прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Ideology

so that the socio-economic position of the other group becomes crucial. This process not only plays a role in relations of domination, but also of resistance. Thus, for linguistic minorities, the language of the linguistically dominant group will be a major category of judgement.

What seems rather straightforward for the organization of social opinions about other people and groups — the construction of evaluative group schemata consisting of variable hierarchies of social categorizations — is less obvious for attitudes about social issues and problems, such as abortion, nuclear energy or pollution. Although here also groups of people are involved about whom we may develop opinions, such attitudes rather focus on right or wrong social practices, or even about properties of objects or nature. Semantically such 'problems' may be construed (by different groups) as implying some kind of norm violation, if not as a threat, but such semantic contents are not readily reduced to abstract, general categories that allow the description of large classes of attitudes. And yet, given the typically organized nature of the mind, it is highly unlikely that such attitudes merely consist of lists of propositions representing opinions about what people like or dislike.

My theoretical approach tries to go beyond the traditional approaches to the structures of opinions in social psychology, such as consistency and balance theories. What we find here is an account of the mutual relations between (sets of) propositions and the dynamics of their acceptance or rejection by individuals. Thus, adopting mutually inconsistent opinions may create 'cognitive dissonance', which people try to resolve by strategically adapting their opinions. Similarly, we may find further analysis of opinion propositions in evaluative 'molecules' whose development and change may mutually influence each other. If, for instance, I like John but disapprove of nuclear energy, than what happens when I also know that my friend John does approve of nuclear energy? Would this make John less likable and/or nuclear energy less detestable, or do I apply other useful strategies to combine the inconsistent 'valences' of my opinions? 1.

These traditional questions about the acquisition, organization and change of opinions and attitudes remain relevant today. However, they address somewhat different dimensions from those I am interested in. First, they do not distinguish between personal and social opinions, nor indeed between opinions and attitudes. Secondly, they focus on the individual 'management' of opinions in specific contexts and situations, rather than on general, complex and socially shared attitudes. Thirdly, they do not answer the question about the oyeran organization of such attitudes, and the relations of such an organization with the social dimensions of the groups that entertain them. However, such questions are still relevant as soon as we need to examine the ways concrete opinions are produced by individuals in specific contexts, possibly as a result of mutually 'inconsistent' attitudes. These strategies of opinion management and the representation of opinions in mental models (see Chapter 7) need to be dealt with separately.

From this discussion, we may provisionally conclude that evaluative social representations, such as attitudes, have their own , that is, their own, socially based schematic organization and categories, which are a function of the symbolic or material interests of the group. I shall later examine in more detall what these 'interests' are.

The argument I have been pursuing in this chapter suggests that if all social representations have their specific structural categories and organizational principies, this should also be so for the very foundation of such social representations, that is, for ideologies. This hypothesis will be explored in the next chapter.

5

Structures of Ideologies

Searching for a format

Given the assumption that social representations such as knowledge and attitudes of groups are organized by a non-trivial structure, it is plausible also that ideologies are not merely a list of basic beliefs. The acquisition, the changes and the uses of ideologies in social practices suggest that we should try to find schemata or other structural pattems that are typical for ideological systems. Since we have no a priori or theoretically obvious format for such structures, we have to build such schemata from scratch and find evidence that suggests how ideologies may be organized.'

One heuristic option is to assume that the structures of ideologies are similar to those of other social representations. For instance, if scripts organize our knowledge about stereotypical events, do ideologies also have such a script-like nature ? 2 This assumption may be rejected without much hesitation: whatever we know about ideologies, they do not in any way reflect the stereotypical structures of events. First, ideologies are much more general and abstract, and do not merely apply to specific (types) of cultural events, such as shopping or going to the movies. Second, ideologies not only apply to events, but also to situations, processes, groups, group relations and other facts. Indeed, given the fundamental nature of ideologies and their assumed role in the management of social representations of groups and group relations, they should somehow reflect how groups and their members view a specific issue or domain of society. Third, ideologies do not merely control knowledge but also opinions about events, and such opinions do not represent event structures. Scripts, therefore, do not constitute a likely candidate for the kind of organization we would expect ideologies to have.

