This paper follows the debate on the law through the newsprint media, examines the representation of immigration as an economic utility, and investigates the contents of this economic-utility perspective of immigration in light of neoliberal restructuring in Germany. The analysis focuses on 609 articles sampled from five major German daily newspapers published between July 2001 and August 2005. A discourse analysis suggests that the newsprint media represented immigration on the one hand as an economic necessity to replenish the labor market and ensure the international competitiveness of key industrial sectors. On the other hand, immigration was depicted as an economic liability that raises unemployment rates and burdens the public welfare system. Although the media emphasized the economic necessity of immigration, the final law does not permit any significant immigration of labor. The paper resolves this contradiction by situating media discourse in a wider context of neoliberal reforms and European Union expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subsequent to the Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, Our Common Future), sustainability has been set up in many countries as a mission statement of cross-sectoral policies. Sustainable development carries the normative notions of equity, empowerment and environmentally sensitive economic development. Thus, it seems to suggest a fundamentally different vision to neoliberal dogma, which is at the same time described as dominating all socio-political processes. This paper intends to explore the relation between these two discursive framings of contemporary policies through the example of German spatial planning guidelines. More precisely, it addresses social justice as one pillar of sustainability and how it is operationalised in spatial planning policies in Germany. This may exemplify how the seemingly opposing discourses interact in policy practices. The empirical analysis suggests that the ways in which the German spatial planning report focused on social space in territorial terms promotes an economistic and truncated view of social justice, one which fosters the neoliberal idea of regional competition for global capital and reduces socio-spatial justice to territorially equally distributed economic inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined German‐speaking Twitter users' reckoning with racism in response to the right‐wing extremist shootings that targeted ethnic minorities in Hanau, Germany. We employed a mixed‐methods analysis combining Structural Topic Modelling (STM) and discourse analysis. We used STM to identify broad topic patterns and focused on the topics involving the racialized commentary the German‐speaking public offered in the aftermath of Hanau. The STM analysis resulted in 50 topics; among these conversations, racism in German society and racism: threats and fears were among the top 10 topics. In total, 36.8% of the 50 topics in the first month of the shootings were racism‐related discussions but the majority of these discussions did not describe the Hanau shootings as racially motivated. We conducted a discourse analysis to capture a more fine‐grained understanding of the users' racialized conversations, focusing specifically on the discursive contexts in which racially suppressive discourses were used and taking place. We identified three racially suppressive discourses, including the explanation that the shootings/shooter was mentally ill, might be racially motivated, and a product of extremist groups. This study uncovered multifaceted public conversations in the aftermath of Hanau and offered interpretations of large‐scale conversations that reckoned with racism on German‐speaking Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]