Article published In:
Culture of Sustainability and Discourses of Social ChangeEdited by Franzisca Weder
[Journal of Language and Politics 22:5] 2023
► pp. 661–686
Edited by Franzisca Weder
[Journal of Language and Politics 22:5] 2023
► pp. 661–686
From controversy to common ground
The discourse of sustainability in the media
Once a concept of the radical environmentalist movement, the term sustainability was incorporated into the hegemonic discourse. Prior research argues that this occurred through a process in which the original controversy between ecological and economic issues has evolved from an antagonist opposition to a broad concurrence. While this development has mainly been analysed qualitatively, we apply quantitative analysis of mass media in Austria between 1990 and 2020 to trace the changing use of the term. Applying methods of corpus linguistics, topic modelling, and dictionary based analysis, we find that the discourse has become less polarized over time, deploying increasingly positive language, and catering more and more towards the conservative parts of the population. Political actors’ presence declines significantly after 2000, and simultaneously, commercial and individual solutions are more widely discussed – everyone is responsible, and no one is to blame.
Keywords: sustainability discourse, automated text analysis, Foucauldian discourse analysis, moral foundations, Austria
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 2.1Discourse, dispositives, and power
- 2.2From anti-capitalist opposition to green growth
- 2.3Media and sustainability discourse
- 3.Data and methodology
- 4.Findings
- 5.Discussion
-
References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
References
Asur, Sitaram, Bernardo A. Huberman, Gabor Szabo, and Chunyan Wang
2011 “Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay.” In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 51:434–437. 
Baker, Paul
2012 Contemporary Corpus Linguistics. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Baker, Susan
2007 “Sustainable Development as Symbolic Commitment: Declaratory Politics and the Seductive Appeal of Ecological Modernisation in the European Union.” Environmental Politics 16 (2): 297–317.
Barkemeyer, Ralf, Frank Figge, Diane Holt, and Tobias Hahn
2009 “What the Papers Say: Trends in Sustainability: A Comparative Analysis of 115 Leading National Newspapers Worldwide.” The Journal of Corporate Citizenship, no. 33: 69–86.
Benoit, Kenneth
2020 “Text as Data: An Overview.” The SAGE Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations, SAGE Publishing, London (Forthcoming).
Bischof, Gunter
2020 Austro-Corporatism: Past, Present, Future. Routledge.
Blei, David M., Andrew Y. Ng, and Michael I. Jordan
2003 “Latent Dirichlet Allocation.” Journal of Machine Learning Research 31 (Jan): 993–1022.
Blühdorn, Ingolfur
2020 “Die Gesellschaft Der Nicht-Nachhaltigkeit. Skizze Einer Umweltsoziologischen Gegenwartsdiagnose.” In Nachhaltige Nicht-Nachhaltigkeit: Warum Die Ökologische Transformation Der Gesellschaft Nicht Stattfindet, by Ingolfur Blühdorn, 65–142. X-Texte Zu Kultur Und Gesellschaft. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Blythe, Jessica, Jennifer Silver, Louisa Evans, Derek Armitage, Nathan J. Bennett, Michele-Lee Moore, Tiffany H. Morrison, and Katrina Brown
2018 “The Dark Side of Transformation: Latent Risks in Contemporary Sustainability Discourse.” Antipode 50 (5): 1206–23.
Boykoff, M. T., and J. T. Roberts
2007 “Media Coverage of Climate Change: Current Trends, Strengths, Weaknesses.” Human Development Report. UNDP.
Brand, Karl-Werner
2018 “Disruptive Transformationen. Gesellschaftliche Umbrüche und sozial-ökologische Transformationsdynamiken kapitalistischer Industriegesellschaften – ein zyklisch-struktureller Erklärungsansatz.” Berliner Journal für Soziologie 28 (3–4): 479–509.
Brand, Ulrich, and Adam Pawloff
2014 “Selectivities at Work: Climate Concerns in the Midst of Corporatist Interests. The Case of Austria.” Journal of Environmental Protection 2014.
Brandstedt, Eric, and Maria Emmelin
2016 “The Concept of Sustainable Welfare.” In Sustainability and the Political Economy of Welfare, edited by Max Koch and Oksana Mont, 15–28. Routledge Studies in Ecological Economics. London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Brundtland, Gro Harlem
1987 “Our Common Future – Call for Action.” Environmental Conservation 14 (4): 291–94.