Since attitudes are clusters of socially shared, evaluative beliefs, it is therefore more plausible to examine whether ideologies have the structural features of attitudes. Such an assumption would probably also make it easier to link ideologies with attitudes, for instance when we assume that ideologies organize attitudes, or that they assign some forro of coherence to the clusters of attitudes that are govemed by the same ideology.

Especially since we as yet have no definite idea about what attitudes look like in general, our question about the similarity of attitude structures and ideological structures might well be rnoot. So, let' s take a few examples of attitudes and see whether their possible structures suggest a more general format that also may be relevant for ideologies. For instance, there is good

evidence that at least some groups of people have attitudes about immigration, abortion and nuclear energy. Thus, a (prejudiced, nationalist or racist) attitude about immigration may feature the following evaluative beliefs, among many others:

1 Too many people come to our country.

2 Our country already has too many people.

3 Immigrants only come here to live off welfare.

4 Most immigrants are economic refugees.

5 Immigrants require scarce housing and jobs.

6 Immigrants face growing resentment in the inner cities.

7 The government must send back illegal immigrants.

8 Immigration has to be restricted to 'real' refugees only.

These evaluative beliefs, which are routinely expressed in both elite and popular discourse about immigration, together define the (negative) attitude about immigration? However, as presented, it merely seems to have the structure of a list of beliefs. If there is structure here, it is at rnost an argumentative one: opinions 1 to 6 may be interpreted as arguments that support the normative political conclusions 7 or 8.

At another level of abstraction, attitudes may be structured by the basic categories ofproblem and solution, where the problem category is recursive. Immigration is conceived of as a set of problems that result from immigration: overpopulation, lack of housing and work, growing resentment, and so on. The solution category, what must be done to solve the problem, in this case coincides with the main normative conclusion of the other opinions.

This specific example does not imply, incidentally, that all ideologies and attitudes have a problem/solution structure. However, many ideologies, especially of dominated and dissident groups, organize around basic beliefs about what is wrong, and about what should be done about it.

If we were to disregard the general nature of the beliefs (this attitude exists in most European countries as well as in North America), it could even be organized as a story, with an orientation such as 'Our country did not have many problems and not many immigrants'; complication: 'Suddenly many immigrants carne to the country, and caused a lot of social and economic problems; resolution: 'Restrict the number of immigrants.' 5

Finally, some further structure may be assigned to this attitude by applying a group-schema to it, in which immigrants are characterized by, for example, the following categories and their (here highly simplified) belief contents typical for a prejudiced attitude: 6

•Origin: Third World;

•Appearance: mostly people of colour (unlike Us);

•Socio-economic characteristics: they are poor and want to become

rich;

• Cultural characteristics: they speak other languages, are often Muslims, and have strange habits;

• Personal characteristics: they are illegals/criminals, cannot be trusted, doñ t want to work hard, etc.

We see that attitudes may be organized in different ways: in tercos of an implicit argument, in terms of problem/solution categories or the related categories of stories, and finally in tercos of a group schema.

Further analysis, however, suggests that these structures can only be very tentative. First, the most articulate structure, namely, the group schema, defines an attitude about immigrants rather than about immigration, although these attitudes are of course closely related. Second, narrative and argumentative structures characterize the discourse in which these beliefs may be used, but not the beliefs themselves. 7

The problem/solution category seems more promising, since it is very abstract and general, and reflects the fact that attitudes are usually developed for social issues or problems, as seen by a specific group. For the groups who share them, the same is true for evaluative beliefs about nuclear energy or abortion. Yet, this structure is so general that it has litde organizational significance, since it does not say more than that a social issue is a problem for the members of the group, and that these members also have a solution for it.

Do ideologies have a problem/solution structure? Many ideologies indeed seem to have something like that. Thus, whereas racism typically defines immigrants, foreigners, minorities or others as the reason for most social and economic problems, and withholding 'our' scarce resources (residence, citizenship, housing, employment, equal rights, etc.) as the solution, similar simple analyses may be made for anti-racism (problern: racism; solution: equality, diversity, etc.), feminism (problem: male chauvinism; solution: equal rights, etc.), and environmentalistn (problem: pollution; solution: stop polluting). Other ideologies, such as liberalism, do not seem to have such a clear problem/solution structure, although originally it may have had such an organization as an opposition ideology against feudalism.

In sum, where attitudes seem to represent a problem or a social conflict, they may well have at least some structural features that we also find in ideologies. This is of course hardly surprising since ideologies are most likely to represent (real or imaginary) problems and conflicts of interests of

— or between — social groups. As is obvious from the example of immigration, there is therefore also a strong polarization between Us and Them, as representatives of the groups involved in such a conflict. Similar observations hold for the attitudes about nuclear energy and abortion.

Very tentatively, these examples provide us some suggestions for at least some ideas about the format of ideologies: problem/solution, conflict and group polarization. Let us analyse these potential categories of ideological structure in more detall.

Group conflict

Although ideologies may have some features that we also encounter in more specific attitudes, we need to explore a bit further to come up with a format

that is general enough to fit afl ideologies, and specific enough to be nontrivial and functionally useful in the cognitive management of ideologies as well as in their acquisition and applications.

Instead of starting with the organization of social representations in general, we may also inquire whether the structure of ideologies is a function of their role in society. We have already seen that often social conflicts between groups with different interests are involved. We also know from most traditional approaches that ideologies are typically used as foundations for domination and resistance; that is, they represent social struggle. Moreover, ideologies are also intuitively functioning as self-serving principies involved in the explanation of the world in general (as in religious ideologies) and of the social and economic worlds in particular (such as conservatism or capitalism) Finally, ideologies have a normative dimension, and summarize what group members should do or not do: for example resist oppression, stop pollution, or prevent abortion.

If we assume that many if not most ideologies are a socio-cognitive representation of the basic evaluative and self-serving beliefs of group members about social struggle and group conflicts, it may be most fruitful to study this fundamental feature in more detall in order to find out the most effective format that might organize such beliefs. Crucial for such a representation is how group members see themselves and how they see Others.

Thus, typical for a racist ideology is that we are representing Us as superior, and Them as inferior, and that as a consequence we (should) have preferential access to society's scarce resources (for an empirical case study of such a racist ideology, see Chapter 28). This is even the case when racist groups claim Us and Them to be equal but different, and hence advocate separation of the 'luces', because also in that case no equal access to scarce social resources is usuálly permitted. A similar basic representational format may be postulated for male chauvinists and their opinions about gender relations. Feminist ideologies are not merely the mirror-image of sexist ideologies, but represent Them (men) as oppressing Us, and themselves as engaged in resistance against gender inequality. Religious ideologies represent Us as (good) believers and Them as (bad) non-believers (infidels, heathens, etc.). And finally, environmental ideologies represent Them as polluters, and Us as those who resist pollution and defend nature and the rights of animals, for instance. More generally, conservatives see themselves as defending traditional social relationships and moral values against Them (progressives, etc.) who want to change these in favour of social equality.

Recall that these highly simplified ideological representations are not, as such, true or false, although each group will of course tend to believe its own ideological beliefs to be true or justified. Thus, we may agree that prejudices based on racist or sexist ideologies are wrong or otherwise misguided, and hence defined in negative terms, but this evaluation of course only holds on the basis of an anti-sexist or anti-racist ideology.

rl

The very general polarization schema defined by the opposition between Us and Them suggests that groups and group conflicts are involved, and that groups build an ideological image of themselves and others, in such a way that (generally) We are represented positively, and They come out negatively. Positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation seems to be a fundamental property of ideologies. Associated with such polarized representations about Us and Them, are representations of social arrangements, that is, the kinds of things we find better (equality, a clean environment) or those which we believe others stand for (inequality, a polluted environment, a free market). At this very abstract level these social arrangements are specifications of more general values.

Thus, if'freedom' is a general, socio-cultural value, then 'freedom of the market' is one of the things a capitalist ideology will represent as something We stand for; feminista will translate this general value in terms of the freedom of women (freedom from oppression and inequality, freedom of choice, and so on); and environmentalists will interpret the value as freedom from pollution, and so on. We shall focus on the nature of values later, but they obviously play a fundamental role in ideologies. This is not surprising when ideologies are taken to be the basis of group beliefs.