Bulkeley, Harriet, Andrew Jordan, Richard Perkins, and Henrik Selin
2013 “Governing Sustainability: Rio+20 and the Road Beyond.” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 31 (6): 958–70.
Buttel, F. H.
2000 “Ecological Modernization as Social Theory.” Geoforum 31 (1): 57–65.
Chan, Chung-hong, and Marius Sältzer
2020 “Oolong: An R Package for Validating Automated Content Analysis Tools.” Journal of Open Source Software 5 (55): 2461.
Chang, Jonathan, Sean Gerrish, Chong Wang, Jordan L. Boyd-graber, and David M. Blei
2009 “Reading Tea Leaves: How Humans Interpret Topic Models,” 91.
Eisenmenger, Nina, Melanie Pichler, Nora Krenmayr, Dominik Noll, Barbara Plank, Ekaterina Schalmann, Marie-Theres Wandl, and Simone Gingrich
2020 “The Sustainable Development Goals Prioritize Economic Growth over Sustainable Resource Use: A Critical Reflection on the SDGs from a Socio-Ecological Perspective.” Sustainability Science 15 (4): 1101–10.
Engels, Anita, Otto Hüther, Mike Schäfer, and Hermann Held
2013 “Public Climate-Change Skepticism, Energy Preferences and Political Participation.” Global Environmental Change 23 (5): 1018–1027.
Eshima, Shusei, Kosuke Imai, and Tomoya Sasaki
Feinberg, Matthew, and Robb Willer
2013 “The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes.” Psychological Science 24 (1): 56–62.
2015 “From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 41 (12): 1665–1681.
2019 “Moral Reframing: A Technique for Effective and Persuasive Communication across Political Divides.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 13 (12): e12501.
Fischer, Daniel, Franziska Haucke, and Anna Sundermann
2017 “What Does the Media Mean by ‘Sustainability’ or ‘Sustainable Development’? An Empirical Analysis of Sustainability Terminology in German Newspapers Over Two Decades: What Does the Media Mean by Sustainability or Sustainable Development?” Sustainable Development 25 (6): 610–24.
Foltin, Robert
2004 “Und Wir Bewegen Uns Doch.” Soziale Bewegungen in Österreich.
Foucault, Michel
1980 Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Vintage.
Foucault, Michel, Hubert L. Dreyfus, and Paul Rabinow
1982 “Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics.” The Subject and Power, 208–26.
Fritz, Martin, and Max Koch
2016 “Economic Development and Prosperity Patterns around the World: Structural Challenges for a Global Steady-State Economy.” Global Environmental Change 381 (May): 41–48.
Giovannoni, Elena, and Giacomo Fabietti
2013 “What Is Sustainability? A Review of the Concept and Its Applications.” In Integrated Reporting: Concepts and Cases That Redefine Corporate Accountability, edited by Cristiano Busco, Mark L. Frigo, Angelo Riccaboni, and Paolo Quattrone, 21–40. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Glaser, Marion, Gesche Krause, Beate M. W. Ratter, Martin Welp, and Andrew Halliday
eds. 2012 Human-Nature Interactions in the Anthropocene: Potentials of Social-Ecological Systems Analysis. Routledge Studies in Environment, Culture, and Society 1. New York London: Routledge.
Graham, Jesse, Brian A. Nosek, and Jonathan Haidt
2012 “The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Spectrum.” PloS One 7 (12).
Graham, Jesse, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Haidt, Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, and Peter H. Ditto
2011 “Mapping the Moral Domain.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101 (2): 366.
Greenwood, Royston, Roy Suddaby, and Christopher R. Hinings
2002 “Theorizing Change: The Role of Professional Associations in the Transformation of Institutionalized Fields.” Academy of Management Journal 45 (1): 58–80.
Grimmer, Justin, Margaret E. Roberts, and Brandon M. Stewart
2022 Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences. Princeton University Press.
Grimmer, Justin, and Brandon M. Stewart
2013 “Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts.” Political Analysis 21 (3): 267–297.
Grisold, Andrea, and Daniel Grabner
2018 “Maturity and Decline in Press Markets of Small Countries. The Case of Austria.” Recherches En Communication 441 (April).
Haidt, Jonathan, and Jesse Graham
2007 “When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions That Liberals May Not Recognize.” Journal of Social Justice 20 (1): 98–116.
Harandizadeh, Bahareh, J. Hunter Priniski, and Fred Morstatter
2022 “Keyword Assisted Embedded Topic Model.” In Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, 372–80. Virtual Event AZ USA: ACM.
Hargreaves, Tom
2010 “Putting Foucault to Work on the Environment: Exploring pro-Environmental Behaviour Change as a Form of Discipline.” CSERGE working paper EDM.
Jacobs, Thomas, and Robin Tschötschel
2019 “Topic Models Meet Discourse Analysis: A Quantitative Tool for a Qualitative Approach.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 22 (5): 469–485.
Janoušková, Svatava, Tomáš Hák, Vlastimil Nečas, and Bedřich Moldan
2019 “Sustainable Development – A Poorly Communicated Concept by Mass Media. Another Challenge for SDGs?” Sustainability 11 (11): 3181.
Jessop, Bob
2010 “Cultural Political Economy and Critical Policy Studies.” Critical Policy Studies 3 (3–4): 336–56.
Kaiser, Jonas, and Markus Rhomberg
2016 “Questioning the Doubt: Climate Skepticism in German Newspaper Reporting on COP17.” Environmental Communication 10 (5): 556–574.
Katzenstein, Peter J.
2019 “Corporatism and Change.” In Corporatism and Change. Cornell University Press.
Keinert-Kisin, Christina
2015 “CSR in Austria: Exemplary Social and Environmental Practice or Compliance-Driven Corporate Responsibility?” Corporate Social Responsibility in Europe: United in Sustainable Diversity, 137–151.
Kriesi, Hanspeter, and Marco Giugni
1996 Ökologische Bewegungen Im Internationalen Vergleich: Zwischen Konflikt Und Kooperation. Westdeutscher Verlag.
Krotz, Friedrich
2019 “Ausblick: Medienwandel und Mediatisierung als Herausforderung für Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft.” In Österreichische Mediengeschichte, edited by Matthias Karmasin and Christian Oggolder, 315–28. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.
Kwartler, Ted
2017 Text Mining in Practice with R. John Wiley & Sons.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe
1985 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.
Levy, David, Juliane Reinecke, and Stephan Manning
2016 “The Political Dynamics of Sustainable Coffee: Contested Value Regimes and the Transformation of Sustainability: The Political Dynamics of Sustainable Coffee.” Journal of Management Studies 53 (3): 364–401.
Lewis, Tammy L.
2000 “Media Representations of ‘Sustainable Development’: Sustaining the Status Quo?” Science Communication 21 (3): 244–73.
Link, Jürgen
1983 “Was Ist Und Was Bringt Diskurstaktik.” KultuRRevolution 21: 60–66.
Lytle, Mark H.
2007 The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement. New Narratives in American History. New York: Oxford University Press.
Malette, Sebastien
2009 “Foucault for the next Century: Eco− Governmentality.” A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium, 221–39.
Markowitz, E. M., and A. F. Shariff
2012 “Climate Change and Moral Judgement.” Nature Climate Change, no. 2(4): 243–47.
Mautner, Gerlinde
2016 “Checks and Balances: How Corpus Linguistics Can Contribute to CDA.” Methods of Critical Discourse Studies 31: 155–80.
Mayer, Clara
2021 “Klimadiskurs(e) in Österreich [Master’s Thesis].” Master’s Thesis. Universität Wien, Philologisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät. [URL]
McEnery, Tony, and Andrew Hardie
2011 Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press.
McManus, Phil
1996 “Contested Terrains: Politics, Stories and Discourses of Sustainability.” Environmental Politics 5 (1): 48–73.
Miller, Justin M.
2012 “Framing Sustainability.” J Sustain Educ 31.
Mohammad, Saif M.
2016 “9 – Sentiment Analysis: Detecting Valence, Emotions, and Other Affectual States from Text.” In Emotion Measurement, edited by Herbert L. Meiselman, 201–37. Woodhead Publishing.
Moyer, Bill
1987 “The Movement Action Plan: A Strategic Framework Describing the Eight Stages of Successful Social Movements.”
Nambiar, Prithi
2014 “Framing Sustainability: A Case Study Analysis of the Environment and Sustainability Discourse in the Indian English Language Press.” Global Media and Communication 10 (1): 93–110.
Neckel, Sighard
2018 “Die Gesellschaft Der Nachhaltigkeit: Umrisse Eines Forschungsprogramms.” In Die Gesellschaft Der Nachhaltigkeit: Umrisse Eines Forschungsprogramms, edited by Martina Hasenfratz, Sarah Miriam Pritz, Timo Wiegand, Natalia Besedovsky, and Moritz Boddenberg, 11–23. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.