In sum, ideologies are representations of who we are, what we stand for, what our values are, and what our relationships are with other groups, in particular our enemies or opponents, that is, those who oppose what we stand for, threaten our interests and prevent us from equal access to social resources and human rights (residence, citizenship, employment, housing, status and respect, and so on). In other words, an ideology is a self-serving schema for the representation of Us and Them as social groups. This means that ideologies probably have the format of a group schema, or at least the format of a group schema that reflects Our fundamental social, economic, political or cultural interests.

Such an assumption is plausible when we think of the various social functions of ideologies, to which we shall return in more detall later. Thus, ideologies may be used to legitimate or obscure power abuse, or conversely they may be used to resist or denounce domination and inequality. Ideologies thus are needed to organize our social practices in such a way that they serve our best interests, and prevent others from hurting such interests.

These various more or less intuitive conceptions of the nature and functions of ideology, and the assumption that ideologies may be represented as group schemata, suggest the following categories for a tentative format of the structure of ideologies:

• Membership: Who are we? Where are wé from? What do we look like? Who belongs to us? Who can become a member of our group?

•Activities: What do we do? What is expected of us? Why are we here?

•Goals: Why do we do this? What do we want to realize?

1

• Values/norms: What are our main values? How do we evaluate ourselves and others? What should (not) be done?

• Position and group-relations: What is our social position? Who are our enemies, our opponents? Who are like us, and who are different?

• Resources: What are the essential social resources that our group has or needs to have?

These categories and the basic questions they stand for seem to be the fundamental co-ordinates of social groups, and the conditions of their existence and reproduction. Together they define both the identity as well as the interests of the group. Thus, if ideologies are primarily representations of the basic properties of groups, then this schema should be a serious candidata for the organization of ideological beliefs.

This schema seems fairly generally applicable to all ideological groups, whether based on more or less inherent characteristics (gender, ethnicity, age, etc.), on what we do (as for professional ideologies), our goals (as for ideologies of action groups), norms and values (as for conservatives versus progressives; religious and non-religious people), our relations with others (superiors versus subordinates), and the typical resources we do or do not have (rich versus poor; employed versus unemployed; homeless versus those who have a home). That is, each category may be needed to define all groups, but groups may also be identified specifically by one particular category.

This may also explain why there are differences between membership, activity, goal, etc. ideologies. Thus, feminism is typically a goal ideology, that is, defined by the hierarchically most important belief of the ideology, namely, to arrive at full equality for women and men. Similarly, the ideology of black nationalism is a membership ideology when it is limited to questions of appearance and 'racial pride' (as old slogan about 'black is beautiful' and 'négritude' imply), and a position or resistance ideology when it focuses on self-determination and black empowerment. Capitalism on the other hand would rather be a resource ideology, aiming to ensure freedom of enterprise and freedom of the market. In other words, the categorial structure of ideologies also allows a typology of ideologies, as well as the possibility of changing hierarchies in the representation of ideological beliefs.

Each category of this ideological format functions as the organizing pattem of a number of basic evaluative beliefs. Note though that these beliefs are by definition ideological. Thus, journalists in their professional (activity) ideology, may represent themselves essentially as gathering and bringing the news, for instance. They do this, they would say, in order to inform the public and more generally to serve as a watchdog of society. Obviously, these are ideological goals, because we know that many journalists hardly do this. That is, such a goal is at most a benchmark or a property of an ideal type: how journalists would like to be. The same is true for their (professional) values, such as truth, reliability, fairness, and so on. The

specific resource of journalists, access to which must be guaranteed as a condition for the existence or the activities of the group, would be information or the freedom of the press (as it is freedom of the market for managers, and freedom of research for scholars, and freedom from discrimination for feminista and anti-racists).