Ransmayr, Jutta, Karlheinz Mörth, and Durco Matej
2017 “AMC (Austrian Media Corpus) – Korpusbasierte Forschungen Zum Österreichischen Deutsch.” In Digitale Methoden Der Korpusforschung in Österreich. Veröffentlichungen Zur Linguistik Und Kommunikationsforschung 30. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Reisch, Lucia A., and Mario Schmidt
2017 “Nachhaltige Entwicklung.” In Verbraucherwissenschaften, edited by Peter Kenning, Andreas Oehler, Lucia A. Reisch, and Christian Grugel, 103–22. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.
Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak
2016 “The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA).” In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 23–61.
Remus, Robert, Uwe Quasthoff, and Gerhard Heyer
2010 “SentiWS-A Publicly Available German-Language Resource for Sentiment Analysis.” In LREC. Citeseer.
Rhomberg, Markus
2016 “Climate Change Communication in Austria.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. December 22, 2016.
Schäfer, Mike S.
2012 “Taking Stock: A Meta-Analysis of Studies on the Media’s Coverage of Science.” Public Understanding of Science 21 (6): 650–63.
Schäfer, Mike S., and Heinz Bonfadelli
2017 “Umwelt- und Klimawandelkommunikation.” In Forschungsfeld Wissenschaftskommunikation, edited by Heinz Bonfadelli, Birte Fähnrich, Corinna Lüthje, Jutta Milde, Markus Rhomberg, and Mike S. Schäfer, 315–38. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.
Spaargaren, Gert
2003 “Sustainable Consumption: A Theoretical and Environmental Policy Perspective.” Society & Natural Resources 16 (8): 687–701.
Stoddard, Isak, Kevin Anderson, Stuart Capstick, Wim Carton, Joanna Depledge, Keri Facer, Clair Gough, Frederic Hache, Claire Hoolohan, and Martin Hultman
2021 “Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 461: 653–689.
Swyngedouw, Erik
2014 “Depoliticization (‘the Political’).” In Degrowth, 90–93. Routledge.
Torgerson, Douglas
1995 “The Uncertain Quest for Sustainability: Public Discourse and the Politics of Environmentalism.” In Greening Environmental Policy, 3–20. Springer.
Trubowitz, Peter, and Kohei Watanabe
2021 “The Geopolitical Threat Index: A Text-Based Computational Approach to Identifying Foreign Threats.” International Studies Quarterly 65 (3): 852–865.
Tulloch, Lynley, and David Neilson
2014 “The Neoliberalisation of Sustainability.” Citizenship, Social and Economics Education 13 (1): 26–38.
Vaisey, Stephen, and Andrew Miles
2014 “Tools from Moral Psychology for Measuring Personal Moral Culture.” Theory and Society 43 (3–4): 311–32.
Valdivia, Gabriela
2015 “Eco-Governmentality.” In The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology, 467–80. Routledge.
Voci, Denise
2022 “Logos, Ethos, Pathos, Sustainabilitos? About the Role of Media Companies in Reaching Sustainable Development.” Sustainability 14 (5): 2591.
Walker, Gordon, and Kate Burningham
2011 “Flood Risk, Vulnerability and Environmental Justice: Evidence and Evaluation of Inequality in a UK Context.” Critical Social Policy 31 (2): 216–40.
WCED, SPECIAL WORKING SESSION
1987 “World Commission on Environment and Development.” Our Common Future 17 (1): 1–91.
Weder, Franzisca
2021 “Sustainability as Master Frame of the Future? Potency and Limits of Sustainability as Normative Framework in Corporate, Political and NGO Communication.” In The Sustainability Communication Reader: A Reflective Compendium, edited by Franzisca Weder, Larissa Krainer, and Matthias Karmasin, 103–19. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.
Weder, Franzisca, Isabell Koinig, and Denise Voci
2019 “Antagonistic Framing of Sustainability by Energy Suppliers.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 24 (2): 368–90.
Willmott, Hugh
2015 “Why Institutional Theory Cannot Be Critical.” Journal of Management Inquiry 24 (1): 105–111.
Yacoumis, Paul
2018 “Making Progress? Reproducing Hegemony Through Discourses of ‘Sustainable Development’ in the Australian News Media.” Environmental Communication 12 (6): 840–53.