It should be emphasized that this abstract categorial schema is merely a theoretical construct that may .be used to organize and explain the basic evaluative beliefs of group members. This schema, as such, does not tell us yet how ideologies are acquired, used or changed, how they manifest thernselves in social practices, and how they reproduce thernselves in society. It is also a social representation. This means that it characterizes groups, at a macro-level. Individuals members on some dimension may not identify with the group, and hence not share the ideology of the group. Socially this usually implies that they are considered as dissidents, traitors, deviants, or otherwise as group members who no longer 'belong' to the group, and may hence be excluded, marginalized or otherwise punished. I shall return to these and other social conditions and consequences of ideological group memberships later.

Note that, at the moment, the schema primarily serves as an organizing frarnework for ideological beliefs. That is, its function here is cognitive. Yet, as suggested, each of its categories is rooted also in social structure, that is in group membership criteria, social activities and goals, group relationships, social values and social resources. This will later allow us to define ideologies precisely as the socio-cognitive interface between the (mental) social representations shared by the group, and the social identity, activities, organization, and so on, of the group and its members.

Later I also need to analyse how this abstract schema, designed as an organizational pattern for ideological beliefs, can be empirically founded. That is, we should see it not just as a theoretical construct, but as a schema that actually does play a role in the acquisition, changes and uses of ideologies. One of the ways to assess the empirical nature of the schema is to make a systematic study of social practices, and especially of discourses that express ideological beliefs. If these expressed beliefs and their inferences appear to be organized according to the ideological schema, then we have some evidence that the schema is indeed a socio-cognitive device used by social groups and their members to organize their basic beliefs.

There is an interesting iniplication of choosing a group schema as a format for the structure of ideologies, namely, the obvious relation it has with group identity. If ideologies monitor the way people as group members interpret and act in their social world, they also function as the basis of their social identity. Structurally this would suggest that the first category (membership) is not the only one that defines identity, although it seems to organize beliefs about what we 'essentially' are (white, black, men, women, poor or rich). However, it is obvious that the whole schema, all categories together, defines group identity: what people do, their goals, their values, their relations to other groups, and their resources for survival or social

existence also are part of their identity. The first category in that case defines only a fragment of group membership: a number of more or less inherent or relatively permanent properties (such as origin, appearance, gender, religion, language or other cultural specifics) that define primary group membership criteria, as well as conditions of inclusion and exclusion (for details about social identity, see Chapter 12).

Also, it should be stressed from the outset, as will be developed in more detall later, that social actors are obviously members of many social groups, and that therefore they have multiple, sometimes conflicting identities and hence share a mixture of ideologies. Discourses and social practices in concrete contexts will show such complex combinations, conflicts and sometimes inconsistencies. The same is true, cognitively, for people' s attitudes, models and opinions, which may be monitored by different ideologies, of which the unique combination may be personal or limited to sub-groups (such as the sub-group of US middle-class black women journalists). Obviously, empirical research needs to take such complex interactions into account in order to be able to describe ideological social practices and discourse (for an illustration of how several ideologies interact, see Chapter 28). 8

Contents

The same is true for the contents of the respective categories of the schema. What we now have is an abstract framework. Ideologies, however, are content-specific, and further empirical work is necessary to spell out the actual group beliefs that are organized by these categories. This will also allow us to link the ideologies with the more specific attitudes that are in turn controlled by these ideologies. I shall therefore be brief about the contents of ideologies.

At an elementary level of analysis, ideologies consist of clusters of basic social beliefs organized by the schematic categories proposed aboye. Although these beliefs may in principle be about anything that relates to the social experiences and practices of social groups and their members, they will mostly be about conflicts of interests between groups, typically so in relations of competition, domination and resistance. That is, ideologies usually organize attitudes which in turra control those social practices of the group and its members that are somehow relevant to the interests or identity of groups, and are related to membership criteria (inclusion and exclusion), activities, goals, values, relations to other groups, and resources. Since these beliefs are often evaluative, they presuppose socio-cultural values, such as truth, co-operation, equality, freedom and autonomy, among many others (see Chapter 6). Thus managers may hold the ideological belief that they want to be free from state intervention, and feminista that they want to have equal rights as men, among many other ideological beliefs.

In sum, the contents of group ideologies pertain to what, for each group, is the preferred social and moral érder, whether or not such an order is seen